Transformation

...In 1914, Europeans expected a short, decisive war of movement...

...Military Power is an important book...

...Biddle contends that "since at least 1900, the dominant technological fact of the modern battlefield has been increasing lethality...

...Military Power reminds us that defense policy is a topic too serious to be left to "true believers...

...The radical restructuring of the U.S...

...Indeed, there is a consensus among military historians that the German army in both world wars was far more effective at the tactical and operational levels of war than its opponents, but that this excellence was trumped by a combination of Allied material superiority and bad German strategic choices...

...In 1991, for instance, congressional debate about the use of force to expel Saddam Hussein from Kuwait hinged to a great extent on the likely casualties that the United States would suffer...

...A decade ago, the term was "revolution in military affairs" (RMA...

...Neither Arabs nor Israelis expected anything like the staggering losses of the 1973 war...

...It has important implications for both international relations theory and defense policy...

...The ones he chooses would seem to favor the "materialist" alternatives—^preponderance and systemic technology—to his theory...

...Of course, Vietnam proved beyond a doubt that success in war depends upon more than economic power and an edge in technology...

...Stephen Biddle's Military Power calls the Pentagon's focus on technology into question, developing a theory of military power that stresses the importance of "force employment" as the key to success or failure in war, as opposed to such traditional factors as technology and preponderance...

...Since 1918, the central means of doing so has been what Bid-dle calls "modern system force employment"—a "tightly interrelated complex of cover, concealment, dispersion, suppression, small-unit independent maneuver, and combined arms at the tactical level" (the level of combat at which battles are fought) and "depth, reserves, and differential concentration at the operational level of war" (the level of war concerned with the conduct of campaigns...

...We must and can do better," says Biddle...

...I focus here on defense policy—visions of future war, defense budget priorities, force structure, weapon development and acquisition, campaign assessment, and military doctrine...

...When fully implemented, "the modern system damps the effect of technological change and insulates users from the full lethality of their opponents' weapons...

...Then they asked the computer, "When will we win...

...For instance, an autocratic state may not be willing to permit the decentralization and freedom of action to its junior officers that the modern system requires...

...The Gulf war debate was hardly unique...

...He demonstrated that the allies' technological edge served primarily to punish Iraqi operational and tactical errors, thereby magnifying the skill differential between the two sides...

...Such writings reinforce the claim that technology is the central driver of the Defense Department's transformation strategy...

...From Alfred Nobel's prediction that dynamite was such a radical change that it would lead to the end of war, to similar claims about the machine gun, the naval torpedo, the bomber, and the nuclear bomb, predictions of revolutionary change in warfare have been commonplace—and wrong...

...In all cases, his theory of force employment proves superior to the materialist alternatives: Operation Michael, the unprecedented German breakthrough at the Second Battle of the Somme (1918...

...BY MACKUBIN THOMAS OWENS The late Harry Summers, author of On Strategy, an influential but controversial book about the Vietnam war, used to tell the following anecdote...

...He takes aim at a key claim of trans-formation/RMA advocates: that today's battlefield is qualitatively different from battlefields of the past...

...force structure from a balanced force of air, land, naval, and space capabilities to one that relies primarily on long-range air- or ship-delivered precision strikes would be very risky...

...While the United States has recovered from its defeat in Vietnam, and now sits at the pinnacle of world power, critics of U.S...

...In 1940, observers were astonished by Germany's rapid defeat of France...

...The most important point is that the radical changes advocated by "transformers" in current approaches to war (the doctrine and force structure that advocates demand) could actually reduce U.S...

...However, this criticism does not outweigh the real value of Military Power...

...How does a state maximize its chances of victory while minimizing casualties...

...But against one that has such mastery it would be at a severe disadvantage...

...Biddle tests his theory of force employment by first examining three historical cases...

...There is no question that Pentagon planners focus heavily on one material factor in particular: the role of technology...

...To execute missions on such a battlefield, a military force must reduce its exposure...

...Accordingly, the major military "gap" of the future will be between those states that have mastered the modern system, and those that have not...

...it is always aimed simultaneously at the moral forces which give it life, and the two cannot be separated...

...The computer whirred for about 30 seconds and spat out its answer: "You won in 1964...

...defense policy suggest that we persist in favoring material over nonmaterial factors in preparing for our wars...

...For the last decade, Department of Defense planning documents have advanced a vision of future war shaped by technological innovation, especially vast improvements in informational technologies...

...the majority of predictions were off by more than an order of magnitude...

...They will be able to distribute forces more widely by increasing information sharing via a secure network that provides actionable information at all levels of command...

...Transformation advocates fancy themselves revolutionaries struggling against reactionary military establishments...

...That is because the "emerging battlefield is a further extension of the one for which traditional approaches were designed," says Biddle...

...What are the causes of victory and defeat...

...Yet all the analyses used to ascertain U.S...

...Operation Goodwood, the failed British breakout from the Normandy beachhead (1944...

...But real improvement will require a new approach" that avoids the shortcomings of the current state of the art: analysis that is either rigorous but narrow, or broad but un-rigorous...

...Today it is "transformation...

...Biddle contends that the key determinant of battlefield success or failure is force employment—the doctrine and tactics that govern the operations of a state's military force...

...When the Nixon administration assumed responsibility for the war in 1969, the analysts at the Pentagon fed all the available quantifiable data related to both the United States and North Vietnam into a powerful Cray computer...

...Biddle's research led him to broaden and generalize the issues he had raised with regard to the Gulf war...

...Technological change since 1914 has only increased the range over which exposure to fire can be fatal...

...Air Force in the late 1940s, the French jeune ecole navalists of the 1880s, and the British Army in the late 1930s...

...I first became aware of Biddle's work when he published an important essay in a 1996 issue of International Se^^^iity entitled "Victory Misunderstood: What the Gulf War Tells Us About the Future of Conflict...

...Such questions, Biddle observes, are matters of life and death affecting everyone "from infantrymen on the battlefield to office workers in the World Trade Center to entire nations and peoples...

...Such an unbalanced force structure might work well against an opponent that has not mastered the modern system of force employment...

...He argued that the main cause of the one-sided coalition triumph in the Gulf war was not, as the advocates of RMA claimed, technology per se but the skill differential between the coalition forces and those of Iraq...

...and Operation Desert Storm (1991...

...Unfortunately, the answers to such questions have left much to be desired...

...Biddle argues that they have not made their case...

...But not all states can master this system, which is complex and poses painful political and social tradeoffs...

...Clausewitz pointed to the importance of "moral factors"—fear, the impact of danger, and physical exhausMackubin Thomas Owens is professor of national security at the Naval War College...

...A recent Pentagon publication, Transformation Planning Guidance (2003), provides a template for transforming current military forces, shaped by the demands of the Cold War, into: information age military forces [that] will be less platform-centric and more network-centric...

...So yes, Operation Michael was a German success at the operational level, but Germany still lost the war...

...In all cases, his new theory of force employment outperforms its more orthodox materialist competitors...

...military capability...

...tion—observing that "military activity is never directed against material forces alone...

...He then turns to analysis of statistical data and, finally, to computer simulation experimentation...

...Is there something about modern war that has changed the answers to these questions...

...Certainly, in the past, some military organizations have been too slow to adapt to changing conditions, but there are also many examples of militaries that have changed too fast or too much: the interwar Royal Air Force, the U.S...

...losses radically overstated the numbers: The closest estimate was wrong by a factor of two...

...This, in turn, will create conditions for increased speed of command and opportunities for self-coordination across the battlespace...

...Future war, he argues, is not a radical departure from historical precedents, as the transformation advocates seem to believe, but a continuation of trends and relationships that have been evolving for a century and a half...

...But it is open to criticism, the most important of which is the undeniable fact that, in the past, the side with the most operationally competent military nonetheless suffered defeat in the war...