56 of 58 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Entertaing, thought-provoking, but kind of silly, July 21, 2005
This review is from: The Future of War: Power, Technology and American World Dominance in the Twenty-first Century (Paperback)
"The Future of War" predicts US dominance of warfare throughout the 21st Century, as a result of US advanced technology in general and precision weaponry in particular. Their train of thought has considerable merit, and deserves reading and thoughtful attention. However, the book suffers from the same two major flaws as most books by visionaries without enough practical experience: misunderstanding of specific happenings in the past, and unlikely projections into the far future. Having been involved with US defense for 50 years, as a member of the military, as a designer and developer and advisor on US weaponry, and as an advisor on strategic, operational and tactical issues, I read this book with considerable amusement, although I do take seriously much of what it says. I shall give specifics on two failures to understand the details of the past, and then offer criticism of two of the book's projections, as examples.
Past episode #1: The 1991 precision strikes against Iraq. There is no doubt that our air strikes and land attacks in the 1991 campaign to liberate Kuwait were exceedingly effective, and there is no doubt that this effectiveness was largely due to our precision weaponry. However, to do precision strikes, whether with airborne munitions or ground forces, it's necessary to know what targets to attack, where they are, and what weapons are likely to be effective against a particular target. In the 1991 campaign, this effort was undertaken by the "Jeddi Knights", largely under the guidance of Col. John Warden. The key role of the "Jeddi Knights" was to establish priorities and mission profiles for which targets to strike when with what munitions, and they did this extraordinarily well. What the Friedmans obviously don't know is the amount of detailed information that was available to the "Jeddi Knights", carefully acquired over the 70 years preceding the campaign, first by the British until about 1950, and thereafter by the US military. The armed forces of major powers assume they may have to fight wars on short notice aganst opponents who have been designated shortly before by national authorities, so they invest a great deal in gathering information pertinent to how various campaigns might be conducted. In the case of Iraq, the British did very careful mapping from 1920 until about 1950, producing "ordnance" maps of higher detail and accuracy than exist even for some parts of the United States, and these were invaluable to planners. Then, starting in about 1950, when it began to seem possible that the US might someday have to fight somewhere in the Middle East, the US military carefully gathered information relevant to how a campaign might be fought, and which potential enemy targets should be candidates for destruction. These studies resided in US intelligence and military archives until the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, and were then used as the basis for planning the campaign.
Two examples of this. First, the destruction of certain bridges was given high priority not to impede vehicular movement, but to sever the communications cables running under the bridges; our planners knew which cables important to Iraqi Command and Control were buried too deeply to destroy easily except where they were routed under bridges, and therefore which bridges to take out to disrupt Iraqi military communications. Second, the swing by US, British and French forces far to the West, the "Hail Mary" gambit, would not have been possible in that harsh terrain unless viable routes for armor and supply vehicles were known, and the Iraqi Army either didn't know of such routes or didn't believe we could know of them. There are exactly two feasible routes, and both were used; they can both be determined in complete detail from careful study of the British Ordnance maps prepared in the 1930s, and (although I wasn't involved in the campaign planning) I had no difficulty in finding and plotting the only two feasible routes before the ground campaign began, from the good maps in my possession. I also understand why it was necessary to bring the two prototype JSTARS systems to the theatre, to detect and allow blocking of any Iraqi strike intended to sever the Tapline Road; this was also evident from the maps.
By contrast, we had no success at all in locating and destroying mobile Scud missile launchers, because they moved around with great frequency. If you don't know where something is, no precision of your weaponry, and no amount of technical sophistication or military skill, will allow you to destroy it.
Past example #2: The SAFEGUARD BMD system. The Friedmans say, on the basis of assertions by people who may or may not be experts, that SAFEGUARD was deactivated because it wouldn't work. In fact the situation was exactly the reverse, but one must know the purpose of SAFEGUARD and its mode of operation to understand what actually happened. The mission of SAFEGUARD was to prevent complete success of a Soviet counterforce first strike against our Minuteman ICBM fields, by opening a "launch window" for a retaliatory strike by the Minuteman missiles in the face of a full-scale Soviet strike. I helped to plan and design that system, and it would have done what it was intended to, although at a horrible increased toll of death and destruction, which I dreaded, but could see no alternative to in the face of rapidly increasing Soviet capability. Far more important than the fact that we knew SAFEGUARD would work was the fact that the Soviets concluded it would work; that realization brought them back to the bargainng table at the Helsinki talks, and led to the SALT I treaty, which I rejoiced about. Provisions of that treaty made SAFEGUARD unnecessary, and that's why the one completed SAFEGUARD site was deactivated and construction on the other sites was stopped.
Also on the subject of balistic missile defense, the Friedmans assert that midcourse discrimination and destruction of incoming warheads is infeasible. This is simply not true, although there is an exceedingly serious problem associated with doing it. I know three quite different ways of doing midcourse discrimintion and destruction of enemy incoming warheads, and, given that I've been out of that business for more than 10 years, I expect that other ways are known by now. The problem is that, at least for the three ways I know, one is politically unacceptable to the US Congress and the US public, one is so expensive that it's unlikely Congress would ever fund it, and the third, if fully developed, would be usable for certain other military purposes that would probably lead to a renewed arms race as our potential major opponents sought to counter it. (I was one of a small group of scientists who successfully recommended to Congress that development of that third approach be stopped, to avoid the resulting foreseeable escalation; scientists and military professionals, despite various comments in the Friedmans' book, work closely together over years and decades, and come to have considerable knowledge of each other's fields.) Whether at some future time it may become desirable to develop and deploy a BMD system that does midcourse discrimination and destruction of warheads is a political and diplomatic question to be decided by the public and its elected leaders, on which I have no insight, but it is technically feasible.
Now, turning to the future, what the Friedmans fail to understand in their glowing vision of US technology dominating future warfare, is that for every technical advance, opponents can devise at least partial countermeasures, and that therefore no amount of technology as such can determine the outcome of a campaign. The Coalition conquest of Iraq in 2003 provides an excellent example. Although large parts of the Iraqi army, and all of its top leadership, was utterly incompetent, other large parts of the Iraqi army were composed of thoroughly trained officers and enlisted men, who fully understood that if they confronted US forces nose to nose, they would be destroyed. Understanding this, very many of the best Iraqi units simply demobilized themsleves and disappeared into the civilian population as Coalition forces approached, in many cases taking their weaponry with them. One entire Iraqi division near the border with Iran totally vanished before we got to its bases; everyone from the division commander to the most junior private. Professional soldiers, even if motivated to fight, have no more desire than anyone else to be killed pointlessly in a situation where they are unable to resist effectively.
A substantial fraction of these well-trained, motivated Iraqi forces subsequently emerged as part of the resistance movement that continues in Iraq. How many of the resistance fighters come from that crowd is obviously impossible to know for sure, but my personal estimate is that about 30,000 of Saddam Hussein's best and most loyal troops and officers became part of the resistance movement. And our overwhelming superiority in all aspects of conventional warfare have been far less effective against current Iraqi resistance methods; the resistance movement seems to be gradually weakening and fragmenting, but it's a long slow process, in which our precision weapons and our advanced communications and intelligence give us far less of an advantage than they do in conventional warfare.
There are various other gaps in the Friedmans' assessment of the future. I'll mention only two of many. First, vircators, often touted as the most effective weapon of the 21st Century, have had only relatively diappointing results so far. Why? Partly because technical improvements to vircators are needed; those will surely come along in due course. Much more serious is the fact that battle damage asssessment after a vircator strike is at present almost impossible to do with any degree of...
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