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Virtual War, Impunity, and the Undiscovered Country
Reading Dan's latest drone piece, I was reminded of some arguments about airpower and information warfare I first encountered in 1999 while watching the Kosovo War on TV. About 15 years ago, you couldn't pick up a defense or international relations publication without reading a downbeat analysis of "virtual" or "post-heroic" war. Modern technology had made wars cost-free, more likely, and could potentially subvert democracy, the theme went. Today we're hearing a similar jingle, and this time, the future of robotics technology is the bogeyman.
The 1990s literature on virtual war and post-heroic war was not uniformly bad. Some of these reflections were thoughtful, as Jack McDonald notes about Michael Ignatieff's always fascinating oeuvre. Others were completely ridiculous and sprung from intellectuals' loathing and suspicion of any and all standoff weaponry. Perhaps the nadir of this era were Jean Baudrillard's arguments about the Gulf War. Yes, most people got what it really meant wrong. But even when you take into account the points Baudrillard really wanted to make about the relationship between media, information-based warfare, and politics, he was still a tad off course. The post-heroic moment was fundamentally rooted in a deeply rooted sense of fear about the implications of the information-based Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA). It seemed to cement the dominance of the West and the US in particular. Worse yet, it promised a future of war in which Third World armies were swatted away by precision weapons as surely as a little boy could fry a helpless nest of ants with a magnifying glass.
The post-heroic critics were wrong on multiple levels. First, they were wrong (as they are now) about the novelty of power projection enabling discretionary wars. As Dan has noted, if you're unhappy about discretionary wars, blame the Navy. If you're unhappy about privatized force being used as tools of state power, well, blame John Hawkood. David Parrot has also written about how privatized force has been the norm for most of Western history. Private CIA air forces supporting local allies is the Agency's equivalent of a cheap bar band playing "Free Bird," as is the peculiar idea held by many supporters of drone operations and humanitarian intervention that operating in an a country's airspace without its expressed permission is not violating its sovereignty. It's true that America's intervention in Libya had troubling implications for war powers---but I'm talking about the first one 200 years ago. You know, the one fought by a crew of foreign mercenaries Uncle Sam dredged up from every sundry Mediterranean watering hole from Athens to the Levant.
Second, the "virtual war" movement took Pentagon ad copy seriously without realizing that all of the "systems of systems" rhetoric was an aspiration rather than a military fact. Most postwar analyses of the actual impact of RMA platforms during the Gulf War also cast doubt on the idea that platform superiority would translate into operational effectiveness. The grisly ambush of Blackhawk Down also proved that special operations forces aren't always so special when they are outnumbered by massess of Third World infantry in urban environments. Finally, the Future Combat Systems (FCS) fiasco and the numerous tactical surprises encountered by ground forces in the 2003 invasion phase of the Iraq War laid the final nail in the coffin in the technocentric vision of dominant battlespace knowledge that would supposedly "lock in" American military advantage. This didn't mean that an RMA hadn't occured, or that Admiral Cebrowski and others were not correct about the way technology was transforming military operations. But those that feared the political impact of these technologies, at home and abroad, had made future projections that did not take into account the zig-zaggedy trajectory of strategic history.
Military revolutions also do not remain within a single country. The Chinese were so shocked by the seemingly effortless way the US intervened in the Middle East and Balkans during the 1990s and resolved to invest in "informatizing" their forces and building up an anti-access capability. People's Liberation Army (PLA) military writings, though shrouded in the political jargon characteristic of Communist militaries, could have been written by a DoD green-badger during the height of the Effects-Based Operations (EBO) craze. Yes, PLA doctrine, is, like a particularly inspired Houhai Bar Street cover band, partially inspired by the top 40 "hits" of yesteryear. But the specific way the PLA built its own information warfare, precision-strike, and joint operations doctrine bears little resemblance to the American assimilation of the RMA. Quite naturally, it's shaped by unique Chinese roles and missions, technological base, doctrine, and strategic culture. And this is to say nothing of the way technology may have transformed non-state militaries.
Military innovation literature has consistently demonstrated the basic fact that individual national culture, economics, and defense requirements dictate the form a particular state's use of technology or doctrine will take. How a state or non-state actor assimilates a given technology matters more than whether they have it or not, especially since technological innovations do not necessarily stay with first adopters. Examples can be found in the evolution of tank doctrine and carrier operations. The British may have been initially ahead in tank design and doctrine, and but that didn't save them from deploying them in a manner distinctly inferior to the Wehrmarcht. The fragility of RMAs was grasped by the early RMA writers, who often warned that the US could not expect to be the only actor to exploit precision-strike technology.
Another basic truth is that those who forecast continued impunity also forget that the defense is the stronger form of war. Tanks soon were countered by layered anti-tank defenses. Massed artillery barrages in World War I were frustrated by elastic defense. Aircraft once prophesized to be invincible were torn to pieces over the skies in Europe in the Combined Bomber Offensive. And what of the nuclear weapon, the so-called "ultimate weapon?" Well, its ultimate-ness meant that it could not be employed as an effective operational weapon, and using nuclear weapons to do anything more than deter was very chancy. For every ambiguous success of nuclear compellence (such as the end of Pacific War and the Korean War), there have also been many more failures to achieve escalation dominance. Iran is likely to discover that all they do is protect it from something the US has never seriously contemplated: full-bore regime change. And covert action, the political "ultimate weapon" of the Cold War era, has a checkered history so infamous that even reasoned scholars of intelligence history such as John Prados think the entire idea in and of itself is dubious. Maybe Prados is a bit too harsh, but his point is important.
Solly Zuckerman noted in 1962 that technological complexity actually make it more difficult to achieve strategic effect on the battlefield. More complex systems tend to increase personnel requirements and require a complex backbone of supporting technologies and systems to optimize. This will not change with the introduction of autonomous weapons. In fact, the need to ensure that these military technologies act in accordance with the commander's intent will likely create new classes of technicians and operators--just as remotely piloted vehicles generated their own set of support requirements. Zuckerman also argues that more complex technologies also limit freedom of action, which is also true when one examines the political implications of actually utilizing drones in expeditionary environments. Autonomous weapons, should they emerge, will be targeted by a group of international lawyers and activists opposed to their mere existence. Using an autonomous system is one thing on the open seas or skies, but even the most gung-ho robotics supporter is likely to see their relative lack of utility in a populated area. As Martin Libicki predicted in The Mesh and the Net, urban warfare will remain an infantryman's game. Sure, technology will transform infantry operations, but all of the robotic bells and whistles will not change the fact that the ultimate decider of the "three-block war" is the man on the scene with the gun.
Maybe future robotics technology will expand impunity, but strategic history suggests that impunity never lasts very long. The predictions of "virtual war" during the 1990s must have seemed very hollow to Army and Marine soldiers slugging it out house-to-house in Fallujah or armor commanders discovering in 2003 that they were still fighting encounter battles in the age of dominant battlespace knowledge. Critics of American intervention and the Shock and Awe crowd are strangely both (unintentionally) in agreement about the future of warfare. But the future, as that great philosopher James T. Kirk once said, is an undiscovered country.
How much longer until a proxy
How much longer until a proxy war starts in Syria like we did in Tripoli? Pretty sure 6 months from now their President will suffer the same fate. Any thoughts AM?
Ever felt devoid of space
Ever felt devoid of space charge? Adam not sure where you are taking us. Limpet retired.
I had to laugh when the USG ran into a security problem with critical components of their new Passports being manufactured offshore. The US semiconductor industry off-shored MIL /883 integrated circuit assembly in the early 90's. That is when COTS became a reality and DOD had no clue what was going to happen next. Manufacturers took out the quality assurance flow steps which ensured product lifetimes, device infant mortality returned. Little of that US domestic assembly capability remains today except in the boutique custom shops that some defense suppliers maintain and there are not many of those left. There is still semiconductor manufacturing capacity in the US, in the 2004 time frame for the first time more semiconductors were shipped from the Asian Rim than the US. The semiconductor industry breaks the business into front end (wafer fabs, the place the silicon is doped and patterned with people dressed in bunny suits) and back end operations (assembly and test, putting the silicon in a package that can be mounted onto a circuit board and the testing is about functional electrical verification. No one likes their electronics DOA). Vertical assembly is now in places like FoxConn in China, now a household word.
Few of the off shore Front End Foundry operations are here:
http://www.tsmc.com/english/default.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chartered_Semiconductor_Manufacturing
http://www.umc.com/English/
This is an example of the Back End Operations
http://www.siliconfareast.com/subcons.htm
One of the Radiation Hardened Semiconductor producers in the US was decommissioning a wafer fab a few years ago that had fabricated Trident components (and others), DOD paid $20Million to delay the closing to insure the continuous supply of critical RadHard components. That fab is now an empty building donated to a State college with the technology transferred to the last wafer fab that the company owns in the US using dated 1980 technology (the company sold off any equipment that would let the fab evolve past one-micron circuit features. To give you an idea of where the industry is today, Intel's new Ivy Bridge has patterned 22 NANOMETERS features, that is a thousand times smaller than a MICRON. This might help visualize what I am saying... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YIkMaQJSyP8 ). There are other radiation hardened foundry operations in the US, but you can count them on one hand. Battle field conditions are harsh, it doesn't take much of a dose to nuke your unhardened electronics. Radiation Hardening is not magic some can be done by design (knowing what to expect so it can be an allowed product lifetime variable of the system).
What is the point of the above? Who is going to build all this virtual battle equipment !!! In the mid 90's when "virtual" was a discussion the electronics industry was still fabricating in the US with domestic back end operations available. Today the bulk of both front and back end manufacturing is off-shore.
It is about cost. To fabricate in the US it would be expensive because the economy of scale no longer exists and neither do the trained people that once worked in the operations. Industry doesn't speak the language anymore, it only exists at the cost plus defense job shoppers. Any electronics capability in the US has been centralized and concentrated by business consolidations and off-shoring.
This is an eye opener. http://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2012/0512bondgraham.html
Really Bain Capital and PE is about the past and I am not sure why we are trying to have that discussion for the 2012 elections. PE and US bankruptcy court enabled capitalizing the off-shoring of American manufacturing (many auto contractors bankrupted their US operations after 2008, now your GM parts (like Visteon Radiators used by both GM and Ford) are made in Mexico) and the resulting PE IPOs cashed out the managers that ran the US operations so they would not have to manage anymore. US law voted on by both Democrats and Republicans provide the frame work for globalization and enabled it. Lot of that happened because US industry matured and had created financial mass in the late 80's, the older manufacturing and social model no longer valid. Today, PE is having a hard time buying anything to flip they have more leveraged US pension fund money than they ever had (I always thought it was an irony that PE used people's retirement money to take away peoples retirements. Democrats should not b*tch, it was their pension funds that were leveraged and PE paid them 30-40% returns for their state managed retirements !).
The people to watch in America today are the Hedge Funds cause they are the ones that balance the spread sheets global business. The Hedge Funds are dumping cash into both parties election war chests.
It isn't about virtual anymore. It is about the "synthetic" battlefield. Adam you talked about Oakland's police department layoffs, it is because of the bad interest swaps that Oakland made. We are seeing the same thing happen in every State of the union. Money was never free, but the people managing our business made themselves believe it was. Someone did not do their jobs and those people now socializing their poor judgement and short cuts.
BTW....Visitor on May 31, 2012 - 2:07pm
The Syrian proxy war has already started. US is providing communication and logistics and the Saudis and Qatar are providing the hardware and cash. The money is rolling.
Hey Fnord!!! Norse Energy
Hey Fnord!!! Norse Energy just bought NY State!! I'm from there originally.
Hey I say great, the Norse for all the Green posturing are running positive balance sheets because they ruthlessly exploited North Sea oil.
Look at this Press release. They are a major player in NY State.
http://www.4-traders.com/NORSE-ENERGY-CORP-AS-1413209/news/Norse-Energy-...
Marcellus and Utica shale 97,000 acres and pipelines to be built...they sold it to a Norse buddy.
I'm all for it. That place has been in a depression since the 70s.
Elf.... Looks like EmKey is
Elf....
Looks like EmKey is buying the assets of Norse. Norse is selling NY. I would sell NY too if Hillary Clinton was my Senator. Folks up in up State NY are OK, NYC is different.
EmKey just got bigger. Private companies are a black box cause they do not have to report like public companies do (things like 10k's etc).
EmKey is about bring energy to market and there is a lot of drilling going on in the NE these days. From the surface, I would say that EmKey is after Norse's right-a-way agreements. The agreements are how they deliver energy.
With all the energy production going on in the US, the only reservation that I have is selling it overseas. The pipeline for the Canadian Tar Sands is not about energy for America, it is about export worldwide. China is the buyer !!! Seems a little stupid to pay good tax money for a USG oil reserve (buy oil to pump in the ground for a reserve) then turn around a sell the natural reserves just for a quick profit.
Knew some Florida crackers that had thousands of acres of land in the swamps. They harvested all the cypress except their own. Crackers are funny people until they adopt you. Really it is smart not to harvest your own trees when everyone else is done harvesting your land is the only one covered in trees. Hard to find that old growth Cypress anymore. Crackers aren't dumb.
With that much land you can harvest trophies too. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_enhw_g0lds&feature=related
Ole' boy I knew got the trophy licenses and took Yankees hunting at a few thousand dollars for a Gator. Use to hang the 16 footers off the front bucket of his John Deere 644 Loader. If they weren't hunting gators they had the pit bulls out looking for hogs. Crackers are a bunch, sort of like moonshiners in the GA mountains.
Never met one that I didn't like. Hard to say the same about folks from NYC, some of those I wouldn't let in my truck.
Ironically, it looks like
Ironically, it looks like Baudrillard -- who saw "no war" and nothing changed in Iraq after the first Gulf War -- found his most eager audience in the Bush-2 neocons, who without a shred of justification seized on 9/11 to extirpate this major threat posed by Saddam's regime.
Shifting gears, the essential truth about modern warfare (apart from the information dominance aspect that favors the West) is that major military equipment is prohibitively expensive and therefore fielded in shrinking numbers which must seldom if ever be risked on the battlefield. So what are we left with? Drones, cyber, & "nation-building."
Ralph Hitchens on June 1,
Ralph Hitchens on June 1, 2012 - 8:43am
People will be debating over Iraq 1 and 2 for eternity. To find the conclusion of that debate, you have to answer what the graceful end of the Iraq 1 established NFZ would have looked like. Problem is without regime change there was no graceful end to Iraq 1, which was the rule used in 2011 Libya. I see the 90's Bosnia as a latent conclusion of ww1. Vietnam 1968 was rooted in ww2. Korea the same, but with a police action layered on top. Iraq 2 is was an end to Iraq 1 and that conflict is being decided. People do not consider when they start a conflict, there is a lot of momentum in social conflict. Takes years for those spun-up axe grinding stones to slow down. The US is still paying Egypt for the non-successful conclusion of the Arab-Israeli conflict, it is hard to tell how much pent up frustration is built up in the lack of conflict resolution. Some people will never agree even after a 100s of years of disagreement.
Modern warfare? If the West has the advantage then why hasn't the West laid to waste our enemy with the least technological manufacturing capabilities, like AQ? Where technology gives the West advantage is creation of wealth to pay for and prepare for war, that is the only true advantage technology has to offer. Unfortunately, the West has chosen to globalize the ability to produce that wealth while not keeping its house in order. The very technology that gives the West advantage is structurally changing how we fund our government which creates an economic weakness.
Making war toys costs money, AQ is fighting a economic war of attrition and the West responds with the most expensive technology from a cost plus defense shopper on the broadest of war fronts. War Robots and Drones are fun, unless the are made in China by US own industry partnered with a China Government approved business entity they are expensive to make. Gives new meaning to projection of power to the far east ! The West is giving China power by handing them our manufacturing capabilities on a silver platter, the ability to fund and prepare for war ! That is the only true power.
It took the whole of the US Army and the willingness of the NVA to use the VC for their own destruction. In that decision, the NVA won a victory that changed American opinion. That was Tet 1968.
All the VC had was a rice bag, rifle, and their wits.
Technology does not read minds. In the end it is the human idea that wins the battle, not technology. Technology is only an amplification of the ideas.
Problem with the USof A is it equates technology with Intelligence and human will. When you run out of money to make technology what is left?
Ralph, Your point about
Ralph,
Your point about shrinking armies and weapons too expensive to risk was one of the core points of my first post here. I really do wonder if the major powers, should they wage war again, are going to revert to the 18th century concepts of low-objective and thus low-risk war. There was a political (not wanting to do anything to threaten the existing domestic order) and financial (force was really, really expensive) component to the Dynastic system of warfare in Europe that seems at least superficially similar to today.
@Depletion Region, My reading
@Depletion Region,
My reading of the sale is EmKey - a private Norse company - has the rights and agreement to build pipelines if and *when* the resources are exploited. Norse Energy retains 37.5% stake in what it sold. They have much more lands with exploitable shale then they sold..so this Norse Energy/EmKey looks like a sweethearts handshake for Norse Energy to raise cash..and finance their 10=1 reverse split. So it' still worth a good look...
I'm heavy into the entire beat down now shale plays...N.B I am not a financial adviser and I'm using the Force.
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