Tampa Prep 2009-2010 Impact Defense File
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AT: Military Quality1. Quality of the force is irrelevant—it’s just a question of having quantity to deal with insurgent tacticsPeters, 6 – retired Army Officer – 2-6-2006 (Ralph, The Weekly Standard, “The Counterrevolution in Military Affairs; Fashionable thinking about defense ignores the great threats of our time,” http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/006/649qrsob.asp) REVOLUTIONS NOTORIOUSLY IMPRISON THEIR MOST committed supporters. Intellectually, influential elements within our military are locked inside the cells of the Revolution in Military Affairs--the doctrinal cult of the past decade that preaches that technological leaps will transcend millennia-old realities of warfare. Our current conflicts have freed the Pentagon from at least some of the nonsensical theories of techno-war, but too many of our military and civilian leaders remain captivated by the notion that machines can replace human beings on the battlefield. Chained to their 20th-century successes, they cannot face the new reality: Wars of flesh, faith, and cities. Meanwhile, our enemies, immediate and potential, appear to grasp the contours of future war far better than we do. From Iraq's Sunni Triangle to China's military high command, the counterrevolution in military affairs is well underway. We are seduced by what we can do; our enemies focus on what they must do. We have fallen so deeply in love with the means we have devised for waging conceptual wars that we are blind to their marginal relevance in actual wars. Terrorists, for one lethal example, do not fear "network-centric warfare" because they have already mastered it for a tiny fraction of one cent on the dollar, achieving greater relative effects with the Internet, cell phones, and cheap airline tickets than all of our military technologies have delivered. Our prime weapon in our struggles with terrorists, insurgents, and warriors of every patchwork sort remains the soldier or Marine; yet, confronted with reality's bloody evidence, we simply pretend that other, future, hypothetical wars will justify the systems we adore--purchased at the expense of the assets we need. Stubbornly, we continue to fantasize that a wondrous enemy will appear who will fight us on our own terms, as a masked knight might have materialized at a stately tournament in a novel by Sir Walter Scott. Yet, not even China--the threat beloved of major defense contractors and their advocates--would play by our rules if folly ignited war. Against terrorists, we have found technology alone incompetent to master men of soaring will--our own flesh and blood provide the only effective counter. At the other extreme, a war with China, which our war gamers blithely assume would be brief, would reveal the quantitative incompetence of our forces. An assault on a continent-spanning power would swiftly drain our stocks of precision weapons, ready pilots, and aircraft. Quality, no matter how great, is not a reliable substitute for a robust force in being and deep reserves that can be mobilized rapidly. There is, in short, not a single enemy in existence or on the horizon willing to play the victim to the military we continue to build. Faced with men of iron belief wielding bombs built in sheds and basements, our revolution in military affairs appears more an indulgence than an investment. In the end, our enemies will not outfight us. We'll muster the will to do what must be done--after paying a needlessly high price in the lives of our troops and damage to our domestic infrastructure. We will not be beaten, but we may be shamed and embarrassed on a needlessly long road to victory. Not a single item in our trillion-dollar arsenal can compare with the genius of the suicide bomber--the breakthrough weapon of our time. Our intelligence systems cannot locate him, our arsenal cannot deter him, and, all too often, our soldiers cannot stop him before it is too late. A man of invincible conviction--call it delusion, if you will--armed with explosives stolen or purchased for a handful of soiled bills can have a strategic impact that staggers governments. Abetted by the global media, the suicide bomber is the wonder weapon of the age. 2. Worse yet, the perceived inability to counter guerrilla and terrorist tactics will actually make their use more prevalent by future enemies Boot, 5– Senior Fellow for National Security Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations – 2005 (Max, Foreign Affairs, “Affairs, “The Struggle to Transform the Military,” March-April, vol. 84, no. 2, p. 103) Donald Rumsfeld's tenure as secretary of defense will continue to be marked by his attempt to transform the military into a lighter, nimbler force better able to take advantage of new technology and respond to new threats. Despite (or perhaps because of) the rancor he has generated within the Pentagon, Rumsfeld has managed to shake up a hidebound institution that, if left to its own devices, would probably prefer to endlessly refight the 1991 Gulf War. The continued fighting in Iraq, however, shows the limits of what he has accomplished. The U.S. military is superb at defeating conventional forces--as its three-week blitzkrieg from Kuwait to Baghdad in the spring of 2003 demonstrated--but not nearly as good at fighting the kind of guerrilla foes it has confronted since. To be sure, many of the current problems in Iraq result from Rumsfeld's failure to send enough troops there and from the precipitous disbandment of the Iraqi military. But they also reveal more fundamental shortcomings in U.S. capabilities for dealing with unconventional threats. Many policymakers and military officers will no doubt react to the problems in Iraq by trying to eschew this type of conflict in the future. Just as there was an aversion to fighting guerrilla wars after Vietnam (manifested in the Powell Doctrine), there will be a similar backlash after Iraq, no matter how it turns out. Most U.S. soldiers understandably prefer to focus on what they do best: beating conventional foes in the open field. Unfortunately, the United States cannot determine the nature of its future wars; the enemy has a vote, and the more evident the U.S. inability to deal with guerrilla or terrorist tactics, the more prevalent those tactics will become. There is a limit to how much "smart" weapons can achieve against a shadowy foe. Recall the ineffectual cruise-missile strikes on targets in Sudan and Afghanistan in 1998, which served only to highlight U.S. weakness. Defeating terrorism, as Washington has learned in Afghanistan, requires putting boots on the ground and engaging in nation building. Yet it is precisely those areas in which the United States remains weakest and that Rumsfeld's high-tech defense transformation agenda has neglected. Strengthening those capacities should be the goal for the next stage of military transformation, and continuing that revolution should be a top priority in President George W. Bush's second term. Directory: files -> documents documents -> North Mankato Taylor Library documents -> In the Red and Brown Water documents -> - documents -> I. Disaster Summary Sheet II. Tropical Cyclones documents -> Cbp and Trade Automated Interface Requirements Appendix: pga december 22, 2015 documents -> Ace abi catair customs and Trade Automated Interface Requirements documents -> Ace abi catair customs and Trade Automated Interface Requirements documents -> Mobile audio/video recording systems documents -> Cartographic Concepts for Realizing a Location Based umts service documents -> 1/ Background Statistics Human development index rank Download 2.71 Mb. 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