IN RECENT SPEECHES and in the newly minted National Security Strategy, President Bush has declared that he intends to prosecute the war on terrorism aggressively and to oppose the acquisition of weapons of mass destruction by rogue states. U.S. actions in Afghanistan and preparations for a war against Iraq have confirmed that he means what he says. The president’s forthright approach has been a welcome relief from a decade of confusion and misdirection. But there remains one critical component that the president does not mention: A year into this activist foreign policy, the defense agencies that will prosecute the war on terrorism remain starved of resources and thus incapable of fulfilling their assigned tasks. The rapidly developing crisis with North Korea sharply underlines this point. In 1994, Kim Jong Il extracted a series of bribes from a war-wary Clinton administration in return for the promise to terminate its nuclear program. Now, having admitted that it broke that promise, North Korea is preparing to demand another set of concessions for yet another promise. The Bush administration appears to understand that there comes a point at which the United States must insist that North Korea keep its promises without further bribes. This is the right course, but there is no way to guarantee that it won’t lead to open conflict and, possibly, war. Can the United States win a war against North Korea? Of course. Estimates vary wildly on the number of casualties we would take and inflict, but that we would win is not in doubt. What would happen, however, if war with North Korea broke out, or even threatened, while we were fighting around Baghdad? Or during the period after victory when thousands of troops were required to restore order in Iraq? The answer is frightening. Our armed forces right now are not capable of fighting well in two such conflicts. The result would be not defeat in either, but almost certainly greater damage to our allies and many more casualties sustained by both sides than would be necessary if our military were more capable. The great danger, however, is not that we would fight and endure damage, but that we would be deterred from fighting, leading us to yet another bad deal. Which could be disastrous. We know the North Koreans already possess highly advanced ballistic missile technology. And we have no reason to be confident that they would not make their weapons available to the highest bidders–for North Korea is an extremely poor and hungry country–or use them to blackmail us and their neighbors. In order to halt the North Korean nuclear arsenal, we need the strength to face the prospect of war with Pyongyang with equanimity. In the short term, then, Bush’s failure to champion increases in the numerical strength of the armed forces and to secure an adequate defense budget threatens to undermine his forthright foreign policy. Between the downturn of our economy and the upsurge of patriotism in the wake of September 11, it can no longer be said that there are not enough volunteers. The army needs probably 50,000 more soldiers on active duty (the equivalent of two divisions, plus increases in supporting elements); the navy and the air force need more pilots and crews; the Marines should have another expeditionary force on active duty. These are needed simply to execute the president’s current plans. The long-term picture is bleaker. The president rightly insists we transform the military to prepare for future conflict, but his current budget spends too little on “leap-ahead” technologies. The administration may already be heeding this criticism, however, and preparing to kill or reduce certain systems (including the F-22, the Comanche helicopter, and the navy’s DD21) in order to fund the leap-ahead systems, missile defense, and the war on terrorism. This is not an acceptable solution. Without developing the interim systems, it is impossible to know what the next set of systems should look like and what attendant changes should be made in organization, doctrine, and training. And the world will not wait for us to complete our leap. As events have shown, the armed forces must be able to meet multiple and significant threats even as the technologies they rely on are evolving. Killing the interim systems will reduce our capacity to respond to crises and likely force us to choose between accepting greater damage than is necessary and failing to act when action is essential. It is vital, in other words, to fund both interim systems and “leap-ahead” technologies. The administration’s other priorities–ballistic missile defense and homeland defense–are also important and necessary to the successful prosecution of the war on terrorism. But those efforts should not compete with conventional armed forces for funding. In short, the defense budget must be increased dramatically. The Bush administration, it will be objected, has already increased the budget both in terms of proposals and in requests for emergency supplemental appropriations. Most of those increases are appropriate to help the nation respond to the terrorist attacks, but they do not touch on the problems outlined above. Increases of some $100 billion annually or more–over and above the increases already called for–will be necessary to provide for a defense establishment able to fulfill the president’s national security strategy. This fact should surprise no one. The president has repeatedly said we are at war, that it will last a long time, and that it may take many unpredictable turns. Which makes it all the stranger that President Bush has not called for a wartime budget. Money alone, of course, will not solve the problem. The Department of Defense needs radical reform as much as the agencies handling homeland security do. The activities of the individual services need to be mutually supporting, to bring about truly joint planning and programming. Organizational and doctrinal reform within the services is also essential. Without it, no amount of advanced technology will transform the way we conduct war. But it is time to face the fact that cash-starved bureaucracies are resistant to change. When an organization feels itself stretched beyond its capacities, it becomes defensive and unwilling to take risks. A zero-defects mentality, marked by an overwhelming fear of error, inevitably takes hold. In such an environment, significant change becomes impossible. The truth is that we need to increase readiness and the size of the force today. We need to purchase interim systems, even flawed ones, to upgrade our capabilities in the mid-term. We need to invest heavily in generating truly transformational technologies for the long term. We need to fund missile defense and protect ourselves domestically against terrorism. We need to make thoroughgoing changes in the way our defense agencies do business. We need to transform our strategic and organizational culture fundamentally. And we need to do it all as quickly as possible, because the world will not wait for us to be ready. Frederick W. Kagan is a military historian and co-author of While America Sleeps.
