its size, its structure, its purpose.
I think that, but what do I know, since I served briefly in the Marines almost 5 decades ago and am now a Quaker.
No, I am sharing the thoughts of Thomas Ricks, longimte Washington Post reporter who has written five books on the US Military and now serves as an adviser on national security at the New America Foundation, where he participates in its “Future of War” project. He has an op ed today titled To improve the U.S. military, shrink it.
There is a lot of context to his article. For example, he focuses on the recent commissioning of the U. S. S. Gerald Ford, a $13.5 Billion aircraft carrier, of which Ricks writes
Its modern aspects include a smaller crew, better radar and a different means of launching aircraft, but it basically looks like the carriers the United States has built for the past half-century. And that means it has a huge “radar signature,” making it highly visible. That could be dangerous in an era of global satellite imagery and long-range precision missiles, neither of which existed when the Ford’s first predecessors were built. As Capt. Henry Hendrix, a naval historian and aviator, wrote this year, today’s carrier, like the massive battleships that preceded it, is “big, expensive, vulnerable — and surprisingly irrelevant to the conflicts of the time.” What use is a carrier if the missiles that can hit it have a range twice as long as that of the carrier’s aircraft?
Read that last sentence again:
What use is a carrier if the missiles that can hit it have a range twice as long as that of the carrier’s aircraft?
Of course I realize that some will use that fact as an excuse to spend billions to develop an effective anti-missile system - the equivalent of hitting a bullet with another bullet. But there is more.
Here I focus on the final two paragraphs of the piece by Ricks. The penultimate reads
My point is not to beat up on the Navy. All branches of the U.S. military face the same issue. By and large, the United States still has an Industrial Age military in an Information Age world. With some exceptions, the focus is more on producing mass strength than achieving precision. Land forces, in particular, need to think less about relying on big bases and more about being able to survive in an era of persistent global surveillance. For example, what will happen when the technological advances of the past decade, such as armed drones controlled from the far side of the planet, are turned against us? A drone is little more than a flying improvised explosive device. What if terrorists find ways to send them to Washington addresses they obtain from the Internet?
One might question whether this is merely an issue for the military. Let's be serious - if all one is interested in is targeting one person as they walk or drive a car or in their single family home or their apartment, the technology currently exists for relatively small remotely-piloted aerial vehicles to do damage right now - it would not be that hard to take a small commercially available vehicle and attach a small amount of explosives sufficient to do great damage and to control it by line of site - the attacks do not have to be just from the other side of the world.
But then there is another issue, raised in the final paragraph, one which given what we have seen from technology companies should truly get our attention:
Imagine a world where, in a few decades, Google (having acquired Palantir) is the world’s largest defense contractor. Would we want generals who think more like George Patton or Steve Jobs — or who offer a bit of both? How do we get them? These are the sorts of questions the Pentagon should begin addressing. If it does not, we should find leaders — civilian and in uniform — who will.
Here let me step back for a minute. I'm not sure I would hold up either Jobs or Patton as a model, for lots of reasons, mostly dealing with their personalities. That each had skill sets that have use in certain situations is undeniable. But I certainly would not want a military led by a set of either or both, although I would want those skill sets as part of the thinking of those shaping our military policy and structure.
I would also want moralists. I would want philosophers. I would want social scientists who understand under cultures. The military should never be the sole determinant of how it is shaped and used, because there are larger purposes than what a military may be able to do. That we can use a certain technology does not mean that we should - hence we did not use nukes to help the French at Dien Bien Phu, to cite one case where a military man with a larger purpose, Eisenhower, turned down his military. Nor did we bomb the Soviet missile bases in Cuba, as Kennedy's military wanted to do.
That said, I do think Ricks is on to something.
I would not argue that aircraft carriers have no use, and am amenable to the idea of working to develop means of protecting those military assets into which we have sunk hundreds of billions of dollars against emerging threats.
The idea of being able to fight two full-scale wars simultaneously should not be driving military doctrine.
We should remember that war is politics by other means, a doctrine I am sure was in the minds of this administration in its current dealings with Iran, perhaps because the Secretary of State understands at least a little about war from his personal experience of it.
I have no personal experience of war.
I have limited personal experience of the military.
I am a humanist, someone who reads widely in a variety of fields, notably in history, but also in politics, in human dynamics, and who chooses to ponder beneath the surface of arguments, beyond the demagoguery of issues for political purposes.
There are lots of reasons beyond those offered by Ricks to rethink the size and structure and purpose of our military. Certainly the treasure we expend upon it now seems well beyond the benefits we may obtain. And far too often because we have that hammer of the large military there is the inclination, the momentum, to see things around the world as nails against which is should be applied. Make the hammer smaller, or perhaps turn it into something else and that temptation may at least lessen.
In any event, given his background and stature, I felt that the piece by Ricks deserved some attention.
Do with this post what you will.
And, oh by the way?
Peace.