Your Q His A

Secondly, the historical lesson that political legitimacy for a war is an important factor in the shape that war takes has been re-emphasised almost dramatically. The task of the US in waging the war, and even more so of managing the post-war situation in Iraq and its wider ramifications for jihadi terrorism has been complicated to say the least essentially because of the lack of legitimacy for waging the war. There were no WMDs (Weapons of Mass Destruction) and no evidence of Iraq’s links to Al Qaeda and terrorism, the two main reasons for the war. The third, regime change, was achieved only partially with the removal of Saddam Hussein, but a workable alternate acceptable to majority of Iraqis has yet to emerge. Winning wars is not a sufficient objective by itself and its political dynamics strongly influence the ultimate judgement on the war. Thirdly, the war clearly re-emphasised that firepower and mobility, if anything, have assumed even greater salience in strategy, tactics and outcome in wars. Advances in modern military technology have dramatically improved firepower to levels of very high precision and mobility in consonance with it, and the ways in which they can be brought together in time and space. Reconnaissance, surveillance and targeting sensor and guidance technologies now allow precision strikes at long ranges even in adverse weather. We need to invest in precision attack capabilities.

Fourth, air and space power played the key role in the warfare. While the role of ground forces remains critical, their ability to succeed or fail depends increasingly on the quality and quantity of air power and space capabilities that can be brought to bear on the enemy, mostly beyond the immediate battle lines. We need to pay serious attention to use of space for our defence. It is also necessary to stop the decline in the force level of our air force and modernise it.

Fifth, the concept of traditional force ratios, for example where 3:1 superiority was considered essential to offensive operations by armies, has been made obsolete. US military strategy put the old concept on its head by launching a successful land offensive with a ratio of 1:10 in favour of Iraq. This has far reaching implications for our defence policy. For example, there is no doubt that we need modern high-technology weapons and combat support systems. But we seem to also want to increase the size of our manpower at the same time. Apart from the military logic of it, there is an obvious reality that expanding high technology and manpower would simply not be affordable and we run the risk of falling between the two.

And last, but not the least, intelligence and its assessment remains a key element, failure in which area has created serious problems and setbacks to the US and the UK in unanticipated ways. Our problem is that we have yet to establish a national intelligence assessment institution that coordinates all intelligent information and analyses. At the minimum we must ensure that the DIA (Defence Intelligence Agency) become the central assessment body for intelligence of military significance instead of managing intelligence directorates and information gathering.