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Some Reflections on the Future of War
Naval War College Review, Autumn, 2000 by Martin van Creveld
While the decline in the number of regular troops--both regulars and, especially, reservists--has been sharp indeed, the fall in the number of major weapons and weapon systems has been even more precipitous. In 1939, the air forces of each of the leading powers counted their planes in the thousands; during each of the years 1942-45, the United States alone produced seventy-five thousand military aircraft on average. Fifty years later, the air forces of virtually all the most important countries were shrinking fast. The largest one, the U.S. Air Force, bought exactly 127 aircraft in 1995, including helicopters and transports; [24] elsewhere, the numbers were down to the low dozens, or nil. At sea, the story has been similar. Of the former Soviet navy, built by Admiral Sergei Gorshkov in order to project the power of the state, little remains but rusting surface vessels and old, poorly maintained submarines that allegedly are liable to leak nuclear material into the sea. The U.S. Navy is in a much better state, but it has seen the number of aircraft carriers--the most important of its weapon systems, around which everything else revolves--go down from almost a hundred in 1945 to as few as twelve in 1995. The United States apart, the one country that still maintains even one
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carrier capable of launching conventional fixed-wing combat aircraft is France. That aside, the carriers (all of them decidedly second rate) owned by all other states combined can be counted on the fingers of one hand. Indeed, it is true to say that with a single major exception, states no longer maintain oceangoing navies at all--and even the exception, the largest navy of all, that of the United States, has been cut by almost half since the late eighties.
In part, this decline in the size of armed forces reflects the escalating cost of modern weapons and weapon systems. [25] A World War II fighter-bomber could be had for approximately fifty thousand dollars. Some of its modern successors, such as the F-15, come at a hundred million dollars apiece, when their maintenance packages (without which they would not be operational) are included; that, even when inflation is taken into account, represents a thousandfold increase. Even this does not mark the limit on what some airborne weapon systems, such as the "stealth" bomber, AWACS, and J-STARS--all of them produced, owned, and operated exclusively by the world's sole remaining superpower--can cost. It has even been claimed that the reluctance of the U.S. Air Force to use its most recent acquisition, the two-billion-dollar B-2 bomber, against Iraq stemmed from the absence of targets worthy of the risk; [26] should one be shot down or lost by accident, the storm of criticism would be hard to withstand.
Even so, one should not make too much of the price factor. Modern economies are extraordinarily productive. As the histories of both world wars show, they could certainly devote much greater resources to the acquisition of military hardware than they do at present. Thus, the cost of modern weapon systems may appear exorbitant only because the state's basic security, safeguarded as it is by nuclear weapons and their ever-ready delivery vehicles, no longer appears sufficiently at risk to justify them. In fact, this is probably the correct interpretation; it is supported by the tendency, which has now been evident for decades, to cut the size of any production program and to stretch the length of any acquisition process almost indefinitely. For example, to develop the Manhattan Project--which besides the application of revolutionary physical science included the construction of the largest industrial plant ever built up to that time--and build the first atomic bombs took less than three years; nonetheless, the d esigners of present-day conventional weapon systems want us to believe that a new fighter-bomber cannot advance from drawing board to deployment in less than fifteen. The development histories of countless modern weapon systems prove that usually only a fraction of the numbers initially required are produced, and then only after delays of years. [27] The reason is that in most cases by the time the system can be fielded, the threat--which would have made rapid mass production necessary and, incidentally, have led to a dramatic drop in per-unit cost--is no longer there.
