Completing the Transformation of U.S. Military Forces

Issues in Science and Technology, Summer 2004 by Deitchman, S J

The updated military excelled in Afghanistan and Iraq, but further progress must be supported now to ensure long-term security.

On taking office in 2001, secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld announced his intention to transform the U.S. armed forces to meet today's threats of rogue states and transnational terrorism. The effectiveness of U.S. fighting forces in Afghanistan and Iraq indicate that the transformation, which some have called a "revolution in military affairs," is on the right path. But many technical challenges remain to be met, and today's headlines make it clear that the end of combat between organized armed forces does not necessarily herald the end of a war. If the United States chooses to rest on its military laurels, the nation may in the long run lose the great benefits that have accrued from the armed forces' efforts thus far.

The U.S. armed forces today are characterized in large measure by their unique ability to attack opposing military forces with enough precision and speed to prevail against heavy odds. This capability is, as much as any of the armed forces' other features, indicative of their transformation over the past decade and a half from forces tailored for major land war in Western Europe to those far better suited for the new kinds of warfare that have come to face the nation since the Berlin Wall came down in 1989.

The transformation actually began very gradually but picked up speed after U.S. military leaders learned valuable lessons in the first Gulf War. There, the forces designed for Europe achieved their goal magnificently but were ponderous and hence slow to respond to changing battlefield conditions when agility was needed. The pace of change picked up again in the mid-1990s, when there was a need to limit civilian damage and casualties during military operations in the Balkans. After taking office in 2001, Rumsfeld institutionalized the notion of force transformation to meet the new world conditions. The success of the transformed military was evident in action in Afghanistan and in Iraq, where a U.S. force far smaller than the one that waged the first Gulf War defeated Iraq's armies and overran the country in about a month.

Two major advances in technology helped make the transformation possible. First, the joining of Global Positioning System (GPS) navigation updates with coarse inertial guidance reduced the cost of precision-guided weapons that the military services had previously been reluctant to use in abundance because of their high unit costs. second, vast improvements in information processing and communications enabled the forces to be embedded in a broad information and targeting network that, together with ensuing changes in command relationships that shifted battlefield responsibility and authority to lower levels of command, makes them far more agile and responsive to battlefield conditions than the Cold War era forces had been. Retired Vice Admiral Arthur Cebrowski, who now heads the Department of Defense's (DOD's) Office of Force Transformation, dubbed this new approach "Network-Centric Warfare," and it was convincingly demonstrated in the seamless melding of air and land forces in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The force changes were accomplished through large substitutions of capital for labor, just as productivity has been increased in the civilian economy. The exchanges can be illustrated by comparing the armed forces' size and budgets for 1970 and 2003. The 197Os forces had almost none of today's precision engagement capability, whereas today's forces are essentially built around that capability. The DOD budgets of the two years, in constant dollars, are within 5 percent of each other, but today's forces are far smaller than the forces were in 1970 at the height of the Vietnam War. The Army has only one-third as many members in 2004 as it did in 1970, and the other services have shrunk as well. The equipment cost per person in the active forces has approximately doubled, and the budget-allocated personnel cost per person has increased by about two-thirds. These increases reflect the incorporation of more sophisticated weapons and the prevalence of more highly educated and better-trained members in the all-volunteer military. On average, the United States spends just short of $300,000 per person in the armed forces-twice as much as its closest allies and far more than any potential antagonists.

The returns on this huge investment are found to have been far larger than the investment when they can be measured in dollar terms. At the macro level, smaller forces and the reduced length of organized conflict from the first to the second Gulf Wars show enough money saved to pay for at least two years' worth of the overall investment. At the micro level, the cost to destroy any military target from the air has been reduced to as little as a fifteenth of the cost under previous conditions.

Indicators of intangible benefit can be derived from comparisons of performance in conflicts that were similar, even though no two conflicts are exactly identical. Compare the length and number of military casualties in the Soviet and U.S. campaigns in Afghanistan or consider the number of civilian casualties in the bombing of Dresden in World War II compared with the more recent Belgrade and Baghdad bombing attacks, which were directed against similar targets.