Post by Admin on Nov 4, 2020 7:43:19 GMT -5
The Blaster
If you couched effectiveness correctly, there would be no quality versus quantity debate at all. You would simply build the most effective weapon that delivers the force that’s most likely to make you win. But as soon as you leave out the idea of the force numbers deployed in battle, then you get into these total abortions of small buys of super expensive weapons that don’t work, of which the prime example is the F-35, which is like the F-111 on steroids. Right now, the F-35 can’t fly more often than once every three days. So, there’s your quality-versus-quantity debate, right? Nobody looked at how many F-35s we could buy within a fixed budget or how many of the ones bought would show up for combat. And if we had, we’d have come up with a much better, much bigger Air Force.
The reform movement tried to reallocate defense spending towards winning wars and reducing costs in the face of counterproductive bureaucratic and political incentives. Sprey worked closely with Col. John Boyd, another legendary figure of mid-to-late 20th century U.S. military thinking. Boyd enlisted in the Army Air Force at the end of World War II, returned to serve as an F-86 fighter pilot in Korea, became the Air Force’s leading air-to-air tactician, and then commanded a major air base during the Vietnam War. Boyd is best known in aviation circles for innovating tactics that changed the way every air force in the world fights and for his energy maneuverability theory which revolutionized fighter plane design. After retiring, he grew into a strategic thinker of Clausewitzian caliber.
Q. What is the greatest weakness of the American way of using technology in war?
In brief: The really devastating, people-impacting aspect of how we use technology in war is that almost every new technology we’re developing is killing individual initiative at lower levels and putting more and more top-down control into higher level headquarters.
A. Aside from the fact that the technology we’re getting is becoming more and more grossly inadequate and badly designed and executed, the really devastating, people-impacting aspect of how we use military technology is that almost every new technology we’re developing is killing individual initiative at lower levels and putting ever more top-down control into higher headquarters. It was considered one of the great sins in the German blitzkrieg formations to tell a subordinate how to do something. You gave him the responsibility to accomplish the mission, and he determined the method. Today, we develop and use our technology for the opposite purpose.
One extreme example is when you have the president sitting at his desk and watching a drone strike on a big video screen. That is an utter disaster for the whole chain of command. There is no reason the president needs to watch drone strikes. But what happens when he does, when you hook up the huge communications network necessary? Think about what it takes to transmit that stuff up through one-star, two-star, four-star headquarters and then to the president; that’s a huge network and a huge investment in communications. That drone strike should simply be settled between the drone operator and the unit being supported. It’s nobody else’s business. But when more and more high-ranking people watch it, those poor guys at the tip of the spear are under deadly pressure. They can’t take a single risky or innovative action. If they don’t do it by the book, some four-star general is going to come down on them like a ton of bricks, court-martial them, or whatever.
Q. At times in American military history, we have adhered to the “better is the enemy of good enough” theory of our weaponry (think Sherman tank vs Panther). Yet at other times, in the quality vs quantity debate, we side 200% with the former (today’s aircraft and submarines). Please comment on this debate.
In brief: As soon as you define effectiveness in a way that includes both the effect of the individual weapon and the effect of the numbers of those weapons that you’re able to deliver in the face of the enemy, then the whole debate solves itself.
Instead, the useful way to look at it is to forget about quality versus quantity and to sit down and get serious about what constitutes effectiveness. When you define effectiveness in a way that includes both the effect of the individual weapon and the effect of the numbers of those weapons you are able to deliver in the face of the enemy, then the whole debate solves itself. But of course, the bureaucrats who sit down and write the requirements for the new glitzy weapon never include the issue of how many of them show up in combat and how many of those are still working when the rifleman or the pilot or the artilleryman needs to pull the trigger.
If you couched effectiveness correctly, there would be no quality versus quantity debate at all. You would simply build the most effective weapon that delivers the force that’s most likely to make you win. But as soon as you leave out the idea of the force numbers deployed in battle, then you get into these total abortions of small buys of super expensive weapons that don’t work, of which the prime example is the F-35, which is like the F-111 on steroids. Right now, the F-35 can’t fly more often than once every three days. So, there’s your quality-versus-quantity debate, right? Nobody looked at how many F-35s we could buy within a fixed budget or how many of the ones bought would show up for combat. And if we had, we’d have come up with a much better, much bigger Air Force.
The reform movement tried to reallocate defense spending towards winning wars and reducing costs in the face of counterproductive bureaucratic and political incentives. Sprey worked closely with Col. John Boyd, another legendary figure of mid-to-late 20th century U.S. military thinking. Boyd enlisted in the Army Air Force at the end of World War II, returned to serve as an F-86 fighter pilot in Korea, became the Air Force’s leading air-to-air tactician, and then commanded a major air base during the Vietnam War. Boyd is best known in aviation circles for innovating tactics that changed the way every air force in the world fights and for his energy maneuverability theory which revolutionized fighter plane design. After retiring, he grew into a strategic thinker of Clausewitzian caliber.
Q. What is the greatest weakness of the American way of using technology in war?
In brief: The really devastating, people-impacting aspect of how we use technology in war is that almost every new technology we’re developing is killing individual initiative at lower levels and putting more and more top-down control into higher level headquarters.
A. Aside from the fact that the technology we’re getting is becoming more and more grossly inadequate and badly designed and executed, the really devastating, people-impacting aspect of how we use military technology is that almost every new technology we’re developing is killing individual initiative at lower levels and putting ever more top-down control into higher headquarters. It was considered one of the great sins in the German blitzkrieg formations to tell a subordinate how to do something. You gave him the responsibility to accomplish the mission, and he determined the method. Today, we develop and use our technology for the opposite purpose.
One extreme example is when you have the president sitting at his desk and watching a drone strike on a big video screen. That is an utter disaster for the whole chain of command. There is no reason the president needs to watch drone strikes. But what happens when he does, when you hook up the huge communications network necessary? Think about what it takes to transmit that stuff up through one-star, two-star, four-star headquarters and then to the president; that’s a huge network and a huge investment in communications. That drone strike should simply be settled between the drone operator and the unit being supported. It’s nobody else’s business. But when more and more high-ranking people watch it, those poor guys at the tip of the spear are under deadly pressure. They can’t take a single risky or innovative action. If they don’t do it by the book, some four-star general is going to come down on them like a ton of bricks, court-martial them, or whatever.
Q. At times in American military history, we have adhered to the “better is the enemy of good enough” theory of our weaponry (think Sherman tank vs Panther). Yet at other times, in the quality vs quantity debate, we side 200% with the former (today’s aircraft and submarines). Please comment on this debate.
In brief: As soon as you define effectiveness in a way that includes both the effect of the individual weapon and the effect of the numbers of those weapons that you’re able to deliver in the face of the enemy, then the whole debate solves itself.
Instead, the useful way to look at it is to forget about quality versus quantity and to sit down and get serious about what constitutes effectiveness. When you define effectiveness in a way that includes both the effect of the individual weapon and the effect of the numbers of those weapons you are able to deliver in the face of the enemy, then the whole debate solves itself. But of course, the bureaucrats who sit down and write the requirements for the new glitzy weapon never include the issue of how many of them show up in combat and how many of those are still working when the rifleman or the pilot or the artilleryman needs to pull the trigger.