Lifting the Fog of War. - Review - book review

Aerospace Power Journal, Summer, 2001 by Maj Peter W. Huggins

Lifting the Fog of War by Adm Bill Owens with Ed Offley. Farrar, Straus, and Giroux (http:// fsbassociates.com/fsg), 19 Union Square West, New York, New York 10003, 2000, 280 pages with index, $25.00 (hardcover).

Adm Bill Owens, a retired Navy officer and former vice chairman of the joint chiefs, builds a strong case for the radical restructuring of the US military and the Department of Defense (DOD) to take advantage of the explosive potential of the revolution in information technology. Owens's argument places him in the middle of what Prof. Steve Biddle categorizes as the Contingent Innovation/Revolutionary Transition school in the ever-growing literature on the revolution in military affairs.

Owens's crisp and readable style enhances his argument as he describes the current state of the US military that is the result of budget shortfalls, force-structure diminishment, and increased operations tempo. He also ably describes the culture of the four military services and demonstrates why they would be reluctant, from an organizational perspective, to embrace the radical changes that he proposes.

Some parts of his argument are problematic, however. The keystone of Owens's case for the radical transformation of the military is built on the analogy that he draws between the other "revolutions" in military affairs and today's. Using Martin van Creveld's categorization of the different eras of military history from Technology and War, Owens asserts that for a new technology to be truly revolutionary, it must be accompanied by changes in military culture and doctrine in order to maximize the opportunity. In other words, new technologies did not really become revolutionary until changes in culture and doctrine also occurred. From this, he concludes that a radical transformation of military doctrine and DOD acquisition policies is necessary to take full advantage of the information-technology revolution. However, this reviewer is not completely convinced that this analogy holds in this particular instance.

There is another problem with Owens's argument. In outlining how his proposed "system of systems" might operate, he describes a conception of attack against an adversary that is, coincidentally, quite similar to the late John Boyd's conception of strategic paralysis. As Col David Fadok succinctly described Boyd's theory in The Paths of Heaven: The Evolution of Airpower Theory (Air University Press, 1997), warfare's aim is to "render the enemy powerless by denying him the time to cope mentally with the rapidly unfolding--and naturally uncertain--circumstances of war" (emphasis added, page 364). The goal is to "overload the adversary's capacity to properly identify and address those events that appear most threatening. By steadily reducing an opponent's physical and mental capability to resist, one ultimately crushes his moral will to resist as well" (page 365).

Such unwitting similarity to Boyd's conception of strategic paralysis suggests that Owens's variant possesses the same weaknesses. First, strategic paralysis seems to work best against an industrialized adversary. What happens if the adversary happens to possess only agrarian technology? Or, more realistically in today's world, what if the adversary's weapon is relatively primitive, as in humanitarian disasters such as Rwanda, where the primary weapon was a machete? Moreover, what happens if the adversary doesn't care if the United States operates within his decision cycle? As the tenets of Maoist insurgency theory suggest, in a "protracted war" the insurgent will simply outlast his adversary. As such, if an insurgent is faced with a tactical or even an operational defeat, he will simply fade into the population until the time is again ripe to recommence activities.

Despite these flaws, I recommend Owens's book to anyone with an interest in what the ongoing debate about the revolution in military affairs is about and what, if anything, this country should do as a result. Owens is perhaps the most eloquent spokesman for the radical-transformation school of this literature. One should read and understand this argument because Owens will continue to be the leading advocate for the radical transformation of the US military and DOD.