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When we employed primitive precision-guided munitions in Vietnam in 1968-69, we proclaimed a new age of electronic battlefields and push-button warfare. And we were right! But also premature. We are equally right in praising the Tomahawk, smartest of the smart bombs, but we don’t want to be too right too soon.
Like the Spartans—one of whose kings, Agis II, said, “The Spartans ask not how many the enemy number, but where they lie"—the greatest soldiers of ancient Greece. Americans since World War II have relied on qualitative superiority in facing a numerically preponderant foe. Since 1945, America’s qualitative military advantage has been composed of three elements: advanced technology, highly skilled people to operate technically advanced equipment, and sound strategy. But today, even those people most confident in America’s ability to defend itself and its interests would consider the words of King Agis more appropriate as the sentiments of a bold battlefield commander than as the philosophy ot a prudent military planner. Recent evaluations of U. S. defense posture have cast doubt on the nation's ability to rely on any of the familiar ingredients of qualitative superiority in coming years. The result has been a growing perception, hterally world-ranging in scope, that the only state capable of opposing Soviet power, if necessary by force of arms, may soon be unable to do so except in the direst circumstances.
The perception of the United States weakening as the Soviet Union grows in power is so distorted and misleading it should defy belief; instead, its popularity widens, encouraged by a public policy debate composed chiefly of handwringing and budget talk. Sober, professional evaluations of political, military, and technical trends are needed to establish the actual Soviet-U. S. military balance.
Some reasons for the unsatisfactory quality of present-day attempts to assess the military balance between the two countries are evident. The U. S. Government is not always candid in its treatment of important questions—for example, in reporting the reliability of major weapon systems being procured or already deployed or how U. S. forces may be employed in various contingencies and scenarios. There is also a political-military version of Gresham’s law of economics. Inferior and irrelevant measures of relative advantage tend to drive out better ones. Moreover, indicators of military power are misused almost as soon as they are invented. For instance, yet another generation will pass before the effects of Vietnam-style measurements of “progress’’ in war are behind us.
America’s military experience in Vietnam should have demonstrated another truth about the measurement of military power. Measuring input has been much more accurate than measuring output in military matters. Sorties flown, tons of bombs dropped, ton-miles of supplies and forces moved or lifted, dollars spent—these we can count within statistically tolerable accuracies. But the outputs or consequences sought in military posturing and engagement have, for the most part, political rather than physical dimensions. Their estimation remains not only elusive but contentious.
Now, amid rapid technological and political change, it is something of an irony that technology and strategy, while crucial components of military capability, have become at best arguable indicators of relative military power or advantage. The pace of technological change virtually precludes nonscientists from evaluating technical developments, while the complexities of political change similarly reduce the ability of technologists to assess the meaning and effects of new technology.
As a result, we have developed deceptively attractive but flawed approaches to analyzing indicators of power. The reading of technical trends has led, perversely, to a constant rediscovering of the inevitable coupled with premature transposition of ultimate conclusions into the present—what one might call “being right too soon." In strategy, there is a dangerous confusion of investment issues with deployment concerns, a state of affairs reflected in a national defense debate disappointingly focused on the funding of defense rather than on its substance.
In one respect, judging advantage in military technologies is like reading the stock and bond market: being right too soon can actually be worse than simply being wrong. The cost of acting on conclusions that, while ultimately correct, are premature can be colossal. Unfortunately, in defense, unlike the stock market, the consequences of this error are difficult to confine to those making the play. In the market, a man can impoverish his family or firm by being right too soon; in military policy, he can prostrate his nation. Premature conclusions invite long-lasting adjustments of America's military posture and forces, which, if ill-judged, can reduce both the nation’s political influence and its military competence.
The question of aircraft carrier vulnerability and the issue of increased reliance on conventionally armed precision-guided munitions are two possible examples of “being right too soon." Both are prominent in contemporary discussion of U. S. defense, and both have potential significance in budget terms as well as in terms of national military capability.
Aircraft Carrier Vulnerability: For more than a decade, a contentious issue in Navy force planning has been the question of whether to build more largedecked nuclear-powered aircraft carriers and, if so, how many. Questions of the carriers’ potential vulnerability to enemy attack, their costs, and their role in national strategy have become almost inextricable.
Soviet cruise missile improvements and deployments. overhead surveillance, and the development of land-based, long-range naval aviation carrying effective cruise missiles were making it virtually certain that U. S. aircraft carriers could—and perhaps would—be brought under heavy attack early in a war. The dilemma for force planners arose out of several related concerns: the growing need for mobile, sea-based tactical aviation; the pattern of past
The USS Carl Vinson (CVS-70), the newest of the nuclear-powered aircraft carriers, is welcomed into the fleet. But will the welcome mat be extended to her two proposed sister ships as well? Some say these “great gray leviathans” are more vulnerable to the enemy than the warm water whales were to cannon-fired harpoons.
STU GILMAN
expenditures ensuring that the Navy as it existed today would still, at the end of the century, be largely the same as now; and the realization that, even with cruise missilery and surveillance improving, carriers remained the most difficult vessels either to sink or to put out of action.
The carrier vulnerability issue developed rapidly as Vietnam ended, spurred in large part by cost concerns. Early in the 1970s, then-Chief of Naval Operations Elmo Zumwalt considered committing the Navy to smaller aircraft carriers because of his conviction that the Navy needed more carriers than it would be able to obtain if it continued to build large, nuclear-powered ships. Further, carrier costs soaked up so much in shipbuilding funds it was difficult to find enough money to replace the hundreds of ships reaching the end of their service lives in the early 1970s.
But, in the middle 1970s, questions of cost and alternative shipbuilding policies gave way to clear concerns over the carrier’s vulnerability. Some believed the nation’s real interests lay in building smaller, conventionally powered carriers. No one could expect to fight wars without equipment casualties as well as human losses. The United States needed more aircraft carriers anyway. It was prudent to make them cheaper and simpler in order to spread the risk and reduce the cost of casualties and to reap both the peacetime and wartime benefits of having a more numerous fleet more widely deployed.
By the late 1970s, with the publications of the Boston Study Group* and others, carrier vulnerability had become part of a canon—an article of faith in the post-Vietnam critique of U. S. military. World War II carriers, the Boston Study Group members wrote, had on occasion been forced to suspend flight operations after only one or two bomb or kamikaze hits. A modern Soviet coordinated attack on a battle group could mean as many as 30 cruise missiles coming in on a carrier in a matter of seconds or, at best, minutes. These great gray leviathans stood little better chance against the nation’s enemies than had the warm water whales of the latter 19th century against the brute power of cannon-fired harpoons.
In 1982, the Reagan Administration proposed a fiscal year 1983 defense budget that included two nuclear-powered aircraft carriers at a cost of about $3.5 billion each, without their air wings. The familiar objections of cost, numbers, and potential vulnerability to attack are raised in opposition. Proponents of the large-decked, nuclear-powered carriers emphasize the absence of alternatives that provide similar tactical aviation at times and places of our choosing. They cite the unreliability of dependence on access to bases and facilities in supposedly friendly countries around the world. Finally, they allude to advances in electronic warfare that make the carrier’s defenses considerably better than assumed by most critics.
Who is right? All, of course. Carrier critics will probably be correct someday; carrier advocates are correct now. We cannot meet the needs of the next
*The Boston Study Group is a loose association of scientists, policy scientists, academics, and professional people interested in defense issues. In 1979. the group published The Price of Defense: A New Strategy for Military Spending (New York: Times Books, 1979). They argued that the chief danger to U. S. national security grew out of nuclear weapons and the sheer size of the superpower militaries. They advocated, therefore, immediate sharp reductions in U. S. military forces and nuclear inventories, with a reorientation of defense spending toward defensive rather than offensive weapon systems and a strong push for arms limitation agreements.
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This marine has to be lucky and good to survive firing a Dragon. To sight and fire the Dragon antitank weapon in an upright position can take as long as ten seconds—about six times the lethal exposure interval on a battlefield.
25 to 30 years by now building the forces that might be right for the year 2030. If carriers did not take ten years to build and then have a service life of 30 to 40 years thereafter, there would be little to debate.
Precision-Guided Munitions: Another group of defense commentators who are right too soon are those now advocating a massive expansion of the U. S. military’s use of precision-guided munitions (PGMs). Many different rationales undergird this issue. Some advocates of PGMs hope to save money; others expect to reduce the political complications that have always accompanied forward defense; some wish to reduce the likelihood and number of U. S. casualties in the event of conflict; and a number wish to reduce the pressures for escalation in a war or crisis.
Hence, people have linked the promise of PGMs, especially cruise missiles, to advocacy of disengaging the United States from its commitment to supply manpower for the defense of Europe. They believe withdrawal of U. S. forces from Germany could be offset by loading thousands of cruise missiles onto ships of every description and steaming around in the waters of Europe.
Other advocates of PGMs argue that the United States and its allies could save money by avoiding mirror-imaging in response to Soviet force buildup, and investing in antitank weapons, for example, rather than in new tanks and armored fighting vehicles. Similarly, new aircraft could be built more cheaply by designing them simply for delivery of highly accurate standoff weapons rather than for penetration of Soviet air defenses, air-to-air combat against numerically superior forces, or other strenuous missions certain to characterize Soviet-U. S. or East- West warfare.
Yet, in all of U. S. defense, there is probably no more clear-cut case of being right too soon than in precision-guided munitions. In 1968-69, when the first North Vietnamese bridges fell to what now seem primitive “smart” weapons, the military as well as the proto-army of defense experts and intellectuals out of uniform celebrated the dawning of a new age of electronic battlefields and push-button warfare, much in the manner of motorcar mechanics hanging up their tools just inside the stable doors. By the middle 1970s, the international arms trade included shoulder- and tripod-fired PGMs for use against tanks, helicopters, low-flying aircraft, and more.
Beginning in the latter 1970s until the present, however, precision-guided munitions have manifested flaws serious enough to disappoint earlier hopes. Regrettably, this realization has spread much more slowly than did the original enthusiasm for PGMs. One problem with PGMs is that guidance systems have improved much more and more rapidly than ordnance itself. Although it is possible to hit hardened point targets with PGMs, it remains exceedingly difficult to destroy these targets with conventional warheads. Moreover, the costs of PGMs have risen rapidly because they are heavily dependent on state-of-the-art electronics. Our technology now enables us easily, but not profitably, to spend several million dollars to deliver a 500- to 800-pound warhead on a target. Furthermore, large numbers of PGMs are required to do much damage to targets such as airfields. The circle is endless: high numbers of PGMs create serious problems of deployment; shortcomings in performance prevent PGMs from completely replacing other major weapon systems.
Moreover, as in other weapon development and procurement programs, there have been a few mistakes in PGM development. A case in point is the Army’s Dragon antitank weapon. If fired by a trooper lying prone, the back-blast of the round sears the soldier's buttocks; but to sight and fire the weapon in an upright position can take as long as ten seconds, about six times the lethal exposure interval on a modern battlefield. By the Army’s own calculations, it would lose seven three-man Dragon teams for every tank knocked out by this “one-shot, one-kill” PGM.
PGMs will provide no panacea for America's military in the 1980s.
The foregoing examples provide glimpses of problems in the analysis and discussion of relative military power.
First, it is important for nontechnicians and “soft scientists” to realize that technological progress is
uneven. As a result, it is extremely difficult to assess change and assimilate it. New technology often brings not an improvement in military capability but a reduction of it, at least temporarily. Transitions to new weapons and systems cause temporary disruptions in training, supply, maintenance, operations, tactics, and even strategy that amount to a loss of capability. These are overcome only as the problems of operating and supporting new weapons and systems yield to determined efforts to master them.
Uneven technological progress also causes substantial difficulties in meshing new systems with old ones. Communications, computer software, command and control, weapon design—these and other aspects of hardware and operations show constantly the effects of rapid technical change and uneven development. In these conditions, it is difficult to assess relative advantage between the military of one great power and that of another—except in matters so simple that great expertise is not necessary anyway.
Second, the more difficult the estimation of comparative advantage becomes, the more likely defense debates will reflect fiscal rather than defense concerns. What cannot be understood will not be understood. Hence, in today’s defense debate, well- informed people such as national columnist William Satire appear on network television to advocate the withdrawal of U. S. forces from Germany on the grounds that this will save money. The truth is, bringing these forces home would cost the United States more money than keeping them in Germany, New bases, facilities, training grounds, weapon ranges, housing, and more would be required to accommodate these forces if they returned to the United States—all to be paid for without the very large contribution the German Government now makes to offset the expense of maintaining U. S. troops in Germany.
Third, the more obscure the defense debate becomes, the wider the gap between perception and reality grows. Such a divergence is the source of miscalculations that put civilizations at risk. Without the ability to judge relative power and advantage, nations and their leaders cannot frame proper policies and strategies. Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger once remarked that statesmen are obliged to “know the real correlation of forces, and to make that knowledge serve their ends.’’ Faulty estimates of relative power and position, because they increase the risk of miscalculation, in themselves become causes of unease, uncertainty, and even of war in unstable times.
As for the tendency of defense debates to become budget debates, who but the “policy scientists” remind people that “the bottom line” is simply another expression for the lowest common denominator? We cannot settle for the simple view that, as one Air Force study concluded in 1964, “strategy is money.”
If, indeed, these are pivotal times, then both the government and those conducting policy-related discussions and studies have some responsibility for improving their quality and substance. Our sense of timing should be developed at least as well as our sense of the momentum inherent to technology and trends. It is easy, in being right too soon, to perfect forces for the future in ways that make it impossible to deal with the present. We have, after all, an obligation to be both right and timely, to anticipate the logical conclusions of developments under way without forfeiting all present capability in a rush toward the future.
Thomas H. Etzold, formerly professor of strategy at the Naval War College in Newport, is now assistant director (strategic studies) of the Center for Naval Warfare Studies. He holds a B.A. and a M.A. in history from Indiana University and a M.Phil. and a Ph.D. from Yale. In addition to articles and comments in numerous magazines and newspapers both here and abroad. Professor Etzold has been author, coauthor, or coeditor of five books. His most recent. Defense or Delusion? (Harper & Row, 1982), was reviewed in the April 1982 Proceedings.
________________________________________________ Close Range____________________________________
A few years ago, Mare Island Naval Shipyard contained a submarine attack trainer known for its realism. The trainer simulated the curvature of the earth, targets looked realistic, and a full range of sound effects were available. Hence, it was easy for an approach officer to get caught up in his “attack problem.
During one torpedo approach on a surface ship target, the approach officer barked out orders and called out his estimated target ranges. The position-keeper operator corrected the approach officer, indicating his estimated range was too long. As the target drew nearer, the approach officer continued to call ranges long, and the position-keeper operator continued to correct him with shorter ranges, pointing out that the target was much nearer than the approach officer suspected.
Suddenly, there was a loud crash, and the lights in the trainer went out. Our submarine and the target had collided. All was quiet for a brief moment until the harried officer gained control of himself. He then casually turned to the position-keeper operator and gave his final order. “Set target range 0.”
Commander A.W. Steele, USN
(The Naval Institute will pay $25.00 for each anecodote published in the Proceedings.)