Washington Rules_ America's Path to Permanent War - Andrew J. Bacevich [67]
Within the military, the inevitable search for relevant lessons focused on identifying “what is important to protect and preserve in our military capability.” According to the Pentagon, five key elements had contributed to victory in the Gulf: a decisive president who “not only gave the military the tools to do the job but . . . provided it with clear objectives and the support to carry out its assigned tasks” (that is, a president who avoided the errors charged to Lyndon Johnson); technological superiority, especially a new generation of precision weapons that “gave our forces the edge”; the professionalism and competence of U.S. troops and their commanders; the availability of forward-deployed units along with the bases that made their commitment to combat possible; and finally the accumulated benefit of intense preparation over the course of many years. “It takes a long time to build the high quality forces and systems that gave us success.” Implicit in that concluding point was a warning: Abuse this force and you’ll break it; once broken, recovery won’t come easily.7
Looking ahead, the Pentagon identified two key priorities: first, “to retain our technological edge out into the future,” and second, to “be ready for the next Desert Storm–like contingency that comes along.”8 In sum, by 1991 the military establishment felt that it had achieved something approximating the summit of perfection. The last thing soldiers needed or wanted was for someone to start tinkering with a machine so painstakingly assembled. Powell’s priority and the priority of the officer corps was to preserve what had been regained.
There was an alternative view, however, according to which the results achieved against Iraq fell well short of being decisive. After all, Saddam had survived. So, too, had the most capable parts of his large, if not especially competent, army. To deal with this continuing “threat,” U.S. forces remained in Saudi Arabia and elsewhere in the region, a decision consistent with the principle that the presence of American forces abroad contributed to security and stability yet one provoking deep resentment throughout much of the Islamic world. In the end, a brief campaign touted as a great victory had settled little, while creating new complications; the historic feat of arms over which Colin Powell had presided turned out to be something of a bust politically and strategically.
Proponents of this view—for the most part civilians ensconced in universities like Harvard and Chicago, in security-oriented think tanks, and in an obscure but influential Pentagon directorate called the Office of Net Assessment—saw Operation Desert Storm not as a great victory but as a missed opportunity, not as the culmination of a process of reform but as a harbinger of better things to come. In the campaign to expel the Iraqi army from Kuwait, they glimpsed stupendous possibilities. America’s armed services stood on the cusp of what they called a Revolution in Military Affairs or RMA. Properly exploited, they believed, this revolution promised to invest force with unprecedented effectiveness and utility.
Considered from this perspective, Operation Desert Storm signaled not the perfection of industrial-age warfare but its death knell. According to RMA enthusiasts a new era of Information Age warfare was dawning. Primacy in the cyberworld held the promise of primacy in the real world: This was their conviction.
During most of the twentieth century, machines had dominated the battlefield. As the twenty-first century beckoned, information