January 14, 2003
LITTLE CAESARS:
Future Combat: The Army of the future will be lighter, fleeter and better connected (Frank Vizard, January 13, 2003, Scientific American)The goal sounds simple: be able to send a brigade anywhere in the world within 96 hours, a division within 120 hours and five divisions within 30 days. Achieving that goal, however, means transforming the army from a ponderous force built around the use of tanks and other heavy vehicles to one that is comprised of lighter, less heavily armored vehicles that can sprint across the battlefield at speeds of 60 mph and that can deliver the same dose of lethality as their bigger predecessors."We're changing how the army fights and deploys," General John M. Keane, Army vice chief of staff, told an audience of 1,161 scientists and technologists at December's biannual Army Science Conference in Orlando, Fla. The 23rd Science Conference was essentially a blueprint for attendees that laid down the goals and technological challenges associated with what the Army calls Future Combat Systems. Key to the transformation will be a host of new technologies that includes hybrid electric vehicles, robotics, lasers, mobile network communications and an array of smart weapons and sensors based on enabling technologies such as micromechanical systems (MEMS), biotechnology and nanotechnology. Other research efforts will help protect troops from biological agents (see "Detecting Biowarfare Attacks"). [...]
Underlying this transformation in hardware is a shift in the army's battle plans for future wars. As explained by General Keane, past military operations such as those in the Persian Gulf War were characterized by massive firepower proceeding across a border to take over as much enemy territory as possible. Advances in sensor technologies, deployed in everything from Earth-orbiting satellites to unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones, now allow troops to "see over the hill" as never before. In future battles, says Keane, the Army will occupy strategic points "like pepperoni on a pizza, with sensors watching over the rest of the pie."
Considering the difficulty that even Don Rumsfeld, one of the great bureaucratic infighters in recent government history, is having getting the Pentagon to change its way of thinking, you have to wonder if such a transformation is truly possible until we have the kind of dismantling of the armed forces that has usually followed the end of war, but which barely occurred in the 90s. Folks often lament how unprepared the US was for everything from the Civil War to WWII, but they fail to consider that it allowed the military to reinvent itself, to arm with the best available technology, and to bring in men with few tactical or strategic preconceptions. In a way that's tough for a conservative to acknowledge, some lack of institutional memory and continuity may be a very good thing for the armed forces. Posted by Orrin Judd at January 14, 2003 9:01 AM
This transformation of the military is a long-term project. Much of it depends on development of new technology. What's different is that in the past, the military took technology as given and figured out how to apply it to warfare. Now the military is figuring out what it wishes it had, and trying to develop the technology. If successful, it will give us a huge military advantage over the rest of the world; but we can't count on any particular technology development effort succeeding.
While the technology is under development, we have to fund both the old ways and development of the new ways. This is expensive. The trade-offs over money are what's behind the infighting and Pentagon resistance. Rumsfeld is doing a good job of keeping the transformation pot boiling despite all the other demands on our military right now.
Didn't Clinton try to downsize the military in the peaceful 90s? And who was stopping him? It must have been those big-government liberals.
Posted by: Charlie Murtaugh at January 14, 2003 12:15 PMI read somewhere that even if you had the greatest idea in the world and even if it was acknowledged by everyone in the army to be practical and useful, it still would take anything between ten to twenty-five years to be adopted since change in the army tends to be generational more than anything else.
Posted by: M Ali Choudhury at January 14, 2003 2:31 PMCharles:
He did cut spending in half as a % of GDP, that was the entire budget balance and government surplus. But that was still too high for peacetime. When 9-11 happened we should have been totally unprepared, with fighter pilots flying bi-planes and stuff. That's been our history.
Ali - you could have read that about any line of work - I remember an Isaac Asimov essay from the '60's in which he said it's a long-established truism that the way to get a new scientific theory accepted is to wait for all the established scientists to die.
Posted by: pj at January 14, 2003 4:38 PMThe militaries of the U.S. and Great
Britain have been driving technology, not
merely adapting to what's available, for
at least 75 years in a big way. That's
the start date for special committees
that were designed to do so. Ever heard
of radar?
Until around 1925, most new military
technology was developed on spec by
the private sector.
Hitler's army went to war in 1939 with
over a million horses. The British and
American armies didn't have any horses
by then.
By the way, the strategy of Gulf War I
was not to grab territory. What territory
did we grab?
The doctrine of the U.S. Army for generations
has been "dominate the enemy." In fact,
this general sounds really dumb. His
pepperoni pizza idea is extensively
discussed by Clausewitz in "On War." In
fact, about a third of that book is on
outposts.
You do end up having to control the ground,
as Clausewitz recognized. That's how
Hitler lost in Russia. His army surrounded
millions and millions of Soviet soldiers,
but the Germans didn't have enough
infantry to process them, so they filtered
through to fight another day.
Infantry is still the Queen of Battle, though
it is unfashionable to think so.