Gazing over a battlefield strewn with thousands of corpses and moaning wounded, Napoleon muttered to his shocked aides, "Soldiers are meant to die."
Fast forward more than 150 years, to 1970, when U.S. Army Gen. William Westmoreland said: "On the battlefield of the future, enemy forces will be located, tracked and targeted almost instantaneously through the use of data links, computer-assisted intelligence and automated fire control. . . . I am confident the American people expect this country to take full advantage of its technology--to welcome and applaud the developments that will replace wherever possible the man with the machine."
The current war in the Balkans between NATO forces and Yugoslavia is delivering new lessons about the contrast of these two perspectives--whether wars are won by soldiers dying for a cause or by machines that deliver death and destruction to the enemy.
There obviously is a growing chorus of critics of this latest war, who are pointing out that NATO's bombing of Serbia is doing little to bring about a solution to the Kosovo crisis. In fact, the bombing may be producing the perverse effect of reinforcing Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic, while he uses the war as an excuse to accomplish his goals, such as "cleansing" Kosovo of ethnic Albanians. Critics are saying that ground troops are the only real solution, and the introduction of ground troops will almost certainly entail American casualties, something the Pentagon has done everything to avoid thus far.
This conundrum illustrates a debate that has been going on in the military for more than 20 years over the role of high tech in warfare and U.S. arsenals. This debate goes back to the war in Vietnam, a time before personal computers or even microchips. But the debate has intensified in recent years because of the revolution in weaponry and in our society at large, brought about by new information technologies.
A great many people are puzzled by NATO's strategy, given its poor results. An Albanian Kosovar refugee told the media, "We don't understand NATO's strategy. They are up in the air, while we are dying here on the ground."
There are many historical reasons NATO has chosen its strategy, and these reveal significant frictions between Napoleon's view of war and that of modern U.S. military officers enamored of high tech.
