Letters to the Editor, Proceedings

March 2003, pp. 24-25.

"The American Way of War"

(See A. Cebrowski, T. Barnett, pp. 42-43, January 2003 Proceedings)

Brigadier General Michael Vane, U.S. Army, Deputy Chief of Staff, Doctrine Concepts and Strategies, U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command -- Vice Admiral Cebrowski's and Dr. Barnett's article offers compelling insights into how emerging technologies will enable joint tactical actions within the framework of an emerging American way of war.  In doing so, they illuminate important and as yet unanswered strategic questions about how we build our future armed forces.  The article, however, does not adequately account for the full dimensional operational complexity and moral imperatives that they rightly identify as crucial to understanding how our nation fights.  Ultimately, how we conceptualize future warfighting must account for achieving political termination criteria and for achieving military objectives in ways that support U.S. exit strategies.  This is an important dialogue in that the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) is tracking carefully and eager to contribute to.  I would like to take issue with the focus on strike-based destruction, the focus on efficiency versus effectiveness, and the misplaced emphasis on "superempowered individuals."

In  The American Way of War (Indiana University Press, 1978), Russell Weigley characterized America's first 200 years of warfighting as being dominated by attrition and intense destruction.  Perhaps the advent of new capabilities decreases the need for attrition, but the defeat mechanism of destruction appears dominant in the article.  Destruction alone as a defeat mechanism has not proven to be wholly successful at achieving strategic ends, nor is it likely to be tolerated by an increasingly altruistic U.S. public.  Nonattrition and nonlethal effects will be more important in the future and are not always as amenable to precision solutions.  Moreover, network-centric, precise, and fast warfare is not distinctly American; we will not be the only country to ever have the capabilities that underpin this vision.

Precision clearly offers battlefield benefits, but it is important to understand its limitations.  The battle of Tora Bora is a testament to the limitations of precision capabilities and a cautionary tale for a military in danger of confusing efficiency for effectiveness.  The seizure or killing of Osama bin Laden was a precise strategic objective we failed to achieve.  In hindsight, we see that other capabilities are needed.  To use the author's cop metaphor, we needed a drag net, and they are inherently imprecise and inefficient operations.  Moreover, urban and complex terrain create daunting challenges to precision, particularly when a single operation includes tasks from the full range of military operations, such as those of Operation Just Cause and those likely to exist in any operation in Baghdad.

The authors' state that the ultimate attribute of the emerging way of war is the super empowerment of the war fighter and that the hallmark of success will be joint tactical operations.  Joint tactical action is an exciting prospect, but the real excitement is the potential to integrate the efforts of hundreds and thousands of air, sea, land and space warfighters and synchronize unit operations across and entire theater, or even globally to achieve strategic effects.  As we develop future strategic and operational level organization, it appears clear that battle management and logistics will be joint tasks, requiring joint units.  So too are theater air and missile defense and strategic mobility.  As high-speed as joint tactical action will be, it pales in comparison to the potential improvements in the operational art and the ability of the United States to plan and execute complex global campaigns.

We also must be careful not to overemphasize the impact of individual combatants.  It is a mistake to characterize al Qaeda as merely a group of individuals.  Al Qaeda is a system of systems that will require the full resources of the United States to defeat.  They can only be defeated through the execution of a sustained campaign that includes widely distributed, fully integrated tactical actions.  Opportunities to achieve decisive effects will be fleeting, and we must capable of responding with precision and mass.

Is there a uniquely American way of war emerging?  It is a question worthy of a detailed study, and the authors have offered some valuable insights focused on the tactical level.  As we work our way through joint transformation, the answers we come up with will drive the organization of our armed forces for years to come.  It is important that we achieve a balanced force, ready to realize the potential of technology in ways that meet the demands of the American people.