Jets or GIs?

[Rob Thornton]

Matt makes a good point though about our strategic culture and predisposition toward technological over human solutions.

I think the key to getting our priorities straight is understanding why we default to believing technology is always the best and cheapest answer. Then we need to hold the basis of those beliefs up against the current and most likely future problem set so we can see the limitations of technical solutions.

I also believe we can and should maintain our technological edge - I want to have the best stuff in the fight - I just don't want it so bad that I'm willing to sacrifice investing in people to get it.

I'm pretty sure the two afore mentioned SecDefs were/are great Americans, its just that their management philosophies were more attuned to producing things for a profit then managing a bureaucracy of which the most important "product" is its people (substitute warrior/leader/etc. if you like). I'm not sure you can run the Pentagon (or for that matter the Federal Govt.) like a for profit based corporation - maybe that too is not a problem, just a condition that you cope with the best you can.

I admit to being somewhat amazed by citizens of their caliber (Robert McNamara and Donald Rumsfeld) - for whatever we criticize them as Sec Def or their "vision" (rightfully criticize I think) of how the DoD should function - they were/are brilliant men who love & served their country - they just tried to make something into what it was not, could not or should not be. GM/Ford/Chrysler are not the same as the DoD. In my humble opinion though - I would not want to walk a mile in their shoes for a million dollars.

On a side note about tech:

We got a lecture from Con Crane while at BSAP where he asked the question why we thought the USAF believed technology so important? The answer was so simple and obvious, yet of profound importance - you can't fly without technology! You have to give the platform/system driven services credit for recognizing the importance of technology to their roles and missions. I'd also say you can find where platform an human meet in the ground services in their crewed systems - ala Abrams/Bradley/Stryker/FCS.

On the flip side, we can't allow the fascination and obsession with technology to obscure that people fight the wars and ultimately people make the peace. We need some part of war to be recognizable for the ugly but sometimes necessary act it is so that as quickly as possible we can restore order and put people's lives back together and maybe avoid worse.

Best regards, Rob

[Tom Odom]

A longstanding question on the orals board for the Masters program at Leavenworth was and still may be, explain the relationship between doctrine and technology. Now when I sat for my orals or sat on the boards, we lumped doctrine and TTPs together as in the category of "ways to do things" and technology was "Things to do stuff with". Army, Marine, and foreign ground warriors usually got it; that there is no set relationship, that doctrine and technology see saw back and forth in concert and in opposition. When we get 'em in concert it really works well. When they are in opposition (waves of infantry charging machine guns for example), it's a real bitch.

But when it came to Naval officers (surface, subsurface, and air) and Air Force it was always technology leads. Doctrine--when they talk it and neither the Navy nor the Air Force really likes doctrine--is basically an owner's manual for the technology. Doctrine then serves to get the best use out of the technology versus setting the parameters for what you want the doctrine to help you do.

Rumsfeld as a former Naval aviator is/was classic.

best

Tom

[Ski]

Quick correction - the GAO has found that $2.3 Trillion is not accountable since the 1970's.

The defense budget process has been so screwed up the Army Audit Agency, along with other governmental audit agencies, cannot even audit the military to find what is wrong and what is missing.

What needs to be done is to redefine and recreate the POM. It's archaic, convoluted, confusing, and in a 24/7 society, way too inflexible and slow.

Good luck with anyone tasked with that project. Talk about shattering rice bowls.

[Ski]

Good info here. Always saw doctrine and technology as a see-saw - one could potentially drive the other.

A longstanding question on the orals board for the Masters program at Leavenworth was and still may be, explain the relationship between doctrine and technology. Now when I sat for my orals or sat on the boards, we lumped doctrine and TTPs together as in the category of "ways to do things" and technology was "Things to do stuff with". Army, Marine, and foreign ground warriors usually got it; that there is no set relationship, that doctrine and technology see saw back and forth in concert and in opposition. When we get 'em in concert it really works well. When they are in opposition (waves of infantry charging machine guns for example), it's a real bitch.

But when it came to Naval officers (surface, subsurface, and air) and Air Force it was always technology leads. Doctrine--when they talk it and neither the Navy nor the Air Force really likes doctrine--is basically an owner's manual for the technology. Doctrine then serves to get the best use out of the technology versus setting the parameters for what you want the doctrine to help you do.

Rumsfeld as a former Naval aviator is/was classic.

best

Tom

[stanleywinthrop]

On the flip side, we can't allow the fascination and obsession with technology to obscure that people fight the wars and ultimately people make the peace. We need some part of war to be recognizable for the ugly but sometimes necessary act it is so that as quickly as possible we can restore order and put people's lives back together and maybe avoid worse.

Best regards, Rob

Quite true, as John Boyd said (an air force officer no less) weapons don't fight wars, terrain doesn't fight wars, people do--and they use thier minds.

[pvebber]

Another Kaplan piece in Atlantic Monthly>

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/prem/...merica-decline

Focuses on the Navy - but much of the "problem" is military wide.

My favorite part:

Of course, admirals will continue to march to Capitol Hill and declare that no matter the size of the budget, they will succeed in every mission. Managing decline requires “a degree of self-delusion,” as Aaron Friedberg put it in his 1988 book, The Weary Titan: Britain and the Experience of Relative Decline, 1895–1905. “British statesmen,” Friedberg observed, “continued to talk as if nothing of any significance” had occurred, even as they abandoned worldwide sea supremacy. Abandoning supremacy was, in Friedberg’s view, a “prudent” and “sensible” strategy, given the economic and political realities of the time. And it didn’t stop Britain from helping to save the world in succeeding decades.

When there is nobody in senior military leadership really pressing for prioritization of roles and missions and drawing a line where the dollars run out, we will continue to get a "do more with less" peacetime mentatlity, that casues us to spend exhorbatant amounts in "war". Its a amazing to pull the string of the money trail of what the "cost of war" includes - and doesn't include!

I'm not sure I agree with Kaplan's fear that we are going "overboard prioritizing COIN" - when I look at the budget just passed, its the same ole Cold War stuff. Halsey or Spruance would feel perfectly comfortable leading from the Vultures Row of a current CV, except for the part that there are only 3-5 ships dending a CVN toady instead of a 10-15 15 years ago, and 20-30 in their day...

I am fearful that his prediction that - win or lose in the big picture in Iraq, the next adversary we will face will try to exploit the tactical imbalance of our naval forces and maritime dependance in ways our mindset, like 9/11, just won't see.

PS

Having done time in the Navy's DOctrine shop at NWDC, the reality in the navy is even worse than "technology leads doctrine". The TTP full of flow charts and decision matrices indicate that we want to tacke decision making out of the hands of warfighters and create training that "programs them like a computer to take the right action". Which of course is perfectly fine because our future autonomous naval systems will form a complex adaptive network, capable of tactically relevant, emergent, (some dare say creative!) response to adversary action.

The Navy of the future is being built on the premise that humans should think like machines, and machines should think like humans.

[Tom Odom]

Having done time in the Navy's DOctrine shop at NWDC, the reality in the navy is even worse than "technology leads doctrine". The TTP full of flow charts and decision matrices indicate that we want to tacke decision making out of the hands of warfighters and create training that "programs them like a computer to take the right action". Which of course is perfectly fine because our future autonomous naval systems will form a complex adaptive network, capable of tactically relevant, emergent, (some dare say creative!) response to adversary action.

We learned nada from the "Robo-Crusier" shoot down?

Tom

[pvebber]

Only that it demonstrated the dangers of the humans not having a strict procedural script to follow that would have prevented it.

You have to understand the the standard Navy system engineering development process assumes that meddling humans exist only to degrade the theoretically possible capabilities of a Naval weapons system.

If a human screws up, it costs you money to remidiate, if a machine screws up, the Navy can recoup money from the contractor for failure to perform.

Of course its all being done under the uncontestable veil of "getting the sailor out of harms way". Who can be "for" keeping sailors unnecessarily in harms way?

[Rob Thornton]

I read the Kaplan piece this morning in the earlybird. I'm still not sure what to make of it. When you read it - it sounds like Kaplan is not even sure what he thinks about it.

To me, he is basically saying what everybody else is - the world is an uncertain place with lots of potential for conflict as resources get more scarce and become more important to the heavy weights requires a strong enough conventional force to deter and prevail if it should ever come down to it; while Barnett's "non-integrating gap" (one of many ways to describe it) along with Non-State Actors and the global jihad/global insurgency/global how we describe it next week, require a different skill set - we got that one - no arguments from me.

This all means more stuff for us to have to go do - and its across the full range of military operations - OK - got that one too. If Kaplan is arguing for more "means" to cover down on all the possible contingencies so we can do them all well - that is a hard uphill sell I'll bet. If he is talking about well defined policy goals that make tough choices and perhaps figures out ways to grow and employ soft power tools to achieve goals we might have had to use military force for - well, that sounds good too - but I'll bet that means growing some of the other departments and agencies to accomplish that - $$$.

What I am wondering about is the bouts of the COIN/SSTRO/LIC pushback I'm hearing about from some in the FG (field grade) ranks in all of the services. I heard from a Navy 05 who gave me his opinion of why he thought the navy should not invest in littoral ships to support "brown water" operations. While debate is healthy, and reminds us of things we might otherwise overlook - the stuff I've heard is darn near polar in terms of position - where folks refuse to acknowledge the concerns of the other side. Shows that this is a complicated issue for sure.

While we do have a responsibility to develop, acquire and train the capabilities we'll require for the future - we also don't get to choose our fights - people in pinstripes must decide that. In a very bare bone sense of things - fmr SEC DEF Rumsfelt was correct - when the bugle sounds - "you do go to war with the military you have" - its the only one we'll have at the time when somebody else makes the decision, and we won't be able to change it much.

More and more I believe this is why we should invest in people and leadership above all other DOTLMPF areas. All of those choices about how we proceed and why we should develop this, buy that or reorganize something are pushed forward by leaders - the better the leaders, the better choices I believe we'll make, the better advice we'll be able to provide in civil-military relations, and the more flexibility we'll have built into our choices - they'll simply be able to get more out of them as the future we saw 10-20 years ago, evolves differently in ways that could not have been anticipated. Leadership is the best mitigator to risk I know of, because it is the dynamic which helps shape the future - an absence of, or weak leadership leaves you a ship with no rudder.

Best regards, Rob