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By Norman Friedman, author, Naval Institute Guide to World Naval Weapons Systems
U.S. Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney (right) talks with German Minister of Defense Stoltenberg at NATO headquarters. U.S. sea power looms large in the world after the demise of the Soviet Union. What will be the role of NATO—or nations like Germany?
In March, a draft version of the U.S. Department of Defense’s “Defense Planning Guidance,” which is intended as the basis for mid-range planning, was leaked to the press. It called for a U.S. strategy designed specifically to prevent the emergence of another superpower capable of opposing the United States, and the ensuing outcry was, if anything, amplified by the normal stresses of an election year. The new strategy was derided as yet another attempt to justify a bloated defense establishment, or as a license for U.S. involvement in every possible conflict worldwide—a recipe for future Vietnams. Both the White House and the State Department rushed to repudiate it.
Yet the Pentagon proposal is a serious, if perhaps unfortunately phrased, attempt to set future U.S. military priorities in line with national interest. Indeed, it sets out just what that interest is, in the period of inevitable uncertainty caused by the departure of the nation’s most lethal recent rival. The problem is not new, but it was last faced so long ago—between 1945 and 1948—that we have forgotten what it is like.
We have forgotten in particular that the Cold War was really a war, albeit one fought in slow motion.
We won—and former Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev is quite wrong when he says that he decided unilaterally to end the conflict in pursuit of the higher goals of world peace and prosperity. He had no real choice, because he and his predecessors had taken on a much more powerful set of economies—and lost—and because more purely military options had been foreclosed by, among other things, the existence of a survivable Western deterrent in the form of ballistic-missile submarines.
In 1945, those who had survived the war Were painfully aware that their generation had risked all by allowing Hitler to rise to Power. They formed the United Nations in the hope that all nations would see the same sort of danger in advance, and this time deal with it. Even in the 1930s, though, the lesson was mixed. Hitler was indeed visible and there was even a legal basis (the Versailles Treaty) for dealing with him and his rearmament of Germany.
The Pacific war, however, presented more ambiguous conclusions. Japanese aggression was indeed visible long before it engulfed the Western powers, but by then Japan was already a formidable power and dealing with it would have been neither easy nor cheap. Nor is it clear that very many countries would have agreed to do so, whatever the state of international law.
The aftermath of victory in 1945 left U.S. thinkers with two alternative formulae—perhaps linked—for future international stability. One was to maintain forces strong enough to make a major new war unthinkable. The other was to rely on the international community—the United Nations—to join in preventing aggression. The second formula made sense only if it were assumed that all countries would agree to a common definition of unjustified aggression, i.e., if all had roughly the same aims. Since war generally occurs precisely because countries differ in their aims, it was difficult for some to imagine how the second policy, which created the United Nations, could be expected to succeed.
The aftermath of victory in the Cold War led many to imagine that the United Nations type of policy had come of age. They thought that the United Nations had failed in the past only because of the United States-Soviet enmity. The aftermath of victory in Kuwait led them to believe that the United Nations had found its true and unanimous voice. Much of the anger directed at the leaked Pentagon document is really fury at a tacit denial of the U.N. solution.
If the recent Coalition response to the Iraqi aggression was really the prototype of a new United Nations, then the anger at the proposals in the leaked documents may be justified. If it was not, if it was really a fortunate confluence of national aims, then the authors of the planning guidance documents are right. The United States has its own aims, which may well be threatened by international chaos, and only the United States can ensure its own security. Different governments see their aims and needs differently. They do not in fact necessarily share U.S. political ideas or goals.
The most basic U.S. foreign policy goal is to maintain world stability and peace—the status quo. For many, though, the status quo is anathema; it represents the acceptance of poverty or denial of basic nationalist aims. The U.S. position has always been that peace plus trade can bring prosperity, but that is by no means a universal perception. This is the unpleasant truth behind the leaked documents. We currently have the military power to back up our position. We currently also have considerable encouragement to discard much of that power. Even if we do not choose to do so, we are likely to lose much of our ability to base our forces forward (overseas). The real question, then, is whether we should spend heavily to counterbalance that almost inevitable loss.
This is merely the latest round in a debate that goes back to the founding of the Republic, a debate that was suspended only by the Cold War (just as it was suspended by the two World Wars).
The debate turns on just how much the United States should involve itself in foreign affairs. Many Americans think instinctively that so large a country can easily distance itself, relying on its own resources and its own industries; the oceans are so broad that direct invasion is practically impossible. This logic did not apply to the Soviets, because it was
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widely accepted that, oceans or no, they could vaporize much of the United States. Now that the former Soviet Union is in chaos, the older instincts, which in the past led to isolationism, have come back with a vengeance.
Americans tend to forget that until 1941 the United States benefited enormously from the existence of Great Britain—a superpower with broadly similar aims. The United States was able to avoid direct involvement in Europe because most of the potential sources of hostility would have to face the British first. When World Wars I and II almost destroyed this shield, and Britain fell from superpower status, the United States had to step in.
It is true that, despite parallel interests, there was a considerable undercurrent of Anglo-U.S. rivalry between wars. On the other hand, when the British signed the Washington Naval Treaty in 1922 (and abandoned the Anglo-Japanese Alliance), they were acknowledging U.S. preeminence—appeasing their most powerful enemy so that they could better hope to deal with the next worst case, Japan.
One consequence of the current situation is that, in describing a policy designed to head off possible rivals, many Americans assume that the current alliance structure will persist. Now that the glue of Soviet enmity has been largely dissolved, however, the two other major friendly powers, the European Community and Japan, are potential superpower rivals. Short of unacceptable military action, we cannot prevent them from developing just that way.
Unfortunately, the Pentagon language, intended to apply mainly to rising rogue states in the Third World, was perceived by some allies as a direct threat—and thus had to be disavowed. Indeed, such statements threatened to unravel the current alliance structure rather quickly.
The basic facts remain. We cannot presume to dominate either European or Japanese (or, for that matter, East Asian) foreign policy; we can only hope that their political culture keeps them on a more or less parallel course. We certainly can hope to affect the attempts of more primitive (and often more hostile) governments, such as that of Iraq.
We can be fairly confident that we will face some future conflict, and the Defense Department has proposed two alternative approaches:
> The first is to devise very flexible forces that can meet a range of scenarios, one of which more or less corresponds to a likely future crisis. Much depends on just how the scenarios are designed, so as funds are drawn down each service becomes quite interested in just that question.
The important point is that all the reported scenarios describe combat, which is best considered the result of failed policy. For example, the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait occurred partly because the U.S. government failed to convince Saddam Hussein of the likely consequences of invasion. Clearly, the United States cannot and should not maintain forces everywhere sufficient to enforce our desires; we do not want to be a world empire, and even if we want that, we cannot afford it. But it is by no means clear that the appropriate conclusion is to avoid foreign entanglements altogether.
► The second alternative is more active and depends on heading off trouble we can see coming. This is generally far cheaper and far less unpleasant than waiting for actual warfare, and is probably the best path to reducing combatant forces without risking national disaster.
This approach is in fact the basis of the “Defense Planning Guidance.” The unfortunate part is the assumption that we can build a strategy always capable of derailing the ambitions of future potential enemies. Moreover, if the strategy is phrased as an attempt to neutralize all possible future rivals, it must enrage our current allies. They are being given an unacceptable choice: remain under our umbrella, or watch us put you out of business.
To anyone of President George Bush’s generation, avoiding some form of proaction is not merely stupid, but obscenely stupid. Hitler would have been quite easy to stop before about 1937, but the great powers were unwilling to do so (even though they virtually had the obligation to do so, under the Versailles Treaty). Few would doubt that action then would have been
preferable to the disaster that followed___
a disaster that virtually sank the existing superpower, Britain, and determined that the United States would take its place.
An active policy is politically difficult to explain, because it responds not to an obvious present danger, but to the need to prevent that danger from ever really arising. Over the past four decades we have become used to annual statements relating our military strength directly to that of the main current enemy. Now the main enemy is in disarray. To the extent that the conflict was ideological, it seems to have been overtaken by events. Critics of continued substantial defense spending question if there a main threat exists; right now, there is nothing like the Soviet Union of, say, five years ago. But the idea behind an active policy is to prevent such an enemy from arising, if indeed that could be done.
The other idea is to prevent some Third World government, basically hostile to the
United States, from gaining the ability to do real damage. Many Americans forget that foreign quarrels, some of them quite obscure, have a way of being brought home. In the 1970s, for example, both New York and Chicago were the scene of terrorist bomb attacks designed to support Croatian independence, an issue in which the U.S. Government was only peripherally involved. Similarly, both the Cuban and Vietnamese exile communities have seen considerable violence involving different factions. Such feuds are unpleasant but they hardly affect U.S. national security, at least not directly.
Now things may be changing for the worse, and quickly. A bomb that destroys a baggage locker in a train station sends a message, and perhaps kills a few people. Once nuclear weapons become freely available (which may well be the most chilling consequence of the Soviet breakup), the potential to send a really lethal message grows accordingly.
The United States is engaged around the world, not because it has some foreign policy objective abroad, but because it is perceived throughout the world as the leading power. In parts of the world that have been badly hurt during the 20th century, the United States is often perceived as the leading engine of unacceptable change. It does not matter whether we have troops abroad, or whether we trade much with the place involved. Our mere existence is very often the problem.
The purpose of the Pentagon’s draft document is to develop a framework for the further analysis that will define forces. Since the central guidance is only now being discussed, its consequences have yet to be drawn. The public debate will probably set back any sensible guidance for a year or more, but the underlying realities will not change.
What does all this politics mean for us? It means that we cannot abandon the policy of forward presence, but also that we cannot expect anyone to provide us with much in the way of bases. Even when we keep some base rights, we will discover that we cannot use those bases freely.
It should mean that we will have to rely more, not less, on seaborne forces, precisely because only those forces can remain in place without the active assistance of local governments. A proactive policy emphasizes deterrence over actual combat, and for deterrence to work we need to be able to place our forces in position to threaten, not always actually to attack.
Dr. Friedman is the author of numerous books published by the Naval Institute Press, including Desert Victory: The War for Kuwait, published in 1991 immediately following the Gulf War.
Proceedings / Naval Review 1992