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在战时，我们应该一起拉 - 但这并不意味着我们忘记了如何思考。然而，一旦反对伊拉克的战斗开始，华盛顿的意见阶级大部分都会让其关键的院系以正常时期的方式感到羞耻。
Barely three days after the first strike on Baghdad, talk-shows and op-ed pages rang with the first great `lesson' of the gulf war: `High technology' worked for America's military. From that it followed that the Reagan administration deserved our thanks for increasing military budgets (although the Carter administration could fight for some credit too) and that the `defense reform' movement, which criticized the Pentagon's patterns of spending a procurement, had been proved conclusively wrong.
`This is just an unbelievable validation of what the defense industry has been doing,' a Paine Webber analyst named Jack Modzelewski was quoted as saying in the Los Angeles Times. George Will looked upon the Patriot missile and concluded that, since it could shoot down Scuds, it was time to revive SDI. The Scud, of course, has a single warhead, which follows an absolutely predictable path as it falls. Soviet missiles, which SDI is supposed to intercept, have many nuclear warheads, each of which can be maneuvered as it hones in on its target--and which, unlike Scuds, must be destroyed far, far away from the target if lives are to be saved. Distinctions like these would come automatically to Will or most other people in analyzing other subjects. They should be made about `high tech' and `defense reform' as well.
爱国者实际上已经有效，这告诉了我们一些关于“点防御”的系统。但它几乎没有任何关于高新技术武器的Regan预算一致。要转向周围的逻辑，那里的最多的“先进”和昂贵的单一武器是B-1轰炸机，尚未在伊拉克的单一地发送。
关于适当武器的论点
is often presented as a simple high-tech versus low-tech choice, as if it were a matter of preferring swords and muskets to laser-guided bombs and night-vision tanks. We should be interested in any level of technology that works; but we should be empiricists, wanting to be convinced case by case, via thorough testing and performance. The defense reform analysis was never about technology per se. It was, above all else, about military effectiveness, which lead to a subsidiary bias against needless complexity in weapons design.
复杂性与高技术不同：半导体芯片比真空管更进一步技术先进，但它在军事或民用中使用更简单，更强大，更有效。通过类比，某些武器使用先进的技术来变得更加可靠;一个例子是A-10攻击平面，在战斗的前两周内进行了非常危险的低级任务，而不会遭受任何损失。干扰设备和防辐射导弹，在敌人的雷达上，在技术上先进，但又有效。（这些相对低成本的技术边缘没有是Pundits注意的主要目的是一个讲述的嘲笑者的讲述指示。）
复杂性的问题是它引入了更大的失败可能性 - 在机器本身内，在人员和机器之间以及机器之间以及它使用的环境之间。高度复杂的武器成本更多地建立并更难以维护，因此对于相同的金额，他们的行动较少。那么，适当的复杂程度取决于它们的效果如何 - 在现实测试和战斗中。
What the empirical evidence from Persian Gulf combat tells us is * * * almost nothing so far. No one yet knows the most crucial fact about this war: how it will turn out. It seems certain that the U.S. side will prevail, since its material advantages are so overwhelming. (Defense Secretary Richard B. Cheney has emphasized that Iraq spent $50 billion over the past decade to build its vast arsenal. The U.S. military has spent $50 billion since Thanksgiving and over the last decade outspent Iraq about 50 to 1.)
但是,尽管壮观的录像,我们没有yet know how effective our weapons have been in the unpredictable circumstances of real war. Two days into the fighting, U.S. military briefers said they believed that all the fixed-site Scud launchers had been destroyed. The Scuds kept coming and, according to sources in the Pentagon, it now appears that most of the `fixed-site launchers' initially hit were in fact decoys. A Soviet expert told the BBC last week he had advised the Iraqis on techniques of deception such as hiding airplanes in apartment buildings and painting `craters' on runways to deter further bombing runs to keep the U.S. technical advantage from being put to full use. With similar tricks the Iraqi command-and-control system remained at least partly operational under intense attack.
Nor do we know how many of our weapons have slithered through windows and down chimneys, compared to how many have landed in empty fields or on civilian targets. The mistakes too are recorded on tape that is for now, and perhaps forever, unseen. After the bombing raid of Libya in 1986, the Pentagon released a video of a direct hit. That turned out to have been one of the few accurate bombing runs. A GAO analysis of the mission concluded that laser-guided bombs were actually less accurate than old-fashioned unguided bombs.
In the 1989 raid on Panama, a bomb from an F-117 Stealth fighter missed its target by over 300 yards, despite the Pentagon's initial claims of `pinpoint accuracy.' In an astonishing interview last week on CNN, John Lehman said off-handedly that when he was secretary of the Navy he used to pay settlements `at least once a month' for damage done when laser-guided bombs hit resort towns in California and Nevada, two or three miles from the target area. Lehman later told Fred Kaplan, of the Boston Globe, that laser-guided weapons were hitting targets in Iraq about 60 percent of the time. This, Lehman said, was `consistent with the test performances'--but quite inconsistent with the ratio suggested by the very few videos the Pentagon has shown.
Similarly, we have been told in briefings that Tomahawk cruise missiles, the only truly new weapon used so far in Iraq, have hit more than 90 percent of their targets. Yet just two days ago CNN ran footage of Tomahawks flying into Baghdad and destroying residential buildings. Cruise missiles may be promising, but we should see more evidence of their performance, especially about their vulnerability even to unguided fire from the ground.
Cost has been the great unmentionable in the `everything works' reaction. Against any enemy except one we outspend 50 to 1, our resources are limited. Choosing to build one weapon means choosing not to build or properly maintain another--in the case of complex weapons, choosing to build one F-117 or B-2 means choosing not to build scores of A-10's or F-16s. During the Vietnam War, about two-thirds of all sorties flown were to drop ordnance. In the gulf, only about half are--the rest are for the increased support these airplanes require. Expensive, delicate weapons have to be not just good, but far better
而不是好，因为他们丧失了他们的选择。
Indeed, the wave of excitement about the weapons is itself a sign of trouble. If there were more realistic testing within the Pentagon, there would be less doubt about how the weapons would actually perform. But the system that develops the weapons has a bias against realistic testing; it is not by accident that overpriced fiascos like the B-2 bomber have rarely been tested at all, and then usually fraudulently. Both the Tomahawk and the Stealth fighter were proposed for use in Libya in 1986--and both were turned down, because the Pentagon was afraid they would fail.
The Pentagon procurement system--with its bias against realistic testing and costcutting, with its potential to convert the officer corps into budget-boosters rather than military leaders--is at the heart of the `reform' debate. Almost every outside analysis of the system's incentives and performance concluded that things are severely amiss. Paine Webber's Modzelewski gave the game away with his reaction to the first news from the war: `The real beneficiaries are going to be the big conpanies like General Dynamics, McDonnell Douglas and Lockheed.' The weapons that work often emerge in spite of this system rather than because of it--for instance, the Air Force tried to wriggle out of the A-10.
虽然现在是一个陈词滥调有备注still a long way to go in this war, and that major ground action is increasingly likely many in Washington (in and out of uniform) with and without TV shows) don't seem to have realized that this prospect alone should dampen their technophoria. The consequences of technical failure look much different when we move from the Tomahawk to the Abrams tank or the TOW anti-tank missile. And as defense consultant Pierre Sprey observed `When an air-to-ground missile fails, the pilot still comes home. When an infantryman TOW fails, he does not come home.'
The point of these cautions is not to say `nothing works' or to quibble about imperfections. The question we should consider, once we know enough about the gulf war to draw sensible conclusions, is whether our weapons proved effective enough--enough to forestall a grisly land warfare, enough to justify their great cost. We won't always enjoy such a onesided advantage in spending and tactical realities. We must still think, rather than just enthuse, about the way to build our forces.
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结尾