The defense budget implosion (VIII): Sir Michael Howard on how a financial squeeze can sharpen defense thinking

For part of my
book, I decided to go back and check the origin of the thought often attributed
to Sir
Michael Howard, the World War II hero turned military historian, that
everyone gets it wrong at the beginning of a war. I was told once at the Army
War College that he continued the thought this way: so, the important thing is
not to get it too wrong.

Well, it turns out
that isn't quite what he said, at least in the article I found, "Military
Science in an Age of Peace," published in the RUSI Journal in March
1974. What he said was that everybody gets it wrong so the important thing to
do is develop the intellecutal capacity in officers to adjust faster than the
other guy. That's quite different.

Anyway, all that
mess goes into the epilogue of my book. But in the same article he also has an
interesting discussion of how to think about defense acquisition. New weapons
and other purchases, he says, grow out of a "triangular dialogue between ... operational
requirements, technological feasibility and financial capability." He
continues:

In discerning
operational requirements the real conceptual difficulties of military science
occur. If there is not rigorous thinking at this level, neither technology nor
money can help. With inadequate thinking about operational requirements, the
best technology and the biggest budget in the world will only produce vast
quantities of obsolete equipment; bigger and better resources for the wrong
war. Indeed, it can sometimes be suggested . . . that ample resources can be
positively bad for the military because this enables them to shelve the really
vital question: what do we really need and why?

The defense budget
is gonna go waaaay down, so might as well groove on the vibe, as it were.