Military article recommendation

 For those interested in military affairs, I recommend an article yesterday from the Modern War Institute site entitled Poor History and Failed Paradigms: Flawed Naval Strategy and Learning the Wrong Lessons for a Century of Conflict.

George and Meredith Friedman, in their excellent 1996 book The Future of War, introduce the concept of "weapon senescence", the idea that as warfare evolves in a measures-countermeasures arms race, some weapons eventually become so hard to protect in the battlespace for their offensive power that they are no longer worth the investment.

Tanks fit this model. Tanks are essentially mobile armored short-range artillery. They were a wonderful weapon when first introduced. Now they can be taken out by a single soldier with a portable anti-tank weapon, or even a cheap drone, so they have added more and more armor and grown to enormous weight (the main US battle tank is over 60 tons) and enormous cost (over $6 million apiece), but still have more or less the same short-range artillery power. In an age with long-range rocket-boosted artillery (up to 300 kilometer range) guided precision shells (2-3 meter precision) and even more precise airplane or drone-delivered precision munitions that can do the same job at far less risk and cost, tanks are simply obsolete, though institutional inertia keeps nations, including the US, investing in them.

The same can probably be said in the navy for wildly-expensive ($20-30 billion, costing around $6 million PER DAY!! to operate) carrier battle groups. Carriers today carry more or less the same number of aircraft, with more or less the same ranges, as carriers in the past, but now require a whole battle group to protect them, and in an age of ship-killing hypersonic missiles and ever-quieter submarines even that may not be enough (we will only know when they are really attacked by a peer opponent).  But again, institutional inertia is still in play and the navy simply can't give up its love of big carriers, whatever the cost.

In fact, large expensive surface warships in general may soon be obsolete, now that they can't hide from satellite coverage and can be taken out from hundreds of miles away by precision missiles from much smaller, less expensive surface ships, from hidden submarines, or even from shore-based sites. Probably we ought to invest far more in submarines and in far more smaller and less expensive surface ships, so that we don't have all our eggs in a few vulnerable big ships.

It is a repeated story in history that winners are always slow to adapt to changes in warfare. After all, they won the last war with the equipment and strategies they used, so why change? Losers have an advantage - they have to face that whatever they tried last time didn't work, so they need to rethink things.