The Future of War

Some years ago I recommended George and Meredith Friedman’s 1996 book The Future of War: Power, Technology & American World Dominance in the 21^st Century (see my book list in the sidebar under 1996). As I have been doing with other Friedman books lately I have gone back to re-read it, because Friedman is unusually perceptive and I get a great deal of new insights rereading his works.

I am struck again by Friedman’s description of the lifecycle of weapons systems, and in particular his definition of “senile” weapons. A “senile” weapons system is one that still does its intended job, but has grown wildly expensive to make survivable in the current battlefield.

Think, for example, of the bomber. The B52 bomber cost about $14.3 million each 1955, and we could afford to build 744 of them. The current replacement is the B-2 bomber, which carries a much smaller ordinance load (40,000 lbs vs 70,000 lbs), and flies slightly slower, and has a shorter range (6,897 miles vs 8,800 miles with full load) but is so stuffed with sophisticated equipment to help it survive in today’s battlespace that it costs $1.157 billion a plane, and we could only afford to build 21 of them.

Or think of manned fighter planes, whose pilots in evasion can manage at best a 9 g turn (9 gravities before they black out) and mach 1.6 speed (1.6 times the speed of sound), while some of the missiles they are trying to avoid can manage mach 5 and pull 100+ gs in turns.  

Or think of today’s aircraft carriers that still carry about the same number of aircraft as a World War II carrier, but now need a flotilla of five or six of expensive Aegis destroyers ($1.6 billion each) and one or two Virginia class attack submarines ($2.68 billion each) just to protect it. Note that this wildly expensive flotilla of defensive ships adds nothing to the carrier’s offensive power; they just exist to keep the carrier afloat.

Or think of tanks. The best American tank of WW2 was the M26 Pershing tank, at a little over $83,000 a copy and weighing about 40 tons. Today’s equivalent is the M1A2 Abrams tank, at about $6.2 million each, and weighing over 60 tons. Yet the M1A2 tank is essentially the same thing – a mobile artillery piece - that the M26 was.

We are still building aircraft carriers (at $13 billion a copy) even though today’s new intelligent ship-killer cruise missiles, at a few million each, can probably sink them or at least put them out of action, especially if a number are launched at once to saturate the defensive systems. We are proposing to build a new bomber (the B-21), even though the best current anti-air missiles can probably bring it down, and the next generation of missiles will certainly be able to. We are still building tanks, even though a relatively inexpensive anti-tank missile can destroy them. We are spending a fortune building new F-35 fighters that are still limited to 9 g turns because they still carry a human pilot.

Throughout history militaries have been slow to adapt to new technologies, and it seems to me that is what is happening now. Clearly intelligent, unmanned weapons are going to dominate the battlefield of the future. Clearly we as a nation – wealthy as we are – can’t afford to keep building increasingly expensive weapons systems that really don’t project that much more offensive power than their predecessors. Especially since we are already running a half-trillion dollar a year deficit.  It is worth rereading this Friedman book to get some clarity on this issue.