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The Army has made it official. What
those who work in Washington have long known -- that the Pentagon
is about money, not war -- is now Army policy. According to the
March 10 draft of the Army Campaign Plan, "The Army's center
of gravity is the resource process."
Yep, it sure is, as the cost
of the Future Contract System readily attests. Still, the Army
deserves some sort of award for its truth in advertising. How
about a medal showing a hand with a West Point ring on it reaching
for someone else's wallet?
Of course, money has always
been important in war. For centuries, a king who wanted to go
to war had first to trot down to his Schatzkammer and see how
many thaler he had piled up. If the cupboard was bare, he wasn't
going anywhere.
But saying, as the U.S. Army
has, that its center of gravity is the resource process is going
a great deal further. Clausewitz defines a center of gravity
as "the hub of all power and movement, on which all depends."
If that were true of money, then the current wars in Iraq and
Afghanistan would not be happening. The U.S. Army's resources,
not to mention those of the rest of the Defense Department, are
so vastly greater than those of our Fourth Generation opponents
that they would not be able to stand against us for an hour.
The Military Reform Movement
of the 1970s and 80s put it differently. It said that for winning
in war, people are most important, ideas come second and hardware
is only third. How does the Army affect its people, ideas and
hardware by making resources its center of gravity? In each case,
negatively.
Within the officer corps, the
focus on acquiring and justifying resources corrupts, not in
the sense of people taking money under the table but in the more
profound sense of corruption of institutional purpose. Officers
whose focus and expertise is combat are shunted aside while those
who are most adept at the resources game are promoted. Worse,
a swarm of vultures is drawn by the resources, in the form of
a secondary army of contractors. Because their goal is not truth
but the next contract, intellectual corruption is added to corruption
of purpose. At its higher levels, the whole system becomes Soviet,
Gosplan in or out of uniform. The outside world, the battlefield,
is an irrelevant and unwelcome distraction.
Ideas are similarly corrupted.
In general, poverty begets ideas, while an excess of resources
brings intellectual laziness. The illusion that the organization
can simply buy its way out of problems spreads. The ideas that
are valued are those that justify still more resources, while
ideas that promise battlefield results with small resources are
dismissed or seen as threats. Again, the FCS is a wonderful example.
From a military standpoint it is a joke, a semi-portable Maginot
Line doomed to collapse of its own complexity. But in terms of
justifying resources, it is a tremendous success because for
the first time the Army has a program that costs even more than
Navy or Air Force programs.
That leads to hardware, where
complexity becomes the rule because simplicity does not cost
enough. The more complex a system, the less it is able to deal
with threats not envisioned by its designers. Thus we see what
Iraq has illustrated time and again, expensive, complex systems
nullified by imaginative, simple countermeasures based on people
and ideas. Worse, because hardware best justifies more resources,
hardware becomes the Army's top priority with both people and
ideas left far behind. In the end, the Army loses to opponents
who have kept their priorities straight.
The Army should not be blamed
for coming out of the closet and stating up front that resources
are its center of gravity. The scandal is that for all the American
armed services, the resource process is the center of gravity
and has been for a long time (the most recent to make it so was
the Marine Corps, in the mid-1990s). To return to Clausewitz's
definition, one might say that when a military defines resources
as its center of gravity, it creates a hub of all weakness and
stasis, on which all fatally depends.
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