I have no initial objection to a "high-tech" army. Our technology (especially our military technology) is so far ahead of anyone else that comparisons are useless. Of course, to achieve that we spend money on military technology like a drunk sailor at his last bar before a six-month trip in a submarine. It was the level of our technology that allowed us to just brush aside Iraq's formal army in the war 2 years ago.
So I'm happy to see Rumsfeld pushing "Future Combat", the system he envisions as the integration of high-tech weapons, communication, information technologies and low-weight (to ease deployment issues and make it faster for us to get soliders anywhere we want them). This sounds fine. However, it should be noted that most of the deployments by the Army aren't for the purpose of running over someone (like Saddam), but are instead for low-intensity, peacekeeping operations (Bosnia, Kosovo, East Timor, Afghanistan, post-invasion Iraq - just to name the headlines). Thus, the average soldier should not only be integrated into the new technological army, but should also be protected from any ol' random IED. Thus, paragraphs like this make me nervous:
The Army wants Future Combat to be a smaller, faster force than the one now fighting in Iraq. Tanks, mobile cannons and personnel carriers would be made so light that they could be flown to a war zone. But first they must be stripped of heavy armor. In place of armor, American soldiers in combat would be protected by information systems, so they could see and kill the enemy before being seen and killed, Army officials say.
So, we take all the armor out of the vehicles. This makes them light and easy to transport (this is good: as noted, lighter vehicles mean you can get soldiers to where you need them much faster). In theory, "Future Combat" means that through satelite, ground-based radar and other systems, airborne sensors, etc. the US soldiers will "see" the enemy and blow them up before the enemy has a chance to even take a shot (if the enemy doesn't get to shoot at you, you don't need any armor to protect yourself). The story notes that the development work on this is getting very expensive and not working all that well. (Fine, these things often work out in the end, but end up costing a ton.)
My point, however, is what do these unarmored trucks and tanks do when the guerillas in the post-war mopping up plant home-made bombs everywhere (like, say, in Iraq about 60 times on any given day)? The lack of armor will make these vehicles tremendously vulnerable to in low-intensity conflicts (which, as I pointed out above, is mostly what we do). Thus, this recipe seems to produce some very wired dead soldiers. Hasn't anyone at the Pentagon noticed this, or is everyone so scared of Rumsfeld that they've sewn their mouths shut?
I'm all for a high-tech military. And certainly, there is a difficult balance between indestructable (lots of armor, can't move it unless you rent a supertanker) and swift (weighs nothing, blows up when a fly hits it). But lets try to restrain the high-stupidity military plans.
Posted by baltar at March 29, 2005 12:12 PM | TrackBack | Posted to Politics