The Quadrennial Defense Review will likely revamp the Pentagon’s profoundly influential requirement to prepare for two concurrent wars by dropping the second major combat operation while insisting U.S. forces juggle an array of smaller but still substantial operations worldwide, according to defense and military officials.
Given the enormity of the challenge in Iraq and Afghanistan, the two-MCO construct that emerged in the early 1990s is seen by Defense Secretary Robert Gates and others at the Pentagon as unrealistic. Details of the new plan remain in the works behind closed doors.
But a Pentagon official told Inside the Pentagon this week that Gates wants to reflect that U.S forces will be executing many small and medium operations all the time. The Defense Department is developing an approach that will reflect Iraq, a long-term commitment to Afghanistan, a series of “foundational” missions that will include multiple “defense support to civil authorities” efforts, the campaign against violent extremism, and some specific force structure for deterrence, and then several medium-sized contingencies, one of which is mainly an air and naval conflict, the official said.
A senior Pentagon official, David Ochmanek, will have a key role in shaping the new approach. Earlier this year, he became deputy assistant secretary of defense for force development and the head of the QDR analysis and integration cell.
“You’ve got a massive amount of your force now tied down in what is in effect a major irregular operation -- two of them,” Ochmanek told ITP in a May 22 interview. “What gives with the two MCO construct? Are you going to fall off of that or are you still going to be able to do it? You know, in the no-kidding level of life it’s not possible to . . . lift forces out of Afghanistan and Iraq and send them to a war in Korea if that happens. You don’t have that flexibility.”
Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Casey made the same point in remarks last week at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Casey said a new construct is needed. Given U.S. commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan, one MCO is already off the table, he said. He also argued the top “reality” scenario should call for having 10 Army and Marine Corps brigades deployed for a decade.
Others argue the Pentagon clearly lacks enough troops to execute the required missions.
“My favorite sizing construct is ‘lots more,’ and I’m only half kidding,” said Kori Schake, a former adviser to Sen. John McCain’s (R-AZ) 2008 presidential campaign, a Hoover Institution fellow and the distinguished chair in international security studies at the United States Military Academy at West Point. “I don’t think the force-sizing process is nearly as rigorous as we pretend,” she told ITP.
Revamping the two-war standard would have huge implications for DOD. As noted in a 2001 National Defense University paper, the standard has affected not only force levels and the activities of the combatant commanders, but also manpower policies, readiness standards, improvement efforts, program priorities and budgeting.
The 2006 QDR used a force-sizing “1-4-2-1” criterion calling for DOD to simultaneously defend the United States (1), deter aggression and coercion in four critical regions (4), and swiftly defeat aggression in two overlapping conflicts (2), while preserving the option to impose a change of regime in one of the conflicts (1).
Ochmanek co-authored a 2007 RAND report that argued the number of places in which U.S. and allied forces might need to promote stability and democracy is indeterminate; the paper therefore proposed the new moniker “1-n-2-1.” No new code number has emerged yet in the ongoing QDR, an official said. Gates does not want a “bumper sticker,” another official added.
Notably, the RAND report argued the Army and Marine Corps could be relieved of the requirement to prepare forces to fight in the second of two nearly simultaneous wars because the Navy and the Air Force could handle the second war.
“It’s an idea that’s in play,” Ochmanek told ITP. “But quite honestly we have not . . . formalized it. We haven’t discussed it.” The QDR has not yet reached that stage because from April to June it is focused on learning about the capabilities and limitations of the force, he said.
Ochmanek described two “school solutions” to force planning. “One is you state a force-sizing criteria up front as a hypothesis and you go out and test whether the resources you have will allow you to meet that criteria,” he said. “The other is you go into your scenario analysis and you see what your force can do. You make your trades and get the best distribution of capabilities that you can. And then as a post hoc effort you assess the extent to which you define that force-sizing criteria that fits, reviewing the latter process.”
At any stage in the process DOD can hypothesize a force-sizing criteria but it is only a draft until the leadership does the trade-offs, the puts and takes, and decides what the program is going forward, he said, adding a decision could come this fall. Sources inside and outside DOD told ITP the department will first identify force-planning criteria and then compare three alternative forces against the criteria.
The 2007 RAND report focused on a “perfect storm,” Ochmanek recalled. “We had 9/11 and all of the fallout from that. We were fighting two wars. At the same time we have what I think is still somewhat an underappreciated dynamism in the threat posed by state adversaries.” DOD has compelling reasons to enhance its capabilities in two very different areas of military operations but also faces fairly severe constraints on resources, he said.
“So how do you square that circle?” he added. “If you can’t do it all, where do I take risk, to use the popular parlance? Our judgment was the least bad place to take risk was in the ground component of a second MCO.”
Rethinking the two-MCO idea is “very overdue,” Gates told the House Armed Services Committee on May 13.
“And my view is that since 1991, it’s been important to look at a world that was more complicated than two MCOs,” Gates said. “And the fundamental question facing the QDR is, how do we account for a world that is not accounted for by two MCOs? And that will have huge resource implications, but it will also have enormous strategic and force-sizing implications.”
The 2007 RAND paper argued there are strong strategic reasons to sustain the capability to project power effectively into two regions of the world simultaneously.
“We are a superpower,” Ochmanek told ITP. “We have important interests in the Persian Gulf, in Europe, in Northeast Asia and the East Asian littoral. We face challenges to those interests. So if we’re going to continue to underwrite security alliances in those regions we can’t just focus on one part of the world at once. . . . This was a proposal to sustain that two-power projection capability in a world of constrained resources. And I think that set of demands and constraints is still on us.”
DOD policy chief Michèle Flournoy was asked two days earlier whether the notion of a superpower handling two major wars -- an idea tied to the 2006 QDR -- still applies.
“What I would say is I think what reality shows is we have to be able to do multiple things at a time,” she told reporters at a May 20 breakfast. DOD is concurrently engaged in a global campaign against violent extremism, engaged in Iraq, engaged in Afghanistan, dealing with piracy and helping allies deal with their problems, she said.
“I think we’re trying to capture not just sort of how many things, the numbers issues, but the diverse range of the kinds of challenges we may be called on to deal with at one time,” Flournoy added. Discussion about the fate of the two-MCO construct will be informed by work on defense planning scenarios and other analysis, she said.
“It is a surrogate for talking about this question of how do you allocate risk,” Flournoy said, noting the force-sizing or shaping construct gives planners a conceptual framework for making choices about where to place emphasis and where to accept risk. “So that will be one of the main products of the QDR, a new force sizing and shaping construct.”
Schake said force-sizing constructs are budget drills and that DOD has a poor record of predicting how much is enough. Kosovo consumed a major regional contingency’s air power while Iraq and Afghanistan have “consumed our force” with their sustained requirement, she told ITP.
“But we clearly don’t have a large enough force for the wars we’re fighting,” Schake said. “The president’s plan foresees 50,000 troops in Iraq, we’re beyond that in Afghanistan, and those are likely to be steady state demands.”
President Obama campaigned on adding 92,000 soldiers and Marines to the force and Gates said during budget hearings that people are his top priority, so the force-sizing construct should budget for those additions, she said.
“But Dave Ochmanek’s right that we should press for greater substitutability in our forces, increasing the components under least stress, as was done with air power when troops stationed in Korea went to Iraq,” Schake said. -- Christopher J. Castelli
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