We all know the old saying,
“Quantity has a quality all its own.”
Unfortunately, our military has forgotten (or chosen to
ignore) that pearl of wisdom. We’ve made
the conscious decision to opt for exquisite quality and have ceded quantity to
the enemy. Worse, as it’s turned out, the
enemy’s quality is, arguably, as good or better than ours so that they now possess
both quantity and quality advantages over us.
It is past time to revisit quantity.
Consider just a few examples of recent quantity limitations
which, contrary to our hopes and beliefs, were not offset by quality:
Quality also comes with a penalty in terms of cost. Quality is expensive. It’s a simple fact. As we speak, the Navy is using multi-million
dollar missiles to shoot down thousand dollar Houthi drones. What shipboard missile in the Navy inventory
costs less than $1M?
The SPY-6 radar on our latest Burkes cost $180M according to
the 2024 Navy budget documentation. The
TRS-3D radar costs around $10M. Quality
is expensive.
Additionally, quality equals complexity and complexity
equals unreliability. Our exquisite
aircraft struggle to attain 50% full mission readiness rates. Aegis is permanently degraded, fleet
wide. And so on. Dumb artillery shells, on the other hand, have
100% readiness. Sure, there may be an
occasional dud but when you’re firing thousands of shells, who cares? We have hundreds of Aegis technicians
laboring daily to keep it running. How
many artillery shell maintenance techs are there? That’s right … none.
Conclusion
We’ve consciously ceded quantity to the enemy and have
failed to achieve any overarching quality advantage. That leaves us at an overall disadvantage
compared to China. We need to rethink
the role that quantity plays on the battlefield.
Quality has to be pretty substantial to compensate for
quantity and our quality is not substantially superior to our enemy’s.
If we can’t achieve a quality overmatch, that brings us full
circle back to quantity. Quantity is
easily achievable, affordable, easily mass produced during war, reliable, and
brutally effective. What’s not to like?
Germany and Japan entered WWII with quality advantages and
were beaten by overwhelming quantity, especially as their quality advantages
faded as the war progressed. There’s a
lesson there for us.
We need reasonable quality in overwhelming quantities.
- Ukraine weapons/munitions supply has been woefully insufficient to meet military needs and the quality of the weapons we’ve provided has not compensated for the limited quantities.
- The 2011 Libyan intervention saw weapons/munitions depletion occur in a matter of weeks with no compensating success due to quality.
- Air wings have been steadily downsized with no compensating improvement in quality.
- The LCAC is being replaced in smaller numbers despite the landing craft being virtually identical to the original. Smaller quantity and identical quality.
- We currently have more VLS cells than missiles in our inventory and our strike and anti-ship missiles are fading rapidly in quality due to obsolescence. Our quantities are limited and our quality is stagnant.
