Yellow Smoke: The Future of Land Warfare for America's Military

Major General Scales is now retired. His last assignment in the Army was to work on the definition of the so called Army After Next. This required a detailed analysis of the American way of war, both from the military standpoint and the social. The American public has become very reluctant to fight in a war, or more precisely to accept casualties. This has been growing down through the past century. Only the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor turned the isolationist tide that was keeping American out of World War II. The tradition, began in Viet Nam, of reporting battlefield deaths on a daily basis have created a strange (to me) philosophy where the 2,000 deaths in Iraq are major news, and the fact that about that many people are killed every three weeks on our highways is ignored. But the Army has gotten the message clearly that we can go to war, but don't kill any Americans. MG Scales has worked on the development of technology and techniques that will enable the Army After Next to fight with an absolute minimum of casualties. He has done an excellent job in describing how these developments may play out. It's a very interesting projection, well written, and clearly expressed. Of course the enemies are thinking about these subjects as well. And the situation in Iraq shows some of their analysis. Don't fight directly, but use ambushes, even start a civil war. This is unfortunately not what MG Scales is confronting.

MG Scales is one of the great military thinkers of the modern age, and this book reflects the vast effort of thought he has put into military problems during his career. His thesis, that in limited-objectives warfare, technology enabled firepower is the key way to destroy the enemy, and that close-combat maneuver forces are for 'findin' em and fixin' em.' To some degree, I agree with his thesis, but note that my personal experiences in Iraq taught me that A) clese combat with the insurgents is the most efficient way to inflict mass casualties on the insurgents; B) the insurgent's capability of hiding themselves in the populace prevents the use of massed fires and target detection, not to mention the politically unpalatable possibility of collateral casualties. As usual, MG Scales writes well, and thoroughly understands his subject.