Military Review English Edition November-December 2013 | Page 36

(U.S. Army)

Technology contributed to significant micromanagement as early as the Vietnam War. Company commanders were often
forced to deal with several levels of commanders orbiting in helicopters above them.

Unfortunately, few of these qualities are what they
could be in our Army.
All that glitters is gold. The British poet Thomas
Gray ended a poem about a cat that drowned chasing goldfish in a tub, thus: “Not all that tempts your
wandering eyes/And heedless hearts, is lawful prize;/
Nor all that glisters gold.” Our military would do
well to heed this moral rather than continue the
often-headlong pursuit of glittery new technology.
Our love of technology is a cultural preference
with deep historical roots. It is, perhaps, the natural
one for the military of an economically powerful
nation. Technology’s decisive use in long-ago wars
of near-annihilation reinforced this preference. For
example, Native Americans could not win against the
repeating rifle, and in 1945, the atom bomb emphatically ended our nation’s bloody struggle with Japan.
This preference prevails despite superior weapons
proving nondecisive on more recent battlefields. In
Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, such weapons
made missions seem accomplishable, only for
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us to find that quick victory was a shimmering
mirage. Short-term kinetic effects like “body
counts” and “shock and awe,” we learned, are not
in themselves sufficient to achieve lasting success
in modern conflicts. Indeed, they can actually be
harmful if they distract us from modern war’s
most significant components, its political and
moral aspects.
Technology’s primacy is most evident in budgetary decisions. The U.S. Army is currently set
to downsize more than the technology-based Air
Force and Navy.33 Of the categories of military
spending, only the procurement budget is projected to grow over the next three years.34 Most
of this growing budget is going to high-dollar,
“gee-whiz” weapons such as jet fighters, missiles,
submarines, and destroyers—weapons that have
only marginally influenced battlefield outcomes
during the last 50 years.35
Our Army is not immune to technology’s sirens’
song. We are, for example, spending billions on
November-December 2013

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