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... The primary problem we face in preparing for future wars is an intellectually corrupt budgeting and procurement process, a system that forces the services — especially the Navy and Air Force — to make extravagant, impossible-to-fulfill claims for the weapons they wish to buy. It isn’t possible to argue that a system will be “useful.” To appear competitive, each system has to be “revolutionary.”
Compounding the damage, each of the services (except the Marine Corps) has fallen into the trap of designing its strategy to fit the systems it wants, rather than devising an honest long-term strategy, then pursuing the weapons best-fitted to support that strategy.
We have gotten the process exactly wrong.
No sensible person would argue against the potential benefits of new military technologies — but those technologies must be relevant to genuine wartime needs, not merely sexy platforms for air shows. The services become so mesmerized by their in-progress procurement programs that any challenge to a system’s utility is treated as an attack on the service itself.
The truth is that we lie...
Nonetheless, at the Joint Forces Command and in the Air Force, proponents of Effects-Based Operations now suggest that, by striking just the right pressure points, we might bring China to its knees. Well, China’s already on its knees — a position that gives China greater inherent stability than our own top-heavy military and hyper-developed national infrastructure possess. The crucial question in any war is, “What will it really take to force our enemy to surrender?”
We know what it took in Nazi Germany. And in Imperial Japan. To defeat China, we’d have to inflict at least a comparable level of destruction.
EBO isn’t a strategy. It’s a sales pitch.
Yet, EBO also reflects a recurring American delusion — the notion that, if only we can discover it, there must be a formula for winning wars on the cheap. EBO and other schemes for sterilized techno-wars have surprisingly deep roots in our military culture — the American vines were grafted onto diseased European root stocks...
One could rehash this endless tug of war between our military theorists, who never fail to come up with new clothes for their emperor, insisting that this time they really do know how to win wars cheaply (in terms of blood and bother, if not financially), and the fighting generals and colonels who have to step into the mess the theorists have made and clean it up while the bullets are flying. Contemporary generals such as Mattis and Wallace are the heirs of Sherman and Sheridan — not afraid to fight and ever ready to ride to the sound of the guns. On the other side, you have the theorists, who have them outnumbered, if not outgunned. No matter the empirical evidence, theorists will always insist that they know a better, easier way to wage war than the men who must actually fight it. Compounded by the power of the defense industry and the political momentum of legacy weapons systems, the theorists win. In peacetime...
There’s no end of such revolutions. Only the End of Days will see an end to military innovation. And we’re told, again and again, that the nature of warfare has changed. But the nature of warfare never changes — only its superficial manifestations. On the battlefield, Cain still squares off with Abel. The technologies evolve, but it’s still about killing the enemy until the survivors raise their hands — and mean it.
Even as our soldiers and Marines fight primitive (but intelligent) enemies in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, we’re told that the evidence before our eyes doesn’t really mean anything, that the next war is going to be different, that technology really will do the trick this time. If the United States still exists a hundred years from how, I have no doubt that your great-great-grandchildren will also be assured that, while the theorists were wrong for the past century (or two, or three), they really have it figured out now and that technology really is going to be decisive this time.
Appropriate technologies are essential. But flesh and blood wins wars. The only Effects-Based Operations that mean anything are those that destroy the enemy’s military, the opposing leadership and the population’s collective will. Bombing well-selected targets helps. But only killing wins wars.
Oh, and a last note on Effects-Based Operations: Any combat doctrine that cannot be explained clearly and concisely will fail.
