Like a lot of other sage observers, Naval Postgraduate School professor John Arquilla isn’t nuts about the idea of spending a ton on Cold War-style weapons systems when we’re supposed to be fighting terrorists and insurgents. But Arquilla is one of the first military analysts I’ve heard say that “the Pentagon’s big platforms [aren’t] merely the wrong weapon systems to fight present and future wars, but [are] actually likely to bring defeat.“
In an interview with Technology Review, the author of Networks and Netwars: The Future of Terror, Crime, and Militancy explains:
[O]ur military today oversees spending of about a billion and a quarter dollars every day. Most of that is misspent… The principal argument for that is: “We have to keep the big, old-style military because we might fight a big, old-style war one day.” But in the future the bigger you are, the harder you’re going to fall to ever-more accurate weapons. Creating a mass army to deal with an old-style mass army is simply to put hundreds of thousands of our troops in harm’s way needlessly.
TR: In short, smart, precision-targeted weapons like cruise missiles are going to become increasingly cheap and available to any government or group that can afford them. The Falklands War between Britain and Argentina gave early indications of the vulnerability of big platforms, didn’t it?
JA I think so. The lessons there include: how many British submarines did it take to pen up the entire Argentine navy? Two. Simultaneously, the Exocet missile proved the slow-moving capital ship’s vulnerability. Today, the Chinese aren’t developing aircraft carrier battle groups, but brilliant sea-going mines that know how to maneuver, supersonic anti-ship missiles — which means the Falklands War on steroids — and super-cavitation torpedoes, which create a bubble of air in front of the torpedo, letting them move at hundreds of knots per hour. The Chinese have an explicit “swarming” doctrine that can best be characterized as sea power without a navy. In this new naval antagonism that’s emerging, our potential enemies are not trying to emulate what we’re doing. Instead, they’re innovating in very thoughtful, effective ways
Since we’re spending so much on military affairs, maybe some of that should be directed towards technologies that will break our opponents’ communications. In World War II, there was an investment in creating the first high-performance computers, for that very purpose. Today, it may be an investment in creating the most effective quantum computing or figuring out how to structure the vast ocean of data that masks the movements of al-Qaeda on the Net and the Web. We need a new Bletchley Park [the country house where the German WWII codes were broken], if we’re going to win this war.
TR: Aren’t our enemies in Iraq an entirely human network? It’s not clear that breaking into their Internet communications…
JA: Oh, but they don’t exist without the Web and the Net. You don’t move around that country easily and even the old-school Baathist insurgent elements rely on the Web. A networked insurgency doesn’t have anything like a traditional leadership. Most of the leadership they get is by going on websites, where they share information very quickly.
TR: Could we take down the Net in Iraq and would it have the effect of downing the insurgency to a significant degree?
JA: You could end all Internet access in Iraq and it would in many ways cripple the insurgents, in terms of slowing them down tremendously. But you’d also cripple reconstruction.
TR: So, in other words, we should data-mine Net exchanges within Iraq?
JA: There you go.
I was reading a book on battleships and there was a lot of european talk about why the U.S. was using 8 inch guns at the turn of the century. It was assumed the U.S. was using it because 8″ guns where better, when in reality the U.S. had no 5 or 6 inch rapid fire guns to use.
I believe the French knew they couldn’t compete with then english battle ship based navy and so concentrated on torpedo boats. Yet battle ships lasted for 30 more years.
Maybe china can’t build aircraft battle groups so the swarm weapons are their best response.
I’m not saying its right, but the pattern happens time and time again.
Well, I seriously doubt that the Exocet “proved” anything about the vulnerability of “capitol ships” — all it proved was the same lesson as the USS Stark: when your anti-missile system isn’t working(for whatever reason), you’re likely going to get blown out of the water.
Using this line of reasoning, torpedos should have killed the surface combatent after WW1…Obviously, they didn’t.
Neither will anti-ship missiles, supersonic or not. Missiles are a whole lot easier to defend against than torpedo’s.
And, I won’t even bother with the purile comment about attack subs and the Argentine Navy.
The secret of the “swarming” doctrine(yes, I read the Rand Corp. study, too: “Swarming and the Future of Conflict”) is omnipresent, secure, high-speed communications; anything else is simply timing attacks via wristwatch. Penetrate/disrupt that commo, and the whole concept devolves into tiny, isolated units facing insane local odds with no support — Mogadishu, anyone?
Also, I find the logic behind not equipping to fight a major-war opponent because most of your opposition are the human equivalent of “killer bee’s” highly faulty. Just because most of the opposition are small ‘commando’-type units doesn’t mean that a large-enough power won’t try something interesting.
The secret to major/main-force dominance is a massive and secure logistical train, both in CONUS and in forward area’s…which requires additional “teeth” to protect it, wherever it is located.
What I don’t hear, from either the pundits or the Pentagon, is what they plan to do when some bright light gets a clue, and stages a large-scale series of commando-type attacks on the CONUS base system with very simple light-infantry weapons.
As our current structure now stands, that would be an inconvenience for the forward-deployed forces, as they tend to operate from the forward bases…shortening the tail at the front end, resulting in deployed units that are almost all combat arms in the battlezone and are resupplied from CONUS directly(which is the logical extension of Arguilla’s argument) is asking for defeat in detail.
Where he gets it right — although he doesn’t elucidate it well for the non-literati — is that there needs to be a focus on what used to be termed “civil affairs”. A few highly-specialzed CA units are fine, but the regular infantry troops at the sharp end need to be trained for that as well.
The trial of the Abu Ghraib dog-handler clearly demonstrates that the training is severely broken somewhere in the chain, assuming that his attitude is indicative of any significant portion of the troops.
The last two lines about data mining Iraq made me think about the reported Google plan to deploy data centres in a standard container sized packages http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20051117.html now at first glance a couple of these dotted about the internet may well be the places to start mining.
The swarm missile torpedo mine theory actually makes the case for the cold war weapon systems. The DDX and the F-22/F-35/longrange supersonic stealth bomber in such an environment will be some of the few platforms that can even dare wonder into the battle zone. Also dont forget for every weapon there is a counter weapon and tactics.
What I dont see is how anyone cant see the fact that the maybe the reason why no nation wants to face US except in a insurgency type warfare is because in the 80s we jumper far enough ahead of the war curve that we were overly dominant on the conventional battlefield.
If we forget this and allow others to challenge our absolute domination of the conventional field it will mean we will once again have to fight such. Peace through superior firepower may sound Rightwing but it is basic. Think in school who had to fight more the big guy everyone was scared of or the average sized guy? Why is that?
You cannot fight an insurgency war until you win the conventional war.
Does anyone else find Anguilla’s off the cuff comments that paramilitary/terrorist/insurgent forces in Iraq “don’t exist without the Web and the Net” and “you could end all Internet access in Iraq and it would in many ways cripple the insurgents, in terms of slowing them down tremendously,” to be implausible? Maybe I’m not working from the same data as he is, but his comments seem (a) to be a huge assumption and (b) unlikely.
Re. super-cavitating torpedoes: “…which create a bubble of air in front of the torpedo, letting them move at hundreds of knots per hour.“
Now, last time I checked, one knot was a speed measure, equal to one nautical mile pr. hour, making “knots pr. hour” a measure of acceleration. But of course this guy is a Naval Postgraduate School professor, so what do I know.…
That aside, the supercavitating torpedo was, if I recall corectly, originally a Soviet idea, intended to blast big holes in US aircraft carriers. A nifty idea, too.
Big expensive war toys make us weak when we can’t afford to build/buy enough of them to be effective. A/B/C/D/etc-22, call your office.
Sometimes it’s so damn confusing following Chinese military events. They’re modernizing and de-Sovietizing their military on one hand, while investing in military technologies which seem keyed towards invading Taiwan and dealing with the US response.
Which would, of course, bring about economic disaster for everyone involved. Just who are we supposed to believe? And why are they buying up t-bonds, anyway? It’s either demonstrative of benign intent, or preparations for some sort of economic payback. Or is it?
Confusing. Maybe I should follow baseball instead.
Charles: Don’t get me started on the Tofflers!
My problem is that the “RMA” crowd are pushing this idiodic notion that “‘puters and radios and aero-plane-thingies and R2D2 win wars all by themselves!“
Classic case of GIGO, and “SEGA-itis”: What we have done is create a military that is extraordinarily adept at blowing things up, but that doesn’t have a clue about how to “win the peace”.…Which eventually gets more of its own troops very dead, and damned little else.
As to the log-issues, the through-put and/or volume isn’t really the issue[s] — it’s the fact that Foggy Bottom’s Neighbor of Five-Sides is increasingly relying on direct CONUS-to-troops shipping, since they figure that will “free up” forces…to, presumably, sit on their arses at home, instead of putting boots on the ground to fix the problems at the local level.….
Not that a sudden shot of “Clueless Remover” will solve the problem, but it would be gratifying to see in action.….