Nov 11th - - Business Standard - Modern arms and old norms of war

By Alex Nichol, Director of Defense Analysis and Publications; Senior Fellow for Defence Industry and Procurement

11 November 2005: Business Standard

The world of defence moves amazingly slowly, as anybody familiar with the saga of the Arjun tank or the Light Combat Aircraft will appreciate. Weapons programmes absorb people's time, brainpower, and money for many years before anything is delivered to armed forces. Sometimes, nothing is ever actually delivered.

This is a global phenomenon. The US poured $7 billion into the Comanche helicopter, and cancelled the programme after 21 years without receiving a single one. The F/A-22 Raptor fighter aircraft has so far absorbed about $30 billion and taken 20 years, but is not yet in operational service. Each year, its planned numbers are pared back, raising the unit cost—the latest estimate is $262 million, and it will not be the last.

Meanwhile, Britain decided in 1998 that it would build two aircraft carriers, with the first one due to enter service in 2012—a mere 14 years later. But that target is slipping. Perhaps this does not matter much as the main aircraft that is supposed to fly from their decks, the American F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, will almost certainly suffer delays as well if past programmes are any guide.

The acquisition of weapons systems is like a very slow dance, or a very long multi-dimensional chess game, involving politicians, armed services, civil servants and industry. It takes so long that nobody can remember what the previous moves were, or why people made them. There is not much accountability when the previous decision was taken by the government minister/chief of staff/chief executive before last. Taxpayers are poorer as a result.

All this is in fact somewhat surprising, because if you go to any conference at which these issues are discussed—and there are plenty - there appears to be no shortage of dynamism about addressing the problem and attempting to get new cutting-edge capabilities speedily into the hands of the soldiers, seamen or airmen who can use them.

It is not that governments do not understand the problem. In fact, impressive new initiatives and concepts are regularly rolled out—in effect, large-scale corporate change programmes for government departments. But they tend to meet a wide range of constraints and objections from all sides, and to run into the bureaucratic sand.

Examples of new concepts that have sprung up from the 1990s onwards are the “Revolution in Military Affairs”, “transformation”, and “network-centric warfare”. If you were to follow each of these ideas to its logical conclusion, you would radically change the way that defence budgets are spent. Critics would say that they were all just fads, but each was an attempt to capture and conceptualise the impact that new computer and communications technologies would have on war and weapons.

To some extent, the concepts came after the fact: they began to be talked about after the first Gulf War revealed new American precision weapons and stealthy aircraft to be already in action. But the theories have advanced in parallel with the explosion in technologies for information processing and communication: since these have revolutionised the way that many of us live and work, it was not unreasonable to deduce that the same should apply to the military. It also follows that it was not just a matter of changing the technologies, but of whole concepts of operation and organisation. And—appealing to budget-cutters—surely it could all be done with fewer people!

When NATO achieved its military objective in Kosovo in 1999 with a stand-off air campaign involving no casualties, and when US special forces riding on horseback used modern gadgets to call in pinpoint air strikes in Afghanistan in 2001, a new way of warfare did indeed seem to have been born.

But reality has got in the way. The enemy always has a say. The Afghan and Iraqi armies had no counter to American technology in the conventional phases of the campaigns in 2001 and 2003, respectively. But insurgents understood that they did not have to fight their struggle on American terms. Conflict sharpens technologies: insurgents in Iraq are finding new ways to set off bombs today even as the Americans work out tactics and equipment to deal with the way their opponents did it yesterday. The poor outcome of recent campaigns has shown the dangers of going against previous military guidelines on the number of people needed for success.

This nimbleness does of course occur on both sides of a conflict. In Britain, the forces find that they can achieve big improvements in capabilities by short-circuiting the procurement system during times of conflict. They submit “Urgent Operational Requirements” that produce results at extraordinary speed.

But this merely serves to show up the absurdly cumbersome, wasteful process of normal procurement. Concepts on the use of modern technologies could indeed increase capabilities—provided that well-developed military norms and lessons are not ignored—but in practice, the same old big procurement programmes, conceived long ago to fight wars long finished, simply go on taking the vast majority of the available funding.

The author is Director of Defence Analysis at the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies.