It Always Leads to This

John Arquilla, the inventor of the term "netwars", suggests that the military needs to get cheaper, smaller, and smarter. It's not an entirely original idea, but he points out some obvious challenges to getting a better military.

The greatest problem traditional militaries face today is that they are organized to wage big wars and have difficulty orienting themselves to fight small ones. The demands of large-scale conflicts have led to reliance on a few big units rather than on a lot of little ones. For example, the Marines have only three active-duty divisions, the U.S. Army only ten. The Navy has just 11 carrier strike groups, and the Air Force about three dozen attack aircraft "wings." Almost 1.5 million active service members have been poured into these and a few other supporting organizational structures.

It is no wonder that the U.S. military has exhausted itself in the repeated deployments since the 9/11 attacks. It has a chronic "scaling problem," making it unable to pursue smaller tasks with smaller numbers. Add in the traditional, hierarchical military mindset, which holds that more is always better (the corollary belief being that one can only do worse with less), and you get massive approaches to little wars.

It's an interesting discussion. I don't see this paper as supporting a shift to COIN operations, but rather recognition that the military's basic inertia is still fueled by a Cold War mass-production, attrition-based philosophy. Despite all the doctrine that we espose, it's still "throw a lot of shit at the enemy until they give up." The US military's use of the art of warfare hasn't really kept up with the times, and the acquisition costs inherent in that philosophy are now killing us.  I kept nodding my head, right up to the last page, when he hit Sigger's Law.

Is such a shift feasible? Absolutely. Big reductions in the U.S. military are nothing new. The massive demobilization after World War II aside, active forces were reduced 40 percent in the few years after the Vietnam War and by another third right after the end of the Cold War. But the key is not so much in cutting as it is in redesigning and rethinking.

But what happens if the status quo prevails and the potential of this new round of changes in strategic affairs is ignored or misinterpreted? Failure awaits, at ruinous cost.

The most likely form catastrophe could take is that terrorist networks would stay on their feet long enough to acquire nuclear weapons. Even a handful of warheads in Osama bin Laden's hands would give him great coercive power, as a network cannot be targeted for retaliation the same way a country can. Deterrence will lie in tatters. If there is ever to be a nuclear Napoleon, he will come from a terrorist network.

Oh for crying out loud. Why is it that intelligent analysts so quickly fall into the "oh noes the terrorists will get nukes" trap. The most likely form catastrophe would take is that al Qaeda would continue to use its members to recruit Muslims to attack US forces for the next decade with explosives and modern firearms. The most unlikely catastrophe is a nuclear terrorist incident. But what the hell, read the article, it's interesting.

Comments

[FDChief]

I think the problem with this "smaller, lighter, faster" meme (which always comes up when the subject of the post-Cold War land force is discussed) is that the bottom line with smaller and lighter is that when you get down to the nitty there's only really one ways to do this: you have tp go all high-tech and substitute extremely expensive smart weapons for the old combination of indirect fire/armored maneuver mass with infantry support 1945-style formation, backing up lots of penny-packet sized troop units supported with "light" armor.

But if you're going to send a highly-paid professional long-service infantryman instead of a bullet - or you're going to send a REALLY expensive bullet - pretty soon the costs for this stuff get out of hand. And when you are doing this in some backasswater Third World shithole, where the job really amounts to police work and colonial administration (and what you really need are a bunch of cheap but trustworthy locals) the game quickly becomes not worth the candle - what the Brits used to call "breaking windows with guineas".

[Ray]

Bloody right,FD Chief.

[Mark]

My question to Mr. Arquilla is this. What is a Marine or Army Division made up of? Regimental/Brigade Combat teams. Those teams are made up of battalions (squadrons for cavalry). That are made up of companies, batteries, troops are made up of platoons and those platoons made up of squads/sections. There seems to be plenty of "smaller" units there.

Though I will admit that "Transformation" missed the boat when they decided that the brigade was the new "Unit of Action" instead of the division. The squad/section, platoon and company are the real "units of action".

The shift that needs to happen is not to replace divisions (or even Bde/Regt) with battalions. The shift needs to be AWAY from "command and control" to "communication and coordination" as the main function of higher level commands. "Synchronization" needs to be from the bottom up, not from the top down that is part of the Post-Vietnam military (both the AirLand Battle and RMA). Then again, it would be synchroniztion, it would coordination. The coordination of empowered medium and heavy units, combined arms from the level of battalion and below.

[Mark]

Though I should also take issue with the idea of the Army being "smaller". It was too small back in 2001. It is still too small now. The Infantry BCTs are too small, with only 6 infantry companies. They are nothing more then an undersized, poorly equiped "filler" to make the Army look bigger on paper. Just as the "Army of Excellance" LIDs of the 1980s.

I personally thing that the US Army depends too much on the National Guard. The Army needs 14 to 16 divisions (divisions with no fewer combat forces companies then the current divisions have, not simply another Unit of Action Shell game).

[Ray]

Specious Forces...

[joe]

There's worse things than nukes they could get.

The kind of things only crazy people seriously contemplate actually using.

It would take only a handful of intelligent-but-crazy people to do it, and not much money either.

Let us hope they stay crazy-but-not-intelligent... because our only defense would require changes that could not be made (for domestic political reasons) until it is too late.

Keep on reading, keep on writing, I enjoy your work.