THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES (143 page)

Read THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES Online

Authors: Philip Bobbitt

11
. Ibid., 175.

12
. Carter and Perry, 135. This change “began in the 1970's with the development of satellite reconnaissance, smart weapons, cruise missiles, stealth aircraft, and other breakthroughs that would not have been possible without the microchip…”

13
. Eliot Cohen, “A Revolution in Warfare,”
Foreign Affairs
75 (1996): 37. “Admiral William Owens, former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has written of a ‘system of systems’: through an integrated network of powerful computers and high-speed communications. This will transform the way commanders and troops see and communicate on the battlefield. In the past, information was passed around the battlefield via radio conversations or typewritten messages. Commanders got only a fraction of the information they could really use in combat. With the system of systems envisioned in Force 21, commanders will have the ability to send and receive, in digital bursts, critical information about the location of enemy and friendly forces: the rate of use of food, fuel, and ammunition; the progress of current operations; and plans for future operations.“The effect on combat operations will be revolutionary. Every commander will have ‘battlefield awareness’: a constant, complete, three-dimensional picture of the battlefield. Every field unit will be better able to carry out its commander's orders because it will be able to see more clearly through the ‘fog of battle.’ An entire division will be able to fight as a single integrated combat system.“In battle, when a tank commander spots enemy forces, he will have a choice. He could engage the enemy with the weapons on his tanks, or he could call in attack helicopters, artillery, strike aircraft, or naval gunfire. Because of digital technology… these other units will see exactly what the tank commander sees…. As combat is underway, the supporting logistics unit will monitor the ammunition usage, so it will be able to resupply at the time and amount needed, thereby reducing the huge logistics tail otherwise needed to support combat operations.” Carter and Perry, 199.

14
. Cohen, 38.

15
. It had caused a complete reworking of American nuclear strategy and prompted the introduction into Europe of fast-reacting Pershing II missiles and survivable ground-launched cruise missiles.

16
. Jeffrey R. Cooper, “Another View of the Revolution in Military Affairs,” in
In Athena's Camp: Preparing for Conflict in the Information Age,
ed. John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt (Santa Monica: RAND, 1997), 114.

17
.
Future Visions for U.S. Defense Policy, the Council on Foreign Relations Defense Policy Review
, ed. John Hillen (Council on Foreign Relations, 1998), 5 – 6.

18
. Les Aspin, address to Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, Washington, D.C., September 21, 1992, reprinted in Richard Haass,
Intervention
, 183 – 190.

19
. See e.g., “A National Security Strategy of Engagement and Enlargement,” The White House, February 1995; and see also “Annual Report to the President and the Congress,” William S. Cohen, Secretary of Defense (1999), 3 – 4.

20
. General Colin S. Powell, remarks to defense writers' group, September 23 1993, quoted in Harry G. Summers,
The New World Strategy: A Military Policy for America's Future
(Simon & Schuster, 1995), 139.

21
. Paul Bracken defines this list a little differently, treating the “C” class candidates as states that, though they suffer problems rather than pose threats—for example, problems such as ethnic civil war (Yugoslavia), insurgency (Peru), terrorism (Egypt), civil disorder (Somalia), or infiltration such as by narcotics flows—these states nevertheless can impose demands on the U.S. military. Paul Bracken, “The Military After Next,”
The Washington Quarterly
16 (Autumn 1993): 157.

22
. T. R. Fehrenbach,
This Kind of War: A Study in Unpreparedness
(Pocket Books, 1963).

23
. This study was highly controversial insofar as it seemed to imply that current allies might become future competitors. See Patrick Taylor, “Pentagon Drops Goal of Blocking New Superpowers,”
The New York Times
, May 24, 1992, Ai; Barton Gellman, “Keeping the U.S. First; Pentagon Would Preclude a Rival Superpower,”
Washington Post
, March 11, 1992, A1. See also Francis Fukuyama, “The Beginning of Foreign Policy,”
The New Republic
, August 17, 1992, 24.

24
. Bracken, 157.

25
. Goure, 31.

26
. Jeffrey Cooper, “Another View of the Revolution in Military Affairs,” in
In Athena's Camp: Preparing for Conflict in the Information Age
, ed. John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt (Santa Monica: RAND, 1997), 114.

27
. This figure comes from Dr. Hans Mark, former director for defense research and engineering at the United States Department of Defense.

28
. Cohen, 50.

29
. “An analogy might be Germany's acquisition of a modern air force in the space of less than a decade in the 1930s. At a time when civilian and military aviation technologies did not diverge too greatly, Germany could take the strongest civilian aviation industry in Europe and within a few years convert it into enormous military power, much as the United States would do a few years later with its automobile industry.” Cohen, 51.

30
. Howard Baker and Lloyd Cutler, “A Report Card on the Department of Energy's Nonproliferation Programs with Russia,” The Secretary of Energy Advisory Board, United States Department of Energy, January 10, 2001.

31
. Carter and Perry, 76 – 77.

32
. Cohen, 51.

33
. See Paul Bracken, “The Military after Next,” 161. Clifford Rogers notes that although the technology has been perfected, when military organizations failed either to restructure effectively, whether through lack of funds or organizational insight, they failed to achieve the benefits of revolutionary increase in military effectiveness. Clifford J. Rogers, “The Military Revolutions of the Hundred Years War,”
The Journal of Military History
(April 1993): 241– 278.

34
. Cohen, 53.

35
. Goure, 180.

36
. “To the extent that the defense sector increases its dependence on the commercial sector for the ability to support and reconstitute its forces, it will be further pushed in the direction of a revolution by necessity.” Ibid.

37
. “Virtually no one is considering [conflicts] where the next military will face competition from its peers or from major regional competitors that can adversely affect U.S. interests in key regions. This is
terra incognita
,” Bracken, 166.

38
. Josef Joffe, “Bismarck or Britain?: Toward an American Grand Strategy after Bipolarity,”
International Security
19 (Spring 1995): 31 – 32.

39
. Joffe describes this as “a demand for [American] services, and that translates into political profits,” and he suggests that “[t]hese revenues can be nicely invested elsewhere, e.g., [in gaining] America's access to the [European] Single Market. To be in a position where all the powers need us… would clearly help the United States to improve the political terms of trade vis-à-is the E.U. and to contain neo-mercantilism in general.” Joffe, 113.

40
. Carter and Perry, 56 – 57.

41
. Ibid., 27.

42
. Ibid., 42.

43.
Ibid., 47.

44
. Ibid., 120 – 121.

45
. Martin C. Libicki, “Informational War and Peace,”
Journal of International Affairs
51 (1998): 420 – 421.

46
. Joseph Nye and William Owens, “America's Information Edge,”
Foreign Affairs
75 (1996): 21, 28.

47
. Kees van der Heijden,
Scenarios: The Art of Strategic Conversation
(Wiley, 1997), 2.

48
. Ibid., 8, 7.

49
. Bracken, 162.

50
. See Wesley K. Clark, Waging
Modern War
(Public Affairs, 2001).

51
. Barry Posen and Andrew Ross, “Competing Visions for U.S. Grand Strategy,”
International Security
21 (1997): 50 – 51. The Clinton administration, in its second term, plainly took these lessons of the first term to heart when it determined to prosecute a humanitarian intervention in Kosovo through the use of precision air strikes.

52
. Joffe, 2.

53
. Edward Luttwak, “Toward Post-Heroic Warfare,”
Foreign Affairs
74 (1995): 115.

54
. See Colin L. Powell, “U.S. Forces: Challenges Ahead,”
Foreign Affairs
72 (1993): 32; and Caspar W. Weinberger,
Fighting for Peace: Seven Critical Years in the Pentagon
(Warner Books, 1990).

55
.Luttwak, 109, 112.

56
. Bobbitt,
Democracy and Deterrence
, 101 – 102.

57
. Ibid., 102.

58
. Roger Hilsman, “Does the CIA Still Have a Role?”
Foreign Affairs
74 (1995): 104

59
. “The key professional argument advanced by the most senior U.S. military chiefs to reject all proposals to employ U.S. offensive air power in Bosnia rested on the implicit assumption… that only decisive results are worth having…” Luttwak, 120 – 121.

60
. Richard Holbrooke,
To End a War
(Random House, 1998), 142 – 158.

61
. Ivo H. Daalder and Michael E. O'Hanlon,
Winning Ugly: NATO's War to Save Kosovo
(Brookings Institution, 2000), 231.

62
. Ibid., 4.

63
. Ibid., 233.

64
. “The rise of information technologies [has led to] the development of intelligent weapons that can guide themselves to their targets [but this] is only one and not
necessarily the most important. The variety and ever-expanding capabilities of intelligence-gathering machines and the ability of computers to bring together and distribute to users the masses of information from these sources stem [also] from the information revolution.” Eliot Cohen, “A Revolution in Warfare,”
Foreign Affairs
75 (1996): 37.

65
. “Spacecast 2020” (Air University, June 1994).

66
. Andrew F. Krepinevich, “Cavalry to Computer: The Pattern of Military Revolution,”
National Interest
(Fall 1994): 30 – 41.

67
. Raffi Gregorian, “Global Positioning Systems: A Military Revolution for the Third World?”
SAIS Review
13 (1993): 133.

68
. For a more skeptical view of missile defense, see Joseph Cirincione and Frank von Hippel,
The Last Fifteen Minutes: Ballistic Missile Defense in Perspective
(Coalition to Reduce Nuclear Dangers, 1996).

69
. Keith Payne, “Post-Cold War Deterrence and Missile Defense,”
Orbis
39 (1995): 203.

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