The Science of War: Defense Budgeting, Military Technology, Logistics, and Combat Outcomes | Date: 28 April 2011, 07:07
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The Science of War: Defense Budgeting, Military Technology, Logistics, and Combat Outcomes
By Michael E. O'Hanlon
* Publisher: Princeton University Press
* Number Of Pages: 280
* Publication Date: 2009-09-20
* ISBN-10 / ASIN: 0691137021
* ISBN-13 / EAN: 9780691137025
Product Description:
The U.S. military is one of the largest and most complex organizations in the world. How it spends its money, chooses tactics, and allocates its resources have enormous implications for national defense and the economy. The Science of War is the only comprehensive textbook on how to analyze and understand these and other essential problems in modern defense policy.
Michael O'Hanlon provides undergraduate and graduate students with an accessible yet rigorous introduction to the subject. Drawing on a broad range of sources and his own considerable expertise as a defense analyst and teacher, he describes the analytic techniques the military uses in every crucial area of military science. O'Hanlon explains how the military budget works, how the military assesses and deploys new technology, develops strategy and fights wars, handles the logistics of stationing and moving troops and equipment around the world, and models and evaluates battlefield outcomes. His modeling techniques have been tested in Iraq and Afghanistan, including the methods he used to predict higher-than-anticipated troop fatalities in Iraq--controversial predictions that have since been vindicated.
The Science of War is the definitive resource on warfare in the twenty-first century.
* Gives the best introduction to defense analysis available
* Covers defense budgeting
* Shows how to model and predict outcomes in war
* Explains military logistics, including overseas basing
* Examines key issues in military technology, including missile defense, space warfare, and nuclear-weapons testing
* Based on the author's graduate-level courses at Princeton, Columbia, and Georgetown universities
Summary: Ignores the most important question
Rating: 1
This book ignores the most important question - why should the US have a large military, and why should it be intervening in other countries' affairs? Why is it that the US has such a large and complex military apparatus and why are we using it so much?
During the Vietnam War, the mainstream media (contrary to illusions) had a criticism of the war, that it wasn't being fought hard enough, and that we were losing. The important issue should have been whether we had any right to be in Vietnam and whether we should be winning it at all. This book assumes that it is right for us to be intervening in other countries' affairs, that it's right for us to have a large military.
It ignores the larger question of whether it's right for us to be in Iraq and Afghanistan, whether it's right that we have nearly a thousand military bases in dozens of countries, and that we are the only country in the world with aircraft carrier fleets which roam the earth "protecting our interests" and intimidating foes.
This book is part of a long line of hawkish, pro-war thought from the neocon tradition which got us into the messes in Afghanistan and Iraq and if we continue to let the debate over foreign policy to be set by idiots like O'Hanlon, who only care about whether our military is "working well" and not whether our actions are moral, then we'll continue to invade other countries and foster hatred towards us from others.
Summary: Flawed Basics of Analysis
Rating: 3
O'Hanlon is a recognized expert on National Security Issues, who in this book provides a moderately good tutorial on what he calls "defense analysis" as practiced by the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD). He is especially good at explaining such arcane issues as the mechanics of DOD budget development, methods of combat modeling and force sizing, and factors affecting logistics and basing. Yet as O'Hanlon himself noted mechanics and methodology are not isolated analytic techniques, but other factors also influence the analytic process. So it can be asked what about the roles of threat analysis and risk mitigation in defense analysis? These are important considerations when budgeting for defense and planning force structures, but there is no mention of them in this book.
The weakest chapter in the book is titled, "Technical Issues in Defense Analysis" that is an exposition on the role of technology and innovation in defense analysis. Now O'Hanlon does provide reasonably good discussions of missile defense issues (a current hot button) and nuclear weapons in this chapter. But he also demonstrates a particularly poor understanding of the what he dismissively refers to as "nifty new gadgetry" and the so-called Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA). In point of fact, the concept of information driven command and control systems (command, control, computer, communication, intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance (C4ISR)) are integral to successful counter-insurgency operations and to waging asymmetrical war in general (including counter-terrorism). C4ISR systems represent an evolutionary not revolutionary development yet the RMA was the catalyst in their implementation. Network Centric Warfare(NCW) is not as O'Hanlon would have it, a phrase describing " a variant of RMA theory", but is a deployed system representing the latest evolution of the Combat Information Center (CIC) and represents the latest effort by the U.S. Navy to manage a geometrically increasing amount of relevant information. O'Hanlon also appears to be behind the power curve on Information Operations (IO) which he refers to as "effect based operations" and like NCW seems to think it represents theory not practice. This is nonsense and suggests O'Hanlon might want to review the current literature on both subjects. Overall a useful book, but one that would have been better had O'Hanlon made more of an effort to explain how the Information Revolution and its attendant "nifty gadgetry" has impacted on defense analysis in the 21st Century.
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