Doomed to fail: America's blind faith in military technology

Parameters, Winter, 2002 by John A. Gentry

* Use of unconventional methods and tactics do not expose US enemies to the mass of US military power. Many of these alternative approaches, including attack on the US military information infrastructure, are inexpensive by many definitions, including political cost. The Defense Department euphemistically calls some of these approaches "asymmetric threats."

* Ways of avoiding the sensors the United States uses to achieve "information superiority" are well known. The Soviet Union called this complex of techniques maskirovka. Orbits of US intelligence satellites are posted on the internet, making evasive measures relatively easy. "Deception and denial" techniques are in common use; associated with hills, forests, clouds, and rain, they regularly foiled US sensors over Yugoslavia in 1999. There are no immediate prospects for overcoming these facts of nature. Moreover, many aspects of unconventional warfare are not susceptible to monitoring by traditional sensors. Forces have but to disperse among civilians and have communications discipline in order to be all but invisible to sensors--as members of the Taliban have shown yet again. NSA has publicly lamented changes in the telecommunications industry--including the use of fiber-optic cables and encryption--that degrade its traditional capabilities. (29) Precision munitions cannot hit targets they cannot identify.

The combination of the easy evasion of sensors and cheap countermeasures makes war of attrition an attractive strategy for potential US enemies--at first blush an incongruous strategy for conflict against the world's military superpower and wealthiest country. (30) However, the United States has relatively few of the expensive precision weapons it likes, while America's dearth of collective patience and self-discipline is legendary. Combined with the imperatives of force protection, the ISR, financial, and sometimes political costs of even mundane US operations are high. This means that enemies can devise strategies to run US troops and intelligence processing capabilities ragged while protecting their own forces. Opponents can take deception actions that lead US forces to waste scarce precision munitions on low-value targets. Adversaries also can use information operations to bully the United States into policies and actions they want--like forcing Washington to order an unseemly, hasty withdrawal of 800 US Marines from an exercise in Jordan in June 2001 due to concerns about force protection. If they can kill a few GIs and plant doubts in the minds of US decisionmaking constituencies, even weak opponents--as defined in traditional military terms--reasonably can expect to defeat the United States. Yugoslavia nearly accomplished the feat in l999. (31) Surely many states and groups are studying ways to exploit US politico-military vulnerabilities.

Institutional Impediments Cannot Be Overcome

Even if engineers achieve the technical goals of JV 2020, DOD has systemic institutional deficiencies that would prevent fielding of operationally effective technology. Military attitudes, doctrine, and inertia would prevent effective operation of even limited RMA-inspired technology.