The war in Afghanistan has interesting implications for the ongoing development of network-centric warfare. The long-range U.S. air strikes, many of them prosecuted from carriers, exemplified the precision strike or long-range attack elements of net-centric warfare. Yet it was always clear that, in themselves, they could not be decisive. That understanding was sometimes encapsulated in the observation that there were no targets of intrinsic value in the country. The attacks were enormously important, however, because they contributed to the success of our coalition partners, the groups opposing the governing Taliban. By itself, net-centric warfare was hardly enough. With a non-net-centric coalition partner, it achieved very impressive results. Anyone reading the newspapers printed a month ago, in which so many experts predicted a massive U.S. ground presence, can sense the extent of that success. The bombing functioned partly as the long-range artillery of the opposition, and partly as a way of undermining any Taliban attempt to withdraw in good order.
At this writing it may be too early to claim complete victory in Afghanistan, but it does not seem too early to see the effect of a net-centric/non-net-centric coalition. The success of this coalition would explain how and why the new kind of warfare should replace older methods. In the past, theorists of netcentric warfare had two alternative theories of victory. One pointed to the potential offered by attacks directed against an enemy's center of gravity, pursued without having to defeat his forces in detail. The other pointed to the agility offered by a clear tactical picture, the claim being that a really agile force could so frustrate an enemy as to cause what would amount to a nervous collapse. Both theories were problematic at best.
Network-centric warfare (or the current version of the Revolution in Military Affairs) bears a resemblance to naval warfare in that in each case distance is banished. After all, a major reason why the sea is so valuable is that it is so inexpensive to move heavy weights great distances over it—to abolish the cost of distance as it is understood on land. A century ago, many statesmen were convinced that sea power, by itself, could win wars, because it could interrupt the foreign trade on which a nation's prosperity depended. World War I showed that blockade was not decisive in itself. On the other hand, neither was the ground arm, whose advocates also had claimed decisive power. It turned out that no victory on land could be decisive, because armies could be regenerated even after disasters (albeit at terrible human cost). What won was the combination of land and sea power. Combined with the stress imposed by warfare ashore, sea power could be devastating. That kind of coalition effect seems analogous to the coalition effect achieved in Afghanistan. Neither partner in itself was going to win; after all, the Taliban often had defeated its enemies within Afghanistan. Together the net-centric attack and the Afghan ground troops were decisive.
It is important to understand just what coalition means. As the Taliban collapsed, there were references in the U.S. press to proxy troops, and to resentment at the unwillingness of coalition forces to accept U.S. leadership or a decisive U.S. role in a post-Taliban Afghanistan. Such views betray a dangerous misunderstanding. Coalitions are, by definition, weaker than alliances. Those who join coalitions do so out of self-interest, not some abstract sense of loyalty or gratitude. They leave at will—that is why the combinations are called coalitions, not alliances. Incidentally, these considerations apply as much to the United States as to the Northern Alliance. We found the Afghan troops very useful partners in a war we could not win by ourselves. They similarly found us useful. Once the elimination of Taliban power was achieved, there was no particular reason for the Northern Alliance to accept U.S. dictation.
Coalitions are difficult to manage because the partners generally have diverging interests. Our coalition partners in Afghanistan wanted to liberate the country from the Taliban, who were oppressing the population. Once the war began, the U.S. government very properly pointed out just how evil the Taliban were. Critics asked why we had helped them in the past; for example, as President George W. Bush pointed out, before 11 September the United States was the main supplier of food to Afghanistan. There is actually no contradiction here. In foreign policy it is best not to interfere with any country's internal regime, no matter how repugnant, unless that regime becomes a threat to us. The reason is simple. If governments decide that they have the right of intervention, they may choose to attack us. Obviously the rules are bent often, but keep in mind that through the Cold War we found the Soviets particularly threatening precisely because they refused to disavow subversion as standard behavior.
Thus, until the Afghans made themselves our business we could properly avoid intervention in theirs, no matter how hair-raising the stories emanating from Kabul. We might not be very happy about that, but foreign policy is often a choice between very unpleasant alternatives. Once we found ourselves at war, however, it felt far better to be destroying an evil regime than to be attacking a virtuous one. Americans, by and large, do prefer a reasonably ethical foreign policy.
All of this means that U.S. and Afghan interests coincide only up to the point at which the anti-U.S. regime in the country is destroyed. We probably will want to help Afghanistan recover, if only to foreclose the option of a Taliban revival, but in a larger sense we have no great interest in what comes next in Afghanistan—as Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld once said, probably in an excessively candid moment. For the Afghans, of course, what happens is of vital importance; they gave their lives not for us but for their own country. Whether they fall back into endless feuds between warlords, or construct a viable state, is really up to them.
The U.S. interest in Afghanistan is to destroy those who killed so many Americans on 11 September, as a warning to others who may have similar ideas. It also is possible that Osama bin Laden has been a uniquely effective enemy, and that his personal destruction will help ensure U.S. security. There has been much talk about how the Muslim world believes, falsely, that this is no more than a U.S. fight against bin Laden and his supporters, whereas it is a universal fight against the modern evil of terrorism. The truth lies somewhere between.
For the United States, there is a particular interest in dealing with bin Laden and his organization; they are out to kill us—not everyone in Europe, say, but Americans. A government's first duty is to deal with those who would kill its citizens. That is why they pay their taxes and obey laws. On the other hand, bin Laden is a threat to many others, who will be quite happy to see him dead. Terrorism in general is a threat to governments and to world order, but usually dealing with it is a kind of police issue. Bin Laden was different because he had seized control of a government. Perhaps it would be better to think of the current problem as an attack by a government that, having only very limited resources at home, chose a covert kind of military action to spread itself.
Every country shapes its policies according to its political culture. Americans like to imagine that theirs is universal, which is about the same thing as saying that we tend to mirror-image when we look abroad; we think that foreigners are really like us, despite their odd dress and their unintelligible languages. The reality is that we share a political culture with only a few other countries; it is no accident that our closest allies are Britain and the countries of the old Commonwealth, such as Australia. We speak in terms of universal justice. We have judicial systems in which our own governments can, and are, held to account. What we forget is that these are very rare attitudes in the world. Most of the world understands justice as victory for the home team, not as victory for universal principles. Moreover, for most of the world the idea of a self-restrained government is a fantasy, albeit sometimes an attractive one. It also is important to remember that, in much of the world, one side's terrorists are the other side's freedom fighters, perhaps the only hope of overcoming very long material odds.
In a democratic society, the rule is that you fight at the ballot box, and you accept defeat gracefully, but few of those supporting terrorism would accept that they live in democratic societies willing to accept their victory in an election. In some cases, of course, terrorists have realized that they cannot win elections, and their reaction has been to keep fighting. The outlawed wings of the Irish Republican Army are a case in point. Much more of the time, there is no democratic option, so terrorism can be portrayed as the defense of the weak against the strong.
Afghanistan may be more typical of the future than we imagine. It is possible that we usually will find ourselves fighting wars such as this, in which territory is not the object, and it may be that in such wars the concepts of network-centric warfare will prove particularly apt. One implication of network-centric concepts is that small units gain enormously in firepower. For example, it is said that an army brigade now can do the work of a division. A subtler implication may be that such units have to be widely dispersed to preclude their attacking each other; errors in identification can be very destructive. Another feature of network-centric warfare, less widely discussed, is that network-centric really means that the concentration in investment shifts from platforms or mass units (in the case of an army or air force) to remote sensing and coordination (the net). If that is so, then as long as overall funding cannot rise substantially, the effect of adopting network-centric concepts will be to cut force structure—which will be acceptable, at least in theory, given the greater efficacy of small units. These cuts are more likely to affect ground and air than naval forces, as naval forces already are heavily netted and widely dispersed. In the case of ground forces, something is lost as force structure is cut. The main loss would seem to be the ability to occupy ground, as opposed to destroying an enemy. Hence the significance of Afghanistan: if controlling ground is not the point of the war, then the cuts become acceptable. If control of the ground is the point, then the ongoing revolution in military affairs may be unaffordable.