Really highly recomended reading: Article about the future of military affairs, weapons systems and national security:
The Counterrevolution in Military Affairs
Fashionable thinking about defense ignores the great threats of our time.
by Ralph Peters
02/06/2006, Volume 011, Issue 20
REVOLUTIONS NOTORIOUSLY IMPRISON THEIR MOST committed
supporters. Intellectually, influential elements within our military
are locked inside the cells of the Revolution in Military Affairs--the
doctrinal cult of the past decade that preaches that technological
leaps will transcend millennia-old realities of warfare. Our current
conflicts have freed the Pentagon from at least some of the nonsensical
theories of techno-war, but too many of our military and civilian
leaders remain captivated by the notion that machines can replace human
beings on the battlefield. Chained to their 20th-century successes,
they cannot face the new reality: Wars of flesh, faith, and cities.
Meanwhile, our enemies, immediate and potential, appear to grasp the
contours of future war far better than we do.
From Iraq's Sunni Triangle to China's military high command, the counterrevolution
in military affairs is well underway. We are seduced by what we can do;
our enemies focus on what they must do. We have fallen so deeply in
love with the means we have devised for waging conceptual wars that we
are blind to their marginal relevance in actual wars. Terrorists, for
one lethal example, do not fear "network-centric warfare" because they
have already mastered it for a tiny fraction of one cent on the dollar,
achieving greater relative effects with the Internet, cell phones, and
cheap airline tickets than all of our military technologies have
delivered. Our prime weapon in our struggles with terrorists,
insurgents, and warriors of every patchwork sort remains the soldier or
Marine; yet, confronted with reality's bloody evidence, we simply
pretend that other, future, hypothetical wars will justify the systems
we adore--purchased at the expense of the assets we need.
Stubbornly, we continue to fantasize that a wondrous enemy will
appear who will fight us on our own terms, as a masked knight might
have materialized at a stately tournament in a novel by Sir Walter
Scott. Yet, not even China--the threat beloved of major defense
contractors and their advocates--would play by our rules if folly
ignited war. Against terrorists, we have found technology alone
incompetent to master men of soaring will--our own flesh and blood
provide the only effective counter. At the other extreme, a war with
China, which our war gamers blithely assume would be brief, would
reveal the quantitative incompetence of our forces. An assault
on a continent-spanning power would swiftly drain our stocks of
precision weapons, ready pilots, and aircraft. Quality, no matter how
great, is not a reliable substitute for a robust force in being and deep reserves that can be mobilized rapidly....
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