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Obsolete? Pilots Face a UAV Future
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Already, though, some are envisioning the end of the Air Force as we know it.
Peter Singer, director of the 21st Century Defense Initiative at the Brookings Institution, one of Washington's oldest and most respected think tanks, predicts a vast array of missions for unmanned craft, from stealth bombing to electronic warfare -- even dogfights.
"It's not just intelligence and bomber pilots who will be replaced with machines," said a recent article by Singer, a campaign adviser on defense policy to President Obama.
"Planning is proceeding on UCAVs, unmanned combat aerial vehicles, which will replace fighter jocks, too." Last manned fighter?
Defense Secretary Robert Gates is among those gazing into the future.
- Well there you have it. I've said again and again that Gates intends to gut the Air Force. Several people have thought I'm crazy. But this is the second major influence leading him in that direction: the promise of UAVs. The first is faith in the theory of fourth-generation warfare, or at least the assumption that nation-state-level warfare is obsolete. These are two very big and, at least where the latter is concerned, dubious assumptions. Are we certain enough in our ability to predict both the future of global conflict and technological development to consciously choose to give up our greatest military advantage, advantages no one else has but many desperately seek? Are we certain enough to give up one of, if not the biggest enabler of U.S. military superiority--i.e. the proven ability to dominate the air domain--in favor of gambling on a very new, largely unproven technology? - on 2009-07-27
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Already, though, some are envisioning the end of the Air Force as we know it.
Peter Singer, director of the 21st Century Defense Initiative at the Brookings Institution, one of Washington's oldest and most respected think tanks, predicts a vast array of missions for unmanned craft, from stealth bombing to electronic warfare -- even dogfights.
"It's not just intelligence and bomber pilots who will be replaced with machines," said a recent article by Singer, a campaign adviser on defense policy to President Obama.
"Planning is proceeding on UCAVs, unmanned combat aerial vehicles, which will replace fighter jocks, too."
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The TX Hammes PowerPoint Challenge (Essay Contest)
A balanced, well-thought reply to Hammes' anti-PowerPoint diatribe. "Starbuck" rightly points out that the real problem is one of poor communication skills, that PowerPoint in and of itself is not the problem.
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Earlier this month, retired Marine Colonel TX Hammes wrote an article in Armed Forces Journal regarding the drawbacks of pervasive PowerPoint use in the military. He challenged readers to compete in an essay contest at AFJ, with a selection of books as the prize.
Col. Hammes' article has gotten quite a reception throughout the blogosphere, with a few sites (Red Team Journal by Adam Elkus, Building Peace by "Reach 364", The Best Defense by Thomas Ricks) posting their own replies.
In the hopes of spurring some conversation on the topic--I'm too into the whole instant gratification thing to wait for the winner to be announced in November--I'm posting my own reply to Col. Hammes.
Essay: Dumb-dumb bullets - July 2009 - Armed Forces Journal
When this is what passes for good analysis of technology by a leader in contemporary military thought...well, let's just say the "dumb-dumb" takes on a whole different meaning.
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Every year, the services spend millions of dollars teaching our people how to think. We invest in everything from war colleges to noncommissioned officer schools. Our senior schools in particular expose our leaders to broad issues and historical insights in an attempt to expose the complex and interactive nature of many of the decisions they will make.
Unfortunately, as soon as they graduate, our people return to a world driven by a tool that is the antithesis of thinking: PowerPoint. Make no mistake, PowerPoint is not a neutral tool — it is actively hostile to thoughtful decision-making. It has fundamentally changed our culture by altering the expectations of who makes decisions, what decisions they make and how they make them. While this may seem to be a sweeping generalization, I think a brief examination of the impact of PowerPoint will support this statement.
COIN lies we love
Armed Forces Journal, 29 April 2009
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When it comes to fighting terrorists and counterinsurgency warfare, we have less intellectual integrity than Bernie Madoff had financial integrity. Priding ourselves on our educational credentials and career successes, we engage in comforting lies and bureaucratic superstitions so absurd that a shaman or witch doctor would only shake his head.
We believe what we choose to believe, not what the evidence tells us. We have no time for evidence, since facts confound us damnably.
- A grood critique of the "new conventional wisdom" of the U.S. community with regards to counterinsurgency. But the more damning critique is of patterns of thought in the defense community as an epistemic culture--i.e. a knowledge-producing culture. Sloppy thinking and lack of empirical rigor is not just a problem for COIN, but is a problem I've observed again and again, especially where qualitative and/or historical work is concerned. In many ways, Peters' own recommendation for how history should be used is also an example of the kind of sloppiness that leads to the very notions he critiques. - on 2009-04-30
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Add Sticky NoteInstead of dissembling by citing a few preferred case studies that we distort to our own ends, we should search for confirmatory evidence from 3,000 years of history of revolutions, insurgencies and terrorism.
- No! This is NOT how to use history. 1) It's unrealistic to think you can meaningfully search 3,000 years of history. 2) To try at all requires treating secondary sources as promary sources, which a common problem for military theorists. 3) The methodological presentism of reading past conflicts through the lens of modern notions of counterinsurgency is problematic at best. 4) Searching for "confirmatory" evidence is NOT valid research design. Falsification should be the goal, not confirmation. Ultimately, while Peters is correct that the defense community is often plagued by sloppy thinking, he offers us no way out of that pattern. Instead, he offers more of the same kind of sloppy thinking that leads to the kinds of ridiculous ideas that he is criticizing here! - on 2009-04-30
Soldiers in the Blogosphere: Would you use "interactive" FMs?
Another idea for using new media for purposes of military knowledge formation, in this cases shortening the lessons learned, doctrine development loop.
Thoughts on the “New Media” (Updated) (SWJ Blog)
There is some excellent material over at the Small Wars Journal blog about perceptions of the value of new media for the lessons learned process. I've been thinking of writing a paper on this very topic, but focused on "military knowledge formation" more generally. This post, linked PDF, and other posts that link to and comment on it, will all be great material for that.
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“The New Media: Ricks cited a discussion on Small Wars Journal once and also cited some things on PlatoonLeader.org but never considered the way in which the new media has revolutionized the lessons learned process in the U.S. military. (Forget Abu Muqawama, though, because this lowly blog started around the same time as the surge.) Instead of just feeding information to the Center for Army Lessons Learned and waiting for lessons to be disseminated, junior officers are now debating what works and what doesn't on closed internet fora -- such as PlatoonLeader and CompanyCommand -- and open fora, such as the discussion threads on Small Wars Journal. The effect of the new media on the junior officers fighting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan was left curiously unexplored by Ricks, now a famous blogger himself.”
A Balanced Strategy
If by "balanced" you mean completely unbalanced, then yes, this is a balanced strategy.
Critical systems thinking
I recently came across a reference to "Critical Systems Thinking" in a blog comment by a professor at the Army's Command and General Staff College. Having not heard the term before, I looked it up. Here's a link to the Wikipedia entry about CST. Definitely interesting and worth some more reading.
U.S. Military: The War Within
Like Charles Dunlap, Jr., Mr. Weinberger criticizes SecDef Gate's short-sighted policies of seeing Iraq, Afghanistan, and COIN as the basis upon which to plan future forces, with the result that the Air Force is being systematically ignored, even slowly dismantled. Dunlap cites this piece by Weinberger. Both make very strong arguments about what's wrong with the dominant assumptions that underlay current DoD policies.
Forget the lessons of Iraq
The most recent piece by Charles Dunlap, Jr. He argues that the currently dominant thinking of what he calls the "New Establishment"-i.e. that counterinsurgency will be the main task of U.S. forces in the future--is both wrong and dangerous. Training and equipping our forces under these false assumptions, he says, will leave us unprepared should we find ourselves in a more traditional, high-intensity, state-on-state conflict, a possibility that he sees as far more likely than most in the "New Establishment" would like to admit. A great article, superbly argues and well-reasoned, that should be required reading right now, especially in the face of the "New Establishment's" attempts to eliminate or seriously cut practically every major weapon system currently in development.
How to do Defense, When the Money's Gone
This has been out for a while but I just came across it recently. John Robb uses the occasion of financial crisis to promote his theory of global conflict. It's presented under the guise of telling us what the security implications of a global depression will be. But, par for the course for military theorists like Robb and others, his lessons about what the new situation will bring are actually the same old lessons he's presented before--i.e. there's nothing unique to global depression here, just the same stuff he's been preaching for years. It's the continuation of a patter I noticed long ago: Everything that happens seems to confirm his theory.
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