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It's my view that this society has decided that it will only use a certain fraction of its human effort in its own defense in peacetime. The imperative just isn't there . . . so consequently we have no other alternative but to turn to high technology. That's it.--DARPA Director Richard Cooper
[¶3.] In the early days of smart weapons, military officers were fond of saying that the new weapons were "designed by geniuses to be operated by idiots." The argument, made by military officers as well as in the Pentagon, was that there was a difference between a complex weapon and a sophisticated one--if all you must do to make them work is press a button, they are not complex, they are sophisticated.1 This attitude was not created by the military; it simply mirrors in the military realm the arguments made over automation, efficiency, and deskilling in the workplace. Given that one facet of the modernization of officer training was to send them to business schools, that is perhaps an unsurprising outcome.
[¶4.] As in the civilian world, the push toward more complex and automated equipment was soon overtaken by the realization that although use of the new technologies required fewer operators, they had to be better educated and better trained. Moreover, the new equipment greatly alters the balance of "tooth-to-tail," the ratio of actual fighters to noncombatant support personnel. It no longer suffices to train troops, arm them, and send them into battle. For every sophisticated weapon at the front, a long and increasingly tightly coupled train of logistics and other support is required.
[¶5.] The transition to the electronic office, and the electronic factory, also brought with it an increased web of tight dependence on those with particular skills in computer software, interlinkage, supply, and maintenance that changed both the culture of the workplace and the balance of power.2 As was discussed in the preceding chapters, the consequences have been serious enough for some organizations, particularly those performing demanding and safety-critical tasks. For the military, the consequent changes in structure have been external as well as internal. They have affected combat units, combat systems, and the structure of military command, as well as the risks, role, and purpose of the military in an era of smart (and therefore expensive) weapons and highly trained (and therefore increasingly valuable) personnel.
[¶7.] For more than four thousand years, military history was dominated by the search for better ways of organizing mass formations for massed fire. Historical studies of the use of technology in warfare have shown a consistent pattern of conservative behavior with regard to innovation and change.3 Until recently, the military tended to adopt new technical devices and methods from the civilian sector rather than generating them internally or providing support for specialized technical development. Innovations in time of peace were incremental and relatively slow extensions of more general changes taking place in the broader civil and social environment. Even when experience in war forced rapid adoption, it was often only temporary; after the war the military often sought to restore the status quo ante.
[¶8.] Change began with the first modern industrial war, the American Civil War, fought not on open fields in colorful uniforms, but in trenches and from behind walls, trees, and fortifications, by soldiers dressed more or less uniformly in relatively colorless Union blue or Confederate grey.4 What had changed was the ability of mechanized, industrialized societies to engage their new technologies of production, transportation, and coordination in the military enterprise.5 Mass production and interchangeable parts resulted in better clothed and armed armies than any before them.
[¶9.] But military attitudes toward technical innovation were still changing very slowly. Even at the height of the war, General James Ripley, the Union Army's Chief of Ordnance, blocked the introduction of repeating rifles and magazine carbines for more than two years.6 The arguments he used were to become familiar over the ensuing decades: the repeating rifle would make men careless in their use of ammunition; it would spoil the tradition of aimed fire (which was the pride of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century warfare); it would ruin the discipline instilled by having to hold fire and aim. In short, the repeating rifle did not fit into the image of accurate massed fire the military had been nurturing since the doctrinal and tactical reforms of Marlborough and Frederick the Great.7 It was culturally disruptive.
[¶10.] After the war, the U.S. Army chose to return to the single-shot rifle designed in its own Springfield armory.8 For the next twenty years, it issued only a few of the famed Spencers, and adopted such other innovations as the Gatling (machine) gun and rifled artillery only for specialized purposes.9 The doctrine of accurate aimed fire led to retention of heavy, long-barreled, bolt-action single-shot magazine rifles as the standard weapon of the U.S. infantry right through World War II.
[¶11.] The Gatling gun and other predecessors of the twentieth-century machine gun went through a similar historical cycle. Pushed into service in the Civil War, they were never effectively used by the infantry. In subsequent years, machine guns tended to be mounted on carriages and assigned to cavalry units rather than to the infantry.10 The Army kept evaluating it as light artillery even as the weight of the gun went down and its mobility went up. Because it did not fit well into the tactical structure of the artillery either, it fell between organizational stools and was almost completely ignored by the military until the First World War.11 Despite abundant evidence of the power of the gun against Dervishes, Africans, and even in Tibet, it seems to have been considered a weapon to be used primarily against mass attacks by primitives, not on the orderly field of battle on which Europeans fought each other.12
[¶12.] Even more remarkable was the resistance of navies to specific forms of technical change in the midst of the greatest reconstruction of naval weapons and doctrine in history. Driven by the British-German naval competition, the navies of the world were to move in less than twenty years from an era of sailing ships with smooth-bore cannon to huge, steel-hulled, steam-driven battleships with rifled guns. The range of both ships and guns was thereby increased, but accuracy on the rolling sea did not keep up with the new propensity to stage duels at comparatively long range. The laying of guns (timing the firing to compensate for the roll of the ship as well as the motion of the enemy) remained one of the premier forms of professional expertise, at times approaching an art form.
[¶13.] Near the turn of the century, individual entrepreneurs within and without the military combined to develop a set of means and mechanisms for continuous-aim naval gunnery, in which the gun is fitted with sensing and driving mechanisms that allow it to perform controlled movements to counter the rolling of the ship.13 It is estimated that continuous-aim technology improved the accuracy of naval gunnery in the British and American fleets by nearly a factor of thirty in six years between the turn of the century and the launching of the famed HMS Dreadnought, the first huge, steel-hulled, heavily armored battleship with large, stabilized, remotely fired, rifled guns.14 Yet, both the British and American navies at first strongly resisted the change, yielding only when the political pressures became too great and higher authorities intervened.
[¶14.] Despite these pockets of resistance, both the weapons and the structure of military forces were by and large transformed by the technological arms race of the early part of the twentieth century. But the general officers in charge at the outbreak of the First World War were still largely of the old school. For the most part, the technical innovations that had transformed the capabilities of warfare had not yet completed the systemic cycle of technological change; military organizations and military cultures had not fully adapted. Armies hastily outfitted with the latest in military technology, including accurate, rapid-fire artillery pieces, chemical weapons, and the machine gun, were trained and led into battle by generals whose model and conception of warfare was still based on well-drilled soldiers walking across a battlefield, firing careful shots until they got close enough for a bayonet attack.15 What resulted was stalemate in the trenches and carnage when the armies left them.
[¶15.] It has been said that the greatest invention of the industrial revolution was the invention of the method of invention. For the military, that experience was not transferred until the First World War. Innovations such as chemical weapons, military aircraft, the tank, and the submarine made it clear to a few younger officers that the military advantage to be gained by seeking not just technical but technological change, by reconstructing force structure and doctrine rather than fitting new armaments into old ones, outweighed the arguments for stability and tradition.
[¶16.] The struggle between these cadres and the military traditionalists has been reviewed many times.16 Those arguing for such changes as armored cavalry (tanks), strategic bombing, aircraft carriers, long-range submarines, and long-range fighter aircraft remained lone, and sometimes lonely voices, more often than not cut off from the career lines that would lead them to power. Militaries did continue to welcome a series of other innovations of apparently smaller scope and scale, particularly with regard to electronics and communications. Even so, it was only the growing threat of war that would move first Britain, and then the United States, toward the cycle of innovation in military technology that was to continue during the war and accelerate after.17
[¶18.] The Second World War was in retrospect three wars. One was fought in secret, in the realm of electronics, communication, radar, and cryptography.18 Another, fought even more secretly on the mesas of New Mexico and along the Tennessee and Columbia rivers, was to provide the dramatic ending at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But most of the resources were devoted to the other, more ordinary war, where military tradition and military influence were still dominant over the scientific and technical, and the desire to innovate had to be balanced against the need to keep feeding men and machines into the maw of battle.
[¶19.] The costs of command rigidity in the First World War remained vivid, and the concrete-bound traditionalists and technical reactionaries were usually weeded out once they were identified. But there were still many instances of traditionalism and resistance. The U.S. Navy was relatively quick to transfer its allegiance from the battleship to the aircraft carrier, but at first neglected its submarines, sending them to sea poorly supported, unevenly crewed, and with notably defective torpedoes. At Guadalcanal in November 1942, Admiral Callaghan, steaming into the night waters of "Iron-Bottom Sound" with the first screen-display naval radars, refused to open fire without visual sighting of the enemy, and suffered terrible losses at close and bloody range in the melee that followed. The antitank bazooka issued to American soldiers lacked the known technology of the armor-penetrating shaped charge. The U.S. Air Force suffered huge bomber losses during deep daylight air strikes in the fall of 1943 before developing long-range fighter escorts. Coordination between ground and air forces during the rush across Europe in 1944-1945 was ad hoc and technically improvised, and air cover could not be supplied at all during bad weather.
[¶20.] To some extent, the resistance to innovation and change in conventional weapons systems was a conscious decision made in Washington, based on the recognition that the greatest asset the United States had was the productive power of its industrial base and its ability to sustain large combat losses. The Second World War was fought and won as a war of attrition, as were the First World War and the Civil War before it.19 It was easy for postwar critics, particularly from the academic, scientific, and technical communities, to once again raise the accusation that militaries, and in particular military staffs, were technically backwards--if not positively reactionary.
[¶21.] The record of technical advancement and innovation in transforming conventional military operations in the Second World War is nevertheless impressive.20 Among other things, the war produced Blitzkrieg, massive tank warfare, maneuver warfare using tactical air power for close support, extended submarine warfare, the air wars in the Pacific and in Europe, strategic bombing, air defense and air-to-air radar, the V-1 and V-2 missiles (predecessors of later generations of cruise and ballistic missiles), operations research, and the first jet aircraft. But in the long term none of these matched the long-range impacts of the other two wars, those waged by scientists and engineers outside the historical military sector to develop the atomic bomb and modern electronics.
[¶23.] Nuclear weapons had the most visible and immediate impact on military organization. Later analysis of U.S. and British strategic bombing showed that the effects of conventional bombing on morale and industrial structure had been greatly exaggerated (as they were to be again in Korea and Vietnam). But the bombs that hit Hiroshima and Nagasaki were beyond exaggeration. No future war could be fought without dominance in the air. Indeed, it might reasonably be argued that in a nuclear-armed world no future war could be fought at all, and survived. Bernard Brodie, working for the newly created RAND think tank, put it best in his typical clear and precise style: "Thus far, the chief purpose of our military establishment has been to win wars. From now on, its chief purpose must be to avert them. It can have almost no other useful purpose."21
[¶24.] This was the ultimate challenge to traditional military organization and culture. But Brodie and his colleagues lived in a somewhat simpler time, when central war with the Soviet Union was seen as the single driving purpose for the U.S. military. As nuclear weapons became more powerful, and more threatening, and the United States and the Soviet Union settled into a pattern of mutual deterrence, fighting the "big war" seemed less and less likely. There were other modes of warfare and arenas of possible conflict to deal with for which nuclear weapons were unsuitable.
[¶25.] The most lasting and long-term effect of the involvement of academic and research scientists and engineers in the war was their continuing involvement in military affairs afterward, and their increasing influence over weapons and policy. As the military-industrial complex built up during the war expanded into a military-industrial-scientific-academic complex, technical radicals and strategic revisionists in the military found new allies in their long-standing fight against conservatism and tradition. The military intellectuals and service-funded technocrats argued that military advantage was now to be gained primarily through exploiting the discoveries of science and technology. Policy shifted from entrepreneurial and armory-driven adaptation and innovation to the systematic, government-funded search for new weapons and new military technologies that we now take for granted.
[¶26.] As might be expected, the course of technical innovation was not free from the sharp and frequently bitter interservice rivalries that had plagued the military during the peaceful interwar years.22 What was most remarkable given military history and tradition was that most of these struggles were over the shape and control of the military technology of the future. Much of this had to do with computers. Four of the five key innovations arose during the generative period 1940-1960: as an embedded means of fire control for artillery and anti-aircraft guns;23 as solvers of long, complex technical and engineering problems; as elements of advanced command and control; and as the basic tool for strategic analysis and war gaming.24 A fifth, only to come later with advances in miniaturization, was as embedded and programmed controllers for self-guided weapons.
[¶27.] The lesson that the new strategic advisors and military technocrats derived from their studies of military history and technology was that traditional attitudes and culture created officers who were inflexible and slow to learn and change, who defended tradition even at the price of capability. In the future, they argued, the emphasis would have to be shifted to encourage them to adapt rather than to resist. The military was to become actively involved in the processes of innovation, invention, and analysis. As a consequence, technology became a career path for a new cadre of ambitious and aspiring young military officers.
[¶28.] The newly formed U.S. Air Force, separated at last from the Army, set the tone. As a new service, it had no tradition, and no core of traditional backers in Congress or industry. Realizing from the outset that its future lay with advanced technology and continuous innovation, the Air Force set about institutionalizing the processes of scientific and technical advice, supporting research and creating its own think tank, RAND, in 1946. It was one of the prime promoters of numerically controlled machine technology during the 1950s, and of the progress in computers necessary to program them.
[¶29.] The U.S. Army and Navy were also to maintain connections with the intellectual community through hired consultants and other think tanks. The Office of Naval Research became a prime basic research contractor; the Army Signal Corps provided most of the funding for the early development of the transistor; the newly created ARPA was the prime supporter of basic computer research. As Eisenhower was to note, the military-industrial-complex (or, more properly, the military-technical-university-industrial-complex) had become a permanent feature of modern industrial societies.
[¶30.] The argument about the technological backwardness of military staffs could no longer be made. In his book on the development of the ICBM, Edmund Beard states:
The disposition to innovate [is no longer] generally inhibited by a technically illiterate and conservative military leadership. Having witnessed the decisive impact of novel weapons on the battlefield in World War II, and having been entrusted with the responsibility for maintaining a continuing deterrence, generals and admirals have been transformed "from being the most traditional element in any national society--hanging on to their horses, or their sailing ships, for as long as possible--into the boldest innovators."25
[¶32.] At first, most of this process was devoted to the development of nuclear weapons, nuclear delivery systems, and nuclear strategy. But the Korean War, fought more or less with the weapons and tactics of 1945, made it abundantly clear that not all conflicts would be nuclear (and perhaps that none would). Given its newly accepted role as an interventionist world power, the United States would also have to develop suitable weapons and tactics for its "general-purpose" forces.
[¶33.] Between 1964 and 1972, the military, down among the weeds in Vietnam, was still in a period of transition, and it showed. The cumbersome and complex weapons, systems, and tactics developed for the purpose of fighting a postulated, if unlikely, central war with the Soviet Union in the relatively flat and unencumbered landscape of Europe proved inappropriate, and at times counterproductive, when fighting insurgents and infiltrators in the jungles of Southeast Asia. Supersonic jet aircraft and fast, heavily armored tanks were sledgehammers swung at mosquitos. Strategic bombing could destroy the North's cities, but not its fighting capabilities. Perhaps most damaging of all, command and communications technologies had far outstripped other aspects of military technology, not only enabling but fostering the constant intervention of remote commanders into even the smallest details of battles on the ground.26
[¶34.] Technical innovation proved very uneven. There were such now-famous excesses as the attempt to wire the Ho Chi Minh trail with electronic sensors, or build an electronic fence along the border, or to fit helicopters with a "sniffer" that would detect Viet Cong by picking up the traces of ammonia from their urine. Such excesses eventually earned a name of their own from the hard-pressed grunts on the ground: "blip krieg."27
[¶35.] There were, however, also some signal successes that were to prefigure subsequent developments in weapons and systems. The most notable among these was the "smart bomb," the first of what were eventually to become known collectively as precision guided munitions (PGM). In 1972, toward the very end of the war, a single flight of Phantom aircraft armed with laser-guided Paveway bombs destroyed a bridge at Thanh Hoa that had survived eight hundred previous sorties with iron bombs.28 The advent of PGMs seemed to provide a technical alternative to risking American lives, provided that targets worthy of their cost could be found.29
[¶37.] Vietnam was a turning point for the United States in more ways than one. The military came out of that war determined not to fight again unless it could win; the public acquired a greatly decreased tolerance for human loss of life, particularly in overseas policing operations; the politicians came away looking to satisfy both constituencies. What all seemed to have settled upon, despite evidence to the contrary, was the notion that a new generation of high-technology weapons was needed.30
[¶38.] This was not a new idea. With Eisenhower's "New Look" in the aftermath of the Korean War, the United States shifted to a policy of massive retaliation, to a dependence upon nuclear weapons as a cost-effective alternative to building up large conventional forces. Now that it was widely accepted that there was no natural link between nuclear weapons and the need for conventional forces, the new emphasis on PGMs allowed a partial return to the earlier strategy, but this time with an emphasis on smart conventional weapons.
[¶39.] The 1970s were a time of turbulence and transition as a series of struggles took place over a whole generation of emerging new weapons.31 Controversy over such weapons systems as the TFX fighter (later to emerge as the FB-111 bomber), heavy versus light ICBMs, air defense systems, and the next generation of fighter aircraft were to some extent the result of the usual processes of bureaucratic infighting and interservice rivalry, now augmented by political scrapping over the distribution of increasingly scarce procurement funding.32 But they also reflected some real dilemmas as to the choice of military strategies and military postures, both of which were now seen as intimately connected with the outcome of technical choices as to weapons and weapons systems.
[¶40.] The use of computers was clearly to be central, but there remained two quite distinct, and often conflicting, paths. The first emphasized the creation of more complex and sophisticated man-operated integrated systems, such as the F-111, the B-1 bomber, and the M-1 Abrams tank. With their array of powerful computer-aided equipment, these were far more capable and lethal than anything that had preceded them. But they were also far more expensive than the systems they replaced, which meant that far fewer could be afforded.
[¶41.] The other trend was away from manned systems and toward advanced self-controlled or pre-programmed PGMs such as the Tomahawk cruise missile, launched from a distance by existing platforms or from specially designed, less expensive "stand-off" launching vehicles. Self-contained, computer-guided, and unmanned, the combination of PGMs and dedicated, relatively low-performance platforms was estimated to be far cheaper than attempting to deliver the same ordnance via a manned system, particularly when probable combat losses were taken into account. But they did entail complete reliance on an electronics package rather working a human being into the final control loop.
[¶42.] The debate that followed mirrored a continuing split over the nature of combat in the computer age. It also mirrored the contemporary debate in the business world between networked offices built around central computer systems and decentralized ones based on individual desktop computers. Although almost all in the military were now technology promoters, there were several camps, each with a different vision of the relation between soldiers and weapons, and between weapons and military doctrine and posture. Was the primary role of the soldier to be a directly engaged, armed fighting man, or the remote operator of a technology for fighting at a distance? Were remotely controlled or automatic weapons more or less reliable than humans in uncertain battle and electronic environments?
[¶43.] Cost also became an issue. With large sections of the military now convinced that only state-of-the art technology could offset Soviet numerical superiority, new systems were developed and old ones modified at an unprecedented pace, which in turn led to exponentially rising costs for such items as fighter planes, helicopters, missiles, and tanks.33 This in turn caused a back reaction against what critics saw as a military being driven by technology for its own sake, regardless of mission or combat requirements.
[¶44.] The ensuing debate saw a historical role reversal, with those in power arguing for sophisticated and complex "high-tech" weapons even at the cost of being able to buy very few ("quality"), and a highly professionalized military to operate them. The reform movement argued instead for much larger quantities of cheaper, possibly unmanned weapons with less complexity and a different kind of technical sophistication ("quantity"), on the grounds that numerical superiority and mass production should continue to be the U.S. strong suit in a major conflict.34
[¶45.] The proponents of advanced high-technology systems perfectly expressed the post-Vietnam attitudes of the United States to armed conflict. The key words were "force multipliers," rapid victory, a smaller and more professional military, reduced casualties, and the immorality of sending U.S. troops to battle in any but the very finest equipment money could buy. Those on the side of quantity replied that one man's force multiplier is another's high-value target, that failure to obtain a rapid victory would deplete both weapons and personnel much faster than they could be replaced, and that war without ca-sualties was a dangerous illusion. Although the reformers clearly stood closer to the historical U.S. tradition, the growing perception that mass armies, attrition warfare, and the traditional acceptance of casualties in search of victory were no longer publicly acceptable under any reasonable scenario for military action prevailed.35
[¶46.] The reformers were not alone in arguing that the military had gone too far in seeking to introduce businesslike methods to justify the new systems. The valuative criteria and strategies of civilian organizations may not be applicable to militaries, who are not fighting each other for profit or market share. Civilian organizations seek to maximize both efficiency and effectiveness. This may suit military organizations in peacetime, but in time of war efficiency and effectiveness (military success) not only differ, they may work at cross-purposes.36
[¶47.] The ideal of concentrating on a very few, very sophisticated weapons, increasing standardization within and between the services, and still avoiding the potential vulnerabilities entailed is no simple task.37 As was increasingly true in the world of business and industry, the new powers of the general-purpose computer were appealed to as showing the path to the future.
[¶48.] Flexible, programmable computers and computerized systems could adapt to circumstances and learn from error, so that standardized systems could be built to adapt and learn even in the midst of conflict. The use of computers in manned systems was to make them far more effective in offense, and far less vulnerable in defense. The use of computers in smart weapons would allow militaries to buy far fewer to accomplish the same ends, since these weapons would have such a high success rate that there would be no need to buy the huge stores required in the days of artillery barrages or mass bombing. And the use of computers to gather and distribute information and coordinate and integrate military efforts would make the whole system more efficient (and presumably more effective), reducing the need for stocks and reserves.
[¶49.] The next wave of computerization was to allow the independent development of weapons and platforms with state-of-the-art technology at both ends. There were to be numerous self-guided or remotely controlled munitions and vehicles whose cost would be brought down by economies of scale in production, while the number of very sophisticated and very costly platforms for bringing them to the battlefield could be greatly reduced. As will be discussed in chapter 11, this required a series of elaborate new systems for C3 I (command, control, communications, and intelligence) to inform, guide, and control the whole. This added greater complexity to the rising costs of integration, but that was a task for which the computer was thought to be especially well suited.38
[¶50.] Although disputes lingered, the quantity-quality debate was essentially over by the early 1980s. The Reagan administration made a conscious choice for high-technology military systems, rejecting the "smaller is better" arguments while keeping and expanding upon the idea of computerized and sometimes self-guided precision weapons.39 But it did so in the context of a broader decision to move the United States from a small professional core able to expand quickly as a conscript army to a fully professionalized military. Because human life could no longer be treated as a commodity, even in warfare, it was necessary to invest instead in high-technology systems, with high-technology, highly trained people to run them.40
[¶51.] As the new systems emerged, so did the open acknowledgment of the rationale for the longstanding support of American electronics and computer research.41 As Richard D. DeLauer, then undersecretary of defense for research and engineering, so clearly put it in 1982: "Electronics is the most critical of all technologies for the maintenance of peace. The raison d'être of the U.S. Department of Defense is peace, and the unparalleled strength of U.S. defense capabilities depends upon electronics in one form or another."42
[¶53.] Some of the short-term consequences of the move to computerize various aspects of the military will be discussed in more detail in the next few chapters. But as with business and personal computing, there are also long-term and indirect consequences that may eventually become more significant, and more durable. Militaries are more than collections of people and technologies; their organizations are structured, interdependent, and highly complex, even by the standards of comparable industrial organizations.43 Technical traditionalists were correct in their belief that major changes in the nature, and not just the quality, of weapons and weapons systems, communication systems, and control systems have long-term and transformational effects that are difficult to understand and, unlike business systems, are unlikely to be fully tested until irreversibly committed in the full-scale test of combat.
[¶54.] The following chapter will explore some of the effects as they played out with specific weapons systems under specific circumstances. There is also a discussion of some of the more long-term and permanent effects, including the redistribution of resources, that modern, computerized weapons and systems are bringing about. For every element in the fighting "tooth" of an army (or navy or air force), there is always a necessary train of logistics, support, information, and command-and-control that makes sure that the tooth can bite when called upon. Historically, that logistic "tail" was kept as small as possible to conserve resources for massing forces--which provided one motivation for standardization of weapons and low differentiation.
[¶55.] In a modern combined military force, there is not just one type of weapon at the front but many, each of which has distinct and often narrowly defined missions and tasks that must be monitored, evaluated, and integrated. The operational and support requirements of sophisticated, computerized weapons systems are far more demanding than for the simpler systems of the past. Fewer trained personnel are required at the front, but far more are needed behind it. The number of nominally noncombatant personnel necessary to make the new weapons effective has been growing in concert with their new capabilities. In addition, they must be maintained, supported, coordinated, and directed by a complex military support system whose personnel are far more differentiated and highly trained than in any military in history. The resulting military organization more closely resembles the classic definition of a vertically integrated complex bureaucracy than the rigidly hierarchical structure that has historically been considered the military model.
[¶56.] In the Second World War, about 65 percent of the Army's enlisted personnel were combat soldiers (which was considered by many a relatively poor ratio). By 1990, only 25 percent were listed in the "occupational category" of combat; of the rest, 20 percent were in very technical categories, 14 percent in technical, 31 percent in administrative, and 9 percent in semiskilled.44 This may actually understate the effects of technology, since it is not clear how many of the administrative jobs were created to serve the technical cadres.
[¶57.] Moreover, the demands for education and skills even for simpler jobs, such as craftspeople or clerical workers, have risen, just as they have in the civilian work force. The number of military occupation specialties in a modern army runs into the hundreds, some twenty or thirty times as high as it had been in 1945. By 1985, 20 percent of all jobs in the U.S. Army, 28 percent in the U.S. Navy, and 20 percent in the U.S. Air Force were electronics-related.45 Many are in computer-related categories that could not have existed even as recently as the late 1960s.
[¶58.] When the U.S. Army first moved to "black boxing" electronics in the 1970s, part of the reason was the need to isolate the very expensive equipment from the increasingly less-educated pool of draftees. The philosophy became known as "Smart Machine--Dumb Maintainer."46 Maintenance at the front was to consist primarily of pulling faulty black boxes and replacing them, thereby reducing the training requirements for front-line maintainers. The costs turned out to be higher than expected. Front-line diagnosis required another layer of complexity: sophisticated front-line diagnostic testing equipment. And doing maintenance at the rear involved yet another trail of logistic and equipment support, not to mention management and control of inventories, loss of time and availability owing to false positive rates, and so on. This was exacerbated by the continuing problem of the vulnerability of the very few maintenance shops, which required that they be kept far to the rear and/or heavily defended.
[¶59.] In the 1990s, with a professionalized military, the new systems require a much higher level of training all around. The smart machine, as it turns out, requires smart people to operate it as well as to maintain and support it. And as the level of required training and experience increases, the cost to the unit (and its effectiveness) of losing a single individual grows proportionately larger. Those experts in the logistics, maintenance, and supply train who have special skills have a particularly high value.
[¶60.] The demanding knowledge and communications requirements of the new systems requires that a greater portion of what is nominally the support structure be moved closer to the arena of combat. Given the greater range of new weapons, more people will therefore be placed at risk. The incentive then grows to increase both longer-range striking power and the distance between enemy and friendly troops. As the distance between the forces grows larger, the military organization with supposedly superior technology will grow more confident of its ability to use technology rather than ground forces to minimize the risk of losses. Smart weapons are valuable and require smart people; smart people are valuable and require smart weapons to protect them.
[¶61.] In a superb essay on the nature of technology, Langdon Winner has pointed out that artifacts have politics.47 Needless to say, politics also have artifacts. What the computer made possible in the aftermath of Vietnam was a military whose posture, doctrine, and weapons were based on reducing the traditional American reliance on numbers, mass, and endurance while increasing capacity for the rapid and precise application of very large amounts of force, albeit for a comparatively short time. And the complexity of operation and differentiation of skills also mean growing a larger and more complex organization to manage and coordinate it all.
[¶62.]
[¶64.] With each new generation of smart systems, computing power becomes more deeply embedded as an indispensable technical element of military systems. As the military shifts to ships built totally around their combat electronics and missile suites, to tanks, gun systems, and missiles that require electronics for control as well as for aim, and to aircraft that can neither fly nor fight effectively without relying on their sophisticated electronics, effectiveness and reliability come to depend upon an elaborate, tightly linked web of maintenance, logistics, and repair.
[¶65.] The social effects on the military have been profound. The change in warfare did more than increase the overall complexity of the military.48 The reduction in the ratio of warriors to support personnel, and the attendant shift in emphasis from manning the weapons to designing and controlling them, reconstructed the balance and distribution of power within the military, diluting the importance of tradition, rank, seniority, and even leadership.49 More than one analyst was heard to remark (usually in private) that the next set of training manuals might as well be titled: "War: The Video Game." Moreover, future military officers are very well aware that intellectual and computer skills are growing in importance compared to the physical and emotional ones that once dominated.
[¶66.] When the smart weapons revolution began, the leading objectives were to maintain stable deterrence in Europe without building a force that would have to resort immediately to nuclear weapons, and to "deter" the Russians from assisting or intervening in other theaters where the United States might be politically invested or militarily involved. The most probable scenarios, such as the United States having to fight a land war in the Persian Gulf, or possibly (again) in Asia were not something that could be sold to the public as a normative posture. Not every intervention would be a Grenada.
[¶67.] Attempts to remedy this dilemma with technology led to a series of military force postures of increasing complexity, both in the nature of the weapons systems and in their integration with command-and-control and intelligence networks. AirLand Battle, the doctrine underlying the U.S. Army's field manual FM 100-5, issued in the early 1980s, for example, stated flatly that the future combat would take place on an integrated battlefield, characterized by deep attacks against follow-on forces behind the front lines (popularly known as FOFA, for follow-on forces attack). As will be discussed in chapter 11, increased coordination would be required between ground and air operations, in an extended battlefield that encompassed a wide array of electronic sensors, communications, and mechanisms for integrated and coordinated fire control and command.50
[¶68.] The military of the future increasingly began to look like the corporation of the future, consisting of units that were formally dispersed but tightly coordinated through vertical chains of command, and complete with communications and information mechanisms that allowed for micromanagement at all levels. The implications of the transformation that would result are not widely appreciated, but they were well set out by James William Gibson in his review of vertical integration and micromanagement during the Vietnam War:
[¶70.] For the U.S. military, this seemed to be the dominant, and perhaps the only, option. With the United States unwilling either to give up its role as the leading world power, to build and man large armies, or to incur significant losses, technical innovation is seen not just as a palliative, but as the determinative answer. Although the growing demand for low-intensity intervention and peace-keeping missions once again made it clear that nothing can ever replace the physical presence of combat troops as a decisive factor in warfare, it was also increasingly clear that the United States was prepared to go to extraordinary technical lengths to ensure their safety before committing them to combat. The era of attrition warfare was over.
[¶71.] This was to have consequences at every level of the U.S. military, from the organization of infantry companies to the structure of command and control. The following chapter will examine how the new systems affected the performance of some of the newer combat systems, including the advanced missile cruiser USS Vincennes. Fitted with the extensive computerized battle displays, threat analysis, and weapons control computers, the Vincennes, caught fighting a relatively simple battle against relatively unsophisticated opponents, formed and held to a false image of a sophisticated attacker--a situation much closer to the one she had been designed and built for. As will be discussed in chapter 10, similar problems were also to emerge even in operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm, which are held up as models for how much a highly technical military can accomplish with very low casualties.
NOTES:
The quote from then DARPA Director Richard S. Cooper used as an epigraph to this chapter is taken from Henderson, Cohesion: The Human Element in Combat.
1 Demchak, Military Organizations, 80ff.
2 See, for examples, Zuboff, Age of the Smart Machine; Strassman, Information Payoff; Noble, Forces of Production; McColloch, White-Collar Workers in Transition; Bainbridge, "Ironies of Automation."
3 For sweeping surveys of all or part of this long history, see, for example, van Creveld, Technology and War; McNeill, Pursuit of Power; Dupuy, Weapons and Warfare.
4 It is interesting to note that many of our European colleagues skip over the Civil War, taking the history of military technology from the Napoleonic Wars to the Franco-Prussian War, and then to World War I. Because of this emphasis on European history and technical innovation, they often date the era of industrial warfare from the end of the nineteenth century instead of its middle.
5 On land, that is. That part of the war fought at sea still greatly resembled that of Napoleonic time, with the slight but remarkably prescient exception of the experiments with ironclads and submersibles.
6 Beaumont and Snyder, "Combat Effectiveness: Paradigms and Paradoxes." Also see Mcnaugher, The M-16 Controversies.
7 Strachan, European Armies and the Conduct of War.
8 Dupuy, Weapons and Warfare, 196.
9 It should be noted that both the cowboys and the Indians of the "Old West" had no such compunctions and disdained the Army's rifle in favor of the Spencer and later equivalents such as the famed 1866 Winchester. The apocryphal story was that the victorious Sioux did not even bother gathering up the single-shot Springfields that littered the ground after the Battle of Little Big Horn. It was not until 1903 that the Army was to produce even a bolt-loaded magazine rifle of its own, the 1903 Springfield, that was to remain the standard infantry weapon right into the Second World War. The same struggle between accuracy and rate of fire (culture vs. technology) was to take place over the relative merits of the M-14 and M-15 rifles, leading ultimately to the use of the flawed M-16 in Vietnam.
10 Ellis, Social History of the Machine Gun, 63ff.
11 As noted by Armstrong, Bullets and Bureaucrats, 137, American critics of the machine gun enunciated four major objections to the large-scale employment of the weapon:
12 Ellis, Social History of the Machine Gun, and Armstrong, Bullets and Bureaucrats suggest that this was a form of neocolonial racism. It would cost the British dearly.
13 Morison, Men, Machines, and Modern Times.
14 Beard, Developing the ICBM, 233.
15 Ellis, Social History of the Machine Gun, 53ff.
16 A few examples among many are van Creveld, Technology and War; McNeill, Pursuit of Power; Dupuy, Weapons and Warfare; Ellis, Social History of the Machine Gun; Deitchman, Advance of Technology; O'Connell, Of Arms and Men; Rosen, Winning the Next War; Shimshoni, "Technology, Military Advantage, and World War I; Smith, ed., Military Enterprise and Technological Change.
17 The great exception, of course, was Germany. Prohibited by the Versailles treaty from building a large army, German rearmament in the 1930s was forced to focus on the new ideas and technologies as an offset to prohibitions against raising a large army.
18 Baxter, Scientists against Time; Jones, Wizard War; Bush, Modern Arms and Free Men.
19 Indeed, postwar analysis of the German effort showed that their remarkable innovation, particularly in aviation, seriously compromised their war effort by interfering with mass production. See, for example, Millett Murray, eds., Second World War; van Creveld, Fighting Power.
20 References are too numerous to mention, as the war itself, its crucial battles, the performance of soldiers, and the individual categories of weapons systems have all spawned enormous literatures--even when restricted to categories touching primarily on technology. Of recent books, Carver, Twentieth-Century Warriors, is a good place to start. Also useful are van Creveld, Technology and War; Dupuy, Weapons and Warfare; O'Connell, Of Arms and Men; Hadley, Straw Giant.
21 Brodie, ed., Absolute Weapon, 76.
22 This history and its subsequent continuation through Korea and Vietnam into the present is discussed in admirable detail in Hadley, Straw Giant.
23 In fact, ENIAC, the first large-scale digital computer, had been built specifically to improve ballistic firing tables; only later was it pressed into service by the designers of the atomic bomb.
24 Edwards, "History of Computers and Weapons Systems."
25 Armacost, Weapons Innovation. The quoted portion is from Buchan, "Age of Insecurity." The entire quote is taken from Beard, Developing the ICBM, 13.
26 See, for example, Hadley, Straw Giant; Gibson, Perfect War; van Creveld, Command in War.
27 Hadley, Straw Giant, 177.
28 During the hundreds of sorties that took place during the Rolling Thunder campaigns of 1965-1968, a legend was said to have appeared among Navy and Air Force pilots that "the world was composed of two spring-loaded hemispheres, hinged somewhere under the Atlantic and held together by the Thanh Hoa bridge" (Gibson, Perfect War, 364). The irony is that the North Vietnamese never bothered to try repairing the bridge. There was a ford a few miles upstream.
29 Other PGMs were in fact available to the U.S. forces, but the lack of valuable targets made their use somewhat problematic. There may be occasions and circumstances where it makes sense to fire a $25,000 missile at a $2,000 truck, but that is not a tactic to be applied as a matter of course during a protracted and dispersed conflict.
30 See Gibson, Perfect War, for some of the contrary arguments.
31 This, too, resulted in an outpouring of critical literature. For examples that treat individual weapons or systems in some depth, see Beard, Developing the ICBM; Betts, ed., Cruise Missiles; Coulam, Illusions of Choice; Dörfer, Arms Deal; Bellin and Chapman, Computers in Battle; Fallows, National Defense; Kaldor, The Baroque Arsenal; Luttwak, Pentagon and the Art of War; Rasor, ed., More Bucks, Less Bang.
32 For an unusually in-depth study of the new political economy of military procurement, see Kotz, Wild Blue Yonder.
33 See, for example, Fallows, National Defense; Spinney, Defense Facts of Life.
34 Although the debate was essentially over in the United States by the mid-1980s, it was picked up in the European context as part of the continuing argument about defensive versus offensive postures for NATO. See, for example, Clark, Chiarelli, McKittrick, and Reed, eds., Defense Reform Debate. Deitchman, Advance of Technology, provides a good summary at pp. 223ff. The internal debate that shook the Pentagon in the 1970s was revealed publicly in Fallows, National Defense; the famed briefing by Chuck Spinney upon which Fallows drew was later published as Defense Facts of Life.
35 Nelan, "Revolution at Defense."
36 van Creveld, Technology and War, 318.
37 The main direct risk of excessive sophistication and standardization is the vulnerability to surprise of having few systems with little variety. See, e.g., van Creveld, Technology and War; Luttwak, Art of War.
38 For a superb and detailed review of the organizational and cultural costs not only of weapon system complexity, but also of the computer systems that are designed to maintain it, see Demchak, Military Organizations.
39 See, for example, Perry, "Defense Investment Strategy." The extent to which this was true even for so-called conventional forces and postures was largely masked in the public debate by the continuing arguments over nuclear weapons control and the Strategic Defense Initiative. But the money spent on these high-profile programs was considerably less than that being spent on force modernization and technical improvements.
40 The preceding is in part based on comments made by John Lehman, former Secretary of the Navy, at a colloquium at the Institute of International Studies, University of California, Berkeley, April 16, 1991.
41 For a superb exposition of this linkage, see Edwards, Closed World.
42 De Lauer, "Force Multiplier."
43 For a discussion of complexity in military organizations, see Demchak, Military Organizations; Binkin, Defense Manpower; Bracken, Command and Control of Nuclear Forces.
44 Binkin, Defense Manpower, 38.
45 Ibid., 43ff.
46 Demchak, Military Organizations. The rest of this paragraph is based largely on the study of implications for the Army of the complexity of the M-1 Abrams main battle tank. Binkin, Defense Manpower, tells two similar stories. In the 1970s, the Navy introduced a general-purpose automatic test equipment suite known as VAST, for Versatile Avionics Shop Test; 70 percent of VAST time was spent in self-diagnosis of its own problems. The first variant of the built-in test and fault-isolation capability of the F-16 advanced fighter detected only half of the faults that occurred; 45 percent of the faults reported were false positives.
47 Winner, "Artifacts."
48 Demchak, Military Organizations.
49 See, e.g., van Creveld, Technology and War; Margiotta and Sanders, eds., Technology.
50 "The essence of AirLand Battle is to defeat the enemy by conducting simultaneous offensive operations over the length and breadth of the battlefield . . . AirLand Battle doctrine is centered on the combined arms team, fully integrating the capabilities of all land, sea, and air combat systems, and envisions rapidly shifting and concentrating decisive combat power, both fire and maneuver, at the proper time and place on the battlefield" (U.S. Department of Defense, Persian Gulf War). The demands for coordination, integration, and synchronization, in real time, in the face of an enemy trying to interfere with electronic and command-and-control systems as well as combat units, are immense.
51 Gibson, Perfect War, 23.
Conclusion
The same "fetishism" of technological production systems found in foreign policy similarly occurs within the military. The social relationships within the military disappear and all that remain are technological-production systems and ways of managing them. . . . Combat leaders inspire troops to fight in dangerous battles; social relationships of loyalty from top to bottom and bottom to top are crucial. Managers allocate resources. As two other military sociologists . . . say, "no one expects anyone to die for IBM or General Motors."51
Points 1, 3, and 4 were essentially the same arguments used against the repeating rifle. British and French general staffs used the same reasoning, adding to it the notion that it went against the grain and tradition of infantry movements on the battlefield--even though the lessons of the Civil War showed that the next war would be fought in trenches, not on open fields. The misperceptions and ideological biases of the period from 1865 through 1914 are also discussed extensively by Ellis, Social History of the Machine Gun.