NYTimes.com Article: American Power Moves Beyond the Mere Super

This article from NYTimes.com 
has been sent to you by tganesh@stlawu.edu.


 Have we really reached the end of the arms race? Or is this the beginning of 
an endless triumphalism following an occupation?  How much of what is claimed 
here is indeed verifiable?  Is the early 21st century destined to be the age of 
the hawks and vultures?


tganesh@stlawu.edu

/-------------------- advertisement -----------------------\

Explore more of Starbucks at Starbucks.com.
http://www.starbucks.com/default.asp?ci=1015
\----------------------------------------------------------/

American Power Moves Beyond the Mere Super

April 27, 2003
By GREGG EASTERBROOK 




 

Stealth drones, G.P.S.-guided smart munitions that hit
precisely where aimed; antitank bombs that guide
themselves; space-relayed data links that allow individual
squad leaders to know exactly where American and opposition
forces are during battle - the United States military
rolled out all this advanced technology, and more, in its
lightning conquest of Iraq. No other military is even close
to the United States. The American military is now the
strongest the world has ever known, both in absolute terms
and relative to other nations; stronger than the Wehrmacht
in 1940, stronger than the legions at the height of Roman
power. For years to come, no other nation is likely even to
try to rival American might. 

Which means: the global arms race is over, with the United
States the undisputed heavyweight champion. Other nations
are not even trying to match American armed force, because
they are so far behind they have no chance of catching up.
The great-powers arms race, in progress for centuries, has
ended with the rest of the world conceding triumph to the
United States. 

Now only a nuclear state, like, perhaps, North Korea, has
any military leverage against the winner. 

Paradoxically, the runaway American victory in the
conventional arms race might inspire a new round of
proliferation of atomic weapons. With no hope of matching
the United States plane for plane, more countries may seek
atomic weapons to gain deterrence. 

North Korea might have been moved last week to declare that
it has an atomic bomb by the knowledge that it has no hope
of resisting American conventional power. If it becomes
generally believed that possession of even a few nuclear
munitions is enough to render North Korea immune from
American military force, other nations - Iran is an obvious
next candidate - may place renewed emphasis on building
them. 

For the extent of American military superiority has become
almost impossible to overstate. The United States sent five
of its nine supercarrier battle groups to the region for
the Iraq assault. A tenth Nimitz-class supercarrier is
under construction. No other nation possesses so much as
one supercarrier, let alone nine battle groups ringed by
cruisers and guarded by nuclear submarines. 

Russia has one modern aircraft carrier, the Admiral
Kuznetsov, but it has about half the tonnage of an American
supercarrier, and has such a poor record that it rarely
leaves port. The former Soviet navy did preliminary work on
a supercarrier, but abandoned the project in 1992. Britain
and France have a few small aircraft carriers. China
decided against building one last year. 

Any attempt to build a fleet that threatens the Pentagon's
would be pointless, after all, because if another nation
fielded a threatening vessel, American attack submarines
would simply sink it in the first five minutes of any
conflict. (The new Seawolf-class nuclear-powered submarine
is essentially the futuristic supersub of "The Hunt for Red
October" made real.) Knowing this, all other nations have
conceded the seas to the United States, a reason American
forces can sail anywhere without interference. The naval
arms race - a principal aspect of great-power politics for
centuries - is over. 

United States air power is undisputed as well, with more
advanced fighters and bombers than those of all other
nations combined. The United States possesses three stealth
aircraft (the B-1 and B-2 bombers and the F-117 fighter)
with two more (the F-22 and F-35 fighters) developed and
awaiting production funds. No other nation even has a
stealth aircraft on the drawing board. A few nations have
small numbers of heavy bombers; the United States has
entire wings of heavy bombers. 

No other nation maintains an aerial tanker fleet similar to
that of the United States; owing to tankers, American
bombers can operate anywhere in the world. No other nation
has anything like the American AWACS plane, which provides
exceptionally detailed radar images of the sky above
battles, or the newer JSTARS plane, which provides
exceptionally detailed radar images of the ground. 

No other nation has air-to-air missiles or air-to-ground
smart munitions of the accuracy, or numbers, of the United
States. This month, for example, in the second attempt to
kill Saddam Hussein, just 12 minutes passed between when a
B-1 received the target coordinates and when the bomber
released four smart bombs aimed to land just 50 feet and a
few seconds apart. All four hit where they were supposed
to. 

American aerial might is so great that adversaries don't
even try to fly. Serbia kept its planes on the ground
during the Kosovo conflict of 1999; in recent fighting in
Iraq, not a single Iraqi fighter rose to oppose United
States aircraft. The governments of the world now know that
if they try to launch a fighter against American air power,
their planes will be blown to smithereens before they
finish retracting their landing gear. The aerial arms race,
a central facet of the last 50 years, is over. 

The American lead in ground forces is not uncontested -
China has a large standing army - but is large enough that
the ground arms race might end, too. The United States now
possesses about 9,000 M1 Abrams tanks, by far the world's
strongest armored force. The Abrams cannon and fire-control
system is so extraordinarily accurate that in combat
gunners rarely require more than one shot to destroy an
enemy tank. No other nation is currently building or
planning a comparable tank force. Other governments know
this would be pointless, since even if they had advanced
tanks, the United States would destroy them from the air. 

The American lead in electronics is also huge. Much of the
"designating" of targets in the recent Iraq assault was
done by advanced electronics on drones like the Global
Hawk, which flies at 60,000 feet, far beyond the range of
antiaircraft weapons. So sophisticated are the sensors and
data links that make Global Hawk work that it might take a
decade for another nation to field a similar drone - and by
then, the United States is likely to have leapfrogged ahead
to something better. 

As The New York Times Magazine reported last Sunday, the
United States is working on unmanned, remote-piloted drone
fighter planes that will be both relatively low-cost and
extremely hard to shoot down, and small drone attack
helicopters that will precede troops into battle. No other
nation is even close to the electronics and data-management
technology of these prospective weapons. The Pentagon will
have a monopoly on advanced combat drones for years. 

An electronics arms race may continue in some fashion
because electronics are cheaper than ships or planes. But
the United States holds such an imposing lead that it is
unlikely to be lapped for a long time. 

Further, the United States holds an overwhelming lead in
military use of space. Not only does the Pentagon command
more and better reconnaissance satellites than all the rest
of the world combined, American forces have begun using
space-relayed data in a significant way. Space "assets"
will eventually be understood to have been critical to the
lightning conquest of Iraq, and the American lead in this
will only grow, since the Air Force now has the
second-largest space budget in the world, after NASA's. 

This huge military lead is partly because of money. Last
year American military spending exceeded that of all other
NATO states, Russia, China, Japan, Iraq and North Korea
combined, according to the Center for Defense Information,
a nonpartisan research group that studies global security.
This is another area where all other nations must concede
to the United States, for no other government can afford to
try to catch up. 

The runaway advantage has been called by some excessive,
yet it yields a positive benefit. Annual global military
spending, stated in current dollars, peaked in 1985, at
$1.3 trillion, and has been declining since, to $840
billion in 2002. That's a drop of almost half a trillion
dollars in the amount the world spent each year on arms.
Other nations accept that the arms race is over. 

The United States military reinforces its pre-eminence by
going into combat. Rightly or wrongly, the United States
fights often; each fight becomes a learning opportunity for
troops and a test of technology. No other military
currently has the real-world experience of the United
States. 

There is also the high quality - in education and
motivation - of its personnel. This lead has grown as the
United States has integrated women into most combat roles,
doubling the talent base on which recruiters can draw. 

The American edge does not render its forces invincible:
the expensive Apache attack helicopter, for example, fared
poorly against routine small-arms fire in Iraq. More
important, overwhelming power hardly insures that the
United States will get its way in world affairs. Force is
just one aspect of international relations, while
experience has shown that military power can solve only
military problems, not political ones. 

North Korea now stares into the barrel of the strongest
military ever assembled, and yet may be able to defy the
United States, owing to nuclear deterrence. As the global
arms race ends with the United States so far ahead no other
nation even tries to be America's rival, the result may be
a world in which Washington has historically unparalleled
power, but often cannot use it. 

Gregg Easterbrook is a senior editor of The New Republic
and a contributing editor of The Atlantic Monthly. His next
book, "The Progress Paradox," will be published this fall
by Random House.

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/27/weekinreview/27EAST.html?ex=1052435871&ei=1&en=47302be5e8878544



HOW TO ADVERTISE
---------------------------------
For information on advertising in e-mail newsletters 
or other creative advertising opportunities with The 
New York Times on the Web, please contact
onlinesales@nytimes.com or visit our online media 
kit at http://www.nytimes.com/adinfo

For general information about NYTimes.com, write to 
help@nytimes.com.  

Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company