Shock and Awe — Achieving Rapid DominanceUllman, Harlan
History
Shock and Awe — Achieving Rapid Dominance
Ullman, Harlan
Rapid dominance (Military science)
Innovate. Use the carrier to haul the army to war, and then fly the
fighters aboard after the helicopters or tanks are unloaded. Accept
the benefits of Federal Express that can be federalized during times
of national emergency as a costly, but ready augmentation to military
supply lines that has no cost during the much longer periods of
peacetime. Our nation has other industrial capacities that also have
duplicate military capabilities. They may be 80 percent solutions, but
the cost of ownership could prohibit creation and maintenance of a
military owned and operated 100 percent solution. Iridium telephones
may not be jam-resistant or secure, but 80 percent of the time they
will satisfy the need for 2 percent of the cost. Of course, this
avoids the problem we have created for ourselves with our medieval
acquisition system.
Finally, we must acquire hardware of a type and at a pace that will
assure the future force capability will be enduring. We cannot keep up
with technology using our current ways of acquiring military hardware
and training our people in how to use and maintain it. In many areas
we would be better off to throw it away when it breaks given the low
cost, durability, and reliability of modern solid state electronics.
Why train technicians? Give the troops a gold card and a telephone
number and they know how to spend money more efficiently than do our
government agencies. Make sure the equipment we do buy not only
integrates with that of other services and functions, but that it can
integrate with both older and newer equipment designated to do the
same function. The fighter aircraft secure radio must be capable of
communicating with the ground and sea based forces command and
control, as importantly it must be able to communicate with the next
generation fighter aircraft radio.
The added dimension is the realization that we are unlikely to fight
alone in the future. We gain valuable legitimacy from forming
coalitions, plus it makes up for the growing feeble force structure we
maintain in declining budget years. An enduring force must also
recognize the necessity to operate cooperatively with the forces of
other nations. This means we must more freely release our technologies
to foreign nations so that our military forces can fight side by side,
so that our deployment forces can draw from stocks of others while our
logistics system seeks to catch up with the rapidly deployed combat
force.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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