James Fallows:
This week I realized that over the past 45 years I’d been preparing for the news of the past nine days.
I’ll list the reporting steps I’ve taken, because they set up the questions and reactions I have now.
-In 1981 I published a book called "National Defense", which was serialized in the Atlantic.
Its purpose was to interview people who’d spent their lives waging war, or studying warfare,
and ask what realities of combat they think the rest of us misunderstand.
One of its messages was that the ability to think many steps ahead of the adversary
—if we do this, they’ll probably do that, and then we’d have to imagine something else
—distinguished the victors from the defeated.
This applied on the battlefield and in other arenas of competition.
So did the related-but-different ability to re-orient and change plans more quickly than the adversary,
when circumstances inevitably changed.
These points may seem obvious,
but you’ll see why I’m returning to them now.
Another message involved “quantity vs quality.”
The historians, combat veterans, and technologists I spoke with also emphasized that in warfare,
having more weapons, could sometimes matter more than having “better” weapons.
One gruesome example from Vietnam was the cheap but reliable AK47 rifle used by the Vietcong, versus the more “advanced” American M16, prone to deadly jams in the arms of US troops.
Drones did not exist in those days.
But since 2022 Ukraine has shown how a $2,000 “first-person-view” drone can destroy a $5 million Russian tank.
Right now, Iran can buy at least 150 of its Shahed “suicide missiles” for the cost of a single US-made Patriot missile to defend against them.
https://fallows.substack.com/p/the-arrogance-of-ignorance
This week I realized that over the past 45 years I’d been preparing for the news of the past nine days.
I’ll list the reporting steps I’ve taken, because they set up the questions and reactions I have now.
-In 1981 I published a book called "National Defense", which was serialized in the Atlantic.
Its purpose was to interview people who’d spent their lives waging war, or studying warfare,
and ask what realities of combat they think the rest of us misunderstand.
One of its messages was that the ability to think many steps ahead of the adversary
—if we do this, they’ll probably do that, and then we’d have to imagine something else
—distinguished the victors from the defeated.
This applied on the battlefield and in other arenas of competition.
So did the related-but-different ability to re-orient and change plans more quickly than the adversary,
when circumstances inevitably changed.
These points may seem obvious,
but you’ll see why I’m returning to them now.
Another message involved “quantity vs quality.”
The historians, combat veterans, and technologists I spoke with also emphasized that in warfare,
having more weapons, could sometimes matter more than having “better” weapons.
One gruesome example from Vietnam was the cheap but reliable AK47 rifle used by the Vietcong, versus the more “advanced” American M16, prone to deadly jams in the arms of US troops.
Drones did not exist in those days.
But since 2022 Ukraine has shown how a $2,000 “first-person-view” drone can destroy a $5 million Russian tank.
Right now, Iran can buy at least 150 of its Shahed “suicide missiles” for the cost of a single US-made Patriot missile to defend against them.
https://fallows.substack.com/p/the-arrogance-of-ignorance
2
