5.5 THE SELF-DEFEATING CHARACTER OF NETWORK CENTRISM
Wars are a means by which one nation tries to impose its will upon the population of another. No matter how signal the victory on the battlefield, a war that has failed to attain this political goal would have been fought in vain. Therefore, the revolution in military affairs promised by the Network Centric vision would have to enable the attainment of a political goal if it is to be of any value.
As history shows, however, the connection between a nation’s military victory and the enemy’s willingness to submit to that nation’s will is laden with cultural and historical content. In the early days of our western culture, a nation that had been defeated on the battlefield would be expected to submit itself to the political will of the victorious nation. Principles of honor animating the individual leaders, as well as the need for them to husband their very limited forces, dictated that the vanquished king stop all opposition and symbolically disarm at the feet of the victor. By those rules of etiquette, the nation that ruled the day could automatically expect to secure its political goals as well.
With the beginning of the 20th century, this pattern of behavior began to lose its sway over the warring nations of the West. There are at least three reasons for this change. First, because nations were now led by complex power structures rather than individual leaders, the principles of honor were relegated to a distant second place in the affairs of the world. Second, since nations now possessed significantly more economic and military wherewithal, their governments could continue the military confrontation for a much longer period of time than nations were able to do in the past. And, third, since nations were now no longer indistinguishable from to their kings, the defeat of the government would not automatically translate into the defeat of the populations they governed. For all these reasons, then, the nation that wielded the more powerful military would no longer be automatically assured of its political end despite its having beaten the enemy army on the battlefield. To guarantee its political goals, the victorious nation would have had to inflict so much pain and destruction throughout the land as to bend the defeated population into total submission. Thus destroyed, both physically and psychologically, the losing side would have had little choice but to submit to the victor’s will.
The two world wars of Western Europe are good examples of this change in military etiquette. In the first of these wars, the two sides fought each other to exhaustion, leaving behind a devastated Europe and a German government in shambles. The formally defeated nation, having no stamina left to resist the will of the Allies, accepted defeat. Similarly, in World War II, the Allies had to level much of the German homeland before the war was finally over, and therefore there was no question about Germany resisting the will of the Alliance that defeated her.
After the end of the Cold War, the rules appear to have changed again. If recent history is any indication, it appears no longer possible to use the automatic link between military devastation and submission that obtained during the 20th century to implement one’s political aims. The main reason is that, given the general mellowing of the war-like spirit in Europe, it has become nearly impossible to even contemplate inflicting the kind of devastating damage upon an enemy’s country that Europe was quite willing to contemplate just fifty years ago, let alone actually inflicting it. But, without the pain of total destruction, an enemy would be less inclined to disarm and submit itself to the will of another nation. Therefore, the western powers will have to find some other way of employing military force in the service of their national security interests than visiting unspeakable pain upon the enemy country.
We do not yet know with certainty which paradigm will prove to be effective in the 21st century; that decision will have to emerge naturally as the need for it becomes increasingly obvious to the defense community. We do, however, understand some of the key considerations that will influence the selection of that paradigm. Thus, we know that the irreversible globalization of western economies carries with it an unstoppable flux of western values into nations that, not being prepared to accept them, would stand up in active opposition. This fact will tend to increase the likelihood that our enemies will hail from beyond the boundaries of our western world.
We also know that people living beyond those boundaries tend to place a much higher value on their souls than on their material possession, and that, therefore, they would vest much less significance in their armed forces that would we. Since their national pride is thus resident in their system of beliefs and in the tribe to which they belong rather than in their military establishments, losing the confrontation on the battlefield would not materially affect their will to resist.
Finally, we know that these, our prospective enemies, would be able to take the hardship of armed resistance, should that become necessary, with a lot more equanimity than would your typical western populace. For them, time and living conditions do not mean quite the same thing that they mean in the West. A western nation may prefer political submission to living the uncomfortable life that would normally accompany armed resistance to the political will of a conqueror, and in any event, would not have the patience to bear such conditions for long. Indeed, as the French experience during the World War II shows, their first instinct was to collaborate with the Third Reich rather than continue to fight it. It was only later in the war, largely under pressure from the Allies, that some fraction of the population decided to refuse collaboration with the Germans. However, although, as a symbol of this refusal, the French Resistance went on fighting to the end of the war, it is not clear that such resistance would have long outlived a German victory.
The children of the desert, on the other hand, are well accustomed both with harsh living conditions and with the slow motion of time. There is good reason to believe therefore that they would be more inclined than western nations to abandon a symmetric war when defeat became probable and undertake the hardship of an open-ended asymmetric war instead. The resistance posed by armed mujahideen to the Soviet-supported government of Afghanistan a decade ago is a case in point, as are the guerilla wars carried out by rebel groups fighting the established governments of various countries in South America and the Far East for many decades.
Thus, by inclination as well as by training, the likely enemy would easily slip into an asymmetric war. Confronted with the immovable object, they would most likely abandon the field before the battle is joined and convert their efforts into an asymmetric challenge to the conquering force.
These considerations suggest that the old paradigm, under which the victor forced submission upon the vanquished by physical and psychological devastation, would no longer function and should be replaced by a new paradigm focused upon denying our enemies the option of armed resistance. Otherwise, sooner or later our symmetric wars will naturally transform themselves into asymmetric ones and political submission would thus become elusive. The key to achieving our political goal through military means is finding a way to discourage the enemy from switching from a symmetric to an asymmetric war, and if that proved impossible, to find a way to disarm quickly and completely the population of the country whose military forces we vanquished.
However, Network Centric war is quintessentially symmetric war. Although the Network Centric narrative contains some brave words about asymmetric war, the fact remains that the image underlying its argumentation is that of an enemy prosecuting the war according to the same set of rules as ourselves; he just happens to be so far behind our own technological capability, that playing the game by those rules affords him no advantage. Therefore, Network Centrism can not be part of the new paradigm. On the contrary, because of the overwhelming power that it is supposed to generate, a networked military would induce the enemy to switch from a symmetric war, where Network Centrism would have easily held sway, to an asymmetric war, where a networked force as currently envisioned would have little, if anything, to contribute. By doing so, Network Centrism would inadvertently force events in an unwanted direction. In fact, a networked force would almost ensure that the enemy, desirous of husbanding its limited resources, would forgo the symmetric phase of the war altogether and start directly with an asymmetric war. Unless we then succeed to quickly disarm the enemy, the war may turn out to be long, bloody, and without exit.
Ironically, therefore, its very excellence appears to relegate Network Centrism to irrelevance. If we were to follow the dictates of Network Centrism, our very invincibility would almost certainly deny us the political victory that the military victory was expected to bring about. Had we continued to maintain a balanced posture with our likely enemies instead of pursuing ultimate military power, they might have been inclined to fight the war against us symmetrically, and thereby incur sufficient losses to destroy their will to resist. Going Network Centric may prove to be a self-defeating move.