By Ankit Panda
Technology matters, but it isn’t all that matters in planning for war.
My colleague Franz-Stefan Gady wrote an excellent reflection on the troublesome epistemic problems in military planning (see ‘The Fog of Peace’: Why We Are Not Able to Predict Military Power). While his thoughts were perhaps more on the conceptual side than the usual content you see on this blog, the point being made is absolutely central to how budding strategists ought to think about the world, be they in Beijing, New Delhi, Tokyo, or Washington. Indeed, contemporary military analysis might be ever-so-slightly favoring technology as a variable in determining power at the expense of other factors including, but not limited to, geography, manpower, tactics, and even morale. Situated as we are, in the “fog of peace,” we tend to follow our instincts and heuristics, leading to a disproportionate focus on technology.
Technology plays an important role in many analytical frameworks studying complex social and economic phenomena. One of the most famous insights in neo-classical macroeconomics, for example, was the Solow-Swan exogenous growth model — an economic model of long-run growth that explains macroeconomic growth by looking at several variables, but most critically, changes in productivity via technology. While this model ended up earning one of its progenitors a Nobel Prize in his field, today the insight that technology creates geometric growth in productivity and efficiency is second nature for strategic planners in business and defense alike — an obvious truism. The ability to neatly resolve the effect of a particular technological innovation on aggregate growth proved to be both a powerful and exciting insight.
Franz’s concern that today’s “tech-crazed world” overhypes “disruptive technologies” is well-placed, nonetheless. In examining the trees, we miss the forest altogether. In his piece, Franz used the example of the French and British governments overestimating the strengths of the Czech, Polish, and Italian armies. While that’s an apt example of over-thinking capabilities, another that immediately strikes the mind is the tendency of modern militaries to repeatedly and categorically, across decades and continents, underestimate the efficacy of insurgents and guerilla fighters. From Algeria to Vietnam to Iraq, the side with the more impressive technological spec sheet found itself struggling to achieve even the most modest of objectives. The missing link wasn’t technical (for instance, bigger and better tanks), but organizational and strategic (sensible counter-insurgency).
Read the full story at The Diplomat