I lived through at least three bubbles in the US: dot-com bubble, real estate and banking bubble and now this. All were heavily fueled by cocaine and other illegal stimulants. During the dot-com bubble, the sane people who dared to ask how companies which transacted no business and had neither profits nor assets could command market value in hundreds of millions and billions dollars were christened luddites and other names and ridiculed for lack of understanding that in this new world, gravity and other outdated concepts need not apply.
At that time, I was naive, thinking that I did not understand something these aces of marketplace do. During the real estate-banking bubble I had more stamina to resist believing that mortgages sliced, diced and reassembled in the form of exotic securities can eliminate the risks inherent in investing. Even shakier was my belief that the Bush economics, i.e. overconsumption in the times of war pumped by residential equity loans, can be sustained for long. And again, the likes of poor me who expressed mild disbelief in the ability of Wall Street bankers to create something from nothing, were ridiculed as hopelessly outdated grouches.
In the end, the laws of economic gravity downed the first two bubbles. Yet, their proponents, the people who published books that soon Dow will push a 40,000 plank and other garbage, are doing very well, thank you. And now, thanks to Rummy and his crew, they moved to military affairs. Luckily, to check their projections we need an all-out nuclear war and in that case there will be more pressing concerns.
P. W. Singer in his book, so incongrous that I suspect the influence of the same mind-changing chemicals, which fueled previous two bubbles, proposes that armies-- at least advanced (meaning NATO) ones-- will be replaced by fighting robots. It bears heavy traces of Ramsfeld's tenure at the Pentagon: confusion of experimental technologies, or even proposals, with already-existing capabilities, approval of any screwball idea, no matter how technically odd or tactically unsound and total ignorance of any historic precedents of failed large-scale military programs and ventures. Imagine that they planned occupation of Iraq with only 35-40000 combatants.
Because of adoration of the German military tradition by the neocons, the words Blietzkrieg and 1,000 year Reich (I am not joking, Kagan wrote it, modestly cutting the prospect of American global domination to 500 years), started to fly around Washington. So is the late-WWII propaganda slogan of Wunderwaffen, supposed military marvels created in German laboratories, which can turn tide of the war already lost.
Indeed, some of these designs were truly marvelous, the only problem with them was that there were too many of them pursued simultaneously, no mechanism for setting priorities, no mindset to distinguish brilliant from kooky and, finally, heavy drain of all these new projects on the maintenance of already existing fighting capability. Physicist F. Dyson who during WWII worked as an Air Force science boffin estimated that Nazi ballistic missile program consumed, in terms of resources, about the same as would a doubling of their fighter fleet. Equally British program of heavy bombing consumed, by the end of the war, roughly 25% of war expenditure, yet no study could justify that it reduced German war potential by more than 5-6% (and probably was as little as 1-2%). He called this strategy "a misguided hi-tech."
Somewhere, in his book, Singer mentioned supposed 5,000 robots operating in Iraq or Afghanistan. Whatever is the methodology of his count, assuming that it takes 4-6 people to equip and operate a single robot-- if nothing else to pack it into a crate and supply it with batteries, etc.-- this fleet requires a manpower equal to 8 combat brigades! There are other fantastic things in his narrative: of course, almost every weapon system works when the foe has only light weapons and moves
on donkeys. In fact, operational and communication centers needed to provide armadas of unmanned fighting vehicles with logistical support constitute much "softer" targets than, say, tanks or combat aircraft. Even if information hubs can be located overseas, there is need, e.g. for somebody to launch and collect drones, change equipment, deliver fuel, munitions and arm them.
Finally, new American model of warfare developing under advice of Singer and similar experts, has another weak point. It presumes most of the officers being located far from battlefields in secure bunkers connected by satellite uplinks with the soldiers at the front line, the picture supported by minuscule officer/soldier loss ratio for the US Army compared not only with Russian Army in Checnhya but also with Israeli Army in Lebanon, unless we are yet to hear of another example of covert creativity of Rummy and his successor. Even if one discounts the vulnerability of these links recently demonstrated by the Chinese space agency, there are problems with this approach.
As long as resistance is weak and poorly coordinated, command from behind the Green Line looks fine. Yet, in the face of dedicated resistance cohesion of battle units, especially elated by the sight of their officers partying in Georgetown, cannot be taken for granted. Sergeants supposed to operate units on their own, on behalf of distant officers according to their electronic text messaging, can turn out to be poor substitutes for traditional structures of obedience and loyalty.
Wednesday, February 25, 2009
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)