In December, U.S. Army Chief of Staff General Eric Shinseki said that, given the lessons of numerous post-Cold War deployments, the Army would be transformed into a rapid-deployment force capable of placing a brigade anywhere in the world within 96 hours, or a full division within a week.
Eventually, he wants to eliminate all vehicles (including tanks, most significantly) that cannot be carried by a C-130 cargo plane. The Army of the future is to be based on lightweight wheeled vehicles, perhaps comparable to the U.S. Marine Corps' light armored vehicles (LAVs). Responding to critics who argue that it takes tanks to deal with the armor currently fielded by Third World countries, Shinseki replied that other forms of firepower, including new-generation antitank missiles like the Javelin, and attack helicopters and aircraft can perform this duty. Thus, the new-model Army will be much closer to infantry formations of the past, which had (at least in theory) considerable strategic mobility because of their light weight. The wheeled vehicles are seen as a way to solve the classic infantry problem, which is very limited tactical mobility. The Marine Corps, after all, adopted the LAVs to overcome mobility problems exposed during European exercises in the late 1970s.
The changes seem to have been prompted, at least in part, by a series of recent embarrassments. During the Kosovo crisis, the Army found it very difficult to deploy heavy armored units from Europe to Albania, and it took months to move a small force of only 24 Apache attack helicopters. Congress was less than impressed, and it appropriated $100 million for the Army to use to improve its performance. It may well seem to the current Army leadership that the service cannot present a good rationale for further support if it cannot solve such problems and present itself as a viable means of quickly intervening in the sort of brushfire wars that seem to mark the post-Cold War period.
Certainly the Marine Corps seems much better adapted to rapid deployment. Strategic mobility, moreover, requires much more than simply being able to fly combat and support vehicles from point to point. An Army division (or brigade) consumes vast stocks of fuel, ammunition, and rations every day. It is one thing to place men and machines somewhere, but quite another to move in sufficient supplies to make the unit truly combat-effective and mobile. The Army's Apache attack helicopters, for example, could easily have been flown to Kosovo on board heavy transport aircraft, but they were only the tip of a massive iceberg. The real problem lay in moving their support into position quickly. The Marines, on the other hand, could have deployed attack helicopters (based on board an amphibious assault ship in the Adriatic) in a few days.
General Shinseki's initiative can be read as yet another move in the on-again, off-again struggle between the Army and the Marine Corps. During the latter stages of the Cold War, the two services arrived at a modus vivendi in which the Marines would deploy rapidly and seize a beachhead for the heavy, long-endurance Army to exploit and enlarge. The Army had two rapid-deployment divisions, the 82nd Airborne and the 101st Air Assault, but it was widely understood that they could not bring much firepower with them. They were useful mainly in cases of civil unrest or as tripwires. That was the case during Operation Desert Shield in 1990; to many in the Army at the time, the 82nd offered no more than a "speed bump" to delay any Iraqi attack into Saudi Arabia because it lacked the support for sustained combat. The Marines, in contrast, could carry enough with them to fight effectively for about 30 days, while the Army deployed heavy long-endurance forces and the backup logistics needed for them to fight effectively.
The Marine Corps approach to mobility has been twofold. First, amphibious ships are forward-deployed as amphibious ready groups (ARGs), and new ships are being built to maintain a strength of 12 such units, corresponding to the 12 large-deck carriers. These units can support small landings, or small evacuation operations, into or out of areas to which the United States has not been invited, i.e., in the face of probable local opposition. Second, maritime prepositioning squadrons, each of which carries heavy Marine Corps equipment and logistical backup, can link up with Marines flown in by air. Afloat prepositioning, however, assumes the availability of friendly port and airfield facilities. The Army has some prepositioning ships of its own, but clearly it does not consider them sufficient for the mobility it seeks.
Both approaches offer quick response, admittedly only to areas near seacoasts, but the Marines have argued that most potential crises will evolve in exactly such areas. Presumably, General Shinseki's logic is that there are enough potential crises far enough from coastlines to justify considerable expenditure on an Army whose main virtue is that it can reach them by air.
That begs some important questions. Relying on MV-22 tilt-rotors and sea-based fire support, the Marines soon will be able to reach landing zones about 200 miles inland. To offer real capability, then, the Army must offer to land troops much farther inland. A fully-loaded C-130 has a radius of about 1,000 miles, so any objective will probably have to be within about that distance of a friendly airfield (air-refueling on a vast scale would complicate operations considerably). The implication would seem to be that the fully mobile Army divisions of the future will be set down well inland, albeit with very little staying power. Once they have used up their onboard ammunition, how will they be resupplied? From a strategic point of view, one would have to ask whether U.S. interests are well served by an aerial-delivered, quick-intervention capability that risks, say, 15,000 hostages deep in hostile territory.
Another important question is whether in fact technology now offers a lightweight method of dealing with enemy tanks and automatic weapons. For several decades, lightweight missiles, such as the Army's long-serving TOW (tube-launched, optically tracked, wire-guided), have been advertised as the end of the tank, yet tanks have survived because their tactical value has justified developing countermeasures to deal with virtually all of the newer precision-guided weapons.
There can be little question that the new-model Army is intended to get the Army a piece of the expeditionary mission—traditionally Marine Corps territory. Ironically, if the Army develops a family of lightweight vehicles, the Corps may be the main beneficiary—the vehicles may be transportable slung under helicopters and MV-22 Ospreys. The Marines have their own air assets, and they may be far better placed than the Army to operate effectively as a truly lightweight force.
The United States of Europe?
Also in December, leaders of the European Union reached nominal agreement on a pet French project, the creation of a 60,000-man European Union (EU) intervention force, independent of U.S. participation. To the French, the force is the opening wedge for creation of an EU foreign policy; the ultimate goal is to turn the EU into something like a sovereign state, with its own currency (the Euro), foreign policy, and military force. This new entity would, presumably, reflect European, i.e., French, values and perspectives. The U.S. government has reluctantly agreed that the Euro-force is a good idea. The reality is probably somewhat different.
France, in particular, has long opposed what it sees as U.S. interference in Europe, on the theory that France would naturally lead a Europe free of "Anglo-Saxon" hegemony. A cynical observer would suggest that the opportunity for such French dominance is past, now that Germany has unified the Germans are likely to take a much more active and dominant role within Europe, corresponding to their economic power. If the French actually do succeed in ejecting the United States, they still may find themselves in a subservient position, merely having exchanged one dominant partner for another.
The more immediate occasion for the creation of a Euroforce was clearly the embarrassment of Kosovo, where the Europeans proved incapable of dealing on their own with an entirely European problem. It is not clear that any bureaucratic solution would have helped; the problem was basically lack of political will. There was also, however, a serious problem of lack of resources. Throughout the Cold War, the United States complained that the European partners just would not pay enough for the robust non-nuclea defense of Europe that it envisaged. Europeans quite understandably equated such a defense with ruination; they preferred to make it very clear to the Soviets that any European war would soon turn nuclear. This quite reasonable policy left the Europeans with very limited conventional defensive capabilities at the end of the Cold War; they presently spend about two-thirds as much as the United States does on defense. If the Euro-force is to be effective, they will be forced to spend at levels well above what they spent at the height of the Cold War. That will be very difficult to explain politically. In fact, the announcement of the Euro-force may be nothing more that a kind of last-ditch attempt by the European governments to claim that a failing European Union is alive and well.
There also is some evidence that European Union policies may be loaded in favor of some countries. Some readers will remember the ban on British beef exports following the outbreaks of mad cow disease. The disease has been wiped out and the European Union has rescinded the ban, but the French government is continuing it, mainly to support the economic interests of French farmers who wield disproportionate economic power in France. This makes it difficult for the British government to maintain that Britain should support closer European integration. The current government could fall at the next election if the Tories can make integration the main issue.
If, as seems to be the case, the main effect of European integration is further economic misery in the form of a declining Euro, then many Europeans must wonder just why they are being squeezed into this supra-national Union, to which they have little or no emotional attachment. What happens then to the Euro-force? Is its real role to deal with attempts to dismantle the Union? And what is the position of the United States in the event that the Union finds itself in some sort of civil war?