By Eliot Cohen.
The New Republic, 19 January 1998.
Half a century ago, shortly after the end of World War II, the military forces of the United States dominated most of the globe. But America's military leaders faced a strategic predicament: how to complete a postwar demobilization of their vast forces, while at the same time running military governments in faraway countries, adapting to revolutionary military technologies, and preparing for a new great-power challenge to the U.S. On top of that, a brand-new Department of Defense had to explain to a skeptical public why a large military establishment should continue to exist even after it had vanquished the Third Reich and the Japanese Empire.
To the rescue came Mr. X. George Kennan used that pseudonym when he wrote his famous 1947 article on "The Sources of Soviet Conduct" in Foreign Affairs, which set forth the principle of containment of America's emerging foe, the Soviet Union. Containment was a superb strategic concept: simple, sweeping, and flexible. Though intended primarily to shape foreign policy, it served defense policy as well. For more than four decades, containment provided the rationale and conceptual framework around which the U.S. constructed its military establishment.
The cold war ended in 1990, and once again the Pentagon finds itself trying to downsize in the context of U.S. global dominance, unconventional missions, revolutionary technological change--and public skepticism about the need for a large military. But, this time, no formidable new foe looms on the horizon, and there is no Mr. X. The Pentagon's pallid substitute for "containment" is a requirement to be ready to fight two major theater wars "nearly simultaneously"--an artificial standard driven by short-term concerns. A better strategic concept would embrace some uncomfortable truths, not least of which is the reality of an America that now acts as a global empire, rather than as one of two rival superpowers, or a normal state.
The Clinton administration first settled on the two-front strategy in 1993, after the vaunted Pentagon policy exercise known as the Bottom Up Review. In that review, the administration called for a force slightly smaller than the "Base Force" President Bush had created, divided into more or less the same units. The Bottom Up Review's designated adversaries were a resurgent Iraq and a bellicose North Korea. The administration argued that each of these "major regional contingencies" would require four or five Army divisions and a similar number of Marine brigades (equivalent to one or two divisions), four or five Navy carrier battle groups, ten Air Force fighter wings, up to 100 bombers, and special forces. Not coincidentally, this was roughly the size of the force that beat Saddam Hussein in 1990-1991.
The notion of maintaining forces sufficient to fight two large regional wars has persisted through the latest iteration of the Pentagon's planning, the Quadrennial Defense Review, which was released last May by Secretary of Defense William Cohen. The nomenclature has changed a bit ("major theater wars" have replaced "major regional contingencies"), and there are minor modifications (for example, the QDR recognizes that peacekeeping missions may divert forces from big regional conflicts), but the basic idea remains the same. The Pentagon will justify the size, composition, and structure of the armed forces on the basis of a requirement to fight another Gulf war and an equally large war in Korea in very close succession--if not at the same time.
The QDR demonstrates how the habits and logic of bureaucracy can turn the work of even the most intelligent, hard-working, and patriotic civil servants into pabulum. Not one Mr. X, but dozens, maybe hundreds of anonymous authors labored to produce this mushy document. Scores of subpanels drafted language which they sent to seven full panels, which provided edited and rewritten drafts to an "Integration Group," which in turn sent a revised copy to a "Senior Steering Group," which modified the resulting document before giving it to the secretary of defense assisted by the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The result was empty phrases ("shaping the environment"), false promises (a "revolution in business affairs"), and phony choices (the United States can choose either isolationism, serving as the world's policeman, or "engagement"). The QDR also relies on bogus measures of military power, such as the insistence on 100,000 troops in Europe and the Pacific--as if we lived in the days of Napoleon when generals measured strength by counting bayonets and sabers.
But those are cosmetic problems compared to the QDR's more fundamental flaws. For one thing, the strategic vision of the QDR--like the Bottom Up Review before it--stretches Pentagon resources too thin. Although the U.S. military is roughly two-thirds as big as it was during its Reagan-era peak, it is, if anything, more active, consuming billions of dollars to handle exercises, interventions great and small, and routine peacekeeping activities. Satellites and other components of its global infrastructure require replacement and repair. A frenetic pace of overseas deployments (150 to 190 days per year is now common in some units), coupled with shrinking manpower, has steadily but noticeably eroded morale and equipment readiness.
Moreover, by most accounts, the current defense budget underfunds procurement by tens of billions of dollars. Since the Bush era, the Pentagon has kept manpower reductions to a minimum, sustaining pay scales that keep pace with inflation and funding training at the necessary level. But that has meant less and less money for replacing hardware--tanks, planes, and ships. Like the Bush administration before it, the Clinton administration has cut procurement more deeply than manpower. Since 1993, the overall defense budget has declined by 17 percent, direct manpower costs by 20 percent, operations and maintenance by only seven percent, and procurement by 28 percent. Even if the two-major-theater-war concept made strategic sense, the unwillingness to fund it properly would make it untenable in the long run.
But the two-major-theater-war concept does not, in fact, make strategic sense. First, it exaggerates the near-term requirements in the Persian Gulf. It would not take nearly the same forces that the United States dispatched in 1990 to make short work of the enfeebled Iraqi army, and even then, as we now know, Iraqi forces were seriously outgunned. (Moreover, the kind of force--much heavier in air power--required to defeat an Iran bent on closing the Strait of Hormuz would differ from that needed to stop an Iraqi armored drive into Kuwait.) And if North Korea collapses--which is quite possible--half of the strategic two-war scenario will become obsolete overnight. The notion that South Korea will perpetually require large American ground forces to rescue it flies in the face of common sense. With almost twice the population and 15 times the gross domestic product of the North, the Republic of Korea needs American help in the form of some land and (more important) air forces, but not an American rescue.
The problem is not that the Pentagon is asking for too much--the problem is that the Pentagon is not seeking its resources for the right reasons. For example, the American presence in Asia serves to discourage renewed military rivalry among China, Japan, and other states. But rather than ask what kind of forces the U.S. might need to maintain a comfortable lead over China 20 years hence, or even to project forces into a turbulent central Asia in a similar period, the Pentagon has fallen back on cold war thinking. The QDR uses cold war units of account (divisions, carrier battle groups) to denominate military power; its scenarios, physically located in the Far East and Persian Gulf, dwell mentally in a cold war world of precise calculations of forces required to defend an opponent attacking after just so many days of warning and with just so many forces. Small wonder that in its recent report the National Defense Panel-- a congressionally mandated but administration-appointed nine-member group--looked askance at the QDR. Although mostly composed of pro-administration figures, the panel nonetheless concluded that the two-major-theater-war standard would inhibit development of the kind of armed forces America would need 15 years hence.
A real reexamination of defense policy--the kind Clinton promised when he took office--would begin by dealing with the mismatch between resources and force size, recognizing that the Pentagon needs more money, not less. For a decade now, the defense budget has been falling in absolute terms, from a 1985 high of $415 billion in current dollars to $254 billion today. Considered in relationship to the overall size of the economy, however, the decline is sharper: the Pentagon will soon absorb three percent of the gross domestic product as opposed to more than six percent during the Reagan years. The Pentagon says that savings from reorganization and base closings will pay for more procurement. Such hopes, however, have always proved chimerical. There is no substitute for a bigger budget. Indeed, without some modest increase in real levels of spending--no more than that of the growth of the economy overall--the Defense Department will suffer a slow erosion of material and human quality.
And that would be only a beginning. One sign of a real strategic rethinking would be an examination of issues traditionally ignored by Pentagon leaders. Every great period of strategic reform in the past, for example, has involved a radical change in America's military educational system. After the Civil War, General William Tecumseh Sherman created the Army's first professional schools for advanced military education; after the Spanish-American War, Secretary of War Elihu Root created a war college to train a new general staff. The recent plan to create a "chancellor" for defense education--a new layer of bureaucracy--is quite different from educational reform, which might merge some of the war colleges and create new schools for teaching joint operational art--the interweaving of ground, air, sea, and space forces that increasingly characterizes modern warfare.
Genuine reform would also consider changes upsetting to service identity and tradition. Congress recently killed, with Pentagon compliance (if not encouragement), an interesting idea for a new kind of naval vessel, the "arsenal ship"--a floating barge filled with launch tubes for an array of long-range cruise and ballistic missiles. (You knew the arsenal ship was doomed when the Navy began calling it a "Maritime Fire Support Demonstrator" instead.) There are other interesting ideas--for example, former Air Force Chief of Staff Ron Fogleman suggested that in the foreseeable future the Air Force will become a "space and air force." Fresh thinking will require a push from the top of a Pentagon that still plans to spend a third of a trillion dollars on short-range tactical aircraft.
A real strategic concept will wrestle with three very different kinds of military challenges that the United States can expect to face--well beyond the major theater wars that dominate Pentagon thinking. The first is a potentially great power challenge from a state that cannot match the United States across the board but that may invest in the military technologies to thwart U.S. projection of military power: China, for example. The second is that of peacekeeping and peacemaking: the tiresome and unwelcome duties that keep American soldiers patrolling in Bosnia and on watch over the skies of Iraq. And the third is terrorism, including the possible use of weapons of mass destruction.
Another way to put it is that the United States needs an imperial strategy. Defense planners could never admit it openly, of course, and most would feel uncomfortable with the idea, but that is, in fact, what the United States at the end of the twentieth century is--a global empire. Talk of "cooperative security" masks the reality that in any serious military confrontation, the central question is whom the United States asks to cooperate. When, as in Bosnia, it is prepared to act, its allies usually go along; when, as in the recent confrontation with Saddam Hussein, the U.S. wavers, friendly states retreat into passivity. One cannot separate the so-called "soft power" of the United States--the global dominance of its culture, beginning with its language--from its military strength. Rock fans around the world listen in English; so do fighter pilots. The same information technologies that make the Internet a decidedly American phenomenon provide the nervous systems of American military power. Free trade rests on common consent, to be sure, but would it exist absent America's military dominance?
Like many past empires, the United States does not seek new commitments or conquests. But also like past empires, it finds itself drawn into the quarrels of other states and the anarchy of disintegrating polities, from the Balkans to the Horn of Africa. It towers above other states in the scale of its strategic thinking, the resources at its command, and the military capabilities it can bring to bear. Yet its military feels overcommitted, outnumbered, and underfunded. Hampered by the restrictions of imperial foreign policy (such as the need to work with militarily inferior and politically fractious allies) and by an indifferent domestic opinion, thrifty with the lives of its own volunteer soldiery, U.S. planners would prefer to prepare for quick, unconstrained, knock-down fights with easily identified opponents. Instead, they will spend their years waging "savage wars of peace" in one corner of the globe while worrying about the rise of envious rivals in another.
Like most empires, the United States faces the strategic problem of overextension. As the British found themselves mired in the Sudan at the end of the nineteenth century in order to protect Egypt, to protect the Suez Canal, to protect the route to India, to protect India itself, so too the United States finds itself drawn into obscure conflicts for tertiary interests. Because, for empires, "the reputation of power is power," as Hobbes put it, American credibility is often at stake in a way that is not the case for other countries. And because the U.S. is seen (correctly) as overwhelmingly powerful, other countries will feel even less willingness than in the past to share its military burdens. The disregard by America's nato partners of the costs of expanding nato beyond its current borders is a case in point. So is the resistance of France and Russia to U.S. policy toward Saddam Hussein--a resistance based not only on those countries' economic interests in Iraq, but also on their sheer psychological need to exhibit independence from the U.S.
The final and most serious danger of imperial strategy is complacency. Contrary to the fears of many internationalists, the American people have so far not demanded the abandonment of far-flung garrisons; nor have they deplored routine but prudent uses of force overseas. Quite the contrary: they accept the episodic bombing of Iraqi air defense sites, the patrolling of Bosnian villages, and even the deployment of paratroopers to Kazakhstan with an aplomb that their grandparents would have found astonishing. But this acceptance rests on two assumptions: one, that volunteers, not draftees, will make the requisite sacrifices, and two, that no major setback can befall the American military.
The first is reasonable; the second is not, as even such relatively minor episodes as the 1996 terrorist bombing of the U.S. Air Force barracks in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, reveals. More generally, the historical experience of both the U.S. and other global powers suggests that success in one war may only pave the way for nasty surprises in the next. Think of the red-coated British soldiers deployed in front of ragged Boer farmers peering at them through the gunsights of Mauser rifles. The United States is today by far the most powerful state on the planet. If it chooses to remain so, citizen and soldier alike must brace themselves for the occasional imperial fiasco. More important, they will have to accept the uncomfortable notion that they are wielding military power in a way that is historically unusual for a country that has long viewed empires with proper republican suspicion. America's strategic vision will thus have to peer inward, as well as out, if we are to play our new role in the world successfully.
COPYRIGHT 1998 The New Republic, Inc.
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Citation: Eliot Cohen, "Calling Mr. X: the Pentagon's brain-dead two-war strategy," The New Republic, 19 January 1998.
Original URL: http://www.tnr.com/archive/0198/011998/cohen011998.html
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