Air University Review, September-October 1983

"Quantity Versus Quality" is Not the issue

During the past year or so, a new element had entered into the national defense debate: the Military Reform Movement. The Military Reform Movement is a loose alliance of members of Congress, civilian defense analysts, and military personnel (mostly junior ). Its goal, simply stated, is to bring our defense polices and priorities back into with what is important for winning in combat. Generally, people are most important, strategy and tactics come second, and hardware is only third. Therefore, the reformers are more concerned with people and ideas— issues such as unit cohesion, officer education, and tactical innovation—than with defense procurement.

However, as one military reform briefing states, "weapons that don’t work or can’t be bought in adequate quantity will bring down even the best people and the best ideas." The reformers have accordingly begun to question some procurement programs, especially those which have led to weapons of inordinate complexity with poor readiness rates and such high costs that we cannot buy the number we need.

Elements within the Washington defense establishment have already begun to strike back, not by addressing the reformers’ concerns but by distorting them. They are attempting to say the debate is between advocates of "quality" equipment and proponents of "quantity." The services, supporters of "quality" hardware, are said to want only the best weapons—weapons which ensure that each American soldier, sailor, or airman has the greatest possible edge over his Russian opponent. This leads, they argue, to very expensive, very complicated weapons: the Army’s M-1 tank, the big nuclear carrier, the F-15 fighter.

The reformers, labeled the "quantity" side, are portrayed as so worried because the Russians outnumber us in tanks, ships, planes, etc., that they are willing to accept weapons of inferior quality but lower cost in order to get larger numbers.

This is a false picture of the hardware issue. The debate is not between quality and quantity. Rather, it is between two very different definitions of quality. The defense establishment and the contractors with which it works largely define quality in technological terms. The reformers define quality tactically, by looking at what is important on the battlefield.

The defense establishment definition is evident in the sales pitches it gives to the Congress. The stress is on "faster," "higher performance," "more electronics," or the favorite catch-all, "highly capable." These supposedly desirable qualities are seldom discussed in terms of what happens in actual combat. Instead, Congress and the public are given "test results" or "computer studies," which are usually based on unrealistic proving-ground experiments. They are often heavily doctored, reflecting the fact that the testing agency serves the research and development bureaucracy that developed the weapon. And they seldom reflect competition among prototypes.

The defense establishment’s concept of quality leads to weapons that push the technological state of the art but often do so in areas that have little relevance to actual combat. These weapons also tend to be fragile and difficult to maintain in the field, often fail to perform under combat conditions—which are very different from conditions on proving grounds—take decades to develop, and are extremely expensive both to buy and operate.

The military reform view, the view mislabeled "quantity," uses a different measure of quality. It looks not to the technological state of the art but to combat experience. It asks: What qualities have tended to make weapons effective on the battlefield? Five seem to shine through much modern experience:

Weapons should be small and hard to detect. Often, to be seen or heard is to be killed. Big ships, be they the Bismarck or the Nimitz, tend to become the hunted rather than the hunter. Big fighters like the F-15 fall victim to smaller, more agile fighters they never see, such as the F-16. Tanks with big signatures (like the intense heat from the M-l’s turbine engine) quickly become targets for antitank weapons.

Weapons should be reliable and easy to maintain. Ships that spend much of their time in port undergoing repairs, planes stuck in hangars awaiting maintenance, or tanks that break down constantly in the field are liabilities, not assets. Combat is full of mud, confusion, broken-down supply systems, and tired soldiers. The high-quality weapons sought by the defense establishment are hard to maintain even in peacetime. How will we maintain them in the much more difficult environment of actual war? How many will be "ready" after the first few days of combat? the first week?

Weapons should be agile. Agility means many things. In tanks, it means good cross-country mobility (the M-1 throws its treads in rough terrain). In fighters, it means good energy maneuverability and the ability to transition quickly from one maneuver to another. In all weapons, it means an ability to change as the nature of combat changes. Sometimes the ability to change and adapt can be designed in: aircraft carriers built during World War II are still useful ships because we can put new aircraft on them; cruisers and destroyers of the same vintage, with their weapons built into the ship, are obsolete. But often agility means getting rid of a weapon before it is physically worn out because the opponent has figured out how to defeat it. Superexpensive weapons are too expensive to throw away, so we keep them in service long after they are obsolete.

Weapons should achieve their effect quickly. Weapons such as the TOW antitank missile, * the Sparrow radar-guided air-to-air missile, or the Copperhead laser-guided artillery shell require the operator to expose himself for a long time to guide the system to the target. The enemy has a chance to react and counterattack. The devotees of complex technology promise that future weapons will be "fire and forget." But we had fire-and-forget weapons years ago, in the form of antitank cannon and recoilless rifles, air-to-air cannon, and infrared missiles— weapons the technology junkies have pushed into the background.

*TOW--Tube-launched, Optically-tracked, Wire-guided.

Weapons should be affordable in adequate numbers. Quantity is a quality and an important one in determining who wins and who loses. Sending our boys to fight with "less than the best" is not attractive, and the reformers propose no such thing. But sending them to fight heavily outnumbered may endanger them even more.

Interestingly, many of the qualities that make a weapon tactically effective also lessen its costs so we can afford sufficient numbers. Pierre Sprey, one of the military reformers’ authorities on tactical aircraft, argues that the best individual fighter aircraft would be very small (smaller than an F-5) and have primarily passive avionics and no radar-guided missiles. While it would cruise above mach 1, faster than any current fighter, it would not have to have a mach 2 top speed, which is seldom used in combat. These characteristics would make it cheap—less than $4 million, compared to about $25 million for the F- 15. Thus, we could afford a larger quantity of these individually superior fighters.

The choice is not between quality and quantity. It is between technological quality often irrelevant to combat and tactical quality with quantity. We can choose between a small number of relatively ineffective weapons or a larger number of effective weapons. The real question is, why does the defense establishment prefer the former?

Alexandria, Virginia

William S. Lind (A.B., Dartmouth College; M.A., Princeton University) is Legislative Aide for Armed Services, Office of Senator Gary Hart, United States Senate. He previously served as legislative assistant to Senator Robert Taft, Jr. of Ohio. Lind has been a frequent contributor to the Marine Corps Gazette, U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, and the Review.

The conclusions and opinions expressed in this document are those of the author cultivated in the freedom of expression, academic environment of Air University. They do not reflect the official position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, the United States Air Force or the Air University.

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