Since the administration of Franklin Roosevelt, each US President has eagerly gotten in line to proclaim some derivative of that description of the military over which he was Commander-in-Chief. But what made the statement ring true over the last century? Was it our tactics and doctrine? Was it our collective American grit? Or was it our numerous technological advantages, beginning with the advent of the M1 Garand and culminating in today’s superiority in satellite technology? While the answer is undoubtedly a combination of all the above, what I want to examine in particular is the notion of technology, and how one of the sources of our greatest strengths may be increasingly a source of one of our greatest weaknesses.
Let me start off with a dose of humility. I’m merely a salty E-5 who spent 4 years as just one of the thousands of similar cogs in the infantry. I never made it to Ranger school, nor did I commission (despite the chance with my bachelor’s degree), go to West Point, or attend the Army War College. Consequently, while I have stayed in a Holiday Inn Express multiple times, I don’t profess to have anything “all-figured out” by any stretch of the imagination. However, I do know a thing or two about history. And coupled with my own experience on the ground, starting from rifleman and ending at squad leader, I couldn’t help but notice some ominous parallels along our path into the future.
Before I get too far, I do want to stress that technology has been a paramount facet to our military might. We would not be the world’s sole remaining superpower without it. As I said earlier, America’s military has been largely ahead of its adversaries since WW2. Whether it was nukes, night vision, or aircraft carriers, America has undoubtedly dominated the battlefields of the latter half of the 20th century armed with these and other game-changers. However, within that timeline lies a serious red flag which we don’t seem to be talking about as much as we should: history has given the world a fairly simple blueprint on how to defeat us in spite of our cutting edge tech. Moreover, we have repeated this exhibition just in case nobody was watching the first time it happened in a small country called Vietnam.
Since the end of the Cold War, the United States’ defense budget has continually dwarfed the military spending of the next 10-15 countries combined, depending on the year and who you talk to. Not even our nearest competitors, China and Russia, have come remotely close to annually matching our expenditures. They know this, and have increasingly embraced it. Sure, they have upped their budgets in recent years, and have closed the gap in certain realms such as Russian tank design or Chinese missile development. Nonetheless, Russia and China know it’s neither practical nor necessary to try and match us dollar for dollar on military spending. This is because, as I maintain, the next conventional war of the 21st century will not be decided by who leads the space age, but instead by who is most comfortable fighting in the stone age.
Look at our foray into Vietnam in the 60s: America towered over both the North Vietnamese Army and the Vietcong in terms of weapons and technology it brought to the field. Yet, we were ultimately flummoxed and humbled by an inferior enemy at the end of our Indochina brawl. That’s because the VC and brazen NVA quickly learned to turn their disadvantages into strengths, and our strengths into weaknesses. Enter the guerilla war which impressively and effectively negated many of our inherent advantages. The communists fought on their terms, striking when and where they chose to, often under cover of darkness (“We own the day, but Charlie owns the night”). Furthermore, they introduced the tactic of engaging us so closely and so intimately (“grab them by the belt buckle and hold on”) that our air and artillery support was rendered effectively useless without dropping ordinance on top of our own positions. Even the very gear we took into the jungle with us turned out to be a hindrance, as our troopers were often loaded down with easily 50 pounds of equipment while the lightweight guerillas ran circles around them in the dense jungle. And so, despite our stratospheric advantage in weaponry, we could not prevail against a “little piss-ant country” as LBJ used to say.
60 years later, our experience against the Taliban in Afghanistan ended up being a hauntingly duplicative tale. Once more, our overall strategy has demonstrated that we haven’t entirely heeded the warnings of history. In addition, with the DOD’s sights set on maintaining our edge technologically with costly new drones, “smart” small arms sights, and other proposals (some of which I personally had the chance to test in the prototype stages)—it seems to me, in my lowly grunt opinion, we’re losing sight of vital fundamentals as a force. Whether it’s simple land navigation, basic marksmanship, or squad-level mission autonomy; we’ve become complacent with luxuries like encrypted GPS, fancy optics/lasers, and TOC-centric decision making. But what happens when China/Russia or even Iran force us to fight in the metaphorical dark by neutralizing our satellite/comms networks via cyber warfare, crippling our airpower with carrier-killing shore-based missiles, and interrupting our equally complacent supply chains? If you want a good example, take some time and look up Millennium Challenge 2002, a simulated strategic exercised put on by the Pentagon nearly 20 years ago. Long story short: the outcome wasn’t good for us.
Now, to be fair, the Army for one has done some initiatives to get the ball rolling in the right direction, particularly in the squad autonomy realm. But we’re going to need much more support and a cultural shift from the top down to ensure that technology remains only an asset, and not a potentially catastrophic crutch in the next battlefield setting.
- Loren Collins, (2016-2021, Afghanistan)
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