Debunking future warfare

Carlton Meyer gives a wonderful critique of the nonsense governing the U.S. military's "Future Combat systems". Namely that the military leadership is wasting billions of dollars on a concept that hasn't been proven to be effective, and that there are much more effective alternatives.

For those who don't know, the Future Combat Systems(FCS), is a project in the works that is designed to "modernize" America's armed forces with the technology it will need to fight wars of the future. The concept lacks any real achievable goals, and simply revolves around developing extremely complex and super-high tech weaponry. Meyer argues against this approach, instead advocating that simple and more low-tech upgrades are more than enough to sustain the military's future capabilities. He explains how such an approach has been successfully adopted by the Swedish military.

I myself have previously commented on the Pentagon's obsession with high technology. However, many defenders of the FCS and other high-tech projects usually try to deflect critics by labeling them of a "Luddite" persuation. Yet this is a strawman.

The argument is not that technology doesn't have a place on the battlefield, but that it must be used within reasonable limits. Not to mention that there's much debate about whether or not the military actually needs all these high-tech gadgets on the battlefield.

Retired Maj. Gen. Robert Scales, president of the Army War College, probably explained it best in his testimony to the House Armed Services Committee:

Technology is useful...But machines alone will never be decisive. … The tools most useful in this new war are low-tech and manpower-intensive … night raids, ambushes, roving patrols mounted and dismounted, as well as reconstruction, civic action, and medial contact teams. The enemy will be located not by satellites and [drones] but by patient intelligence work, back alley payoffs, collected information from captured documents, and threats of one-way vacations to Cuba. … Buried in an avalanche of information, commanders still confront the problem of trying to understand the enemy's intention and his will to fight.

In other words, wars of the future will still have to follow the same common sense that governed wars of the past. The notion that new technologies are going to make decisive "breakthroughs" in the nature of warfare is nothing but hogwash!