As the Defense Department prepares to release its comprehensive review of the U.S. military, it is clear that the force of the future—now of age after operations in Bosnia and Kosovo, where targets were blasted entirely from the air—can and will depend more than ever on the asymmetric edge of aerospace power.
It is evident that the Bush administration does not intend to take a business-as-usual approach to national security or the management of the Department of Defense. During his campaign last year, candidate Bush spoke of the need to transform the military. President-elect Bush, in his statement announcing the selection of Donald Rumsfeld to be Secretary of Defense, charged his nominee with reshaping the thinking and behavior of his department. In his confirmation hearing, Mr. Rumsfeld made it clear that the Department of Defense needed new thinking, capabilities, and processes.
Is such change likely? Past experience would argue no. It usually takes major crises, so-called forcing functions, to alter significantly the thinking and behavior of large institutions. In this case, however, something different may occur. For one thing, a President and his Secretary of Defense, if they are of like minds, can exercise extraordinary influence over military capabilities and strategy. The machinery—an effective, systematic, and tested planning process—through which the Secretary of Defense can effect change is in place. In addition, there are strong pressures inside the Department of Defense that increasingly push toward significant changes. The stage is set.
We are at the end of the post-Cold War period. The past decade has proved to be not the start of a new era, but more a pause or strategic hiatus. We are at the beginning of a new phase in international relations. While no one can predict the future, it is clear that we face a number of issues, many of which could lead to tension and conflict—some of it armed—in the years ahead. Changing relationships among members have frayed the alliances we built in the Cold War. The arms-control structure that once influenced and channeled the military relationship between the superpowers and their allies is of questionable relevance in the years ahead. Globalization is knitting the world together while it stimulates traditional local loyalties, tensions, and hostilities. The capability to build and use weapons of mass destruction will spread as norms and institutions of international interaction weaken. These generally are seen as the types of dynamics that will shape the world and the role of the United States within it. There is little agreement, however, on what creates these dynamics, where they are leading us, or how fast they will carry us to a future for which our past cannot prepare us.
Tectonic Security Issues
Given these tidal and centrifugal flows, tectonic-like pressures have been building for more than a decade to change the structure of U.S. military forces and how they are used. These pressures are driven by increasingly visible faults within U.S. security strategy, resources, and operational concepts. One such rift is between Cold War capabilities and post-Cold War problems. Despite changes in missions and operations, the design and structure of today's force—and therefore what it is best capable of doing—are remarkably similar to the force that once protected Europe and Asia against the threat of a nuclear-armed military superpower. The ways in which the military is used to deal with post-Cold War problems, however, undercuts the ability of the United States to deal with the major conflicts for which its forces were designed.
The U.S. military is a smaller force (roughly 60% of the size it was shortly before Desert Storm) and is deployed and operated overseas differently from ten years ago. About 25% of the active force normally was stationed overseas during the Cold War; today, that portion is closer to 15%. Even so, more of today's active and reserve force is sent on operations away from home. We have a military capability that is starting to crack with age, underfunding, and operational stress.
This clearly is the view of the military chiefs. In October 2000, for example, they testified before Congress that it would take about $1.7 trillion over the next five years ($200 billion more than current budget plans, and four times the increase President Bush has requested) to restore and maintain the ability of the military to carry out its missions. The discrepancy between desired capabilities and what the military is sized, designed, and funded to do may be the impending train wreck observers have talked about over the past decade. Regardless of what it is called, the new administration will not be able to ignore this defense rift, even if it wanted to do so.
The U.S. Asymmetric Edge
Another fault line lies along the divide between old and new ways of conflict. Aerospace power has been a critical component in almost every instance of the use of military force since the Cold War ended. It is emerging as the instrument of choice whenever force is required.2 Aerospace power provides the combination of striking power, range, versatility, and dominant strategic position that allows for a new "American Way of War." The combination of stealthy strike platforms such as the F-117 and B-2 bomber employing precision-guided Joint Direct Attack Munitions, non-stealthy Air Force F-15Es and F-16s, Navy F/A-18s, air- and sea-launched cruise missiles and sensor systems including AWACS and unmanned aerial vehicles created a new kind of air campaign.
The debate surrounding this new way of war has been under way at least since the mid-1990s, stimulated not only by the use of aerospace power in the Gulf War and Bosnia, but also by what the military has been asking and telling itself. In 1997, then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs General John Shalikashvili outlined what he called "new operational concepts" in Joint Vision 2010. The ideas this document contained (including shifting from sequential to concurrent military operations—a direct challenge to the way Americans have waged war since the Civil War) have stirred increasingly profound and controversial debates within the Pentagon. Still undefined fully, the new way of war's characteristics are the avoidance of massive, force-on-force engagements and attrition warfare in favor of battle space awareness, force agility, and speed. It is an argument in favor of shifting away from the commitments of overwhelming force toward the goals of decisive operations and building the forces needed to obtain them. It would result in a force structure that could look and operate very differently from what exists today.
Aerospace power is a key enabler and executor of these new operational concepts. It can transcend traditional limits on military operations such as distance, weather, and density of forces. It provides new and enhanced means of preventing conflicts, keeping the peace, conducting diplomacy, and responding to humanitarian crises. It is a decisive U.S. asymmetric advantage.
Leveraging Asymmetric Capabilities
Most discussion about asymmetric warfare and capabilities focuses on how potential antagonists would seek to counter the overwhelming power of the world's only superpower. Interestingly, the hypotheses and scenarios at the heart of this discussion have their origin in the traditional American view of war. That is, they deal with how opponents might try to keep the United States from occupying territory, prevent U.S. ground forces from entering a conflict, deny the use of nearby land or sea bases, limit our ability to exploit the air and space above critical areas, and get U.S. forces to leave if they come. It is a mirror image of the U.S. concept of offensive operations a decade ago.
The real asymmetry in conflict is our own—and it rests not with ground power, but with aerospace power. That is where the U.S. military edge is most pronounced, not just in terms of quantitative or qualitative comparisons of air and spacecraft, but in terms of the disparities generated from what can be done because of that edge. The U.S. military, for example, can use force with relatively less risk, in less time, and across greater distances than its opponents can. It also can generate relatively better, more comprehensive, and timelier battlespace knowledge.
The United States needs to broaden the way it looks at asymmetrical capabilities to include aggressively exploring new ways for it to exploit its own advantages, rather than simply focusing on how others will use theirs. Changing U.S. concepts of operations used to engage in peace and fight wars could allow the restructuring of joint forces to sustain engagement—in addition to retaining the ability to win major theater wars—without demanding unsupportable levels of additional funding.
Operationalizing Our Edge The new administration has the opportunity to provide coherent, compelling, and comprehensive solutions to the central questions of national security. Unlike the situations faced by Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, Nixon, Carter, and Clinton, public sentiment is not focused on ending a conflict or reducing defense expenditures, nor is it demanding a military buildup as when Presidents Kennedy and Reagan entered office. As a result, the Bush administration has relatively wide political leeway to set U.S. foreign policy and national security priorities. The primary constraints are only the momentum of the past decade of decision procrastinations and the residue, if any, of Cold War concepts and experiences.
The Bush administration will have an impressive set of instructions through which it can lay out a comprehensive solution and provide concrete guidance to make it happen. The past three administrations formulated a National Security Strategy of the United States. Drafted in his name and signed by the President (usually annually), this document seeks to outline the administration's basic approach to foreign and security policy. It provides the framework for more detailed guidance regarding how to use military forces and the goals and capabilities to seek in designing, funding, and building future forces. The former task is most directly addressed by the National Military Strategy, drafted by the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. This document does not restrict itself to discussing the use of existing military forces—it often recommends new force structures. But the formal purpose of the National Military Strategy is to recommend to the Secretary of Defense militarily effective ways of using existing forces in the Secretary's exercise of his operational chain of command responsibilities. The National Military Strategy has the practical effect of establishing parameters within which the unified commands draft and refine operational plans.
The primary vehicles for affecting the size, structure, and character of the military stem from documents associated with the Pentagon's planning, programming, budgeting, and execution system. Originally established in the early 1960s under Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, the system seeks to convert the broad national security concepts, now outlined in the National Security Strategy, into more specific force-building plans, programs, and budgets. The crucial link between the President's national security concepts is the Defense Planning Guidance. This is a potentially critical document because it allows an administration to transform its national security goals into the design, size, structure, and character of future forces to the officials charged with building these forces and maintaining the current ones. Under activist Secretaries of Defense, the guidance became the vehicle against which the services proposed programs and budgets were evaluated and altered to ensure conformity with the broader security views and strategy of the President and his administration.
These are the existing mechanisms through which the administration can seek change. Some of these are public, but all are more closely tied to the mostly nonpublic and esoteric process inside the Pentagon that converts the concepts and directives of elected officials into the U.S. armed forces. These mechanisms are important and potent because the bureaucracy and the defense establishment take them seriously.
The new administration, however, has two other instruments that may turn out to be both important and less vulnerable to the propensity of bureaucracies to resist change. One of these is the presently unreleased assessment being conducted by the Secretary of Defense. New administrations are, of course, prone to reassessing, but this one promises to go beyond simply building a national missile defense system. This comprehensive review will turn out to be more significant than the second instrument, the Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR), established by congressional legislation. Mr. Rumsfeld's assessment was designed to serve as an "audit" of the state of the Department of Defense, as well as a point of departure for the QDR. By conducting an independent assessment, Secretary Rumsfeld could seize control of the department and direct the QDR to serve his overriding interests: revitalizing the Department of Defense and beginning the process of transforming the U.S. military into a 21st-century force.
The QDR was created to do two things. It requires the Department of Defense to review whether its strategy and force-building efforts are consistent with the changes in the world, and it seeks to provide Congress with a new basis for evaluating the defense program and budget. The Defense Department tended to see the first QDR (conducted in 1997) as a means of reinforcing the assumptions it made at the beginning of the first Clinton administration, and it used the review less to devise and explicate security goals and strategy and more as a budgetary means of enforcing the path it had chosen earlier. A number of observers criticized the 1997 QDR and the congressionally mandated companion effort, the National Defense Panel, for this, and recent commentary calls for the forthcoming QDR to be less oriented toward budgetary issues. Eliot Cohen, among others, has argued that documents such as the National Security Strategy, the National Military Strategy, the Defense Planning Guidance, and the Quadrennial Defense Review are not top-down efforts aimed at articulating and implementing a reasoned national security strategy, but rather are exercises by the defense and foreign policy bureaucracies to justify their parochial interests.
But that was the past. The new administration has the machinery in place to provide the kind of guidance that could imbue the defense and foreign policy establishments with new senses of purpose and coherence. And for the first time since the end of the Cold War, the administration has the political freedom to change the conceptual and intellectual drift that began in the late 1980s.
Finding a New Strategy
The Bush administration is likely to move quickly to ensure that the Quadrennial Defense Review (and any other top-level assessment it may launch) addresses the transformation of U.S. forces clearly and with enough specificity to serve as a guide for the myriad decisions that go into building future forces. The challenge confronting the upcoming review will be to recognize and embrace the future by defining both the ways the military will pursue its assigned tasks and the means required to accomplish them. It should establish clear priorities within a logical framework.
The essential ingredient the administration can add is to identify ways of leveraging aerospace power as the centerpiece of both joint and coalition operations. A joint approach would seek to develop and exploit the synergy between complementary force elements. Such an approach would coordinate and integrate the aerospace elements being developed by all the services. It then would look at the right mix of non-aerospace elements and provide required capabilities that aerospace forces cannot. This approach would allow allocations of resources between the services to be assigned based on capabilities needed within a strategic framework, rather than being based on budget shares that have remained rigid over the past 25 years.
Meanwhile, the administration should move expeditiously to articulate and publish its own security priorities, goals, and strategies in a new National Security Strategy. This document usually has emerged late in the year; the new administration should not wait until the end of 2001 to articulate its views. The nation needs a clear, unambiguous strategic worldview with which to move forward.
What are the elements of such a framework? First, U.S. forces will be engaged globally. Second, the time frame for responding to crises and conflicts has become compressed, which means forces will have to shift rapidly from shaping and presence operations to full combat status. They also must be rapidly deployable to distant theaters. Third, these forces must be able to respond decisively to a full range of crises and conflicts. Finally, the force posture must be able to accomplish missions in a sustainable manner. This involves more than just logistics; it also means having political sustainability.
Ten years after the end of the Cold War, it is time to rethink how the nation should employ military power and on what pillars that power will rest. More important, it is time to do something about it. The Bush administration has the authority and means to articulate how this nation should cope with the world and shape it. It should seize this opportunity—quickly, systematically, openly, and effectively. The nation deserves no less.
Dr. Blaker and Dr. Goure are senior fellows with the Lexington Institute in Arlington, Virginia.