Thursday, March 23, 2006
Technology and the Future of Warfare
Author and Pentagon advisor John Arquilla believes that today's big weapons systems are wrong for modern battle.
By Mark Williams
In 2007, the Pentagon's budget will exceed the combined military spending of every other country in the world. In round numbers, according to the U.S. Department of Defense's own Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR), published this past February, the American military will spend more than $440 billion next year, supplemented with another $120 billion for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.
It would be more reassuring, then, if the Pentagon's four-year plan for how its strategic priorities and force structure align with its budget made for less schizophrenic reading.
On the one hand, as the QDR lucidly explains, the threats confronting U.S. forces today are asymmetric: catastrophic attacks by small groups, insurgencies by enemies of U.S. allies, and so on. This argues for the "transformation" of America's military, away from industrial-era U.S. forces that depend on "big platform" weapons systems such as aircraft carriers and tank regiments, which took half a year to mass in the field for operations like the Gulf War [in 1991]. Instead, the QDR counsels that the new military should be networked, lean, and nimble, using special operations and robotics for rapid global response.
On the other hand, the 92-page document calls for $84 billion of weapons spending -- mostly for items like the F-22 and F-35 fighters, DD(X) and LCS warships, and the CVN-21, the Navy's next-generation supercarrier, which will start construction in 2007 and be bigger than today's Nimitz-class carriers. Thus, despite a 15 percent increase in Special Forces and investments in new systems such as drone aircraft, overall, the Pentagon continues to embrace military gigantism.
Yet what if the Pentagon's big platforms weren't merely the wrong weapon systems to fight present and future wars, but actually likely to bring defeat? John Arquilla, one of the military intellectuals who created and promoted the concept of "transformation" for the U.S. military, believes that may be the case. Arquilla teaches at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, CA, and is a RAND consultant and a Pentagon advisor. His publications include Networks and Netwars: The Future of Terror, Crime, and Militancy, In Athena's Camp: Preparing for Conflict in the Information Age and the forthcoming The Reagan Imprint: Ideas in American Foreign Policy from the Collapse of Communism to the War on Terror.
Interview with John Arquilla
http://www.technologyreview.com/...