Edited by author 12-02-2003 07:31 PM
TM


Your strategy page link was a little disappointing, though in it’s own unintended way it points out a big problem whether the lessons learned are being reviewed by insiders or outsiders.



You work with computers, did you ever do any programming? From a systems design viepoint the amateur tends to write “spaghetti code.” Start with all the bottom level problems and build up the system up around them. When you trace the logic it looks like a bowl of spaghetti. For small programs this works very well, but for large programs it produces programs that often don’t work, are difficult or impossible to maintain, and are usually over budget. The better way to do it is to use a “structured top down” approach; engineers call this a “black box approach. Start at the top, define the problem inputs and outputs and the major steps in the process. You then have a structure at the top consisting of a “black box” for each step but you haven’t written the code for the step. Then you take each step ooor “black box” and do the same to it. You end up with a program does what it supposed to do, if there is a problem it is relatively easy to find it and fix and is much more predicable on the resources required to accomplish the task.



The article you linked is a prime example of spaghetti code thinking. Lots of good data (mostly correct) from the bottom level of the structure but he does not really look at the top of the system to see what the structure of the problem is.

For example he has an excellent description of the operational viewpoints of ground and air units with regard to air support. There are two things he does not consider that should come prior to his discussion.

First what is the overall mission of the Armed Forces? He realizes the Army and Air Force see their missions differently. Depending on how the mission is understood will change the relationship between the ground and air forces. If the mission is to “nuke them ‘till they glow” the emphases should be on the air force solutions, and if it is to throw out the bad guys and liberate their oppressed populations a ground force solution is more appropriate. Or should we maintain both capabilities? Put a little differently is the lesson learned to avoid ground operations in favor of strategic bombing or provide ground forces with the means to occupy and hold. Depending on how you see the goal both an air and ground lesson can be drawn from the article's evidence.

Second in the early 1940’s Congress decided and still thinks that the Army and Air Force should be split. Partly this was a result of their strategic vision the time, and partly the old policy of having agencies with overlapping functions so disputes must go back to congress for resolution. If Congress had decided instead to leave them in one service and force a more combined approach, there would be more of a common viewpoint. The Marine Corp witch combines tactical air and ground forces has much less of the problem he describes. Both approaches can work. There are problems and lessons learned with each approach, but if one do not see that the different viewpoints result are the indirect result of a Congressional decision, one is likely to make irrelevant or wrong recommendations.





The problem of using a wrong approach to look at lessons learned is common to military and civilians, insiders and outsiders. After all most of us live near the bottom of what ever system we are in, the “spaghetti code process" works for most of our day to day decisions and it is hard to transfer thought processes. This problem is solved by being sure persons making force structure decisions by personality or education tend to look at the problem top down.


The author correctly realizes that there is a consistent problem in applying lessons learned, and has lots of interesting data. However he does not correctly see where the problem lies. If one uses the wrong approach to analysis even “a totally dispassionate look at the lessons learned.” will not produce reliable results. However as he points out in the end, truth and logic will have their way. and if his approach is used the truth of this statement will be all to apparent.

cynical joe - I need the capability to destroy a city.

nuclear capability = 1 missile with one nuclear warhead
conventional capability = x troops, y ammunition

The combat nuclear capability and the combat conventional capability are equivalent by definition. I'm using x and y for the amounts for two reasons, first that I don't know the x and the y and second, if I did, I'd likely still get an argument which is irrelevant to the main point.

Your argument that construction + maintenance cost of the nuclear capability is greater than the construction and maintenance cost of the troops + ammunition. I think you're dead wrong.

To make an MX missile, for example, is a $250M expenditure with a much lower expenditure for maintenance, perhaps $10M. The army's budget is about $90B to maintain 10 divisions or about $9B per division including overhead (I believe nukes are in the air force budget so we're not double counting). For conventional forces to equal an MX missile, the destructive capacity equivalent of that missile would be <1% of one division including training, basing, arming, and overhead. I submit that these values for x and y are simply too small and they are too small by a large margin.

Hank - What I was trying to get at was the importance of renewing the military/civilian conversation. The aims of the armed forces are subordinated to civilian intentions by constitutional design. The growing disconnect between the military and the larger society is dangerous all around.

I'm not a programmer by trade, but come in from the administration perspective. We end up dealing with programmer's messes in the real world all the time. I do understand about design and black box development. I wouldn't call the underlying article spaghetti code but rather a nice prototyping effort for the lessons learned project. Prototypes don't have to be pretty and they're certainly not final but they focus attention on what are the essential elements to be solved.

TML:

I share Hank's evaluation of the Strategy Page piece. In particular, the CAS/DAS argument assumes a false dichotomy between those places where a ground controller is available to provide final control, and those where one is not. It also ignores the relative strategic mobility of lighter forces, and the greater likelihood those will be able to be employed-as well as their greater ability to provide the ground control discussed above.

The piece also has a flawed view of the lessons learned system. Its main design is to allow guys at the unit level to pass their experiences on to others who may conduct similar operations. It's not a tool for guiding acquisition policy. I'm all for conversations, but in order for it to be meaningful, both sides have to understand the basics. And the "civilian control" argument would be more convincing if most of the proposals weren't bids to avoid the reforms of the current civilian leadership (i.e., Sec Rumsfeld).

On the nuclear cost, the usual rule-of-thumb is that a nuclear force costs about 10% of a similar strength conventional force (though obviously it's less versatile, and not useful in most scenarios). However, the cost-effective argument probably shouldn't rest on how often a weapon system is used. If that were the case, Hitler's Wermacht or Napoleon's Grande Armee would be among the most cost-effective forces in history . . .

Cecil Turner - Hey, in baseball, .500 is a fantastic average. Thanks for filling some details in.

TML:

You're doing fine--much better than .500--and even if you were just putting up subjects, this is the kind of conversation I tune in for. (I was kind of hoping BruceR was going to weigh in on the whole "lighter and leaner" trend in RMA--especially with the perspective gained in the recent Canadian exercise in that direction.)

The real separation of professionals from amateurs, however, is the former's focus on logistics, and especially the perennial limiting factor: strategic lift. For example, tanks are absolutely the hardest things to move, and devilishly hard to support once they arrive. Iraq was a special case, in that we already had significant number of assets in theater, and a nearly perfect scenario for offloading the Maritime Preposition Shipping (MPS)--and the Army equivalent (APS). And we still had a tough time keeping them in supply once they got rolling. Strategy Page didn't address any of that.

I'm not up on all the procurement plans, but they probably ought to center around demobilizing most of the heavy armor assets (keeping just enough to populate training units and the prepositioning squadrons)--and transforming the rest into a lighter more mobile force that relies on air-delivered precision munitions for much of its firepower. From what I've seen (mostly press releases out of the SecDef's office), the basic thrust of his plans look pretty reasonable. Especially when compared to some of the naysayers (e.g., White, McCaffrey), who seem to be stuck somewhere around the '80s and looking to fight the Fulda Gap scenario.

TML: Your alegbra seems fine, I'll concede it'd be cheaper to use a nuke if you want to obliterate a city, but I think you're setting up false utility. Nuclear weapons are never going to be just another tool in the tool kit for the American military. There will be and should be an extreme reluctance to use nuclear weapons above and beyond normal military calculations. Like it or not the rest of the world has largely made up its mind about nuclear weapons and judged them beyond use. America could certainly decide that the RotW's opinion should have no effect on military decisions, but I think a realist would have to admit that world opinion, however slight, does play a role especially in relation to expedtionary warfare. Nuclear weapons seem more like an insurance policy, and as I said before it is possible to argue that the cost of these weapons are analagous to 'insurance premiums' in case America ever is threatened existentially.

Cecil Turner - You're too kind.

cynical joe - This explains some of the freaking out about recent proposals for new rounds of tactical mini-nukes for use as bunker busters. I would expect that US funding and deploying such weapons would be a good secondary marker to determine how much general world opinion plays in these issues.

TML: I think you have mistaken the new Taiwan/China policy as coming from the state department, but actually Kristol is berating the WH for the policy change and the dangerous signals it sends. I think Marshall at TPM has some stuff on this too.

cynical joe - Split the difference, James Moriarty is under NSC, Doug Paal is under State. I'll update the note.

TML: Wasn't Paal under NSC in the first Bush admin? I wondering how much 'state' is in him. He seems very connected to the WH side of things.

TM

I agree with your more often than not, more importantly whether I do or not I always learn something. Which is also true for Bruce and most of the contributors here.

What I was trying to get at was the importance of renewing the military/civilian conversation. The aims of the armed forces are subordinated to civilian intentions by constitutional design. The growing disconnect between the military and the larger society is dangerous all around.

And I completely agree with your purpose there.

I'll tell you what, Hank, I don't think a disconnect between the military and the larger American society is anything to lose sleep over. We've seen much worse at several points in our history.

The thing to be concerned about is the possibility that the public will start to buy into the idea that people in uniform are dramatically more competent than civilian officials. It's a defensible idea in certain situations, and some of those are highly visible right now, but it is at the high end of a very slippery slope.

cecil, I cannot agree. The trick is getting there firstest with the mostest, not firstest with the leastest. Without the Abrams, the US Army would still be 40 Km's short of Baghdad, the casualties swould be in the thousands and Bush would be under impeachment. No what has to be done is finding a way to get the heavies there faster. There is no point in rushing to get your a$$ whipped. Armored cars are armored cars. I doesn't matter how much you gold plate them the remain death traps. LAV's (armored cars) are for scouting for armies that cannot afford UAV's. They are a classic example of re-fighting the last ( sort of..WW1) War. A good start would be putting wings back on the Army. Let them fecelop their own lift and stop wasting money on whirly birds( another example of gold plated death traps. IIRC about 25% of the KIA's in Iraq are from Choppers being shot down. The Johnson administration crashed and burned because 10 casualties a day was to much for America to stomach. I don't think the bar is anywhere near that high today and I don't see it being raised. Maybe a WMD attack on NY that kills a few hundred thousand will do it. But I think all a sucessfull WMD event will do is force the current administration to respond in kind. While I think World opinion will get over that, it will take a while. Since this is exactly what the current plan is trying to avoid, it will be seen as a failure by the administration. That will give the surrender crowd (Dean) the upper hand. And by the time they figure out that religous fanatics don't take prisoners (except to do a Pearl job on them), it will be to late. Just picture the Taliban ruling everything except China. Scary, huh! And if the Democrats gain power that is what will happen. They will think they can cut a deal with the nutbags, right up until the blade bites their neck. Vietnam was our one allowable loss. We have to run the table from here on out.
919

ableiter,

Care to float a proposal for getting the heavies there faster? MPS/APA is the best thing going, and it's got some obvious limitations (e.g., each squadron only loads an armored battalion, and it requires a friendly, well-equipped port in close proximity). Fast sealift . . . isn't very fast. And there are lots of places without accessible ports (e.g., Afghanistan) where it just isn't practicable to deploy lots of armor--unless you want to fly them in one at a time--and you really don't want to do it that way. Obviously we (and just about everyone else) have a lot more tanks than we're ever likely to deploy. And armor assets on the wrong side of the ocean (or somewhere in Europe) aren't very useful.

In OIF, the 1st MarDiv had a much lighter force structure, including lots of "death traps." They didn't stall. I submit the force could be lightened further yet (though for the record, I support retaining a number of tanks).

Concur that the Army's attempt to use helicopters as a maneuver element (apparently confusing them with cavalry horses) is flawed doctrine. But Apaches are the near-perfect CAS machine, and I expect them to eventually figure that out. Also concur that Dean's defense strategy makes him an unsuitable candidate--but also makes it very unlikely he'll get elected.

The Queen's report must be taken with at least a modicum of salt considering CDA's reputation as a shill for the defence industry in Canada. General Dynamics Canada and General Dynamics Land Systems Canada are sponsoring CDA's 20th Annual Conference, have contributed to Paul Martin's campaign and are extensively involved with the LAV contract.

In addition, they received a $198 million contract in June 2002 to upgrade the surveillance systems for the Aurora fleet.

Maybe they are right, however, it would be interesting to see an audited review of their data and assumptions.

Bruce: I heard something on the radio, here in Vancouver that of the 12billion budget, that 4.5billion was spent at NHDQ! Is this possible? Of the 55-60,000 CF members (or whatever the amount is) how many are actually guys with guns?