Future Wax!

Now and then I watch a TV show on the Military Channel called Futureweapons. I do this not because I think the show is very good; mainly I'm just amused by the gap between hype and reality. Mostly the show seems to feature weapons that are either irrelevant in the post-Cold War context or technological dead ends in any context, but the host of the show gives it to us with both barrels: weapon X will blow you away, wipe you off the face of the earth, obliterate you, annihilate you, and give you bad breath.

They usually end up being nothing more than 15-minute advertisements for various defense contractors, and they seem to be stuck in some alternate reality where the Soviet Union never fell and the primary threat to security is ten thousand or so Russian tanks in East Germany. One show focused on a standoff anti-tank weapon known variously as Skeet, SADARM or ERAM, depending on the defense contractor in question. I was astonished to see that we're still spending money on this thing - its utility in wars like we those face in Iraq and Afghanistan is zero and its fundamental purpose simply doesn't exist any more. (I won't go into the fact that they miss most of the time anyway.)

Another episode talked about how modern sensors on the battlefield give the enemy "nowhere to hide." Osama seems to have been able to hide. The Taliban seems able to hide. The Iraqi insurgency seems to be able to hide. But there's this silly TV show, suggesting that all we need are enough high-tech toys and victory will surely be ours through some hazy process they don't actually define. It's probably the same hazy process by which Pentagon hawks concluded that Iraqis would greet our troops with flowers and bottles of wine.

I read something once in a professional military magazine that's stuck with me over the years. It was in an issue of Proceedings, the official journal of the US Naval Institute, and it ran something like this:

Nuclear forces can obliterate, air forces can destroy, naval forces can blockade, but only men on the ground can seize and hold meaningful political control.

In other words, you can blow up as much stuff as you want, using the fanciest acronym-laden weapons you wish, and you won't win if you don't have enough soldiers on the ground to seize and hold political control. What Futureweapons and Pentagon "transformationalists" don't seem to understand is that wars like those we face in Iraq and Afghanistan aren't won by airstrikes, ICM artillery missions, cruise missiles or Skeet anti-armor submunitions. They're won by having enough men on the ground so that the insurgency can't survive.

Military theorists spend a lot of time talking about "centers of gravity". A central military principle is that one should attack the enemy's center of gravity, and should attack it to the exclusion of everything else. What is a center of gravity? It is something that allows the enemy to maintain the fight. In a lot of European wars, the obvious center of gravity was the enemy's capital city - take it, and suddenly you control the apparatus of government. In the American Civil War, US Grant realized that the South's center of gravity was the Army of Northern Virginia - trap and defeat it, and the war will end because the ANV was the only thing holding the Confederacy together. In the Pacific in World War Two, oil was seen as one of Japan's centers of gravity - deny the Japanese access to oil and suddenly everything else gets a lot easier. And thus were US submarines sent on dangerous patrols, and thus did they wipe out Japan's merchant fleet and cut off the flow of oil.

In a war like Afghanistan or Iraq, what is the center of gravity? It isn't the capital city, because we hold the capital cities. It isn't the organized enemy army, because there is no organized enemy army, just decentralized groups of highly motivated men. It isn't the flow of supplies from abroad, because both countries are awash in the tools of the insurgent trade: Kalashnikovs, RPG-7s, and explosives. What allows the insurgencies to continue?

It is the pe0ple of Aghanistan and Iraq. In an insurgency, the population as a whole is the center of gravity, not some city or some notable insurgent leader. Control the people, and gain their trust, and you've won the battle for the enemy's center of gravity. All that remains is the task of rounding up the diehards, which is more a police operation than a military operation.

And how do you control the people and win their trust? I'll give you a hint: it doesn't involve anything you'll see on Futureweapons.