Warfare is changing, perhaps more rapidly and fundamentally than at any time in recent history. In the coming years, U.S. defense planning will be hard-pressed to keep pace with the metamorphosis of conflict. To benefit from the RMA, the U.S. military, whether it is engaged in conventional or irregular war, will need to reform the way it plans, thinks, procures, and fights. Such transforming innovations will require a framework, some basic set of principles to help guide decisions during a period of dizzying change.
This monograph has proposed one such framework. It may have misidentified the principles; it may be wrong in many of its major assertions. Some military officers and defense planners, accustomed to relying on certain "unchanging truths about war," will undoubtedly reject some of the more dramatic suggestions offered above. And perhaps they will be right.
But this report has tried to convey something of the possible sweep and momentous importance of the trends now at work in the nature of war. It is based on the conviction that, whether or not every element of its long-range thinking is correct, the architects of U.S. defense policy ignore these trends at their peril.
The United States enjoys a proud tradition of innovative military thinkers and the development, in peacetime, of important new capabilities. If this tradition is to continue, U.S. defense planners will need to be more far-sighted than ever. For the changes of tomorrow are coming faster and with more force than the changes of yesterday. It may no longer be enough to avoid fighting the last war; now we may need to be thinking about the war after next.
ENDNOTES
[1] This is the central theme of Alvin and Heidi Toffler, War and Anti-War: Survival at the Dawn of the 21st Century, Boston: Little-Brown, 1993.
Ibid., p. 315. Van Creveld gives as an example the long-desired goal of standardization which, in addition to simplifying the procurement of spare parts and the like, also "make[s] things easy for the enemy"; Ibid., p. 319.
[2] Michael Mazarr, principal author, The Military Technical Revolution, Washington, DC: Center for Strategic and International Studies, 1993, pp. 16-17.
[3] See Mazarr, The Military Technical Revolution; and Frank Barnaby, The Automated Battlefield, New York: The Free Press, 1986. During the cold war, Soviet military analysts contended that modern history had seen three true revolutions in military affairs. The first was the revolution in mass armies, weaponry, and mechanization, just underway in Napoleon's time, which became fully evident in the two World Wars. The second was the advent of nuclear weapons, which completely changed the nature of large-scale warfare and may, in fact, have made such warfare inherently suicidal. The third RMA outlined by Soviet analysts was the one underway
today.
[4] On the elements of the RMA see Frank Kendall, "Exploiting the Military-Technical Revolution," Strategic Review, Vol. 20, No. 2, Spring
1992, pp. 23-30.
[5] Les Aspin, Secretary of Defense, Report on the Bottom-Up Review, Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Defense, October 1993. The report contains a few references to the "revolution in weapons technology" (p. 33), but no sustained discussion of the nature of the military-technical revolution. Indeed, the report hardly discusses the nature of warfare at all.
[6] See, for example, Theresa Hitchens and Robert Holzer, "DoD Eyes 21st Century Now," Defense News, March 28-April 3, 1994, pp. 1, 52. Defense Secretary Perry has spoken of an emphasis on the RMA as one of the legacies he intends to leave, and has formed a large study group on the RMA within the Defense Department.
[7] David Ruelle, Chance and Chaos, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1991, p. 29.
[8] A basic introduction to chaos theory is James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science, New York: Penguin Books, 1987.
[9] Ruelle, Chance and Chaos, p. 81.
[10] As one writer has put it, "Because of this sensitivity, causing microlevel effects to be exponentially amplified over time, long-term predictability from the observation of previous behavior becomes impossible in chaotic systems. Current behavior becomes unrelated to previous events. . ." Diana Richards, "A Chaotic Model of Power Concentration in the International System," International Studies Quarterly, Vol. 37, 1993, p. 58.
[11] An interesting discussion of this point can be found in chapter 8 of Alasdair Macintyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1981, pp. 84-102.
[12] Robert Conquest, "History, Humanity, and Truth," The 1993 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities, Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace, 1993, p. 16.
[13] John Lewis Gaddis, "International Relations Theory and the End of the Cold War," International Security, Vol. 17, No. 3, Winter 1992-1993, p. 29. Cf. pages 27-29, 31, 39, 52, and especially 53-55 in Gaddis for further discussions of this point. And see also Gabriel A. Almond and Stephen J. Genco, "Clouds, Clocks, and the Study of Politics," World Politics, Vol. 20, No. 4, July 1977, which makes roughly the same argument.
[14] Alan Beyerchen emphasizes that the elements of interaction and feedback noted as characteristics of war by Clausewitz are also basic elements of chaos. For example, the notion of "war as continuation of politics" implies an interaction, not a linear set-subset relationship. War is thus described, in good chaotic terms, as "an energy-consuming phenomenon involving competing and interactive factors, attention to which reveals a messy mix of order and unpredictability." Beyerchen, "Clausewitz, Nonlinearity, and the Unpredictability of War," International Security, Vol. 17, No. 3, Winter 1992/1993, pp. 66-75.
[15] The more one knows about technology and its effect on war, van Creveld concludes sadly, "the more difficult it becomes to identify trends and make predictions." Martin van Creveld, Technology and War, New York: Free Press, 1989, p. 313.
[16] The revolution in military affairs points to a strategy of "management of uncertainty," argues Stephen Peter Rosen, rather than "predictions of what future wars would be like. It is a mistake to tailor forces and strategies for one scenario to the exclusion of others. U.S. planners need to "construct a wide range of scenarios and conduct imaginative conflict simulations in order to explore the shape of potential wars ; Rosen, Winning the Next War: Innovation and the Modern Military, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991. Alan Beyerchen's analysis of Clausewitz draws similar conclusions for military art. "The elegance of military axioms," he warns, echoing what he believes to be the true message of Clausewitz, "is a mirage shimmering above the distant abstractions of implicitly idealized, isolated systems; the denseness of Clausewitz's forest of caveats and qualifications more faithfully represents the conditions and contexts we actually encounter"; Beyerchen, "Clausewitz, Nonlinearity, and the Unpredictability of War," p. 89. "The work of Clausewitz," Beyerchen concludes, "indicates that knowing how the system functions at this moment does not guarantee that it will change only slightly in the next. Although it might remain stable, it might also suddenly, (although perhaps subtly) pass a threshold into a thoroughly different regime of behavior. And the causes of such changes in a complex system can be imperceptibly small"; Ibid., p. 90.
[17] As the chaos expert David Ruelle has argued,
The textbooks may give you the impression that the role of the legislators and government officials is to find and implement an equilibrium that is particularly favorable for the community. The examples of chaos in physics teach us, however, that certain dynamical situations do not produce equilibrium but rather a chaotic, unpredictable time evolution. Legislators and government officials are thus faced with the possibility that their decisions, intended to produce a better equilibrium, will in fact lead to wild and unpredictable fluctuations, with possibly quite disastrous effects.
Ruelle, Chance and Chaos, pp. 84-85. The same may be true in economics, suggesting that traditional efforts by government to achieve this or that effect with a pinch in interest rates and a prod in money supply may be far less effective than commonly assumed; see Charles R. Morris, "It's Not the Economy, Stupid," The Atlantic Monthly, July 1993, pp. 49-62.
[18] As a side note, it may be interesting to consider whether this broad unpredictability of political events helps account for the causes of deterrence failure. Why supposedly rational national leaders would take seemingly irrational decisions to defy deterrent threats-as Argentina did in 1982, for example, or Iraq in 1990-has long been the subject of debate. A chaotic model of world politics allows us to see deterrence failures as natural subsets of an overall order that does not conform to linear, "rational" models. Indeed, a thorough analysis of the causes of deterrence failure bears out this point. For an argument that the practice of deterrence is inherently flawed-a contention that a chaos model of world politics would support-see the chapters in Robert Jervis, Richard Ned Lebow, and Janice Gross Stein, eds., Psychology and Deterrence, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985. Michael J. Mazarr, Don M. Snider, and James A. Blackwell, Desert Storm: The Gulf War and What We Learned, Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1991, chapters 2 through 4, applies these same theories of deterrence failure specifically to the Iraqi case.
[19] See, for example, Martin van Creveld's argument about non-state warfare in The Transformation of War, New York: The Free Press, 1991. Van Creveld is no doubt correct that non-state, non-trinitarian warfare will be more prevalent in the future. Chaotic models would merely suggest that it is impossible to claim, as van Creveld appears to do, that they will be the only kind of war. His book was published before the Persian Gulf War, and one wonders if he would admit that the war provides any counterevidence to his claim. It was, after all, a traditional state-versus-state war in almost
every sense.
[20] See, for example, the claims of John Mueller, Retreat from Doomsday: The Obsolescence of Major War, New York: Basic Books, 1989; and Edward Luttwak, "From Geopolitics to Geoeconomics," The National Interest, No. 20, Summer 1990, pp. 17-23. Other elements of this debate are offered in Sean M. Lynn-Jones, ed., The Cold War and After: Prospects for Peace, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1991.
[21] See John Mearsheimer, "Back to the Future: Instability in Europe After the Cold War," International Security, Vol. 15, No. 1, Summer 1990.
[22] Let me make one point very clear at the outset: I do not assume that all weapons, doctrines, or technologies of the RMA are equally applicable to conventional and unconventional war. As a much more ambiguous phenomenon than conventional war, in which social, economic, and political factors predominate, irregular war is immune to many of the technologies of the RMA. It is not immune to all of them, however; and this monograph will contend that the six principles outlined below are equally applicable to regular and irregular war. But applying the principles will require two (or more) very different doctrines. In general, my comments will focus on the role of the RMA in conventional war.
[23] These comments hint at the definition of information I have in mind: it is a broad one, encompassing facts (about the enemy, about friendly and allied forces, about terrain, weather, weapons systems, and the like) as well as command and control (the exchange of facts and orders). The seminal current work in the field of the RMA and command and control is Kenneth Allard, Command, Control, and the Common Defense, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990. See also General Gordon R. Sullivan, "War in the Information Age, Military Review, forthcoming; Sullivan's superb and insightful piece echoes many of the themes presented in this section.
[24] For more details on information warfare, see Alan D. Campen, ed., The First Information War, Fairfax, VA: AFCEA International Press, 1992; Martin Libicki, "Silicon and Security in the 21st Century, Strategic Review, Vol. 20, No. 3, Summer 1992; and Libicki and James Hazlett, "Do We Need
an Information Corps?" Joint Force Quarterly, Vol. 1, No. 2, Autumn 1993, pp. 88-97.
[25] Martin van Creveld has spoken of the critical importance of the "infrastructure" of war, the logistical and communications network that links a force together. This infrastructure, van Creveld notes, "goes a long way to dictate the character of organization, logistics, intelligence, strategy, even the concept of battle itself. Without it the conduct of armed conflict would be impossible, and its very existence, inconceivable"; van Creveld, Technology and War, p. 311-312. In the past, this infrastructure was based on roads and rail; in the future, the military will increasingly rely on an informational infrastructure based on the computer chip and the fiber-optic cable.
[26] See Mazarr, The Military Technical Revolution, p. 20. It could be argued that the Air Force's strategy of the strategic application of airpower to enemy critical nodes is an example of information dominance, because many of those nodes are command and control or information-related targets such as radars, telephone networking stations, and radio facilities.
[27] One interesting result is to strengthen the chaotic nature of warfare mentioned earlier. Information flows are rapid and unpredictable; advanced command and control systems magnify the feedback loop characteristic of chaotic systems and accelerate the feedback process. Ken Allard refers to the "organized chaos of information gathering." Allard, "The Future of Command and Control: Toward a Paradigm of Information Warfare," chapter to be included in Michael J. Mazarr and Benjamin Ederington, eds., Turning Point: The Gulf War and the Future of U.S. Military Strategy, New York: St. Martin's Press, forthcoming; cited from mimeographed draft
chapter, p. 27.
[28] Ken Allard argues that such a doctrine could become the central organizing principle for U.S. military forces, replacing the service-oriented paradigms of today. The American defense establishment "has a long history of organizing concepts that fall short of capturing the essence of what it means to be a superpower with land, sea, and aerospace forces as well as global interests," Allard writes. "The information war paradigm-inchoate, uncertain, and indistinct though it is-represents a possible alternative, precisely because it embraces each of these operational environments as well as the electromagnetic spectrum." Allard, "The Future of Command and Control," p. 31. With such projects as C41 for the Warrior, Corporate Information Management, and the Navy's Space and Electronic Warfare initiative, the Defense Department is laying fertile ground for the latter-day architects of such an information warfare doctrine.
[29] See Sullivan, "War in the Information Age."
[30] See, for example, Brown, The U.S. Army in Transition II, pp.
161-162.
[31] Kendall, "Exploiting the Military Technical Revolution," p. 26.
[32] Martin C. Libicki and James A. Hazlett, "Do We Need an Information Corps?" Joint Force Quarterly, No. 2, Autumn 1993, pp. 88-97. Their notion is that such an organization would help integrate information warfare functions, encourage innovation in this area, and help grant information warriors a unique ethos and culture. The obvious objection is that the nature of information belies such an organizational innovation: information lies at the core of all military operations; we cannot-and should not-attempt to split it off into a separate institution. Such an action flies in the face of the synergy and integration information warfare demands. But Libicki and Hazlett correctly recognize the fact that, without institutional muscle, information warfare will continue to be viewed in a dozen different ways by the services, and its equipment and personnel will continue to get short shrift when compared with warfighting platforms. An alternative idea might be the creation of a joint, unified Information Command. While recognizing that information is integral to all military operations, this command would take control of some relatively unique information-related functions. It could maintain intelligence and attack plans designed to collapse an enemy's information network, plot computer virus assaults, seek ways to deny critical information to the enemy, and so on. The model here, of course, is Special Operations Command. Obviously, special operations are an integral part of nearly every military effort. But having their own unique command has given these forces better influence, budgetary authority, prominence, and pride. An Information Command could do the same for information warriors.
[33] Alvin and Heidi Toffler, War and Anti-War, p. 238.
[34] The points which follow, and other perils of information warfare, are outlined in greater detail and eloquence in Eliot Cohen, "The Mystique of U.S. Air Power," Foreign Affairs, Vol. 73, No. 1, January-February 1994,
pp. 112-116.
[35] Alvin and Heidi Toffler, War and Anti-War, pp. 149-150.
[36] The overall system, writes Ken Allard, must be "capable of winning even after the computer dies"; Allard, "The Future of Command and Control," p. 13.
[37] General Sullivan argues that networks provide the most telling model for war in the information age-interdependent webs of relationships, rather than the stand-alone capabilities of earlier eras. See Sullivan, "War in the Information Age."
[38] Defense Secretary William Perry, before joining the Clinton administration, wrote of the interdependence of U.S. combat systems in the Gulf that "The effectiveness of the coalition's defense suppression tactics depended upon the precision-guided weapons; the effectiveness of the precision-guided weapons in turn depended on the intelligence data that identified and located targets; and the very survivability of the intelligence systems depended on the effectiveness of the coalition's defense suppression systems"; William J. Perry, "Desert Storm and Deterrence," Foreign Affairs, Vol. 70, No. 4, Fall 1991, p. 76. Army Chief of Staff Gordon Sullivan points to the accelerating trend of combined-arms units and the need for land forces "fully integrated" with naval and air forces; General Gordon L. Sullivan and Colonel James M. Dubik, USA, "Land Warfare in the 21st Century," Military Review, Vol. LXXIII, No. 9, September 1993, pp. 27-28. A Navy officer similarly speaks of "joint integrated strike forces" built around a carrier or a division that would nurture personal contacts and exercises down to mid-level officers; Commander James Stavridis, USN, "To Begin Again," U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, Vol. 119, No. 7, July
1993, pp. 38-39.
[39] Yet even today, each service buys its own command, control, and communication systems, an arrangement that will not long survive the RMA; Allard, "The Future of Command and Control," pp. 78, 14, and 24.
[40] See Stephen Peter Rosen, "Service Redundancy: Waste or Hidden Capability?" Joint Force Quarterly, No. 1, Summer 1993, pp. 36-39.
[41] As Martin van Creveld and Edward Luttwak have repeatedly emphasized, the quest for "efficiency" in the organization of military forces may be chimeric. Because war, as suggested above, remains a chaotic enterprise, attempting to impose linear models of efficiency and "streamline" the military, as van Creveld puts it, to create "a perfect one-to-one fit" between means and ends-or, in this case, between weapons systems and missions-is a dangerous mistake. As a result, a solution that attempted to eliminate "any redundant or idle resources" would, when fighting a war, "be useless or worse." Van Creveld, Technology and War, pp. 318, 317. Van Creveld continues that:
The conduct of war against an intelligent opponent differs from the management of a large-scale technological system precisely in that efficiency and effectiveness, the concentration and employment of the greatest possible force on the one hand and military success on the other, are not the same even in the short run, or (one might well argue) particularly in the long run. On the contrary, there are any number of occasions when military effectiveness is not only compatible with diminished efficiency but positively demands that it be sacrificed.
[42] For example, merely because a narrow interpretation of a few missions would suggest that B-2 bombers could perform many of the attack missions of carrier air does not suggest we can henceforth stop building carriers, which have a variety of political uses and unique military value that bombers do not. And as van Creveld argues, eliminating redundancy benefits the United States by saving money in peacetime-and benefits our enemy, by reducing the number of weapons he must confront, in wartime. If an enemy could prepare only for B-2 attacks and need not worry about carrier-based aircraft, special forces raids, or cruise missiles, its task would be considerably simplified. Some will object that this claim denies the true implications of the RMA. How can we be so sure we will have aircraft carriers if the nature of war is changing so rapidly? The point is a good one, but it does not deny my claim here. The RMA may eventually require the U.S. military to replace aircraft carriers, tactical aircraft, and large ground forces with some new kinds of armed forces, but this will only occur after some decades; in the meantime, we can be reasonably certain that these systems, or something like them, will continue to exist. But even more importantly, once the RMA has brought a new generation of armed forces into being, the same argument being made here will prevail: each "service" will best use its capabilities by deciding how it can participate in a given "mission," rather than whether it can do that mission all on its own.
[43] Admiral William Owens, "Living Jointness," Joint Force Quarterly, No. 3, Winter 1993-1994, pp. 7-14.
[44] A superb example of this is the Joint Force Quarterly, published by the National Defense University, which contains articles on all aspects of joint force operations.
[45] See "Joint Warfighting Center," Joint Force Quarterly, No. 2, Autumn 1993, pp. 112-113.
[46] Robert A. Doughty, "Reforming Joint Doctrine," Joint Force Quarterly, No. 1, Summer 1993, pp. 40-47.
[47] Admiral Paul David Miller, "A New Mission for Atlantic Command," Joint Force Quarterly, No. 1, Summer 1993, pp. 80-87.
[48] Owens, "Living Jointness," p. 9.
[49] Kendall, "Exploiting the Military Technical Revolution," p. 28.
[50] Of course, aircraft have ranges of hundreds of miles, and so are not restricted to close combat operations; but enemy aircraft will often target U.S. forces deployed in the field, and if those forces can maintain a separation from the enemy, they may have better opportunities to intercept
attacking aircraft.
[51] Martin Libicki writes that the future battlefield will be composed of "a dense grid of millions-perhaps billions-of sensors and emitters which... illuminate, classify and target everything large enough to be worth destroying" backed up by "armies of precision guided munitions, grown smaller, lighter, (faster and cheaper) which are directed to destroy whatever looks interesting." As a result of this deadly marriage, combatants will be able to create "a joint killing field, virtually impenetrable to the other except at very high cost," as in World War I. "This has the potential of reducing all war to siege operations," he concludes. Libicki, "Silicon and Security in the Twenty-First Century," pp. 63-64.
[52] General Gordon Sullivan and Colonel James Dubik have proposed a number of trends in land warfare, and two of them bear on this point. They argue that the increasing lethality of weapons will require greater dispersion, and point out that this trend has been underway for some time. In antiquity, they argue, armies fought in a concentration of 100,000 men per square kilometer; by the Napoleonic era, this had declined to 4,800 men per square kilometer; in World War I it was down to 404, in World War II to 36, and in the Gulf War to a minuscule 2.34 men per square kilometer. As a result, invisibility is of increasing importance to ground forces. Sullivan and Dubik, "Land Warfare in the 21st Century," pp. 22-23, 28-29. These same principles hold at sea and in the air as well.
[53] This principle partly contradicts the age-old dominance of attrition in U.S. military planning. As Robert Leonhard has suggested, in U.S. Army doctrine, "Virtually every effort. . .seems bent on fighting toe-to-toe with a prepared enemy, leaning into his strength, and outlasting him rather than outthinking him. Leonhard, The Art of Maneuver: Maneuver-Warfare Theory and AirLand Battle, Novato, CA: Presidio Press, 1991, p. 4. AirLand Battle began a trend away from this line of thinking (although Leonhard contends it is a weak trend so far); disengaged and nonlinear combat will
continue along that same line.
[54] Again we see the implications of simultaneous warfare-thousands of attacks all at once against a spectrum of targets throughout the theater of operations. This is what Frank Kendall has in mind with his "Joint Attack Warfare Strategy"; see Kendall, "Exploiting the Military Technical Revolution," p. 28. See also Frederick R. Strain, "The New Joint Warfare," Joint Force Quarterly, No. 2, Autumn 1993, pp. 18-22.
[55] Admiral David E. Jeremiah, "What's Ahead for the Armed Forces," Joint Force Quarterly, No. 1, Summer 1993, pp. 33-34.
[56] Sir Michael Howard, "How Much Can Technology Change Warfare?" Presentation to the Fifth Annual Conference on Strategy, U.S. Army War College, Carlisle Barracks, PA, April 27, 1994.
[57] Nonlethal weapons can also play a role in disengaged combat. By immobilizing or rendering inoperable enemy troops and equipment, nonlethals could help achieve U.S. strategic and tactical goals without direct combat. That they would do so without imposing massive casualties may be a good or a bad thing, depending on the requirements of the moment. Ironically, in this sense nonlethals can be seen as analogous to tactical nuclear weapons. Both are an unusual and unique form of military tool which does not engage the enemy directly in a traditional form of force-on-force battle, but which instead breaks up its forces and renders them ineffective. Nonlethals simply offer a far more humane way of doing so.
[58] See Barnaby, The Automated Battlefield, pp. 144, 148.
[59] The U.S. European Command has already developed a concept for a nonlinear battlefield; see Kendall, "Exploiting the Military Technical Revolution," pp. 24, 26.
[60] Jeremiah, "What's Ahead for the Armed Forces," p. 33.
[61] Ibid., p. 32. Frank Kendall agrees that changes in warfare imply "a greater reliance on fire support systems and less reliance on close combat operations." Martin Libicki, looking at the increasing lethality of the battlefield, points out that "it is hard to understand how the large platforms with which wars are now fought will be anything other than dinosaurs several decades hence"; Libicki, "Silicon and Security," p. 64.
[62] This case is made in Michael J. Mazarr, Light Forces and the Future of U.S. Military Strategy, Washington, DC: Brassey's, 1990. See also Lieutenant Colonel Craig Whelden, USA, "Light Cavalry: Strategic Force for the Future," Military Review, Vol. LXXIII, No. 4, April 1993, pp. 13-20; and Peter F. Herrly, "Middleweight Forces and the Army's Deployability Dilemma," Parameters, Vol. XIX, No. 3, September 1989, pp. 46-59.
[63] Of course, one of the oldest themes in military history is that "war is a continuation of politics." In a strategic sense, therefore, one could argue that war should never be, and indeed has not been, divorced from "civilian"
concerns. My argument here is that, at the tactical level, the actual practice of warfare will become more and more "civilianized."
[64] Martin Libicki makes this point in dramatic fashion in "Silicon and Security." "Military power," he writes, "(if such a concept makes sense in such an era) is likely to belong to those who can best master the technologies and economics of building and running" information grids (p. 64). The revolution in information technologies, he points out, "is being pushed, not by military but by commercial developments. "(p. 65)
[65] Alvin and Heidi Toffler, War and Anti War, see especially pages 87-220 for a discussion of these new "war-forms."
[66] See, for example, Gene Sharp, Civilian-Based Defense: A Post-Military Weapons System, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990; and Peter Ackerman and Christopher Kruegler, Strategic Nonviolent Conflict: The Dynamics of People Power in the 20th Century, Westport, CT:
Praeger, 1994.
[67] See Libicki and Hazlett, "Do We Need and Information Corps?"
[68] See Harvey M. Sapolsky and Sharon K. Weiner, "War Without Killing," Massachusetts Institute of Technology Breakthroughs, Vol. 2, No.
2, Winter 1992-1993, pp. 1-5.
[69] Eliot Cohen argues all of this, and pours cold water on the notion of nonlethal technologies, in "The Mystique of U.S. Air Power," pp. 120-123.
[70] Barbara Opall, "DoD to Boost Nonlethal Options," Defense News, March 28-April 3, 1994, p. 46.
[71] See, for example, Douglas A. MacGregor, "Future Battle: The Merging Levels of War," Parameters, Vol. 22, No. 4, Winter 1992-1993, pp.
33-47.
[72] Carl von Clausewitz, On War, translated and indexed by Michael Howard and Peter Paret, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989, p.
140.
[73] This point is axiomatic in virtually all studies of the future of warfare. See Rosen, Winning the Next War, pp. 251-253; Barnaby, The Automated Battlefield, p. 144; Major General William M. Steele and Colonel Edward E. Thurman, USA, "The Mind is the Key to Victory," Military Review, Vol. LXXIII, No. 7, July 1993, pp. 12-19; and Leonhard, The Art of Maneuver, p.
241.
[74] This is especially true when the cuts are indirect and therefore less visible. A number of the Defense Department's so-called "new initiatives," such as peacekeeping, defense conversion, and environmental cleanup, are being funded partly out of the overall DoD operations and maintenance account. The claimed increase in O&M funds for FY1995, some $5 billion dollars, has in fact been wiped out by a similar increase in spending on environmental restoration. If we are not careful, we will create hollow forces in the name of readiness.
[75] There are exceptions, of course; if we are attacking into North Korea, for example, the combination of the North's dug-in defenses and its peoples' desire to protect their homeland would make the North a tough nut to crack.
[76] With conventional deterrence fading as a mission for nuclear forces, chemical and biological deterrence might not last much longer. Strategic conventional attacks of the sort described above, along with political and economic sanctions imposed by increasingly robust international organizations, should provide plenty of options for deterring, and if necessary retaliating for, chemical or biological use.
[77] See, for example, Seth Cropsey, "The Only Credible Deterrent," Foreign Affairs, Vol. 73, No. 2, March/April 1994, pp. 14-20; and Lewis Dunn, "Rethinking the Nuclear Equation: The United States and the New Nuclear Powers," The Washington Quarterly, Vol. 17, No. 1, Winter 1994, pp. 5-25.
[78] Paul H. Nitze, "Is It Time to Junk Our Nukes?" The Washington Post, January 16, 1994, pp. C1, C2; emphasis added.
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