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Opinion: Timeless Insight Into Why Military Programs Go Wrong
The history of defense program failures was foretold in 1953
Mar 11, 2016 - Bill Sweetman
The best 4,000 words you’ll ever read about 21st-century defense procurement were written more than 60 years ago by a former Royal Air Force radar boffin, Arthur C. Clarke, who would go on to become a lauded science-fiction luminary.
“Superiority” was published in Clarke’s 1953 story collection, Expedition to Earth. The setting is familiar, because it’s the backdrop for the Star Trek and Star Wars franchises: civilizations that have developed interstellar travel but fight like battleship navies at close range. The real war is between the military commanders (including the narrator) and a young and inventive scientist who likes to create superweapons.
In previous superweapon fiction, the weapons worked. The office clerks manning H.G. Wells’s “land ironclads” take out their battle-hardened infantry opponents one by one, with guns that closely resemble the remote-controlled weapon systems on modern armored vehicles.
In Clarke’s universe, it all goes horribly wrong, in ways that match historical experience with spooky exactitude. “A revolution in warfare may soon be upon us,” the scientist tells the general staff at his first meeting. The adversary has matched today’s technology; the research and development organization has not invested in radical new weapons. “It is fortunate for us that our opponents have been no wiser,” the scientist warns. “We cannot assume that this will always be so.”
I suspect that everyone in the defense industry today has heard similar words, whether about the “revolution in military affairs,” “transformation” or even “Third Offset.” Note, too, how the scientist uses the fact that the enemy is sticking with existing technology to support his case.
The first new weapon, the Sphere of Annihilation, “produced complete disintegration of matter over a radius of several hundred meters.” Its main drawback: It required a bigger torpedo that could only be carried on larger ships. The production of existing torpedoes had to stop, but this was worthwhile: “It seemed to us that all our existing weapons had become obsolete overnight,” the narrator says.
But by the time the new weapon is ready, the enemy (having not read the scientist’s memo) has been churning out old-technology (fourth-generation?) ships, has launched offensives while the defender’s ships are low on torpedoes and has an advantage in numbers that blunts the superweapon’s impact.
This is a good time to recall that the Pentagon’s effort to replace thousands of fighters, bombers, cruise missiles and helicopters with stealthy vehicles went into high gear 30 years ago and that the average age of the U.S. fighter force has never been greater.
Next, the scientist offers the disappointed commanders what today’s salesmen would call a force multiplier. “What did it matter, he said, if the enemy had twice as many ships as we—if the efficiency of ours could be doubled or even trebled?” The key was a powerful computer, the Battle Analyzer, which turns out to be decisive—at least in modeling and simulation. “After we had run through several very complex dummy battles, we were convinced.”
The problem is the human factor. It proves impossible to train enough technicians to maintain the complex machine, with almost a million vacuum tubes. The Analyzer becomes a classic low-density, high-demand asset and a single point of failure, and the enemy responds by targeting it.
What is the primary target set for the Chengdu J-20 fighter, aside from small fleets of RC-135 Rivet Joint and E-3 Sentry surveillance aircraft?
The enemy has been continuing to out-produce the narrator’s side and is winning on all fronts. But “we could not now turn back—the search for an irresistible weapon must go on.” The final new weapon is a form of stealth, a space-distorting “exponential field” that allows a ship to approach the enemy unseen and appear in their midst on demand. In the rush to deploy it, snags in operational testing—“a whole flock of minor technical troubles in various pieces of equipment, notably the communications circuits”—are dismissed as trivial.
Apparently, Clarke’s future world has taken the advice of its industry-paid consultants and dispensed with an independent director of test and evaluation.
By the time it is found that the field leaves minute, permanent distortions throughout the ship that become worse every time it is used, to the point where not even the nuts and bolts are interchangeable, it’s too late. Defeat “by the inferior science of our enemies” is inevitable.
Is “Superiority” a parable? Clarke would have known very well how the U.S. 8th Air Force had arrived in Britain in 1942 and how its leaders planned to win the war with precision bombing, thanks to a specific, highly secret weapon-aiming system. It might be a coincidence that Clarke’s arrogant scientist is named Professor-General Norden, but I doubt it.