MAKE NO BONES ABOUT IT, there will be another war. We have entered what should be thought of not as the “post-Cold War” era or the “New World Order” or least of all the “End of History,” but an interwar period, the tenth the United States has faced as a nation. In all the others save the Cold War, we have failed to prepare ourselves for what lay ahead. The evidence is growing that we will fail in this one, too. In an interwar period, there are two great challenges. The first is to take seriously that war will occur again. This is especially hard when the international situation is superficially benign, as it is today. The second is to recognize the importance of active engagement in support of the international order. Liberal democracies find this nearly impossible. They almost always forget that peace must be vigorously defended by the powers that have the greatest stake in it, and that nations can accomplish such defense only by maintaining powerful armed forces and demonstrating willingness to use them to deter and defeat aggression. America is failing to meet both of these challenges. For years already, the leaders of our armed forces have testified that the services are funded below the level needed to sustain them, that training and readiness are declining, that critical maintenance is being neglected, and that modernization is underfunded. Anecdotes abound of soldiers running out of bullets to train with. Observers report that units rotating through training centers do not emerge from them ready to go to war. And senior leaders testify before Congress that the U.S. armed forces could not reasonably be expected to fight and win two nearly simultaneous wars, as they are committed to doing. That is the state of affairs under the current budget. Now, the Bush administration is on the verge of proposing to reduce the size of the services—formally abandoning the longstanding two-regional-wars strategy, cutting combat units accordingly, transferring much of the money saved to a missile defense program, and seeking to rely on high-tech, long-range precision strike systems to fight and win the nation’s wars. This program is a recipe for failure to deter aggression, for unpreparedness for war, and for the collapse of America’s armed forces. Setting aside for a moment the fact that since 1991 America has not actually maintained a force capable of fighting and winning two nearly simultaneous major regional wars, let us review the logic behind the two-regional-wars strategy. Consider the position of a president who has at his command only a one-war force. War is threatened somewhere. Does he deploy his force? If he does, he leaves every other region of the world open to aggression. If he does not, he cannot deter the aggressor. Let us say that war breaks out, and the president decides that he must fight. He must commit the great majority of America’s combat power to a single theater. If things go poorly in that theater, there are no reinforcements. Even worse, the visible commitment of the nation’s combat power in one region is likely to encourage would-be aggressors elsewhere to attack. It was precisely such a situation that drew together two unlikely allies, Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, in 1941. Had the British maintained adequate armed forces both to handle Germany and to defend the Far East, it is unlikely the Japanese would have been so quick to attack. The fact that Britain was completely committed in Europe, however, meant that the Japanese had only America to fear—and America was unprepared for war. We should keep in mind, too, that the decisions that led to this weakness were made in the 1920s—when Japan was friendly and Germany weak. By the time the danger became apparent, it was too late to remedy that weakness. The truth is that no president is likely to run the risk of leaving one or more theaters entirely exposed to potentially hostile states. Like the British in the 1930s, an American president facing this choice would likely be paralyzed and take no effective action. America would become not the deterring power, but the self-deterring power, for a one-war force is really a no-war force. It will not deter aggression, and it will not win wars. If the United States is to have the ability to deter or defeat aggression, therefore, there can be no thought of cutting combat units out of any of the services—which already fall short of a two-war force. The force we maintain today is the product of Secretary of Defense Les Aspin’s Bottom-Up Review of 1993. It is a force that could fight one war at a time—what Aspin earlier described as a “win-hold-win” force. Formally replacing the two-war strategy with a strategy skeptics in 1993 dubbed “win-hold-oops” and “win-lose-lose” might justify leaving the current force as it is, but would certainly not justify reducing it in size, nor would it be strategically sound. And even apart from strategic considerations, further cuts would probably kill the services. There is a minimum size below which a military organization cannot maintain itself. Today’s armed forces are highly specialized, with a very limited number of people in numerous critical specialties such as military intelligence, communications, and foreign area expertise. Army units about to deploy abroad or to training centers often must grab individuals, sometimes by name, from other units to carry out their mission. The deeper the cuts, the more acute the problem. Then there is morale. It is already difficult to convince young men and women to join the armed forces and stay there. It will become much more so as the services are cut. Would-be recruits will see that a smaller force will have to work harder and longer, and will achieve lower standards of performance and readiness. Who will want to join such an organization? Further cuts in force structure will present policy-makers with a choice between evils: pull back from overseas positions and commitments, reducing our ability to preserve the peace, or spread the already overextended services even thinner. The amount of time the average member of the services spends abroad or on assignment is already at a record high. This partly accounts for the large numbers who have fled the services or avoided joining up in the first place. It is impossible to imagine continuing the current load of missions with a smaller force. Withdrawing from overseas stations and commitments, however, would be the height of folly. Policymakers in Washington are not free to determine American interests. American interests are what they are—and what they become when reported in the media and perceived by the American people and foreign leaders—for reasons beyond the control of government officials. It is not possible to say in advance, “We have interests in this region but none in that one.” The world is an unpredictable place. Even an isolationist policy such as the United States pursued in the 1920s brought no divestiture of interests, as we learned painfully in the 1930s. It is hard to believe that any rational person could advocate a return to that policy, even if America’s enormously increased global commitments and ties to the global economy did not make such a policy simply impossible. Still more basic is the fact that our overseas stations and our commitments to critical regions of the world are essential to keeping those regions peaceful and stable. U.S. withdrawal would undermine peace and stability. Nations that now look to us to keep the peace would have to look to themselves. Americans who favor this have not considered the consequences. Our weakness in the Far East (revealed again in the recent crisis with China) has already encouraged the Japanese prime minister to endorse the elimination of any restrictions on Japan’s armed forces. Such a policy would probably encourage rearmament in the many Asian nations that fear a renewal of Japanese aggression. Thus it seems that American withdrawal, even to the small extent that it has occurred in the Far East where we still r
etain forward-deployed combat forces, has already contributed to actions likely to destabilize the region. The consequences of fuller disengagement would be exponentially greater. America threatens no peace-loving state. Our presence, which is not suspected of preparing the way for aggression or manifesting aspirations to regional hegemony, allows other states to maintain non-threatening armed forces of their own. Once we leave critical regions, the powerful states in those regions, forced to undertake their own defense, will almost inevitably be seen as threatening by their neighbors, who will respond in kind. American interests and security are powerfully served by maintaining forces abroad to prevent the regional arms races and instability that are likely to follow our withdrawal. Finally, our forces deployed abroad send a message to those few states that seek to destroy the international status quo and are willing to use force to do it. The message is: The United States will stop you. With our forces maintaining the peace in vital areas, we can deter would-be aggressors. When we withdraw those forces, we not only cease to deter, but we actually invite aggression, for the act of withdrawal is seen as an expression of weakness and unwillingness to fight. This is much worse than if we had never been in the region at all, and may precipitate what we are so eager to avoid. Our interests in Europe, East Asia, and the Middle East will not go away just because we pull our forces out, and once we withdraw them, we may find it very difficult to send them back again when we need to. For all these reasons, the proposal to reduce the size of our armed forces by cutting combat units should be rejected out of hand. So should the plan to fund missile defense by starving combat forces. Building a missile defense system is an admirable project. The present vulnerability of the continental United States and our forces abroad to missile attack is one of the most important problems America must solve. No effort should be spared to develop adequate defenses against ballistic missiles, theater missiles, and cruise missiles. The Bush administration’s willingness to meet that challenge and take the political heat for renegotiating or abandoning the ABM treaty is admirable. But the money to fund missile defense cannot be taken out of other Defense Department programs. The threat of missile attack is serious, but it is not by any means the only threat we face. If we gut our armed forces to pay for missile defense, we will lose our position in the world and our ability to maintain the peace at least as rapidly and surely as if we had no missile defense. We must pursue missile defense, as the administration seems to desire, and find additional funding to pay for it. As for the last major element of the current defense reform proposals—that we rely on high-tech, long-range precision weapons systems to win or deter wars—it has very serious drawbacks. First, we do not yet have long-range “smart bombs” and are unlikely to for a long time. Most of the precision weapons we now have must be launched from platforms in or near the theater of war; they cannot be launched from North Dakota to hit Iraq. And there are other limitations on their capabilities. Their effectiveness depends on the quality of our intelligence about the enemy. During the air attack on Serbia in April 1999, we destroyed many a haystack disguised to look like a tank with multi-hundred-thousand-dollar missiles. And such weapons have other inefficiencies. They can destroy many enemy tanks in close formation, but if the enemy disperses, we are reduced to hitting tanks and guns one by one. In many cases, the missile costs more than the target. It is desirable to force the enemy to concentrate his ground forces, but that is best achieved by ground forces, which will be unavailable if we have cut them to the bone. Ground forces operating in tandem with precision strike weapons are much more effective and efficient than precision strike systems alone. The whole history of warfare confirms that success lies in integrating all of the assets at your disposal as effectively as possible, whether they be pike, horse, and arrow, or bomber, tank, and rifleman. Only in recent years have techno-enthusiasts forgotten this lesson and begun once again to imagine that a single type of weapon by itself can dominate the battlefield. It is well to remember here that today’s techno-enthusiasts had their counterparts in earlier times. After World War I, some in Britain proclaimed that the new technologies of their day, tanks and aircraft primarily, would revolutionize warfare and make it possible to maintain much smaller, cheaper, and more lethal forces than the armies of the past. A critical cabinet decision of August 15, 1919, declared, “In order to save man-power, the utmost possible use is to be made of mechanical contrivances, which should be regarded as a means of reducing Estimates” for defense expenditures. Another report of the same time declared, “Man-power in its war use will more and more tend to become subsidiary and auxiliary to the full development and use of mechanical power.” Sir Hugh Trenchard, the first chief of staff of the Royal Air Force, repeatedly declared that airpower alone would not only win Britain’s wars, but also conduct the peacekeeping operations then known as “imperial policing” that were so enervating to Britain’s ground forces in the 1920s. He frequently demanded that funds be transferred from the Army to the RAF to support this program. But Trenchard and the British cabinet misunderstood the significance of the new technology. They were right that it would transform warfare, but wrong that it would lead to smaller, cheaper forces. On the contrary, all of the major belligerents in World War II deployed multi-million-man armies, and they fought the bloodiest and most expensive conflict the world has ever seen—equipped with the latest technology. There is every reason to suppose that the current claims for silver-bullet technologies will prove equally unsound. Even if such claims proved correct, however, there would remain the serious problem that years will elapse before we can “revolutionize” our forces. In the meantime, we seem to be relying for our safety on the notion that the world is in a “strategic pause”; that there will be no major aggression before we are ready for it, whenever that may be. Unfortunately, our unreadiness is likely to bring on aggression. If, as we transform our armed forces, we pull back from the world, we will only encourage those who seek to destroy the international order to do so rapidly, before we are ready for them. Hitler was aware that the British rearmament program would be near complete by 1942—so he attacked in 1939. One of the most dangerous things we can do is create a window during which it will be relatively safe to attack our interests, and after which it will be impossible. Instead, we must maintain our armed forces and our global commitment even as we transform our forces. One more historical parallel may be in order. After the First World War, the British drastically cut their forces, encountered great difficulties in recruitment and retention, concentrated on peacekeeping and homeland defense to the exclusion of warfighting, withdrew as far as possible from overseas commitments, and generally ran down both their military establishment and their foreign policy. And they paid a high price. In 1933, with Hitler in power in Germany, and Manchuria under the control of a suddenly militant Japan, a committee of the British cabinet described the defenses available for deployment in the first six months of a hypothetical war: Our present resources do not permit us even to aim at anything better than to place in the field single divisions in each of the first two months of the war, a third at the end of the fourth month, and the remaining two divisions at the end of the sixth month. These five divisions would have amounted to a force equivalent in size to the one the defense reviews of the 1990s expected the United States to deploy to a m
ajor regional war. Given the low readiness of U.S. units and the limited “lift” capacity available for transporting them, it is unlikely the United States could better the performance projected here by much. The British report continued: The demands for economy have prevented us from providing the modern equipment and the extremely important and expensive item of sufficient reserves of ammunition which would be necessary for war on the continent of Europe, and even for a major contingency on the Frontiers of India. This is extremely important: Although British forces had been cut in accordance with plans drawn up in the early 1920s for reliance on new technology, little of the technology materialized. Although many weapons went through prolonged periods of research and development, and prototypes were designed, no usable systems were built. It should be underscored that the U.S. armed forces have not fielded a single new major weapons system since 1990. Indeed, more attention is now being paid to what current systems to kill than what new systems to build. Even if we choose to rely on technology in the future, there is no assurance that we will actually build the technology before the future arrives. The British report concluded its discussion of readiness with a damning admission: “The most we could do at present if called upon to intervene in Europe, and it is probably well known to both our friends and enemies, would be to provide a small contingent of, say, one or at most two divisions at the outbreak of war, equipping them to a certain extent at the expense of later divisions preparing to go overseas.” Great Britain was unable to deter the Second World War, and was humiliated in ground combat for the first half of the war, needlessly losing lives and territory, because it failed to maintain readiness in peacetime. If the United States reduces its armed forces along the lines currently proposed, there is every reason to suppose that a similar fate awaits us. The British committee recommended an increase in defense spending of £71 million over five years, at a time when Britain’s annual defense budget was £108 million. The Army was to receive £40 million of that increase. Yet one participant in the discussions evaluated the Army’s needs alone at over £145 million. The price of repairing the neglect of the armed forces in a time of crisis was staggering—so much so that even the committee established to determine that price could not face it, and watered down its recommendation. In the end, politicians adjusted the figures in line with “political reality”—what they thought they could get through Parliament—and allocated only £20 million. But political reality bore no relationship to the real world, and the ultimate price proved much higher: Britain was nearly defeated, her cities were bombed, she took hundreds of thousands of casualties, and she lost her position as the world’s leading power. Exactly the same preoccupation with political reality at the expense of the real world can be seen in Washington today. Independent experts estimate the armed forces’ needs at anywhere from $50 billion to $150 billion annually in additional spending. The cost of missile defense is on top of that. But the increases being proposed by the administration and its various study groups fall far short of these figures—not because those advancing them seriously dispute the forces’ needs, but because higher expenditures on defense mean reduced tax cuts and less spending on health care and education. Virtually no one in Washington seriously worries that we will one day have to fight a war again unless we deter it. It therefore seems easy and not too dangerous to cannibalize the armed forces to pay for domestic programs. But all experience argues that there will be another war—and that we, like many before us, will be unready for it. We will fail to deter it; we will endure reverses in its earliest phases; we will suffer from it grievously and needlessly; and we may not win it. The real world has a way of punishing those who ignore it. Frederick W. Kagan teaches history at the United States Military Academy at West Point.
