Technology and the American Way of War since 1945 (review)

Is there an American way of war? A quick Internet search reveals that a lot of authors think so, but unfortunately there is no consensus on exactly what that way might be and how closely it is linked to new technology. Much depends on the timeframe adopted: the argument identified with Donald Rumsfeld and the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) that the U.S. military should emphasize technological solutions over all others dominated the scene during George W. Bush's first administration, but it suffered a setback after 2006 with Secretary of Defense Robert Gates's emphasis on "fighting the wars we are in." The Air Force, the technological service par excellence, has declined from its supreme position at the end of the 1991 Gulf War to a service chastened by its failure to manage its nuclear responsibilities and a series of procurement scandals, while the Army and Marines have gained importance through their roles in the land battles of the 2003 Gulf War and subsequent years of counterinsurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In Technology and the American Way of War since 1945, Thomas Mahnken aligns himself with the school of thought that sees a historical continuity in America's strategic goals, even as the technologies and types of battles waged have varied. He argues that technology and service culture, operating in a changing strategic environment, have interacted so as to mutually constitute an "American Way of War." The obduracy of military culture in the face of radical technological change is a main theme of the book: "On balance, the services shaped technology far more than technology shaped the services" (p. 11). To support his argument, Mahnken offers a history of U.S. weapons developments since 1945 in five chapters, connecting his many examples to changes in the perceived threat, service preferences, and technological advances in each period.

Even with this broad canvas, which explicitly includes the political aspects of the strategic environment, the perspective is skewed heavily toward a narrow military framing of the issues. Technological choices are made for military reasons, curiously deracinated from social movements. In Mahnken's telling, the end of conscription and the introduction of an all-volunteer force (AVF) had no impact on technology (indeed the creation of the AVF and its effects on the composition of the armed forces are not even mentioned). Intermediate-range nuclear weapons are deployed in Europe in the 1980s and then removed without reference to the European Nuclear Disarmament movement, which mobilized the populations of the European members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization against the weapons and influenced government attitudes. The Soviet Union is defeated by U.S. technological might, and the Cold War ends without any recognition of Mikhail Gorbachev's leadership role. Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan in 2001 is portrayed as a victory for high-tech weaponry, one that demonstrates the U.S. military's ability to adapt to a new way of fighting. Mahnken offers no discussion of the subsequent deterioration in security in Afghanistan, a development that resulted in a growing U.S. death toll after 2005, the deaths of many Afghan civilians, and fears that the United States would follow other countries in failing to pacify the country. Of course, no author writing about near-contemporaneous events can hope to foretell the future in detail, but fewer pages spent on listing the successive models of various aircraft and missiles in favor of a more nuanced discussion of the political context in which those weapons have been used would have improved his chances.

Mahnken's book invites comparison to an earlier work by Steven P. Rosen, Winning the Next War: Innovation and the Modern Military (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991). Like Mahnken, Rosen takes military culture seriously, but he organizes his argument around a distinction between how militaries innovate in peacetime compared to what they do in wartime. Analyzing fewer cases in greater depth, Rosen argues that the military needs to learn to ask the...