Fighting the Last War

During a recent podcast appearance, I took issue with the phrase "generals are always fighting the last war", and as the conversation moved on pretty quickly, I thought that the idea was worth expanding on.

To be clear, I am not claiming that military thought isn't profoundly shaped by the most recent available combat experience. It obviously is, although it's not uncommon to have the response be "everything involved in that was a horrible mistake and we should never do anything like it again". But the last general who actually thought the next war would be exactly the same as the last one died sometime in the 1880s, and since then the conversation has always been about how different the next war will be and in what ways. And in that environment, the main purpose of "fighting the last war" is to argue against a conservative¹ take and for making more radical changes. And given that the discussion is happening, it doesn't really add any useful information beyond "unthinking and reflexive conservatism is wrong", which really should be obvious to everyone anyway.

More than that, I think the conservative view has generally held up pretty well. Obviously, things change, but those who prophecy immediate and radical change based on the new hotness of the day have not found their theories treated kindly by the test of battle. To take the easiest example to work through given my archive, the battleship was declared obsolete several times before it finally succumbed to changes in warfare. The first serious threat was the ram, which generally turned out to be a bigger threat to friendly ships than to enemy ones. Then there was the torpedo, which did prompt serious changes in how navies planned to use their ships and spawned a new type of vessel, but which didn't render battleships obsolete. Then it was the submarine, which again prompted changes and countermeasures, but which wasn't really a major threat to the battlefleet. And finally came the airplane, which did dethrone the battleship as the master of the waves, but which took several decades to do so and which left the battleship an important niche for another decade or so after that.

Billy Mitchell

The example of the battleship also illustrates another point: when making defense policy, what matters is not eventual rightness, but being right at the right time. Billy Mitchell, who claimed in 1920 that the airplane had already rendered the battleship obsolete, was entirely wrong, and had to rig his test on the matter. Whatever the eventual rightness of Michell's claims,² a wholesale adoption of his views in 1920 would have been an obviously bad decision if war broke out in 1925. Likewise, even if, say, we will reach a point by the end of the century where unmanned aircraft have effectively replaced manned aircraft, it's probably going to be a few decades before we can build systems that we are comfortable setting loose to operate autonomously in an environment with the sort of limited communications that are likely to occur in a full-scale war.³ And until we know that such systems will actually work, it would be foolish to discard the manned aircraft entirely.

There's also a strong degree of selection bias in which incidents get remembered as "fighting the last war" and which don't. The obsolescence of the battleship gets a lot of play because it turned out that the critics were right in the end, and because the typical version of the story involves Pearl Harbor, one of the approximately three⁴ events from WWII that a typical American can remember. But what about the obsolescence of the surface ship in the face of the anti-ship missile? That one hasn't fared so well,⁵ and so the whole thing has been quietly forgotten, although I'm sure that if some future missile does render the surface ship obsolete, someone who said it was doomed in 1967 will be hailed as a prophet. And then there's stuff like the British 1957 Defence White Paper, which argued that the manned airplane was obsolescent in the face of the missile. This obviously didn't work out the way the authors thought it would, but they were far from alone in drawing that conclusion, and it's only something anyone remembers because it did tremendous damage to the British aviation industry.

A Global Hawk

Now, obviously the systems we use to fight wars will change, and new technologies will need advocates. But advocates are at their most convincing, and most worth listening to, when they are clear-eyed about both the benefits and limitations of their systems, and can provide specifics about how they work and where they fit into the existing systems. Someone who is going on about how drones will change everything and that we should cancel the F-35 immediately is likely to be operating in the mold of Billy Mitchell, particularly if they can't tell the difference between a Global Hawk, a Tomahawk and a T-Hawk. Someone who has put thought into the niches where unmanned systems do and, perhaps more importantly, don't fit is probably at least worth listening to.

A T-Hawk

It's also worth keeping in mind the stakes of getting things wrong here. We know that the old systems worked in the last war, and while the next war will be different somehow, it's also likely to be pretty closely related to whatever the last war was.⁶ Overly hasty embrace of the new in preference to adding elements of the new to a core of the old thus imperils everything. Or as a 1936 Parliamentary sub-committee said about proposals that Britain stop building battleships, “If their theories turn out well founded, we have wasted money; if ill founded, we would, in putting them to the test, have lost the Empire.”