Back to the Future

Max Boot describes on vision of 21st century US forces: the 19th century
British Army. In Foreign
Affairs article (hat tip: MIG), Boot argues that while Iraq has shown US
forces to be masters at blitzkrieg, they were less than adept at handling
guerilla war. To remedy that, he suggests looking to the past.

Whether or not the United States is an "empire" today, it is a
country with interests to protect and enemies to fight all over the world.
There is no finer example of how to do this cheaply and effectively than the
British Empire. In 1898, it maintained only 331,000 soldiers and sailors and
spent only 2.4 percent of its GDP on defense, considerably less than the 3.9
percent the United States spends today. This puny investment was enough to
safeguard an empire that covered 25 percent of the globe. ...

The old British Army, he says enjoyed four advantages: a technological edge
over their native opponents; an army optimized for colonial fighting; a system
of native auxiliaries; and "an unparalleled group of colonial
administrators, intelligence agents, and soldiers--many of whom would, in their
spare time, double as linguists, archaeologists, or botanists. Adventurers such
as Richard Francis Burton, Charles "Chinese" Gordon, T. E. Lawrence
("of Arabia"), and Gertrude Bell immersed themselves in local
cultures, operating to advance the empire's interests on their own, with scant
guidance from Whitehall." One way to pay for the transformation, Boot
suggests, is to abandon certain highly expensive weapons programs -- like the
F-22 -- an investing in more and better ground troops and equipment,
understanding that these ground troops will be better not merely as fighters,
but as linguists and nation builders.

The immediate objection that comes to mind is the fate of the 19th century British
Army itself. The splendid colonial force was shredded by its first encounters
with a technologically equal enemy as it went to war against the Boers at the
turn of the century, then later against the Germans in the First and Second
World Wars. The British Army could not in the end prepare itself to fight
against opposite ends of the spectrum with equal success. The close order
tactics developed in the colonial wars (for force protection) were to spell
their doom when confronted by the Mauser rifles and automatic cannon of the
Boers. The real challenge is to transform the US military in ways that will make
it effective both against terrorist tactics and a conventional threat, like
China's, where an F-22 may have some worth.