The Pentagon cannot fully be trusted to plan its own future. With this sensible thought in mind, Congress established last year a group of experts to provide an independent evaluation of the Pentagon’s vision of the future of America’s armed forces — particularly as expressed in the Defense Department’s Quadrennial Defense Review, released earlier this year. This National Defense Panel issued its report last week, to considerable hoopla and acclaim. The panel was supposed to consider the future “unencumbered by Pentagon policies, Congressional constituencies, or budget constraints.”
Unfortunately, the panel’s report is also unencumbered by reality. Relying on a Buck Rogers vision of future Information Age warfare, the report takes for granted that we are at the beginning of a “revolution in military affairs” based on developments in information technology. The report asserts that we have entered a period of “strategic pause,” in which we will face only relatively small and manageable challenges to our security in the near future. It belittles the notion that America’s armed forces should be prepared to fight two nearly simultaneous “major regional contingencies” (MRCs), a notion that has driven American strategic planning since the Gulf War. It argues that we should downsize our forces even more in order to pay for the ” transformation strategy” that alone, it claims, will produce the armed forces we must have in 2020. These cuts would be on top of the 30 percent reduction that America’s armed forces have already suffered over the last decade, a reduction that has stretched our capabilities thin.
The report is fundamentally misguided. In the first place, although developments in technology, and information technology in particular, are changing war, it is by no means clear what war will look like at the end of those changes. Second, the determination to maintain the capability of fighting two nearly simultaneous regional wars does not result from “Cold War thinking,” but rather from a rational evaluation of America’s responsibilities. The need for such a capability has been reinforced by the current tension with Iraq, which reveals that our armed forces are already too thinly stretched to deal comfortably with even one MRC. And third, there can be no such thing as a ” strategic pause” for the United States. We cannot afford to step back from the world, focusing on domestic security and domestic concerns while preparing the armed forces of the future. The report ignores the critical role the United States can and should play in shaping a future that suits us. It ignores the fact that if we keep our armed forces strong even as we transform them, we can do better than prepare for the next war: We can deter it.
The Armed Forces of the Future
The panel’s report rests on the premise that a “revolution in military affairs” (RMA) is now occurring and that we therefore need to begin to field a “revolutionary” new force. Is this so?
The report defines an RMA as “a discontinuous change usually associated with technology but also representing social or economic changes that fundamentally alter the face of battle.” But RMAs are not brought about by social, economic, or technological changes. They occur when one or more nations find a way to exploit these changes through doctrine, organization, and strategy, to transform war.
A previous period of apparent “strategic pause” illuminates this problem. In the two decades between World War I and World War II, few military thinkers doubted that tanks and aircraft would transform war fundamentally — some spoke even then of a revolution in military affairs. But the French and the British guessed wrong about what the RMA would bring. As a result, the French bought the wrong tanks and developed the wrong organization and doctrine, while the British relied on bombers, ignoring their ground forces almost completely. The Germans taught both what the RMA really was by inflicting catastrophic defeats on them in 1940. The Germans succeeded by combining new technologies with existing forces, which they then shaped by a new doctrine into a devastating weapon. The French and the British were not stupid — they were just wrong. An incorrect image of the RMA had become fixed in the minds of political and military leaders alike.
We are in danger of making a similar mistake now. The National Defense Panel report admits that we are only at the beginning of an RMA, but goes confidently on to predict that information technology will make it possible to “disperse the fog of war.” In pursuit of this mythical capability, the panel demands that we slash readiness and manpower to pay the cost of fielding a new Information Age army. It does not say, however, what that army will look like, because it cannot. It is now too early to create the army of 2020; the nature of the current RMA is still unclear. We are in serious danger of repeating the French and British mistake of the interwar years by buying the wrong machinery and relying on the wrong systems. In fact, the defense-panel report inadvertently makes clear that the defense procurement system must be revamped. For any system that requires us to know precisely what war will look like and what systems will be needed in 2020 is bound to fail. If we follow the panel’s suggestions, we will sacrifice our ability to deal with current and near-future crises in favor of vague promises of a revolution to come.
The Present Danger
The panel’s recommendations rely on another false assumption: that “we are in a relatively secure interlude following an era of intense international confrontation.” It is true that we face no threats from any “peer competitor” as we did during the Cold War, and that no state or coalition of states can plausibly menace the survival of the United States as the Soviets once did. It does not follow, however, that we face no threats to our national interests, or that those threats are not powerful and dangerous, as the last month and a half with Iraq has made clear. Above all, it is by no means clear that the world will get safer as time goes on, as the report appears to assume.
The panel points out that current U.S. policy — that of maintaining the capability of engaging in two nearly simultaneous MRCs — has its origins in the need to contain both Iraq and North Korea. Its report concludes that the current force structure has the combat power to fulfill this mission “with the support of allies,” a dubious proposition. First, we are unlikely to have the support of allies at the necessary levels to deal with Iraq. Second, even a cursory glance at the American force structure shows that we do not have the capability to fight both North Korea and Iraq at the same time.
But the most dangerous misapprehension in the report is that, if we can manage the Korean situation diplomatically and the Iraq situation with the support of allies, the need for the two-MRC capability will vanish. But the two-MRC strategy is not predicated on a hostile Iraq and a hostile North Korea; it is predicated on the simple fact that a one-MRC capability is, in fact, a no-MRC capability. Presidents cannot be expected to deploy so high a proportion of our armed forces to one conflict that they are left with nothing in case trouble arises elsewhere. In each such crisis, America would be faced with an unacceptable alternative: either fight one conflict with no reserves and no ability to deter or defeat another, opportunistic foe; or, more likely, fight in defense of important interests in important regions. Indeed, the defense-panel report itself unwittingly makes the case for the urgent necessity of maintaining a two-MRC capability: The “two-theater war concept is predicated on the belief that the ability to fight more than one major war at a time deters an enemy from seeking to take advantage of the opportunity to strike while the United States is preoccupied in another theater.” If we lose this deterrence capability, we are more likely to fight major wars sooner than 2020.
Shaping the Future
In contemplating the future, the panel considers four likely scenarios of international relations, ranging from the worst, “chronic crisis,” to the best, “shaped stability.” The report suggests that we “hedge” and ensure that we are prepared for all contingencies by developing and deploying the Information Age armed forces that will do the trick. But that is the wrong way to plan. We should decide that a “chronic crisis” in 2020 is an unacceptable outcome and that “shaped stability” is essential. The United States is the only power that can shape stability, and this fact needs to drive our defense strategy. Unfortunately, the underlying passivity of the panel’s report dictates a course that practically ensures that we will not have the military power — and therefore the will — to shape a reasonably stable world.
To accept the notion that we are in a period of “strategic pause” and security, and that we can “take risks” now in order to field the forces necessary in 2020, is to abdicate America’s world responsibilities and to jeopardize our security. If we do not maintain strong enough armed forces even as we modernize, we will not be able to oppose regional aggression in Iraq or elsewhere. We will not be able to restore and maintain stability in critical regions like Bosnia. We will not be able to reassure allies like South Korea and Japan that they are secure. And above all, we will not be able to make clear to would-be aggressors that we will defeat them. The perception of our weakness will itself encourage more dangers. Our allies, fearful for their own security when we no longer seem able to guarantee it, will begin to rearm, triggering fears among their competitors and instability in critical regions.
In time, our continued withdrawal from the international scene may create the very peer competitors that we most fear, in the form either of large national states or of coalitions that oppose our interests. In short, we will fail to shape a stable future, ensuring that our armed forces, whatever they look like in 2020, will see a lot of action.
Technology is important, yes; force modernization is critical. But so is maintaining our national security today and tomorrow — and, even more important, shaping a future in which American forces are unlikely to be tested. As long as budget constraints require that modernization in the future come at the expense of force structure in the present, no ” transformation strategy” can work. We need to spend less time hoping for transformations and instead have the courage to think the unthinkable: This may be a period of relative peace and “strategic pause,” but, still, we need to spend more money on defense.
Frederick W. Kagan is an assistant professor of military history at West Point. The views expressed here are his alone and do not necessarily reflect those of the U.S. Military Academy, the Army, or the Defense Department.
