DATE: Jan. 13, 2005
CALLOUT: You can’t cut working systems in the middle of a war, before you have proven alternatives.
HED: Hard, and Wrong, Choices
By George Friedman
Donald Rumsfeld came into office facing one strategic reality and with one set of solutions. On Sept. 11, he encountered -- unexpectedly -- another strategic reality with another set of solutions. His job was to reconcile the two sets of solutions or, if that proved impossible, make the difficult choices. One additional imperative was that he had to make the right choices. That was the hard part, as can be seen in his recent decision to cancel a major contract for the C-130 aircraft, the tactical workhorse for U.S. forces around the world.
When Rumsfeld became Secretary of Defense, he saw his job as instituting a revolution in warfare, creating a technologically advanced force that was not constrained by the last generation’s limitations. That was a highly desirable project to undertake in a relatively peaceful environment. After September 11, the environment changed. There was now a U.S. war in Afghanistan that would soon be joined by operations from the Philippines to Africa and, finally, by the invasion and counterinsurgency in Iraq. Revolutionizing warfare was not a frivolous goal, but there was a war to fight. The United States could not wait for the revolution.
Rumsfeld was impatient. He has made decisions as if the revolution were here and ready to roll. There have certainly been important advances, but the force as a whole has by no means been reshaped by technology. New technologies are simply not yet available to replace older, working solutions, and cutting back on these solutions before adequate solutions are in place is not, shall we say, optimal.
The C-130 has been in the U.S. arsenal for half a century. It is a relatively simple, robust and inexpensive aircraft. It can take fire and not go down and it comes in a variety of flavors. The AC-130 is a gunship that can add enormous firepower to a ground engagement. The EC-130 is an electronic warfare platform that can be made available to ground forces at the tactical level. The vanilla C-130 can land and take off in poor conditions, bringing in supplies, taking out the wounded and, if needed, managing an air drop. U.S. Special Operations Command used the C-130 in untold operations around the world. Rumsfeld feels the C-130 doesn’t have the range needed. But he has identified a problem to which he has no solution in the context of this war. The C-130, for all of its limitations, has the minor advantage of being real.
The C-130 is not high tech in any radical way. Its newest version, the C-130J, is more advanced but it is still the same rugged aircraft that U.S. troops have seen in operation since the 1950s. Indeed, during the recent tsunami, as in all serious relief operations, it has been the C-130, flown not only by the United States but also by numerous other countries, that has carried in critically needed supplies.
The C-130 is a very good tool for a variety of difficult military and civilian operations. It may not be the best solution that engineers could imagine, but it is a solution we have right now -- when there is a war going on in which the C-130 remains a basic, unglamorous workhorse. You can’t fight a war with imagination, and it will take a long time to convince me there is a better system in the wings. There are other parts of the military much more broken than tactical air transport. Rumsfeld should focus his attention there.
I am far from a critic of the revolution in warfare. I published a book in 1996 called The Future of War, in which I argued that we are going to see a massive revolution in warfare over the next 50 years. I applauded it. But I also said that it wasn’t going to be ready for prime time any time soon. I wrote, “The United States is not in a position by any means to slash defense budgets and manpower in the hope that new technologies will do the job at lower costs. Quite the contrary. Prudent policies will require higher budgets as older forces are maintained and even modernized, while new technologies are prepared and matured.”
Nothing can take the place of boots on the ground -- at least not yet. Nothing supports those boots on the ground better than the C-130 -- certainly not yet. I had not anticipated that anyone would dream of cutting robust older technologies in the middle of a war, years before newer technologies became available.
This is certainly about the C-130. We need more of them, to be sure, not fewer. This is also about a mindset that has taken hold among advocates of the revolution in warfare that I was afraid would take hold. You can’t cut working systems in the middle of a war, before you have proven alternatives. Across the board, we are fighting a war with a revolution that has not yet occurred.