Euclid's Army review: William F. Owen’s blunt case for simpler, cheaper land warfare

A $500 drone can damage a vehicle worth millions. Convoys stall not because of enemy fire, but because a vital spare is trapped in a supply chain. Radios promise seamless data, then crash when the fight gets messy. Into this reality walks William F. Owen with Euclid's Army, a sharp polemic that asks a painful question: why do land forces keep betting on complexity when war keeps rewarding the basics?

Owen’s message is blunt. Armies should simplify, spend less, and train harder on fundamentals. He argues that modern forces have drifted into an expensive habit—buying exquisite gear and grand concepts that look great on slides but struggle in the field. If the future is unknowable, he says, the safest bet is proven doctrine, adaptable organization, and equipment troops can actually sustain under fire.

A sharp challenge to military orthodoxy

The title matters. Euclid was the mathematician of clean lines and first principles. Owen builds from that idea: strip away clutter and work from what is demonstrably true. He frames the problem with four lenses—cost, weight, complexity, and effectiveness—and keeps coming back to a simple rule of thumb: simpler kit tends to be cheaper, lighter, easier to keep running, and more reliable in a fight.

Look at Ukraine. The war has become a laboratory for what survives contact. Cheap first-person-view drones learned to hunt armor. Electronic warfare shifted the balance again, forcing units to improvise, disperse, and protect signatures. Logistics—fuel, spares, recovery—proved as decisive as ever. Troops that could dig, camouflage, maneuver at night, and keep radios working under pressure fared better than those who trusted a single “silver bullet” system to save them.

Owen’s critique is not just about gadgets. It’s about how armies think. He takes aim at the cycle where a bright idea spawns a decade-long program, budgets swell, features stack up, weight creeps, and by the time the vehicle or sensor arrives it is too heavy to deploy quickly, too complex to fix forward, and too costly to risk in numbers. You do not need to agree with every example to recognize the pattern. Western forces have their list: canceled modernization drives, vehicles delayed by vibration or noise issues, and projects so big they distort everything around them.

He is equally hard on training. Some units become fluent in PowerPoint and procurement language, he suggests, while fieldcraft, combined-arms drills, and repetitions under stress get squeezed. The war that many prepared for—dense networks, perfect awareness, short campaigns—collided with a messier reality: jamming, mud, artillery, deception, and the need to keep moving even when nothing works as advertised.

None of this is an argument for going backward. Owen is not nostalgic for iron sights and map cases. His point is discipline: buy what can be sustained at scale, prioritize mass over rarity, and keep doctrine and training at the center. If a technology truly gives a repeatable edge, prove it, strip it down to what’s essential, and field it in numbers soldiers can maintain.

What simpler looks like in practice

So what does Owen think armies should actually do? He offers a practical yardstick. Judge everything—organizations, vehicles, sensors, software—by whether it increases fighting power at reasonable cost and can be kept alive when the enemy is trying to break it. The future may surprise you, but logistics and human performance won’t.

• Doctrine first. Lock in combined-arms basics: infantry that can move under fire, engineers that can breach and build, artillery that shoots, scoots, and sustains, and air defense that protects gaps without paralyzing maneuver.
• Organization that adapts. Units should be modular, with small teams that can disperse, re-aggregate, and operate when data links die.
• Training that hurts a bit. Rehearsals in bad weather, at night, with jamming and deception, expose weak points. That’s the point.
• Procurement that values field repair. Favor parts you can swap with standard tools, sensors you can replace at the roadside, and software you can patch without a contractor on site.
• Weight discipline. Every extra kilogram limits mobility, burns fuel, and complicates recovery. If armor or a sensor is worth it, prove it in testing that mimics the chaos of battle.
• Cost-per-effect, not cost-per-unit. The right comparison isn’t tank versus tank; it’s the total cost of delivering an effect—mobility, protection, suppression—over time against an enemy that is adapting.
• Logistics as a combat arm. Spares, recovery vehicles, fuel planning, and repair teams are not back-office. They decide who can fight on day three.
• Hardened, simple comms. Radios and networks should degrade gracefully, not collapse. Voice still matters. So do runners and pre-briefed actions.

History backs pieces of this. The T-34’s wartime edge came from reliability, numbers, and a design simple enough to build and fix fast. The M4 Sherman’s virtue was not perfection—it was availability and a supply chain that followed it into battle. The AK’s global spread owed as much to ruggedness and ease of use as to its ballistics. Modern examples exist too: when a system works, it’s often because crews can understand it, maintain it, and improvise with it without waiting on a contractor.

Owen also challenges the habit of loading every mission onto a single machine. Do we expect a vehicle to be a tank, a troop carrier, a sensor hub, and a command post all at once? If yes, it risks becoming heavy, rare, and precious. Once it’s rare and precious, commanders hesitate to use it aggressively. The answer, he suggests, is often more modest platforms, each doing a job well, supported by doctrine that combines them effectively.

Expect pushback. Advocates of network-centric warfare argue that complex, integrated systems are the only way to fight a peer enemy with precision weapons and pervasive sensors. Owen’s reply is not to reject technology—he insists on proving it. Does it survive jamming? Can a junior technician fix it under fire? Can you field enough of it to matter? If the answer is no, the elegant integration might turn into a single point of failure.

Costs and budgets lurk in the background of every chapter. Many NATO armies face the same squeeze: inflation, competing priorities, and war stocks that need rebuilding. That’s why his focus on through-life costs—training time, spare parts, maintenance cycles, transportability—feels timely. Purchase price is just the headline; the real bill arrives during deployment.

Ukraine’s lessons reinforce this. Units learned the hard way to separate vehicles, hide signatures, and rotate positions. Fieldworks and deception cut losses better than some high-end sensors. Drones proved deadly until countermeasures forced new tactics. In that back-and-forth, the teams that could adapt quickly—because their kit was fixable, their drills were ingrained, and their leaders trusted small-unit initiative—kept a step ahead.

Owen writes from years around the British Army and industry, and it shows in the targets he picks: acquisition cycles that stretch for decades, vehicles designed by committee, and training calendars that reward appearances over outcomes. Readers in other militaries will recognize the same patterns. The details differ, the pathologies rhyme.

He is careful, though, not to turn “simple” into a slogan. Simplicity is not the absence of sophistication; it is sophistication you can actually use under pressure. A well-sited, camouflaged, and redundantly supplied battery of old artillery can be more dangerous than a newer system that outruns its logistics. A good radio plan beats a fragile “battle internet.” A platoon drilled on dispersion, smoke, and deception will survive long enough to finish the mission.

There’s a quiet cultural argument here too. If armies reward novelty and rhetoric, they drift toward complexity. If they reward clarity and outcomes, they drift toward the basics. Owen is pushing for the latter—fewer buzzwords, more stress-tested drills, fewer bespoke edge cases, more standardization that lets sergeants solve problems fast.

Who should read this? Procurement chiefs who sign contracts they’ll never have to fight with. Young officers learning to write plans that survive first contact. NCOs who keep units honest in training. Politicians who wonder why defense budgets break while units stay small. Industry leaders who want to build things soldiers can fix without a laptop and a lawyer.

The book won’t cheer everyone up. It steps on sacred cows: exquisite platforms that become too rare to risk, programs that grow because no one wants to be the first to say no, and a faith in future war that keeps floating just out of reach. But there’s a reason this argument lands now. Wars are showing again that mass, logistics, and hard practice decide who holds the ground. Owen’s call is to fund that reality first—and only then pick the gadgets that earn their place.