Our interview for the April – June Critical Thinking with Paul Scharre—he’s a Ranger vet who did tours in Iraq and Afghanistan who is now a robotics expert at the Center for a New American Security—covered so much good material, but we didn’t want to leave it on the cutting room floor. Here’s Scharre on DOD’s history of adapting.
Army AL&T: What lessons can we draw from DOD’s history of adapting—or not—to new technologies and new ways of fighting?
Scharre: It’s a problem for any kind of technology that’s rapidly moving. When we think about the context of acquisition reform, it’s like multiple different pieces. One [piece] is cost issues. And I think that Undersecretary Kendall [Frank Kendall, former undersecretary of defense for acquisition, technology and logistics] did quite a number of things to try to move the department to the point of paying what it should be paying, toward controlling costs.
But then there’s a question: Are we building the right things, and are we being innovative? And there’s another question of speed. And it was fine, when you were competing against the Soviet Union, to have slow, cumbersome bureaucracies, because no matter how slow and dumb we were, [the Soviets] were going to be worse. I mean, anybody who was involved in the IED [improvised explosive device] fight over the last 15 years has lived this problem day in and day out, where we try to work to develop countermeasures and then, within days or a few weeks, insurgents and terrorists have come up with some clever way to get around those or defeat those. And so speed was really of the essence.
Look at World War II: It’s not like countries showed up and they had a military and then they fought with it, right? Rumsfeld [Donald H. Rumsfeld, secretary of defense from January 2001 to December 2006] famously made this dismissive comment, “You go to war with the Army you have.” That’s true on day one, but if you stay at war with the Army you have, you’re going to lose.
Read the full article at http://usaasc.armyalt.com/#folio=90.
LEARNING DOWN THE LINE
Soldiers with the 77th Armored Regiment, 3rd Brigade, 1st Armored Division load onto a UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter after completing a live-fire exercise in November 2016 at Udari Range near Camp Buehring, Kuwait. The Army’s history of adapting to new technologies and new ways of fighting holds lessons for future conflicts. (U.S. Army photo by Sgt. Angela Lorden)
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