Robert Knisely is a former Marine. He was a senior federal official and deputy director of Vice President Al Gore's Reinventing Government project. During his 30-year career (including 20 years as a senior executive), he held positions with seven Cabinet departments, three independent agencies, a regulatory commission and three presidential task forces. He ran an interagency federal program to fund the development of integrated municipal information systems at HUD. He created the Bureau of Transportation Statistics (one of the 15 national statistical agencies) and a departmental program-evaluation office at the Commerce Department. He has served on both sides of presidential transition teams. He is now an adjunct professor at Johns Hopkins University.

Email: robert@knisely.info

Management news in your inbox:
Subscribe to GovManagement Daily

April 3, 2012

Arming to Fight the Wars of Yesteryear

We spend a lot of money to battle threats that no longer exist. We need to refocus on the wars of today and tomorrow.

By Robert Knisely

As warfare evolves, America must evolve with it. Sequestration's across-the-board cuts to the military budget will neither save substantial sums nor maintain our national security. We need to be prepared for the wars of today and tomorrow. We also need to stop funding preparations for the wars of yesteryear. Retired Marine Col. Thomas X. Hammes has shown us how to do both in his book "The Sling and the Stone: on War in the 21st Century."

The history of the Pentagon provides a good example. In July 1938, the Luftwaffe's Hermann Goering said, "I completely lack the bombers capable of round-trip flights to New York with a 4.5-tonne bomb load. I would be extremely happy to possess such a bomber, which would at last stuff the mouth of arrogance across the sea." This "Amerika Bomber" was under development until 1944 — it needed a range of at least 4,000 miles, one-way.

Beginning in 1941, America brought its scattered military headquarters into a single building made of reinforced concrete, using 680,000 tons of sand dredged from the Potomac. Still the world's largest office building, it contains more than 6.6 million square feet of floor area, and two of its seven stories are underground. A 4.5-ton bomb would not have put it out of commission.

In 1957, less than 15 years after the Pentagon's ribbon-cutting, the Soviet Union successfully demonstrated the world's first intercontinental ballistic missile. What could have been easier than aiming an ICBM with a hydrogen-bomb warhead at a huge five-sided building near the east coast of the United States? The Pentagon covers 28.7 acres, has 67 acres of parking, and sits on 280 open acres. From the air, it really stands out.

The Pentagon on September 12, 2001 (Photo: Spaceimaging.com)

But the only successful attack on the Pentagon — the first on a U.S. government facility since the war of 1812 — came on Sept. 11, 2001, exactly 60 years after the Pentagon's groundbreaking. Five men took over an American Airlines jet, flying it into the building's west side, from Dulles Airport — less than 25 miles away. The impact of the plane severely damaged the structure of the building and caused its partial collapse. America's sense of its own invulnerability would never be the same.

In less than a lifetime, state-of-the-art warfare had evolved from the terrifying specter of industrialized countries launching long-distance bombers and intercontinental missiles to suicide attacks by individuals armed with box-cutters.

Hammes' book describes four generations of warfare:

• The first generation employed massed manpower: the Roman legions, the defeated French army at Agincourt, the British redcoats facing American colonists.

• The second generation used massive firepower. Examples include the decisive English archers at Agincourt and the emerging use of machine guns during and after the American Civil War. The increased firepower led to trench warfare, first seen around Petersburg, Virginia, more than a half-century before World War I. The Marines' heavy casualties in the South Pacific in World War II were the result of attacking heavily fortified Japanese defensive positions on islands such as Tarawa and Iwo Jima.

• The third generation of warfare was marked by greatly increased mobility, typified by the German Panzer tanks simply bypassing the heavily fortified Maginot Line and taking Paris in just six weeks. Airpower, whether land- or sea-based, multiplies mobility by focusing rapid concentrations of manpower and firepower.

• The fourth generation is "an evolved form of insurgency," as Hammes put it, that "aims to change an opponent's political position on a matter of national interest." A challenger does not take on an opponent's superior manpower, firepower or mobility directly. America experienced this in Vietnam and more recently on 9/11 and in Afghanistan. It is a potent tool for stateless entities such as al-Qaida. Drones overseas and searching airline passengers at home have been our best defenses so far.

Less than 10 years after "The Sling and the Stone" was published, we may be seeing the emergence of a fifth generation of warfare: computer hacking. Cyberwarfare threatens the complex systems of a modern economy at virtually no cost and also can uncover an enemy's counterstrategies.

America is now well prepared to wage the first three generations of war: We have 10 Army and three Marine active divisions of about 20,000 each. We have 10 aircraft carriers with three more under construction. We have more than 70 submarines, and aircraft by the thousands and thousands. We have about 2,300 M1 Abrams tanks deployed, with another 3,000 in mothballs.

We have also moved on to fourth- and fifth- generation warfare. The Pentagon has created the Distinguished Warfare Medal for drone pilots and cyberwarriors (amid some controversy) and is adding 4,000 people to the its Cyber Command to deal with hacking from abroad — and perhaps to continue "offensive" hacking, as may have been the case with Stuxnet, the virus that helped shut down Iran's nuclear centrifuges.

But we're still prepared for nonexistent threats. We have more than 50,000 troops in Germany (although that number is shrinking) to defend against a Soviet Union that no longer exists. China has exactly one aircraft carrier. No country can challenge our air superiority. About a hundred Russian nuclear submarines are rusting in port on the Kola Peninsula. The Abrams tank is quite vulnerable to improvised explosive devices, which is why it is in limited use today.

A leaner military would be nice; a more focused military is essential. We continue preparations for yesterday's wars in large part because, by law, equipment and supplies for our military must be procured in America. This results in jobs and profits — and political pressures — here at home, and will be hard to change. Despite President Eisenhower's warning about a "military-industrial complex," a half-century later we are paying billions for unnecessary weapons systems and make-work jobs.

In the complex economic and political world of 2013, we certainly cannot afford to waste our resources on wars long gone. We would be far better off with fewer of today's dollars going to the Pentagon and more going toward the triangle of research, infrastructure and education. A stronger America would be better prepared for the warfare of the future.

Copyright 2013, Robert Knisely | All rights reserved