- FEBRUARY 9, 2010
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Death by technology
Posted By Thomas Donnelly
Thursday, May 21, 2009 - 8:45 PM
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How Gates condemned the U.S. military to equipment that is so last century.
By Thomas Donnelly
U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates's decision to end the Future Combat Systems (FCS) program may be a budgetary necessity, but it is a nightmare for a force that hasn't modernized since the Reagan years. As U.S. military equipment has fallen behind, warfare has kept up with the times. The FCS, begun in 1999, was meant to build a new generation of ground combat vehicles to keep pace. By quashing those efforts, Gates has widened the gap between modern wars and U.S. equipment.
It is true that the program had its kinks. The Army struggled to define just what FCS would look like in the post-9/11 world, and controversy grew over the program's seemingly unsatisfactory products and ballooning budget, which recently reached $200 billion by some estimates. Indeed, many pundits and defense analysts hailed FCS's termination as a bold reform; one retired four-star general calls it a "mercy killing."
But with another look, it is apparent just how misguided this budget trimming will be. Without a source for new equipment, the Army will be forced to use and reuse systems dating back to the Cold War. It will be in no position to refashion itself systematically to meet the needs of U.S. involvement across the greater Middle East. Gates, the supposed visionary of irregular warfare, is now making the past's mistakes once again: He is assuming that today's combat challenges -- think IEDs in Iraq circa 2006 -- will also be tomorrow's threats.
The Army's current systems are not what the Army most needs, nor will they be in the future. The M1 Abrams and M2/M3 Bradley have been (and will remain) the Army's dominant heavy tracked combat vehicles. But they're old -- designed in the 1970s and first fielded in 1980 -- and getting worn out much faster thanks to the demands of recent years. These are vehicles conceptualized and built with the Soviet threat and a German theater in mind. In modern times, their capabilities weigh heavily -- literally -- on Army operations. The tanks are each 70 tons, with powerful turbine engines that guzzle down fuel. That was no problem when the hypothetical war was in Germany. But where supply lines are stretched and combat operations are widely dispersed, as in most 21st-century wars, the tank is itself a logistical complication.
At first glance, the Stryker looks like it might do better in modern warfare. An eight-wheeled vehicle, it has a more efficient engine and can move rapidly. But the Stryker lacks the off-road capability of a tracked vehicle like the Abrams or Bradley. Although it performed beyond expectations in Iraq -- and should as well in Afghanistan, where it is just being introduced -- it can only play a niche role, since its combat capabilities are limited.
Then there are the mine-resistant ambush-protected vehicles (MRAPs), refashioned from an older model after an inexcusable three years of war to resist IEDs in Iraq. The MRAPs do what they were designed to do: They are single-purpose vehicles, basically heavily armored monster trucks. But the danger now is that the MRAPs risk becoming the backbone around which the Army is structured, despite their uselessness as fighting vehicles.
The ability to adapt and equip for new conflicts in a timely manner should be a top priority. Future vehicles will have to include all-aspect protection (that is, shells that can resist impact from above, below, and either side), a common chassis design to ease the logistical challenges on distant battlefields, and fuel-efficient engines that generate electricity for onboard and personal electronics. FCS was designed to provide these elements. Absent FCS, innovation and redevelopment will move forward only haphazardly by modifying current vehicles or introducing new systems one at a time. There will be no way to ensure common design elements across the entire force.
Gates's decision delays Army modernization for a decade. U.S. soldiers have proven time and time again that they can make do with aging and imperfect weaponry. But they should not have to keep stretching the capabilities of Cold War-era systems that already feel dated. The termination of FCS delays the Army's ability to, as Secretary Gates often says, "win the war we're in."
Thomas Donnelly is resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
Photo: Wathiq Khuzaie/Getty Images
What is one supposed to say to this, really?
Is it a matter of Washington etiquette not to point out that a weapons system in its tenth year of development, with recurring technical problems and an exploding budget, was probably being managed by people who did a lousy job? Or are we allowed to say that they did a lousy job, even while arguing with a straight face that the country has no choice but to pay some fraction of a trillion dollars to buy the fruits of their failure?
Forgive me, but this is the logic of an extortionist. Pay the money the defense contractor demands for the weapons platform it designed, promote the officers who supervise the contractor before retiring to go to work for it, or American soldiers will die. Just take the contractor's word for it that the platform in question -- riddled with glitches and budget overruns as it is -- represents the best that could be done, or else.
There is one throwaway paragraph in Donnelly's post here about the procurement process that put Sec. Gates in the position of having to scrap the FCS. He doesn't address, let alone explore, any of the points raised there, nor does he link to any of the analysis he mentions. He just argues that, whether FCS works or not and whether we can afford it or not, we will regret not paying the money anyway. That's the opposition to Gates in a nutshell: Just Pay the Money.
It is difficult to imagine how a disinterested analysis arrives at the conclusion presented here.
FCS could not succeed. We were pouring in the money to develop vehicles when we didn't have the specs clear. That cannot work. The best we could hope for is that some military contractors might take the money and make something useful we hadn't asked for.
Looking back, the most effective military vehicle we've ever had was the Jeep. We made them in vast numbers, cheaply. We used them up in vast numbers and didn't worry about the jeeps, we worried about the casualties. Reasonably fuel-efficient. Cheap. Plentiful. Low-maintenance. Easy to repair.
When we fight third-world nations we have a big use for giant tanks. They look intimidating. They make third world armies feel hopeless. If we ever fight a first-world army we'll have a big use for quiet motorcycles, or maybe trail bikes. Quiet and inconspicuous. Something that lets heavily burdened infantry move quicker while spread out. Infantry that's shut up in little metal boxes will be as dead as the armor guys.
We desperately need to come up with military stuff that's adapted from civilian stuff. Cheap. Plentiful. Reliable. Long, slow development cycles to produce small numbers of expensive stuff that inevitably requires lots of maintenance using special parts that need a superb supply line -- it doesn't work. We've been lucky so far that we didn't really need it to work.
This reads like an extortion letter
I suppose I missed the part where Donnelly told what this money would actually go toward and what the benefits to the military would be and also whether or not those military benefits would reap any tangible security reward for the civilians doing the funding.
By repeatedly mentioning how U.S. military needs and conflicts could change again, he seems to be hinting that the U.S. is headed toward "great power" conflict. Yet, if this were the scenario, wouldn't the presence of Cold War-era "great power war" military machinery already have us properly equipped for ground and traditional air combat? Maybe we wouldn't have the latest and greatest en masse, but who would?
Perhaps it is time for the civilian supporters of the military to apply the "fiscal responsibility" principles they love for domestic issues to military affairs. With all the money U.S. taxpayers already give them, they ought to be able to figure out how to use it most in line with their needs.
If the military has more needs than the U.S. has taxpayers, then it is time for U.S. political and military elite to change America's political identity and worldview to something more in line with her capabilities.
Actually all those worthy quizes have answers in the essential "Ground Truth"
Two of GrEaT sAtAn"S premier defense and security policy scholars, Thomas Donnelly and Frederick W. Kagan, have proven it does not take a weighty tome to analyze America’s most pressing defense issue, the size and capability of our land forces.
Ground Truth: The Future of U.S. Land Power succinctly examines in 155 pages the security interests impacting the future of land warfare.
The authors pronounce, based on their analysis, that America needs an active duty, land force of one million personnel. Whether the reader agrees with the specifics of the author’s recommendations or not, they will be hard-pressed to argue with the logic and scholarship that led to such a conclusion.
Donnelly and Kagan argue that policymakers need to realize that it is the paucity of American land forces that limits our current military strategy and its execution. Their analysis leaves little doubt that if we are to be truly capable of meeting the challenges that exist across the entire spectrum of conflict we must generate a larger and more capable land force.
Additionally, they call for a revitalization of the logistics, training, and support services that will support this new land force capability.
The authors point to the fact that such an increase in capability, while costly, may be achieved with little more than a one percent increase in the gross domestic product over the next decade. Donnelly and Kagan masterfully make their case that the rebuilding of America’s land force capability is long overdue.
The authors conclude with a call for a bipartisan commitment to the creation and maintenance of a new and revitalized land force capable of defending America’s status as the world’s sole military superpower.
In fact, in any military contest short of all out war, the real objective is the hearts and the minds of the subject population. That given, there is no way to bomb and kill enough people of a given population to make them like you, to get them on your side. The more efficient and high tech your killing machinery, the more fanatical the hatred you generate, the more insurgents or terrorists that you create.
In fact, in any military contest short of all out war, the real objective is the hearts and the minds of the subject population. That given, there is no way to bomb and kill enough people of a given population to make them like you, to get them on your side.
What nonsense. In fact, "winning the hearts and minds of the subject population" only matter in a narrow, specific situation: governing a conquered territory and trying to turn it into a favorable, self-sufficient state. In nuclear wars, or anti-pirate operations, or air strikes, or even Gulf War I style fights, nobody gives a shit about "winning hearts and minds" - they might distribute propaganda to try and get enemy soldiers to flee, but that's it.
"In fact, in any military contest short of all out war, the real objective is the hearts and the minds of the subject population."
In nuclear wars, or anti-pirate operations, or air strikes, or even Gulf War I style fights, nobody gives a shit about "winning hearts and minds" - they might distribute propaganda to try and get enemy soldiers to flee, but that's it.
Nuclear wars and Gulf Wars are outside the scope of his discussion.
Piracy isn't affected much by public opinion provided the efforts to stop them are mostly on the open sea.
Air strikes, maybe we should pay attention to what the enemy population thinks. It used to be, we did airstrikes with the stated intention of terrorising the enemy population into giving up. But that pretty much failed in europe on both sides, and it failed in vietnam.
Now we say we're going to minimise collateral damage, and we still find the civilians get upset about it. Maybe if it was a nation we were at war with, and we hit military targets, they wouldn't mind so much. Maybe. And if we were at war with them then we might not care about getting the civilian population to get tired of the war, we'd just win first and then deal with the occupation etc later. But when we aren't at war with them they don't want us bombing civilians in their country. Nobody does.
Imagine that some chinese citizens were hiding in the USA, in Fasrgo, Ki Guong members say that the chinese government said were terrorists who were trying to overthrow the government. Ideally the chinese government would ask the US government to return them, and we would investigate and see that they were terrorists and we would hand them over to china to be tortured. Or maybe anonymous assassins would show up in Fargo and kill them. If the chinese government somehow did airstrikes on Fargo and killed 50 or so people including 12 Ki Guong members, we would be upset. I would be upset. Probably you would be upset. OF course china doesn't have that capability, asnd we have a lot of resources to retaliate with, so it wouldn't actually happen. But the upset is likely to be pretty similar in pakistan or wherever. Even though in terms of sheer force there's nothing they can do about it.
So when we do airstrikes in countries we aren't already at war with, we really need to balance out the advantages and disadvantages. On the one hand we get a military advantage by precisely destroying a small target. On the other hand we get a lot of public outrage there, which has big effects when it's a democracy, and maybe big uncertain delayed effects when it's a dictatorship that doesn't defy us thoroughly enough to suit their people, and if we were to do it in say venezuela or cuba where the government does already make a show of defying us it would have different effects.
Is killing those particular people worth those results?
FCS could not succeed. We were pouring in the money to develop vehicles when we didn't have the specs clear. That cannot work. The best we could hope for is that some military contractors might take the money and make something useful we hadn't asked for.
This is a very good point, and is probably what will happen to the remains of FCS - parts of it, particularly the networking components, will get integrated into the modern military. Other parts, namely the parts that deserved to be cancelled - the non-viable program to turn basically all the US military vehicles into a certain set of modular designs - will get tossed, as they richly deserved.
This is what separates FCS from other, better programs, like the F-22. The latter was designed with a clear purpose in mind - to serve as the next generation air-superiority fighter. FCS, on the other hand, was launched with no clue as to what exactly it was supposed to do or be, other than "be more modern!" or "better!".
Cancelling the program was the least bad option out of several. Hopefully with it dead, we can now work on some sane programs, like a replacement for the Abrams Tank, and a whole host of programs designed to meet an established role.
Yet, if this were the scenario, wouldn't the presence of Cold War-era "great power war" military machinery already have us properly equipped for ground and traditional air combat? Maybe we wouldn't have the latest and greatest en masse, but who would?
The Chinese and Russian military, possibly, particularly in certain areas.
Moreover, the margins matter. The different between having the best military and merely a decent one with outdated equipment can be the difference between a long, drawn-out, bloody war and a rapid, Gulf War I style war.
I hopefully don't need to mention that this equipment is wearing out, which is why we need to replace the stock.
That's the opposition to Gates in a nutshell: Just Pay the Money.
No, it's "Think of the Future". That's the problem with Gates - he's tremendeously short-sighted and narrowly focused, pushing his whole driving force towards meeting the needs in Afghanistan and Iraq, and gutting programs left and right with long-term strategic importance to free up resources.
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