Dear Laura,
I don’t think your criticisms are unfair, but I do think that Max Boot may merely be the messenger. As you correctly say, the apostles of military orthodoxy have been advancing this idea of a revolution in military affairs for some time. They argue that advances in battlefield communications, logistics, and surveillance will herald a new age of warfare, much as the invention of gunpowder did centuries ago. But, as you also say, there is little that is revolutionary about this change. Assuming all the technologies described by Boot come to fruition, we will still not see truly epochal change. At best, America will improve on the way it fought World War II and Desert Storm and field a conventional military only marginally better than the one it fields today. Given that few of our enemies want to fight us conventionally anymore, we may end up with the most expensive and anachronistic military in history.
Defining epochal military change is a difficult task, more so while we’re in the middle of it. Clearly, over the last 20 or 30 years, the “losers” have learned the most from warfare, and they are the ones we should be studying to see what truly revolutionary military change looks like. As you rightly point out, al-Qaida’s synthesis of globalization, indigenous systems (airplanes, railways), capital, and ideology does indeed look like a fundamentally new way of war.
A few road signs mark the path to revolutionary military change. Such change will cause a great deal of “creative destruction,” not unlike the economic upheaval associated with industrialization described by economist Joseph Schumpeter. Epochal military change will upset old power relationships and produce a new paradigm for the calculation of military power. In this new world order, birth rates and madrassa attendance rates may matter more than the number of tanks, ships, and airplanes owned by a government. Ideology may matter more, too. Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. mobilized their people and defeated force with ideas in the 20th century. In the 21st century, nations and groups will rely increasingly on ideology for power. Instead of purchasing conventional military power with money, they will purchase people and support with ideas.
We will recognize such change by the conflict it produces. But the conflict will not always be combat. We will likely see new forms of warfare emerge where conflict occurs in the economic, information, and political spheres of human activity. China may decide that fighting the U.S. military makes no sense when it can more easily bring the United States to its knees by boycotting our goods, attacking our currency, and destroying our securities markets. The U.S. response to these shifts in military art has been either tepid or overly defensive. Last year, a major Pentagon strategy document stated, “Our strength as a nation state will continue to be challenged by those who employ a strategy of the weak using international fora, judicial processes, and terrorism.” Perhaps. But living in a state of denial about new forms of war like “lawfare” will do little to protect this country. We must find ways to make American power relevant to these new forms of conflict.
So, where does that leave us? I think a useful model for strategic change comes from the late Col. John Boyd, an Air Force fighter pilot and one of America’s most brilliant military thinkers. Boyd understood that the human dimension of war mattered most, and he fought relentlessly against a Pentagon procurement community bent on purchasing increasingly expensive weapons systems that Boyd saw as less important than the men who used them. Boyd developed the theory of “O-O-D-A loops,” sometimes called “Boyd cycles,” for the dynamic thought processes pilots used in combat to observe, orient, decide, and act. Combat victory didn’t go to the pilot with the most expensive or the fastest plane. Instead, the more maneuverable plane, with the more intellectually agile pilot, generally carried the day, because he could perform more Boyd cycles in a shorter amount of time, leaving his adversary to react to his earlier maneuvers. Boyd’s critical insight was that agility and flexibility mattered more than absolute power. His ideas found an audience among strategists who saw their relevance for all kinds of competitive endeavors—aerial dogfights, infantry battles, business ventures, even soccer matches. Boyd barnstormed around the country with his briefings, thundering at his audiences that America’s military priorities should be “people, ideas, and hardware—in that order!” He understood that America’s future wars would not be won by purchasing the biggest toys, but by breeding the smartest warriors and adopting the best ideas.
People matter the most, both in Boyd’s opinion and in mine, and I suspect in yours, too. But here, again, I depart with Boot and his discussion of America’s vaunted all-volunteer military, because I think he frames the issue too narrowly. America’s strategic victory in the Cold War owed much to the deep reservoir of talent and intellectual capital we developed by pouring money into America’s schools. Visionary programs like the GI Bill played a big role in this. In building massive research and teaching complexes like the University of California, we set the conditions for American political, economic, and military hegemony. The scientists and engineers we taught on these campuses went on to develop leading military technologies like stealth, GPS, and the Internet (which started as a project for the Pentagon’s research arm on four university campuses). Pick a patent today in biotechnology, computer design, or business processes, and you will likely trace its lineage to a major U.S. research university. One of my great fears today is that we have let this advantage erode. Post-9/11 restrictions on immigration have made it difficult for the world’s best and brightest to study in America. Our children no longer lead the world in math and science education, as they once did during the Cold War. European students far outclass Americans when it comes to language and cultural education. And our greatest research universities today find themselves frequently starved for funds, prisoners of political fights between state legislators and tax-averse voters. More than pedagogy suffers when America’s universities go hungry; our nation also loses ground to those countries (like India) that recognize the strategic importance of an educated population.
Ideas also play an extremely important role in determining national power. In his elegant short history of the Cold War, Yale historian John Lewis Gaddis makes a convincing argument that America won that struggle because it beat the Soviet Union in the war of ideas. Simply put, America’s way of life appealed to the world more than the failed utopia offered by Soviet Communism. I have thought a great deal about this argument since reading Gaddis’ book, because I think it’s particularly relevant to our struggle with terrorism. What is the one idea that America can advance to win today’s war? Liberalism sounds good at home, but it does not sell well abroad, particularly in the Middle East. Democracy? Same problem. Human rights? Perhaps, although even the ideals in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights fail to gain traction in some parts of the world. I see this search for an idea as the central strategic challenge facing the United States today.
Then there’s hardware. The last quarter of Boot’s book takes us on a tour through some of America’s most promising military technologies. But I don’t think that buying these gadgets will prepare us for the new forms of warfare over the horizon; they will simply equip us to better fight wars that have already ended.
I agree with you, Laura, that nanotechnology is one area where we should invest more and better manage our investments, because the potential payoff is so great. But I would also broaden the strategic procurement construct to include much more than just military hardware. Foreign-aid programs and emergency-assistance missions are also a kind of strategic procurement. If we invest wisely in development and diplomacy, we may pre-empt or undermine threats that might otherwise emerge in 20 or 30 years. On a recent cab ride in Los Angeles, my driver told me about a wealthy Saudi philanthropist who was paying Ethiopian families $1,000 to convert to Wahhabist Islam. Although I don’t particularly favor using taxpayer money to subsidize religion abroad, I thought this program was pure strategic genius. Winning hearts and minds sounds good, but buying hearts and minds and converting them through an ideological proxy like religion probably works better. Can you imagine a U.S. government program so simple and effective? Unfortunately, that kind of strategic thinking about national security spending, which existed during the Cold War, is conspicuously absent today in Washington.
America’s enemies are impressive learners. I fear they have developed a new way of war, while we have simply improved on the old one. What’s a superpower to do?
Best,
Phillip
