One of the many things that keep me up at night — and anyone who thinks about the future of terrorism — is the possibility of a nuclear detonation in New York or some other American city. North Korea has a small arsenal of nuclear bombs, and tested one in October 2006. It did not explode; it merely fizzled, but perhaps its scientists have learned from the experience and future tests will be more successful. In any case, the cash-strapped country has both indicated and demonstrated a willingness to disseminate its nuclear technology to other rogue states, most recently, some evidence suggests, to Syria. (For a discussion of North Korean proliferation, see the pertinent section in this report issued by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.)
Our own arsenal, of course, offers reason to worry, as the recent breakdown in control revealed in the Broken Arrow incident of last August makes clear. But the problem is of a different order of magnitude; preventing mishaps is vitally important, but the possibility of an authorized detonation, either deliberately or by accident, appears to be close to nil.
In response to my recent post on the surety of U.S. nuclear weapons, one of my sources in Washington pointed me to a Pentagon document summarizing dozens of accidents with U.S. nuclear weapons that occurred in the period 1950-1980.
The bad news is that even when great care is exercised, major accidents have happened. The good news is that even when these fearsome devices are subjected to unexpected shocks and the heat generated in fiery airplane crashes and the detonation of their high-explosive triggering devices, the nuclear core of these babies has never once exploded.�
If Rangel’s objective is to ensure that poor blacks, Hispanics and other minorities bear a disproportionate burden of military service, then bringing back the draft is a surefire way to do so. And. incidentally, it will undermine the finest professional fighting force the world has ever seen.
I am afraid. And I am praying a lot.
The problem with this argument is that the “Professional” army isn’t large enough to fight a War on Terror-WW4. If the hard core Contentionsistas are correct, and we are in a global conflict to defend civilisation against the Islamofacists,we are going to need a draft to man that effort. Our struggles with a undermanned force in Afghanistan is evidence. Remember, with a Draft we won WW1,WW2,Korea, and Vietnam(which we won militarily). The problem with Vietnam was that the military didn’t stand up to the idiocy of its civilian bosses,and tried to fight a war based on the mentality of an automakers time-motion expert-Mcnamara. The soldiers drafted to fight in Vietnam were awesome;however they were disillusioned by their perception of a government that wouldn’t let them win,and they were correct.
According to Rangel, “The military is not sufficiently “diverse” for Rangel’s standards: it’s filled with too many people from the lower socio-economic strata, and not enough from the more privileged classes.”. Well, let’s not let the facts get in the way of our dogmas, shall we?
According to two studies conducted by the Heritage Foundation (Who Bears the Burden?) several years apart, the upper income quintile is slightly over-represented in the military, the lowest quintile slightly under-represented. The military we have today in fact looks remarkably like the United States as a whole.
Living in New York City, there are numerous insufferable politicians, by and large Democrat, who disgust me. But Brylcreem Charlie Rangel is just wholly detestable on every level. A crook, a demagogue, a liar, a cheat who will do anything and everything to maintain power while keeping his constituents immiserated. Yet he’s bamboozled them all for nigh on 40 years.
Let me rephrase the brilliant Dorothy Parker just a wee bit:
Charles Rangel is not someone who shoule be tossed aside lightly. He should be thrown away with great force.
#4,” The military we have today in fact looks remarkably like the United States as a whole.”
Except, didn’t the majority of the military vote to continue the policies of The Bush era,when the nation was going blue.? &The only way you’re going to get blues to serve is to draft them. Do we need blue power to fight WW4? Or maybe WW4/The War on Terror isn’t as real as the Contentionsistas would have us believe.
in the current economy, new enlistments will not be a problem. And the current small size of the military is the result of Clinton cutbacks which were never reinstated by Bush, not the volunteer system itself.
Actually, RCAR, I think WW4/The War on Terror isn’t as YOU believe. All you have done is assert that we aren’t manned for it, without making any kind of argument. To demonstrate that we are not manned to fight the GWOT, you would have to first state some objectives, outline a strategy, and propose some measures of effectiveness, and then analyze how our military manpower falls short.
#7,”in the current economy, new enlistments will not be a problem.”
So the jobless get to participate in a national jobs program. LOL
And, if they’re going to Afghanistan, it’s a big recruiting problem.
#8,
Are we properly manned to achieve our objectives in Afghanistan? Is Afghanistan a part of the WOT/WW4? What if we need to go in force into Pakistan,are we ready to do that? Should we be prepared to do that?
RCAR; The blues will not fight the war on terror unless the US is attacked on a Dims watch. Sorry. Expedience demands blunt reality. In the aftermath of such an attack, GWB will continue to play pinata just as he has been used on the economy.
Liberalism; never has so many whined about being misunderstood by rational humans. Reality is; your party is in charge of all the levers now. Lead! My bet is that when the gargantuan “stimulus” package lays an enormous egg, Pelosi/Schumer/Franks/Dodd will double down with equal results. Not to worry, the fawning press will still describe blue sky, birds singing and all is right with the world under the wise guidance of “the One”.
J.E. Dyer Says:
January 16th, 2009 at 12:21 PM
Actually, RCAR, I think WW4/The War on Terror isn’t as YOU believe. All you have done is assert that we aren’t manned for it, without making any kind of argument. To demonstrate that we are not manned to fight the GWOT, you would have to first state some objectives, outline a strategy, and propose some measures of effectiveness, and then analyze how our military manpower falls short.
How come the architects of The WOT/WW4 haven’t yet stated objectives,outlined a strategy,proposed measures of effectiveness etc etc. That’s their job. And I think you know why. Anyway, if the military Masters of the Universe ever do develop an overall plan for WW4,I’ll be glad to hear your opinions on it. In the meantime, I’m assuming that if we are undermanned in Afghanistan,then we’re undermanned to fight WW4.
I talked to a British officer in one of the elite guards regiments back in the Vietnam era. I pressed him as to what the problem was, why were we doing so poorly. He kept dodging an answer until finally he said, “Frankly, it’s the quality of your troops.” An army of conscripts is fated to be second rate or worse. It’s why the Russians and the Soviets before them had sorry combat records. The left wants an army of conscripts because it permits greater control and therefore strategic and tactical timidity through the threat of political demonstrations back on the home front. If we want an army like the euros with elaborate rules of engagement that prevent firing a shot except in self defense, we’ll go with this crooked scumbag of a politician.
RCAR — the architects of the GWOT DO have objectives, strategy, and measures of effectiveness. It’s your argument that doesn’t have them. If you like, feel free to use the objectives, strategy, and MOEs chosen for the GWOT by Bush and his advisors, to demonstrate that we are not manned to prosecute it.
But make the argument. Three years ago, people like you were insisting hysterically that there weren’t enough grunts in the whole, entire US military to stabilize the situation in Iraq. They never managed to make any kind of case for that assertion; they just ran around making the pronouncement, with appropriate hyperventilation.
They were wrong to draw their conclusion, about Iraq and the size of our military, from the fact that the news was bad at the time. It will take a lot more than you pointing to bad news from Afghanistan, to make a sound argument that we literally don’t have enough troops to achieve our objectives there.
#13
The conscripts who fought in four wars*
for the US were superb soldiers and many were heros. Are you saying they were 2nd rate?
*WW1-2,Korea,Vietnam
14
J.E. Dyer Says:
January 16th, 2009 at 12:50 PM
RCAR — the architects of the GWOT DO have objectives, strategy, and measures of effectiveness.
Sure they do. Tell me what happens if Pakistan goes Islamofacist? Or even if Iraq develops into an ally of Iran,what’s the contingency plan there?
RCAR,
You really need to read more of my stuff (you can find a lot of it over at The Weekly Standard. The problem isn’t too few troops, it’s the wrong type of troops in the wrong mix of units. The Army today remains focused on fighting the Red Army on the plains of Central Europe, but the odds of a major conventional ground war are slim to nil. We are victims of our own success: because we are so good at conventional armored/mechanized warfare, nobody wants to face us on our own terms. Hence the emergence of terrorism, counterinsurgency and other forms of asymmetrical warfare. There is only one potential peer competitor on the horizon, and that is China. And as I have written before, China lives in a strategic cul de sac from which it can emerge only by air or sea. To paraphrase Lord St. Vincent on Napoleon, “I do not say they cannot come, I only say they cannot come by land”.
Yet more than half of all active army units remain armored or mechanized. And armored/mechanized units are not very useful for the types of wars we are fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, which require light infantry and special forces above all else. A typical armored/mechanized division of 18,000 men has only 2500 riflemen in it. All the rest are tankers, truck drivers, maintenance technicians, supply personnel, cooks and bottle washers. A Stryker Brigade has 4500 men overall, but the same number of riflemen as an entire mechanized division. A light infantry brigade has about 3500 men, but 2500 of those are riflemen. So, if I convert one mechanized division into light infantry, I can form five light infantry brigades with more than 12,000 riflemen. Which is more relevant to the kinds of low intensity combat we are likely to be fighting?
Just enlarging the Army won’t do it. We don’t need more of the same, we need something better, more appropriate for our missions. And we won’t get what we need from conscription. Low intensity conflict–especially counterinsurgency and counter-terrorism operations–require highly trained, professional troops who not only know when to shoot, but when NOT to shoot. They have to have a degree of discipline and forbearance not found in conscripts, whose only concern is putting in their time and getting out in one piece. We tried running a counterinsurgency with conscripts in Vietnam. it did not work out too well.
While we are reforming the Army, I will once again put forward my proposal to cut the officer corps by 50%. Officers presently account for 15% of all Army personnel (not counting pilots or doctors)–about one officer for every six enlisted men. In World War II, we had one officer for every ten enlisted men (not counting the Army Air Force). In the German Wehrmacht, it was one officer for every 19 enlisted men. We have maintained a bloated officer corps since the end of World War II to provide a mobilization cadre, but on the down side, we have to find things for these officers to do, hence the bloated Army bureaucracy and rampant rank inflation (jobs done by colonels in World War Ii are done by major generals today). Cutting the officer corps would equate to an automatic gain of 17,000 personnel slots, while the resulting “shortage” of officers would force the Army to decide what are and are not essential functions.
“he conscripts who fought in four wars* for the US were superb soldiers and many were heros. Are you saying they were 2nd rate?”
Um, yes. Quite a lot of them were. Even George Patton admitted such, when he said that “The worse the infantry, the more artillery support it needs. American infantry need a LOT of artillery”. Moreover, if you crunch the numbers dispassionately and don’t get caught up in Stephen Ambrose/Tom Brokaw “Greatest Generation” hagiography, you will see that U.S. forces generally underperformed their German opponents, even after the Wehrmacht had been ground down by three years of fighting on the Russian Front. Ambrose himself recognized this in his early works, before his exposure to Easy Company in Band of Brothers turned him into a starry-eyed hero worshiper. But Company E was perhaps the best rifle company in the best regiment in the best division in the U.S. Army, and not at all a representative sample. In his seminal works on combat effectiveness, the late COL Trevor N. Dupuy managed to quantify the relative performance of the combatants in World War II. His finding was 100 German soldiers were equivalent to 125 U.S. soldiers, 130 British soldiers, or 200 Russian soldiers. This held true whether the Germans were attacking or defending, with or without air superiority, outnumbered or were outnumbered, regardless of weather and terrain.
Some American units were very good. A few were very bad. Most were mediocre, as a result of Army personnel policies that (a) sent the worst quality conscripts to the infantry; and (b) sent replacements to combat units as individual soldiers rather than pulling units off line to reform, The former made it hard to train troops to do more than follow rote battle drills (again, the Airborne Divisions, the 10th Mountain Division and a few other units were exceptions); the latter ensured weak unit cohesion, especially after units began taking casualties.
Interestingly, we learned NOTHING from this experience, and repeated the same errors in both Korea and Vietnam. In all three cases–WW II, Korea and Vietnam–we prevailed on the battlefield because we had an overwhelming advantage in firepower, which we used to compensate for a lack of tactical aptitude.
There is no way one can compare those armies with the one we have today. Our present army is the most professional, best trained, most highly motivated and most combat-proven force our nation has ever put into the field, and some day historians will look back upon them with something akin to awe.
As an aside, while we no longer have conscription, we do have registration for 18 yr. old MALES. Why aren’t the feminists picketing the pentagon over this sexist omission?
#18,”In all three cases–WW II, Korea and Vietnam–we prevailed on the battlefield because we had an overwhelming advantage in firepower.”
Now you’re talking, about how to win WW4,(Unless it’s a fantasy)
I say why stop there. Disband the professional army and bring back militias.
chuck martel — the feminists are picketing Congress over it. The Pentagon doesn’t set Selective Service policy.
Stuart Koehl’s argument is well articulated, and there is a lot of truth to it, although in the end, I think the deal-maker or -breaker in Afghanistan will be political will, rather than an always-transient situation of military maladjustment to particular warfighting conditions. I do think that our military, per se, has adapted superbly to the conditions of the battlefield in Afghanistan. Our overall policy for prosecuting that conflict, which includes dragging our NATO allies along with us in a protective bubble, has some fundamental flaws.
Regarding Mr. Koehl’s argument, one comment I’ve made more than once at Max Boot’s posts is this one: choosing to man, train, and equip an army for the warfighting style of counterinsurgency — as opposed to the WWII model of decisive combat between uniformed armies, with heavy armor — represents a political decision to accept wars of occupation, and nation-building, as our “way of war.” This isn’t just a professional hurdle for the military: it’s a political hurdle for the American people.
How many Americans want to deliberately choose, in advance, to optimize our military for occupation, counterinsurgency and nation-building? Most Americans still see these as OCCASIONAL, regrettable necessities, not as the starting position of our national security posture. The general idea in people’s minds is that occupation and nation-building are optional, but decisive combat — in traditional military terms — is essential.
My own view is that the best we can do is strike compromises, over time, in preparing for these models of warfare. We are always in a resource-constrained environment, when it comes to MT&E; and we DON’T know for sure where we may one day have to fight, or how. As a Naval officer, I can already see the eventual demise of the aircraft carrier on the horizon, as asymmetric weapons and new counterforce options (e.g., space) gain traction and proliferate. But in 2009, it would be a grave error to cease fighting with them; and that means huge expenditures, and a whole “way” of naval warfare being perpetuated for the foreseeable future.
The infantry soldier in Iraq is an amazing advance, in weaponry and combat leverage, over his counterpart in WWII. That doesn’t mean the American people have changed their minds about the advisibility of commissioning him to fight mainly in occupations and counterinsurgency. Maybe we want our people to change their minds about how they see war, but I’m not so sure. Expecting occupation and counterinsurgency as a military way of life is the mode of empires, which I think ought to give us pause.
>>>Now you’re talking, about how to win WW4,(Unless it’s a fantasy)<<<
One reason we went to a professional army in the 1970s was the recognition that we could never afford to have overwhelming material superiority on the battlefields of World War III. The Soviets would ALWAYS outnumber us, and thus we would have to beat them with better technology. But high technology weapons could not be maintained or operated effectively by short-term conscripts (nor could we afford them in the numbers needed to justify conscription). By the 1980s, we also learned that such weapons were not very effective unless wielded with tactical finesse, which in turn required soldiers even MORE skilled than before. Now, we find ourselves fighting wars in which technology is largely irrelevant, and thus to be decided almost entirely by the quality of the troops involved. Ideally, our army would be composed entirely of special operators–men who have the equivalent of olympic athletes with two masters degrees, several foreign languages, and warrior spirit of a Samurai. But, given that the washout rate for selection to such elite units can verge on 90%, we will be hard put to increase their numbers beyond the 15,000 or so that we have, unless we sacrifice quality, which defeats the purpose.
With regard to J.E. Dyer’s comments, I see the need for a bifurcation of our forces; the active component of the Army must be reconfigured to deal primarily with low intensity conflict, while maintaining a hedge capability against high intensity regional conflicts (mainly in Korea and the Middle East). At the same time, conventional war being a remote possibility, the reserve components of the Army should be reconfigured as heavy/mechanized mobilization assets which can fall in on our forward deployed forces.
The Navy and the Air Force, on the other hand, can have only a secondary and supporting role in low intensity conflict, mainly by providing RSTA and transportation assets, with some selective close support of ground forces. Most of their high technology assets are useless (or worse) under these conditions, and those services should develop small but capable low-tech assets for low-intensity missions. For instance, I have noted elsewhere that most of the close air support/battlefield interdiction missions being undertaken by (overly capable) manned aircraft (F-15s, F-16s, A-10s) in Iraq and Afghanistan could be performed by long endurance UAVs, given the benign air defense environment over the battlefield.
But the Navy and the Air Force will be the primary forces employed should we ever have to fight a war with China, and thus we should invest as much as needed to maintain our technology edge over current and projected PRC capabilities. That means, in practice, more F-22s (even at the expense of the less capable but almost as costly Joint Strike Figther), a new generation of naval surface combatants and submarines, anti-missile and anti-satellite systems, more robust satellite communications systems, etc.
In a world filled with full spectrum threats, the U.S. must maintain full spectrum deterrence by demonstrating the ability to fight and win at every level of conflict, from insurgency to major regional war, to general war. Deterrence should involve both offensive and defensive capabilities, which not only hold enemy assets at risk, but devalue his offensive assets so as to make successful attack a dubious proposition, and the costs of a failed attack disproportionately high.
If we do this, we may not have to occupy many countries or fight many insurgencies. But facts are facts, and nation building is going to be part of the military portfolio for decades to come. It is simply too dangerous these days to allow states to fail and become havens for terrorists, so preemptive interventions–in the form of development assistance, training, building civil society, etc.–is unavoidable. At present, the military is the only government institution capable of doing this effectively, but it would be much better if we had some civilian capabilities in this area we could use instead.
#22,” Maybe we want our people to change their minds about how they see war, but I’m not so sure. Expecting occupation and counterinsurgency as a military way of life is the mode of empires, which I think ought to give us pause.”
Politically,for the forseeable future,it will be a liability to talk about nation building. The same is true for the military needs of our “empire”. Rome had to go through a painful reeducation of their citizens who were nurtured on the “myth” of Rome’s republican heritage to the “realities” of the Roman Empire. Most conservatives would deny that there is an American Empire;most leftists accept that concept,but only because they hate the idea of the American Empire. I agree that it’s a huge challange to organize our state Dept and military in a way that reinforces our national interests,while our voters,on both sides, are cocooned in our national myths & antimyths.
Umm, wouldn’t we have to fight WWIII before fighting WWIV? Or is WWIII considered the WOT?
Chris Bolts Sr. — Norman Podhoretz christened the GWOT WWIV, with the Cold War figuring in his analysis as WWIII.
I should note that RCAR is not signifying agreement with Norman Podhoretz by employing his formulation here.
I know, J.E., that’s why I did that.
We are actually, by my reckoning, on World War VI:
WWI: The Seven Years War
WWII: The French Revolutionary/Napoleonic Wars
WWIII: The Great War, 1914-1918
WWIV: The War Against the Dictators, 1939-1945
WWV: The Cold War, 1945-1989
WWVI: The War Against Islamic Terrorism, 1993-ongoing
Each of these conflicts was global in scope and involved the major powers of the day, either directly or through various proxies.
J.E. Dyer & Stuart Koehl
How does this figure in to it: http://www.wilsoncenter.org/index.cfm?fuseaction=wq.essay&essay_id=496613 ?
Under what possible circumstances are our Ohio class subs going to be used in their design function?
To respond to Chuck,
Robots and unmanned systems perform certain tasks extremely well, particularly if these tend to be simple and repetitive. Teleoperated systems are extremely useful for performing certain tasks that would otherwise require a human being to go into unnecessary danger–such as explosive ordnance disposal.
On the other hand, more complex military missions are beyond the abilities of robotic systems at present. Take unmanned combat aircraft (UCAVs) for an example. In a relatively benign environment, such as the airspace over iraq and Afghanistan (no enemy fighters, primitive air defenses), relatively simple UCAVs such as the Predator can function just as effectively as manned aircraft–moreso, since they have the endurance to remain on station for days at a time, providing persistent surveillance and continuously on-call air support, at a small fraction of the cost of using a manned fighter such as an F-16 or an A-10.
But such a simple UCAV would be worthless fighting a sophisticated adversary such as China, which has both fighters and integrated ground-based air defenses. That is why the military is developing much more capable, high-speed, stealthy UCAVs–to penetrate these defenses to destroy high value targets. But, as the program matures and the difficulties of the mission become more evident, the cost of the UCAV rises precipitously, until it begins to converge with that of manned aircraft. Once a UAV reaches a certain price, whether because of its innate complexity or because of its payload, it is no longer an expendable item, which in turn means it has to be provided with some form of defensive countermeasures, which drive up the cost, which makes the services even more reluctant to risk them, until the relative advantage over manned aircraft disappears.
In contrast with manned aircraft, the UCAV has a very limited payload; one might think of it as a reusable cruise missile. But just as a cruise missile is a very inefficient way of delivering a 1000-lb bomb, a UCAV can be even more inefficient, depending on how many sorties it can generate before being destroyed or lost in an accident. A Tomahawk cruise missile costs about $1 million; a UCAV about $20 million. If the UCAV carries a 1000-lb. payload, it would have to complete twenty sorties to equal the cruise missile in cost effectiveness. In contrast, a manned fighter can cost between $30-80 million, but carries upwards of 8000 lbs of ordnance, and is much more survivable, to say nothing of tactically flexible. Both a cruise missile and a UCAV are only as accurate as the mission planning data input into their computers. If the target has moved, or the target scene changed, or the defenses been rearranged, the chance of the UCAV completing its mission successfully go down rapidly. A manned aircraft is much more flexible because it has a pilot, with a brain, and a pair of eyes on the end of a swivel mount, in the cockpit. If things go south, the pilot can improvise, but the UCAV cannot, because the situational awareness of its remote operator is very limited, while (at present) its artificial intelligence is perhaps on par with a homing pigeon.
Unmanned vehicles such as UCAV therefore have very narrow, specialized niches, but they lack the broad-based capabilities of manned platforms, which means that the latter have far more utility over the long haul. I could see using UCAVs as can-openers to bust through the enemy’s defenses to take down key command and control nodes, but I can’t see it being used as the backbone of a strategic or operational air campaign against a sophisticated enemy. The same criticism applies at present to unmanned ground vehicles and unmanned surface and underwater vehicles.
With regard to the Ohio class SSBNs, as a deterrent system the general idea is that they NEVER be used. That said, four of them have been converted to SSGNs, armed with up to 154 Tomahawk cruise missiles, which would certainly give Chinese air defenses headaches. They also have lock-out hatches for SEAL delivery and can act as mother ships for SEAL Delivery Vehicle mini-subs.
I largely concur with Stuart Koehl’s assessment here, and would add the following points.
1. Regarding the Ohio-class SSBNs, they are, of course, a deterrent, meaning we hope we don’t have to use them. Our SSBNs, however, might also be called, given the current state of technology, the “ultimate” deterrent — because once deployed, they cannot be found. No nation has a means of detecting them when they are operated properly underway — including us. At best, potential nuclear-armed opponents — Russia, China — can tally up how many are probably underway at a given time, based on how many are missing from their mooring positions at our naval stations.
Although our own Navy’s, and intelligence services’, skills have declined in this matter of detecting submarines, over the past 20 years, we still have an advantage in this regard. (The decline has been due to the near-absolute departure of the former-Soviet SSBN force from the world’s oceans. The Russian SSBN deterrent is wielded from positions next to naval piers now, for the most part.)
The SSBNs produced by Russia and China are louder and easier to detect from a distance; that is one aspect of our advantage. The other is that we were always better at submarine detection than our potential opponents, from the standpoints of technology, experience, intelligence processing, and converting low-quality long-range detections into high-quality tracking and targeting with tactical forces.
Strictly as regards SSBNs, we retain our advantage in the ability to hold the enemy at risk, substantially better than he can hold our own SSBN deterrent at risk. Where we have lost much of our advantage is in detecting “conventional,” diesel-powered submarines, at ranges useful for preserving tactical superiority. This is largely due to submarine quieting technology: diesel-powered submarines, when they are running on battery power, are a true order of magnitude quieter than they were even 30 years ago — and 30 years ago they were an order of magnitude quieter than in WWII.
All but maybe one of the world’s diesel-powered submarines are attack submarines, meaning they are intended to attack ships and other submarines, rather than lobbing missiles at shore targets. These attack diesels, or “SSs,” don’t pose the threat to populations or facilities ashore that SSBNs do, or that the cruise-missile equipped, nuclear-powered attack submarines (SSNs) of the world’s biggest navies do. (E.g., the US and UK SSNs with Tomahawk missiles, a handful of Russian SSNs with the SS-N-15 — “Tomahawkski” missile.)
That may change, however, and if it does it will be China that leads the way in fitting long-range cruise missiles to extremely quiet, cheap-to-produce-and-operate diesel-powered submarines. There are good reasons why the US need not worry overmuch about the possibility of attack on our homeland from a cruise-missile equipped SS, at least not for the near future. But virtually everyone in Asia and the Middle East has to be concerned about it, as nations like Iran and Pakistan, both clients of China, seek exactly this kind of naval power. Iran achieving this capability would make a huge difference to the balance of maritime power in the Persian Gulf. The neighbors of Venezuela in Central America must also be concerned about it, and indeed, it would not take much for such a combat capability to endanger the stability of the Mediterranean Sea either.
2. Regarding unmanned remote devices, Stuart Koehl is quite correct that there is a limit to their ability to replace man-in-the-loop systems. Between a tactical UCAV like Predator and a reconnaissance helicopter or fixed-wing aircraft, it is sometimes the case that the sheer ability of a human to look out a window yields a more comprehensively useful perspective, and better overall awareness of the tactical situation, than what a remote operator can detect through the UCAV’s field of view. In the realm of delivering weapons, as opposed to just reconnaissance, the manned delivery system will probably always be more tactically agile and adaptable.
The great virtue of unmanned systems is not, of course, so much that they may be monetarily cheaper than sending in a human, but that sending them in is not a moral decision about risk exposure for humans. It’s in this regard that I would add the following comment to Mr. Koehl’s: The availability of unmanned systems has already shown a tendency to lower the threshold of political risk, in national security decisionmaking. This is not necessarily a good thing.
When the Tomahawk missile, and its Air Force counterpart, the ALCM (Air-launched Cruise Missile), were being designed, back in the 1970s, the concept for their use was as part of an overall military effort involving ground forces, the whole air force, and all the naval capabilities we have. It would have required a major objective and a large force commitment to cause us to launch the long-range cruise missiles. The intention for them was to strike things like radar sites and air defense command posts, to blind the enemy so that the anti-air threat to our bombers would be reduced.
That is exactly how Tomahawks and ALCMs were used in Desert Storm. But what the next administration — Clinton’s — noticed about these weapons is that they could be used with very low risk to military lives, because of their stand-off nature. That made the decision to use them — and use them for lesser objectives — much easier. The long-range cruise missile basically made it not just possible, but likely, that we would decide to “shoot” over lesser objectives: things we weren’t willing to commit to combat losses over.
That’s what we did in 1993, when — days after taking office — Clinton attacked the Iraqi intelligence HQ in Baghdad, and a research facility at Zaafaraniyah, with cruise missiles. The justification was that Saddam had plotted to assassinate the elder Bush. We did the same thing in 1998 after our African embassies were bombed, when we launched dozens of cruise missiles at worthless targets in Afghanistan and Sudan.
Our missile and air attacks on Srebrenica (Bosnia-Herzegovina) in September 1995, and on Iraq in 1996 and 1998, are in a different category because they also included manned air attacks. However, if we had not had the option of using cruise missiles as the initial wave in those brief air campaigns, there is a good possibility we would not have undertaken them. (I should note that I’m not guessing about that here; I know it for a fact.) We would have expected more combat losses than the shooting down of one little scared Air Force rabbit over Bosnia, and the threshold of risk might well have been surpassed.
An even more insidious effect of unmanned reconnaissance, as opposed to unmanned weapons delivery, is that reconnaissance gives decisionmakers an often-false sense of mental security that they have “done something” — taken action, rather than having failed to take it. They can point to having activated or assigned some national or military asset, without having to make any more decisive or consequential commitment. When the reconnaissance asset is unmanned, there is no moral decision about risk exposure. And that reduces further the time spent on what the national priority actually is here, and whether reconnaissance is the right means of addressing it.
We may agree with every one of Clinton’s decisions to launch missile, or missile and air, strikes, but we still have to recognize that without the option of the “missile compromise” — the ability to wield force with low moral commitment, by using stand-off missiles — Clinton might not have made the decisions he did. My own analysis is that, with the partial exception of the Bosnia strike in 1995, Clinton’s missile/air strikes were strategically useless. They were political demonstrations that failed to produce effects advantageous to us. I am not at all convinced that it will be a good thing for more and more remote, unmanned devices to offer additional options of this kind to our national leaders.
Oy. When discussing the Russians’ “Tomahawkski” missile, I meant to type SS-N-21, not SS-N-15.