Anyone paying sober attention to the invasion of Ukraine has witnessed the resurgent power of mass over finesse. Even when elegant, expensive weaponry works well, as in the air-defense realm, its utility is constrained by staggering cost differentials. Employing a million-dollar missile against a fifty-dollar drone is unsustainable. In a war of even greater scope, such lopsided expenditures would shatter budgets as munitions stockpiles dwindled. If there is one description that definitely does not apply to the current American way of war, it is “cost-effective.” Indeed, the most appropriate term for our approach to general war or even neo-colonial dustups (“Iraqistan”) would be “wishful-thinking warfare.”
Whether evaluating the follies of an individual or the behavior of a complex institution, never underestimate the seductive power of self-delusion and the ability of both lost souls and powerful decision-makers to perceive reality in the most convenient and comforting terms.
For over three decades, we have lied to ourselves about:
The nature and motivation of our enemies. For more than a generation, the U.S. government, no matter the party in power, insisted that religious faith had nothing to do with our religious-zealot enemies, their professed purposes, the alacrity with which they sacrificed their lives, and the tenacity of a foe who insisted that—for him, at least—our recent wars were religious endeavors indeed, and the duty of believers. How could we possibly have won when we were afraid even to admit who our enemies were?
The likely duration of future wars. When it became obvious, by the late twentieth century, that the weapons defense contractors wanted to sell us and, ambitious officers and I-want-my-slice politicians were eager to buy––could not be purchased, supported or rearmed in sufficient numbers to survive, let alone win, a long war, we simply declared that future wars would be short (we’ve already written off our two decades in Iraqistan as irrelevant).
We denied the enduring need for deep reserves of raw destructive power. Exemplified by the artillery corps’ anti-historical infatuation with limited numbers of low-yield precision munitions (and the ever-appealing fantasy of minimally destructive war), we forgot what it takes to win existential strategic conflicts (hint: It’s more than striking a few nodes on an electrical grid or blocking a dictator’s favorite porn site). Now, in the farm-team contest in Ukraine, NATO is running out of artillery shells; our own reserve stocks have revealed themselves as alarmingly shallow; and Vladimir Putin’s will to win through massive destruction is furthered by huge volumes of cheap shells available to his otherwise-shabby forces. The wastelands of eastern Ukraine are but a mild preview of what it could take to prevail on future battlefields, of what a full-up war would look like, once our sleek new toys broke down or proved more vulnerable than their peacetime champions promised.
We also shy from the human reality that fighting to win takes a lot of merciless killing—but our alternate-universe conviction that good manners are the key to victory is too complex and ingrained to address here.
On-the-ground reality throughout history tells us that poor-but-smart enemies learn to undo the initial advantages of self-satisfied, wealthy opponents. What made the funding-starved U.S. Army and Navy of the 1930s the foundation of global victory in World War II was poverty: When generals and admirals can’t spend, they are forced to think.
We are, and likely will remain, prisoners of our wealth. We have begun to acknowledge the threat from drones (a threat noted decades ago by outliers in our defense community and dismissed by the establishment), and we may even accept, grudgingly, the need for brute force sustained beyond the enemy’s ability to sustain. But we will never field truly economical counter-weapons—not even when we can walk into a hobby shop and buy a reliable weapons platform for less than our monthly smartphone bill.
We will settle on sloppy compromises that guarantee continued profits for defense contractors (who have dictated our “big war” doctrine since Elvis returned from Germany). Note that every war or war-by-another-name we’ve fought in that period has been, at best, a draw—and usually a humiliating loss.
Our military will contribute by layering on “must-have” specifications that, mysteriously, our enemies do not seem to require. We will turn a fifty-dollar drone into, at least, a fifty-thousand-dollar drone: At present, there is no serious consistency for cost-effective, appropriate weapons and countermeasures. Beyond all the silk-lined hairshirt wailing and whining, there is still a deep-down conviction that the money will never really run out, that we can afford to pretend that future wars will accommodate us. For example, we continue to insist on the lunatic stance that our aircraft carriers will prove survivable in a general war, when the reality is that our surface fleet will be bottled up by fear as completely as was the German navy after the tragicomedy of Jutland.
We are splendid in our largesse and suicidal in our complacency.
