THE DANGER OF TECHNOLOGICAL SURPRISE: EXPECT THE UNEXPECTED OR SUFFER THE CONSEQUENCES
Posted byCon Crane
January 6, 2022
Within a year, Soviet MiGs drove B-29 and B-26 bombers of the U.S. Far East Air Forces out of the daytime skies.
I am always uneasy with planning based on wargaming results without combat experience to validate them. Early in the millennium, I was a witness to an Army exercise at the Center for Strategic Leadership at Carlisle Barracks, designed to justify the course of Army Transformation. The scenario created a complex crisis with American forces in great peril, but then new Future Combat Systems (FCS) arrived and saved the day. It was assumed to have all the capabilities touted by contractors and force managers who were developing the system, and the service was already changing its organizational structure and tactics to incorporate it. However, the capabilities demonstrated in that wargame never became reality, and the FCS program was cancelled in 2009. We cannot allow hype from defense contractors to become operational assumptions. Neither can we underestimate the technological capabilities of our potential adversaries.
In late October of 1950, rumors of mysterious swept-wing jet aircraft reached United Nations Command in Korea. On November 1st, the MiG-15s attacked UN aircraft across the Yalu River. Their Soviet pilots blinded aerial intelligence-gathering along the Chinese border with North Korea, facilitating the passage of Chinese Communist armies. They would soon force the longest retreat of an American Army in history, after a massive onslaught, later that month. Within a year, Soviet MiGs drove B-29 and B-26 bombers of the U.S. Far East Air Forces out of the daytime skies. Meanwhile, America scrambled to get F-86 Sabres, its only aircraft capable of combatting the new foe, into theater as it cranked up production and reclaimed the 60 it had sold to Canada.
The MiG-15s’ capabilities shocked American leaders and the U.S. Air Force (USAF). No one thought the Soviet Union and its allies had the knowledge and skills to build such jets. American technical intelligence had failed. Congressional hearings cited captured German scientists and imported British jet engines as possible explanations for the quick Soviet advances in aeronautical engineering, but the result remained that the rest of the air war over Korea would be radically different than what had been expected, entailing greater challenges and much higher costs.
https://warroom.armywarcollege.edu/articles/tech-surprise/
