“Americans tend to forget that people, not machines, win wars”

The Pentagon is using some of its most sophisticated weaponry in Afghanistan, but defense industry expert Winslow Wheeler says Americans have a technological ignorance when it comes to machines’ capabilities.

The war in Afghanistan has become a testing ground for innovations, says Wheeler, a director of the Center for Defense Information’s Straus Military Reform Project. Wars, he noted, are typically used as a laboratory for figuring out what works and what doesn’t.

“But machines don’t win wars – people win them,” Wheeler added. “They use their minds and their moral strength to do that, and Americans tend to forget about that.”