Editorial: A Science-Fiction Army

Editorial: A Science-Fiction Army
New York Times 03/31/05
c. 2005 New York Times Company

One frustrating thing about futuristic weapons is that the future does not always turn out the way people expected at the start of the decades it takes to design, develop and produce them. As a result, America's armed forces too often end up with enormous shares of their overall budgets committed to expensive toys that have little practical combat use - at the expense of more prosaic but real needs like enlistment bonuses or better armor for Humvees exposed to rocket-propelled grenades.

That sorry pattern now threatens to play itself out over the Army's stubborn commitment to the ultra-high-technology complex of weapons, robots and communications networks known collectively as Future Combat Systems. The original vision of a light and highly mobile force that could do with less armor because it would have more advanced information about enemy movements is more suitable to battles against recognizable, conventional forces on relatively open terrain than in the new world ushered in by 9/11 and the war in Iraq.

The United States entered that era with Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon wedded to the concept of deploying military forces rapidly, winning swiftly with technological wizardry and then departing just as rapidly. Instead, the Iraq war has turned into an indefinitely prolonged campaign against hit-and-run insurgents who melt in and out of cities and villages and fire rocket-propelled grenades that make armored vehicles a life-and-death need. This kind of combat seems far more likely to characterize America's wars than set-piece battles like those of the 1991 Gulf war or the first three weeks of the Iraq invasion. The Army needs more armor, not less. Greater mobility and highly advanced radio networks are fine, but not at the cost of leaving American soldiers more exposed to lethal dangers.

In addition, the Future Combat program depends on unacceptably expensive technologies so experimental that the Army is having trouble making them work.

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It is worrysome that the battlefield is changing. I don't believe anybody is adverse to trying to address that issue. However, traditional armies still exist. We have the dual threat of terrorist organizations, and conventional armies. We must find a way to successfully combat both types of enemy forces. We should also keep in mind that if we never invest in new technologies, we will never discover innovations, we will never learn different solutions to our problems. Instead we will be stuck solving the old problems, the same old way - with soldiers' lives.