Ivan Eland reviews the current political struggle over defense policy reform in the familiar framework of procurement choices (new versus old, expensive versus cheap, necessary versus unnecessary, etc.) Most of his points are well taken, yet the most profound effect of new technologies in military affairs is not an expanding choice of hardware but rather the opportunities technological developments provide to reorganize the way humans do their military work.

Some of this is familiar ground. For instance, the Navy argues for its new destroyer design by pointing to the efficiencies gained by way of much smaller crew requirements (not nearly a sufficient reason, in itself, for the capital expenditure.) The Comanche helicopter will have lower maintenance requirements than its predecessors (helicopters in general have extraordinarily high maintenance requirements.)

But I do not refer simply to labor saving improvements in the traditional sense; the over-hyped but real information revolution allows for profound transformation of military structures and units. Military units can now perform their missions with smaller, less layered command structures. Better communications can make an everyday reality of the notion of joint operations and allow for smaller logistical tails through just-in-time supply. All these areas of change, and more, will make possible fewer force redundancies, which are at once a wasteful and an essential aspect of armies in their dangerous and unpredictable line of work.

There are surely resource savings to be had by deciding to skip a generation of new platforms (those with 1980s and 1990s designs) while modernizing through less costly upgrades, acquisition of new blocks of older designs, and limited buys of new designs. America's great surplus of conventional military security in the early decades of the new century will allow us to do this safely. Nevertheless, the greatest efficiencies of the new era can be found in the transformation of the way human beings organize and structure their military institutions. It is this transformation, in particular, that we must press our political and military leaders to accept.

Much more about these issues, from a variety of viewpoints, can be found at The RMA Debate Page.  Also see The Macgregor Briefings.

Citation: Charles Knight, "A Response to Ivan Eland's 'Bush Versus the Defense Establishment' in Issues in Science and Technology, Summer 2001", Cambridge, MA: Commonwealth Institute Project on Defense Alternatives Commentary, Fall 2001.
http://www.comw.org/pda/0203eland.html

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