On Riskless War

Particularly for the Air Force officers out there, this article at Small Wars Journal might be of interest. Riskless War: Technology, Coercive Diplomacy, and the Lure of Limited War by Douglas Peifer, a professor at the Air War College, warns that the growing use of UAVs and robots may be resurrecting the dangerous myth of "riskless war." Advocates say that robotic technological dominance will allow the United States to quickly and effectively coerce an enemy to do our will, with little risk to our own forces. Peifer quotes one writer in Harper's, who writes, "Within our lifetime, robots will give us the ability to wage war without committing ourselves to the human cost of actually fighting a war."

Not so fast, Peifer warns. He writes at length about the history of technocentric coercive diplomacy and "air policing" and concludes that "even when technological dominance enables advanced states to use force against others with minimal risk to their militaries or public, coercive diplomacy and limited war is often less effective and more costly than anticipated." Also, when the political objective is important enough, efforts at coercion fail and often lead to protracted interventions, occupations, and small wars.

I don't think many officers these days believe in "riskless wars"--Afghanistan and Iraq have killed that idea for at least a decade--but I enjoyed the article for its analysis of coercive airpower. I was surprised and pleased to see such a sober analysis of airpower's effectiveness coming out of Air University. I was also pleased that the author published on Small Wars Journal; I've long believed that the Air Force needs to make a deliberate effort to join the excellent intellectual community online pioneered by the Army.

While on the subject... another excellent article about the myth of riskless war and the enduring presence of uncertainty is H.R. McMaster's 2003 Crack in the Foundation: Defense Transformation and the Underlying Assumption of Dominant Knowledge in Future War.