A defense of military transformation.

Rumsfeld's War by Tom Donnelly, Weekly Standard

For the past 15 years, big thinkers and strategists have observed that the application of information technologies had made businesses more efficient and effective. Why couldn't similar efficiencies and increases in battlefield effectiveness be wrung from military forces which, after all, were troglodytic expressions of the Industrial Age? Heavily armored ground forces, in particular, were too ponderous and therefore vulnerable in the emerging age of "netwar" with al Qaeda and spectacularly "enabled" leaders like Osama bin Laden. And, as Rumsfeld told the troops in Kuwait, armored vehicles still get blown up anyway.

Whatever genuine wisdom was resident in these observations was long ago smothered by two more traditional impulses: air-power theory and number-crunching systems analysis. In fact, these two schools of thought actively conspired to capture the flag of transformation. And so it turned out that transformation perfectly fit the programs that the Air Force already had on the books, most importantly and expensively the tactical fighter programs like the F-22 and the Joint Strike Fighter. And to pay for it, the green-eyeshade analysts at the Pentagon looked to cut Army force structure. Like all good captains of industry, they looked to substitute capital for labor.

Those "heavily armored ground forces" of heavy tanks and infantry fighting vehicles have always required an immense logistical tail of soft skinned trucks to keep those tanks running.

This wasn't a problem when fighting the Chinese Communists or the Nazis because the US Army had a well defined front line to put the tanks at and a much safer area behind friendly lines to run the trucks. Note that Patton was stopped when he ran out of fuel and not because of any enemy action.

The same principle of relatively safety for logistics would have applied against the soviets.

But these days nobody stands up against the American front lines for long. Note that more Americans have been lost in Iraq since the Iraqi army disbanded than before it.

So these "heavily armored ground forces" need to be transformed into smaller lighter forces that require fewer convoys to support them as these supply convoys are toughened up to resist attack.

Now unlike former SoD Dick Cheney, Rumsfeld isn't cutting troop numbers, he's increasing the number of available troops by converting as many as 300,000 military jobs to outsourced civilian positions by turning paper shufflers into warfighters.

The problem is that this military transformation isn't going fast enough because we're still wasting too much money on the F/A-22 instead of hardening our exposed assets in a battlefield without a front line.

-HJC