JOHN FERRARI
The lightning-fast victory of the U.S. military over the Iraqi Army in the early 1990s marked a generational turning point for warfare, with the predominant lesson being that exquisite and precise munitions were the key to winning future conflicts. This fit a narrative that many desperately wanted at that time: namely, that we could spend less money, have fewer forces, and turn warfare into a targeting exercise by overwhelming the enemy with precise, short-burst barrages driven by top-down decision-making, all enabled by the digital revolution.
The lessons our senior officials learned from the conflict encapsulated this narrative: spend more to get less, wars can be short with limited casualties, and policymakers can use technology to control from afar. These lessons made their way into military parlance, neatly tied up into concepts like revolution in military affairs, shock and awe, and effects-based operations.
Recent wars have provided, to borrow a phrase from former Vice President Gore, an “inconvenient truth”: the United States military establishment may have fallen into the victor’s trap and assumed away the problems and challenges of future warfare. From Somalia in 1993, to nearly twenty years in Iraq and Afghanistan, to today’s wars in Ukraine and Israel, it’s becoming apparent that the United States may have built the entirely wrong war machine needed for the 21st century.
With a thirty-year, all-in bet on smaller, exquisite, and expensive forces whose flaws have been concealed by rosy policy assumptions such as we would only fight one short, high-tech war, now may be the time to reevaluate three key characteristics of force design. The uniformed military leadership, led by the official who by statute has the authority to set requirements for the military—the Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff—should act now to embed these three key reforms into the Joint Requirements Process.
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