ONE OF THE OLD STANDBYS of Pentagon defense planning–particularly in the age of PowerPoint–is the notion of the “spectrum of conflict.” The concept attempts to plot the gamut of military operations–from Kantian peace to Hobbesian Armageddon–along one axis, with the proper allocation of resources along the other. In practice, the embedded conclusion of these exercises invariably finds that the kind of war that deserves the most attention and the most money is also–coincidentally enough–the kind of war most preferred by America’s professional military: decisive, swift, high-tech, and conventional.
Thus it comes as both a surprise and pleasure to discover that defense guidance and official briefing-chart policy for the upcoming Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) finds the “conventional-conflict camel’s hump” inverted. Now, “guerilla fighting” and “peacekeeping operations” on the low end of the spectrum and “emerging rival power” conflict and “catastrophic terrorist attack” on the high end are deemed to be “moderately” more deserving of resource allocation than aerial dog fighting, fleet operations, and open armored warfare–the old major regional conflict scenarios. It’s a cryptic but undeniable indication of progress at the Pentagon.
It’s also a sure sign that the reality of the post-Cold-War, post-Iraq world has begun to penetrate even the deepest reaches of the Defense Department bureaucracy–and given the stress on U.S. ground forces in Iraq, it’s not a moment too soon. As one military official told the New York Times last week, “It doesn’t matter if you can win a war 20 years from now if we lose the global war on terror next year.”
Equally encouraging, the QDR will also grapple with some of the nightmare scenarios that, previously, were considered too diplomatically dicey or militarily difficult to garner serious consideration. While past defense reports focused on conventional combat against North Korea or Iraq, QDR planners are at last considering what we would do if, say, Pakistan’s nuclear program slipped from Pervez Musharraf’s grasp. “The more the scenarios hit a nerve . . . the more I know I am onto something,” a shrewd Pentagon official confided to the Wall Street Journal‘s Greg Jaffe.
To be sure, there’s a long way to go before the QDR is complete and plenty of mischief will be made before that happens. Moreover, the Office of Management and Budget has already hamstrung the defense review by mandating overall defense spending cuts. As at the beginning of President Bush’s first term, the White House’s domestic political priorities, and in particular its tax policy agenda, are at odds with the military’s real needs. Despite the “unexpected” difficulties in Iraq, the White House has not only resisted the requirement to increase regular defense spending but actually proceeded to make deeper cuts than anticipated in previous projections. The Bush administration continues to fund its “generational commitment” to transforming the greater Middle East by one-year “emergency” supplemental appropriations.
This borderline contradictory approach goes a long way to explaining the recent spate of press reports about the Pentagon’s decision to curtail major weapons programs. Look in the months ahead for even more stories about reductions in major aircraft and shipbuilding programs and the resulting complaints from contractors. The Lexington Institute, often a leading-edge indicator of industry opinion, has put out a spate of “issue briefs” in recent weeks complaining that the administration is in danger of frittering away the U.S. lead in conventional capabilities. “The Air Force and the Navy are paying the bills to fix the Army’s shortfall in resources,” Lexington chief Loren Thompson told the Post on Wednesday. On the other hand, the Army and Marine Corps are paying the bills in casualties in Iraq.
Under such circumstances, it’s hard to get sentimental about the defense industry, but since they are entirely subject to the whims of the government, they do have a point: it will be almost impossible, for example, to maintain two separate shipyards capable of building nuclear submarines if the Navy is only going to buy one boat per year. It certainly makes no financial or budgetary sense. Ironically, it appears as though President Bush is about to fulfill his 2000 campaign pledge to “skip a generation” of weaponry–just not in the way originally planned.
DESPITE THE INCREASES in actual defense spending of the first Bush term–both the “normal” defense budget and the “emergency” supplementals that have grown exponentially since 9/11–the Pentagon finds itself facing the same dilemma as when the president took office four years ago. The gap between U.S. strategic ends and military means is as larger, if not larger, than the gap left by the Clinton administration.
Almost as important as the sheer size of this gap is the need to allocate defense dollars more wisely–and it’s here that the QDR rumors provide a glimmer of hope. For years, we have been telling ourselves that the only thing that mattered was our own unsurpassed capabilities, allowing us to fight in a manner of our own choosing. Our enemies, by contrast, chose to attack us at those points along the “spectrum of conflict” where we were least prepared and had allocated the fewest resources.
It’s time for the Pentagon to develop forces that can display the same kind of primacy in unconventional combat as already achieved in its conventional capabilities. Given that, just a few months ago, the National Military Strategy all but ignored the problem of counterinsurgency warfare, the willingness of QDR planners to put the sledgehammer of the old “spectrum of conflict” is an encouraging sign, indeed. Put another way: resource allocation is just strategy by another name.
Tom Donnelly is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a contributing writer to The Daily Standard.
