Will New Technology Tip the Scales Against Military Intervention?

Christopher A. Preble

Security,

Technological evolution will change the way that the U.S. military fights its wars.

A recent New York Times editorial cast a skeptical eye toward the many calls for huge increases in U.S. military spending. “Giving the Pentagon a blank check does not ensure security,” the Times editors observed. “It got most of what it wanted in the decade after 9/11, yet America still struggles to keep Afghanistan and Iraq from falling to insurgents.”

Why do we spend so much, and appear to get so little?

One reason is our enthusiasm for using technology to solve problems that defy technological solutions. There’s an understandable tendency to focus on the whiz-bang aspects of America’s military hardware, from drones and precision-guided munitions, all the way down to the gear carried by the typical grunt. Fixating merely on the U.S. military’s capabilities could lead to overconfidence: “How can we lose?”

At least, that’s what we used to think. Now, after Iraq and Afghanistan, and Libya and Yemen (bet you forgot that one, and our other invisible wars), you’re more likely to hear “Why don’t we win?” It turns out that technology is not the critical factor behind a country’s success or failure in war. And, in fairness, it rarely has been. We also have to account for the intensity of an aggressor’s desire to win, and the victim’s desire to avoid defeat.

To be sure, colonial masters of old often managed to wreak horrific destruction on highly motivated but outgunned “indigs.” Think Omdurman (1898). In a number of cases, very small numbers of foreign overlords were able to subdue huge populations of resentful but fearful subjects. The restless natives would rise up, kill a few foreigners, thus inviting a more brutal crackdown. Then the pattern repeated. For centuries.