Modern warfare

The Pentagon’s Technology Chief Is an Utter F*cking Fool

For the past 17 years, as the U.S. military has invaded, bombed, and attempted to pacify a fair-sized swath of the map, the assortment of military theorists, practitioners, profiteers, chroniclers and critics known as the “defense community” has engaged in a navel-gazing debate about its future.

Donald Rumsfeld, enraptured with a war in Afghanistan he never bothered to complete, marveled after the invasion that soldiers could lead a cavalry charge while also calling in airstrikes. A few years later, colonels and generals waging another war Rumsfeld couldn’t complete pushed a recalcitrant Army to embrace an imperial and intimate theory of urban war. When that theory fell out of fashion due to its immense commitment of blood, treasure, and time, a fallback version advised building and mentoring foreign armies as proxies. Thousands of miles away, in the Pentagon, the Army leadership treated the wars that it fought as diversions from the great-power conflicts it was used to fighting; then hedged with an all-of-the-above concept called “Full Spectrum Operations”; and finally persisted to see a national defense strategy re-prioritize great-power conflict.