“As we and our coalition partners take the fight to ISIL both where it began as a tumor and where it has metastasized,” said Secretary of Defense Ash Carter at a speech in Washington on Tuesday, “we have to coordinate efforts more than ever before.”
Carter’s address seemed at first glance to be straight D.C. inside baseball—a commemoration of the 30-year anniversary of the Goldwater-Nichols Act, which reorganized the Department of Defense—and a discussion of possible changes to defense acquisitions. However, the secretary’s remarks on the budget illuminated the very real practical and strategic challenges that the DOD will face not just in 2017, but in the years to come.
The top five looming “strategic challenges” he saw were Russia, China, North Korea, Iran and terrorism. It’s a weighty list and Carter admitted, “We’re not postured to be as agile as we could be.”
How can the DOD fix that? The answer, he claimed, was a force that was better organized and integrated, and more responsive.
While the 2017 Defense Posture Statement, released on March 17, lays out the strategic vision and future plans of the DOD, Carter’s speech addressed how the department plans to manage its role in a “dramatically different” security environment. For Carter, the struggle is to maintain the strengths the military currently has, while making necessary changes to areas like cyber security, defense acquisitions, and force integrations.
He strove to present issues positively, like when he proposed filling future command billets with three-star rather than four-star generals.
“Military is based on rank priority,” he said, “but it gets complicated in some of our combatant headquarters where we have a deep bench”
The reality that America’s armed services have shrunk to levels barely sufficient to cover our obligations was an unspoken subtext for much of Carter’s remarks. Synchronization, agility, flexibility, and technology are all merely means of mitigating this problem.
While the military needs to become more agile, part of the desire to synchronize globally comes out of fear of what Carter called future “trans-regional threats” that might present themselves across the globe in overlapping time frames.
As the DOD proposes changes to better equip itself for future conflicts, Carter stressed that it was “important to make all these updates under the guiding principles of ‘Do No Harm.'” In many ways, his proposed changes seemed to be about finding ways to do more with less. Carter’s vision of an agile, globally synchronized command unified across the various branches, would help the future military to spread its forces further.
But is there a limit to how far they can stretch? Carter didn’t elaborate much on the issue—or on the loss of military gains in Iraq. Still, he hinted that the DOD’s wish list might include more than just restructuring.
“It is time to come together as Sen. Goldwater and Sen. Nichols did to give our men and women in uniform the things they need,” he declared.
