The Big Ideas In Defense Personnel and Procurement Policy

What are the big overarching ideas that should be front and center in the U.S. military's future procurement and personnel policies?

1.  There are only quite limited circumstances where heavy tracked armored vehicles like the M1 Abrams tank and the M10 Booker mobile protected firepower vehicle make sense. They almost never make sense anywhere in the United States or its territories. They don't make sense in places with narrow mountain passes. They don't make sense in jungles and swamps and muddy plains. They don't make sense in cities with narrow streets. They don't make sense if they have to cross low weight capacity bridges or cross rivers. They are better suited to deserts, non-muddy plains, frigid tundras, and places with wide roads, strong bridges, and few rivers to cross. They are ill suited to rapid advances. They only make sense in circumstances where they can be safely resupplied with ammunition, fuel, and tracks. They don't make sense where the enemy has advanced anti-tank missiles that have longer ranges than the tanks do, or have air superiority. It is fairly easy to fortify a position against tanks with physical barriers and anti-tank mines. Tanks mostly makes sense, instead, to use against civilians and lightly armed infantry without access to anti-tank weapons. In those niche applications where tanks may make sense, essentially all of those tanks need to be pre-positioned close to the anticipated field of battle before the fighting starts, since so few can be airlifted per sortie, and they are slow and rail transport for them can be easily sabotaged. Selling tanks to allies whose borders we might want to defend, or whom we might want to help defend from an amphibious attacks, makes even more sense than pre-positioning tanks. Also, the demand for extreme off road capabilities is almost always overestimated, while the vulnerability of logistics support for heavy tracked vehicles and the need for all other vehicles in armored units to travel on any terrain that armored vehicles penetrate very far is usually underestimated.  

2. Tanks are rarely useful as anti-tank weapons. Anti-tank missiles, guided bombs, mines, and other obstacles are almost always a better way to destroy tanks than other tanks.

3. We underestimate the value of having well-trained ground troops under the leadership of battle tested commanders in service. Volunteers with little training and conscripts aren't nearly as useful as they used to be in modern warfare, and modern warfare unfolds rapidly leaving little time to bolster forces with new recruits. Reserve forces can provide a middle ground but still won't be as effective as active duty full-time soldiers in terms of readiness.

4. The only virtues of mortars and howitzers are that they are cheap per round, although the vehicles used to deliver them are not always cheap. Both are inaccurate, often requiring many rounds to destroy each target. Mortars have very limited range, but have cheap delivery systems and are fairly small. Howitzers have ranges less than that of medium range guided missiles and have delivery systems that can be quite expensive. A commitment to ditch these systems in lieu of guided missiles to replace their capabilities would make sense.

5.  Aircraft are usually better tools for destroying enemy warships than our own warships, because they put fewer personnel in harm's way, because they are harder to destroy since they are faster, stealthier, and smaller, because they have longer range, because they are easier to reload with new anti-ship missiles, and because they can more rapidly be redeployed to the theater where they are needed.

6. Submarines are better tools for destroying enemy warships than our own surface combatants, because they are stealthier and harder to destroy.

7. The hard part of anti-submarine warfare is figuring out where the enemy submarines are located. Once that is known, submarine killing weapons can be deployed by airplane, by helicopter, by ships and submarines with vertical launch rockets or torpedos. The military systems the locate submarines and the military systems that destroy them don't have to be the same ones, so long as they can communicate. Drones in the air, on the surface, and underwater, are well suited to locating enemy submarines.

8. Land based anti-ship missiles are increasingly valuable tools for destroying enemy warships because these missiles have longer ranges than they used to have.

9. Active defenses must increasingly replace armor on both ground vehicles and ships, because relatively light and inexpensive missiles and torpedos and mines can almost always defeat even heavily armored targets.

10. We are underinvested in air defense systems against jet fighters, helicopters, cruise missiles, ballistic missiles, incoming shells, and drones. Both naval and ground forces need these.

11. Surface ships are slow, big, non-stealthy, put large crews in harm's way, can't be quickly relocated from one military theater to another, and have lots of down time with only about 1/3 of them available to fight at any one time. They are vulnerable to anti-ships missiles including hypersonic missiles launched from aircraft, other large ships, small missile boats which can come in swarms, suicide drones, submarines and ground launch sites. They are vulnerable to enemy submarines. They are vulnerable to naval mines. They are vulnerable to bombing from aircraft including smart bombs. Also, the U.S. Navy already has vastly more surface warships and blue sea submarines than almost all likely adversaries and would be working in combination with allies in almost any foreseeable major naval war.

12. Large naval main guns (typically 3" or 5" guns in the U.S. Navy) are not very effective against many of the threats to surface combatants and have ranges much shorter than anti-ship missiles, and their limited range and less than stellar accuracy make them of limited use in providing fire support to coastal ground troops - their main usefulness is against surface ships that lack anti-ship missiles and also lack armed aircraft, but even then an armed military helicopter is better at dealing with these threats.

13. Guided missiles are almost always superior to unguided shells from tank main guns, naval guns and howitzers and to unguided bombs from aircraft, for pretty much any shell over 50mm. Their greater range, greater accuracy, and minimal launcher size and cost make up for their greater cost per round, much of which consists of royalties for guidance system intellectual property.

14. The weapons and capabilities that are needed for homeland defense of the continental United States are very different from the weapons and capabilities needed for expeditionary warfare abroad against near peer opponents.

15. Many key military functions are best performed by air, ground, surface combatant, and submarine drones, ranging in scale from hand held to tens or even hundred of tons. Even when fully automated drones aren't viable, greater automation to reduce the number of military personnel in harm's way is important. Ground drones with missiles are smaller and better than tanks. Jet fighter substitute drones can outperform manned air to air fighters in air to air combat. Drones are almost always superior to manned aircraft in reconnaissance roles. Armed air drones can be very effective as anti-artillery weapons, particularly if they can overcome jamming devices with their own non-GPS guidance systems. Drones with small arms can rival snipers and special forces.

16. Snipers remain relevant in modern warfare and modern sensors and AI can make them as effective for less skilled users as they are in the hands of experts.

17. Airlift is almost always going to be superior in expeditionary warfare to sealift, at least in the critical early days of a conflict, and there are very few circumstances where a large scale D-Day type amphibious assault make sense. Airlift can get troops and military gear to the fight in hours, while sealift can take weeks. The main reason to deploy soldiers from ships these days is to provide a reasonably secure base for them in a conflict with an opponent that has no meaningful naval or air or ground based anti-ship missile resources, or where we are conducting evacuation of civilians missions and aren't a primary target of parties to a conflict.

18. An important way to limit the procurement costs for a large military like that of the U.S. is to tailor systems to different kinds of conflicts to avoid expensive overkill. For example, anti-piracy and anti-smuggling is an important mission, but it doesn't require $2 billion all purpose destroyers. Similarly, pricey stealth fighters make no sense against an opponent with no radar or advanced air defense systems. To be effective in low intensity conflicts we need cost effective systems so we don't lose a war of attrition.

19. The U.S. has devoted too few resources to evacuations and to embargo busting.

20.   Too many U.S. military ships and ground vehicles are basically defenseless which doesn't work in modern warfare, in which everyone is on the front lines.