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Prediction is hazardous, especially about the future.

—DANISH SAYING COMMONLY ATTRIBUTED TO NIELS BOHR

Humans are notoriously bad at predicting the future. Especially (or at least equally) bad are those deemed to be “experts” in their given field.³ The fact that many technophilic defense scholars predict the pace of future war will approach hyper-speeds should lead us to pause and question that consensus. History provides several examples of eerily similar predictions gone terribly wrong, where the employment of revolutionary technologies has indeed accelerated the speed of tactical maneuvers but done little to eliminate the fog and friction of war at operational and strategic levels—and in most cases has even served to prolong major wars. To illustrate this historical consistency, we begin with the rise of Napoleonic warfare and the evolution of modern Western strategic thought.

Napoleon’s military campaigns changed forever the way Western militaries understood the utility of speed. Napoleonic maneuver turned the largely attrition-based strategy of previous eras on its head, replacing it with an annihilation-based strategy noted for rapid battlefield maneuvers, isolation of an enemy’s fielded force, the decisive destruction of that force, and the ability of political leaders rapidly to translate military success into political effect.⁴ These beliefs were subsequently codified by Baron de Jomini in a work that Napoleon allegedly claimed disclosed his closest military secrets.⁵ A cottage industry was built upon Jomini’s principles of war, giving birth to an idealized form of war.⁶ The subsequent study of Napoleonic strategy drove both American Civil War and World War I military strategists to believe speed and maneuver on the battlefield offered the key to rapid political victory. They were tragically wrong. In both these wars, initial battlefield successes went to the side demonstrating boldness and swift action, but tactical speed gave way to operational pace, and both wars turned into bloody, multi-year affairs favoring the protagonist that could more effectively translate its industrial base and population into combat power. Although Jomini and Napoleon stressed speed in war, the operationalization of their theories produced military stalemate.

Before the outbreak of World War I, French politician Emile Driant concluded that new technologies and concepts would ensure that “the first great battle of the war will decide the whole war, and wars will be short.”⁷ Around that idea formed what would later be known as “the cult of the offensive,” a consensus of military thought that coalesced around predictions of short, high-intensity wars of maneuver and the imagined power of offensive weaponry. Military commanders of the time argued that once war was imminent, it became an operational imperative to mobilize and deploy military force before their opponents, as a decisive first blow would alter the entire trajectory of the overall war. This belief led to a complete upending of civil–military relations, with the military declaring that any delay in the political decision to engage in war would spell utter doom. The manifestation of these beliefs was a rigid “war by timetable,” in which military commanders pressured political leaders to make their decision to go to war early and then step aside to allow the military to translate the combat potential of their nations efficiently into tangible combat power.⁸ Speed was essential, so sweeping aside prewar political dialogue saved much-needed time to launch the first strike at the enemy. Obsessed with Napoleonic maneuver and the quest for a perfect annihilation strategy, strategists at the time of World War I failed to learn from previous case studies of the American Civil War and the Boer War, both of which pointed to technology’s greater impact on the defensive rather than the offensive aspects of war.⁹ Instead, a fascination with emerging technology and the “need for speed” cut short necessary political dialogue, mobilized alliances, and set the world on the path to a multi-year war of attrition.

Similarly, as World War II began, both Allied and Axis military leaders believed innovative technologies afforded them advantages and—when employed correctly—the possibility of a short conflict. The rapid evolution of armor and aircraft technologies defined the era, with both holding the promise of a speedy resolution to conflict. For the Germans, armored units (augmented by tactical airpower) would be used to pierce the static defenses prevalent during World War I and drive deep into the heart of the enemy to achieve success via lightning war. While armored units and blitzkrieg tactics enjoyed initial success, the operational shift to a strategy of defense in depth slowly undercut their effectiveness. Allied strategists, by contrast, put their faith in air power and the idea that “the bomber will always get through”—an idea originating in Britain’s fear of German air power but later transformed into confidence in its own abilities. Air power allowed belligerents to directly target the enemy’s domestic populations in the hope of bringing the horror to their doorsteps and driving them to demand an end to the war.¹⁰ Here again the intended effect of strategic bombing (the capitulation of a population) instead produced a “rally around the flag” effect and steeled the will of those being attacked. Yet again a fascination with emerging technology and a belief in a speedy end to war drove the world into multi-year attrition warfare, costing over 70 million lives. The subsequent involvement of the US in Vietnam would offer yet another painful lesson about technological predictions, the value of tactical speed in determining the outcome of wars, and the all-pervasive “short-war illusion.”

Emerging from World War II an undisputed global superpower, the United States invested mightily in its military to maintain and expand its technological advantages. In the mid-1950s, as it stumbled into the Vietnam War, it did so in the belief that its technologically advanced military would easily defeat a backward communist opponent. Wielding a new technology that gave its infantry the ability to maneuver from the air, the United States demonstrated its awesome technological advantage via coordinated battalion-sized helicopter assaults. The ability to conduct massive bombing campaigns (demonstrated in Operations Linebacker I and II) further reinforced the idea that well-equipped soldiers would make short work of communist peasants. The Vietnam War also showcased the use of massive sensor systems, codenamed Operation Igloo White, building a virtual fence between North and South Vietnam and throughout southeastern Laos. Rather than face these technologies head on, North Vietnamese forces simply shifted their operational and strategic approaches, refusing to meet the American forces in set-piece battles, engaging in a campaign of guerrilla and unconventional war, and choosing a protracted strategy designed to sap the political will of the American populace. The North Vietnamese, unable to achieve the tactical speed of US forces, instead relied upon time as their ally, knowing the support of the American people could not keep pace with their own sustained domestic support. It was a strategy that would cost lives but ultimately deliver success. Yet again, despite the incredible technological advantage the United States maintained throughout the war, these revolutionary new technologies did little to bring the war to a conclusion. US Vietnam strategists had once again mistakenly chosen tactical speed as the key to victory over the primacy of sustainable operational and strategic pace. Nearly two decades after entering Vietnam, the United States was forced into stalemate.

The promise of technology-shortening wars, in the eyes of many, bore fruit in the 1991 Gulf War. Here the United States (leading a coalition with thirty-four other countries) demonstrated immense technological prowess, combining stealth with precision-guided munitions to stun, disorient, and annihilate an Iraqi army deemed—at the time—one of the world’s best. On the heels of a five-week air power campaign, ground forces expelled Iraqi forces from Kuwait in under 100 hours. The conduct of the conflict was hailed as the realization of a new, technologically enabled “strategic paralysis” theory of warfare, developed and advocated by Air Force strategists John Warden and John Boyd.¹¹ At first glance, this appeared to represent the success of technology’s full impact on war and a template for future wars. History would provide an opportunity to test that hypothesis as the United States led a second invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Little had changed in terms of the technological disparity between the Western coalition and Iraqi forces (although many argue Western quantitative and qualitative advantages were greater in 2003), but this time the political objective called for regime change rather than the more limited aims sought in 1991. This Rapid Dominance strategy, articulated in 1996 by Harlan Ullman and James Wade, suggested a revolutionary change was afoot, offering the potential to achieve strategic aims in minimal time. In their own words:

Perhaps for the first time in years, the confluence of strategy, technology, and the genuine quest for innovation has the potential for revolutionary change. We envisage Rapid Dominance as the possible military expression, vanguard, and extension of this potential for revolutionary change. The strategic centers of gravity on which Rapid Dominance concentrate, modified by the uniquely American ability to integrate all of this, are these junctures of strategy, technology, and innovation which are focused on the goal of affecting and shaping the will of the adversary. The goal of Rapid Dominance will be to destroy or so confound the will to resist that an adversary will have no alternative except to accept our strategic aims and military objectives.¹²

Despite the “shock and awe” campaign in which overwhelming military power was unleashed to achieve a rapid strategic victory, the Western forces were instead confronted with another multi-year endeavor. Following an overwhelming air power display, ground forces raced toward Baghdad, destroying Iraqi units as they went. In less than three weeks Baghdad fell, and it seemed technology had—once again—won the day in relatively scant time. But the declaration of “mission success” was premature, as Iraqi resistance to Western occupation grew and insurgency blossomed. Now, nearly two decades later, Western military practitioners are still struggling to extricate forces from the Middle East, and defense scholars are still struggling to explain why this is the case. Despite an immeasurable technological advantage, the promise of a short war once again proved a fantasy.

How could defense scholars and military strategists have gotten it so wrong on so many important accounts? How have technologies destined to shorten wars lengthened them instead? In his seminal 1987 work Strategy, Edward Luttwak postulated that the whole realm of military strategy is “pervaded by a paradoxical logic” that “tends to reward paradoxical conduct while confounding straightforwardly logical action.”¹³ He also suggests that this same paradoxical logic applies to technology and its perceived utility at the start of war. Specifically, he describes “the relationship (inevitably paradoxical) between the very success of new devices and their eventual failure.”¹⁴ The driving reason behind this is the existence of a creative, thinking opponent who will direct time and resources to the development of countermeasures against the most effective weapon systems. For instance, the two technologies most likely to accelerate the end of World War I were the railroad and rifled artillery. The former promised commanders the ability to move entire units rapidly over miles of terrain to outmaneuver, outflank, and eventually annihilate an opposing military force. Yet planners discovered that sabotage often delayed movements, and to prevent this they needed to devote combat forces to the protection of these lines (thus diminishing their power projection capabilities). Similarly artillery promised to rain steel on the opponent’s massed infantry units, allowing one’s own force to punch through any defensive attempt and attain battlefield victory. Instead this “rain of steel” drove the infantry to dig deep defensive trenches in response, virtually turning any battlefield maneuver attempts into suicidal exercises. The armor and air power of World War II, and the heliborne forces of Vietnam, suffered similar fates.

As we enter the third decade of the twenty-first century, a familiar refrain echoes through the halls of security-minded think tanks and Western military commands. It is the same refrain that has driven militaries across time to overestimate the technologies of their respective era and rush headlong into tragedy under the false notion that a speedy first attack would deliver the decisive blow needed to bring war to an end. Believing they were operating “at the speed of relevance,”¹⁵ technology-enamored leaders drove their countries into war at the speed of stupidity.