The art of war: Lengthened shadows: III.

The American military today may be in the best position of any military in history. Its victories over Iraq and Afghanistan have transformed not merely the way the U.S. thinks about and conducts war, but the way the entire world sees violent conflict. American technological prowess and the skill of the professional American armed forces have opened a gap in capabilities between the U.S. and its closest competitors that many see as unbridgeable. Those triumphs, as well as the American people's perception of the threats that the U.S. faces, have also served dramatically to reduce the mutual mistrust and hostility that had separated the military from the public since the Vietnam War. Trusted by its people, emulated by its friends, feared by its foes, unequalled in capability and skill, the American military is in many respects at the height of its power. Properly handled, the U.S. armed forces might be able to maintain and even extend their preeminence into the distant future.

The challenges facing the military today, however, are no less daunting than the opportunities are promising. Most leaders and observers agree that the U.S. military will have to "transform" itself in order to maintain its lead as well as to be able to meet the challenges of the present and the future for which it was not designed. At the same time, the U.S. is engaged in a war on terrorism, in peacekeeping operations in Afghanistan, Bosnia, and Kosovo, and in a massive peacekeeping, counter-insurgency, counter-terrorism, and reconstruction effort in Iraq. Tensions over nuclear proliferation remain high on the Korean peninsula and in Iran. Tensions also remain high over the cooperation of states like Syria in the war on terrorism and operations in Iraq.

These ongoing operations and threats have combined to stretch the U.S. armed forces beyond the breaking point. The Army has been compelled to deploy tens of thousands of soldiers for a full year at a time rather than the normal six months, to forego important training for those soldiers, and sometimes to send soldiers returning from one such deployment immediately into another. The National Guard and Reserves have been mobilized to an extent unprecedented since the 1970s first for "homeland defense" in the wake of the September II attacks and now in support of operations in Iraq, the Balkans, and elsewhere. The strain on soldiers and their families is growing, morale is declining, and it is hard to believe that these trends will not begin to take a serious toll on recruitment and retention in the near future, potentially exacerbating the problem.

The issues of transformation and military overstretch are inextricably linked. The Secretary of Defense has adopted a vision of transformation that relies on high-technology weapons systems rather than on soldiers. He has continued to pursue this program even as the armed forces have been stretched thinner and thinner. He has even resisted efforts by Congress to expand the military--a virtually unimaginable stance for a sitting Secretary of Defense--in order to preserve his program of military transformation. As a result, the U.S. is now attempting to transform its military in ways that hinder the conduct of current operations, even as those operations literally rip it apart. Worst of all, the current program of transformation turns its back on the approach that had brought America success so far, and flies in the face of the historical lessons about how to transform a military. If these problems remain unacknowledged and unaddressed, the U.S. may lose its predominance and endanger its security.

America achieved military dominance in 1991 with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Since no other state or group of states had been attempting to compete directly with the two superpowers, U.S. preeminence arrived unexpectedly and by default. The roots of the dominant position America holds today lie, therefore, in efforts American leaders made in the period from the late 1960s through the early 1980s to transform the military in order the better to face the U.S.S.R.

This first transformation had both a technological component and human element. In the twenty years from 1965 to 1985 America fielded a host of new weapons systems, created a global satellite constellation and advanced communications systems, and pioneered the development of entire new technologies such as stealth and precision-guided munitions (PGMS). In the midst of that technological transformation, a sociological transformation was also taking place within the armed forces. In the mid-1970s the U.S. abandoned the draft and recruited an all-volunteer professional military. Current military theory focuses almost exclusively on the technological aspect of transformation, but the human element was at least as important in bringing the American armed forces to their current level of excellence.

Almost all of the main weapons systems American forces used in Iraq and Afghanistan were developed and fielded in the 1960s and 1970s. The Air Force used new concepts of aircraft design and took advantage of computerization to produce the first generation of "super-fighters," including the F-15 and F-16, while the Navy developed its equivalent in the F-14. These aircraft, together with the F/A-18 fielded somewhat later, dominated the skies over Iraq and have led many of America's likeliest competitors to focus on air defense systems rather than on building their own aircraft with which to challenge the super-fighters.