By Keith L. Shimko
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010
249 pp. $27.99
ISBN: 978–0–521–12884–1
Reviewed by
JOHN A. GENTRY
What are the military lessons of the Iraq wars for the future of U.S. defense policy? Should the Iraq wars be seen as a fundamental turning point in the history of warfare? Keith L. Shimko, professor of political science at Purdue University, addresses these questions through the lens of an American Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) he sees occurring during three Iraq wars—Operation Desert Storm in 1991, the conventional warfare of March–April 2003, and the ongoing insurgency that erupted in August 2003. Shimko’s dissection of the war that began in 2003 is suspect, but it enables him to assert that the American RMA quickly won two “wars” comprised of rapid, violent battles between mismatched conventional military forces.
Shimko explains his conclusion that an American military revolution is ongoing within a lengthy, generally well-balanced intellectual history of the RMA discussion in the United States that is the major contribution of the book. Despite noting many prescient criticisms of the concept, and recognizing that many claims by proponents of RMA and related concepts like transformation and net-centric warfare are exaggerated or fanciful, he largely accepts the latter claims anyway. He also repeatedly attacks Stephen Biddle, one of the best contemporary American political-military analysts of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, who has a less expansive concept of military revolution.
Shimko’s military revolutions are evidenced mainly by tactical advantages in conventional battle provided by technological innovations like precision munitions. They do not, however, have to be used in all conflicts or always even be useful. Hence, the much reduced relevance of RMA-like technologies in the “third” Iraq war in which U.S. forces initially floundered—and the distractive characteristics of the obsessive U.S. focus on finding technological solutions to military challenges—does not diminish Shimko’s confidence in an ongoing American military revolution. We are left with a concept of military revolution that is a light, generalized, and significantly qualified version of more strident air- and network-focused concepts associated with the likes of John Warden, Harlan Ullman, and Arthur Cebrowski.
Shimko’s concept of military revolution is so narrowly conventional, yet fluid and undemanding, that it encompasses most moderately useful military innovations. His broad claims for a continuing American RMA amid accurate descriptions and assessments of troubled U.S. military operations in Somalia, Kosovo, and Iraq since 2003, and recognition that technologically inferior but clever adversaries can defeat even the targeting technologies that are among RMA proponents’ best arguments (pp. 103, 122–123), render his concept largely useless for theoretical, military operational, and policymaking purposes. It can even be dangerous because it presents an appealing vision easily abused by technophiles with parochial interests; exploited by military tourists seeking quick victories in minimally personally risky, short, conventional wars against weak opponents; and used as a lens through which policymakers focus on the narrow range of military activities in which American technology provides clear but transient advantages at the long-term cost of ignoring the full spectrum of military missions that U.S. forces may be ordered to conduct.
Shimko makes some of the common mistakes of RMA proponents. Despite numerous caveats, he sees war as consisting of medium-intensity, conventional fighting—not broad, complex, political/military conflict. He sees in the alleged American RMA a desirable, massive increase in U.S. ability to gather and communicate data but barely discusses the irrelevance of such data without its conversion into sound political/military judgments. He acknowledges that military leaders like H.R. McMaster and David Petraeus learned much of what they needed to know in Iraq by drinking tea with local citizens but ignores the fact that even this kind of information requires contextual knowledge to be operationally useful—something technology cannot provide (p. 208). While recognizing that the U.S. military as an institution long has avoided developing such cultural awareness, he little addresses why or how the deficiency can be overcome.
Shimko also passes on an opportunity to discuss a major, ongoing feature of war that arguably is more revolutionary than the technology he dwells upon—the changes in motives for, political calculations about, and conduct of war driven by massively increased sensitivity to casualties since 1945. He addresses normative aspects of modern war in passing, recognizing that precision munitions can help keep casualties down. But American enemies since North Vietnam nearly half a century ago have repeatedly used tactical military actions to attack casualty-related U.S. strategic political vulnerabilities in ways that defeated the United States while U.S. military forces in the field were unbeaten. These changes have been revolutionary in the broad sense that they alter societies and politics as well as military actions, and they generate surprise strategic outcomes. Gil Merom, Ward Thomas, Alan Kuperman, and others provide some insights into such processes, but much more work remains to be done. Moreover, actual and potential U.S. adversaries, including Saddam Hussein, al Qaeda, the Taliban, and Chinese and Iranian military theorists see in America’s peculiarly gizmo-centric variety of warfare opportunities to exploit U.S. casualty sensitivity and technological vulnerabilities and to convert U.S. material “power” and technological assets into political liabilities by, among other means, using disinformation to mislead Americans into generating collateral damage incidents.
In the end, Shimko does not persuasively offer evidence or logic that the Iraq wars offer major RMA-related lessons or mark a turning point in military history. He does not convincingly demonstrate that a U.S. military revolution exists. Lessons of recent wars surely abound, but they, and Shimko’s modest discussions of them, mainly reflect military cultural and U.S. Government-wide institutional factors whose excessive focus on RMA obscures more than it clarifies.
LTC John A. Gentry (USAR, Ret.) received a Ph.D. in political science from George Washington University and writes on military and intelligence topics.
John:
ReplyDeleteThank for the thoughtful, if not terribly favorable, review of my book. Many of the issues you raise are fair ones that I struggled with in the course of writing the book, particularly the question of whether a more nuanced view of a contemporary RMA that incorporates the insights of skeptics and the obvious limitations exposed by experience could be maintained without becoming too "fluid and undemanding." I was trying to "rescue," for lack of a better word, the RMA thesis from both it critics AND supporters. I was reacting to what I saw as the exaggerated embrace of enthusiasts in the 1990s and the summary dismissal of skeptics after 2003. Let me, however, push back on a few specific points.
I do not see why the ability of less technologically sophisticated adversies to counter America's RMA technologies renders my argument or the concept of a contemporary RMA "useless." I would ask whether the ability of some adversaries to develop a successful method of fighting Napoleon's forces renders the concept of a Napoleonic military revolution useless? Or whether the emergence of new fortifications to counter artillery during the gunpowder revolution renders that a useless concept. In my view, recognizing the limitations of this or any previous military revolution does not automatically mean that no revolution has taken place (unless, of course, one would rather dispense with the concept of RMAs entirely....which is an argument I am not unsympathetic to). Every military revolution that I know of from gunpowder onwards needs to "significantly qualified" if it is to survive meaningful scrutiny.
A further point. I do not think that I "attack" Stephen Biddle. I completely agree that he is one of the best military anaylsts on the scene. Certainly better and more knowledgable than me on most issues. I have learned a lot from his work: it is thoughtful, careful, creative and a model of impeccable scholarship. I simply disagree with him that we have seen no revolutionary changes in warfare since the emergence of the modern system in the early twentieth century. His argument is that a century which has seen perhaps the greatest and most rapid technological advances in all of human history has produced no revolutionary change in warfare. Despite the appearnace of a mechanized infantry, jet aircraft, stealth technology, laser designation, GPS guidance, and so on, there has been no revolution in warfare. This is an argument that deserves to made. He makes it well. But I disagree. At a minimum, the abilty to strike hundreds of tactical, operational and strategic targets with great precision and minimal collateral damage in a matter of days or hours stikes me as something more than a "moderately useful military innovation." We obviously do not agree on this, however.
And I did largely pass on the opportunity to deal with the revolution you mention in terms of the increased senstivity to casualties. But I would note this revolution you speak of would not be possible without the "revolution" I speak of.
Again, I appreciate, even I cannot say that I enjoyed, your review. A book that provokes no thoughtful criticism is one that probably did not need to be written in the first place.
Keith
John:
ReplyDeleteSorry for the second post in a day, but you have me thinking. I just wanted to clarify my last point on the "revolution" involving casualty sensitivity. I think there are increasingly two elements to this -- the unwillingness to take casualties and the hesitance to inflict casualties (evident, for example, in Kosovo). While some of this may predate current technological advances associated (in my view) with a contemporary RMA, the ability to sometimes fight from a safe distance and attack precisely with minimal collateral damage has greatly increased these sensitivities. This is central to J. Marshall Beier's argument (see p. 11). Thus, I think there is a case to be made that these are either deeply intertwined/reinforcing revolutions or part and parcel a single multifaceted revolution. Either way, an important issue.
Keith
Keith,
ReplyDeleteThank you for your thoughtful rejoinder and additional comments.
I certainly agree that “revolutionary” or major evolutionary changes do not remain powerful indefinitely. Indeed, the influence of an innovation can be measured, in one sense, by the strength and effectiveness of the compensating reaction that creates a new normalcy. Hence, I agree that Napoleon and the fortress engineers produced appreciable changes in warfare. Whether they were revolutionary or evolutionary may not be worth arguing about.
Casualty sensitivity has the two elements you note and I agree that there is a connection between them and technology, but I see the nature and implications of the connection differently. The emergence of politically relevant casualty aversion emerged after World War II, largely as a result of the area bombing of Axis cities, which for slightly different reasons both the Royal and American air forces intended to be very bloody, in part because bombing technologies then were crude. Since then, strike technologies have improved and casualty sensitivity has grown, but causal linkages between the two are not clear.
The technologies of precision strike have, I think, had multiple but conflicting influences on casualty-enabled political warfare. As you note, the ability to accurately hit targets from afar has increased expectations that force protection can be enhanced (exemplified best by NATO’s 1999 Kosovo war). It similarly has raised unrealistic expectations for “immaculate” warfare that spares virtually all civilians—producing sometimes incompatible goals. Acceptable levels of “collateral damage” are shrinking. But practitioners who aim to win strategic political goals by selectively producing violence use military and other technologies in different ways. They feed misleading intelligence information to “strong” opponents to induce adversaries to accurately strike other rivals or carefully chosen, pitiable bystanders. They use ostensibly non-military technologies like informational technologies to rapidly, easily, and graphically communicate casualty-related military targeting errors. They rely on traditionally non-military organizations, like the media and NGOs like Human Rights Watch, to generate and/or amplify focused normative outrage over civilian casualties. They practice their own brands of parochially focused norm entrepreneurship. Moreover some, like Bosnian Muslims and Kosovar Albanians in the 1990s, achieve their goals by activating casualty sensitivities at home and abroad by killing their own people with low-tech weapons (like the Muslim mortar attack on a Sarajevo market in August 1995 that killed several dozen people and misled casualty-sensitive President Clinton into ordering air strikes on Bosnian Serbs besieging the city).
As a result, the narrowly military technologies of the RMA produce tools sometimes useful for the new form of warfare. But it relies far more on other technologies and politically sophisticated tactical military operations and strategic information operations. With the scope of war expanding, the technologically cutting-edge tools of conventional warfare associated with RMA retain operational significance in the ways for which they were designed only in a limited, arguably narrowing set of operational circumstances.
John
John:
ReplyDeleteI agree with just about everything in your posted response on the casualty issue.
You may indeed be right that RMA technoligies are only useful in an "arguably narrowing set of operational circumstances" (though a Lt Col in the Aussie Air Force who review my book on Amazon thought I devoted too little attention to how these technoloigies could be used in counterinsurgency operations). I note this very point in my book's conclusion. But I also noted that predictions 10 and 20 years out in terms of what sorts of threats, conflicts and operational circumstances nations and their militaries are likely to face have been notoriously difficult and faulty. Twenty years ago who predicted/ anticipated our current circumstances?
But I still think our main differnce is whether the changes in warfare I point to can be characterized as "modest military innovations." As I mentioned in our private communication but will repeat it here in case anyone else is reading, I think the ability to simultaneously strike hundreds of tactical, operation and strategic targets with great precsion and little collateral damage is much more than a "modest" innovation, and I think the WW II residents of Hamburg and crews of the Combined Bomber Offensive would agree. In an age where technological change is so rapid there is a danger that the revolutionary comes to be seen as mundane and commonplace very quickly.
These changes have been revolutionary in the broad sense that they alter societies and politics as well as military actions, and they generate surprise strategic outcomes. Joye 510
ReplyDelete