UPI Senior News Analyst
Published: April 3, 2009 at 12:42 PM
Courtesy Of United Press International
WASHINGTON, April 3 (UPI) -- There are several intellectual fashions about the patterns of war in the 21st century -- and all of them drive different procurement patterns for buying weapons and structuring defense industries.
The first theory is that in war, as Los Angeles Times columnist Max Boot argued in his book "War Made New," breakthroughs in military technology -- especially by the United States and especially in the fields of "smart" precision guided munitions, command, communications and control, information technology and intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance -- have become irresistible force multipliers.
This theory has been eagerly adopted by nations as diverse as Britain and Israel. French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who was a great admirer of U.S. President George W. Bush, wants to streamline the French military along those lines too.
There is no doubt that '"smart" high-tech weapons systems and cybernetic capabilities are also taken very seriously by Russia and China. However, the pattern of development in these fields in Russia and China is very different from that in the United States.
The prime focus of the lavishly funded Chinese program and the very serious Russian effort is to develop asymmetrical capabilities that will negate or neutralize U.S. systems in the event of war.
Also, although the U.S. military was lavishly equipped with such so-called wonder weapons in its conquest and occupation of Iraq, it proved unable to subdue the relatively small number of Sunni Muslim insurgents there from 2003 through 2006.
That failure has since then been addressed in part by a traditional, low-tech counterinsurgency strategy skillfully implemented by U.S. Gen. David Petraeus.
Petraeus' success has done much to discredit the "war made new" concepts so beloved of former U.S. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his top deputies Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith.
There are other reasons why the "war made new" strategy is running out of steam and out of fashion. The enormous financial crisis now rising in the skillful and traditional counterinsurgency United States looks certain to force major cutbacks in the most expensive of these programs, the long-troubled Future Combat Systems that were Rumsfeld's pride and joy.
As we have often noted before in these columns, some individual components of the FCS are delivering major high-tech and tactical advantages to the U.S. armed forces. But the overall program is way behind schedule, with no end in sight and gigantic cost overruns.
The Democratic-controlled 110th Congress already slashed one-third of the funds the Bush administration sought to advance the program, and President Barack Obama and his military advisers are highly skeptical about it. Add to that the fact Defense Secretary Robert Gates is well aware of the major problems with the program and is under heavy pressure to slash Pentagon costs. All these factors make the FCS a goner.
Also, the current wars that the United States is fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan have made counterinsurgency war, and theories of Fourth Generation war, far more credible and fashionable than the idea that the United States can magically remain the undisputed hyperpower through the use of high-tech, space-based communications and control, surveillance and weapons systems.
However, the second fashionable theory of war is that it will all become guerrilla, insurgency, or Fourth Generation war seeking to undermine and hollow out the effectiveness and legitimacy of state structures. This is a much more valuable and accurate model in assessing current global trends in war than the high-tech theories, but it is not comprehensive either.
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