The technology-first approach to war — the philosophy that animated former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s attitudes toward Afghanistan and Iraq with such tragic consequences — is returning from the grave. Leading the charge of the undead and the prime guru of the transformation movement is Andrew Krepinevich, who directs the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments and was recently named as a member of the Pentagon’s exclusive Defense Policy Board.
Krepinevich also has been making a splash with an essay in Foreign Affairs, “The Pentagon’s Wasting Assets,” that is a cleverly argued attack on current defense programs, and a new book, “7 Deadly Scenarios,” a “futurist’s” look at emerging trends in war. And, according to Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell, it was reading this book that convinced Defense Secretary Robert Gates to name Krepinevich to the board. In sum, Krepinevich is the perfect model of a Washington mover and shaker: One of those people whose influence is far greater than their name recognition.
Krepinevich has been the leading proponent of defense transformation for more than a decade. As a member of the 1997 “National Defense Panel” — a group formed by Congress to counterbalance the Pentagon’s original Quadrennial Defense Review — Krepinevich made the case, convincing fellow panel members that the United States should follow a strategy of transformation. That is, rather than responding to external threats, the U.S. military should strive to exploit new technologies to maintain supremacy over the long haul.
The art of the long view remains foremost in Krepinevich’s mind. His Foreign Affairs article demonstrates convincingly that traditional forms of military power, such as aircraft carriers, surface ship, tanks or fighters, are less dominant than they once were. By using the term “wasting assets,” Krepinevich recalls the anxieties of the early Eisenhower years, when strategists used the term to acknowledge the end of America’s nuclear monopoly. The answer remains, as his think-tank/Pentagon consultancy has argued in an impressive series of papers, to “divest” from these systems and to spend more on innovation, particularly long-range strike systems.
But what seems farsighted in theory can be strategically myopic. Indeed, the original doctrine of military transformation held that the United States was in a 20-year, post-Cold-War period of “strategic pause” following the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Certainly since the attacks of Sept. 11 it has been painfully clear that international political and military competition has continued without pause. Krepinevich not only acknowledges this, but was among the first to point out the failures of Bush administration policy and argue for a classic counterinsurgency approach to Iraq.
But he and his fellow transformationists like Assistant Secretary of Defense Michael Vickers, in charge of special operations and another Gates confidant, are wedded to what they call the “indirect approach” to persistent irregular warfare. As Krepinevich writes in Foreign Affairs, “This means exploiting the U.S. military’s advantage in highly trained manpower by emphasizing the training, equipping, and advising of indigenous forces of countries threatened by subversion … rather than direct combat operations.”
Again, perfect in theory but problematic in practice. The indirect approach has, for example, worked well in Indonesia and the Philippines, but utterly failed in Iraq through 2006; indeed, the train-and-transition approach was a recipe for defeat.
This wrong-end-of-the-telescope perspective even works to undercut the strongest arguments in favor of defense transformation: Responding to the rise of Chinese military power. Krepinevich and company have been at the forefront highlighting the efforts the People’s Liberation Army has made to constrain and complicate the ability of U.S. forces to operate in the western Pacific. But simply meeting these new operational challenges is not enough. The task for America and its allies is to maintain the current technological edge even as new ways of warfare emerge.
And this is the greatest danger of transformational thinking: the belief that American strategic goals are so fungible that they can be easily traded to achieve more congenial military prospects. Krepinevich believes in a “balance” of ends and means, and we are almost certain to hear similar talk coming out of the Pentagon’s current defense review.
But a balance that ignores strategic ends to reduce military means — that is, forces, programs and budgets — is unlikely to be stable or desirable.
