By Thomas P.M. Barnett, with Henry H. Gaffney, Jr.
CNA Corporation, April 1998
I. Overview
While we found much to admire in the National Defense Panel (NDP) Report Transforming Defense: National Security in the 21st century), we think it suffers one overarching flaw: old thinking confronting new times.
The old think is most apparent in the authors’ tendency to characterize any and all instability in the world as a "threat" to U.S. security interests (which are never identified) that must inevitably engender some form of military response—albeit one among many others. This is seen in what we’d call the NDP’s "anywhere/ any reason" framework for U.S. interventions (especially the new emphasis on urban warfare), along with its surprising new focus on "homeland defense" (the Soviet threat goes away, and now our homeland's at greater risk?). The NDP’s approach greatly confuses "risk" with "uncertainty." The former has been vastly reduced with the end of the Cold War, while the latter remains only to the extent that U.S. policy-makers can’t agree on who’s left around to worry about (the debate centers on how few are left). So yes, we’re somewhat unsure as to which of the handful of regional troublemakers will next try our patience, perhaps even triggering a military response, but no one entity poses serious risk to U.S. security for the foreseeable future—according to our own notoriously gloomy intelligence services.fn#1
This constant casting of the U.S.-versus-instability motif gives the report a rather unfocused air. The authors can't seem to come up with any new villains (only the same old list of rogue states, all centered in the Middle East save for starving North Korea). Instead, they seem unduly taken aback by a number of amorphous conditions or trends, none of which are particularly new (e.g., spread of technology, proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), terrorism, refugees, internal implosions in failing states) but which are today advertised as somehow being products of the end of the Cold War now that the so-called stabilizing hand of the Soviets has been removed. In short, the NDP's grand look into the future has yielded nothing more than a regurgitation of the familiar "lesser includeds" of the Cold War era (i.e., regional troublemakers and troubling global trends)—and for this motley crew the U.S. is strongly advised to "transform" its entire national security structure?
This is not to say that we don’t foresee the challenges of the 21st century being different enough from those of the Cold War to necessitate some fundamental change within our national security institutions, military strategy, and defense posture by 2020. But given that we see these changes occurring over the course of a generation, we’ll eschew the term "transformation," even if such changes might indeed warrant that phrase 22 years hence. Why? We’re not eager to buy into the hype about the post-Cold War era stressing the U.S. national defense community like it’s never been stressed before. We think the U.S. military is more than up to the challenges it’ll face over the next two decades, especially since it increasingly finds itself one among many foreign policy tools that our nation’s leadership draws upon in its conduct with the outside world—a world whose macro-stability is more and more defined in geo-financial rather than geo-strategic terms.fn#2
Indeed, if we were going to cite a "Revolution in Military Affairs," we’d describe it as the Defense Department becoming just another federal agency.fn#3 To the extent that this seemingly blasphemous statement comes true, we wholeheartedly applaud the NDP’s call for greater interagency cooperation between DoD and the rest of the Federal Government. We think it’s both warranted and inevitable, but not something that should trigger the military’s rapid transformation. In fact, we fear that such a bureaucratic battle cry will lead to reckless investments in high-tech solutions in search of threats to solve. In our view, the end result we don’t want to achieve is a U.S. military that is overly optimized for high-end, large-scale conventional warfare with "near peers" but poorly organized, trained, and equipped for the type of low-end, small-scale, unconventional scenarios most experts—including the NDP—see dominating the international agenda in coming decades. Clearly, we’d hope for a suitable balance between those two capabilities. We just think that such a balance could easily be lost when pursuing an ambitious "transformation" strategy.
Getting down to more detail, one can only applaud the specific actions recommended by the NDP for streamlining defense infrastructure, reforming the systems-acquisition process, reworking the Planning, Programming, and Budgeting System (PPBS), and improving the visibility of defense costs. New rules are clearly needed to shorten development cycles, encourage more innovation and competition in systems acquisition, and boost accountability in lower-cost procurement. It seems clear, however, that Congress will have to become the DoD’s willing partner for these changes to occur.
As for the rest of the panel’s many recommendations, few stand out for their boldness or clarity. Most just encourage current trends, such as the movement toward greater jointness and experimentation in operations. A significant portion simply mouth laudable goals that most would support, such as: "New approaches and thinking about power projection" (p. 37); "Develop a robust space science and technology program" (p. 39); and "Review the entire national security structure to better anticipate and shape changes in the international environment" (p. 67). Again, we might quibble over the many details underlying these general proposals, but as a whole, this is fairly agreeable stuff.
Actually, that last notion of "better anticipating and shaping international change" points to the fundamental reason why the NDP Report lacks—in effect—the courage of its own convictions, and thus clarity in vision. For all their talk in support of a "Revolution in Military Affairs" (RMA), the authors appear to belong almost as much to the "shapers" camp that posits a role for the United States—not just the military but a broadly defined national security community—in virtually every "crisis" around the world.fn#4 In short, the panel wants to "have its cake" (RMA-like transformation over the long run) and "eat it too" (keep U.S. fully engaged around the world in the short run). The United States can’t afford both visions simultaneously—thus the report’s "mushy middle" tone.
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Citation: Thomas P.M. Barnett, "A Critique of the National Defense Panel Report," The CNA Corporation, April 1998.
Original URL: http://www.geocities.com/ResearchTriangle/Thinktank/6926/ndpzero.htm
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