The First Rule of Modern Warfare: Never Bring a Knife to a Gunfight

There is a tendency in our planning to confuse the unfamiliar with the improbable. The contingency we have not considered seriously looks strange; what looks strange is thought improbable; what is improbable need not be considered seriously.

Thomas Schelling

It comes as no surprise that the first rule of gunfighting is “Never bring a knife to a gunfight. Bring a gun. Preferably, bring at least two guns.”¹ That said, under what conditions might a manned fighter be a gun or a knife in fights of the future? The question addresses manned fighters in general, not any particular instantiation of a manned fighter, such as the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (JSF), the F/A-22 Raptor, China’s J-10, the Euro-fighter Typhoon or the Gripen, the Mikoyan Article 1.42 (also known as the Mnogofunktsionalny Frontovoi Istrebitel [MFI, multifunctional frontline fighter]), or the Rafale—although we may use some of them as examples.

In the case of the manned fighters mentioned above, separate countries may be on the other side of the decision river already. Those nations, including the United States, have such confidence in their foreknowledge of the future that they are committing a fair (and increasing) chunk of national treasure—always subject to review—to the capabilities that one version or another of a future manned fighter promises to provide.² Moreover, so confident are we in understanding the future environment that, absent limitless treasuries, we also must be forgoing investments in apparently less-valuable military equipment for nonaviation elements of our joint forces in order to purchase a future manned fighter. The fact that air forces around the planet periodically need or want a new manned fighter is a familiar condition. But now let’s move to unfamiliar conditions.

Four Simple Premises about the Future

The past is done. Finished. The future does not exist. It must be created microsecond by microsecond by every living being and thing in the universe.

—Edward Teller

This article seeks to enlarge our thinking by creating or defining a few future states wherein manned fighters may have less utility (or little or no utility). Such states would serve as a counterpoint to the futures envisioned or created by planners in the United States and Europe, wherein a manned fighter is an essential element of an armed force. Thus, the article paints pictures of potentially strange and unfamiliar futures, allowing readers to decide whether these states—or combinations of them—are improbable or not. If any do not seem improbable, however strange they may be, we must take them seriously in our planning. Not only must we envision an unfamiliar future (all futures are unfamiliar) but also we must test the value or utility of a manned fighter in those environments.

Envisioning these futures entails accepting four simple premises. The first holds that some things will change over time. I think Edward Teller is correct in asserting that there is really no such thing as “the future,” which—unless or until we have better understanding or mastery of the time-space continuum—is a mental construct, an abstraction, or an invention. Thus, we may construct any future or as many futures as we like.

The second premise tells us that the future—this bundle of changes 10, 20, or 30 years hence—will not resemble the present in every regard. That is, given additional discoveries in chemistry, physics, biology, microelectronics, nanotechnology, and so forth, it is inconceivable that materials, structures, computing machines, robotics, propulsion, sensors, and the like would not experience an accelerating rate of change. Rather, we may reasonably and logically assume that human invention and inventiveness will not cease.

According to the third premise, future discoveries in one science or discipline inevitably will converge with discoveries and applications in other sciences and disciplines, just as they do today but at an even faster rate, given increasing connectivity on the planet. At one time, biochemistry, psychopharmacology, and astrobiology did not exist. At one time, telephones were not portable, and cameras were not hosted by personal digital assistants. We can safely say that stranger things are coming.

The final premise is that the scientific discoveries of one epoch foreshadow the military applications of heft in the next epoch. That is, as Malcolm Dando points out in his book Biological Warfare in the 21st Century, the work and discoveries of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century chemists gave us the energetic materials—the explosives—of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The work and discoveries of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century physicists eventually gave us the atomic weapons of the late twentieth and the twenty-first century.³ Since today’s scientific applications of heft are biology, directed energy, and nanotechnology, we may logically assume, as we invent our futures, that the next epoch will see potent weapons and systems built around at least these elements and their convergence.

Six Futures Unfriendly to Manned Fighters

Recall that no one can predict the future, but anyone can invent a mental construct because all of us do. As some define the term, if a person takes the trash out the night before it is collected, then he or she is a “futurist.” If we accept the four simple premises—that things change, that the future will not resemble the present in every regard, that sciences and disciplines will create convergent applications, and that the scientific discoveries of one epoch foreshadow the weapons of the next epoch—we can now construct six futures.⁴ To sharpen our thinking, these futures are deliberately unfriendly to manned fighters.⁵

Imagine a world in which sensor technology, nanotechnology, space propulsion, and space-station keeping have converged and advanced to the point that we can detect and track all objects in the atmosphere and then engage them with a single pellet moving toward its target at Mach 26 or with directed energy traveling at the speed of light. To avoid such a weapon, a manned fighter would have to create a companion future wherein an incredibly maneuverable aircraft can fly at hypersonic speed, remain stealthy from all aspects as well as invisible to all sensors, and sense and avoid a centimeter-sized ball bearing or instantaneous energy traveling at least five times faster than its target. If not, the gun may become a knife.

The previous vignette described a future in which space occupies the high ground and space superiority trumps air superiority. But space need not trump air. Perhaps the ground can trump air. Air superiority presupposes operating when control of the skies is disputed and having high survivability against multidimensional threats. But envision a future in which combinations of sensors (some on birds and bugs, some on unattended platforms on patrol, some on tethered aerostats, and some in constellations on the ground looking toward the horizon) as well as kinetic and nonkinetic engagement technologies make the air impenetrable to a fighter. Imagine electromagnetic rail guns; highly mobile, man-portable hypersonic missiles; mobile, rocket-powered artillery; lasers; microwave weapons; electromagnetic-pulse weapons; and miniature, unmanned air-and-space vehicles operating in intelligent swarms sucked into air intakes—the mass equivalent of a computer “flood” attack working not on a computer’s operating system, but on the fighter’s propulsion system. Imagine all of them acting together to make the cost of a shot so inexpensive that flying a manned fighter into such a fur ball is economically unfeasible, if not militarily unwise. To these weapons add information operations at the point of origin that extract data from an inertial navigation system—or change it—or that read the head-up display and send it to the defenders. The gun becomes a knife.

Imagine the asymmetry of a future manned fighter squaring off with an enemy’s antiagricultural weapon. A virus is “an ultramicroscopic infectious agent that replicates itself only within cells of living hosts.”⁶ Many viruses are pathogenic; that is, they cause disease in living organisms. Bacteria are “any of numerous unicellular microorganisms, occurring in a wide variety of forms, existing either as free-living organisms or parasites, and having a wide range of biochemical, often pathogenic properties. [Some are] capable of causing human, animal or plant diseases.”⁷

Picture a future in which biology has advanced to the point that virological and bacteriological weapons constitute the new nukes or the poor person’s nukes for deterrence and reprisal. Any attacks on the homeland of an enemy so armed could result in an alteration of the attacker’s ecosystem (or that of the attacker’s ally), even though the retaliatory strike need not be (and probably would not be) acknowledged.⁸ The advantages of this kind of warfare, according to the US Federal Emergency Management Agency, include less physical risk to the attacker, smaller chance of outrage and backlash when attacks are nonattributable (especially since natural outbreaks could be the cause), and fewer technical barriers to creating such weapons.⁹ Under the risk of an enemy waging agricultural, virological, or bacteriological warfare, alliances may weaken—and the gun becomes a knife.

In the years well before Operation Iraqi Freedom, many “soccer moms” in the United States, concerned about the relative US investment in guns and butter, sported bumper stickers on their crashproof Volvos and Saabs that read, “It will be a great day when our schools get all the money they need and the Air Force has to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber.” Envision a future in which the domestic economic climate is such that senators, congressmen, and parliamentarians become intolerant of defense expenditures that they and their constituents consider unnecessary.

The political climate in democracies breeds all the conditions—not only for bake sales but also for perfect storms—that future manned fighters (or any other large procurement of military equipment) must fly through. Free speech, high tolerance of diversity and dissent, universal suffrage, the right to elect representatives accountable to their constituents, public debate, perhaps intervention fatigue, transparency, and the oversight of expenditures demanded by good stewardship (as well as civitas) all come together when the military speaks of the need for modernization or recapitalization.

Modernization or recapitalization of military equipment must be designed so that this equipment—especially the manned variety—can survive in combat and suffice for decades. To last many years and reduce the risks of operating in the future combat environment, the equipment has to be at the leading or bleeding edge of technology—which demands large expenditures. Because of the enormous sums taxpayers must provide, such programs require a great deal of oversight to ensure high accountability. The more oversight, the more complex and exculpatory the offers or bids from industry.

The more indemnification in the bids, the more the government must pay the contractor if the former causes a delay, makes an engineering change, or alters a schedule. The more changes, the more slips. The more slips, the more costs. The more costs, the more oversight. The more oversight, the more expense and delay. The more expense, the more reviews. The more reviews, the fewer units procured or the less capable the units, as this or that functionality is scrapped to save a few pence. The fewer units procured, the greater the costs. The less functionality, the more pronounced the perception of a “breach of contract” with the electorate. And, of course, if the procurement lasts more than two years, we can throw political parties and elections into the mix. As a consequence, perfect storms inevitably batter all large procurements. The predicate of the problem—the cost of slow procurement processes, policy, or excessive oversight—largely gets ignored, and all the attention and condemnation focuses on the object: that which is being procured.

According to a press report, the complexity of manned fighters (here we use the JSF only to illustrate the challenges in complicated development programs) led the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) to conclude that

In testimony the GAO determined that “regardless of likely increases in program costs, the sizable continued investment . . . must be viewed within the context of the fiscal imbalance facing the nation [United States] over the next 10 years. The . . . program will have to compete with many other large defense programs as well as other priorities external to [the Department of Defense’s] budget. The JSF’s acquisition strategy assumes an unprecedented $225 billion in funding over the next 22 years, or an average of $10 billion a year.”¹¹

Within the context of the world economic system, we must also consider the potential economic engine of China, whose gross domestic product (GDP), according to China, will grow. The People’s Daily Online reported in March 2005 that “a report released by the Development Research Center of China’s State Council predicts China will maintain around 8 percent annual GDP growth rate from 2006 to 2010, China’s 11th five-year plan period.”¹²

Unless we believe that we can maintain our present standard of living or that it can continue to rise, then we will have to cut something to preserve that standard. Envision a future whose electorate refuses to have bake sales and whose perfect storms destroy procurement after procurement. In a future dominated by perfect storms, the gun may become a knife. If so, then we must learn to become adept—the best in the world—at knife fighting.

Envision a future in which targets are as “smart” as the weapons designed to affect them—targets designed with mobility, self-healing, and invisibility. A bridge is indeed a bridge, but a “logistics system” becomes a far more elegant notion. “Net-centric” may focus on the wrong things, but networks and networking are right notions. A smart adversary (we should consider all future adversaries smart) may at this moment be preparing to take advantage of perceived flaws in the air tasking order and our targeting notions. We can cause effects to occur, but a wily foe may frustrate our notions of causality. Did the lights go out because we cut off the electricity or because the adversary ordered them out? The same advances in technology that aid the offense will aid the defense. At the end of the day, if the adversary-defender has a smarter target system than the attacker has a conception of targeting, then the gun becomes a knife.

In 1914 George S. Patton, a lieutenant at that time, designed a new saber for the US Army and authored a revision of the service’s saber regulations after studying swordsmanship with the French. The cavalry and saber persisted until 1938 even though the saber had proved ineffective during the US Civil War—over seven decades earlier. I. B. Holley writes that “the Surgeon General’s Civil War wound statistics certainly confirmed this view. After months of operations in which the Union forces suffered tens of thousands of bullet wounds, only 18 authenticated cases of sword injury could be identified.”¹³ Regarding the grand doctrinal battle between the cavalry and the tank, he quotes J. F. C. Fuller as saying, “To establish a new invention . . . is like establishing a new religion—it usually demands the conversion or destruction of an entire priesthood.”¹⁴

Today’s priesthood may be the manned aircraft’s College of Cardinals—chiefs of the already-modern air forces of the planet and their acolytes, the iron majors. But what if secular judges, unimpeded by the white-scarf legacy of manned aviation or the authority and perhaps theological biases of air chiefs, look at the hard data and conclude within the next 10 years that unmanned systems outperform manned systems in disputed environments? Unmanned systems weigh 10 percent to 15 percent less than their manned counterparts; cost less; lend themselves to procurement in larger numbers; require no onboard life support; have higher endurance without performance-enhancing drugs; don’t need crew rest, cable TV, or air-conditioning; can bank and accelerate more rapidly; don’t succumb to information overload; don’t host a human vulnerable to exploitation as a prisoner of war; require no costly supporting combat-search-and-rescue capabilities; and don’t flinch, pucker, or have to urinate.¹⁵ If the unmanned aerial vehicle, the unmanned combat aerial vehicle, the joint unmanned combat air system, or the space-to-earth strike weapon outperform the manned fighter, cost less over their life cycles, or sustain themselves more easily, what will the owners of squadrons of future manned fighters do? More likely than not, they will call the knife of manned systems a gun.

So What?

This article has attempted to propose strange and unfamiliar futures in which a manned fighter might be a gun or a knife. As Sherlock Holmes admonishes us in “The Adventure of the Beryl Coronet,” “It is an old maxim of mine that when you have excluded the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”¹⁶ It is incumbent upon planners, operators, and those individuals involved in acquisition and policy to ensure that the gun of a future manned fighter does not prove to be a mere knife.

1. Adapted from Special Forces List Team House, http://teamhouse.tni.net/Misc/gunfight/rules.htm; and http://www.jimpruett.net/bring_a_gun.htm. The basic rules are as follows: (1) Never bring a knife to a gunfight. Bring a gun. Preferably, bring at least two guns. (2) Bring all of your friends who have guns. (3) Anything worth shooting is worth shooting twice. Ammo is cheap. Life is expensive. (4) Only hits count. The only thing worse than a miss is a slow miss. (5) If you can choose what to bring to a gunfight, bring a long gun and a friend with a long gun. (6) If you are not shooting, you should be communicating, reloading, and moving. (7) Always cheat, always win. The only unfair fight is the one you lose. (8) Have a plan. (9) Have a backup plan because the first one won’t work. (10) The faster you finish the fight, the less shot you will get.

2. In democracies, everything is subject to review. Chapter 2, Title 10, United States Code (USC) was amended to require a Quadrennial Defense Review, whose report the US secretary of defense must provide to the Committees on Armed Services of the Senate and the House of Representatives no later than 30 September 2005. The report may affect some past investment decisions. The language of the law (chap. 2, Title 10, sec. 118, USC) is as follows:

3. Malcolm Dando, Biological Warfare in the 21st Century: Biotechnology and the Proliferation of Biological Weapons (New York: Brassey’s, 1994), 129.

4. My colleague Dr. Jae Engelbrecht chastises me that a “future” must be the logical consequence of the “drivers” of change, must be coherent and internally reflexive, must have a plausible history showing how the future arose, and must pass hundreds of other tests to be legitimate.

5. These futures are fabricated—invented within the logic of the model of convergent changes. The technologies are extrapolations and combinations constructed without knowledge of what is being worked on where.

8. A report on the US Federal Emergency Management Agency’s Web site notes that a number of countries have the potential for developing state-sponsored offensive agriterrorism capabilities or programs: Canada, Egypt, France, Germany, Iraq, Japan, Kazakhstan, North Korea, South Africa, Syria, United Kingdom, United States, Russia, Uzbekistan, and Zimbabwe. In addition to plant pathogens, the report cites a large number of animal diseases as risks to cattle, swine, and fowl. Federal Emergency Management Agency, http://www.fema.gov/txt/onp/toolkit_app_e.txt.

10. “GAO Warns Joint Strike Fighter’s Business Case Is Not Executable,” Inside the Navy, 8 March 2005.

11. Status of the F/A-22 and JSF Acquisition Programs and Implications for Tactical Aircraft Modernization: Statement of Michael Sullivan and Allen Li, Directors, Acquisition and Sourcing Management Issues, GAO-05-390T (Washington, DC: Government Accountability Office, 3 March 2005), 18, http://www.gao.gov/new.items/d05390t.pdf.

12. “Forecast: China to Maintain around 8 percent GDP Growth through 2010,” People’s Daily Online, 21 March 2005, http://english.people.com.cn/200503/21/eng20050321_177555.html. Even so, analyst Richard Cooper reports that “it is not correct, as is sometimes claimed, that the Chinese economy will overtake the US economy in any meaningful sense by 2015 or 2020; at best it will barely reach one quarter the US GDP by 2020.” “Testimony of Richard N. Cooper, Public Hearing on Chinese Budget Issues and the Role of the PLA in the Economy,” U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission, 7 December 2001, http://www.uscc.gov/textonly/transcriptstx/tescpr.htm.

13. Maj Gen I. B. Holley Jr., “Of Saber Charges, Escort Fighters, and Spacecraft,” Air University Review 34, no. 6 (September–October 1983): 3.

15. These are the usual arguments trotted out when asserting the superiority of unmanned flying machines.

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