Casualties, Technology, and America's Future Wars

Abstract

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.