For all our talk about the need for military technical superiority, what if pursuit of that goal becomes our downfall? A couple of weeks ago, Bill Sweetman from Aviation Weekly and I were talking about technology development issues and the Pentagon’s new offset strategy, the Defense Innovation Initiative. During the conversation he mentioned an Arthur C. Clarke story, Superiority, from 1951 that reminded him of some of our current challenges. Being the nerd that I am, I read it that evening with high hopes.
The story is great: It’s short and you should all read it. I’ll unpack it in a moment, but I’d like to pause for a second and consider the role of science fiction in military technology thinking. Why would I automatically assume that a science fiction short story from 63 years ago would be useful today?
Most defense nerds love science fiction. Peter Singer famously explored this relationship in Wired for War — drawing out the relationship between the technologists behind unmanned weapons system development and the science fiction that inspired them. The New America Foundation recently hosted a daylong conference, headlined by Neal Stephenson, that sought to re-focus science fiction on providing inspiration to today’s scientists and engineers. August Cole, of the Atlantic Council’s Art of Future Warfare project, and Peter Singer will publish Ghost Fleet: A Novel of the Next World War next year. And, well, this is how Lt Col Dan Ward writes his books.
We enjoy being amazed by the prescience of authors, from Robert Heinlein’s networked, highly mobile and lethal mechanized infantry in Starship Troopers, to William Gibson’s conception of ‘cyberspace’ in Neuromancer. However, for this defense nerd, technology prediction is merely a by-product of the true genius and value of good science fiction: human insights that teach us about our actions and ourselves.
This perspective on science fiction is best articulated by Ursula Le Guin in the foreword to The Left Hand of Darkness, and by Neil Gaiman in the introduction to the 60th Anniversary Edition of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451.
Clarke’s short story, Superiority, does not predict technologies that we recognize today, but elegantly describes a number of disturbingly familiar military technical failure modes. Such insights are especially helpful when thinking about new endeavors like the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Initiative, which will include both a new long-range research and development planning program and an offset strategy.
In a distant future, an unnamed dominant military power has been engaged in a lengthy space war with a technically inferior adversary. The dominant force appoints a new “Professor General.” This new leader changes the dominant power’s technology strategy from upgrading existing systems incrementally to developing and deploying new weapons, believing that “a revolution in warfare may soon be upon us.” This change in strategy sets off a series of disastrous events that ultimately leads to the dominant military power’s defeat.
Here’s how the decline unfolds. The superior force abandons the production of old weapons platforms to focus on the development of a new “irresistible weapon.” The weapon takes longer to develop than planned and can only be launched in limited quantities. During the development period, the adversary is able to build larger numbers of their inferior weapons so that even when the new weapon works as planned, it does not provide the anticipated advantage. The superior force then attempts a large-scale effort at battle management automation only to have the enemy rapidly adapt to their new concept of operations, targeting central nodes in their new order of battle to devastating effect. In response, the previously superior force develops a final new weapon only to have significant integration issues that throw their forces into disarray, precipitating their defeat within a month.
The story hits home for all of us familiar with the challenges of developing new military technologies and capabilities. Many of these issues can be seen to lesser degrees in recent air, sea, and land weapons system developments. Clarke’s story serves as a powerful reminder that these issues should not be attributed to technology, the cunning of our adversaries, or macro trends in technology diffusion. These are ultimately human failings.
The United States relies on technical superiority to maintain its military advantage. But this technical superiority requires humans to generate the right strategies, design and build the right technologies, devise concepts of operations, and train forces to operate the technology to achieve strategic and tactical objectives. Sometimes this requires new “leap ahead” technology and sometimes it does not. Given that human judgment is required, and that all humans are fallible, we cannot hope to be right 100 percent of the time. However, we cannot ever let the hubris evident in Superiority lead us to defeat due to, as the narrator assesses, “…the inferior science of our enemies.”
Ben FitzGerald is the director of the Technology and National Security Program at the Center for a New American Security. He co-directs the “Beyond Offset” initiative at CNAS.
Photo credit: Jorel Pi
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Ben – which gets to the ultimate in determination – employment. How one employs their weapons, their technology, their force, is the true arbitrator of victory.
I have actually thought a great deal about that story over the past two years. I do hope it does not foreshadow US DOD policy. There is a lot to be said for hundreds of “mini” satellites, thousands of armed drones in the air and other “overwhelming numbers” strategies.
Sounds like he was writing about Nazi Germany on During World War 2. Bigger, badder more innovative weapons, but too few and to late to make a difference.
Or the British introduction of the tank during World War 1
Good article. I think what interests me about this topic is that if you are paying attention to the world in a certain way, then other things may pass you by, or your knowledge will be patchy. An outsider to all this, civilian, not of the male science fiction nerd world (which is a cool world, not complaining), I sometimes feel as if the fantasy fascinates more than the reality of what is, of what the world REALLY is, but this might be my bias as a physician talking.
My favorite part of working in the gross pathology lab as a resident was describing things, getting a lung or leg or spleen or kidney or skin specimen from the OR and looking carefully at each section, describing abnormalities, creating a report of what ACTUALLY IS.
Creativity is important, brain storming is important, visions and stars and skies and space and all that glittering moving shaping wonderful part of art is important, but so too is observation, and care, and carefulness, and striving to see the world as it ACTUALLY IS. Whatever that means.
Cool article, good discussion.
Anyone see the David Bowie exhibit that started at the Victoria and Albert museum, and has moved on to the US?
Artists, the best artists, are often very careful and deliberative, thinking things through. Even a creativity exercise like writing up prose, cutting up phrases, and rearranging them, makes a deliberation of spontaneity. So, the world as it is, observation, is at the root of even the most out-there futurism which is why sometimes it fails as prediction, and other times it succeeds.
Dunno where I am going with this but artists are very careful and technical, it’s not all free form.
Interesting article but the obvious has been left out. The country that has built the most expensive, most technologically advanced and most well trained military the world has ever seen was recently neutralized TWICE by 10,000 insurgents who know how to make their own rifles and, at most, field heavy machine gun mounted on Toyota pickup trucks. Sorry, Ben. It’s not the future. It just happened!
Where is the enemy? Who are they? Why do we kill so many people every year? Do the arms manufacturers have any responsibility for the continuous warfare to which the US now subjects the world? Above all, what purpose does war serve?
Castalia House has been addressing this issue, both from the documentary side as well as the fiction side.
The way you describe Clarke’s Superiority, it’s as if he’s describing Hitler and German WW II weapons development. The V-2 progam cost as much as the Manhatten Project, but did nothing to help Germany’s war effort. His obsession with Extremely heavy artillery and huge monster tanks pulled critical resources away from successful designs that could be incrementally improved. In any event, war is a human endeavor- technology won’t eliminate this.