Beware Of Pentagon Technoenthusiasm
At this week's meeting of the National Defense Industry Association, Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks announced to the world that the Pentagon is taking a new approach to addressing the challenge posed by China, embodied in the Replicator Initiative, which also includes “to help us”. To overcome the main advantage of the People's Republic of China, which is huge... more ships. No more missiles. Many people."
Hicks then outlined the basic principles of the new approach. “We will be the first to create a new state of the art, as America has done in the past, by deploying worthy and autonomous systems in all areas at the lowest cost. We will put fewer people in the line of fire and it could change or improve in much less time. " Overall, this seems like a better commitment than building more complex systems that take decades to develop and deploy and are extremely difficult to maintain and deploy. in some cases, they are much more expensive than systems that adversaries might use. She
But as the Pentagon continues its operational transformation, it is important to remain humble about the potential effectiveness of drones. unmanned vehicles in the air, on land and at sea; and AI-based decision-making systems that can significantly shorten the “kill chain” from the decision to attack to the weapon arriving on target. And it is also important to recognize that implementing these efforts to change the way America arms itself in the event of a potential conflict will result in a bitter political confrontation with Congress over the fate of aircraft carriers, aircraft manned and traditional armored vehicles, which are used and generate losses. income for the country. . Member countries and states with the greatest influence on the size and shape of the Pentagon budget
Even during Operation Desert Storm in 1991, which might look like a prime example of “revolutionary” warfare technology. The U.S. response to Iraq's invasion of neighboring Kuwait included exaggerated claims about battlefield accuracy that were only revised after detailed post-deployment analysis. As longtime Pentagon critic and defense expert Winslow Wheeler points out, postwar analysis by the Government Accountability Office shows that the Pentagon and weapons manufacturers used far more weapons to destroy the initial targets they had initially claimed. Critical systems such as the F-117 stealth aircraft, Tomahawk ground-attack missiles, and laser-guided bombs have been found to have significantly lower success rates than advertised, in some cases appallingly low. For example, a GAO analysis of the Tomahawk's use during Desert Storm found that only half of the missiles fired during that war hit their targets. The agency noted that "others hit specific target areas but only hit far enough from the target to create a crater."
To cite another telling example: “Claims by the Department of Defense and its contractors regarding the ability of laser-guided munitions to hit a target and strike a bomb were supported by an airstrike averaging 11 tons of guided munitions and 44 tons of unguided munitions, and unproven.' Each target successfully destroyed.' It was good enough to defeat relatively poorly armed opponents, but it lacked the marvelous performance originally advertised. Just as important, these capabilities and the resulting improvements were not enough to win wars in Iraq or Afghanistan against adversaries without significant air forces or air defense systems. War is much more than the best bombs and the best communications systems. If such an advantage over China can be built, it is unlikely to be decisive.
Part of the development of next-generation weapons and control systems relies on the alleged success of drones in the war in Ukraine. But it is too early to fully assess the effectiveness of these systems or their relevance in a possible conflict with China, a war between nuclear powers that may or may not result in unprecedented disaster for everyone involved.
All of this suggests that without proper assessment and testing, there is no point in rushing towards the new techno revolution that Hicks spoke of in his NDIA speech. Most importantly, plans to win a war with China must come second to political and diplomatic initiatives to establish rules of the road that make a confrontation between Washington and Beijing less likely.
Technical enthusiasm is not a strategy. And without an appropriate political and diplomatic context, the emergence of capabilities such as drone swarms, capable of destroying thousands of targets in China in the short term, is more likely to spark a dangerous arms race than prevent conflict. potentially catastrophic.
William D. Hartung is a senior fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Government.
