When I was in my early 20s and bored out of my mind, I created an essay website. The first essay that I put up on the website was called “Pondering the Battle of Bicocca” in which I noted how success lead to overspecialization and speculated a little bit on how that might apply to the US Air Force. I thought it might be interesting to revisit that essay now in light of the Ukraine war.

The biggest surprise for me when I went back and reread the essay was how little I remembered about my own writing. The opening part of the essay holds up remarkably well. It does not embarrass me near as much as I thought it would. I would not be ashamed to offer it up today as an introductory essay to the idea that repeated military success causes militaries to overspecialize to their own determent in the long term.

On the other hand, the essay totally fails to effectively develop this idea. I did remember this to be the case but I thought I had at least touched on many ideas I had back then about then current US military spending. But when I re-read the essay, I was surprised to discover that this was not the case. The essay does not go into why I thought investing so heavily into stealth aircraft was a bad idea for strategic reasons (Most people arguing against stealth aircraft do so on tactical grounds and generally just reveal that they don’t understand how stealth works or what is supposed to accomplish). It does not go into my ideas at the time about drones (which were a brand new technology at the time). And it fails to touch upon any of the ideas I had at the time about how greatly increasing computing power would impact air defense.

Ironically, I think a big contributor to this lack of development of any of these ideas is that I did not really consider this to be a serious topic. “Pondering the Battle of Bicocca” was meant to be a practice essay. So for my first essay I worked on a topic that I thought was interesting intellectually interesting but did not really matter to me. My real opinion was basically expressed by the first comment on the essay (also written by me but under a different name) to the effect that none of these things really mattered in light of weapons of mass destruction.

If there was anything about modern military matters of today that would have shocked the younger me, it would be cavalier way in which it is now assumed that nuclear powers (Primarily China and the US) can fight a conventional war without weapons of mass destruction being involved. When I wrote ““Pondering the Battle of Bicocca” I did not think my ideas on dangers of the US military’s overreliance on air power would ever be put to the test in a purely conventional conflict with a near peer. To even think about the development of warfare in line with historical parallels, I had to wish away the horrific reality of nuclear weapons. This made for interesting thought experiments, but I did not think it was a realistic way to think about the future.

I don’t know if I should hope I was right or wrong about that. If war must come, I guess it would be better if weapons of mass destruction were not involved. But it would be bad if people walked into a war with a near peer with the delusion that there was some kind of guarantee that everything would stay conventional no matter what happened. Regardless, at the time I wrote the “Pondering the Battle of Bicocca” I thought all serious strategic thinkers thought that near peer conflicts were likely to become nuclear conflicts if they ever got serious. Now it seems that even “serious” military thinkers are assuming that the US can fight a major war with China without weapons of mass destruction becoming involved so that is one area that has changed since the essay was written.

However, as my own comment on my own essay states, I did not really consider the impact of weapons of mass destruction in my essay. Instead, I focused my speculations on conventional military topics. And it is here that I think that the War in Ukraine has proved a point that I felt was important to my essay.

If you re-read the essay, you will see that I spent a portion of the essay arguing that the US Air Force’s ability to suppress enemy air defenses was an extraordinary thing worthy of being compared to the dominance of the Swiss pikes at the height of their power. Now that we have seen the Russians struggling against air defenses no better than those that US has crushed in Iraq and in the Balkans hopefully more people can understand how amazing the past US success have been from a military point of view. Ukraine in 2020s had no better (I would argue worse when considered on system wide basis) then Iraq in the early 90s. Granted, during the course of the war Ukraine has been given more modern western systems then Iraq had. But when Russian first invaded, Ukraine kept the Russia air power away with systems that Iraq was using in the early 90s. And even though it was 30 years after the Iraq war, the Russian Air force still could not carry out the suppression mission that that US Air Force did almost without a loss in the early 90s. This is why I still think it is valid to compare the post-Vietnam US Air Force to “unbeatable” historical units like the Swiss Pike men.

Another way in which the Ukraine war touches on this essay is via HARM missiles. For some reason I choose to focus on that missile to the exclusion of other systems in the latter part of my essay. I think that was largely because I wanted my first essay to be simple and a HARM missile is relatively easy to understand. The HARM missile seemed to be a simple way of making people think about what happens when other people start using technology that up to the time I wrote the essay had largely been exclusive to the US Air Force.

Now since the US has given these missiles to Ukraine, we can see in real time what the impacts are of another nation having this technology. And I think in most people’s eyes, this technology has been underwhelming. For most people who follow this topic but don’t delve into the weeds like Prerun does, the HARM would not even make the top 10 most important weapon systems that the US has given Ukraine. It is obvious that Russian radars are still operating and Ukraine jets must live in fear of being shot down by SAMs.

To a certain extent, this view missies why these missiles were considered important enough to jury-rig on to old soviet air frames that were never designed to use them. The pro-Ukraine media does not like to talk about it, but Russia was having success in countering many US weapon systems. HARM missiles were critical to making sure US made missiles and drones could get through the Russian defense systems. In fact, the lesson the US military seems to be taking from the Ukraine war is that it needs more weapons with HARM likes abilities to combat electronic warfare systems.

That said, the impact of the HARM missiles given to Ukraine does show that the entire system matters and not just one particular weapon. You don’t create the Swiss pikemen by handing out pikes to any old country bumpkin and you don’t create the US ability to suppress air defenses by handing older less advanced HARM missiles to an Air Force flying ex-soviet planes. That would not have surprised the younger me. I explicitly spelled out that very concept in the early part of the essay when talking about the Swiss and firearms. But I did not do a very good job of carrying that idea over to the later part of my essay which gives the impression that possessing a certain type of weapon was in and of itself enough to be a game changer.

The biggest weakness of my essay is that I never explicitly stated my real target. My big complaint with the US Air Force back in those days was its heavy focus on stealth. I felt that was doubling down on a strength that the US Air Force already had in spades (the ability to defeat anti-air defenses) while not thinking about how the new technologies they themselves were fielding would rebound back on them when other nations invariably started using them. Since I never wrote that out, you will just have to take my word for it that was on my mind.

In that regards, the Ukraine war has only reinforced that view of mine. In this I am a minority. I think most nations (including Ukraine) look at the war and think that stealth aircraft would be a real game changer. But I look at the war in Ukraine and wonder how the US air force thinks it is going to defend the bases necessary for the complex maintenance that stealth coatings require in a world where everyone is getting long range missiles and drones. Russia lacks manufacturing capacity and so to a certain extent this has not been a big issue in Ukraine. But Russia is no longer a near-peer for the US in a conventional sense. They lack the manufacturing capacity to really stress Americans technologically superiority.

China on the other hand, has a manufacturing capacity that is larger than America’s. Even if China’s missiles and drones preformed no better than Russia’s, the sheer volume of drones and missiles they can through in any conflict would exponentially larger then what Russia and Ukraine combined are using in the current war. So would it really do the US air force any good to have planes that China can’t see if China knows where the bases that those planes have to launch from are located?

The Swiss were determined to remain better pikemen then the Germans but were defeated by the Spanish who decided not to even try to push pikes and instead to dig trenches and use firearms. The US air force is determined to always be able to win the dogfight and suppress the enemy air defenses. But what if China instead just lobs thousands of missiles and drones at their air bases? The money that has been poured into stealth and high tech air frames might have been better focused on dealing with that threat.

The bottom line is that I believe that my idea that successful militaries tend to overspecialized in what they are good at still holds true. What we can see in Ukraine is the emergence of technologies that US has long had access to (drones and what not) being used in new ways. What we see in the US military budget is that US spending lots of money on stuff it is already the best in the world at (air frames and air dominance) and comparatively little on countering the new threats that are emerging from technologies that the US has long had access to but not seen fit to invest in.

But the real question remains the one I put in the mouth of Italian air power theorist Giulio Douhet at the very end of the essay where I had him say….

“The source of the American Air Forces incredible strength over the last 20 years comes ultimately from American’s superior economic performance vs its potential opponents. The various toys that the Air Forces have to play with are simply an outgrowth of that.

Atomic weapons on the other hand were developed in the 40’s and they do threaten the real sources of American power. An atomic weapon will transform even the saddest of air forces into a strategic force. The mere possibility that an atomic bomb may get through a nation’s air defense is enough to destroy public support for a war. Even taking into account your inflated opinion of the technology behind the Harm; do you really think that it would have the same effect? “

As much as people marvel over the next “supper weapons” such as drones or cyber weapons, this basic question remains valid. If a nation seriously feels the need to compete militarily with the US, why not go straight for weapons of mass destruction?