CONCLUSION

AS AN EFFORT TO COLLECT, assess, and present simplified tools of defense analysis, this book does not require a major conclusion to draw an overall argument together. There is no single core policy purpose for the book, except to help inform a debate on critically important matters of war and peace, of strategies for combat and for deterrence, and of national resource allocation.

It is useful, however, to repeat some of the central observations and conclusions of the book that do bear on contemporary policy questions fairly directly. They are not policy recommendations themselves, but are sufficiently well established by analysis to be relevant to practical debates. The following does not comprise an exhaustive list, but is an attempt to capture the spirit and approach of the text. As with the main organization of the book, the topics fall into four areas: budget analysis, combat modeling, logistics, and defense technology.

• Despite the amount of effort and money devoted to the undertaking, defense budget analysis remains imprecise. This is partly because the course of possible future wars cannot easily be predicted, partly because the expense involved in inventing a new technology cannot be accurately forecast before the fact. It is also because of sloppiness (or political motivation) in how calculations are sometimes presented. A goal of this book is to help reduce sloppiness and expose political or parochial motivations when such calculations are done and discussed.
• To avoid tendentious defense budgeting, it is always important to understand the budgetary details of a defense policy proposal. Are the projected costs or savings for a single year or for the long term? Are sunk costs being included in discussions of a future budget option when they should not be? Are procurement costs for a system not yet even developed being viewed as firm and reliable when they should not be?
• Some basic budgetary rules of thumb are worth bearing in mind—weapons generally cost about 20 to 50 percent more to produce than predicted before they are developed or procured; American troops cost about $100,000 a year each in personnel costs alone (and a roughly comparable amount to support and train); deploying troops abroad costs extra, above and beyond the normal Pentagon budget (which normally does not include funds for wars or other major operations abroad), to the tune of more than $500,000 per Marine or soldier per year in Iraq and Afghanistan. But these rules are rough, and are not necessarily good indicators of future realities. For example, the last figure is perhaps twice what might have been predicted based on previous operations (the U.S. military operation in Bosnia was forecast to cost about $100,000 per soldier per year in 1995–1996 and wound up costing twice that itself).
• Much of the political rhetoric surrounding the state of the current American military is overblown. Claims that the wars have broken the force cannot be substantiated by the data. Equipment stocks on the whole remain in generally reasonable condition (even if 20 to 25 percent of ground combat equipment is deployed and therefore unavailable for other missions at any given time, with much higher percentages of specific assets such as up-armored HMMWVs committed in Iraq and Afghanistan). In addition, the quality of American military personnel remains very high by historical standards, even taking into account all the recent challenges of recruiting and retention.
• Those dismissive of the strains on the force go too far.” Fairness considerations alone suggest serious questioning about whether the nation is asking too much of its men and women in uniform. Even if the overall state of the military remains good—in terms of the aptitude levels of new recruits, or the experience and retention levels of typical soldiers and Marines—current trends are quite worrisome. Suicides and divorces are substantially higher than in the recent past, if not necessarily beyond overall historical (or societal) norms, as are waivers for former felons joining the Army and Marine Corps. Plus, the sheer strain on people who have been deployed two and three and four times represents a potential ticking time bomb. There is no readiness crisis today, and no clear trend towards one, but given the strains on the force, this conclusion is always subject to change.
• American military spending dominates world figures. However, the Iraqi resistance has shown what a group with less than 1 percent of the total revenue of the U.S. military can do on the battlefield, under certain circumstances, against the world’s only superpower. This suggests that defense budgets are hardly the main determinants of battle outcomes. On the other hand, when the United States increased its resource allocation to the Iraq War by some 25 percent in 2007, it began to achieve synergies of effort, and an overall effectiveness, that had eluded it before. Of course, its strategy changed as well. But the sheer application of additional resources was an important aspect of that strategy. This suggests that, under certain circumstances, it may matter a great deal whether the United States outspends its foe by a factor of 10, or 20, or 100 in a given conflict. In the end, budget comparisons are poor predictors of combat outcomes.
• Combat models are better predictors of outcomes than are budget comparisons. These are fraught with risks, however, and imprecisions, too. Several questions must be kept in mind when using them. Do they employ the wrong historical battle or war as an analogy for a future war? Do they involve such detailed computer simulations as to appear more scientific than they really are—and obscure the key assumptions that go into them about how long adversaries will fight and the tactics they will employ?
• A good and simple rule of thumb to avoid oversimplifying predictions about future combat is to be sure a range of plausible combat outcomes is always presented. Failure to do so usually indicates overconfidence about how well war, an inherently human and unpredictable venture, can be accurately forecast.
• Generally speaking, if a combat model predicts the outcome of a war within a factor of two to five—in terms of the duration of fighting, the relative casualties of the two sides, and the overall amount of devastation and destruction—it will have done reasonably well. In other words, making a prediction that is wrong by “only 100 percent” (for example, forecasting losses to one’s own forces of 100 soldiers but having 200 killed in the actual operation) is actually rather precise by the standards of the field. In fact, being off by 300 or 400 percent is not bad—provided that the basic flow of battle, and the winner and loser, are not mistakenly predicted.
• It is worth bearing in mind that historically, outnumbered attackers have tended to win around half the wars they have initiated. So simple quantitative rules of thumb, such as the idea that an attacker should have three times the battle strength of a defender to prevail, are misleading at best. They may sometimes be useful guides for force planners, but are rarely if ever solid bases for prognostication.
• Military models, despite these limitations, have great uses. They tended to predict rapid U.S. victories in places like Panama and in Operation Desert Storm. They raised warnings about resultant conflicts in the Kosovo campaign and the second Iraq war. That was less because models yielded accurate predictions in these cases, and more because it was difficult to see how to apply standard models to these scenarios. That fact should have sent up red flags for anyone hazarding a prediction of either war’s outcome with great confidence.
• In Iraq and Afghanistan, quantitative rules of thumb and models have consistently highlighted the uncomfortable fact that coalition force levels have been very small by historical standards. Even if those historical standards did not provide an exact answer about how many forces we actually needed in Iraq and Afghanistan, they certainly should have made careful analysts aware of the dangers of the operations as planned.
• Models are useful in other situations, too. They can, for example, help sketch out the hypothetical vulnerability of a city like Seoul to artillery barrage from North Korea. Models can reveal the difficulties a country such as Israel is likely to have in wars like that in Lebanon in 2006 (again, since we know how hard it is to find and target enemy mortars and artillery set against complex terrain). Indeed, in its late 2008 attacks on Hamas in the Gaza Strip, Israel seemed to emphasize attacks on Hamas leadership at least as much as on weaponry—and to have made greater efforts to achieve surprise in its initial strikes so as to maximize effectiveness. Or for a possible war between Taiwan and China (which could also involve the United States), models can make it clear why the PRC would have great trouble in executing a successful all-out amphibious assault—while also demonstrating that China might have numerous other military options short of all-out war.
• The old adage that while civilians think strategy, generals think logistics, remains as true as ever. Modern military forces in large operations typically require a ton of supplies per day for every ten soldiers (plus or minus a factor of two to three). For large ground operations, at least two-thirds of the weight is typically in the form of fuel and water, but there are large requirements for ammunition, spare parts, food, and other solid supplies, too (not to mention the weight of the weapons and vehicles themselves—a U.S. heavy division of about 18,000 troops weighs over 100,000 tons). Sustaining such a logistics flow is beyond the capacity of almost all militaries in the world save those of the United States and, to a much lesser degree, Britain and France. Other countries typically cannot operate far from home territory unless they contract for supplies and the transportation of those supplies, or unless they have many months to prepare a given mission. Even then, their capacities are typically limited to a few hundred troops, or at most a few thousand.
• For all the recent talk of moving to lighter and more maneuverable forces, that are less attached to their logistics tails than militaries of the past, actual trends have continued to go in the other direction, towards heavier forces needing more supplies. In 2002, a different trend seemed underway, since the Kosovo and Afghanistan wars both accomplished some of their goals with modest American capabilities. But the Iraq War has trumped these earlier experiences and reminded everyone how so much about combat has not changed.
• This conclusion about logistics underscores a broader reality regarding military technology. On the one hand it is very impressive, and always changing. On the other, it does not allow truly radical and rapid shifts in how war is fought very often. The hypothesis that a modern revolution in military affairs was occurring, or at least was within reach, may have helped American strategists avoid complacency in the early years after the Cold War. However, aspects of that debate also arguably contributed to the U.S. sloppiness in preparing for the invasion of Iraq.

Military analysis is not an exact science. To return to the wisdom of Sun Tzu, and paraphrase the great Chinese political philosopher, it is at least as close to art. But many logical methods offer insight into military problems—even if solutions to those problems ultimately require the use of judgment and of broader political and strategic considerations as well. Military affairs may not be as amenable to quantification and formal methodological treatment as economics, for example. However, even if our main goal in analysis is generally to illuminate choices, bound problems, and rule out bad options—rather than arrive unambiguously at clear policy choices—the discipline of military analysis has a great deal to offer. Moreover, simple back-of-the envelope methodologies often provide substantial insight without requiring the churning of giant computer models or access to the classified data of official Pentagon studies, allowing generalists and outsiders to play important roles in defense analytical debates.

We have seen all too often (in the broad course of history as well as in modern times) what happens when we make key defense policy decisions based solely on instinct, ideology, and impression. To avoid cavalier, careless, and agenda-driven decision-making, we therefore need to study the science of war as well—even as we also remember the cautions of Clausewitz and avoid hubris in our predictions about how any war or other major military endeavor will ultimately unfold.