thedrifter
12-31-08, 07:07 AM
December 31, 2008
Editorial
A Few Big Ideas
Over the past several months, we’ve discussed the many, severe challenges confronting America’s military services and recommended a set of urgent fixes to relieve the stresses on the men and women fighting overseas and keep the country safe. It is also worth exploring more long-term ideas. Here are three that have particularly impressed us, that we hope will help stimulate a wider debate.
Mr. Gates Champions Diplomacy: Cabinet secretaries rarely go to bat for other departments, especially when their own budgets could be at risk. But Defense Secretary Robert Gates has pressed the case for more robust diplomacy and more spending on the State Department and foreign aid. “But not every outrage, every act of aggression or every crisis can or should elicit a military response,” he wrote in the current issue of Foreign Affairs magazine. Wherever possible, he said, military action “should be subordinated to measures aimed at promoting better governance, economic programs that spur development and efforts to address the grievances among the discontented, from whom terrorists recruit.” That sounds pretty levelheaded to us.
It also is a big change from his predecessor, Donald Rumsfeld, who fought to control every aspect of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars — and pretty much everything else. Many of his generals were a lot smarter, pleading for more help from State Department experts on reconstruction, politics and foreign aid. Too often the State Department lacked enough people with the right skills to do those jobs.
America must ensure that its military remains strong. But the State Department also must develop more capacity for conflict prevention and for postconflict reconstruction. We’re glad to see that Hillary Rodham Clinton, President-elect Barack Obama’s choice for secretary of state, seems determined to bolster the agency’s role. We hope that she can depend on Mr. Gates for continued support, no matter how tough the budget fights may get.
So What About Transformation? We know that was the buzzword of Mr. Rumsfeld’s Pentagon. So it’s not surprising that all the talk of high-tech war, and owning the battlefield, has lost a lot of its luster. “Shock and awe” did not deliver the promised swift, antiseptic victory in Iraq. A smaller, more mobile ground force proved — disastrously — to be far too small for fighting insurgents or rebuilding a shattered Iraq.
We know that. But continued technological transformation is still essential to the future success of the armed forces. The point is to learn from these past mistakes and get it right.
The Pentagon needs to make smarter uses of technology and not forget about other necessary elements and skills of 21st-century warfare — like adequate postwar planning, sufficient numbers of troops on the ground and better training in dealing with civilian populations. A skilled translator or a civil-affairs specialist could help win hearts and minds while a poorly aimed smart bomb that destroys the wrong house would lose them.
Superior technology has been America’s great comparative advantage on battlefields around the world for generations. It must continue to be so.
The Army’s troubled Future Combat System — a network of ground vehicles, pilotless aircraft and launching systems intended to provide individual soldiers with a real-time satellite view of the entire battlefield — exemplifies the great potential value and some of the potential pitfalls of highly advanced technology.
Conceived before 9/11, it is not primarily a counterinsurgency weapon. But it would give American ground forces enormous advantages in any future battles against a conventionally organized enemy force. Such contingencies are too likely not to prepare for.
But since the Future Combat System is built around so many new and previously untested elements, it has encountered major cost overruns and serious delays. Parts of the program have been cut back. And critics are now asking if its development costs might not be better spent on personnel and other more pressing needs. The Army clearly needs to get a better grip on the system’s costs and progress. But it is the kind of technology that promises to make American ground forces safer and more effective on 21st-century battlefields.
Jointness: Another concept that the Pentagon has spent more time talking about than applying is “jointness.” Translated, it means getting the Army, Navy, Marines and Air Force to transcend interservice rivalries and practice fighting together, developing and using common equipment and sharing bases.
Jointness is a terrific idea, which can save a lot of money and make troops more effective on the battlefield. Other militaries, Israel’s for example, practice jointness across the board. The Pentagon mostly confines it to special projects. The most ambitious of these is the F-35 joint strike fighter, developed to serve both Air Force and Navy needs. It is scheduled to come into production in 2012. Unfortunately, the Air Force and Navy also developed their own expensive next-generation fighter aircraft while waiting for the F-35 to become available.
The case for jointness goes far beyond procurement. As William A. Owens, a retired Navy admiral, wrote in a recent Op-Ed article in The Times, the defense budget is padded with redundant spending for communications, intelligence, medical and administrative expenses that the services could easily consolidate. He also pointed out that combining currently separate Army, Navy and Air Force bases into “megabases” could save tens of billions of dollars and actually add to military effectiveness.
It is a big idea that many in the services will resist. But at a time when the country is facing grave threats — and when the military is under such grave stress — all of the nation’s leaders must be open to big ideas.
Ellie
Editorial
A Few Big Ideas
Over the past several months, we’ve discussed the many, severe challenges confronting America’s military services and recommended a set of urgent fixes to relieve the stresses on the men and women fighting overseas and keep the country safe. It is also worth exploring more long-term ideas. Here are three that have particularly impressed us, that we hope will help stimulate a wider debate.
Mr. Gates Champions Diplomacy: Cabinet secretaries rarely go to bat for other departments, especially when their own budgets could be at risk. But Defense Secretary Robert Gates has pressed the case for more robust diplomacy and more spending on the State Department and foreign aid. “But not every outrage, every act of aggression or every crisis can or should elicit a military response,” he wrote in the current issue of Foreign Affairs magazine. Wherever possible, he said, military action “should be subordinated to measures aimed at promoting better governance, economic programs that spur development and efforts to address the grievances among the discontented, from whom terrorists recruit.” That sounds pretty levelheaded to us.
It also is a big change from his predecessor, Donald Rumsfeld, who fought to control every aspect of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars — and pretty much everything else. Many of his generals were a lot smarter, pleading for more help from State Department experts on reconstruction, politics and foreign aid. Too often the State Department lacked enough people with the right skills to do those jobs.
America must ensure that its military remains strong. But the State Department also must develop more capacity for conflict prevention and for postconflict reconstruction. We’re glad to see that Hillary Rodham Clinton, President-elect Barack Obama’s choice for secretary of state, seems determined to bolster the agency’s role. We hope that she can depend on Mr. Gates for continued support, no matter how tough the budget fights may get.
So What About Transformation? We know that was the buzzword of Mr. Rumsfeld’s Pentagon. So it’s not surprising that all the talk of high-tech war, and owning the battlefield, has lost a lot of its luster. “Shock and awe” did not deliver the promised swift, antiseptic victory in Iraq. A smaller, more mobile ground force proved — disastrously — to be far too small for fighting insurgents or rebuilding a shattered Iraq.
We know that. But continued technological transformation is still essential to the future success of the armed forces. The point is to learn from these past mistakes and get it right.
The Pentagon needs to make smarter uses of technology and not forget about other necessary elements and skills of 21st-century warfare — like adequate postwar planning, sufficient numbers of troops on the ground and better training in dealing with civilian populations. A skilled translator or a civil-affairs specialist could help win hearts and minds while a poorly aimed smart bomb that destroys the wrong house would lose them.
Superior technology has been America’s great comparative advantage on battlefields around the world for generations. It must continue to be so.
The Army’s troubled Future Combat System — a network of ground vehicles, pilotless aircraft and launching systems intended to provide individual soldiers with a real-time satellite view of the entire battlefield — exemplifies the great potential value and some of the potential pitfalls of highly advanced technology.
Conceived before 9/11, it is not primarily a counterinsurgency weapon. But it would give American ground forces enormous advantages in any future battles against a conventionally organized enemy force. Such contingencies are too likely not to prepare for.
But since the Future Combat System is built around so many new and previously untested elements, it has encountered major cost overruns and serious delays. Parts of the program have been cut back. And critics are now asking if its development costs might not be better spent on personnel and other more pressing needs. The Army clearly needs to get a better grip on the system’s costs and progress. But it is the kind of technology that promises to make American ground forces safer and more effective on 21st-century battlefields.
Jointness: Another concept that the Pentagon has spent more time talking about than applying is “jointness.” Translated, it means getting the Army, Navy, Marines and Air Force to transcend interservice rivalries and practice fighting together, developing and using common equipment and sharing bases.
Jointness is a terrific idea, which can save a lot of money and make troops more effective on the battlefield. Other militaries, Israel’s for example, practice jointness across the board. The Pentagon mostly confines it to special projects. The most ambitious of these is the F-35 joint strike fighter, developed to serve both Air Force and Navy needs. It is scheduled to come into production in 2012. Unfortunately, the Air Force and Navy also developed their own expensive next-generation fighter aircraft while waiting for the F-35 to become available.
The case for jointness goes far beyond procurement. As William A. Owens, a retired Navy admiral, wrote in a recent Op-Ed article in The Times, the defense budget is padded with redundant spending for communications, intelligence, medical and administrative expenses that the services could easily consolidate. He also pointed out that combining currently separate Army, Navy and Air Force bases into “megabases” could save tens of billions of dollars and actually add to military effectiveness.
It is a big idea that many in the services will resist. But at a time when the country is facing grave threats — and when the military is under such grave stress — all of the nation’s leaders must be open to big ideas.
Ellie