Naval planners should approach the upcoming Quadrennial Defense Review with an eye toward tomorrow’s dangers, such as the security concerns inherent in the world’s unchecked population growth. For example, by 2030, China’s population is expected to increase by 25%, but its capacity to produce food is thought to be shrinking.
Shortly after the 1996 presidential election, the United States will undertake its first Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR). The successor to the Base Force and Bottom Up Reviews, the congressionally mandated QDR is intended to be a comprehensive examination of the defense strategy, force structure, force modernization plans, infrastructure, budget plan, and other elements, with a view toward defining our defense program through 2005. This review comes at a crucial time. We are at the end not only of the 20th century but also of an age—the age of global military rivalry that military professionals have been familiar with since World War I.
The QDR likely will conclude that the next half century will be very problematic and that it may be characterized by population expansion in the developing world; regional conflict; ecological challenges; migration; international terrorism, drug trafficking, crime, and chaos. Robert Kaplan, in his troubling article, “The Coming Anarchy,” in the February 1994 The Atlantic Monthly puts it this way: “To understand the events of the next fifty years, one must understand environmental scarcity, cultural and racial clash, geographic density, and the transformation of war.”
The architects of the QDR should be influenced by what Kaplan writes. The social stresses resulting from world demographics will create new and different security challenges. As we cope with the rivalry between unchecked population growth in the developing world and declining global resources, a key security paradox is emerging. Governments are spending less of their gross domestic products on defense and shifting expenditures to the social infrastructure, but the United States and other allied powers face increased demand for regional, local, and even individual security.
We must begin to think of security in different terms from those that characterized the era of global rivalry. In the new age of regional survival, economic, information, and individual security will become increasingly important to the United States, but we also must sustain our capability to punish adversaries armed with a variety of weapons. The QDR should focus first on the broad characteristics, rather than on the specific types of security weapons we will need.
Beyond the Information Age
It is difficult to be optimistic about the future security environment. Neither the Industrial Revolution nor the Information Age have yielded sufficient social progress to bring about a more civilized world. Before the 20th century, there never had been a world war. In this decade alone, more than a million people have been killed in the civil war in Rwanda—and the displacement of large numbers of people remains unresolved. The next century is not likely to see fewer conflicts, but the type of war is being transformed.
The catalyst for war in the future will come from the world’s unchecked population, and the fight will be of different proportions and dimensions. It is likely to be a regional or civil war. It might be a war against international drug trafficking, terrorism, or organized crime. It might be a struggle over food, water, and fuel. Most important, its soldiers could be the most ruthless we have ever faced—desperate people who have no hope.
According to World Bank demographers, the world’s population growth rate is slowing down, but the number of people on the planet is increasing faster than ever. In the next 35 years, world population will rise 49%—nearly 3 billion more people. By 2030, China’s population will grow by 25%. In the same period, India will grow by 53%, to become the most populated country on earth, with nearly 1.5 billion people. Over the next 50 years, total population will nearly double, from 5.5 billion to more than 9 billion.
New and significant security concerns arise from the failure to control population growth. Environmental scarcity, for example, is now a security issue. Technology has helped increase grain production, but vast differences exist among countries’ abilities to feed their own citizens. Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan now import more than 50% of their grain. China’s capacity to produce food is thought to be shrinking as a result of the conversion of crop land to nonfarm use. Some countries in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia already are on the brink of starvation. Water supplies also are also rapidly decreasing in parts of the world.
Another troubling trend is the migration of large portions of the world’s population to already overcrowded urban areas. Many countries are finding it increasingly difficult to govern populations of diverse languages, religions, and ethnic groups. All too often, geographic density is characterized by spreading disease, water depletion, air pollution, increased crime, and unstable government.
New Security Era
Throughout the first half of the next century, regional balance of power likely will be the predominant concern. The United States will face the challenging task of tailoring its security role region by region, and the QDR is to set the investment or recapitalization strategy for these new requirements. A clear and accurate understanding of future enemies or dangers is essential to investing in the right security for the times.
Our potential adversaries can be broken into four interrelated groups:
- Old enemies don’t die easily. Russia and China, familiar foes that represent the upper end of our defense concerns, likely will cause the United States to maintain a sizable armed force for years to come. Despite severe financial problems, Russia continues to invest more defense monies in its navy than in any other military service. A live-fire naval exercise near Taiwan in March 1996 underscores the importance the Chinese place on preserving a capable navy.
Direct confrontation with these old enemies is not likely in the early years of the 21st century. It is indirect confrontation that will command the attention of Western military leaders. The flourishing arms market, the potential lack of control of weapons of mass destruction, and the export of Russian and Chinese ballistic missiles amid the conditions that promote state failure and recalcitrant behavior by bad actors are the heart of what threatens us.
- Regional bad actors—Iran, Iraq, Syria, and North Korea—also will force us to keep our guard up. Today, the major danger these four nations pose to the world is their sizable militaries with access to weapons of mass destruction. Coupled with a penchant for exporting state- sponsored terrorism, these rogue states create additional and unique requirements for the U.S. military.
- Potential regional hegemons such as India, South Africa, and Brazil are likely to exert more and more regional influence, which could upset key parts of the developing world. India is a prime example. The decades-old tension between India and Pakistan probably will intensify as populations balloon and resources decline. The prospect of a nuclear exchange is a regional nightmare with global implications.
- State failure—driven by destabilizing demographics— will place unprecedented demands on the U.S. military. Bosnia, Rwanda, Somalia, Haiti, Liberia, and Colombia are just a few recent examples of the breakdown of nation-states. Confronted with ethnic clashes, overpopulation, urbanization, disease, drugs, crime, scarcity of resources, and refugee migrations, many states simply cannot cope. Interestingly, U.S. naval forces responded to each of these trouble spots during the past two years.
If these are the future threats to our security, what kind of military do we need? Clearly, a threat-based architecture won’t work against such diversity. We must define a capability-based architecture to cope with 21st-century threats. The QDR must adapt our military accordingly and protect U.S. interests with new security mechanisms.
Global Access, Flexible Engagement
During the Cold War, U.S. military strategy was predicated on the diplomatic principles of containment and deterrence aided by the global presence of U.S. forces. Presence still will be important, but containment and deterrence have lost much of their relevance. There is no other superpower to contain, and there is little we can do to deter the trend toward anarchy as states fail. We will need a new strategy for the next century.
Although we cannot serve as a comprehensive guarantor of global peace, the United States can influence regional security, and our contribution to a safer world will be pivotal. Naval forces possess unique characteristics to advance U.S. diplomacy and security. A strategy that emphasizes global access with rapid and flexible engagement will be important to our future.
Such a strategy will reinforce some old and create some new expectations for the U.S. military. When combat or near-combat operations are not appropriate, diplomatic initiatives may call for economic embargoes enforced in the air, at sea, and on land. These may be the first actions the military will be expected to take in a future crisis.
We can reasonably expect the U.S. military to take an even larger role in the new war against international terrorism, organized crime, and drugs in every region of the world. And as we have seen in 1996—from Bosnia to Liberia to Iraq—the U.S. military may be expected to respond quickly to stabilize a crisis, to evacuate or rescue U.S. citizens or property, and, if necessary, to punish an offender of international law or sanctions. In an unstable region, the use of military force likely will be to punish an aggressor, deny his objective, and then leave.
In the era of new war, the U.S. military strategy will be one of diplomatic and economic access, crisis response, and selective engagement. Our sea services—both the Navy and Marine Corps—will play important roles in this new security structure. Their inherent characteristics are well suited for the new challenges that global demographics are producing: an increased reliance on sea lines of communication for transporting energy, minerals, and food. Their mobility, independence from foreign basing, and flexibility will be important to our ability to execute a strategy of global access. But the application of these forces must comport to new demands.
This past year has given us a window to the future for the role sea services will play. Naval forces helped execute an arms embargo while simultaneously maintaining air and maritime control in Bosnia. Marines operating from ships off the coast of Liberia evacuated the U.S. embassy and then sprinted 2,000 miles to the Central Africa Republic to perform a similar mission. The war on drugs was fought by ships and aircraft in the Caribbean. In September, Navy cruise missiles played the predominate role in punishing Saddam Hussein’s aggressive behavior in northern Iraq.
The sea services face key challenges in the next century. We must reshape the Navy and recapitalize parts of our aging fleet. We must develop new applications, refine old ones, and abandon those that are no longer relevant. Linking an understanding of new war to the ways and means we will need in the next century is the crucial challenge faced by the QDR. It is not just a question of doing more with less. It is a matter of providing a different security for a new and different era.
Preparing for the QDR
Our Navy can best prepare for what is ahead by postulating some logical predictions and recommendations, such as:
- Demographic, environmental, and economic stress will worsen in many parts of the world.
- The transformation of war will continue and move beyond the Information Age. Low-tech solutions may be as useful as advanced technology.
- Secure sea lines of communications, freedom of navigation through choke points, and the ability to achieve regional maritime dominance will be vital to the United States.
- Rapid insertion and extraction of naval forces will play an important role in crisis response.
- Coastal interdiction operations, from embargoes to counterdrug operations, will expand both here and abroad.
- Helicopters, vertical/short take-off and landing aircraft, and unmanned aerial vehicles will grow in importance for naval aviation.
- Tiered readiness and rotating crews forward to ships on station will maximize the return on our naval investment.
- Nonlethal means will be developed to control or thwart the advance of belligerents.
- Modular designs will be developed to allow rapid reconfiguration of commercial vessels or other erectables for naval applications.
- The sea services will leverage their utility by becoming an increasingly mobile, agile, and flexible reaction force, with stronger ties to domestic and international agencies, while sustaining power projection capabilities.
The QDR affords naval planners a unique opportunity. Real progress will be made if our sea services are intelligently aligned to what matters most—tomorrow’s dangers, not yesterday’s.
Captain Morgan is the Director of ASW Requirements (CNO-N84).