I just read the Kelly and Fallows pieces in the April Atlantic, and they can be seen online. Both are in the "agenda" short articles section, which I guess is all to the good, considering how windy the regular long Atlantic articles can be.
Kelly's piece:
The Air-Power Revolution theatlantic.com
Sorta dull, but only goes up through WWII, with a promise of more to come, so maybe the followup will be more interesting.
Fallows' piece:
Behavior Modification theatlantic.com
This one is a little juicier on the defense reform issue, also somewhat broader and more interesting in general. One bit, indicating that there might perhaps be some hope for Rumsfeld as a reformer after all:
The other main view is that the Air Force was neither discovering how to cooperate with the Army nor seeing that it could match the Navy's role. Instead it was responding to direct orders to change its behavior, presumably issued by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. The evidence here is circumstantial. Until September 10 Rumsfeld was described as embattled within the Pentagon, because of his impatience with bureaucratic gamesmanship and interservice jockeying. Both before and after September 11 he expressed to friends his exasperation with the hidebound nature of the services' leadership. In the first two weeks of the war, according to this view, he saw the real-world harm caused by the attitudes he had spent months complaining about.
One retired Army officer describes the first stage of the war as having been conducted "stovepipe" fashion, with separate chains of command for each service. The ground forces would relay their observations and targeting requests up the pipe to the senior Army command. The Army commanders would relay the requests to senior Air Force officials, who would pass word down to the bomber crews. Hours or days after the original request, bombs would fall where targets might no longer be.
It would be in keeping with Rumsfeld's personality and record to order the Air Force and the Army to stop fooling around and start hitting targets. If the campaign in Afghanistan continues to be viewed as a success, many people will claim credit for the crucial change in policy. As long as the military applies the concept of fast coordinated campaigns, the parentage of the idea may not matter. Still, I would like to find out what it was.
The rest of that article is somewhat more pessimistic, though. William Lind, who you've mentioned elsewhere, gets quoted sounding relatively calm, if not happy. Quote:
Of course, it is possible that the campaign will not lastingly be seen as such a victory. William Lind, the military analyst, and G. I. Wilson, a colonel in the Marines, deserve a hearing on this point, because they have been prescient before. For instance, in a book chapter written with Marine Corps Major John Schmitt last summer, two months before the terrorist attacks, they said, "Arguably the most serious direct and immediate threat to U.S. national security today is not another state, rogue or otherwise, but the transnational terrorist organization Al Qa'ida."
Lind and Wilson and three co-authors had warned in an influential 1989 Marine Corps Gazette article that the United States would be vexed in the future by enemies that avoided attacking our big, well-equipped military and went straight for our cities and economic base. We would be all the more frustrated in attempting to respond, they said, because the American military knows everything about fighting other countries and armies but not about fighting enemies that are separate from any state. To the authors' chagrin, in February an Internet magazine that claims to represent al Qaeda cited that article as having helped to give the terrorists their insight that a "new type of war presents significant difficulties for the Western war machine."
I recently asked Lind and Wilson what they made of the war so far. Each emphasized how little was known for sure and how wrong any given interpretation could be. That said, they went on to sound a distinctly non-triumphal note. Lind warned that vanquishing the Taliban, however satisfying, probably accomplished less in the long run than we thought. "When the Taliban had a state, we were able to fight it," he wrote recently, in an unpublished paper that he showed me.
But its essence was never being a state, much less having facilities we could blow up with missiles. The Taliban was a movement, a non-state actor made up of people with a shared world-view ... Those people have not been killed, nor taken prisoner (with a very few exceptions), nor driven out. They are in Afghanistan, waiting ... And, now that the Taliban is not a state, we cannot fight it.
He was also highly skeptical that the spotter-bomber combination that worked so well in Afghanistan would make much difference anywhere else. "It's what I might call the ultimate French dream," he said, referring to France's interwar theory that war could be reduced to forward observers and artillery. The reason it worked in Afghanistan, he said, is that the Taliban had alienated most of the population, so spotters could travel easily. "There are not a lot of situations like that," he told me. "If the population is hostile, your little team has a very short shelf life."
Wilson said that if he were writing the 1989 paper today, he would emphasize the sheer economic impact terrorist attacks can have. "Look at all the money and energy we're tying up trying to improve airport security," he said. "I would also have focused more on the ways in which the basic institutions in our society can be turned into vehicles for destruction." Wilson sounded as if he had been more surprised by the anthrax scare, with its devastating effect on the postal service and the businesses that rely on it, than by the September 11 attacks. "I wish I had focused more," he said, "on the way one lone individual, a Kaczynski type of guy, can leverage our institutions and systems against us."
On only one point did Lind and Wilson line up with the Pentagon officials celebrating success in Afghanistan: technology provides new possibilities in conflict. But ideas and behavior, Lind and Wilson emphasized, are still more important than machines—the terrorists' idea of turning airliners into weapons; the U.S. military's idea, whatever its origin, that B-52s could be directed by soldiers on the ground. This war of ideas may be just beginning. |
