The Future of War and American Military Strategy
Michael C. Horowitz and Dan A. Shalmon
Over the last several years, in response to the American-led invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan and the events that followed, a group of people committed to studying how the United States can better prepare for and fight asymmetric wars against insurgents has gained prominence in the American defense community. Sometimes called the “counterinsurgency, (or COIN) community,” this loosely-affiliated group of advocates, working both within and outside the armed services, argue that the U.S. military needs to recognize that future wars are likely to be asymmetric and irregular. Future wars, in this view, are likely to differ greatly in character compared to the tank battles and aerial duels that the American military focused on during and after the Cold War. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has endorsed much of this view, arguing that while it is difficult to predict the future, and the United States must hedge against uncertainty, the top priority is preparing for irregular and asymmetric wars, not engaging in “Nextwaritis.”1 Most members of the COIN community argue for new defense strategies and planning concepts that would bolster irregular warfare capabilities.
An alternative vision comes from defense scholars like Michael Mazarr and others who share the COIN community's belief that the majority of future conflicts will be complex, asymmetric, and difficult for conventional American military forces to win. However, rather than recommending a transformation to enhance America's COIN capacity, they argue that successful COIN is so difficult and expensive that it will rarely be in American interests to deploy troops on the ground. Additionally, Afghanistan and Iraq have shown that most of the effort should be non-military. Defense strategy should shift away from expensive and futile irregular warfare because COIN investments trade off with the primary task of the American military—maintaining the conventional dominance necessary to deter major conflicts.
While elements of both views are accurate, each misses some vital issues worth considering. First, although it seems intuitive to view irregular warfare as the dominant future concern, it is exceedingly difficult to predict accurately the future security environment. As Secretary Gates noted on May 13, 2008, Winston Churchill stated in 1900 that he viewed war with Germany as very unlikely. In 1920, he said there was not the “slightest chance” of war with Japan during his lifetime.2 Some modesty is necessary when predicting the future of war. “Thiswaritis” might be as risky as “Nextwaritis.” Second, the principal factor underlying the current security environment is American conventional military dominance, especially air and naval dominance. Without conventional superiority, dealing with failed states and fighting insurgents to prevent the development of larger asymmetric threats would fall quite a bit lower on America's priority list. A loss of conventional superiority would also undermine the ability of the American military to win those irregular conflicts it does fight. On the other hand, a fundamental adjustment in America's grand strategy is improbable in the short-term, so U.S. forces must train to win the conflicts they are currently most likely to fight: wars of insurgency.
Unfortunately, in the medium-term, the rate of change in military power is not a constant and U.S. conventional superiority is far from assured. Information-age innovations could alter the requirements for producing military power faster than anticipated, placing U.S. conventional superiority at risk. While the United States could strategically “die” by a thousand cuts from wars of insurgency, it could also “die” from a single interstate knockout blow. The worst-case scenario, where the United States loses conventional superiority and actually faces the specter of a great power war or even defeat in a great power war, although low-probability, is far worse than the security environment the United States currently faces.
Third, and perhaps most importantly, the character of emergent threats will depend on how the United States focuses its resources. Paradoxically, no matter what it emphasizes, the military threats the United States is—or will be—most capable of defeating are the ones it is least likely to face, since potential adversaries will be deterred and seek other ways of confrontation. Early twenty first century adversaries have chosen asymmetric strategies precisely because U.S. conventional superiority forecloses conventional options. American military analysts have noted that this makes irregular war “the smart choice.”3 This strategic logic simultaneously suggests that if the United States emphasizes irregular capabilities to the detriment of conventional warfighting, it will render conventional warfare a relatively more effective option for America's adversaries. That, in turn, would make a different set of actors—nation-states—more capable of challenging the United States. To use an example often cited by COIN advocates, if the United States had focused on irregular warfare after Vietnam, instead of focusing on the Soviet Union, it probably would have been well equipped for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. However, such a choice would have posed a counterfactual risk: not a twenty-first century Osama bin Laden-led mechanized corps, but the hideous possibility that at the peak of Warsaw Pact military strength, Soviet armor might have launched across the Fulda Gap.
With some smart and careful investments, the United States military can both lock in its conventional dominance and continue to improve its ability to succeed in the irregular wars most likely to dominate the landscape in the short to medium term. The United States should recognize that not all parts of the military have to be optimized for the same task.4 A strong Air Force, Navy, and nuclear forces are critical to deterring rising powers and others from even considering conventional military action. Simultaneously, some components of the Army and Marines can—and should—be optimized more for asymmetric campaigns. Moreover, different capabilities have varying per-unit capital costs. A dollar spent on infantry does not generate the same amount of force as a dollar spent on a fighter plane, yet both are necessary. While simple and attractive, dollar-for-dollar comparisons do more to obscure meaningful strategic questions than answer them. Finally, the development of some systems, including unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and capabilities like precision strike and global and tactical surveillance are vital to both COIN and future high-intensity campaigns.
The COIN/Insurgency Vision
A diverse group of advocates and practitioners have advanced a counterinsurgency-centric vision of the threat environment, along with a set of insurgency and terrorism-focused force structure proposals. Retired Marine Colonel T.X. Hammes, a prominent member of the COIN community, argues that irregular warfare now takes the form of fourth generation warfare (4GW). He writes, “[e]very potential opponent has observed… the success of the Somalis and the Sandinistas… Chechnya, Bosnia, Afghanistan, and Iraq. They will not fight with conventional means.” Hammes also contends that irregular forces constitute the gravest threat to U.S. interests because “only unconventional war works against established powers.”5 A recently retired U.S. Army lieutenant colonel and a member of the staff that wrote the new Army/Marines Counterinsurgency Field Manual, John Nagl, approvingly references General Peter Schoomaker's claim that Afghanistan and Iraq offer “a peek into the future.” He contends that COIN will “continue to be the face of battle in the twenty first century,” which necessitates that the United States “build a very different. … Army than the… conventionally focused one we have today.”6
Andrew Krepinevich, whose research spans several schools of thought within the military establishment, argues that the most likely future conflicts are irregular and that the United States military, especially the Army and Marines, should be preparing accordingly.7 Criticisms of current U.S. force structure and budget allocations are a fixture of the COIN school. Army Brigadier General-select H.R. McMaster assails what he describes as “self-delusion” and “faith-based argument” about the future character of war. He assails advocates of “defense transformation” and the “Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA)” who rely on a “fundamentally flawed conception of future war;” elevating speed, technology and information superiority over labor-intensive COIN, state-building and land warfare generally. He asserts that powerful corporate interests and institutional inertia have prevented the military from abandoning “years of wrongheaded thinking,” implying that the U.S. force structure is inappropriate for future conflicts.8 McMaster's critique of the military's focus on technology and air power exemplifies what a recent RAND report describes as a belief “in vogue” with “mainstream” military opinion: that “COIN requires boots, not bytes.”9 Extending this argument to the level of grand strategy, Jonathan Morgenstein, a senior program officer at USIP, and Erik Vickland of the Joint Special Operations University suggest that a global COIN effort should “become the guidepost for all major U.S. Foreign Policy.”10
The advocates we are lumping together into the COIN school disagree with each other on some issues, but share the idea that overwhelming U.S. conventional superiority means the United States should emphasize COIN and COIN-related capabilities because they are expensive, complex and difficult to build.
The Traditionalist Vision
Others, labeled here as “traditionalists,” posit a competing vision of the future of warfare. Most concur with the COIN community that irregular warfare will occur more frequently than interstate war. However, they disagree about the relative strategic significance of state-on-state war and criticize the COIN community's focus on mid-twentieth century conflicts. Furthermore, they agree with COIN experts’ description of the difficulties involved in irregular war, but believe adapting to fight those wars will be so difficult that the United States military should not plan to engage in large-scale or protracted irregular warfare. They advocate focusing on state-based threats and using non-military tools to counter the effects of state weakness.
Steven Metz notes that an accurate view of the future of warfare must drive American planning. If Iraq is a “unique occurrence,” then the United States can return to its conventionally-focused defense transformation agenda, but if Iraq is a “portent of the future,” and similar wars will be the “primary mission” for U.S. forces, “then serious change must begin.”11 Metz has claimed that economic interdependence and U.S. conventional dominance make conventional, state-on-state warfare unlikely. In his view, competition for resources, resentful globalization “losers,” and struggles over post-colonial nation building will increase “tensions that generate violence.”12 Consequently, intrastate or indirect (proxy) interstate war is “likely to dominate the global security environment during the next three decades.”13 MIT professor Barry Posen writes that globalization, diffusion of effective small arms and information technology and the increased salience of identity politics and religion make irregular war both increasingly common and intractable.14
Some scholars question the notion that state-on-state warfare has become unlikely. Army Colonel Gian Gentile argues that the COIN community's analysis “more than anything else… stakes a claim on the future,” concluding that Iraq does not provide a “model” for America's future wars.15 U.S. Air Force (USAF) Major General Charles Dunlap has argued that land forces “will be of little strategic import in the next war.”16 Gentile disagrees with Dunlap but also with the COIN community, writing that “‘legacy’ large-scale battles… might, in fact, still be looming on the horizon.” Citing Iranian, North Korean and Chinese threats, he argues that planners “could (and should) imagine many types of conflict in the near-to-medium term, not all or even most of them counterinsurgencies.” 17 Michael Mazarr assails the “naïve… assumption that the world has been rendered immune from the requirement for deterrence of major conventional war,” referencing possible threats from rogue states, Russia and the People's Republic of China (PRC).18 Referencing similar threats, Dunlap attacks the COIN community for believing that “human nature will change, that peer competitors will not arise and that the rest of the world will not attempt to challenge U.S. air power.”19
Metz calls for defense thinkers to “jettison the concept of counterinsurgency,” which he describes as having “outlived its usefulness,” and rethink how they understand irregular threats, since “not all armed conflict is war.”20 This is similar to Mazarr's argument that the use of military force is not the most effective way of winning COIN operations. Whereas COIN advocates argue for minimizing the costs of irregular warfare commitments by dedicating units to enhancing the capabilities of friendly regimes—especially those facing Islamic radicalism—Posen and Metz oppose most capacity-building efforts because twenty first century insurgency is “not simply a variant of war” but is rather “part of systemic failure and pathology,” requiring comprehensive social re-engineering.21 Consequently, host nation governments and the United States have inherently conflicting interests. Mazarr makes an even broader argument, claiming that given the character of twenty first century irregular warfare, militaries should de-emphasize COIN and focus on conventional warfighting.22 Reversing McMaster's argument, the essential traditionalist claim is that focusing on irregular war, for which violent tools are ill-suited, will undermine the U.S. military's role in doing what it does best—preventing and winning full-scale interstate wars.
Assessing the Debate
One interesting observation about the dominant debates over defense strategy is that, despite their apparently strident disagreements, these two schools of thought share three linked assumptions that drive their evaluation of the security environment. First, both believe that, other things being equal, future wars, are more likely to be insurgency-centered or irregular than “regular” or conventional. Second, both schools agree that the United States military has traditionally—and even currently—focused its efforts primarily on preparing for conventional conflicts and that the budgets of the armed services are the clearest indicator of this tendency. Both also agree essentially that the United States has an enormous edge in conventional military capabilities. Third, while the schools radically disagree about the extent to which the United States should transform its military to focus on insurgency warfare, both agree that to do so would require significant changes in strategy, force and bureaucratic structure.23 Designing a COIN-centric force will be expensive and hard.
To varying degrees, both approaches rely on additional sub-assumptions about the security environment, developments in warfare, and American strategy. They identify issues at the core of how American agencies, civilian and military, prepare for future military contingencies and implement foreign policy. Unfortunately, none of the three assumptions that undergird much of the current debate is beyond reproach. They both also underestimate the uncertainties inherent in planning for the future as well as some of the synergies in capabilities that the United States can leverage as it prepares for that future. By questioning these assumptions, it is possible to highlight a middle ground that may offer a way for the United States military to both deepen its conventional superiority and maintain the hard-earned COIN knowledge gained in Afghanistan and Iraq.
It is important to recognize at the outset two key points about United States strategy and the potential costs and benefits for the United States in a changing security environment. First, the United States is very likely to remain fully engaged in global affairs. Advocates of restraint or global withdrawal, while popular in some segments of academia, remain on the margins of policy debates in Washington D.C. This could always change, of course. However, at present, it is a given that the United States will define its interests globally and pursue a strategy that requires capable military forces able to project power around the world. Because “indirect” counter-strategies are the rational choice for actors facing a strong state's power projection, irregular/asymmetric threats are inevitable given America's role in the global order.24
Second, the worst-case scenario is a loss of U.S. conventional superiority. Losing military control of the sea and the air, “the global commons,”25 would render American global strategy outmoded in an instant. The idea that the United States must improve its capacity to fight counterinsurgency operations presumes a need to do so beyond defending the homeland and that the United States will have the capacity to intervene in future conflicts around the world. However, while it seems unlikely at present, what if developments in warfare cut down and then eliminated the conventional military superiority of the United States? The loss of conventional military superiority by the United States would probably make the current strategic environment look like a picnic.26
For example, currently a Marine unit deploying to Afghanistan or Iraq focuses most on the post-deployment battlefield tasks. However, imagine a world where commanders and soldiers, like their World War II forbears, must fear being sunk on a transport ship or shot out of the sky on the way over, or being targeted by electronic, nanotechnological, or directed energy or precision guided munitions when preparing to search a village for insurgents.27 In such a strategic environment, overseas deployments to win hearts and minds in a low intensity war or wipe out radical jihadi groups would likely—and logically—take a backseat to more “traditional” concerns: convoys, tank battles, air and coastal defenses, and crash programs to build a new generation of naval and air weapons to take back the seas and skies. Meanwhile, in the interim, the United States homeland would be more at risk than at any point since the World War II—arguably more threatened than in its entire history. What John Mearsheimer has called the “stopping power of water” previously functioned to shield the United States, with its oceanic buffers to the east and west, from existential threats. However, in the information age and if the United States no longer controls the waterways of the world, water may not be enough. A world without American conventional military superiority would also encourage aggression by regional actors eager to settle scores and take advantage of the fact that the United States could no longer destroy their military forces at a low cost, to say nothing of the global dangers inherent in the competition among major powers that could result. The latter scenario is the worst case and it bears mentioning only because it should inform the framework in which any debate about defense strategy occurs.
The Most Likely Future of War
Predicting the future of the security environment is difficult. While it currently seems like stability operations and low-intensity conflicts are the most likely future contingencies, it is hard to be sure. Empirically, the “next” war is rarely like the preceding one—especially when comparing larger conflicts. While groupings of smaller conflicts, like the Banana Wars of the 1920s and 1930s and the humanitarian operations of the 1990s occur, the next time U.S. forces land on foreign soil with hostile intentions the war is unlikely to look exactly like the post-2003 Iraq war. Moreover, the historical record suggests we should be very modest in our ability to peer ahead beyond the very short-term.
Consider how well the typical analyst would have done in predicting the future security environment twenty years hence, once every decade starting in 1900.28 Focusing on twenty-year increments, a futurist projecting linearly from 1900 to 1920, 1910 to 1930, and so on, would have done quite poorly. Linear extrapolations would have missed both World Wars, and the rise of the Cold War. World War I did not appear on the horizon in 1900 (or 1910 for that matter), while in 1920 and 1930, Germany's lightning wars against France and Poland were not widely anticipated. Projections from 1950 and 1960 would have nailed the overall global security environment in 1970 and 1980. However, such analyses probably would not have predicted the significance or outcome of the Vietnam War. Furthermore, the 1970 and 1980 predictions would have missed the end of the Cold War, while a linear prediction in 1990 would probably have missed the events of 9/11 and the rise of al Qaeda. The point is not related to any specific prediction—systemic failure simply suggests that it is incredibly hard to accurately predict the future security environment. It often changes quite a bit faster than people like to think and in ways that are difficult to foresee.
Is American Conventional Military Superiority Inevitable?
There is a big difference between ways of warfare that are outmoded and strategically choosing to rest on one's laurels, a distinction that is ignored by some analysts. For example, Steve Metz and Raymond Millen compare a military focused on “rapid decisive operations relying heavily on standoff strikes” to a “16th century armored knight or mid-20th century battleship.”29 Technological changes, such as the advances that rendered cavalry obsolete in the twentieth century can sometimes render capabilities unnecessary. When a category of weapons is no longer necessary, it means militaries do not need that capability anymore. In a completely different situation, a state may be far enough ahead of the opposition in the area of a given capability that it can safely relax—for a time. For example, the F-22 procurement is probably a good example of over-building where the United States already has an extensive edge. However, no one would deny that America needs air superiority. It would be irresponsible for U.S. defense planners to rest on their collective laurels and not attempt to deepen and extend American advantages in areas with continuing relevance. This is especially true since once the defense industrial base is lost in a given area, it cannot be resuscitated quickly in a crisis, meaning the United States will simply lack the ability to produce certain types of equipment.
Limited foresight also applies to predicting future military innovations and the future of military power. The rate of change in military capabilities is far from constant. For example, while the battleship, in one form or another, dominated naval warfare for several centuries, the aircraft carrier replaced it at the center of the most powerful global navies within a single generation. While the British had utilized primitive aircraft carriers by the end of World War I, positing in 1920 and 1930 that the carrier would replace the battleship in the next war as the centerpiece of naval power would have struck most naval officials, even U.S. Navy carrier advocates, as ludicrous.30
Technology also does not always determine capabilities in a linear manner. Difficult as it is, it is much easier to track hardware—technologies in the arsenals of adversaries—than to predict or understand “software”—how future adversaries will use technologies, organize their forces and institutions, and use those forces when war begins. For example, military professionals had studied the submarine for over a century before it made its strategic debut during World War I. However, nearly everyone, including the Germans, had ignored the potential of the submarine as a commerce raider.31 Navalists studied the potential for submarine-on-submarine warfare, the ability of submarines to sink battleships, and other force-on-force concepts. However, when the war started and the German Navy found itself overmatched despite its massive shipbuilding program over the preceding decade, it turned to U-boat warfare and nearly destroyed the supply lines keeping the British alive in the war. Similarly, small technological changes can have massive, unpredictable impacts on the conduct of war: the Gatling gun, repeating rifle, and telegraph in the U.S. Civil War, the machine gun, dirigible, airplane and tank in World War I, stirrups, rifling, magnetically-fused torpedoes, radar, sonar, code-breaking, self-sealing fuel tanks in World War II and the use of cellular phones and the internet in irregular warfare today are just some of the many examples.32
Information-age developments that render capital-intensive platforms less relevant to successful conventional warfighting are one example of the type of change that could place America's conventional superiority at risk. Such a change, if the United States does not lead the transition, would level the playing field and potentially allow rising powers and other states to develop conventional capabilities that could threaten the United States.
Most importantly, traditionalist and COIN-centric visions of the future security environment tend to be one-sided, looking at the future and presuming that the United States can choose its strategy in response. There is an action–reaction cycle inherent in both the choice of strategy on the part of the United States and the character of the global security environment. Former Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld once famously said, “[t]he enemy has a vote.” Adversaries exist in an international context, one that is unpredictably changed when any powerful actor makes a strategic choice.33
In addition to inherent uncertainties regarding both the future security environment and the significance of particular military capabilities, there is an interaction or feedback loop between the military strategy chosen by a dominant power, in this case the United States, and the likely wars of the future. Different enemies will engage at different levels of intensity and asymmetry, depending on the kinds of threats the United States prepares for and how that influences its foreign policy. If the United States optimizes for a given threat, logically, it makes actually facing that threat less likely but makes a threat for which U.S. preparation is sub-optimal more likely. The fundamental issue is one of risk and consequences.
Are Asymmetric and Conventional Wars Really Distinct?
The distinction between asymmetric/irregular and so-called conventional war is not as clear as some authors and analysts assume. The concept of “hybrid wars” is one attempt to capture the complex and varied interactions between conventional and asymmetric warfare.34 Indeed, this concept is a vast improvement on the rigid distinctions often used in more traditional analyses.35 Hybrid war advocates point out that the distinction between interstate or “conventional” war and irregular/guerilla warfare is fuzzy, at best. Future wars are likely to feature interlocking elements, some of which are more irregular and some of which are more conventional. It is possible to take this point even further to argue that the strategic-level linkages between irregular and conventional forms and phases of war necessitate preparing the American military for a range of contingencies that include both forms of conflict.36
Major state-to-state wars nearly always include irregular elements and phases. World War II, which some COIN advocates perceive as a pivotal event shaping expectations for conventional wars, contained irregular elements: the Burma Theater and the Philippines from 1942 onwards, for example. America's involvement in Iraq demonstrates that a single conflict can, for practical purposes, include both “regular” and “irregular” wars. That case also demonstrates that postcolonial great powers tend to face irregular threats after demonstrating they are capable of achieving conventional victory.37 Even the Vietnam War, so often treated as the paradigmatic COIN war, included conventional phases that arguably precipitated a logical North Vietnam and the Viet Cong strategy of indirect, irregular war. Even if the United States were to strategically prioritize countering terrorist attacks, the logic of hybrid counter-strategy would make an irregular warfare-only response ineffective. A strike on the homeland might mean something very different if the attacker is largely state-sponsored, rather than a diffuse network like Al Qaeda. Some state sponsors of terrorism and insurgency possess fairly large traditional militaries as well as dedicated terrorist or insurgent-sponsoring organizations. Examples include Iran in Lebanon, Israel and Iraq, Pakistan in Kashmir and Afghanistan, and Russia in Georgia and Nagorno Karabakh.38
A rigid separation between irregular and conventional war is also problematic. In an uncertain international security environment, small-scale events can spiral unpredictably, triggering large-scale conflict. The canonical example is, of course, that state-linked terrorists assassinated Archduke Ferdinand, exacerbating international tensions that unexpectedly triggered the beginning of World War I. More recently, the escalation from the kidnapping of a few Israeli soldiers to the summer 2006 war between Hezbollah and Israel surprised many observers at the time. While such escalatory chains are the quintessential low-probability, high-impact scenarios, they are dangerous enough to keep in mind when planning defense strategies.
Considering Hybrid Wars Under Conditions of Pervasive Uncertainty
While many of the states that have “failed” since the end of the Cold War, like Somalia, were poor, geopolitically marginal, and did not possess arsenals of highly sophisticated weapons, planners should not assume this will be the case in the future. Before the recent oil boom, analysts openly contemplated the collapse of the Russian state and feared a worst-case WMD-rich hybrid war, including U.S. military involvement.39 History suggests this is not as far-fetched as it might seem; the United States joined the Allied Intervention in the Russian Civil War, itself a hybrid outgrowth of the conventional conflict in World War I. Unfriendly regimes could also experience state weakness. A potential WMD-frought North Korean implosion and/or explosion is one obvious example. State failure or radicalizing, violent regime change in Pakistan is another hybrid war scenario.40 High technology capabilities for counter-proliferation and counter-WMD operations have relevance in these hybrid scenarios.
Even ruling out involvement in any hybrid war involving a WMD-armed foe, future “small wars” in resource-rich areas could include high technology threats to U.S. air and naval assets. Recently, the serving Special Envoy to Sudan bluntly warned that he considers Sudanese state failure a high-probability short-term possibility. This would produce a multi-faceted civil war, dwarfing the ongoing Darfur catastrophe.41 An American peacekeeping commitment to Darfur or Sudan is a distinct possibility, and the country could easily become a textbook hybrid war.
Unfortunately, the United States’ technological edge does not eliminate the risk of high-technology hybrid threats. Ironically, this is true partly because today's ally in the war on terror may be tomorrow's state sponsor of terrorism/insurgency. Beyond Pakistan's internal problems, vulnerable states include Saudi Arabia, Colombia, Mexico, Nigeria, and Indonesia.42 All are economically vital, oil-producing states friendly to the United States and occupying strategic geographic positions. Each faces a combination of multi-faceted internal threats: insurgency, inter-communal strife, violent criminality and/or widespread radicalization. If their militaries politically fragment, the United States could find itself embroiled in a sporadically technology-intensive “small war” or stability operation.
Finally, the “soft” side of COIN—understanding foreign cultures, ideologies, engaging in political warfare, etc. is also relevant to conventional warfighting.43 The United States engaged in large-scale psychological operations (PSYOPs) and propaganda in World War I and World War II. And translated documents show that the Chinese military considers mass mobilization and control of information to be critical aspects of twenty first century warfare.44 Every country has “human terrain,” which always affects the conduct of war. But human terrain is often ignored simply because militaries generally lack the wherewithal and resources to collect the data and map it. Normally, academics conduct these studies; anthropologists in World War II performed “national character” studies and psychologists did “operational code” analyses during the Cold War. In the future, when the United States tries to figure out how to keep a limited war with a major high-tech adversary limited, it will want to know how adversaries perceive the world as well as weigh costs and benefits in the war. Efforts to counter Chinese influence in Africa and Latin America, are textbook examples of “political warfare,” which is usually discussed in “irregular warfare” contexts.
The implication of these inter-linkages between terrorism, irregular warfare, and conventional warfare is that it would be a mistake to plan for a future threat environment that focuses on one to the exclusion of the other. While traditionalists might want the American military to get out of the business of doing counterinsurgency, even a more cautious American foreign policy will likely require more instances of peacekeeping and stability operations by American forces and some of the skills required for successful COIN operations are essential for conventional warfare as well.
Moving the Defense Debate Forward
For the near future, the United States and its military will remain heavily engaged in the world, whether through a direct footprint or over the horizon, meaning the United States has to construct a national strategy and military strategy to help achieve its goals. Given the ongoing financial crisis and the long-term pressure on the budget created by entitlement program outlays, it is unreasonable to assume that the United States defense budget will continue on its current upward trajectory. American defense spending, in constant dollars, has nearly doubled since 2000.45 Such increases are not sustainable. In a world of limited budgets, there are hard choices to make about where to spend defense dollars today to ensure that the United States can defeat current threats, while simultaneously ensuring long-term security and prosperity. While dollars are fungible and budgets are zero-sum, claims advanced by some COIN advocates that COIN suffers because it lacks budgetary equivalence with conventional war expenditures are a red herring.46
It costs different amounts to generate different capabilities, so an equally sized budget cut in one area might only entail small risks, while the same cut in another could generate enormous risks. For example, take the oft-quoted figure that it costs $1.2 billion a year to add 10,000 troops to the Army or Marines.47 In theory, because the largest input in land forces is personnel, expenditures can be broken down to the level of individual soldiers; if you spend half of a given amount, you could still generate half the capability. By contrast, many capital-intensive military platforms, like carriers, bombers, and advanced fighters, are all-or-nothing investments. If it costs $5 billion to build a new aircraft carrier—and the USS George H.W. Bush, the last Nimitz-class carrier, cost $5.4 billion to build—expending only $2.5 billion does not provide half of the carrier's capability—it produces nothing.48 This point is particularly salient since investments to ensure naval and air superiority are likely a precondition for creating situations in which large-scale COIN deployments are in the realm of possibility.
Furthermore, given that a lot of the key investments in COIN are in training rather than technology (and in building the capacity of the State Department and other non-military organizations), it is not clear that improving American long-term COIN capabilities requires a huge defense expenditure footprint, though it does require culture-shifting in training and promotions. If the United States wants friendly forces to develop robust COIN capabilities, this might be an argument for leaner, meaner U.S. deployments. When U.S. forces commit to low intensity wars abroad, even a small number of casualties can rapidly collapse U.S. political support for the operation. COIN operations are labor and casualty-intensive. A less well-known fact is that COIN best practices require that advisors sometimes allow Host Nation commanders to make operational errors. Given these realities, U.S. advisors will periodically end up exposed to disproportionate risks and rapid, precision-guided air support has a legitimate role to play. Regardless, the key should be devising an optimal level of expenditure that, balanced with other policy priorities, generates the necessary capabilities. Asking for budget equivalence or a mandatory percentage share of the budget for any particular service or form of warfare is more likely to cause officials to expend funds simply to meet and justify the budgetary targets, rather than wise and efficient utilization.
Hedging will be the optimal strategy for the U.S. military in the short-to-medium term, even in a world of almost inevitable budget cuts. Hedging especially makes sense relevant given uncertainties about the security environment. The defense officials who choose force structure and military strategy do not necessarily choose the wars a democracy like the United States will fight. Elected officials do the latter while in office, but they fight with their predecessor's militaries and fund militaries for their successors. In contrast, unelected bureaucrats and officers do the bulk of force planning and training. Rigging the game so that a future leader lacks the option of fighting a labor-intensive COIN campaign (as the U.S. military did in the post-Vietnam period) or a state-to-state high tech war (if the United States chose to focus exclusively on COIN—an unlikely prospect for sure) is a recipe for disaster.
While it is important, as Secretary Gates argues, to fight, fund, and win the wars you are in, the United States military must also budget and plan for the future. It is important to avoid a situation where the U.S. military optimizes for conflicts that end up not being the most important ones because it deters some enemies while creating vulnerabilities that other potential adversaries use to their advantage. Concretely, George Kennan described the United States—and democracies in general—as prehistoric dinosaurs with very small brains, stupidly unable to anticipate and deal with problems until they become life-threatening but simultaneously capable of enormous destruction once a truly dangerous threat is upon them.49 This mirrors the classic American fallacy that there is one big threat, or type of enemy, that deserves attention to the exclusion of all others. Ironically, given the COIN community's propensity to elevate irregular war over other forms of conflict, it is this strategic fallacy that led to the degradation of COIN capabilities after Vietnam in the first place.
Given that the United States must be ready for future irregular wars but must also maintain and strengthen its conventional warfighting capacity, it is entirely possible to have parts of the Army and Marine Corps optimized for COIN while optimizing the Navy and Air Forces for higher intensity engagements. This sort of division of labor makes sense given that most foreseeable conventional contingencies are likely to rely heavily on naval and air assets, though ground assets will play an important role as well. Hoehn et al's report for the RAND Corporation on the future of the American military offers one potential blueprint for adopting a more clear-cut division of labor scheme. They argue that U.S. ground forces should orient themselves primarily, though not exclusively, towards dealing with irregular challenges, while the Navy and Air Force should primarily, though not exclusively, devote themselves towards maintaining American power projection capabilities and conventional superiority over the global commons.50
Within the land services, good infantry and mechanized tactics, techniques and procedures are as necessary for fighting the Taliban as they were for fighting the Soviets. Adding crowd control and civil-military operations to the list of basic skills for infantry would never practically mean not training them how to operate against other conventionally trained infantry. The Chinese/Russians have tanks, and al Qaeda does not—but they do use vehicles. Calling in fire or using infantry weapons are pretty much the same tasks no matter the target.
Some key questions for U.S. land forces involve doctrine, officer training, and procurement. Some members of the land warfare community have argued that the newest Operations manual (Manual 3-0) borrowed too heavily from COIN doctrine. This implies that all Army operations for the near future will be governed by principles and structures ideal for operating in an irregular war, specifically, Iraq.51 Many of the things that the Army should do to make these systems/processes better – for example, including culture in planning and assessment – should be done anyway, and in planning for every contingency, not just COIN. Not every part of every service has to do the same job—there are air assault divisions and mountain divisions in the Army, so why not have COIN-focused BCTs with advising specialists?52 Moreover, one outcome likely to be wasteful in a budgetary sense is if the Army fails to resolve its debate over its future and maximizes for both conventional operations and COIN. Neither will be necessary if the United States Navy cannot get Army units to a future conflict and the Air Force cannot protect them from air strikes.
Fortunately, just as training troops to understand foreign cultures and other elements of the “soft” side of COIN are helpful for building the capabilities necessary to win conventional wars, many “high” technology elements essential for conventional wars, like rapid over-the-horizon strike capabilities, UAVs, satellite phones, etc., are also helpful for COIN and asymmetric warfare. Even asymmetric conflicts on the sea and in the air require conventional platforms—or at least the most advanced platforms. One example of investment overlap could be next-generation UAVs. UAVs based on similar research and development streams, might be useful both for the COIN role for which they have been praised and the fighter-replacement role. The Air Force may fight hard because of the way it will disrupt the its fighter pilot-dominant organizational hierarchy. In the meantime, the United States will still need carriers for power projection and to protect the flank of U.S. forces deployed in theater. Another example of the links between COIN capabilities and air and naval forces comes from the methods used by the American military to assist its units or Iraqi Security Forces when they call for help. Air-dropped precision guided munitions (PGMs) and UAVs have replaced indirect artillery in many cases since they are faster and more accurate. Over the last year, when Iraqi Security Forces have engaged insurgents without a massive U.S. land force component backing them up, or when they call for help, it is U.S. fixed wing and rotary wing aircraft that have played a decisive role. For example, in Basra, when Coalition Forces backed up Iraqi Security Forces who struggled to implement Operation Knights’ Charge, air support made an important difference.
Finally, investments in basic defense science are essential. As is logical, given that the United States is fighting two wars, increases in defense spending in this decade have gone mostly towards personnel, as well as operations and maintenance (O&M). Between the “peace dividend” taken at the end of the Cold War and the budgetary focus of this decade, investments in basic research and development for the weapons of the future has suffered. While the FY2009 budget contains an increase of 2 percent in the base DOD budget to $76.9 billion, current defense projections call for a 20 percent decrease in research and development from FY2009-2013, with the savings going into procurement for existing weapons systems. If anything, uncertainty about the future character of war should lead to a greater emphasis on research and development spending. By spending a modest amount of money in promising research areas, the United States can help ensure that it not only leads the way in this generation of military weaponry, but in the next generation as well. In particular, funding for basic defense science—detached from systems close to production—is essential. While results-based funding helps ensure accountability, it also leads to a focus on incremental research that discourages the experimentation necessary to lead to breakthroughs. However, the FY2009 budget proposed only $11.5 billion in Science & Technology (S&T) funding, a decrease of 3 percent from FY2000.53
Conclusion
At present, the dominant strands of defense strategy debates feature COIN advocates that wish to transform the American military to focus more on counterinsurgency and irregular wars and traditionalists who seek to return the American military to focusing exclusively on conventional wars. This debate presents a false choice. The national strategy of the United States calls for remaining actively engaged around the world, which will sometimes require using military force abroad. It is necessary, in a world of limited budgets, to move beyond the COIN v. Conventional War debate, especially because by embracing a zero-sum vision of future war, and trading one capability for the other, it makes facing the neglected threat more likely. Given uncertainty about the future security environment and the future character of war in the information age, a hedging strategy seems prudent. By optimizing different aspects of the military for different campaigns, recognizing significant differences in the types of campaigns that are most likely at different levels of intensity, investing in defense systems with applicability to both COIN and conventional campaigns, and bolstering funding for basic defense science research, the United States can ensure that it remains the leading global military power not only for this generation, but also for the next, as well.
The authors wish to thank Mike Noonan, Mac Owens, Allan Stam, and the members of the FPRI Study Group for their helpful comments and suggestions.
1 Robert M. Gates, “Remarks to the Heritage Foundation,” May 2008, http://www.defenselink.mil/speeches/speech.aspx?speechid=1240 (accessed 10/1/08).
2 Gates, 2008.
3 Steven Metz, Learning From Iraq: Counterinsurgency in American Strategy (Carlisle, PA: US Army War College, Strategic Studies Institute, January 2007), pp. 59–60.
4 Andrew Krepinevich, “The Future of U.S. Ground Forces: Challenges and Requirements,” April 2007, http://www.csbaonline.org/4Publications/PubLibrary/T.20070417.The_Future_of_US_G/T.20070417.The_Future_of_US_G.pdf (accessed 10/2/2008), pp. 12–3.
5 Thomas X. Hammes, “Insurgency: Modern Warfare Evolves into a Fourth Generation,” Strategic Forum, January 2005, http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/ndu/sf214.pdf (accessed 10/3/08), pp. 2, 5.
6 John Nagl, “Institutionalizing Adaptation: It's Time for a Permanent Army Advisor Corps,” June 2007 http://www.newamericansecuritycnas.org/files/documents/publications/Nagl_AdvisoryCorp_June07.pdf (accessed 10/20/08).
7 Krepinevich, 2007, pp. 5–9.
8 H.R. McMaster, “On War: Lessons to be Learned,” Survival, March 2008, pp. 19–21, 25–6; H.R. McMaster, “Learning from Contemporary Conflicts to Prepare for Future War,” Orbis (Fall 2008). RMA/Transformation advocates have become much less vocal over the last few years. To some extent, this has to do with the perception that Rumsfeld overreached with his transformation vision. However, this group still exists and its views could still influence American defense strategy depending on developments over the next several years.
9 David C. Gompert, et al., War by other means: building complete and balanced capabilities for counterinsurgency (Santa Monica, CA: Rand Corporation, 2008), xii, p. 80.
10 Jonathan Morgenstein and Eric Vickland, “The Global Counter-Insurgency: America's New National Security and Foreign Policy Paradigm,” Small Wars Journal Magazine, 2008, http://smallwarsjournal.com/mag/docs-temp/2-morgenstein-vickland.pdf (accessed 10/24/08).
11 Metz, January 2007, p. viii.
12 Steven Metz and Raymond Millen, Future War/Future Battlespace: The Strategic Role of American Landpower (Carlisle, PA: US Army War College, Strategic Studies Institute, March 2003), pp. 9–11.
13 Metz, March 2003, p. 17.
14 Barry R. Posen, “The Case For Restraint,” The American Interest, December 2007, http://www.the-american-interest.com/ai2/article.cfm?Id=331&MId=16 (accessed 10/4/2008). However, Posen does not think it is worth fighting these wars since he thinks they are not vital to American interests.
15 Gian P. Gentile, “A (Slightly) Better War: A Narrative And Its Defects,” World Affairs Journal, Summer 2008, http://www.worldaffairsjournal.org/2008%20-%20Summer/full-Gentile.html (accessed 10/4/2008).
16 Charles J. Dunlap Jr., “America's Asymmetric Advantage,” Armed Forces Journal, September 2006, http://www.armedforcesjournal.com/2006/09/2009013 (accessed 10/4/2008).
17 Gentile, Summer 2008.
18 Michael J. Mazarr, “The Folly of ‘Asymmetric War’,” The Washington Quarterly, Summer 2008, pp. 41, 47.
19 Dunlap, September 2006.
20 Metz, January 2007, pp. vii, 80.
21 Steven Metz, Rethinking Insurgency (Carlisle, PA: US Army War College, Strategic Studies Institute, June 2007), pp. 54–5.
22 Mazarr, 2008, pp. 36, 44–5.
23 Metz, June 2007, pp. 51–5.
24 Shawn Brimley and Vikram Singh. “The Indirect Approach and American Strategy,” Orbis, Spring 2008, pp. 312–31.
25 Barry Posen, “Command of the Commons: The Military Foundation of U.S. Hegemony,” International Security, 28:1 (2003), pp. 5–46.
26 Zalmay Khalilzad, “Losing the Moment? The United States and the World After the Cold War,” The Washington Quarterly, 18:2 (Spring 1995), pp. 87–107.
27 Andrew F. Krepinevich, “Defense Investment Strategies in an Uncertain World,” 2008, www.csbaonline.org/2006-1/1.StrategicStudies/LongHaul.shtml (accessed 10/10/2008).
28 The authors would like to thank Allan Stam for making this point clear.
29 Metz and Millen, 2003, p. 21.
30 Krepinevich, 2008, p. 24.
31 The French Jeune Ecole was one exception. Erik J. Dahl, “Net-Centric Before Its Time: The Jeune Ecole and Its Lessons for Today,” The Naval War College Review, Autumn 2005.
32 Michael Howard and John F. Guilmart, “Two Historians in Technology and War,” Presented at US Army War College Fifth Annual Strategy Conference, July 1994, http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/ssi/2hist.pdf (accessed 10/1/08).
33 David Kilcullen and Justin Kelly, “Chaos Versus Predictability: A Critique of Effects-Based Operations,” Australian Army Journal, 2:1 (Winter 2004), http://www.pixoo.net/cd/AAJ_Winter_2004.pdf#page=88 (accessed 10/2/08).
34 Frank Hoffman and James N. Mattis, “Future Warfare: The Rise of Hybrid Wars,” Naval Institute Proceedings, 132:11 (November 2005).
35 Erin M. Simpson, “Thinking About Modern Conflict: Hybrid Wars, Strategy, and War Aims,” Working Paper, April 2005, http://www.people.fas.harvard.edu/not, vert, similaresimpson/papers/hybrid.pdf (accessed 10/2/08).
36 Michele A. Flournoy, M.A. and Shawn Brimely, “The Defense Inheritance: Challenges and Choices for the Next Pentagon Team,” The Washington Quarterly, Autumn 2008, pp. 63–4.
37 Michael R. Melillo, “Outfitting a Big-War Military with Small-War Capabilities,” Parameters, Autumn 2006, p. 26.
38 Daniel Byman, Deadly Connections: States that Sponsor Terrorism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
39 Olga Oliker and Tanya Charlik-Paley, Assessing Russia's Decline—Trends and Implications for the United States and the U.S. Air Force (Santa Monica, CA: Rand Corporation, 2002), pp. 97–111.
40 C. Raja Mohan, “What If Pakistan Fails? India Isn’t Worried … Yet,” The Washington Quarterly, Winter 2004–2005, pp. 124–5, 127–8.
41 Andrew S. Natsios, “Beyond Darfur—Sudan's Slide Toward Civil War,” Foreign Affairs, May/June 2008, pp.77–93.
42 Robert I. Rotberg, “The New Nature of Nation-State Failure,” The Washington Quarterly, Summer 2002, pp. 89–93.
43 Krepinevich, June 2007, p. 8.
44 Toshi Yoshihara, Chinese Information Warfare: A Phantom Menace or Emerging Threat (Carlisle, PA: US Army War College Strategic Studies Institute, November 2001). pp. 7, 20, 28.
45 U.S. Department of Defense (2008) “National Budget Estimates for FY 2009.” Available at: http://www.defenselink.mil/comptroller/defbudget/fy2009/FY09Greenbook/greenbook_2009_updated.pdf (last accessed 10/3/08).
46 David Ucko, “Innovation or Inertia: The U.S. Military and the Learning of Counterinsurgency,” Winter 2008, pp. 290–310.
47 Adam Ward, “Expanding the US Army,” Strategic Comments, 13:1 (February 2007) http://www.iiss.org.proxygw.wrlc.org/publications/strategic-comments/past-issues/volume-13---2007/volume-13-issue-1/expanding-the-us-army/ (accessed 10/4/2008).
48 John Pike, “CVN-77,” 2006, http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/systems/ship/cvn-77.htm (accessed 10/3/08).
49 George Kennan, American Diplomacy (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1984), p. 66.
50 Andrew R. Hoehn et al., A new division of labor: meeting America's security challenges beyond Iraq (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2007), xv-xvi, pp. 80-84. Also, see Posen, 2003.
51 The authors wish to thank Christopher Alexander for raising this point.
52 Nagl, 2007.
53 Steven Kosiak, Analysis of the FY2009 Defense Budget Request, (Center for Strategic & Budgetary Assessments, 2008), http://www.csbaonline.org/4Publications/PubLibrary/R.20080421.Analysis_of_the_FY/R.20080421.Analysis_of_the_FY.pdf (accessed 10/10/2008), pp. 20–2; John F. Sargent et al., “Federal Research and Development Funding: FY2009,” CRS Report for Congress, Order Code: RL34448, Updated August 15, 2008, http://assets.opencrs.com/rpts/RL34448_20080815.pdf (accessed 10/10/2008).
Vitae
Michael C. Horowitz is assistant professor of Political Science at The University of Pennsylvania, as well as an FPRI scholar.Dan A. Shalmon is a Senior Analyst at Lincoln Group, LLC., and a graduate student at Georgetown University.