Casualties, Technology, and America's Future Wars

No one should want to fight the United States.We are the world's richest, most technologically capable nation.We can mobilize more combat power and move it farther, faster, and sustain it longer than anyone else.Sufficiently provoked, we are very dangerous, indeed even brutal.The World War II experience suggested this; the Korean and Vietnam wars added proof.Our vulnerabilities, such as they are, lie not in the quantity or quality of our conventional forces nor in weapons of mass destruction.The United States cannot be outresearched, outproduced, or outgunned.Our troops are superbly equipped, brave, and well trained.No one's forces can see more or communicate better in the fog of war than ours.We have great redundancy in nearly every aspect of our forces and economy.[1]And as the Cold War demonstrated, not even the threat to use nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons can stop us from protecting what our leaders manage to define as our vital national interests.Rather, our vulnerabilities lie within ourselves and our society.Our strength is complimented by our good fortune.We live in a quiet part of the world surrounded by oceans and neighbors who have not the slightest thought of attacking us.As we have come to recognize both our strength and our security, we have imposed constraints on ourselves.In particular, we have grown ever more sensitive about casualties--our own military casualties, opponent and neutral civilian casualties, and even enemy military casualties--and we seek to avoid them.This limits our ability to exercise the tremendous power we possess and makes us susceptible to pressures others can ignore.Our sensitivity to our own military casualties is long-standing and certainly not unique.People of all countries love their children and their soldiers, but only we in the United States have the opportunity, the wealth, and the technology to protect them, even in battle.One way to protect personnel is to remove them as much as possible from the violent edge of the battlefield.US forces have traditionally attempted this by substituting materiel for manpower in war-capital for labor in economic parlance.[2] Today, capital-intensive warfare means soldiers in protective vests or heavily armored vehicles, increasing ranges of fire, and most important, perhaps, vastly increased firepower which attempts to destroy the enemy before many Americans are engaged.Over time we have become quite good at this.In each of our wars we have increased dramatically the tonnage of ordnance delivered per combat soldier exposed.[3]We also have improved significantly the accuracy of our weapons, their reaction times, and the overall pace of our operations.In fact, by now the very worst place on earth to be is in front of an engaged US armored division or on the receiving end of one of our bombing campaigns.Of course there are other ways to protect against casualties.Historically, disease has been the biggest killer of soldiers.[4] No nation has done more to reduce this toll than the United States.Recall just the effort against yellow fever.We also have worked hard to salvage the wounded.It is the United States that pioneered field surgeons, blood transfusions, helicopter rescues, and medical evaluations.[5]About a tenth of the personnel sent to the Persian Gulf in 1990 were medical.[6] No other nation offers its forces that amount of support.But the main focus of our efforts to keep our casualties low has been to increase the lethality of our military through the use of technology.Thus it is not surprising that we would be, as Eliot Cohen points out, the nation most taken by the mystique of airpower, because airpower promises the best opportunity to increase firepower while reducing reliance on manpower.[7] In World War II, our enemies learned how lethal this trade-off can be.