Financial Times - December 8, 2001
MILITARY PROWESS: A superpower displays its fighting calibre By STEPHEN FIDLER
The rapid collapse of the Taliban under withering American air power has emphasised a trend with profound ramifications far beyond Afghanistan: growing US military predominance.
On the evidence of the US military campaigns of the past 10 years, in Iraq, the Balkans and Afghanistan, the gap between the military capabilities of the US and the rest of the world is huge and is growing. This has important and uncomfortable consequences for America's allies and its potential adversaries - as well as likely effects on future foreign policy decision-making in Washington.
Much of the gulf is caused by the sheer magnitude of American defence spending. Paul Kennedy, the Yale historian, says that the US now accounts for 36 per cent of all military spending around the world, and it spends more than the next nine nations in line on defence. Other figures show that the US together with military allies in Nato and in the Pacific account for 85 per cent of the world's military spending.
Such domination is unprecedented. "This is the largest share of military expenditures around the globe in all of history," says Prof Kennedy, surpassing that of Philip of Spain and the Roman Empire.
But the predominance is also qualitative. Some 95 per cent of the bombs dropped by the US in Afghanistan were precision weapons, compared with about 6 per cent in Desert Storm a decade ago. Moreover, US officials say the Afghanistan war represents a technological leap in precision weaponry even compared with the Kosovo campaign two years ago.
Moreover, the quality of personnel is also high. Mr Kennedy, a visitor to the Naval War College at Newport, Rhode Island, where mid-level officers from all the services go, says he has been very impressed by the intellectual quality of what goes on there, a standard to which he says only the British even come close. "These people are studying Thucydides, Machiavelli, Clausewitz, Basil Liddell Hart, and asking, 'What does this mean for us?'"
The discomfort for allies comes in their increasing inability to contribute to the US war effort. The military contribution of allies in the campaigns of Desert Storm, Kosovo and Afghanistan has declined progressively. That is in part because Kosovo exposed the shortcomings from the US perspective of having military targets vetoed in political capitals. But it was primarily because most of the offers Washington received were not of much use to its high-technology war effort, or could even have got in the way.
Gerhard Schroder, the German chancellor, took political risks to win domestic approval to dispatch German forces that have not been needed. The French government was also unhappy that its offer of forces were not required.
"You are talking about a Potemkin military alliance where the US does 98 per cent of the fighting, the British 2 per cent and the Japanese are steaming around Mauritius," Mr Kennedy says.
Other governments will have been watching closely too. Wayne Merry, a former senior US diplomat in Moscow, says the US successes have further weakened the Russian general staff, who predicted disaster in Afghanistan. It is likely, he says, to give President Vladimir Putin further ammunition in his efforts to shake up top military echelons.
China, astonished by American technical prowess in Kosovo, is also likely to take note. Military specialists said China had been anyway undergoing a military modernisation, partly helped by Russia, but believe Afghanistan may serve to emphasise military caution in Beijing.
Both countries, fearing a possible future strategic confrontation with the US, may decide that their only answer is their nuclear deterrent, such specialists said.
Meanwhile, they argued that America's non-state adversaries - such as Osama bin Laden and his successors - might find it increasingly difficult to find a safe haven around the world. But after watching the Afghan cam paign, they might be increasingly convinced that the only way to attack America is to replicate Mr bin Laden's strategy. This so-called asymmetrical warfare may thus continue to be the main threat to the US in the coming century.
But the Afghan campaign may have an effect also on US policymaking. Some foreign policy observers believe US domination will encourage Washington to use its military as an instrument of diplomacy by other means. Such an outcome would disturb many around the world, not least the US military.
Already Afghan successes have encouraged some conservatives to urge the administration to turn its military attention to Iraq, and replicate the combination of air power and local ground forces to oust Saddam Hussein from Baghdad. Mr Merry points out that the US-led victories of the last decade have been against forces that had already been weakened by years of war. It would be perilous to extrapolate from that and assume victories elsewhere will come so cheaply. He cites Pericles, whose funeral oration was recorded by Thucydides, still studied in American war colleges: "What I fear more than the strategies of our enemies is our own mistakes."