USS Clueless Stardate 20010802.1117

  USS Clueless

             Voyages of a restless mind

Main:
normal
long
no graphics

Contact
Log archives
Best log entries
Other articles

Site Search

Stardate 20010802.1117 (On Screen): The military is an ecology. That sounds strange but it really is true. Is a given animal well adapted? There's no way of knowing without knowing about the environment in which it lives. A camel is a superb desert creature but would perish in days in the Artic. Equally with weapons: when you look at a weapon, it's impossible to answer the question of whether that weapon is good one. Good for which army under what circumstances? A weapon which will massively benefit one army may be totally useless to another.

The reason is that modern warfare isn't won by weapons; it's won by logistics. An artillery piece without ammunition is a useless tube of steel. A tank without fuel is a statue. "Logistics" refers to the problem of getting adequate supplies to the front, which sounds easy and isn't. Anyone can field an army, but a modern army without supplies is useless, and modern warfare consumes supplies at a ferocious rate. The miracle of Operation Desert Storm wasn't that we were able to field six divisions or that they did as well as they did, but that we were able to keep them supplied with food, water, fuel and ammunition. But while those divisions only represented about a third of our field strength, it took every bit of logistics support we had, which is worrisome. The only National Guard units which were called up for Desert Storm were transportation units. This is known as the "tooth-to-tail" problem, and a modern army requires a huge tail for every tooth. To field an infantry division of 18,000 men it can take upwards of 100,000 men behind the line (extending all the way back to the mother country) moving supplies and performing other support functions and coordinating everything. And behind that there may be a million civilians working on farms or in factories or driving trucks or operating trains. That's why it is a truism that "amateurs discuss tactics, but professionals discuss logistics." If you've got supply and your enemy doesn't, strategy and tactics become simple.

Is the new Iranian anti-armor missile a good weapon? Probably not. One reason is that high tech weapons like this can't be produced on an as-needed basis. They simply take too long; if you go to war, you fight with what you have, which means you have to stockpile them ahead of time. That is enormously expensive. And once you've stockpiled them, you have to maintain them so that they're still useful when you finally need them. The US can afford to do this, but Iran can't. If this missile is as good as they claim it is (about which I have my doubts) then Iran would have to build and maintain several hundred of them before they became militarily significant, and if they try to do this they will either destroy their economy or will starve the rest of their military.

Also, weapons like this are vulnerable. The backbone of US military doctrine since World War II has been to achieve and maintain air supremacy in any theater where US ground forces operate. This grants you an enormous advantage: you can scout easily and see where your enemy's forces are while preventing him from doing the same to you; you can attack his logistics while keeping your own safe, and you can launch air attacks against his ground forces while keeping your own safe. Desert Storm represented the ultimate expression of this tactic and the lopsided casualty figures speak for themselves.

That's a rich man's war. It's a way of spending money to save soldier's lives. The US is willing to do this and is one of the few countries capable of doing so. In WWII the Germans learned that their forces would always be smothered by artillery fire during any operation on an American front, because the Americans were willing and able to expend immense amounts of artillery munitions in an effort to save American soldiers. German artillery was just as good as American artillery but never had the amount of ammunition that American artillery had.

Which brings up the fact that a high tech anti-armor missile is a rich man's weapon. The US is quite willing to fire million dollar missiles to take out half-million-dollar tanks (with some missiles not hitting). Iran doesn't have those kinds of resources. If the US in WWII was fighting a rich man's war, then the USSR was using the opposite tactic. For the USSR supplies were dear but men were cheap, so they used tactics which were effective but which resulted in huge casualties to the Red Army. They won against the Germans while taking five casualties for every one they inflicted on the Germans, but that's because they could afford to sustain losses like that and the Germans could not. Equally, the US won against the Germans because the US could afford to spend three times the supply per soldier.

If the Iranians build these missiles they'll have to work out how to protect them against weeks of air assault before any opportunity arises to use them against ground attack. (That's true against Israel, too.) So they have to accept that they'll lose perhaps three quarters of their supply of these missiles without firing them, and that the remaining missiles won't have a 100% success rate. Are they willing or even capable of spending that kind of money on an anti-armor defense? Not a chance. Or are they willing and able to field an air force capable of defending these missiles on the ground? Unlikely. Absent that, these weapons become like the Iraqi Scuds: an annoyance but not militarily significant.

I

Captured by MemoWeb from http://denbeste.nu/entries/00000413.shtml on 9/16/2004