U.S. Military Strategy-What's at Issue in the Rumsfeld Review?

Carl Conetta, Project on Defense Alternatives, 617-547-4474

The purpose of defense reviews is to specify U.S. military strategy and its implications for force structure, military modernization, readiness, sustainment, and infrastructure. The reviews are supposed to provide the links between strategy, policy, and budgets.

JCS Chairman Gen. Henry H. Shelton, among others, has urged that the new review put strategy rather than budgets in the driver's seat. But this is a false dichotomy. If strategy is anything, it is the process of relating competing ends and scarce means. Strategy is about mapping a route to a goal through a field of constraints, including budgetary ones. When strategy fails to do this, it fails as strategy--and should be changed.

Because strategy affects almost all aspects of policy, the institutional resistance to change can be stubborn. The 1997 National Defense Panel speculated that the two-war strategy, for instance, had become "a force-protection mechanism--a means of justifying the current force structure." Another indicator of institutional inertia is how little the distribution of people and money among the services has changed since the Cold War. Re-arranging just four percent of today's personnel and two percent of today's budgets would reproduce exactly the resource distribution of the 1980s.

Interests, Threats, and Instruments

The proper starting point for strategy is a consideration of national interests, security threats, and the instruments available for addressing those threats. Because scarcity is a fact of life, setting priorities among interests and threats is essential. It is also essential that military instruments fit the problem at hand. Because we presently possess military power in unmatched abundance there is a temptation to rely heavily on it. But the exercise of military power is like the use of radiation in medical therapy: even when used properly it is fraught with risk and inadvertent consequences. This caution applies not only to the conduct of combat operations, but to all forms of military activity. Any strategy worth the name will clearly convey limits on where, when, and how the United States will employ its military.

The recent debate over strategy has unfolded around several issues and questions. These provide a template for assessing the Bush administration's military strategy:

What is the role of military power in foreign policy?
How has the threat spectrum changed?
What is an appropriate balance among different military missions?
How do we manage uncertainty?

The Role of Military Power

The first question that military strategy must address is: What types of tasks can we hope to accomplish by military means? During the Cold War the primary purpose of America's armed forces was deterrence and defense against attacks on vital U.S. and allied interests. In recent years, an increased emphasis has been placed on secondary functions, including reassurance, coercion, military diplomacy, and conflict management (or "stability operations"). New functions have been added as well, such as counterproliferation and "environment shaping."

America's global military presence, once a byproduct of superpower contention, has become an environment shaping mission in its own right. The scope of military assistance programs, multinational exercises, and military-to-military contacts has also expanded under the "environment shaping" rubric. The problem with some of these military functions is that their effects are diffuse and uncertain. So are their costs. Among these costs are increased operational tempo and increased exposure of our military to opportunistic attack-as in the case of the assault on the USS Cole. Its presence in the port of Aden was part of an environment shaping mission. There is also the risk that shaping activities will prompt, rather than discourage, military competition.

The new defense review provides an opportunity to return military power to the more traditional function of crisis response.

The Changing Spectrum of Threat

A critical task of strategy is to correlate a nation's military posture with the threats to that nation's security. In recent years the link between posture and threat has come undone. The 2001 defense review presents an opportunity to re-establish it.

During the past decade there has been a dramatic change in both the magnitude of military threats and their distribution across the threat spectrum. Whereas higher-intensity threats once predominated, today's are more evenly distributed toward the mid- and low-intensity end. Today's threats, while smaller than yesterday's, manifest greater variety, complexity, and volatility. This puts a premium on the flexibility of America's armed forces.

Since 1990 U.S. military policy has focused on the threat posed by so-called "rogue states" possessing substantial air and mechanized forces. Our principal concern was that these states might launch rapid large-scale attacks on their neighbors with the aim of seizing territory. However, the conventional military capacity of almost all "rogue" states has been in sharp decline for a decade now. Defense Intelligence Agency reports foresee threats like that posed by Iraq in 1990 diminishing to 20 percent their former level by 2005.

Another new era concern has been the threat posed by irregular forces--militia, guerillas, and terrorists--employing unconventional methods, often in the context of ethnic conflict, civil war, or state collapse. In many case these "complex contingencies" do not immediately threaten critical Western interests, but they can destabilize entire regions. Throughout the 1990s the U.S. military has been substantially involved in such contingencies, although it remains ill-suited to dealing with them effectively.

Other recent concerns are international criminal activity, the drug trade, and the prospect of direct attack on the U.S. homeland by means of ballistic missiles, terrorism, or information warfare. As in the case of complex contingencies, the U.S. military is not presently configured to address these potential threats very effectively.

A comprehensive and accurate threat assessment is the first step toward improving the fit between U.S. armed forces and the threats that face the nation. The new defense review can serve this end in several ways:

First, the review must clearly convey how the threat spectrum has changed. To usefully guide force development goals, it must quantify threats and distinguish between "clear and present" ones, emerging ones, and those that are "future hypothetical";
Second, it must clarify the relationship between threats and specific U.S. interests. This is essential to setting priorities;
Finally, the review must carefully distinguish between those threats that are best addressed by the military and those best addressed by other agencies.

The question of appropriate means applies especially to international criminal activity, domestic terrorism, infrastructure attacks, and some forms of international instability.

Balancing Military Missions

Today's conventional missions fall into three broad categories: fighting major theater wars, conducting smaller-scale operations, and engaging in various environment shaping activities, including global presence. The attempt to cover all three has proved a daunting challenge. Much criticism has focused on smaller-scale operations, although the other two mission areas are far more demanding.

Current strategy seeks to win major regional wars within 100-150 days--much less time than it took to complete the Gulf War. It also pegs war plans to a magnitude of threat that no longer exists. Finally, it prescribes a capacity to conduct overlapping counter-offensives in two wars at once. There are other ways to manage concurrent wars; the present approach is among the most ambitious possible. There is room to revise today's war plans in ways that would significantly reduce force structure, modernization, and readiness requirements.

A new, more realistic strategy might also de-emphasize the Pentagon's "environment shaping" activities and re-associate U.S. overseas presence more closely with specific conflicts of concern. This might entail reducing the number of U.S. personnel permanently stationed in Europe and returning the Navy to a two-ocean standard focused on the Indian and Pacific oceans. Finally, our military might reconsider the way our military prepares for an uncertain future.

Managing Uncertainty

The 1997 QDR asserted a need to "prepare now for an uncertain future". It added to the roster of "real and present" threats a set of "future possible" ones--including new peer competitors. The strategy hedged against these hypothetical future threats primarily by maintaining an overly large force structure and by supporting massive buys of advanced weapon platforms originally designed for the Cold War. This approach crimps our capacity to address current needs, but it cannot assure us that we will have the type and mix of armed forces we actually might need in the future. Should a revolution in military affairs (RMA) eventuate, many of the platforms on today's procurement lists may be obsolete on arrival.

The United States needs to rethink how best to prepare for threats that do not exist today and that may or may not exist 15, 20, or more years in the future. An alternative to the present approach might emphasize force experimentation and organizational adaptiveness.

Adaptiveness requires that we not commit ourselves to any particular vision of the post-2015 future, but instead retain a capacity to reconstitute our forces along unexpected lines. Adaptiveness also depends on our intelligence gathering capabilities; our military research, development, and production base; and our military training and education establishment. With regard to modernization, adaptiveness entails that we economize for the next 10-12 years, while laying the technological basis for re-capitalizing along revolutionary lines thereafter, as need dictates.