BY MARK HELPRIN
Technology buffs see a new era of software-based—and bloodless—national defense. This "revolution in military affairs" holds both hope and danger, says the author.
AS A YOUNG SOLDIER IN
the Israeli army and seconded to the air force, I
was stationed at more than the usual number of posts, which gave me a wide-ranging tour of Israel's defense. My observations and those of
the many other soldiers with whom I spoke combined to convince me that
the military was in poor shape and that its complacency begged a
surprise attack, which for various reasons I believed would come in the
winter months. Throughout my period of service in 1972 and 1973, I tried
to point this out to those in power.
 Through an intermediary I was able to convey my concerns to the prime
minister, Golda Meir, and the minister of defense, Moshe Dayan, who
responded that I, as a private, with a compartmentalized view, was
unaware of the extraordinarily advanced and high quality work
accomplished in the army's elite formations. The message was that I
should rest assured: not only was Israel in no danger, technologically
it was so far ahead of any combination of its rivals as to be safer than
at any time in its history.
Having appealed to the highest authorities and been rejected, I went
back to my work of patrolling, washing dishes, and trying to stay warm.
Still, evidence kept accumulating: sentries who deserted their posts;
tanks that refused to start; a sudden profusion of spies; fights between
groups of soldiers; negligence, arrogance, and corruption everywhere.
And yet the reputation of the army, reinforced by a worldwide consensus,
stood in direct contradiction of my views.
In my transit through several units I served in the field security
force of the First Air Wing at Ramat David Air Force Base. There, for a
time, I was assigned to guard the plane that every morning took Israel's
equivalent of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to the Kirya,
Israel's equivalent of the Pentagon, in Tel Aviv. After standing outside
all night in the cold, I was usually somewhat testy, and one of those
mornings I made sure that the Ramcal, the Chief of the General Staff,
General David Eliezer, had the benefit of my observations. As his plane
was slow in being readied, our conversation stretched out possibly
longer than he would have liked. He was obviously astounded that I, a
private with Hebrew more problematical than Charlie Chan's English,
chose to lecture him on the state of his army. He must have been
especially taken with my certainty that a tactical surprise was in the
offing, as this was not the kind of thing the Arabs visited upon Israel
but rather what Israel visited upon them. I felt in my bones the coming
of a surprise attack, and was absolutely certain of it in the way that
only a young man can be absolutely certain.
Though he dismissed me, he was compassionate. Had he not been, I
might still be washing dishes. Before he flew away, he put his hand on
my shoulder, and said, with perhaps a slight edge, "Look, leave it to
us. We'll take care of all that."
I don't know who it was that he meant by us. Perhaps he meant career
soldiers who had devoted their lives to the army and could speak the
language. Perhaps he meant Israelis as opposed to Americans. Perhaps he meant himself, Golda Meir, and Moshe
Dayan, all legendary figures who knew what was what.
|
For the professional soldier, war may be hell but peace is a time of great anxiety when he relinquishes the advantages of action and takes up the burdens of contemplation.
|
THAT IS HARDLY THE END
of the story, and stories like it are not as
rare as one might think, for armies at rest fight perpetual wars of
opinion. For the professional soldier, war may be hell but peace is a
time of great anxiety when he relinquishes the advantages of action and
takes up the burdens of contemplation. As a peacetime military assesses
its past and debates how to fight the next war, great soldiers always
suffer, for they are creatures of intuition, who, with hardly
discernible effort, see before them the right path as if they had taken
it many times before. Tactless, impatient, and impolitic, they are sent
into exile of one sort or another and summoned from it only after the
collapse of conventional wisdom.
For better or worse, the echelons they inherit are shaped by
colleagues who love seminars, write inoffensive articles, and excrete
their own lubrication as they slip upward through the channels of
promotion. Armies that even the most brilliant soldiers are called to
direct are built upon conventional wisdom. The debates of the interwar
period, therefore, assume great importance. When, in such debates,
Painlevé prevailed, the Maginot Line was built; when Churchill did, the
Fleet was ready. McNamara held fast, and the war in Vietnam was fought
quantity by quantity; Reagan did, and the war in the Gulf was a war of
qualities.
As dangerous are the choices in strategic argument, consensus is more
dangerous still. Given that the future is unknowable, agreement about it
should be held in great disregard, especially because such agreement is
often the result of the overwhelming needs and inhibitions of the
present. As for the state of strategic debate, or lack of it, at the
close of the last decade of the twentieth century, rather than
contending approaches what we have appears to be a single, massive,
amorphous, and invincible notion. That is the general acceptance of the
idea of a revolution in military affairs, a relatively new term now used
so frequently that its thirty letters and spaces have been abbreviated
to one-tenth their original elongation: RMA.
RMA is usually explained by describing imaginary battles in which
technological marvels are responsible for quick victories. At least this
has been the case since the Gulf War created a new market for a
particular kind of military showmanship. No matter that in the conflict
with Iraq the opposition was lame, the staging unhindered, allied strong
points unharried, and the war left unfinished. The high-technological
images were captivating despite the greater context. Images yield
impressions that displace definitions, which is why, as pictures have
displaced words, discourse has weakened.
But RMA has an essence, and it can be rigorously defined as the
military approach to the reduction of time and the perfection of
exactitude. Until recently, the classic military problems have been
those of force and distance. Fifty years ago, the destruction of either
Omsk or Omaha would have required a major campaign, the possession of
foreign bases, and, even with strategic bombing, months of warfare. Then
force and distance were mastered, and the task of tens of thousands of
men over many weeks was assigned to one ICBM over fifteen minutes.
Though most nations still configure their armed services primarily to a
force and distance model, force and distance are now taken for granted
in advanced defense establishments developing a paradigm of time and
exactitude.
Which is to say that they strive for the instantaneous delivery and
processing of the information necessary to do battle, and the ability to
strike a target perfectly and destroy it with the minimum amount of
force. These in turn require the ability to collect, transmit, process,
display, and judge the richest possible and most continuous stream of
data, and to guide an appropriate weapon past obstruction and, at the
chosen moment, find an exact point on the surface of a target, even if
this means that the weapon itself must work through a number of problems
and strategies to do so.
Perhaps it would not be too much of a sin to flesh this out, but keep
in mind the inescapable tendency to confuse the potential with the
actual. Given the current appetite for the development of concepts and
devices, this is virtually unavoidable. Thinking about RMA is like
piloting a supersonic fighter: it goes so fast that if you don't look so
far ahead that you can't even see what's there, you won't know what's
around you.
Hypothetically, six enemy tanks, a dozen armored fighting vehicles,
and a battalion of infantry hold a road and rail junction 250 miles from
a main American force. They are spread out and entrenched. Enemy air
defenses are intact and the junction must be disabled before an aerial
campaign, so as to prevent a breakout of tactical nuclear weapons and biologicals. The functioning air defenses and large defending force prevent the
promising insertion of a special operations group sufficient for the
task. A fusillade of cruise missiles might do extensive damage, but
would not incapacitate road or rail lines beyond quick repair. Precision
bombing with F-117s could be more effective, but it would have to keep
coming in waves, depriving other, more important targets of the
attention they deserve. Initial intelligence, supervision of the battle,
and damage assessment could come from a combination of satellites, high
altitude observation planes, loitering unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs),
and a small reconnaissance team. However, the UAVs and surveillance
planes might be shot down, when directed to other tasks satellites might
miss activity, and the penetration team might be compromised or
imperfectly positioned.
|
Fifty years ago, the destruction of Omaha would have required a major campaign. Then force and distance were mastered, assigned to one ICBM over fifteen minutes.
|
Many of these elements—the information gathering, linkage, and
display, the laser, optical, and tercom guidance of the weapons—are
fully of the time/exactitude paradigm of what is called RMA. RMA is not
new. It began, if not before, with Robert Watson-Watt's work on the
radio-location of thunderstorms, in 1915, which developed into radar
just in time to play a decisive role in the Battle of Britain. Like the
fax machine, which arrived in the 1930s but was assimilated in a sudden
burst half a century later, RMA is both here and not yet here. It is
written of as if it exists and as a gleam in the eye of futurists.
Within a short time unspecified, depending upon accident, investment,
talent, and will, the enemy crossroads will be fully transparent and its
defenders vulnerable to remarkably precise attack. Unmanned aerial
surveillance vehicles the size of a fist would blanket the area. Some
would remain airborne, others would settle to operate on the ground or
stay in reserve, all would be capable of dispatching real-time or burst-timed multiply triangulated data in three dimensions, further
accuratized by almost unerring global positioning satellites. They would
collect optical, infrared, radar, acoustic, seismic, chemical, and
signals data, providing an extraordinary target map, status reports, and
precise geographic coordinates to the fraction of a second. Eventually,
surveillance drones will be smaller even than a fist and cheap enough to
blanket an objective as if they were insects. This is because everything
but airframe, engine, and fuel will eventually be so light that carting
it around in a miniature aircraft will be quite possible. Sensors,
processors, memory, and transponders will be microminiature, as, apart
from their structural and optical elements, they consist of things that
keep getting smaller as more and more power is packed into less and less
space and with less weight. When computational processing is reduced to
the atomic (and perhaps subatomic?) realm, as someday it will be, and
concomitant advances occur in contributory systems (for example, in
power storage, increasingly diaphanous compositional structural
materials, and purely digital optics) these things will be the run of the mill. They are not, however, the run of the mill now.
When an attack was launched, you would not want to be its object.
Just as during the Cold War the certainty of deterrence required a triad
of nuclear weaponry, this enemy would be covered as if with many coats
of paint. Dormant munitions arriving alongside the surveillance
mechanisms would sit amid rocks and hills, awaiting orders to blast up
and rocket down on vehicles and fortifications. Missiles with
submunitions would appear overhead and disgorge large numbers of small,
high-explosive, independently guided and propelled warheads. Some of
these would be able to idle in the air until called. Unmanned weapons
platforms with rapid-fire cannon would be sent into the battle and high-
altitude bombers would sow great tonnages of precision-guided bombs.
Perhaps even a cruise missile or two, or propulsion-assisted shells from
naval guns, would find targets that had been perfectly reconnoitered,
perfectly verified, perfectly designated, and perfectly tracked in real
time.
The defenders would have too many incoming threats to block or
engage, on a mysteriously empty battlefield suddenly dense with fire and
rocket trails. Every time they successfully parried a blow something new
would appear—from the ground or the air, and in such great numbers and
with such ideal guidance and direction that the only thing to do would
be to flee. But then small projectiles would follow them ineluctably.
And throughout the extraordinarily concentrated and intense assault, not
a single American soldier would be at risk.
Such an RMA scenario is almost feasible now. Assuming advances in the
power of computation at even half the historical rate and the impulse to
realize and integrate all the requisite devices, it could be business as
usual within a decade. We have been led to believe that, in fact, it
will be business as usual, if not within a decade then soon enough. But
the more you read of future soldiers in the thrall of computers and
unburdened by rifles, of war almost without casualty, of the demise of
infantry, and of the passing of the need to take territory, the more you
should count your spoons and hope that in the next century you may keep
them. Which is not to say that the oft-praised revolution in military
affairs does not exist, but rather that, as in the case of most
revolutions, the principles it would sweep aside will long outlast it.
These much vaunted changes will mold themselves to the legacy of the
past, and neither from imagination nor desire but from this will emerge
the shape of things to come.
|
Like the fax machine, which arrived in the 1930s but was assimilated in a sudden burst half a century later, the revolution in military affairs is both here and not yet here.
|
THE REALITY OF WARFARE
in the next century will arise from the rubble
of contemporary illusion. Even as the passage of time transforms
conventional wisdom into a will-o'-the-wisp, armies are capable of
following it as an article of faith, until they come to a Bull Run, a
Kasserine Pass, or a Yalu River, geographical features that signify
variously and over a century the tragedy of American military
overconfidence, ill-preparedness, and unwarranted assumption. What leads
a nation into the delusion that a particular magic is an assurance of
victory?
Start with the messengers, as kings do, and probably with good
reason. Politicians who direct military policy are in turn directed by
their constituents, who know what they know based on what they see in
print or on television. But since the sixties the cultural elite (which
for some reason includes journalists) has behaved as if ignorance of
martial subjects were a moral virtue. Thinking the entire field is
unworthy, they do not study it, know nothing about it, and, when they
must come to grips with it, tend to write ethical treatises or science
fiction, skewed by the fact that few of them have ever served and most
of the few that did wielded not rifles but desks.
Worse, they take their cue from professional seers for whom the
future is a kind of free-fire zone for indiscretion (according to their
predictions of the sixties, the earth ran out of metals and food 12
years ago), where the reckoning comes later, and they cannot suffer,
because by temperament they do not look back. And yet the giddiness of
prophecy drives them into one another's company for safety. Whether they
all agree that the world will freeze or that it will bake is less
important than that they all agree. After all, given that the facts do
not yet exist, who can argue with a consensus of futurists? But as they
establish the conventional wisdom about the future they must be guided
by a commonality. And that, mirabile dictu, is the present, which is
why, with no little irony, futurism is usually less a beam of
clairvoyance than a reliable record of the present. Leaving aside luck,
attempts to foretell the future have always failed to identify the
unexpected influences that are so often decisive.
We read Jules Verne and H. G. Wells to understand not our time but
theirs. The 1939 and 1964 World's Fairs, bravely warranting guesses
about the years ahead, seem touching now for their faith in things that
failed. Think of how overemphasized as an element of history was the
idea of streamlined form. For lack of a more substantive notion, this
straightforward and obvious requirement in an age of higher speeds
within the realms of air was exaggerated into a picture of the whole
future, which became a cartoon of pointlessly voluptuous curves.
Aerodynamics as an index of futurism has survived even as late as the
Star Wars movies in which fighter craft in airless space move as if
against the resistance of air.
The potency of planning is always overemphasized by futurists, who
mistakenly extrapolate from a fixed social base. Thirty and forty years
ago, colonies in space and aerocars landing on the decks of circular
skyscrapers were envisioned, and not unreasonably, but as social and
political conditions changed, feasibility was overruled by decision.
Everything was transformed—demographics, expectations, values—and
reasonable inferences in regard to techno-scientific advance became
irrelevant, for more than they shape the course of history, science and
technology are shaped by history.
ILLUSTRATION: TONY LANE
|
AT PRESENT, THREE
factors in particular are encouraging an excessive
reliance on technical means as a substitute for the fundamentals of
military power and the continually elusive art of strategy. With the end
of half a century of cold war, the first is the coincidental transition
from the era of one international system to another as the millennia
shift. At certain points on the course of an airplane flying in rolling
parabolas, everything seems to lose its gravity. With the old regime
left behind and the passengers afloat, the careless among them may think
that weightlessness will persist forever, that in a world that has
advanced beyond consequences what lies ahead will conform not to the
laws of history but to the shape of their dreams. If someone says that
the navy need not control the seas, or that the primary threat to
American national security is environmental degradation, why not? It
doesn't matter that such wishful declarations are forcefully
contradicted by recent history. The people who make them don't know
recent history. And, for them, history is no longer something from which
to draw lessons but rather an object upon which to impress instructions.
|
Since the sixties the cultural elite has behaved as if ignorance of martial subjects were a moral virtue. They do not study it and know nothing about it.
|
Second, seduced hopelessly by computers, American civilization has
taken leave from the refinement of qualities to chase immoderately after
quantities. There are cycles in our national life in which one or the
other predominates: contrast, for example, the America of the
Declaration with the America of Whitman's Democratic Vistas. The
substantive emptiness of the digital world arises not from the fact that
it is powerless in the face of fundamental questions, but that it is
taken for an answer to them. All it has done is to accelerate or amass
quantities. Not coincidentally, its language is one of quantities, its
measure of success an increase in speed, its highest goals the
compression of space and the expansion of capacity. We know the leaders
of this revolution not by their character but by yet another
quantitative measure, their net worth. They are so portrayed because, in
the absence of the flattery that is drawn to power, this is clearly the
essence and extent of their achievement. You probably know, plus or
minus five or ten billion, how many dollars Bill Gates has, but you
never thought to know the net worth of Abraham Lincoln, Mozart, or
Einstein. For a nation used to accomplishing everything faster but very
little better, and to having more and more of less and less, the union
of futurism to which it has been historically susceptible, military
projections about which it is deliberately ignorant, and computers by
which it is dazzled, is an irresistible temptation.
Third, and primarily, the twentieth century has been the bloodiest
century in history. After all the wars in living memory no civilized
nation wants to sacrifice its sons, and now even its daughters. No
matter the effect of standing down from the old fortitude, and how in
the provision of openings for militant adventurers such abdications have
always bred new wars, it is a fact, and although given the record this
may be hardly believable, one of the obsessions of military thought for
almost a century has been casualty avoidance. After the First World War
every effort was poured into this despite often counterproductive
results. Perhaps even more than pacifism, the search for scientific
superiority—not merely as a means to victory but as a way of fighting
without dying—was a hallmark of the period.
In Britain, V. W. Germains protested an overreliance upon the
"scientific school," saying, "For more than a decade the British public
was trained to put faith in every conceivable means of winning wars save
by fighting battles and beating the enemy." 1 Liddell Hart, of all
people, suggested in September of 1939, of all times, that Britain
renounce military means in responding to German conquests and
concentrate instead on morale and the economy. This was an early version
of "It's the economy, stupid," an illusion of escape from the real war
that lay, literally, just ahead. In a sign of inescapable catastrophe,
everyone seemed tempted to try everything. The Gold Medal of the Royal
United Service Institution went to Capt. J. C. Slessor's essay proposing
a small, economical, highly mechanized army, all that the British public
would accept, when it was as clear to Churchill as it is in hindsight
that Britain required an expensive force fifty times the size.
The Maginot Line was yet another article of faith and evasion.
Transforming their predilection for fortification into a massive
investment in the scientific school, the French did all they could to
build their way out of human tragedy. Maneuver warfare, which hadn't
much to do with the latest invention or design and was the brainchild of
reactionary and outmoded cavalry officers, was rejected. The Maginot
Line, the technical military marvel of the age, did not via its
spectacular and careful engineering lead to a cost-free war, but to
complacency and disaster.
Now we are in just this frame of mind. We want to construct our way
out of danger. This is admirable, to some extent possible, and to be
expected of a technological civilization. We are reluctant to engage the
enemy and to lose soldiers. This is admirable and to be expected of a
humane and democratic society. Nonetheless, as the French and British
examples show, admirable impulses can sustain faith misplaced in the
power of agreements, the utility of pacifism, the protections of the
defense, or the magic of a new style of warfare. To avoid such traps,
into which great nations readily fall, it is necessary to separate
illusion from reality, and to understand what currents of war are
fundamental to it in such a way that they continue to flow past and
through inventions created in the hope of cutting them off.
|
Eventually, surveillance drones will be smaller than a fist and cheap enough to blanket an objective as if they were insects.
|
IN MANY RESPECTS
RMA
is an extension of one aspect of the Hi-Lo argument that took place in the seventies and early eighties.
Itself a recapitulation of the persistent choice between military
richness and military rigor, it was not a productive dispute. In its
simplest form the question to be resolved was, Which is better, fewer
capable weapons, or very many middling weapons? The debate was initiated
by those who favored less defense spending and the emulation of the
procurement philosophy of the Warsaw Pact armies, which had inferior
weaponry but so much of it as to be a cause of worry. Little did it
matter (or perhaps, very cynically, it did) that the Soviets had decided
to imitate the West, after careful analysis of, among other things, the
Arab-Israeli wars in which, for the most part, superior numbers of
lesser Soviet arms were overcome by lesser numbers of superior Western
arms. The trend was totally without ambiguity, and the Red Army embraced
it.
In the West, advocates of the Lo faction persisted. Their arguments
seemed almost deliberately weak, and it seemed that what appealed most
to their sensibilities were Liberty ships and disposable razors. What
killed the Lo faction was, of course, analysis of the proxy wars in the
Third World. What could they say in the face of an Israeli air-to-air
kill advantage over Syria of eighty to one? What could they say after a
single British attack submarine cleared the seas around the Falklands of
the entire Argentine navy? Also, they were stymied by the time travel
argument. It was easy and fun to demonstrate that, for example, a single
company of modern infantry could have turned the battle of Gettysburg
any which way it pleased, or that one Hamilton-class Coast Guard cutter
would be capable of sending the entire Spanish Armada to the bottom in a
few hours. The Lo faction was plowed out of the way as if by a tidal
wave. On the one hand, had they prevailed, and had we arrested the
important technical advances of the eighties, the most capable weapons
in the world might now be Russian, and perhaps even Soviet, given that
in such circumstances the Soviets might not have blinked.
But on the other hand, almost every argument has virtues, even
arguments that fail, and the virtues of the Lo argument were ignored. If
the company of modern infantry had been spit out of its time machine not
at Gettysburg but on Iwo Jima, it would have made some difference but it
would hardly have been decisive. The narrower the gap between competing
forces, the more play given to quantities in determining the result. No
divine edict grants America technological superiority forever. For
various reasons, some of which seem less than wholesome, the Clinton
administration has sanctioned the transfer of advanced machine tools,
supercomputers, and nuclear technology to China. After decades of export
discipline and control, we now have a careless promiscuity in which the
grasshopper is selling the tricks of his trade to the ant. Given varying
and sometimes narrow margins, it is clear that victory demands a
balance, with due diligence in regard to the homely as well as the
expected lust after things that flash.
|
We read Jules Verne to understand not our time but his. The 1939 and 1964 World’s Fairs, bravely warranting guesses about the years ahead, seem touching now for their faith in things that failed.
|
Consider the example of landing craft during the Second World War.
They were, of course, neither nuclear weapons, radar, nor Ultra
decodings. They were decidedly low tech, necessitated solely by
circumstances and geography (no ports were available in occupied Europe
for an unopposed landing and the chain of islands leading to Japan was
heavily fortified). The need for them was unforeseen, history has passed
them over, and yet they were absolutely essential to Allied victory. Had
the Allies sufficient numbers of them earlier, the war might have been
shortened by a year and a half. In May of 1942, the Chiefs of Staff
Committee told Churchill that though given what they had the first wave
of an assault upon a portion of the French coast would be limited to
4,300 men and 160 tanks, they needed a first wave of 100,000 men and
18,000 vehicles. This lesson was repeated throughout almost every
category. The 10 Japanese battleships and aircraft carriers that sallied
into the Indian Ocean made the overstretched Royal Navy irrelevant for
as long as they stayed. At one time in the Battle of Britain, every
capable British aircraft was in the air. And so on and so forth, but the
formula is clear. If M = mass and Q = quality, where Q1 and Q2 are
within roughly similar limits (even with important discrepancies) the
comparison is not M1 vs. Q2, but M1Q1 vs. M2Q2. The more closely matched
are two opponents in quality, the more decisive the calculation of mass.
Conversely, the more even the strength of two opponents in mass, the
more decisive their quality. Perhaps most importantly, mass has its own
virtues, for which quality often cannot substitute, and this should
never be forgotten.
Nonetheless, it has been forgotten, or perhaps it was never learned.
It is as if the adversaries in the old debate are now reincarnated as
advocates of either the "recapitalized force" or the "accelerated RMA
force." The first of these is more or less a reprise of the argument for
mass, the second for quality without mass. But whereas in the previous
exchange strong-defense partisans argued for quality, and budget-before-
defense adherents for quantity, the debate is now less symmetrical. In
both cases economy wins, with mass insufficient in one and quality in
the other. Although a third option exists, the so-called full-spectrum
force, in the present environment it is merely noted under protest.
What is happening here? Start with the Reagan military buildup, in
which the need for advanced weapons in quantity was recognized and paid
for. Some will reflexively comment that the payment was shifted to the
national debt. But if, as is commonly asserted, the deficit grew because
President Reagan cut taxes and increased military spending, then it
should follow that for the years 1982 to 1989 revenue changes plus
military increases would have added to the growth of the deficit. But,
though you will never read this in the New York Review of Books, they
didn't. In fact, and counter-mythologically, they accounted for a $238
billion surplus in year-over-year changes.
The Reagan military became the "Base Force" of the early nineties,
which is to say that, though diminished, it was capable of being backed
up into what it once had been. This was then transformed into the
Clinton "BUR" (for "Bottom Up Review") force, so reduced and changed
that it is incapable of being backed up into what it once was. Although
the military balance cannot be adequately assessed in terms of spending,
funding comparisons can sometimes be more illustrative than the most
intricate analysis. Whereas in 1960 defense spending accounted for more
than half the federal budget and a tenth of the GDP, and in 1985 for a
quarter of the budget and 6% of the GDP, it is now running at about an
eighth of the budget and 3% of the GDP.
The link between RMA and even further reductions in defense spending
is clearly illustrated in the semiofficial, and very carefully phrased,
Strategic Assessment, 1997: "Since the early 1990s, there have been a
number of public articles and assessments outside the Defense Department
that conclude force structure changes are both necessary and desirable.
Two factors drive this belief: (1) a concern that the BUR force may be
unaffordable; and (2) indications that advanced technology offers much
greater military efficiency, particularly if it is combined with
organizational adjustments that take full advantage of the new
technologies." 2
What a surprise that the Clinton administration has discovered that
advanced technology "offers much greater military efficiency," at a time
when "the BUR force may be unaffordable." Certainly the technique of
nonattribution in Strategic Assessment's formulation is splendid, surpassed only by the New York Times's use
of the phrase "experts agree" preceding an opinion asserted in a news
story.
The military does not protest when RMA is used as a stalking-horse
for budget cutting. Nor did the French military in similar straits
during the interwar period: "Higher army officers resigned themselves to
the inevitable. But their resentment was nonetheless great, because they
could not dissociate the program of the left concerning the
technicalities of army organization from ulterior political motives." 3
In regard to decisions of such magnitude and consequence it is a
soldier's duty to accept or resign. Those who disagree and remain may
simply be waiting for a galvanizing event, such as the Soviet invasion
of Afghanistan during the Carter administration, or for the next
presidential election, or for just the passage of time. They may hope
that RMA may indeed be sufficient even in penurious circumstances and
small numbers. Or they may feel that the development alone of a
revolutionary new approach can serve as an armature to be fleshed in to
great advantage after a period of luck in international affairs.
Leaving aside the wisdom of trusting the security of nations to luck,
how credible is the idea that the revolution in military affairs is so
great a departure as to be effective even absent reserves and in
conditions of material deficiency? Is it, indeed, a revolution, or is it
something else elevated by an imprecise and hopeful use of language?
|
The Maginot Line, the technical military marvel of the age, did not via its spectacular and careful engineering lead to a cost-free war, but to complacency and disaster.
|
AS IT IS NOW DIRECTED
(rather than as it is now conceived) it is less
revolutionary than it is the restoration of balance between class
ses of devices
as concern with time and exactitude supplants the previous focus on force and
distance. The interaction of science and military development is easily
distinguishable from derivative technological refinement. Galileo’s discoveries
of the property of inertia, the law of freely falling bodies, and the principle
of composition of velocities were the result of his investigations of
ballistics. The problem of longitude, much of the work of Lord Kelvin, Sadi
Carnot, Michelson, Watson-Watt, and the Manhattan Project, are examples of
momentous scientific discovery revolutionizing military affairs. But whereas
such discoveries were usually the result of specific military demands upon the
civilian sector, the present revolution in military affairs simply follows after
the Gatesian world. That in itself should be a sign of danger, if only because
military reality is so different from everything else. Military culture is bred
to extremes, to sacrifices and tasks that in a civilian context seem at best
illogical. If that culture is gratuitously recast to civilian norms, we will
have hell to pay. If the revolution in military affairs is itself part and
parcel of the conversion of military values to civilian norms, the danger is
breathtaking, because in the face of war and destruction, no matter how it is
portrayed, it will be inadequate.
ILLUSTRATION: TONY LANE
Footnotes:
1 Germains, V. W.; in Contemporary Review, CLVIII, 1940, p. 155. back up
2 Strategic Assesment, 1997; National Defense University, Washington, 1997, p. 260.back up
3 Gibson, Irving (pseudonym): "Maginot and Liddel Hart: The Doctrine of Defense," in Makers of Modern Strategy, Princeton, 1943, p. 367.back up
|
The invention of gunpowder was revolutionary. Vauban’s reduction of the
powder charge so as to allow the ball to weave a pattern of glancing blows
rather than to shatter, Nelson’s use of the sea surface to skip cannonballs into
ships along a virtually flat trajectory even at long distances, and refinements
in metallurgy that allowed for eighteen-inch guns, were evolutionary. In regard
to the present revolution in military affairs, nothing yet described in the
public record is entirely novel or without a fairly long history. Guidance, of
course, has been a primary military problem for half a century, and the origins
of techniques such as global positioning, laser marking, and terrain contour
mapping are older than some of the scientists now working on them. Stealth
technology and unmanned aerial vehicles are seventies retro. Tremendous advances
in command-and-control have come more recently, but the concept of battle
management and transparency is hardly new.
The revolution in military affairs is but a name that has been given to a
portion of the long running continuum in military technical development. Where a
new era begins is anyone’s guess. Certainly no sharp break or turn exists to
identify it, and it is hardly ever described in terms of actual developments
rather than in regard to the miracles it will work upon completion. Novelists on
book tours are sometimes accosted by people with “books” they introduce in a
conspiratorial excitement that quickly elides into interrogation about paperback
rights, movie sales, and luxury hotels. But almost invariably the “book” that
will bring the riches does not actually exist, and what they have described is
only the confusion of their desires. This is what happens when a culture makes
the shift from word to image, from law to license, and from facts to dreams.
Neither are military theorists immune, nor have they ever been. Quite apart
from the interference and influence of political questions, the revolutionary
nature of contemporary military developments is exaggerated by miscalculation
along the lines of the de Seversky fallacy. Alexander de Seversky was a Soviet
airpower theorist who during the Second World War bet everything on range,
predicting that by 1947 military aircraft would be capable of 25,000-mile
flights. This signified to him that forward basing, aircraft carriers, broad
foreign alliances, and blue-water navies were a waste of time. All military
missions, no matter where the battle, would start and end in the home territory
of the USSR. Of course, in regard to such things as overseas bases and blue-
water navies the prospects of the Soviet Union were not bright, but de
Seversky’s error was not merely one of wishful thinking or cultural blindness.
He was guilty as well of overextrapolating data, as if he did not understand
that in most physical relations a point of diminishing returns exists where
variables exit simple arithmetic proportionality. As a flight theorist he should
have been aware that effect creates disturbance that influences effect.
Apparently he wasn’t. He was also guilty of pure negligence in not taking into
account the fact that no matter what an aircraft’s range, if it is able to
reduce the distance to target it will be able either to loiter longer over the
target or carry a greater payload, proportionally magnifying its value.
|
What sorcery would allow fewer planes, based in North Dakota, to better support combat in Iraq, than more planes in Turkey or on carriers in the Persian Gulf?
|
More than half a century later no military plane can fly 25,000 miles
unrefueled, and forward basing and aircraft carriers are just as important as
ever. Among other things, potential adversaries have not stood still, and
aircraft must be able to do more in every way to fight their way to the target
and to control the air above it, rather than just navigating to an uncontested
set of coordinates and there drop an iron bomb. And yet, in the estimation of
the president’s de Severskian national security magpies, it may be wise to
“shift away from the forward deployment hub concept toward...a global surge
concept in which naval forces are normally either (1) stationed near the
continental United States...or (2) dispersed and moving globally.” Not
surprisingly, and consonant with first-term candidate Clinton’s proposals
magically to increase American power projection capabilities in the Third World
while simultaneously cutting back on aircraft carriers, “Both of these changes
could...lead to a reduction in the number of carriers. 4
What happens when the forces that have surged are played out? Where are their
replacements if they are destroyed? What sorcery would allow fewer planes, based
in North Dakota, to better support combat in Iraq, than more planes in Turkey or
on carriers in the Persian Gulf?
Ninety years ago H. G. Wells foresaw “the first fight of the airship and the
final fight of...the ironclad battleships,” when “cheap things of gas and
basketwork made an end to them altogether, smiting out of the sky! 5 A sense of
the general direction in which things like this were bound led to the belief
that one large blimp raid that would let fall a few hundred tons of explosive on
London would mortally cripple Great Britain. In the event, of course, in the
Blitz, the estimate proved exponentially inaccurate, but not until military
theorists had elaborated upon it with great sophistication. Most influential was
Douhet, an Italian whose Il dominio dell’aria, 1921, changed the war plans of
the major powers. The heart of his view was that strategic bombing would be
decisive, limiting ground forces to fixed defense and making command of the air
paramount. He was right about command of the air, though for the wrong reasons,
but in consideration of strategic bombing he and others relied upon poorly
designed calculations. Bombing patterns were assumed, somehow, to conform
invariably to a fixed grid. The power of explosive force as inversely
proportional to the measure of distance from it, almost a matter of instinct to
every soldier who has ever served, seemed unknown, as did the capability of
defense, the resistiveness of building materials, the baffling effect of dense
construction, etc.
During his first premiership, Churchill wrote, in instructive agitation:
It is very disputable whether bombing by itself will be a decisive factor in
the present war. On the contrary, all that we have learnt since the war began
shows that its effects, both physical and moral, are greatly
exaggerated....Before the war we were greatly misled by pictures they painted of
the destruction that would be wrought by air raids. This is illustrated by the
fact that 250,000 beds were actually provided for air raid casualties, never
more than 6,000 being required.
This picture of air destruction was so exaggerated that it depressed the
statesmen responsible for the pre-war policy, and played a definite part in the
desertion of Czechoslovakia in August 1938.
6
|
ALTHOUGH STRATEGIC BOMBING
came nowhere near to being the prime and decisive
element of warfare it was slated to have been, it was of course enormously
influential. It was then irresponsibly dismissed in the Strategic Bombing
Survey, which itself was swept away by an accurate perception of nuclear
weapons, that then grew in whatever direction fear tended to push it. Just as
illucidity about strategic bombing led to its more widespread use, the refusal
to cast a cold eye on the real capacities and effects of nuclear weapons may
have set the scene for their use in the next century. In the early eighties,
when nuclear weapons were more numerous, better controlled, and their use less
likely, the public was in a state of panic, and now, when they are less
numerous, out of control, and their use is more likely, the public is in denial.
Loose nukes, terrorists, and rogue states aside, the transition from the force
and distance paradigm to the time and exactitude paradigm invites nuclear first
use on the part of a desperate combatant flummoxed by its opponent’s new weapons
and delighted to see that the very same opponent has moved “beyond” nuclear war
fighting.
The rapidly solidifying doctrine of the revolution in military affairs calls
for engagements characterized by a perfect picture of the battlefield, the
perfect integration of this into automated planning and mission assignment,
attack by precision-guided munitions, and then perfect assessment. It is
conceivable that the United States might develop the most exact and imaginative
forms of warfare, leaving nuclear deterrence, nuclear war fighting, and the old
forms of conventional war behind, only to be overcome by the ‘unthinkable’
detonation of a nuclear weapon over each sector of the battle that the enemy
wished to return to an age before the revolution in military affairs. Then what,
when the delicate equipment is useless or gone?
|
If the revolution in military affairs is to meet expectations, it is in need of deeper thinking and more support. Revolutions cannot be had on the cheap.
|
The RMA paradigm as it is now carelessly proffered pays insufficient heed to
countermeasures, to similar capabilities (especially in light of the revolution
in export affairs, in which the economy takes precedence over all things, as if
there never will be another enemy), to breakdown, to dispersion, to systems
interdependence vulnerabilities, to concealment, to masking, to the necessity of
holding territory, and to strategic defense.
Crediting Napoleon’s maxim Frappez la masse et le reste vient par surcroît,
one would think that in a revolution in military affairs strategic defense would
take center stage. It has not. The channels to which this “revolution” has been
confined (miniaturization, remote direction, standoff, reconnaissance, battle
management) have been deliberately routed away from the truly revolutionary
developments (strategic defense, laser and directed-energy weapons) that are
entirely feasible and would be as unmistakably influential as were the advent of
gunpowder, mechanization, radar, and nuclear weapons. What we have now, an
evolution that has almost uniquely taken its cues from the civilian economy, is
as if the refinement of the weapons of the Great War had deliberately been
limited so that the Second World War saw not radar and the atom bomb but more
advanced Mausers and very large artillery pieces.
What makes the revolution in this case decidedly unrevolutionary is that, in
oversolicitous deference to the ABM Treaty, Department of Defense directives
“demarcate” all (including theater) American antimissile interceptors. 7 Though
they are able to, they may neither take tracking data directly from satellites
nor intercept a target traveling faster than three kilometers per second. This
means that an enemy has not only a free ride in strategic terms but numerous
opportunities to render even our theater antimissile defenses powerless: by
using long-range missiles with speeds in excess of three kilometers per second;
adding terminal boosters to increase the warhead speed of slower missiles; or
using chemical or biological payloads from which plumes could spread over a
target defended by an interceptor too slow to make a hit at a protective
distance. 8
Just as Stanley Baldwin, who stated in 1934 that the eastern frontier of
Britain was the Rhine, found virtue in holding back not only military production
and expenditure but the implementation of design and technical advances,
President Clinton, as he expands NATO and extends American responsibilities to
great swaths of now quiescent territory, finds virtue in the reduction and
technical limitation of military capacity. The catch is that the mismanagement,
interference, and reductions from which RMA is supposed to remove the element of
risk have limited RMA to the extent that it cannot do so. And the irony is that
whereas Mr. Baldwin fashioned his policy during a worldwide economic depression,
Mr. Clinton fashions his while riding a wave of buoyant economic luck.
Is this, indeed, a revolution? What revolution in history has been so
programmatically confined, so much an extension of what has come before, so
limited, so budgeted, so optional, and so tame? If not by definition, then by
implication, revolutions make their own history and unpredictably. If the
revolution in military affairs is to meet expectations, it is in need of deeper
thinking and more support. Revolutions cannot be had on the cheap. Nor can the
best chance of victory. Each time science gives to the military an apparently
miraculous new thing, people assume that it will cost less overall than what it
replaces, whereas almost always when the new thing is adopted it costs a great
deal more. What a shame it would be if, instead of the respectful treatment it
deserves, the revolution in military affairs is merely used, like a matador’s
cape, to distract the attention of a military that is slowly being forced to its
knees.
|
The government did fall. Golda Meir never recovered, Moshe Dayan was reported to have had a nervous breakdown, and the Ramcal was found dead at his home.
|
IN OCTOBER OF THE YEAR
in which the Ramcal had been kind to me and put his
hand on my shoulder, the Egyptians crossed the Suez Canal and overwhelmed the
Bar Lev Line. Before Israel had mobilized, the Egyptians drove into the Sinai
deep enough and fast enough to have been within two days of Tel Aviv. There they
stopped, in disbelief of what they had done. On the Golan, the Syrians almost
won the battle against an unreinforced Israeli tank screen, and had it not been
for a young man named Zwicker, who fought like Horatio at the bridge, they would
have.
Thousands of good men were lost who need not have been lost, and Israel
itself came so close to destruction as to be saved only by the accidents and
vagaries of war. Its highly advanced avionics and American equipment proved
ineffective at crucial moments against the enemy’s brilliant simplicity. The Bar
Lev Line, undermanned during a holiday because it was “impassable,” nonetheless
was made of sand, and the Egyptians punched through it not with electronics but
with water cannon on barges in the canal. The famed Israeli tank force, perhaps
the best in the world, went into battle without antipersonnel ordnance and
beyond the support of artillery, where Egyptian infantrymen made a mockery of it
with cheap antitank rockets. Had it not been for frantic American resupply and
the costly summoning—by death all around—of the Israeli army’s
fundamental abilities, the country would have fallen.
Needless to say, the government did fall. Golda Meir never recovered, Moshe
Dayan was reported to have had a nervous breakdown, and the Ramcal, David
Eliezer, was found dead at his home near Ramat David. It was the kind of war
after which a commission is appointed to study the mistakes, and the commission
was not kind.
What the Israelis did, in essence, was to believe in an image they themselves
had created and of which, in all the world, no credible voices had been
critical. To a large extent, what gave them confidence was the fact that, in
military technical terms, they were light-years ahead of their opponents.
Resting on this false assurance, they neglected everything. They neglected to do
their duty. They neglected to be vigilant. They neglected even to pursue
properly the advantage that had made them so confident. This, I believe, was
their real failing, and it could be ours as well.
The historian Irving M. Gibson (a pseudonym) wrote that the French "ceased to
be la grande nation, because with their Maginot Line mentality they tried to
escape the heavy responsibilities resting on the shoulders of great nations." 9
The new technological warfare will free us of those responsibilities only to the
extent that we are willing to bear them. And if we are not, it will be yet
another illusion over death, paid for once again in the currency of defeat.
Novelist Mark Helprin is the author of A Soldier of the Great War, among
other works. A senior fellow of the Hudson Institute, a member of the Council on
Foreign Relations, and a contributing editor of the Wall Street Journal, he was
an adviser on defense and foreign relations to Republican presidential nominee
Robert F. Dole.
ILLUSTRATIONS: TONY LANE
Footnotes:
4 Strategic assesment, 97; op. cit., p.278. back up
5 Wells, H. G.; The War in the air, London, 1908, pp. 167, 208. back up
6 Gilbert, Martin; Winston S. Churchill: Volume VI; Finest Hour, 1939-1941, London, 1983, p. 1,205. back up
7 Department of Defense Directives 5100.70, 2060.1, and S-5100.71. back up
8 For illuminating discussion of the 3km/sec rule, see Codevilla, Angelo M.; "Missiles, Defense and Israel," Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political studies Research Paper No. 5, November, 1997. back up
9 Gibson, op. cit. p.375. back up
|
|