Rant of the Week: Outdated tactics, technology and thinkers

May 22, 2010 by James

Many both here and abroad believe that the United States has the most powerful military in the world and for the most part they are correct. However the U.S. will be losing that spot rather quickly if they don’t change the ways they use to win wars, and the people who think them up. The U.S. currently spends 1.75 billion dollars a day on the military all for things that seem new to most, but are still things that were used for WWII strategy. The U.S. is taking baby steps if not smaller to adapt to the 21st Century era of warfighting and warthinking.

The United States has been at war for nearly 10 years and we are having little success and certainly not the overwhelming victory we were promised. This is in part because the terrorist networks are able to attack and slip away in small precise attacks. Whereas the U.S. is still thinking it can fight a war based on mass engagement. If you don’t believe me then have a look at WWI and the German blitzkrieg. The Germans saw that everyone including their own were using outdated tactics and the Germans used that to their advantage in running them over quickly and effectively.

The United States has been spending billions on updating outdated technology this being tanks, aircraft, aircraft carriers and warships along with the failed future warrior system. These things would be rendered useless in a conventional war with a more adapted mobile military. The U.S. is not alone in developing supersonic anti ship missiles, which can incinerate ships, especially the steel hull’s of most U.S. navy ships.

The technology available today that is able to be implemented in battle is being denied for various reasons; one being the Generals and battle plan makers. The men who think up the way to win a war are often an older generation taught at a war college which teaches how battles were won from the past. These Generals then input outdated strategy into a 21st century battlefield. This has been proven time and again since Vietnam. Clearly someone steered them onto the right path by trying to make the military a more mobile connected force. They have expanded the Army’s combat brigades from around 12 to over 50, but that is more to ease troop stress than to help win a war.

The U.S. needs to realize that a lot of smaller brigades will beat the few and the large. The U.S. is currently seeing high success with this as they have been deploying platoon sized elements to smaller FOB’s and those troops work directly with the civilian militia. These groups are well received because they work hand in hand with the civilians and the people are willing to trust them with information. These small groups are linked in with aircraft, artillery and the like, thus making them as effective as a larger force but without the distrust from the people. The higher up’s have been reluctant to allow more of these types of units because they are stuck in the rut of believing the wars of today and tomorrow are going to be mass attack and huge battles. Smaller more agile and technologically linked units; prove to be far more capable of winning today’s wars than the huge army’s of the past.

Insurgents have learned that a tactic called “swarming” has had excellent success. This is a method of hitting several targets all at once, as seen in the Mumbai attacks. The chances of dealing death blows in battle is far greater using small agile units “swarming” several targets simultaneously than massing an army in convoys and seeking and destroying. Traditional types of warfare are gone, because our enemy has evolved and know how we fight today. We need to adapt for tomorrow. In the future it will take a swarm to defeat a swarm.

Now by using smaller units to defeat foe’s of both larger and smaller size there is no need to reduce the manpower of today, but there is a huge need to reorganize. The military has reduced in size drastically after WWII and Vietnam. Making a smaller effective force linked in and using all of today’s technology will make our military far more able to respond to an attack and much more capable of winning. America is still on the belief that size matters; like a lot of countries. The size is irrelevant if you cannot adapt to the ever evolving enemies. A smaller force with a bigger punch is far better than a large blind man at a boxing tournament.  Al Qaeda has taken advantage of this since well before September 11, look at the blow they dealt us; yet here we are 10 years later with no clear victory and ever-increasing attacks in Afghanistan. We provided Afghanistan with the weapons they needed to defeat Russia in the 80′s and they did that by employing technology and small army tactics of swarming. So whatever the U.S. chooses to do, either reduce or restructure or both it will prove to be instrumental in our effort to keep peace and preserve it.

Currently the United States is putting the American people and its allies at greater risk than if it were a 21st century force. To the people who say we’re the best in the world, I cite every major ground combat offensive since WWII as my reasoning. The United States has a huge stick but its made of balsa and hard to swing. The United States has shown how incapable we are at responding to today’s types of attacks and wars and we have been shown how effective those small networked groups of terrorists are, yet we cannot adapt to their way of warfighting. To be on the cutting edge of combat we need to overhaul our way of waging war and the people who design how wars are won.

The United States should learn from the past and see how army’s who changed their strategy, either after a defeat or before one, and adapted to the new combat being waged and achieved massive success, the army’s that are smart enough to realize this before the U.S. become our biggest opponent.