How We Lost the High-Tech War of 2020: A Warning from the Future
Abstract
In the name of the people and the party, I welcome my comrades to this celebration of our great victory over our most arrogant enemy, America. A little over 10 years ago they crowed about how their entire armed forces were "adapting" to wage what was then known as "irregular warfare." They were guilty, as so many before them were, of preparing to fight the last war instead of the next. We observed their error and exploited it into the victory we honor today. The core of their miscalculation was the belief that conventional war against powerful nation states -- what they called "peer competitors" -- was passe. With great fanfare, the Americans issued a new manual for counterinsurgency, and many of their national security elites embraced it as if it were a panacea for all possible conflicts. To our delight, they restructured their entire military to conduct such low-tech operations. We had no intent to fight that kind of war, and did not do so when the time came. Popular American thinking at that time expressed a grand vision that irregular wars, like the insurgencies they fought in Iraq and Afghanistan, would be the primary challenge for U.S. forces for the future. We cheered when it was mandated that to "remain viable" any major arms program "will have to show some utility and relevance" to irregular operations. The implementation of this meant that the weapons we feared the most were never built in the numbers that might have deterred us. We would not have dreamed of using force if the Americans still had the capabilities they once possessed to dominate high-technology war. Interestingly, too many Americans miscalculated how quickly once-backward societies like ours could integrate new technology into war-making systems that could defeat the United States even without resorting to nuclear weapons. Strangely, even though it was widely known that we were building a high-tech, globally-capable force, the Americans seemed to ignore that in their planning.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- Feb 19, 2010
- Accession Number
- ADA518977
Entities
People
- Charles J. Dunlap Jr.