By Vernon Loeb
Washington Post, 13 September 2002
When virtually all of his fellow serious thinkers at the Pentagon were preoccupied in late 1990 with a looming war against Iraq, Army Lt. Col. Andrew F. Krepinevich found himself leading a very different mission of one.
Krepinevich worked for the legendary Andrew Marshall, whom many consider the most serious Pentagon thinker of all. And Marshall, then (and still) director of an obscure but highly influential unit called the Office of Net Assessment, wanted him to answer a couple of enormous questions:
Was the Pentagon in the midst of a "revolution in military affairs," a period in which emerging technologies and new warfighting concepts change the very nature of war and produce dramatic gains in military effectiveness?
And if it was, how could the U.S. military adapt its ways and its weapons to avoid falling victim to complacency?
From the vantage point of a decade, the 40-page white paper that Krepinevich completed in July 1992 -- about to be made public for the first time -- stands as the defining document for what the current Bush administration and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld have embraced as their primary thrust at the Pentagon: "transformation" of the U.S. military from an industrial age force to one grounded in the information age.
Indeed, Krepinevich's far-reaching conclusions now make for a case study of institutional inertia inside the $ 1 billion-a-day U.S. military establishment and a roadmap, Krepinevich believes, for how little has really changed.
His Pentagon career also stands as a classic example of what can happen to intellectuals inside the military -- and how many of them come to have far more sway over defense policy from the outside than they ever had within.
Krepinevich, 52, now directs the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a nonpartisan Washington think tank that focuses on military issues and consults for the Department of Defense. His close ties to Marshall -- and Marshall's close ties to Rumsfeld -- give Krepinevich more influence over the acquisition of weapons systems and the development of doctrine than many a general.
"Transformation," Krepinevich said in a recent interview, "is the product of the belief that you are in a period of military revolution. Otherwise, why transform, especially if you're the dominant military. You transform because the competition is changing and if you don't, then your advantage is going to erode, perhaps precipitously."
What kind of marks does he give Rumsfeld and the Bush administration on military transformation?
"They've done a terrific job in identifying the new challenges," he said, but have fallen down badly in defining what kind of weapons systems and war fighting doctrine they need to meet them.
Rumsfeld took office with transformation at the top of his agenda but, in the face of opposition from the uniformed services, took no immediate steps to define what he meant by the term or what weapons systems he planned to kill to fund futuristic technologies such as space-based radar. But Rumsfeld's transformation plans have recently been revived by his increased clout flowing from his successful handling of the war in Afghanistan.
"In a sense, the glass, it's not empty. But I'm not sure it's half full yet," Krepinevich said, noting that the military services like to talk about the "digital battlefield" as they propose spending hundreds of billions of dollars over the next 10 to 20 years on more of what they've coveted for the past half century: fighters, helicopters, armored vehicles, warships and submarines.
Krepinevich's paper, which his think tank is soon to publish with the Pentagon's consent, is titled "The Military-Technical Revolution: A Preliminary Assessment."
In it, the Harvard-educated Krepinevich concludes that the United States was in the early stages of the third revolution in military affairs of the 20th century. The first took place between 1917 and 1939 through the combination of internal combustion engines, improved aircraft design, radio and radar, producing the German blitzkrieg, carrier aviation and strategic aerial bombardment.
The second began at the end of World War II with the advent of nuclear weapons -- "a shift in technology so radical," he writes, "it convinced nearly all observers that a fundamental change in the nature of warfare was at hand."
And the third, still gathering steam, is the product of information technology: reliable ballistic and cruise missiles, precision-guided bombs, stealth aircraft and digitized reconnaissance, surveillance and intelligence sensors that enable war planners to fix and strike targets with pinpoint accuracy from hundreds of miles away.
"The revolution seems to have arrived operationally, at least in part, in the Gulf War in 1991," Krepinevich writes. "Extended-range, advanced conventional munitions, when combined with the information revolution, may permit simultaneous engagement of the enemy throughout the theater of operations, blurring the distinction between tactical, operational, and strategic operations and forces."
Describing how the U.S. military needed to change, Krepinevich questioned the continuing utility of tanks, manned aircraft and large surface ships, and said the military had to reform its heavily bureaucratic system for procuring weapons with one agile enough to keep pace with changing technology.
He presciently concluded that "information dominance could well be the sine qua non for effective military operations in future conflicts." And he came quite close to describing Saudi extremist Osama bin Laden's al Qaeda terrorist network and the regimes supporting it when he said the most likely threat in 10 to 20 years would come from what he called a "streetfighter state," possibly armed with nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, energized either by a hostile ideology or radical theocratic values "with emphasis on terrorism, subversion and insurgency."
Fred Downey, defense aide to Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman (D-Conn.) who worked with Krepinevich on Marshall's staff, calls his study "the intellectual basis" for today's emphasis on military transformation.
"The concepts in it provided the framework for much of the modernization that has started over the last 10 years," Downey said. "But more than that, it shaped the thinking of an emerging generation of military and civilian policymakers."
Once Krepinevich turned in his assignment, Marshall shared it with key lawmakers and found two main adherents: Lieberman and then-Sen. Dan Coats (R-Ind.).
Lieberman and Coats sponsored legislation creating a National Defense Panel that produced a study in 1997, "Transforming Defense." The panel's two congressional appointees: Krepinevich and Richard L. Armitage, a former Pentagon official who is now deputy secretary of state.
Then, Armitage was working for George W. Bush's presidential campaign and, on the subject of defense, whispering "transformation" in his ear and inserting the phrase into key campaign speeches.
And so it is that six "operational goals" set forth in Rumsfeld's September 2001 Quadrennial Defense Review mirror those Armitage and Krepinevich put into "Transforming Defense" in 1997: Protecting forward bases; ensuring continued defensive and offensive information operations; projecting force into distant, inaccessible environments; denying enemy sanctuaries; enhancing space systems and making computers and sensors "talk" to each other across a seamless digitized battlefield.
Krepinevich said last week that if the Bush administration wants to strike deep inside enemy territory against a "streetfighter state's" weapons of mass destruction, Cold War tank maneuvers or aerial dogfighting won't do much good.
"You've got to have long-range, stealthy, highly capable systems," he said, "that can strike unwarned over long distances and achieve significant effects."
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Citation: Vernon Loeb. "Billions, and It Can't Make Change," Washington Post, 13 September 2002.
Original URL: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A10321-2002Sep12.html
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