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REBUILDING AMERICA'S DEFENSES, Part 2 |
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This report proceeds from the belief that America should seek to preserve and extend its position of global leadership by maintaining the preeminence of U.S. military forces. Today, the United States has an unprecedented strategic opportunity. It faces no immediate great-power challenge; it is blessed with wealthy, powerful and democratic allies in every part of the world; it is in the midst of the longest economic expansion in its history; and its political and economic principles are almost universally embraced. At no time in history has the international security order been as conducive to American interests and ideals. The challenge for the coming century is to preserve and enhance this “American peace.” Yet unless the United States maintains sufficient military strength, this opportunity will be lost. And in fact, over the past decade, the failure to establish a security strategy responsive to new realities and to provide adequate resources for the full range of missions needed to exercise U.S. global leadership has placed the American peace at growing risk. This report attempts to define those requirements. In particular, we need to: ESTABLISH FOUR CORE MISSIONS for U.S. military forces: • defend the
American homeland; To carry out these core missions, we need to provide sufficient force and budgetary allocations. In particular, the United States must: MAINTAIN NUCLEAR STRATEGIC SUPERIORITY, basing the U.S. nuclear deterrent upon a global, nuclear net assessment that weighs the full range of current and emerging threats, not merely the U.S.-Russia balance. RESTORE THE PERSONNEL STRENGTH of today’s force to roughly the levels anticipated in the “Base Force” outlined by the Bush Administration, an increase in active-duty strength from 1.4 million to 1.6 million. REPOSITION U.S. FORCES to respond to 21st century strategic realities by shifting permanently-based forces to Southeast Europe and Southeast Asia, and by changing naval deployment patterns to reflect growing U.S. strategic concerns in East Asia. MODERNIZE CURRENT U.S. FORCES SELECTIVELY, proceeding with the F-22 program while increasing purchases of lift, electronic support and other aircraft; expanding submarine and surface combatant fleets; purchasing Comanche helicopters and medium-weight ground vehicles for the Army, and the V-22 Osprey “tilt-rotor” aircraft for the Marine Corps. CANCEL “ROADBLOCK”
PROGRAMS such as the Joint Strike Fighter, CVX aircraft carrier, and Crusader
howitzer system that would absorb exorbitant amounts of Pentagon funding while
providing limited improvements to current capabilities. Savings from these
canceled DEVELOP AND DEPLOY GLOBAL MISSILE DEFENSES to defend the American homeland and American allies, and to provide a secure basis for U.S. power projection around the world. CONTROL THE NEW “INTERNATIONAL COMMONS” OF SPACE AND “CYBERSPACE,” and pave the way for the creation of a new military service – U.S. Space Forces – with the mission of space control. EXPLOIT THE “REVOLUTION IN MILITARY AFFAIRS” to insure the long-term superiority of U.S. conventional forces. Establish a two-stage transformation process which • maximizes the
value of current weapons systems through the application of advanced
technologies, and, INCREASE DEFENSE SPENDING gradually to a minimum level of 3.5 to 3.8 percent of gross domestic product, adding $15 billion to $20 billion to total defense spending annually. Fulfilling these requirements is essential if America is to retain its militarily dominant status for the coming decades. Conversely, the failure to meet any of these needs must result in some form of strategic retreat. At current levels of defense spending, the only option is to try ineffectually to “manage” increasingly large risks: paying for today’s needs by shortchanging tomorrow’s; withdrawing from constabulary missions to retain strength for large-scale wars; “choosing” between presence in Europe or presence in Asia; and so on. These are bad choices. They are also false economies. The “savings” from withdrawing from the Balkans, for example, will not free up anywhere near the magnitude of funds needed for military modernization or transformation. But these are false economies in other, more profound ways as well. The true cost of not meeting our defense requirements will be a lessened capacity for American global leadership and, ultimately, the loss of a global security order that is uniquely friendly to American principles and prosperity. I Since the end of the Cold War, the United States has struggled to formulate a coherent national security or military strategy, one that accounts for the constants of American power and principles yet accommodates 21st century realities. Absent a strategic framework, U.S. defense planning has been an empty and increasingly self-referential exercise, often dominated by bureaucratic and budgetary rather than strategic interests. Indeed, the proliferation of defense reviews over the past decade testifies to the failure to chart a consistent course: to date, there have been half a dozen formal defense reviews, and the Pentagon is now gearing up for a second Quadrennial Defense Review in 2001. Unless this “QDR II” matches U.S. military forces and resources to a viable American strategy, it, too, will fail. These failures are not without cost: already, they place at risk an historic opportunity. After the victories of the past century – two world wars, the Cold War and most recently the Gulf War – the United States finds itself as the uniquely powerful leader of a coalition of free and prosperous states that faces no immediate great-power challenge. The American peace has proven itself peaceful, stable and durable. It has, over the past decade, provided the geopolitical framework for widespread economic growth and the spread of American principles of liberty and democracy. Yet no moment in international politics can be frozen in time; even a global Pax Americana will not preserve itself. Paradoxically, as American power and influence are at their apogee, American military forces limp toward exhaustion, unable to meet the demands of their many and varied missions, including preparing for tomorrow’s battlefield. Today’s force, reduced by a third or more over the past decade, suffers from degraded combat readiness; from difficulties in recruiting and retaining sufficient numbers of soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines; from the effects of an extended “procurement holiday” that has resulted in the premature aging of most weapons systems; from an increasingly obsolescent and inadequate military infrastructure; from a shrinking industrial base poorly structured to be the “arsenal of democracy” for the 21st century; from a lack of innovation that threatens the techno-logical and operational advantages enjoyed by U.S. forces for a generation and upon which American strategy depends. Finally, and most dangerously, the social fabric of the military is frayed and worn. U.S. armed forces suffer from a degraded quality of life divorced from middle-class expectations, upon which an all-volunteer force depends. Enlisted men and women and junior officers increasingly lack confidence in their senior leaders, whom they believe will not tell unpleasant truths to their civilian leaders. In sum, as the American peace reaches across the globe, the force that preserves that peace is increasingly overwhelmed by its tasks. This is no paradox; it is the inevitable consequence of the failure to match military means to geopolitical ends. Underlying the failed strategic and defense reviews of the past decade is the idea that the collapse of the Soviet Union had created a “strategic pause.” In other words, until another great-power challenger emerges, the United States can enjoy a respite from the demands of international leadership. Like a boxer between championship bouts, America can afford to relax and live the good life, certain that there would be enough time to shape up for the next big challenge. Thus the United States could afford to reduce its military forces, close bases overseas, halt major weapons programs and reap the financial benefits of the “peace dividend.” But as we have seen over the past decade, there has been no shortage of powers around the world who have taken the collapse of the Soviet empire as an opportunity to expand their own influence and challenge the American-led security order. Beyond the faulty notion of a strategic pause, recent defense reviews have suffered from an inverted understanding of the military dimension of the Cold War struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union. American containment strategy did not proceed from the assumption that the Cold War would be a purely military struggle, in which the U.S. Army matched the Red Army tank for tank; rather, the United States would seek to deter the Soviets militarily while defeating them economically and ideologically over time. And, even within the realm of military affairs, the practice of deterrence allowed for what in military terms is called “an economy of force.” The principle job of NATO forces, for example, was to deter an invasion of Western Europe, not to invade and occupy the Russian heartland. Moreover, the bi-polar nuclear balance of terror made both the United States and the Soviet Union generally cautious. Behind the smallest proxy war in the most remote region lurked the possibility of Armageddon. Thus, despite numerous miscalculations through the five decades of Cold War, the United States reaped an extraordinary measure of global security and stability simply by building a credible and, in relative terms, inexpensive nuclear arsenal.
Over the decade of the post-Cold-War period, however, almost everything has changed. The Cold War world was a bipolar world; the 21st century world is – for the moment, at least – decidedly unipolar, with America as the world’s “sole superpower.” America’s strategic goal used to be containment of the Soviet Union; today the task is to preserve an international security environment conducive to American interests and ideals. The military’s job during the Cold War was to deter Soviet expansionism. Today its task is to secure and expand the “zones of democratic peace;” to deter the rise of a new great-power competitor; defend key regions of Europe, East Asia and the Middle East; and to preserve American preeminence through the coming transformation of war made possible by new technologies. From 1945 to 1990, U.S. forces prepared themselves for a single, global war that might be fought across many theaters; in the new century, the prospect is for a variety of theater wars around the world, against separate and distinct adversaries pursuing separate and distinct goals. During the Cold War, the main venue of superpower rivalry, the strategic “center of gravity,” was in Europe, where large U.S. and NATO conventional forces prepared to repulse a Soviet attack and over which nuclear war might begin; and with Europe now generally at peace, the new strategic center of concern appears to be shifting to East Asia. The missions for America’s armed forces have not diminished so much as shifted. The threats may not be as great, but there are more of them. During the Cold War, America acquired its security “wholesale” by global deterrence of the Soviet Union. Today, that same security can only be acquired at the “retail” level, by deterring or, when needed, by compelling regional foes to act in ways that protect American interests and principles. Today, America spends less than 3 percent of its gross domestic product on national defense, less than at any time since before the United States established itself as the world’s leading power. This gap between a diverse and expansive set of new strategic realities and diminishing defense forces and resources does much to explain why the Joint Chiefs of Staff routinely declare that they see “high risk” in executing the missions assigned to U.S. armed forces under the government’s declared national military strategy. Indeed, a JCS assessment conducted at the height of the Kosovo air war found the risk level “unacceptable.” Such risks are the result of the combination of the new missions described above and the dramatically reduced military force that has emerged from the defense “drawdown” of the past decade. Today, America spends less than 3 percent of its gross domestic product on national defense, less than at any time since before World War II – in other words, since before the United States established itself as the world’s leading power – and a cut from 4.7 percent of GDP in 1992, the first real post-Cold-War defense budget. Most of this reduction has come under the Clinton Administration; despite initial promises to approximate the level of defense spending called for in the final Bush Administration program, President Clinton cut more than $160 billion from the Bush program from 1992 to 1996 alone. Over the first seven years of the Clinton Administration, approximately $426 billion in defense investments have been deferred, creating a weapons procurement “bow wave” of immense proportions. The most immediate
effect of reduced defense spending has been a precipitate decline in combat
readiness. Across all services, units are reporting degraded readiness, spare
parts and personnel shortages, postponed and simplified training regimens, and
many other problems. In These readiness problems are exacerbated by the fact that U.S. forces are poorly positioned to respond to today’s crises. In Europe, for example, the overwhelming majority of Army and Air Force units remain at their Cold War bases in Germany or England, while the security problems on the continent have moved to Southeast Europe. Temporary rotations of forces to the Balkans and elsewhere in Southeast Europe increase the overall burdens of these operations many times. Likewise, the Clinton Administration has continued the fiction that the operations of American forces in the Persian Gulf are merely temporary duties. Nearly a decade after the Gulf War, U.S. air, ground and naval forces continue to protect enduring American interests in the region. In addition to rotational naval forces, the Army maintains what amounts to an armored brigade in Kuwait for nine months of every year; the Air Force has two composite air wings in constant “no-fly zone” operations over northern and southern Iraq. And despite increasing worries about the rise of China and instability in Southeast Asia, U.S. forces are found almost exclusively in Northeast Asian bases. Yet for all its problems in carrying out today’s missions, the Pentagon has done almost nothing to prepare for a future that promises to be very different and potentially much more dangerous. It is now commonly understood that information and other new technologies – as well as widespread technological and weapons proliferation – are creating a dynamic that may threaten America’s ability to exercise its dominant military power. Potential rivals such as China are anxious to exploit these trans-formational technologies broadly, while adversaries like Iran, Iraq and North Korea are rushing to develop ballistic missiles and nuclear weapons as a deterrent to American intervention in regions they seek to dominate. Yet the Defense Department and the services have done little more than affix a “transformation” label to programs developed during the Cold War, while diverting effort and attention to a process of joint experimentation which restricts rather than encourages innovation. Rather than admit that rapid technological changes makes it uncertain which new weapons systems to develop, the armed services cling ever more tightly to traditional program and concepts. As Andrew Krepinevich, a member of the National Defense Panel, put it in a recent study of Pentagon experimentation, “Unfortunately, the Defense Department’s rhetoric asserting the need for military transformation and its support for joint experimentation has yet to be matched by any great sense of urgency or any substantial resource support.…At present the Department’s effort is poorly focused and woefully underfunded.” In sum, the 1990s have been a “decade of defense neglect.” This leaves the next president of the United States with an enormous challenge: he must increase military spending to preserve American geopolitical leadership, or he must pull back from the security commitments that are the measure of America’s position as the world’s sole superpower and the final guarantee of security, democratic freedoms and individual political rights. This choice will be among the first to confront the president: new legislation requires the incoming administration to fashion a national security strategy within six months of assuming office, as opposed to waiting a full year, and to complete another quadrennial defense review three months after that. In a larger sense, the new president will choose whether today’s “unipolar moment,” to use columnist Charles Krauthammer’s phrase for America’s current geopolitical preeminence, will be extended along with the peace and prosperity that it provides. This study seeks to frame these choices clearly, and to re-establish the links between U.S. foreign policy, security strategy, force planning and defense spending. If an American peace is to be maintained, and expanded, it must have a secure foundation on unquestioned U.S. military preeminence. |