Sticks and Stones in Afghanistan
Consider, most recently, the U.S. experience in Afghanistan. The U.S. brought overwhelming technological superiority to the battlefield -- and with it, we also brought new blind spots. The Taliban, a low-budget but by no means low-innovation adversary, quickly developed low-tech responses to our high-tech blind spots.
Unable to prevail in direct combat with U.S. troops, for instance, the Taliban turned to improvised explosive devices made of readily available materials and detonated by cell phone. We countered by developing costly vehicle-based cell-phone jammers, designed to prevent the long-distance detonation of IEDs as our vehicles drove by them. These often had the unintended consequence of disrupting our own communications, and they also led the Taliban to shift to using IEDs with mechanical triggers. We responded by equipping our forces with ground-penetrating radar designed to detect the metallic signature of IED components. The Taliban countered by moving even further in the direction of sticks and stones, constructing pressure-plated IEDs out of foam rubber, plastic, and wood.
We've seen similar Taliban low-tech countermeasures in other areas. We have invested heavily in both encryption technologies and surveillance technologies designed to thwart adversaries' use of encryption, for instance, but since we took it for granted that potential adversaries would have made similar high-tech communications commitments, we allowed our ability to locate simple FM radios to degrade.
Most of the time, Taliban forces don't bother with encryption; they communicate openly over simple handheld walkie-talkies, using multiple mobile FM repeaters to retransmit these weak signals over longer distances. U.S. forces initially lacked the equipment needed to intercept these transmissions, and reportedly had to reply on purchasing cheap "commercially available radio scanners in the Kabul souk" to listen in. The equipment needed to intercept Taliban radio communications became standard, but it has proven far more difficult for us to locate the enemy themselves; we can locate the repeater towers, but not a Taliban soldier on his handheld radio.
Al Qaeda, too, is a learning organization. Threatened by U.S. drones, al Qaeda is reportedly turning to low-tech countermeasures, encouraging militants to use mud and grass mats to disguise vehicles from overhead surveillance. This tactic won't be successful for long, but it's a good bet that AQ will find new low-tech means to thwart U.S. drones in the coming years.
You get the picture. Sometimes, high-tech measures leads to higher-tech countermeasures -- but at other times, high-tech measures lead to lower-tech countermeasures. More ominously, a misplaced confidence in our technological superiority dangerously increases our vulnerability to low-tech countermeasures.
The Moral of the Story
Some will be tempted to dismiss this as an artifact of the ill-fated post-9/11 U.S. ground wars. Though 65,000 U.S. troops remain in Afghanistan, we've already begun to lose interest in that war and its lessons. We should know better.
In the 1970s, we convinced ourselves that there would be no more Vietnams, and turned our backs on whatever wisdom we had gained during that brutal, protracted conflict (wisdom about the nature of asymmetric and guerilla warfare, the strength of nationalism and the perils of occupation). Then, in Iraq and Afghanistan, we painfully relearned many of Vietnam's grim lessons -- just in time for the wars to wind down and the public to lose interest.
Now, many leaders in both the military and civilian world seem determined to repeat our post-Vietnam head-in-the-sand routine. We won't have any more Iraqs or Afghanistans, we tell ourselves -- we won't invade or occupy states or territories with vast ground forces, and we won't be engaged in messy COIN or stability operations, so we don't need to remember our mistakes -- we can just move on! The lessons of Afghanistan will have no applicability to future wars, for these future wars, if any, will be high-tech conflicts with sophisticated state or state-backed adversaries.
Maybe so, maybe not.
Here's the thing: Even if the cyberwarriors and the Air-Sea Battle proponents are right -- even if any future wars will be with sophisticated, high tech states -- it's a big mistake to imagine that sticks and stones will play no role in future conflicts.
After all, it took the Taliban remarkably little time to realize that high-tech U.S. capabilities could frequently be thwarted by lower-tech countermeasures. Why should we imagine that near-peer states such as China haven't taken notice?
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