The Myth of Immaculate Warfare
6 September USA Today commentary - The Myth of Immaculate Warfare by Ralph Peters.
Quote:
Under the right battlefield conditions, sophisticated military technologies give Western powers remarkable advantages. Under the wrong conditions and employed with unreasonable expectations, high-tech weapons inflict more damage on our own political leaders and national purpose than they do on the enemy.
Precision-targeting systems and other superweapons are dangerously seductive to civilian leaders looking for military wins on the cheap. Exaggerated promises about capabilities — made by contractors, lobbyists and bedazzled generals — delude presidents and prime ministers into believing that war can be swift and immaculate, with minimal friendly or even enemy casualties.
It's a lethal myth. The siren song oftechno-wars fought at standoff range makes military solutions more attractive to political leaders than would be the case were they warned about war's costs at the outset. Inevitably, the “easy” wars don't work out as planned. Requiring boots on the ground after all, they prove exorbitant in blood, treasure, time and moral capital...
A paradox of this era of dazzling technologies is that the conflicts we face are born of ethnic bigotry and faith gone haywire — atavistic challenges that cannot be resolved with guided bombs or satellite imagery.
Employed incisively, technologies certainly help our troops, but they aren't a substitute for troops. And they won't be. Yet, the false promises will continue.
We've been through this before. In the 1950s, large ground forces were supposed to be obsolete, superseded by missiles. Then came Vietnam, followed by a succession of brutally human conflicts, from Lebanon through Somalia to the Balkans. For the 78 days of the Kosovo campaign, NATO aircraft attempted to force Serbia — a weak, miniature state — to agree to treaty terms. In the end, it took the threat of ground troops to achieve the international community's goals. After the firing stopped, we found that our expensive, sophisticated technologies had been fooled by cheap Serb mock-ups of military vehicles.
Why are defense contractors and partisan generals nonetheless able to convince Congress and one presidential administration after another that technology has all the answers? Because Congress and the White House want to believe machines will get them off the hook when it comes to sending our forces into battle. And there are huge practical incentives to buy big-ticket weapons systems from politically supportive defense contractors.
The defense industry silences military leaders who know better by employing them on generous terms after their retirement from service. The system is legal, but it's morally corrupt and ethically repulsive...
The promises made for advanced military technologies are all too seductive to political leaders with no experience in uniform. Hype kills. Until we abandon the myth of immaculate wars, our conflicts will continue to prove far more costly than the technology advocates promise.
Rebuilding the Legionnaire
Tom,
Much as I hate to say it, you're quite right in this parallel.
Quote:
Originally Posted by
Tom Odom
There is another relevant parallel in all of this. Look at the infantry as a labor cost, one that keeps costing management after the infantry (or soldiers in a larger sense) are worn out. Business models all focus on reducing such costs whenever possible. Systems like A/C can be rebuilt and upgraded as necessary and as new technology is available. Soldiers--especially infantry--require near constant training and their "wear out date" comes much earlier than a mainline battle tank, APC, or A/C. They are therefore a recurring sunk cost that must be constantly renewed. Business models abhor such costs.
The folly in that approach has been well demonstrated. Even stop gap measures as contrcat operations have their own 1st, 2nd, and 3rd order effects. War is not a business though some would argue all wars are fought for economic reasons.
FW Taylor, the "father" of Scientific Management, has a lot to answer for. :rolleyes:
For the sake of discussion, let's play with the analogies a bit. Labour cost, as that old crackpot Marx noted, are really the costs involved in transforming one material into another, regardless of whether the labour is provided by individual workers or by machines or by some combination of the two. This second material is then "sold" on the open market and the difference between the cost of labour, the cost of the raw materials and the cost of amortization of some other incidentals (e.g. factories, etc.) and the final sale price is the "profit" derived. The key problem that I see in the application of "business models" in most military situations is that the costing and "profits" are not in equivalent units and, hence, can't be compared.
In one sense, war is definately a business - a business that is involved in the transformation of a potential or actual opponent into a potential or actual non-opponent (back to von Clausewitz) - a shifting of their perceptions if you will. The "profit" derived from this "sale" appears in a whole variety of different forms - access to resources (a basic motive of WWI), access to land, shifts in alliances or power relations, "honour" (although whose honour is always a tricky question), some particular point of "principle", socio-cultural survival, etc., etc.. Hence, in any given situation of potential conflict, it is always a really good idea to know before hand exactly what you hope to achive from the conflict. It is also a good idea to have a specific transformational plan with exact markers.
Back to the labour cost anaolgy for a second. Would you use a table saw to hammer a nail? Most of the people I know wouldn't - they would use a hammer. So, if the transformation, the "profit", desired from OIF was defined as
- Regime change
- A re-alignment of regional power
- The creation of a "pro-Western" power in the region
- Eliminating alleged WMD
- Disallowing the use of Iraq as a terrorist "haven"
what would be the most efficient means of conducting such a transformation? Any MBA student handed this as a project should, if they wanted to pass :), be able to figure out that the key to these transformations would be in Phase IV operations. Figuring how to neutralize the basic combat power of the existing Iraqi conventional forces, a/o the start of the war, was, actually, a fairly simple, if highly detailed, planning exercise. Figuring out how to do the actual transformations - the started goals of the war - is both much more complex and, at the same time, involves a totally different skill set.
The problem, of course, is that the stated goals - the transformation - all hinge around actions taking place in Phase IV, but almost all of the planning seems to have been aimed at earlier phases with Phase IV allowed to operate on a set of highly questionable assumptions. As far as historical parallels are concerned, I am reminded of both Vietnam and the campaigns planned by the Bureacratic faction of the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire.
In a rather round about way, this takes us back to the old Roman Legions...
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Originally Posted by
Tom Odom
We still need more and better infantry--just like the Legions of Rome.
I couldn't agree more! Man for man, the Legionaires were the most versatile fighting force of the ancient world. They had the best training, the best discipline and the greatest combat ability of any ancient infantry - Alexander's Phalanxes and Hypapsists included.
Personally, I think their greatest strength was in their flexibility and cross-training. Legionaires could fight, and win, at 10:1 odds; could build roads and bridges that are still in use today; and could act as semi-trained military, naval and civil engineers.
Let's get back to labour costs for a second or so. One of the main reasons why the legions were so effective was that they could be, and frequently were, employed in non-combat infrastructure projects that had both civil and military applications. In MBA-speak, that means that you didn't have much labour down-time. If we compare that with the flashy, high tech combat systems, we find that they actually do have an incredible amount of "labour down-time" - after all, an F-22 doesn't really do that much except in combat, patrol or intimidation situations.
Tom, you say we need "more and better infantry" and I totally agree. I would go further, and say that we also need to completely revamp the "business models" involved in the military so that they more accurately reflect what the actual, transformational tasks of the 21st are likely to be.
Marc
