Why Battles Are Won

Below we excerpt with permission Military Power: Explaining Victory and Defeat in Modern Battle by Stephen Biddle.* This well-received book asks: What determines the outcomes of 4? Are high technology weapons as decisive as most people now believe? Biddle says no, arguing that the advantages of modern weapons are reduced in the face of tactical countermeasures. Victory is not due to weapons primarily, but to the training, skill, and discipline needed to operate on the battlefield. Dr. Biddle is associate professor of national security studies at the U.S. Army War College Strategic Studies Institute.—Ivan Oelrich

Projections of future warfare are now dominated by the claim that technology is creating a “revolution in military affairs” (RMA) in which the nature of military power is being transformed. In the future, it is held, long-range precision air and missile strikes will dominate warfare, ground forces will be reduced mostly to scouts, and the struggle for information supremacy will replace the breakthrough battle as the decisive issue for success. These views misunderstand the relationship between technology and force employment, however. Because RMA advocates misun­derstand warfare prior to the 1990s, they misread the 1991 Gulf War as a radical departure; by projecting this mistake forward into the 21st century, they derive a case for a radical restructuring of U.S. defense policy that is neither necessary nor desirable...

Change, of course, is inevitable. But so is continuity. And today’s political debate systematically exaggerates the former and slights the latter. In this book, I argue that major warfare since 1900 has actually seen much less real change than most now suppose and that the future, too, should bring far more continuity than many now expect. In fact, the real causes of battlefield success have been surprisingly stable since 1917-18 and are likely to remain so for at least the first decades of the twenty-first century. Expectations of a looming revolution in military affairs are both a serious mis­reading of modern military history and a dangerous prescription for today’s defense policy: They could easily lead to an over empha­sis on new technology or radical operational concepts that could weaken, not strengthen, the American military and undermine its ability to prevail on future battlefields...

[In particular,] I hold that a particular pattern of force employment — the modern system — has been pivotal in the 20th century and is likely to remain so. I argue that since at least 1900, the dominant technological fact of the modern battlefield has been increasing lethality. Even by 1914, firepower had become so lethal that exposed mass movement in the open had become suicidal. Subsequent technological change has only increased the range over which exposure can be fatal. To perform meaningful military missions in the face of this storm of steel requires armies to reduce their exposure, and since 1918 the central means of doing so has been modern system force employment.

The modern system is a tightly interrelated complex of cover, concealment, dispersion, suppression, small-unit independent maneuver, and combined arms at the tactical level, and depth, reserves, and differential concentration at the operational level of war. Taken together, these techniques sharply reduce vulnerability to even 21st century weapons and sensors. Where fully implemented, the modern system damps the effects of technological change and insulates its users from the full lethality of their opponents’ weapons.

Not everyone can master it, however. The modern system is extremely complex and poses painful political and social tradeoffs. While some have been able to surmount these challenges and implement the modern system fully, others have not. Militaries that fail to implement the modern system have been fully exposed to the firepower of modern weapons — with increasingly severe conse­quences as those weapons’ reach and lethality have expanded. The net result has thus been a growing gap in the real military power of states that can and cannot implement the modern system, but surprisingly little change over time in outcomes between mutually modern-system opponents...

[This analysis implies some very different directions for defense policy than current mainstream views.] Many RMA advocates call for a radical restructuring of the U.S. military away from direct-fire ground forces and toward heavier reliance on air and deep strike missile systems. The analysis here, on the other hand, suggests that such a restructuring could be very risky. Sometimes it would be highly effective: Against non-modern-system enemies, a mostly air and deep strike-oriented U.S. military would in fact be the ideal solution. Against an opponent better able to limit its exposure, however, such an imbalanced U.S. force would be at a grave disadvantage. By giving up direct fire ground capability in exchange for more deep strike systems, such a force would be much weaker than today’s against opponents able to escape destruction at extreme range and close with American ground forces (as al Qaeda, for example, proved able to do in Afghanistan). Such a restructuring would thus strengthen U.S. capability mostly where it is already so strong as to be nearly beyond challenge (that is, against exposed non-modern-system opponents) by creating weaknesses elsewhere. Unless it is certain America will never again face skilled opposition, this could be a dangerous approach...

The analysis above also implies some different directions for system acquisition, research, and development. In particular, it suggests that pilot programs to explore remote surveillance against targets in wooded and built-up areas merit higher priority and accelerated development relative to other ongoing surveillance initiatives. Similarly, new precision munitions effective against dispersed targets in such terrain also warrant greater relative attention...

Perhaps, most broadly of all, war’s conduct and outcomes need to receive the same kind of sustained, explicit, rigorous theoretical analysis that other social phenomena have come to receive — not just because war affects politics or society, but because victory and defeat is an objectively important subject in its own right. War’s causes have received intensive study in the hope of finding means of prevention; preventing war is crucial, but not all wars can be prevented. And where they cannot be prevented, winning rather than losing has tremendous importance. The difference between victory and defeat can mean the difference between freedom and oppression, or between life and death itself. America is now engaged in a potentially global war on whose outcome thousands to millions of lives may rest. Explaining success and failure in such struggles is a matter of paramount national importance — it deserves the most penetrating research that modern scholarship can provide simply on the basis of its intrinsic significance alone.

*Excerpted from Military Power: Explaining Victory and Defeat in Modern Battle, by Stephen Biddle, Princeton University Press, 2004, with permission. Stephen Biddle may be reached at Stephen.Biddle@us.army.mil.