Techno-War
By Via Ezra, Ralph Peters wrote an outstanding column on modern warfare this week. Money quote:
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 of techno-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.
And…
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.
Meanwhile, the impressive-in-theory capabilities of the latest weapons cloud the vision of military planners, leading them to focus on what the systems can do instead of concentrating on what needs to be done. Rather than buying the weapons we really need, we twist the conflicts we face to conform to the weapons we want to buy. The results are flawed war plans based on unrealistic expectations — in short, Iraq.
I would add that there’s some variance across the services in their attachment to the technological fantasy (the Air Force, always, is the worst), although that may be changing. One of Ezra’s commenters noted that different implications can be drawn from this argument; the inherent nastiness of war might incline some to avoid conflict, while it might incline others to eschew any effort to make war less destructive. Peters probably falls into the latter camp, but this doesn’t invalidate his analysis of the situation.