Push-Button Warriors
We’ve not seen the effort yet.

Mr. Kurtz is also a fellow at the Hudson Institute
November 29, 2001 8:35 a.m.

ull a baby across a room in a little red wagon and watch his face light up. He's doing nothing but going along for the ride, but he feels as though the wagon's power is his. Put some speed on your car on a clear and pleasant road and you'll feel the same way. True, you bought that car with the sweat of your brow, and you're the one who's driving. Still, there's some sort of "cheating" going on. You feel as though the speed is yours, when it's really the car's. Master the difficult and dangerous art of flying a fighter jet off an aircraft carrier, push a button, and set a laser-guided bomb on a course for your enemy. Here the problem of effort and responsibility becomes more complicated. Now watch it all on television.... More complicated still.

I'm a tremendous admirer of Peggy Noonan, but the other day she said something about what we've learned since September 11 that troubled me:

We...learned we are stronger than we knew. A nation that had spent the past few decades trying to decide what kind of cashmere slippers to buy found out is was, still, tough as old boots.

It's true that, with the exception of some Leftist ideologues, the country has united behind the war. Yes, our economy has been disrupted, and many of us have personally felt the fear of attack. But for all that, I'm not sure we can refer to this conflict yet, the way we once did World War II, as the war effort. The ease of our military success is a wonderful thing — up to a point, anyway. But we have certainly not yet proven ourselves as tough as old boots, and the relative lack of effort expended to this point in the war does matter.

In more ways than one, this war has been precipitated and shaped by technology. The context for the war was set by the collapse of the Soviet empire and the emergence of the United States as the world's only superpower. Technology mattered there, in that the inability of the Soviet system to adapt to the computer revolution hastened its collapse. Home computers, faxes, television dishes, and the like were incompatible with a totalitarian system. And the impossibility of matching our "star wars" technology was a crushing blow to the Soviet Union's economic, military, political, and psychological position in the world.

Now the Muslim world is struggling with the question of whether its own way of life is compatible with the technologies of power and pleasure that are synonymous with modernity. Muslims want these technologies, but the sort of education, economy, and polity required to produce and enjoy them puts much about traditional Muslim society into doubt.

And almost everything important about the conduct of this war is tied to technology. It's true that the attack on the World Trade Center itself was relatively "low tech." Still, our vulnerability is tied to our technology. The existence of skyscrapers allows those who can find their weaknesses to commit mass murder. Our extraordinary infrastructure — skyscrapers, subways, tunnels, gas pipelines, dams, water-treatment facilities, nuclear power plants — makes us vulnerable to even a few determined foes. And a relatively small country (or terrorist network) with real technological facility now has the potential to create weapons of mass destruction. So our new vulnerability is a function of technological advance.

At the same time, our unexpectedly easy success so far in Afghanistan is a function of advancing technology. Our special-operations forces really are "tough as old boots," but through their courageous and brilliantly executed efforts at laser targeting, we have so far been able to avoid committing significant numbers of ground troops. This combination of special-operations forces, proxy armies, and new targeting technologies (global-positioning systems, laser guidance, moving-target indicators, etc.) portends a revolution in warfare, the full political and moral implications of which we are only beginning to feel.

In the Persian Gulf War, the bombing of Bosnia, the bombing of Kosovo, and now in Afghanistan, the United States has won a series of wars, largely through air power, and with almost no casualties. With advances in the new targeting technologies still to come, we face the prospect of being able to dominate the world at the touch of a button — and at virtually no cost in casualties. Technology appears to be taking the human element out of war. Worries about American national will, or the warrior fierceness of the Taliban, now seem almost irrelevant. Nothing can stand against a combination of air supremacy, the new targeting technologies, and a select few forces — mostly non-American — on the ground. Or so it would appear.

There are lots of ways in which this breezy scenario might be complicated. There is still the possibility of serious guerilla resistance from the Taliban, or ongoing civil war in Afghanistan. Despite our desire to get out of the country as soon as possible, a significant number of American troops could be tied down in policing operations for some time to come — perhaps taking regular casualties. Even so, our laser-guided victory from the air has probably saved us from having to commit significant troops to Afghanistan.

The real test will be Iraq. A month ago it was a safe bet that Iraq would have to be taken with a Gulf War-like conventional force, even if heavily dependent upon bombing to prepare the way. Now, taking Iraq through a combination of special-operations forces, precision bombing, and a Kurdish proxy army is at least a possibility. How extraordinary that would be.

The danger in all this is that we might in fact get to used to our cashmere slippers when an old-boots moment finally arrives. This war is still in the early stages, with great unpredictability and great danger ahead. A conventional war in Iraq may indeed be necessary, while Afghanistan may continue to be torn by civil strife. That could break apart our coalition, forcing us to give up our hopes of getting out of Afghanistan quickly. Without our coalition, an international police force will be unreliable. We'd have to do it ourselves. And the need to be certain that even small terrorist cells with weapons of mass destruction aren't hiding out in some remote corner of the world is going to make it more difficult than we may realize to disengage ourselves from the international military commitments that emerge from this war.

Nonetheless, the new technologies of war may turn out to save us from the need to commit massive numbers of ground forces, even as the war expands to other countries. If that does prove to be true, there will be calls to drastically reshape our armed forces to accommodate the new conditions of war. And Americans will come to believe, even more than they already do, that we can have our cake and eat it to — that we can control the world, casualty-free, and without conscription.

Technology or no, that sort of situation cannot last. There are too many long-term dangers on the horizon — North Korea and China, to name two. Sooner or later, America is going to run into a potential conflict with a massive Asian land power where the threat of force will not be credible without a large conventional army and a willingness to take casualties in defense of freedom.

In a thoughtful and spirited reflection on the quantum leap in warfare that our air victory in Afghanistan represents, Fareed Zakaria recently argued that bureaucrats with an antiquated belief in the irreplaceability of ground troops are blocking the necessary transformation of America's military to a modern, high-tech force. But surely we will have to do both — to expand our special-operations forces and pursue the revolution in targeting technology, while also keeping substantial forces prepared for a conventional land war. A serious land conflict could easily come before the current war is over. But sooner or later, it will come.

Advances in technology appear to have made us at once unimaginably powerful and unimaginably vulnerable. The loss of millions of Americans to an attack by only a few terrorists using weapons of mass destruction is now thinkable. The threat will not disappear, even after this war is over. Technological advance has rendered us permanently vulnerable.

At the same time, American control of the world through low-casualty, almost push-button wars is now a realistic possibility. And while only a few terrorists can do a great deal of damage, even great nations will not easily be able to compete with America for world supremacy. The Europeans cannot now even remotely compete with our defense industries, and given the complexity of the new technology and the need for a truly national high-tech infrastructure to manufacture and maintain it, less developed nations haven't a prayer of challenging American power.

So the long-term prospects are for American hegemony. It could take 30-50 years for any challengers with the technological ability to rival us to emerge, and by that time they would likely be our economic and cultural allies. The real danger — once we surmount the challenge from sections of the Islamic world — is from East Asian nations that are at least partially modernized and well-stocked with both manpower and will. To forestall that threat, we must not allow ourselves to be transformed into a push-button power. Technology is our irreplaceable edge, but woe to us if we lose the ability or will to fight a serious land war.

Technology is both the embodiment and the enemy of our humanity. Our ability to make and use tools that extend our natural physical powers is, in a sense, the mark of human civilization. Yet something about our technology has the ability to undercut our dignity, our self-command — our very lives. In everything from our battles over biotechnology to the Islamic world's struggle with modernity, we see the conflict between machinery that serves and extends human power and happiness, and the danger of a life in which humanity is turned into the lackey of his own machinery. Now this conflict has been starkly put before us in the form of advances in weaponry that can destroy civilization, or protect it on the cheap. We shall stay in command of the situation only if we avoid the childish mistake of believing that we are driving the little red wagon when the wagon is driving us. In the end, it will always come back to human skill, and sweat, and spirit.