The Baby And The Bath Water: Insights On Desert Storm Argue For Resources To Fund Both Modernization And Readiness

(Washington, D.C.): In an important
op.ed. article in today’s Wall Street
Journal (see href=”index.jsp?section=papers&code=97-D_124at”>the attached),
Stephen Biddle warns that those inclined
to perform major surgery on the Defense
Department budget — whether from within,
on Capitol Hill or through the
recommendations of the National Defense
Panel — risk making serious mistakes if
they draw the wrong conclusions from the
U.S. experience with Operation Desert
Storm.

Biddle, associated with the Institute
for Defense Analysis in Washington and a
professor at the University of North
Carolina, Chapel Hill, expresses
particular concern that either
of two competing analyses of the Gulf War
— if taken in isolation — could result
in American forces ill-equipped to meet
the security challenges of the future. As
he puts it:

“[The first
reflects] most defense planners’
belief that new technology was
chiefly responsible for the Gulf
War’s almost unbelievably low
allied losses. This view
holds that new surveillance, air
defense suppression, stealth and
precision-guidance systems gave
U.S. aircraft total command of
the skies; and that thermal
sights, compound armor and
depleted uranium ammunition
allowed allied ground forces to
strike from beyond the range of
out-gunned, out-armored Iraqi
defenders. The lesson, we’re
told, is that continued
technological modernization will
provide similarly spectacular
results in future wars.

“A rival
interpretation holds that Iraqi
shortcomings, not U.S. strengths,
produced the dramatic Gulf War
results. In many cases,
the Iraqis were so incompetent
that they failed to perform such
crucial routine tasks as digging
their tanks in and alerting other
members of their units that an
attack was in progress. As the
political scientist John Mueller
recently put it, ‘The Americans
gave a war and no one showed up.’
If that’s so, then the Gulf War
was less a revolution in military
affairs than the mother of all
military anomalies.”

Biddle observes correctly that the truth
lies, literally, in the middle:
“…U.S. technology doesn’t get all
the credit, but neither do Iraqi
shortcomings. Only the two
working together produced the dramatic
results: New technology enabled
us to exploit Iraqi mistakes with
unprecedented severity.” Biddle goes
on to identify three key lessons: 1)
Critics of high tech weapons systems are
missing the point; even if advanced U.S.
systems did not perform perfectly in
Desert Storm, they did the job when
operated by skilled personnel. 2)
Modernization of U.S. weapons is
important, but so is ensuring the
competence and robustness of the units
that will employ them. And 3) there is an
important synergy between modern, but not
necessarily state-of-the-art, weapon
systems and those utilizing the best
technology available.

The Bottom Line

The Center for Security Policy
welcomes the commonsense arguments
advanced by Stephen Biddle and commends
the Wall Street Journal for
giving them prominent treatment as
Congress completes its deliberations on
the annual defense authorization and
appropriations bills, as the Pentagon
weighs the FY99 budget choices and,
perhaps most importantly, as the National
Defense Panel prepares its breathlessly
awaited recommendations.