At the same time, the U.S. military is at any given time a reflection of the society and economy it represents. Military officers are often trained in management and organization at civilian colleges and universities whose curricula have been transformed by the influence of computers, networks and the imperatives of the information economy.
Moreover, senior military officers are often hired by defense contractors after they retire, and they have close ties to defense technology experts even during their service. They are disinclined to criticize the assumptions of the defense industry, which survives on selling increasingly complex and sophisticated technologies to the Pentagon.
Thus the worldview of the military has been reshaped by the culture of high tech in civilian and defense technology firms. "Efficiency" is a watchword for the military, as it is in the high-tech economy, and is a concept that competes with effectiveness, leadership, bravery and sacrifice.
Finally, of course, military leaders are only too aware of public opinion polls that show sharp downturns in public support for U.S. military involvement if it means American casualties. Recent polls have indicated public support for the use of ground troops in the Balkans would drop from 50% to below 20% if U.S. casualties exceed 1,000 soldiers. TV images of body bags returning to the U.S. from a place most Americans have only recently heard of would be the earliest trigger of collapsing public support. The Pentagon would rather have TV show dramatic explosions of targets hit by smart bombs.
For all these reasons, the U.S. military is trapped in its own web when it confronts a completely different, hostile and primitively brutal environment such as that of Yugoslavia. As the military should have learned in Vietnam, or as the Russians learned in Afghanistan, high technology cannot substitute for determination and perseverance on the ground by opponents. The U.S. dropped three times more bomb tonnage on Southeast Asia than was used by all the powers of World War II, in all the theaters of that war--a grim fact that most Americans still don't grasp--yet even that failed to secure victory.
The American public sustains very high levels of defense spending for high-tech weapons based on the rationale of wanting "nothing but the best" for our troops. But that naive desire may be at odds with military success. High-tech weapons may have changed the way war looks, but not the way wars are won.
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Gary Chapman is director of the 21st Century Project at the University of Texas at Austin. His e-mail address is gary.chapman@mail.utexas.edu.
