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Bush's Ranch Hands
Friday, August 23, 2002
By David Isby
The Washington Times

David Isby is a Washington-based national security consultant and author



Congress and the Pentagon need to think in terms of developing and funding joint multi-system war-fighting capabilities, not specific systems (even those being built in key congressional districts).

Military transformation, like war itself, is too important to be left to generals. That President Bush summoned high-level civilian and military officials to his Crawford, Texas, ranch on Aug. 21 to discuss military transformation -- rather than the crisis du jour -- shows that its importance reaches beyond the technical concerns of the Pentagon.

Military transformation is shorthand for an emerging series of changes in technology, strategy and society; some going back decades, others accelerated due to the microchip revolution. The victories in Kosovo and Afghanistan demonstrate that these changes -- if implemented by required investments in research, procurement and training -- have revolutionary potential. Precision firepower offers the attraction of low-casualty, low-political cost war-fighting. However, the transformed world can also look much like the old one: Ask the infantry that today occupy hills in Afghanistan or man checkpoints in Kosovo.

There is no more important question a country must ask itself than what is the nature of future war, for the answer will provide guidance to national strategy and shape the armed forces. Investing in the ability to carry out the type of military operations that transformation makes possible does not remove the need to carry out "legacy" military operations: dangerous, costly, painful.

Getting transformation wrong -- through investments, training, even unrealistic expectations -- will be costly in money, in battles lost and people dead. Experts -- always seemingly reactionary -- are aware of both the reasons behind the status quo and of the full set of costs that change entails as well as its potential benefits. Change that looks good in the newspapers has often proved useless on the battlefield.
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2002 © The Washington Times.

Dan