More Troops, Less Support is Bad Strategy
Change is an arduous thing. In scientific theory and military strategy the process is similar, and exceptionally brutal. Established beliefs and practices are threatened by new ideas. Innovators champion the new paradigm while traditionalists circle the wagons. Thinkers are labeled heretics, and persecuted. Traditionalists stop thinking, and rely instead on dogma, rote learning, and a mythical past of imagined success. The epitome of such traditionalism is the December 24th position of the editorial staff of the New York Times, which railed, “… the estimated $15 billion a year (plus start-up costs) needed to add 100,000 more ground troops could easily be found by slashing military pork and spending on unneeded stealth fighters, stealth destroyers and attack submarines, and by trimming the active duty Air Force and Navy.”
Such is not only bad math–the cost of a soldier, sailor, marine, or airman is far higher than annual expense of salary, room, and board–it is bogus strategy. The NYT acknowledges in its opinion that recruitment and one-time equipment costs for these new ground troops will be more than ten times the annual amount cited, yet ignores continuing military education, health and welfare programs, and retirement care and benefits. These are needed in addition to proper training and state-of-the-art equipment to provide each combatant with the best possible chance of survival. Adding a hundred thousand troops without accounting for the enormous associated costs of doing so (indeed, while advocating broad cuts in the DOD budget, “… the overall Pentagon budget is larger than it needs to be”) merely creates, in the lexicon of previous generations, cannon fodder. The NYT editorial staff has a proud and positive history of progressive idealism on social issues, but a notoriously wrong-headed legacy in the fields of cutting edge science and military strategy. Just one week before the Wright Brothers’ successful Kitty Hawk flight, for example, it urged researchers to stop wasting their time on dreams of powered aircraft. It famously forced rocket scientist Robert Goddard to hide his research from public view after scathing attacks in the 1920s and 1930s that claimed he “seems to lack the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools … ,” not retracted until the 1969 Apollo 11 moon landing.
Experience shows that sooner or later, all scientific theories and military strategies break down. The utility of their predictions lessens with time, and efficiencies diminish. Anomalies, situations the theory or strategy cannot explain, appear to challenge what were once reliable and comfortably established truths. Initially, attempts are made to refine the theory or strategy, increasing its complexity until all the previous anomalies are accounted for by tried and true experience. Over time, the anomalies increase and the established paradigm can no longer cope. New theories and strategies are proposed. Perhaps counter intuitively, it is this process of decay that is the engine for progress. Many of the new ideas are simply bad, some comprehensively so and others because they explain the anomalies reasonably well but do not account for previous cases as well or as comprehensively as the old paradigm.
Within the time-frame of change, however, a point is reached in which the old ways are widely understood to be obsolescing, but the new theory or strategy has not been widely accepted. Change is obviously occurring, but the prophet of a new order has not been recognized. Yet so entrenched are the old ways that when a new paradigm explaining all past and anticipated instances appears it is seen as dangerously fantastic. This appears to be where we stand today. There is no credible military position that argues emerging technologies that increase the speed, precision, and lethality of the modern warrior ought to be eschewed in future strategies, but there are credible pundits and commentators who come perilously close. With the exception of the historically neo-Luddite opinions exemplified by the NYT, in the post-Vietnam, post-Cold War environment, a wide-ranging (and ongoing) reassessment of military theory and strategy is taking place. The old American way of war, described by Russell Weigley, in which overwhelming force is used in response to direct national threats, is being replaced by a transformation of efficiencies. The precise and perfected paradigm for the next century has not yet been fully established, but the form it will take is already known. The one true constant in all the proposed remedies is a requirement for combined or truly joint operations, a requirement placed into law in the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Act.
All the nation’s military services—integrated in their vision and maximizing their unique capabilities—will be needed in America’s future conflicts. No one knows what form future conflict will take, but if history is any guide, the next strategic paradigm will follow the same path of acceptance, decline, and replacement. So let us stop calling to throw the baby out with the bath. In the 1990s, with air and space power apparently in unstoppable ascendancy, there were drastic cuts in ground capabilities. Today, mired in a ground occupation on foreign soil, traditionalist reactionaries are calling for a return to old-style slug-it-out battle forces to see America into the future. Einstein said that it is impossible to solve a problem using the same kind of thinking that gave rise to the problem. More troops/less support is the paradigm that lost in Vietnam, and will lose in Iraq and Afghanistan. Today we need to support our troops with even greater sea, air, space, and cyber power. Our soldiers need full-time air cover, persistent intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance, predictive battlespace awareness, and rapid mobility and resupply from air and sea. They need this as much as they need bullets and Kevlar, and more than they need verbal pats on the back.
February 16th, 2007 at 7:39 am
I see this thread as way too presentist. There are 4000 years of military history out there and all you care about is what happened in the last year or two.
July 8th, 2007 at 1:13 am
more of a response to the comment than to the blog because I have not had the chance to read the article it is based on, but to claim that Dolman’s response does not take into account the 4000 years of military history is inaccurate. Think about the relative costs of the the same military units in the middle ages, or the classical age…It has always cost more to build sea units and fleets than it has to create the same number of ground forces. I’m no expert but I can only imagine nations have had this same argument for the length of history. Should I invest in many many cheap weapons (i.e. conscripts, modern infantry) or few expensive ones? (knights, modern airplanes). One could even extend the analogy all the way, stating that the knights were defeated by cheap weapons (bowmen, and infantry), and that our impressive modern weapons largely invulnerable to “real warfare” may be defeated by insurgents, and terrorists, which are cheap and with the proliferation of AK-47s and IEDs still lethal.