Editor’s Note: This piece on the War on the Rocks Hasty Ambush blog is published in partnership with the Hoover Institution’s Military History in the News.
In the 1990s, as a result of the overwhelming victory that U.S. military forces and those of their allies achieved over Saddam’s army in the war over Kuwait, a number of military pundits argued that a revolution in military affairs had occurred. That revolution rested on the newly developed capabilities of stealth, precision weapons, computer-based communications, and reconnaissance capabilities of satellites. Supposedly, this revolution would allow America’s military forces to see and understand everything that was occurring in a 200-mile by 200-mile space, and destroy enemy forces at will. As the vice–chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff argued in the mid-1990s, these capabilities would banish friction, uncertainty, ambiguity, and the fog of war from their traditional habit of gumming up the conduct of military operations. The subtext of such popular theories was that ground forces would play a minimal role in future war; in effect soldiers and marines would find themselves useful only in policing up the wreckage left by American air power, missiles, and other weapons systems. Donald Rumsfeld and his advisors largely agreed with such visions, which is why they expended such efforts to minimize the size of ground forces deployed to destroy Saddam’s regime in 2003.
Events did not quite turn out as they expected. What the American military discovered in Iraq beginning in summer 2003, was that it was one thing to destroy Iraq’s military forces, but quite another to put down a swelling insurgency with too few troops and intelligence organizations that possessed neither the linguistic nor cultural understanding required. As the history of the past 150 years has underlined again and again, technology can extend and maximize military capabilities, but it cannot and will not in the future alter the fundamental nature of war. Friction and fog will inevitably continue to hinder the conduct of war. As the old military proverb goes, “the enemy always gets a vote.” The outcome was a long, drawn-out conflict which required a major commitment of boots on the ground, before coalition forces were eventually able to defeat the insurgents, at least long enough to turn Iraq over to Nouri al-Maliki’s grossly incompetent government.
Despite the lessons of the past it would seem that the Obama administration is going down the same path trod by the technologists of the 1990s and early 2000s. It is drastically reducing the Army’s size, while the Marine Corps is also feeling the pinch. In its efforts to deal with the substantial threat that the Islamic State raises, Washington’s current leaders are refusing to put advisors in harm’s way. Its apparent belief is that drones and precision weapons dropped by aircraft will prove sufficiently effective to destroy the military forces of the Islamic State. So far that approach has been less than successful. The Islamic State remains in control of much of eastern and central Syria and northern and western Iraq, while its survival represents a beacon to innumerable fanatical Muslims not only throughout the Middle East, but in Western societies as well. All in all, current American strategy in the Middle East represents a wonderful repetition of the old saw that “the more things change, the more they stay the same.”
Williamson Murray serves as a Minerva Fellow at the Naval War College. A widely published historian and former Air Force officer, Murray was educated at Yale and taught there before moving on to Ohio State University as a military and diplomatic historian. In 1987, he received the Alumni Distinguished Teaching Award. He retired from Ohio State in 1995 as a professor emeritus of history.
Photo credit: Staff Sgt. Perry Aston, U.S. Air Force
Paul 
The RMA is not over; the RMA is ongoing, and each new turn of its technological wheel gives the forces of the West further tactical and operational advantages of their Third World and Jihadi opponents.
Think of the episodes detailed and made famous in two popular books and movies: “Blackhawk Down” and “Lone Survivor.” Both those missions — conducted historically with ‘boots on the ground’ — would be, were they to be run today, supplanted by the use of missile-firing drones and no politically risky boots on the ground.
What the RMA cannot do is make up for bad strategy — in regard to war winning — when such is set in place as policy at the top of our command chain.
The primary example of that today, of course, would be the Obama administration’s ‘lead from behind’ strategy in the Mid-East in general and in Iraq and Syria in particular.
Even so, that policy does make more sense — and you can better understand the RMA’s crucial enabling role within it — when you understand the administration isn’t looking to win the war; rather, they’re only looking for a policy that will let their political party win the next election.
The strategic thought of our political elites extends no farther than this: no strategy that aims to succeed in any situation beyond winning the next election is a waste of time and resources. “Long range strategy” for them extends no further than doing whatever is most expedient in terms of winning election after election. With that accomplished on an ongoing basis, they believe, the ‘long run,’ at least as far as they ever worry about it, is also taken care of.
None of that will change until such time, if ever, that our society is faced with what’s clearly an existential national security crisis.
Murray fundamentally misreads Obama’s policy. Obama is not making the same mistake by thinking the U.S. can destroy ISIS’s military forces by precision strikes only. Despite the degrade and destroy rhetoric, Obama does not intend to destroy IS; he merely means to “mow the grass” for groups targeting the U.s. and weaken IS where he can. The administration seems to understand ground forces are needed to actually destroy IS, but they’ve made the decision that those ground forces will not be American. Hence the miscarried efforts to train a U.S.-sanctioned rebel force from scratch and the renewed efforts to train Iraqi security forces.
I think the Obama administration understands the limitations of technology perfectly well. They are leveraging technology where they can can take out HVTs focused on attacking the “far enemy” through targeted strikes. When it comes to actually eradicating terrorists who pursue the control of territory, he understands the need for ground forces but has sought to have others take on that burden (training Yemeni security forces; training Iraqi security forces; training Syrian rebels). This strategy hasn’t met with much success, obviously, but it doesn’t mean the administration has failed to appreciate the essential role of ground forces.