Stardate 20020816.1708

(On Screen): I wrote an extended discussion a few days ago describing how a modern army works by pushing decisions down as far as possible. Men and women at every level of the hierarchy are given assignments instead of orders, and are expected to use considerable judgment and initiative to figure out how to accomplish them, rather than slavishly doing what they've been told to do. I pointed out that such a style of warfare was particularly suited to the American temperament because we also run our society and government and economy that way.

Perry de Havilland doesn't agree. He concentrates on the primary advantage that the US has being its ability and willingness to spend immense amounts of money in order to consume materiel to win wars instead of risking and expending its men.

The US military does not achieve its results as Steven Den Beste suggests, by empowering individual soldiers and harnessing their brains and initiative more than any number of armies I could mention, but rather it achieves results by maximising its true advantages: firstly a huge economy and therefore sheer firepower (it can afford to shoot more bullets/drop more bombs) and secondly, its advanced technology (it can make its aeroplanes hard to shoot down and therefore safely drop smart bombs on people they don't like from 20,000 feet). In simply wins by dumping large numbers of expensive smart bombs and cruise missiles on the enemy where it hurts most, followed by precise massed artillery if required. The job of America's infantry and tank jockeys is to pick their way through the crater pocked remnants to what gets left over after the aerial (and maybe artillery) bombardment. Factor out the high tech long range bombardment capabilities, which is unique in the world at the moment, and whilst the US army is a fine one, it is not particularly exceptional in the way it fights compared to many other armies.

I'm afraid that Perry misses the point. That is what we do, but it isn't simple, and it can't work without the kind of initiative I was talking about.

It can seem as if we have won the last couple of wars we've fought by smothering our opponents with huge quantities of precision munitions, but actually making that work is much harder than it seems. It seems easy, but that's because we're very good at it.

What he's seeing is the result of successful execution of what's known as "combined arms operations". What this means is that military assets of many radically different kinds will cooperate closely to deal with specific tactical problems, so as to eliminate them as efficiently and thoroughly as possible in a short amount of time. When it runs smoothly, it can seem effortless, and what gets observed is that all enemy concentrations get bombed or shelled instead of attacked on the ground.

But how did the air units know where to drop their bombs? How does the artillery know where to shoot? From five kilometers up or 15 kilometers away, you see nothing. They're striking map coordinates, not enemies. They're hitting what they've been told to hit. (And they're very good at it.)

Perry says that the job of our infantry is to "pick their way through the crater pocked remnants to what gets left over". Actually, that's what they do after they've done their job. Their real job is to control all that firepower and decide where it will hit. They are not dodging a fight, that is the way they fight. They don't fight with rifles and tank guns, they fight with radios. (They can also fight with rifles and tank guns if they need to, but this way is better.)

And that's possible because the effective structure of command in the US military is not a downward-directed tree, but a heavily cross-branched network. A front line lieutenant or even a sergeant can initiate an action which results in orders being sent to an entire bomber section to tell it to strike a certain location. The initial action isn't an order, exactly, but it amounts to it. Army sergeants are being permitted to decide where Air Force colonels are told to put their munitions. (And American Special Forces sergeants did a lot of that in Afghanistan.)

And those requests/orders don't have to flow all the way up and back down again through the chain of command. The guy on the ground who needs an attack actually puts the map coordinate into a computer he carries, and those coordinates are transmitted to the bomber whose guidance computer then programs its bombs accordingly. In other words, that sergeant really is controlling the weapon directly. (This flows through a command asset whose job is to handle this coordination.)

Though I said that I thought the US was among the best at this, I didn't mean to imply that no one else does it at all, or that any who try are all much worse at it than we are.

But it's true that many are not as good at it, because they don't have the technological ability to do it. One reason why we trust high altitude bombers to make precision attacks within half a kilometer or less of friendly units is because, first, we have heavy high altitude bombers (no-one in Europe does) and second because the munitions they're dropping are accurate enough so that they'll actually hit what they're supposed to nearly all of the time. You have to have those kinds of te