Episode 3: AirLand Unmanned Battle – Vietnam to the Fall of the Wall

>> Speaker 1: Airland unmanned battle Vietnam to the fall of the wall.

>> Speaker 2: There's no way to capture the suffering and grief of our own nation from the most divisive conflict since our own civil war. We embarked on this Vietnam journey with good int intentions, I think. But once upon the path, we found ourselves having been misguided, many of us, myself included.

 

In our private personal opinions of the rightness of this course came half circle around. And perhaps that is our big lesson from Vietnam, the necessity for candor. We, the American people, the world's admired democracy, cannot ever again allow ourselves to be misinformed, manipulated and misled into disastrous foreign adventures.

 

The government must share with the people the making of policy, the big decisions.

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: Welcome to the Hand Behind Unmanned a podcast about how America fights war without human beings, told from the perspective of the human beings making those choices. I'm Jackie Schneider.

>> Julia Macdonald: And I'm Julia Macdonald.

 

In this podcast, we take you inside weapons budget lines and behind classified program doors to understand not only what unmanned technology the US Military bought, but why. For those of you who came for the technology, we hope you'll stay for the people. Because this really is a story about remarkable humans, historical junctures, and our beliefs about the future of war and what that means for unmanned weapons we buy.

 

 

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: Along the way in our unmanned journey, we'll learn valuable lessons about how technology shapes the winners and losers in war,. How humans and technology interact at a time when the march of technological progress seems inevitable, how public funds get invested when it comes to warfare, and above all, the human hands at the heart of unmanned technology.

 

 

>> Julia Macdonald: In the last episode, we talked about military service identities and examined how the distinct cultures and interests of the Army, Air Force, and Navy affected the way each one thought about buying and using unmanned technology during the Cold War. In this episode, we're going to delve into the related roles of beliefs, a key factor in explaining how we got the unmanned force of today.

 

Many individuals in the military services and other parts of the defence establishment brought specific beliefs about military technology to the table that often became more important than the details and characteristics of the technology itself. Today, I'm going to focus on one belief that emerged organically in the waning days of Vietnam and shaped a cadre of officers who went on to develop doctrine, plans and campaigns for the Department of Defense over the following 30 years.

 

This group of individuals brought to unmanned development a deep and ingrained belief that strategic success was tied not only to tactical success, but also to the military's ability to win wars without losing public approval. From this belief came A drive for unmanned technology to protect the US armed forces and mitigate the effect of public casualty aversion.

 

Whereas, previously unmanned systems, mines, large warhead missiles and bombs, and even kamikaze drones had been designed to create advantages in wars of attrition, these new systems were focused on avoiding opting into or getting stuck in those very wars. This would be a remarkably sticky trajectory for unmanned use in which remotely piloted large airframes would end up dominating the battlefield.

 

First, what is this casualty aversion belief and how does it relate to military technology? In very simple terms, this is the view that US Public support for war is sensitive to US Casualties, that as casualties go up, public support for war goes down. In democracies where public support matters to elected officials, politicians pay attention to levels of support and will go to great lengths to protect US forces, including by supporting investment in military technologies that mitigate risk to US Lives and also to innocent civilians.

 

In essence, it is the belief that, all things being equal, the public wants to avoid its soldiers dying on the battlefield and that political leaders pay attention and make choices based on that public sentiment. Casualty aversion or the desire to protect US Forces from harm wasn't new to Vietnam.

 

Public opinion about casualties has influenced US decision makers since the advent of the American military and can certainly be seen during the world wars. This is Peter Feaver, professor of political science and public policy at Duke University and an expert in civil military relations.

>> Peter Feaver: It turns out that some myths emerged over the decades about the public's attitudes towards casualties.

 

One of the myths was that if it's a good war, then the public doesn't care about casualties. And if it's a bad war, then the American public really cares a lot about casualties. Good war, World War II, bad war, Korea and Vietnam. And so Vietnam we couldn't fight because Americans cared too much about casualties.

 

In World War II, we didn't care about casualties because it was the good war. Actually, when you dig into the historical record more closely, you realize the public did care about casualties in World War II. Senior leaders, Roosevelt on down very concerned about US casualties in World War II.

 

And indeed on the 80th anniversary this year of the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Nagasaki that was all about minimizing US casualties, a way to end the war at lower cost to the United States.

>> Julia Macdonald: Despite this history, our story emphasizes the important role of Vietnam because of the impact that this experience in particular had on a group of very influential officers.

 

A cadre who went on to staff the most powerful officers from the Pentagon to the US Army Training and Doctrine Command to the Air War College at Montgomery. What they thought and the lessons they took from Vietnam mattered because of the positions that they would go on to fill.

 

Moreover, the beliefs that these officers took away from Vietnam fundamentally differed from a generation of officers before them. The generals that led Vietnam campaigns, leaders like Abrams and Westmoreland, had a very different belief about how America won wars. They saw US Victories in Europe, Japan, and, to some extent, Korea, and believed that the American way of winning wars was to demonstrate the will of the American people to create and to sustain enemy loss at a higher rate than friendly casualties.

 

For these leaders, friendly loss was an intervening variable in the ultimate strategic success, but not the primary determinant. Technology's primary role was not to defend or protect the force, but instead to create mass amounts of firepower to increase the ratio of enemy to friendly loss. While Abrams and Westmoreland may have believed in the strategic advantage of attrition campaigns over time.

 

The politicians defending their decision to commit American personnel lives in Vietnam were not as convinced that the United States could stomach the friendly losses required to win against the North Vietnamese. Though there was support for the war in its early stages as part of a policy of containment and to stem the tide of communism in Asia, this quickly changed as U.S military and civilian deaths mounted.

 

The televised nature of the war had a big impact on US public opinion. It was the first time that the American public was able to viscerally experience the realities of combat while sitting in the comfort of their living rooms with journalists embedded on the front lines reporting back daily to the American people.

 

 

>> Speaker 3: American soldiers hiking their way through the sweaty jungles of South Vietnam searching for an elusive enemy. The temperature is almost 100 degrees and the jungle stifles even the tiniest breeze. The going is slow, there could be a North Vietnamese regiment hiding a few yards away and no one would see it.

 

Nobody talks, so you start thinking. Specialist Corps Duane Bloor is thinking he's going to meet his fiance in Honolulu in two weeks and he will show her the Silver Star the general pinned on him yesterday. Devalle is the lone medic in the platoon. He's scared, scared from the moment he gets out of the chopper to the moment it picks him up.

 

Scared that someday he's going to get killed, picking up a wounded buddy.

>> Julia Macdonald: The day after Johnson announced he wouldn't run for re election, he reflected on the impact of television on public opinion, of the war and of his presidency. He said, I thought of the many times each week when television brings the war into the American home, adding, historians must only guess at the effect that television would have had during earlier conflicts on the future of this nation.

 

During the Korean War, for example, at that time when our forces were pushed back there to Pusan, or World War II, the Battle of the Bulge, or when our men were slugging it out in Europe. Or when most of our Air Force was shot down that day in June 1942 off Australia, American military officers were especially wary of how the television coverage of Vietnam affected the American public and blamed the reporting for much of the loss of public support for the war.

 

Westmoreland repeatedly blamed the media for slanted coverage and ultimately for contributing to the US Failure in Vietnam. Decades after the Vietnam War, Westmoreland continued to blame Walter Cronkite's pessimistic take on the Tet Offensive for crippling public support and influencing the Johnson administration to adopt less optimal strategies. Here is Walter Cronkite addressing the country in February 1968.

 

 

>> Speaker 4: For it seems now more certain than ever that the bloody. Experience of Vietnam is to end in a stalemate. But it is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy and did the best they could.

 

 

>> Julia Macdonald: As early as 1965, President Johnson was looking for technological alternatives to a casualty heavy strategy. And said to his Secretary of defense, Bob McNamara, I don't think there's any way, Bob, that through your small planes or helicopters you could spot these people and then radio back and let the planes come in and bomb the hell out of them.

 

The desire to mitigate risk to US Military personnel in Vietnam led to important developments in unmanned technologies on the battlefield. McNamara invested in a weapons program that included anti infiltration barriers of mines, fencing and barbed wire, all monitored by a series of unmanned sensors and manned patrols. The barrier had tactical successes, but it couldn't change strategic outcomes.

 

Nevertheless, the experimentation led to one of the first machine integrations of information within a real time display. A harbinger of later machine learning enabled operating pictures. As the Vietnam War waged on and Nixon struggled with public opinion about the loss of American lives, his cabinet increasingly looked for technology to substitute for American lives and to minimize civilian casualties.

 

Future Secretary of Defense Bill Perry led the development of an unmanned intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance collection outpost for the US army that eventually evolved into an unmanned aircraft guardrail program. The unmanned system requested by the army and the National Security Agency was developed to solve a fundamental problem for their intelligence collection efforts.

 

Manned listening posts were dangerous and the army was losing too many of their intelligence officers. An unmanned listening outpost could substitute equipment for personnel, an inherently less risky choice. This experimentation with unmanned systems in Vietnam was foundational for Perry and influenced his later support for unmanned technologies in the late 1990s.

 

The domestic political situation created by Vietnam was exacerbated by the advent of Soviet surface to air missiles, which made American pilots vulnerable to shoot down and capture. This confluence of tactical and political issues opened an aperture for bottom up experimentation and empowered the Air Force's Tactical Air Command to steer autonomous systems away from their previous strategic focus.

 

Unmanned aircraft flown as decoys and jammers, early laser guided and inertial navigation bombs, anti radiation homing missiles and infrared guided air to air missiles all debuted in Vietnam as technological solutions to tactical problems. Jim Roche, who went on to become Secretary of the Air Force and ultimately armed the MQ1 predator, first interacted with unmanned systems in Vietnam with an experimental use of a remote relayed unmanned helicopter and sensor to conduct intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance along the Vietnam coast.

 

This memory of the utility of unmanned systems stuck with Roche, as did his experiences as a combat search and rescue helicopter pilot. As he noted, I spent too much time in Vietnam picking up downed pilots and crying at night because I couldn't pick up guys that I wanted to pick up.

 

But the future Secretary of the Air Force's Vietnam experience was also showing him how unmanned technology might keep those pilots out of danger in Vietnam.

>> James Roche: I did search and rescue up off of Haiphong, and they had another destroyer, be near my destroyer too. It had guns, and I had modern distributed, made guns.

 

I had old destroyer which is a shotgun, literally a shotgun. And we were up close so we saw our own things go do their thing. And the North Vietnamese, North Vietnamese did not have missile drones like we did. Ours were mainly for intelligence. So one of the questions we had was where were the North Vietnamese keeping their PT boats?

 

That was our problem. I'll tell you, a little boat that's flying around is like having a damn gnat around your face.

>> Julia Macdonald: The young Navy officer Roche knew of a solution. Unmanned drones that could go places. Small places, hidden places and dangerous places to find the gnat. So the bigger Navy guns could go out and swap the PT boats.

 

 

>> James Roche: The ship gates came in that fast. The guns came all over, and you'll have to shoot on another ship. So we worried about them. Well, one day the carrier could launch them and they would come back out to sea. And then Papa's parachute fall into the water at a predetermined point, where some small boats were waiting to pick him up and take him back to the carrier.

 

They fired one and it went over the land in Haiphong. And it got lost, we lost it. I don't know what the hell happened to it anyway. And about an hour later, it popped up and he decided to come home. So here he comes home over the water.

 

First, we don't know, is it still working? And it got to the right spot, it popped this little chute, came down. It was a good size hidden under the hospital. So what the North Vietnamese did was they had them hidden and it was a hospital. We wouldn't bother a hospital.

 

So we had to wait for them to come out of there. And it got to the point where they just didn't bother us very much after that. So that was the use of an unbanned system. Was not remotely piloted. It was pre-programmed and it had a flight, right?

 

And we don't know where it went but went on its own. It found some things we never could have found on our own. We would never have thought to look inside under the hospital to see if we could find big PC in the hospital. So that always led me to say, okay, we can do things with these things.

 

 

>> Julia Macdonald: Vietnam provided an opportunity for early experimentation of precision guided munitions. Tactical Air Command repurposed a radar bombing method called Sky Spot from Strategic Air Command to guide otherwise dumb bombs from B52s in what was one of the early innovations in precision guided munitions. The use of off board and onboard radar sensors to guide bombs set the stage for more autonomous munitions with longer and smarter handoffs.

 

The increasing effectiveness of the manned platforms that dropped the bombs meant that early guided munition innovations in Vietnam, including the Bullpup, Shrike and Walleye bombs, were primarily naval. However, as the conflict progressed, the Air Force adapted Navy innovations and developed its own smart munitions, including the Homing Bomb system, Electro Optical Guided, GBU 15, Rocket Propelled, Maverick and Paveway laser guided bombs.

 

Even the AIM7's sparrow air to air missile got a jump start during Vietnam. Tactical Air Command also convinced Strategic Air Command to reapportion the Lightning Bug, an unmanned reconnaissance system, from a strategic reconnaissance mission to a tactical support role. The Lightning Bug and later Buffalo Hunter drones flew over 4,000 sorties in Vietnam, serving as bait for manned missions, taking photos of Vietnamese surface to air missiles and prison camps, conducting poor weather battle damage assessments and dropping propaganda leaflets.

 

The drones were useful complements to manned bombing runs because they were small and flew at low altitudes and high speeds and were hard to detect. Further, the systems were supported by electronic countermeasures and remotely controlled, allowing pilots to maneuver and evade threats. It wasn't full autonomy, but it was a model for remote controlled unmanned piloting that adapted well to the tactical air fight.

 

All these systems paved the way for the precision guided munition revolution that was looming on the horizon. By 1972, with public polls increasingly suggesting the American public was more likely to support bombing over ground campaigns, technology became a key component of Nixon's casualty sensitive strategy. B52s equipped with the first high precision bombs, were now able to execute bombing runs from increasingly safe high altitudes.

 

But it wasn't enough. In the end, those technological advancements that mitigated risk to friendlies and took the American GI further from the battlefield were not sufficient to either shore up American public support or to win the war. Here is former Secretary of State John Kerry addressing Congress in 1971 on behalf of the Vietnam Veterans against the War.

 

 

>> Speaker 5: Each day, to facilitate the process by which the United States washes her hands of Vietnam, someone has to give up his life so that the United States doesn't have to admit something that the entire world already knows so that we can't say that we've made a mistake.

 

Someone has to die so that President Nixon won't be, and these are his words, the first president to lose a war. And we are asking Americans to think about that, because how do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?

 

We are here to ask and we're here to ask vehemently, where are the leaders of our country? Where is the leadership?

>> Julia Macdonald: As Krepenovich concludes, US withdrawal from the ground war against the insurgents could have been sped up by accepting higher casualty rates. But this would have had to be weighed against the accelerated erosion in US popular support for the war effort.

 

The experience of Vietnam and its outcome laid the groundwork for a new theory of victory among the young officers of its time. They pointed to the pivotal role that televised images of body bags and body counts played in decimating public support for the war and linked this effect to the United States withdrawal.

 

From this belief came a drive for unmanned technology to protect the US armed forces and mitigate the effect of public casualty aversion. Ultimately, the lesson these officers took from Vietnam was that public sensitivity to loss leads American policymakers to choose technologies and operations that may insulate them from the political ramifications of body bags on the nightly news, but potentially at the cost of strategic success.

 

These young officers, coming of age at the advent of the microprocessor and major computer advances, couldn't influence politicians. But they saw in technology an opportunity to substitute for human risk, potentially without sacrificing battlefield effectiveness. Their conclusion, lives were expensive. Technology could make up for that strategic cost. In the years following Vietnam, this created one of the strongest trajectories for unmanned systems as substitutions for manned platforms that increased the physical distance between the human and the battlefield while still maintaining control and precision.

 

This wasn't about using unmanned systems to create quicker engagements or to condense the sensor shooter timeline, but instead to provide humans on the battlefield with resources for force protection. This sometimes led to unmanned systems with significant logistical tails, limited automation and high overall cost. However, these were acceptable trade offs for systems that could potentially limit the scope of violence and conflict.

 

And these beliefs are reflected in the doctrines and weapons acquisitions programs of the 1970s and 80s that would create a trajectory trajectory for weapons designed for quick, overwhelming and low casualty wars. Following the Vietnam War, US defence expenditures declined. Warsaw Pact forces outnumbered NATO forces by 3 to 1 in Europe, and the Department of Defence didn't have the funds to increase forces sufficiently to match.

 

Secretary of defense Harold Brown, therefore sought technological means to offset the numerical advantages held by US adversaries and restore deterrence stability in Europe. Secretary Brown's offset strategy built on the developments of Vietnam and emphasized new intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance platforms. Improvements in precision guided weapons, stealth technology, and space based military communications and navigation, all with the goal of insulating the public from US casualties to enable strategic success.

 

In the mid-1970s, at an army installation in the suburbs of Virginia, General William Depew, the first commander of the army's training and doctrine command, led the army's first major doctrine rewrite since Vietnam. Depew isn't an unmanned influencer like Shriver or Rickover, but he plays a large role in how the army begins to shape beliefs about technology and the American way of war post Vietnam.

 

 

>> Benjamin Jensen: Depew had this massive quick. Rise in the army, but he was always a very conceptual thinker.

>> Speaker 2: That's professor and army officer Ben Jensen that we first met in episode one. He wrote a book on the evolution of army doctrine.

>> Benjamin Jensen: He later was a division commander in Vietnam.

 

He actually even was attached to the CIA to kind of quietly advise groups. We were trying to get to overthrow the Chinese communist party in the 1950s. And really where he comes into the act here is he basically writes a memo, has a three star to invent this thing called training and doctrine command.

 

He basically, does the ultimate staff officer ninjutsu. He writes a paper about the position he wants, he staffs it and gets the position created. And the idea was, and again, he'd been a division commander in Vietnam, and he was always obsessed with tactical level details. He believed that if you trained 100 soldiers the right way, they could kick the crap out of any 500.

 

So he believed that combat power and lethality emerged as a function of training and education, not just in terms of how many push ups or pull ups you can do or how slick you look with your hair back. And he was very adamant about this. And so I say that because act one is this staff officer creating an entirely new four star command and using it as a forcing function to kind of pull the army out of Vietnam, to pull the army away from Vietnam.

 

In terms of a lot of the lapses of professionalism. People really good warriors. But there was, we forget that there were race riots, tensions, drug addiction, all sorts of complex kind of military and society issues in Vietnam that he had to grapple with. And two, you have also this emergence of the professional force.

 

So you're at this critical kind of social and political junction and at the same time you have all of this wild kind of pent up demand way before this is now, this is decade before really the kind of Reagan defense bump where the army was broke, right? There wasn't necessarily going to be the Marshall defense dollar was going to nuclear weapons and the Air Force wasn't coming to the army.

 

So in some ways, whether it's because of his personal experience or bureaucratic necessity, he has this idea of developing a new doctrine and changing how the army trains for war. And it's called active defense.

>> Julia Macdonald: Depew and his staff drew heavily from lessons learned in the Arab Israeli wars.

 

He watched the advent of long range precision strike and anti tank missiles and observed that what can be seen can be hit and what can be hit can be killed. His team concluded that technology would create a large scale advantage for those states able to harness the new technologies, but that the technologies would heavily advantage defence by imposing lethal costs on attackers.

 

Active defence, as the doctrine was known, recognized the increasing importance of technology to warfare, but saw its main impact in creating firepower and lethality. This was not what the young officers from Vietnam wanted to hear. They were convinced that the only way to ensure public support was to design a doctrine that enabled short and overwhelming conflicts that mitigated loss of American lives.

 

They saw technology not primarily as a means to create firepower and lethality, but instead as a way to enable high maneuver offensively dominated campaigns met with widespread unpopularity. The active defence doctrine lasted only one assignment cycle. Now enter Erlan Battle. A new doctrine that took the beliefs from Vietnam and applied new technology to create campaigns that decreased casualties by striking first and winning quickly.

 

Perhaps most important for our story, Air Land Battle was the first real call for unmanned aerial vehicles within a surface wide strategy. And crucially, it was accompanied by the largest acquisition program to occur before the end of the Cold war. Air Land Battle's acquisition initiative called for remotely piloted vehicles, tactical satellites, long range artillery fires, medium range ballistic missiles, and cruise missiles and mines, all linked together by network and sensor capabilities.

 

The doctrine embraced and capitalized on technological advances since Vietnam, especially in microprocessing and the precision capabilities that enabled. Whereas, 1950s inertial guidance had an accuracy of 0.03 degrees per hour, by 1970 this inaccuracy was down to 0.005 degrees. Further, whereas, previously inertial system's large size 300 pounds had necessitated larger cruise missiles, post microprocessor inertial navigation systems were only 29 pounds.

 

These smaller, more maneuverable munitions, in conjunction with new computer enhanced terrain mapping capabilities, meant that the cruise missile of the 1970s was more survivable against Soviet surface to air missiles than many manned aircraft. The cruise missile also skirted around the constraints of the strategic arms limitations agreements that capped the quantity of ballistic missiles.

 

Then Deputy Director of Defence for Research and Engineering William Perry argued, that precision strike advances offered the greatest single potential for force multiplication to meet the Soviet threat in Europe. Because they had the potential for revolutionizing warfare and would greatly advance our ability to deter war without having to compete tank for tank, missile for missile.

 

In short, air land battle provided the doctrinal transition between the experimentation with unmanned systems in Vietnam and a theory of warfare in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It also came in the midst of a major reshuffling within the Department of Defence. In 1986, Congress passed the Goldwater Nichols act, which among other things created a more powerful chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and incentives for the always bickering services to work together to acquire and equip the armed forces.

 

The reform induced the army and the Air Force to work together on air land battle. Though the partnership was in some ways more of a frenemy situationship than a pure collaboration. Ben Johnson again, one school of thought.

>> Benjamin Jensen: Is that, basically, the army had a bigger crush on the Air Force than the Air Force had on the army.

 

So really the army kind of thought they were dating the Air Force, but the Air Force was just over them. And I think what you have there is, I mean, I don't think it's all reduced to budget politics and bureaucratic maneuvering. But if you look at it from that line, it's in the Air Force's tac Air Force fighter mafia interest to show a little love to the army as they're maneuvering versus the kind of bomber mafia.

 

And so I think you could make an argument and go look about how this helps the Air Force then justify certain budget capture certain type of tails so it's still part of the Air Force in terms of at least the fighter side, not at all the bomber side, though, and strategic attack.

 

And I think you could probably draw that out to find out why the army is actually behind on unmanned systems and aerial unmanned systems in that respect compared to, for example, the Marine Corps.

>> Julia Macdonald: And it wasn't just the army that was interested in unmanned systems. The Navy jumped onto unmanned systems after suffering losses in Lebanon.

 

After Vietnam, the US had remained engaged in conflicts in the Middle east, including a small contingent of Marines on the ground and Navy vessels as part of a multinational peacekeeping coalition in Lebanon. In October 1983, 241 Marines were killed by suicide bomber attacks on the Marine barracks in Beirut.

 

Just a few months later, during a routine air patrol, Syrians shot down three Navy aircraft, killing two pilots and capturing one. Decision makers were desperate for an unmanned alternative. After the loss of the pilots, the Navy and Marines recommended that the Navy acquire the Israeli UAV system and the US Purchased the Pioneer UAV shortly after that.

 

But while the Israelis had used the unmanned aerial vehicles for early warning and detection within manned suppression of enemy air defense packages, then Secretary of Defense Weinberger and the Navy bought the systems chiefly as a replacement for otherwise risky manned reconnaissance missions. These unmanned systems would not be used in the integrated sensor shooter tactics envisaged by the Israelis, but instead to increase persistent surveillance as a force protection measure for ground and naval troops.

 

They were meant explicitly to decrease the chance of losing a human pilot. In 1984, shortly after the devastating loss of the Marines in Lebanon, Weinberger unveiled a new doctrine. The Weinberger Doctrine detailed six criteria for the use of the American military, including that, first, the conflict involved vital national interests of the United States.

 

Second, that troops be committed wholeheartedly and with the clear intention of winning. Third, that there were clearly defined political and military objectives, which then led to adjustments to the size and composition of forces to make sure that the military could accomplish those objectives and that five US Troops should not be committed to battle without a reasonable assurance of the support of US Public and Congress.

 

Together, all these criteria would lead to number six. The use of US troops only as a last resort. The Weinberger Doctrine codified the beliefs created by Vietnam into a military directive. The need to maintain public support to ensure strategic success was now an official tenet of the US military.

 

The beliefs that had emerged from the failure in Vietnam would further cascade in the mid-1980s as the young officers of Vietnam stepped into senior leadership roles within the Dodge. This new guard of officers were led by a young new Chief of Staff of the Army, Carl Wuerno, and were determined not to repeat the mistakes of their predecessors, which they saw chiefly as a deficit in the political and public support they needed to win conflict.

 

This view was also espoused from a man who became uniquely powerful in the US military establishment. In 1989, General Colin Powell became the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, an auspicious time to influence the US military, given the imminent collapse of the Soviet Union and the recent change in the nature and influence of this position.

 

In a unique way in American history, Powell's beliefs mattered. And for Powell, the belief in American public casualty aversion was strong. As he explained in his memoir, war should be the politics of last resort. And when we go to war, we should have a purpose that our people understand and support.

 

We should mobilise the country's resources to fulfill that mission and then go in to win. In Vietnam, we had entered into a half hearted, half war with much of the nation opposed or indifferent, while a small fraction carried the burden. So that brings us to the end of this episode.

 

We've covered a lot of ground from the early years of Vietnam through the 1970s and 80s up to the end of the Cold War. What we've seen is how a belief that emerges from first hand experience on the battlefields of Vietnam, ultimately about the relationship between the US public and the wars that it sanctions, shapes the thinking, doctrine and investments in unmanned technologies over subsequent decades.

 

This belief guides investments in unmanned technologies that insulate military forces from risk by substituting unmanned for manned platforms that can be used by an operator and remotely. This isn't about speeding up decisions on the battlefield or reducing the temporal distance between sensor and shooter. It's about creating a physical distance and providing persistence and loiter capabilities so that decisions that decrease the chance of unnecessary loss of life, both friendly and civilian, are optimized on preventing civilian casualties as well as providing force protection.

 

Peter Fever adds.

>> Peter Feaver: Policymakers over the last 80 years have become more and more attuned to this and the need to reduce civilian casualties as well. And again, the contrast with the battles that were fought 80 years ago in 1945, the firebombing of Tokyo, the bombing of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, huge, huge numbers of civilian casualties that were inflicted so as to save US combat casualties.

 

That trade off policymakers today, or up until the Trump administration, at least, American policymakers said, we're not going to do that anymore. So we are going to reduce our own combat casualties and we're going to reduce their civilian casualties. And that's required much greater precision in fires and in targeting and, of course, in force protection, our own force protection.

 

 

>> Julia Macdonald: In sum, unmanned technologies provide a technological solution to the constraints decision makers believe are imposed by the American public public's casualty aversion. In the next episode, we're going to look at another important belief that has shaped debates around unmanned technology, the belief that just around the corner, there was a military revolution on the way.

 

I'm Julia.

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: And I'm Jackie.

>> Julia Macdonald: This is the Hand behind Unmanned podcast. If you liked it, buy the book. It's by Oxford University Press and available on Amazon.

>> Jacquelyn Schneider: Thanks for listening.