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[FiRe] Dinner Speech by Admiral William Owens
These are notes from the Future in Review conference. More here.
On the opening night, retired Admiral William Owens (once the 2nd highest ranking military official in the US), gave a dinner speech which I could not take notes to (dinner speech, you know), but here is what I remember from this highly impressive man.
He spoke about the role of the military in our current times.
We could right now have a full view of the battlefield, all the time everywhere, if we wanted to. The technology is available, and if we'd used our budget and the military guys would want to do such a non-macho thing, we really could.
Example for how technology has improved efficiency: In Desert Storm I we needed 10 bombs per target. In Desert Storm II (he really said so), we only needed 1.1 bombs per target. Would we need a smaller military now that efficiency has increased that much? Absolutely.
But the Bush increase in the military budget way above historical averages will mainly be invested on enlarging it further. Cost estimates: Navy carrier ship = $5bn, I-90 floating bridge in Seattle = $250m, Modern floating oil platform = $300m. -> Why can't we build something on commercially competitive costs?
US really bad in their history of leaving countries they freed in the last 10 years. Why are we not setting up a group that specializes in nation-building, when we are really doing just that "nation building"? A group that knows how to set up systems and structures in a country would be needed.
Are we having a top 5 list of countries that we need to contain / worry about? Shouldn't we? Every business has (or should have) such a list, but the US government probably doesn't.
Sidenote: Mark Anderson summarized the talk in the most recent SNS as follows:
Admiral William Owens began this trend first off on Monday evening. I suppose that most listeners, reading that he had run the Sixth Fleet during the first Gulf War, expected some kind of military booster presentation, or at least a justification for more money spent and ever-wider use of the military in world events. Wrong.Pointing to an average expenditure rate of about $200B per year since the end of WWII, Bill noted that next year the U.S. would spend over $500B. Noting that "the military that just won the Iraq war was the Clinton military," he questioned the need to continue - or expand upon - a force structure held over from Napoleon. Buying more planes, when planes and their weapons today are perhaps 10x as effective as in the past, may be unnecessary, and he questioned the future mission that would require such a massive buildup.
"You're the taxpayers," he told the group, "You're the ones who should be asking these questions." Bill concluded by suggesting that new weapons systems, and new structures for force deployment, could be achieved at near-traditional expenditure rates, and would greatly increase military effectiveness.