Washington Rules_ America's Path to Permanent War - Andrew J. Bacevich [74]
With the fall of Baghdad, Rumsfeld succeeded in silencing RMA skeptics. Senior officers—at least those wishing to remain in the defense secretary’s good graces—now dutifully parroted the language of transformation. Here, for example, is army Lt. Gen. Robert Wagner riffing on the future of warfare, less than a year into Operation Iraqi Freedom:
We envision the future from an information age perspective where operations are conducted in a battlespace, not a battlefield. . . . We are now able to create decision superiority that is enabled by networked systems, new sensors and command and control capabilities that are producing near real-time situational awareness. . . . [O]ur operations in Afghanistan and Iraq [have demonstrated the] operational attributes that an adaptive joint force must possess in the modern Battlespace. To dominate this battlespace, the joint force must be “knowledge centric,” “coherently joint,” “fully networked and collaborative” interdependent in organization and employment and uniquely designed for “Effects-Based Operations.” Certainly any future joint force must be capable of conducting rapid, decisive combat operations. But we have found that a future joint force must also apply these operational attributes synergistically across the entire range of military operations. We must be decisive in every operation, not just the high-end portion of war but across the full range of military operations. . . . The advent of reliable and secure digital communications, a new level of battlespace awareness borne from joint and combined interoperability, and precision weapons have created the potential for a new type of force.21
Some readers may flinch from wading through this gaseous passage. Yet it deserves careful consideration. Take a moment to read it a second time. Savor the vocabulary: seamless, digital, networked, effects-based, coherently joint, along with the reference to precision and, of course, speed, all of it redolent of a pitch marketing an info-tech start-up rather than an activity involving death and destruction, risk and uncertainty (all of which go unmentioned). Note the references to synergism, interoperability, and situational awareness, which suggest the absence of fog and friction. Ponder Wagner’s jaw-dropping assurance that forces organized consistent with such principles will “be decisive in every operation,” apparently without exception.
General Wagner’s testimony recalls H. L. Mencken’s famous assessment of President Warren G. Harding’s oratory:
It is so bad that a sort of grandeur creeps into it. It drags itself out of a dark abysm of pish, and crawls insanely up the topmost pinnacle of posh. It is rumble and bumble, it is flap and doodle. It is balder and dash.
The bloviating of hack politicians offers a suitable subject for comedy and satire. Balderdash that presumes to express the truth about war does not: The stakes are too high. The views expressed by General Wagner, a Vietnam veteran to boot, illustrate the extent to which, midway through the Age of Rumsfeld, the officer corps, its ranks normally filled with sober empiricists, had become unhinged. A soldier transported from the 1940s—or even the 1990s—would have found General Wagner’s incantations all but incomprehensible.
Not only were such views divorced from the historical experience of warfare, they were also radically at odds with ongoing events. Wagner spoke in late February 2004. That month, 19 American soldiers lost their lives in Iraq with another 150 wounded. The following month the totals would rise to