High-Tech Warfare Is a Losing Proposition

First, NATO forces were configured in the 1970s and 1980s to counter the armies of the Warsaw Pact in Western Europe, not to fight the kind of war NATO is now waging in the Balkans. In the mid-1980s, the Warsaw Pact had an overwhelming numerical superiority in weapons, such as its 46,230 battle tanks to NATO's 17,730. The U.S. always claimed that it might be forced to use nuclear weapons because of this numerical imbalance in the event of a Warsaw Pact attack against Western Europe, but few people took this seriously, as nuclear weapons would destroy the very places NATO was sworn to protect.

Because of this, NATO instead pursued a policy of "quality over quantity" by investing in "smart" weapons that would destroy Soviet and Warsaw Pact forces deep behind their lines. These weapons included cruise missiles, precision-guided "submunitions" (missiles that deploy multiple homing warheads) and "fire and forget" projectiles that would seek out their targets after release. This trend gave birth to an entire generation of "over the horizon" weapons using distant remote sensing of targets, sensors on-board munitions and weapons guided by satellites, as well as laser-guided bombs and stealth aircraft.

The era of "attrition warfare," such as that practiced during World War II, in which soldiers and armor engage the enemy directly, was replaced with "maneuver warfare," a model in which opposing forces are held at bay by overwhelming firepower; advanced technology; rapid movement; complex, theater-wide communications; and command and control.

Another reason the U.S. military began to rely on high tech during the last two decades of the Cold War was that military leaders understood that the option of a vast standing army was no longer possible. Not only was a peacetime draft politically infeasible, but demographic changes in the U.S. and Western Europe had dramatically lowered the population of young men who might enlist in military service. Thus high-tech weapons were viewed as "force multipliers," substituting for manpower.

Richard Cooper, director of the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Projects Agency in the early 1980s, said, "It's my view that this society has decided that it will only use a fraction of its human effort in its own defense in peacetime. The imperative just isn't there. . . . So, consequently, we have no other alternative but to turn to high technology. That's it."