New threats and challenges will force the Pentagon and industry to invent new ways to accomplish military missions, a process that will start but not end with the Quadrennial Defense Review, according to David Ochmanek, a defense official with a key role in the assessment.
“As the new threats and challenges mature and play out, I think it’s not an overstatement to say the U.S. defense establishment will be pressed to define wholly new concepts of operation for accomplishing their missions,” he said. That job will not be completed by the end of the summer, when the QDR starts feeding into the fiscal year 2011 budget process, according to Ochmanek.
However, he added, it is the Defense Department’s responsibility to identify “robust vectors” along which the force should move confidently in the right direction toward supporting whatever new concepts are needed to meet future challenges. “And I think that’s exactly the task we’re focused on,” he said.
Ochmanek, who spoke May 4 at a conference sponsored by Jane’s, noted Defense Secretary Robert Gates has called for a balanced force to meet the full range of challenges ahead.
Among the challenges are high-end “anti-access” threats from countries that might aim to impede and perhaps prevent America from deploying combat power to their theater, he said. Ochmanek did not name any countries when making this point, though in Washington such references are often seen as allusions to China. He cited theater-ballistic missiles that can threaten land bases and aircraft carriers, “double-digit” mobile surface-to-air missiles, numerical superiority in sophisticated fourth-generation fighters and advanced weapons designed to counter space and naval assets. According to the Air Force, the “double-digit” phrase refers to the two-digit designator in the NATO reporting name for Russian-designed mobile SAM systems made by Russia and China.
“It is easy to be complacent about our so-called conventional or traditional military suite of capabilities based on our performance against adversaries such as Iraq and Serbia, but that doesn’t carry forward into the security environment that we see in the future,” he said. “We see a dynamic threat environment in which U.S. forces have to work pretty hard to sustain the level of superiority they need to fight in an adversary’s backyard.”
Gates expects and demands that this QDR be strategy driven, meaning that the decisions that are put up for consideration for the leadership must be identified, assessed and taken in the context of a clear understanding of what the nation expects the military to do in the emerging security environment and what challenges are arising, Ochmanek said.
The importance of engagement and a “recognition that we live in an interdependent world” in which the United
States cannot be expected to secure its interests unilaterally will be at the center of the Obama administration’s national security strategy, he predicted.
The QDR, like any force-planning exercise, is about ensuring the future military has the capabilities that officials anticipate will be needed to carry out important missions, he said.
“The post-post Cold War world” will be less comfortable to American interests and defense planning, he said, noting potential foes know not to challenge America with conventional military capability. The Pentagon must address irregular threats on one hand and “high-end adversary state threats” on the other, he said.
U.S. officials must be mindful of the diffusion of technology to lower and lower levels of organization, he said.
Coping over the long term means knowing about places where threats could be gestating, preventing non-state actors from harming American interests, he said. To address high-end threats, America must combat nuclear proliferation, continue efforts to re-energize the six-party talks with North Korea and dissuade Iran from going down the nuclear path, he added.
“But over time I think the prudent planner would, recognizing the importance of preparing for the possibility that important regional adversaries like these two and perhaps like others could acquire a modest number of nuclear weapons,” he said. “And it’s important to understand how that event will shape the behavior of these states. In the past states that have acquired nuclear weapons if they are what we might call non-status-quo states have tended to be more assertive about their interests in their region.” This was the case with Pakistan, he added.
A regional power with nuclear weapons might feel emboldened to start testing the tolerance of the United States and the world, he said. It also might be more difficult to deter a nuclear-armed regional adversary from threatening or actually escalating in the context of a conflict with America if that adversary had no other cards to play, he said. U.S. officials must be mindful that very weakness of such an adversary’s conventional military might make it more likely for such a country to “resort early on” to the nuclear card if in a conflict with America, he said. North Korea cannot simply be viewed as a lesser version of the deterrent relationship that America had and successfully managed with the Soviet Union during the Cold War, he said. -- Christopher J. Castelli
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