Abstract
Admiral Bill Owens (retired) doesn't beat around the bush. In the first 650 words or so of his book—not much longer than this magazine's editor's note—we learn a lot about the U.S. military:
U.S. military spending represents 34 percent of the world's total military expenditures.
The armed services are manned by highly educated and technologically adept professionals.
U.S. warships steam unopposed in every ocean, U.S. precision weapons have a global reach, and the United States can quickly transport troops and equipment to any spot on earth.
The U.S. strategic nuclear arsenal remains an overwhelming deterrent to any nation contemplating an attack by a weapon of mass destruction.
Nevertheless, over the next decade or so, the U.S. military faces a possible “general collapse.”
Given his credentials—a 1962 graduate of the Naval Academy, Owens served as commander of the Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean during the Persian Gulf War and as vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1994 and 1995—his sense of alarm cannot be easily dismissed.
In 1991, midway in his tenure as fleet commander, Owens began to realize just how “dysfunctional and inefficient” the U.S. military juggernaut had become. In Owens's eyes, the Gulf War had revealed a surprising inability of the services to efficiently communicate with one another. Several months after the war ended, he decided to conduct an experiment in emergency communication.
In his experiment, Owens told each naval unit in his command to demonstrate that it could communicate directly with an army combat unit—any combat unit—somewhere in Europe.
Owens notes that naval forces routinely communicate with ground forces—but only by way of “convoluted routings and different communication channels, switchboards, and operators,” none of which are appropriate for today's and tomorrow's fast-paced warfare.
In wartime, direct communication is vital. “We tried to do it,” writes Owens of the experiment. “We tried—for six months—to make the connection. And we could never link up with the army. There was always something wrong. The army and navy units used different frequencies. The communications protocols employed by the army and navy were different. The communications personnel had never been trained to do this. And so on.”
The inability of two different military services to communicate directly was, from Owens's point of view, a symptom of a deeper, systemic dis-ease—the long-standing rivalry among the services, which even today are inclined to cherish incompatible hardware, software, and doctrine.
“Sire, they've all got the sniffles, and say they would much prefer to go into battle some other day.”
For 30 years or more, the Defense Department has spoken endlessly of the value of joint operations. Owens himself was a principal author of the Defense Department's Joint Vision 2010, issued in 1995, a study that portrayed the military of the near future as operating with seamless system-of-systems perfection. But alas, says Owens, that vision was premature. Five years later, jointness and “seamless” communication are still more rhetoric than reality.
Consider the Apache debacle during last year's American-led NATO air campaign against Serbia. Twenty-four of these formidably deadly army helicopters were dispatched to the theater of operations as tank killers, but none ever engaged Serbian forces.
A major part of the problem, says Owens, was a deep-rooted reluctance by the army to turn over its prized ground-attack helicopter to air force controllers, who directed the air war.
Beyond that was the chronic can't-communicate syndrome—the Apaches could not be readily integrated into the air force communications matrix, which included JSTARS ground-surveillance aircraft, EC-130 radar-jamming planes, and F-16CJs, which were equipped to defeat Serbian air defenses.
The fact that the army and the air force—or the navy and the army, or the navy and the air force, or the marines and just about everyone else—are not trained and equipped to work together as fully integrated units will not come as a news flash to anyone.
In peacetime, generals and admirals are seldom lacking for adversaries. They fight the other services; they shape their missions partly to meet the requirements of their service; above all, they defend their missions and budget prerogatives.
Historically speaking, that has not been such a bad thing, Owens says. Service-specific specialization “takes advantage of inherent efficiencies in the integrated traditions, doctrines, discipline, and procedures of a single service.” And it helps build esprit de corps, an intangible thing that has helped win many battles. But it also encourages an “inbred preference to support one's own service above the others.”
Owens thus joins the chorus of analysts who have long suggested that the individual services are often too self-serving for the nation's good. But his voice stands out nevertheless because of his bona fides and because of his extraordinarily dark prognostications.
The military's “plague of parochialism” was not a great problem during the era of industrial-age warfare. But in the information age, Owens writes, “when technological advances have blurred the traditional space and time that long physically separated the air force from the navy and the army from the marine corps, the services' inability to communicate with one another and their indifference to doing so have set the stage for crisis and disaster.”
Owens belongs to the there's-a-train-wreck-coming school of military analysts, men and women in the armed forces, in think tanks, in universities, and in politics who believe that successes in the Gulf War and in the NATO air campaign against Serbia have papered over grave problems.
Most train-wreck analysts believe that Clinton administration budgetcutters have compromised the ability of the armed forces to develop and buy the ever-more-sophisticated hardware they will need in the future while maintaining high standards of readiness today. Owens agrees, but he does not believe that the answer mainly lies in greatly increased defense budgets. He would like to see higher defense expenditures, but in the absence of an old-style Cold War threat he does not believe large increases are likely.
Not that Owens lacks vision regarding threats. To him and to many of his colleagues in the private/public defense enterprise, terrorism and possible cyber attacks loom large, as do long-range ballistic missiles from the likes of Pakistan, Iran, and “other nations.” More important, he is afflicted with the modern scourge of defense analysts, the Twenty-First Century China Syndrome, in which a nation that cannot provide adequate shelter or disease-free drinking water to its own people is thought to be poised to take on the American behemoth:
“It is not the military capability of China today that should cause us concern. Rather, it is the clear message that Chinese government officials are sending—amplified by their ambitious and wide-ranging effort to acquire modern military technology—that portends a significant Chinese military threat to the interests of the United States and its East Asian allies a decade from now.”
Indeed, the lack of a credible Soviet-style threat has been a boon to the authors of a host of recent books, treatises, reports, and alarums about the allegedly sorry state of the U.S. military, including Lifting the Fog of War. Ambiguous and uncertain threats are by nature open-ended. Virtually any military program can be justified on the basis that threat X, Y, or Z might materialize. Owens believes that the United States had better get ready to counter these possible threats, but in a cost efficient way.
The way to do that is to get on with the “Revolution in Military Affairs”— to build a new, integrated, high-tech fighting system that is information rich and thus will get more precision bang for the buck.
The United States has the technological know-how to give its field commanders complete real-time knowledge of the “battlespace”—which will, supposedly, for the first time in history lift the notoriously confusing and casualty-producing “fog of war.” Total knowledge of the battlespace combined with an ample supply of precision weaponry equals victory.
But this will not happen, Owens says, if the individual services continue to compete. There will be no “system of systems”—no fully realized “revolution”—unless the services reshape themselves into a de facto unitary force. They must create standing joint forces that train together, procure weapons and communications together, and, when necessary, fight together.
That won't be easy. Generals and admirals will have to give up turf battles and their service-specific budget authority. Bases will have to be closed. Tens of thousands of military personnel will have to be transferred from one region to another. Long-standing bonds within the individual services will be strained.
For individuals, a de facto unitary service will cause added stress at a time when military service is already stressful to the breaking point. And the creation of joint standing forces will collide with each service's most deeply held notions of their own identity and cultural importance.
But if the U.S. military fails to restructure itself into a single organization, says Owens, it will be in danger of imminent collapse. And more money will not alone solve the problem. As Apple Computer marketers urge, somewhat ungrammatically, the generals and admirals simply have to “think different.”
Is Owens too pessimistic? Given the fact that U.S. military forces bestride the world in a manner not seen since the early Roman Empire, he seems a bit shrill. But 2,000 years ago, how many Romans would have predicted Rome's fall?
Is Owens too optimistic regarding the possibility of near-total military reform? After reading one anecdote after another that underscores just how separate army, navy, air force, and marines fiefdoms are, achieving the kind of reform he speaks of beggars the imagination.
At the end of Lifting the Fog of War, Owens sketches a plan of action. A key element: a strong secretary of defense fully committed “to carrying out a transformation of the U.S. military to successfully implement true defense reform and the Revolution in Military Affairs.”
Owens's treatise is a trenchant description of what is meant by such a revolution. But perhaps more to the point, it also reads a bit like an extended job application. Owens is now in private business. But one suspects that he would like to return to public service as that strong, revolution-minded secretary of defense.