No Defense for This Defense Policy

Last October, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) hosted a remarkable three-day symposium: “Clash of Visions,” addressing the future(s) of the military. The participants were distinguished, the presentations and dialogue both sophisticated and frank. Toward the end, a member of the audience commented:

“I’ve learned one thing here. You can say anything you want, if you preface it with ‘With all due respect …'”

The CSIS conference witnessed a lot of “due respect” prefacing a lot of barbed assertions. But there was also an aura of weariness. This clash of visions thing has been going on since before DESERT STORM’s dust even settled. Everybody knows their lines; everybody knows the standard refutations and when it’s time to get mad or start telling war stories. And everybody acknowledges that, no matter what the validity of the arguments, within the Beltway “where you sit determines where you stand.” The “real” issues are money, turf, and careers.

And so it has gone for nearly seven years. We’ve had Base Force studies and the BUR, the CORM, the QDR; the NDP. Don’t worry about the acronyms. The world will little note nor long remember what they said here … with the possible exception of the recently-released “Transforming Defense” report of the NDP, in many ways an excellent attempt at unilateral rationality.

Seven years gone, with not much accomplished, save for institutional self-preservation and a trillion and a half dollars spent. So let’s maybe file the preformatted debates and consider five simple points, many of them made explicitly or implicitly by the NDP study.

1. There is no New World Disorder, no chaos waiting to sort itself out. The situation is clear enough. The Age of the Wars of Ideology is over. The Age of the Wars of Identity and Ecology has begun. What started at Lexington and Concord ended in Moscow and Berlin. Future conflicts will be generated by religion, ethnicity, and sheer hatred of western trash, and by the misery and death that climatic and other natural forces will inflict, especially in the Third World. These conflicts need not be, and probably won’t be, “conventional.” They will involve the use of weapons of mass destruction.
2. The United States now has a defensive perimeter that begins at the subatomic level (infowar and protection of civilian computer infrastructure) and extends out into the militarily and economically significant regions of space. The vital issue is how to defend and exploit this perimeter — a matter that does not respond to the standard practice of “rationing the poverty” among the services, or the standard definition of “jointness” as “everybody gets a piece of the action.”
3. Within this perimeter, the United States has both inner and outer physical borders. The inner borders are those of the homeland. The outer borders correspond to interests, friends and allies, and a few nations with whom we might become friends and allies.
4. Homeland defense comes first. To the extent that this country pursues an activist foreign policy — or, if you prefer, messes in other people’s domestics — we’re going to get hit. The era of invulnerability is long gone; so is the era of impossible defense against an overwhelming Soviet threat. And irony can be pretty ironic. A genuinely isolationist country would require no Fortress America, just a retaliatory capability to deter gratuitous nastiness. Fortress America is necessary only if we intend to leave the fort.
5. Militarily, this country has one unique advantage: its aerospace supremacy. That advantage must be kept, and must be used. This is not to say that air and space power can replace “boots on the ground” in every, or even in most situations. But what can be done from the air and space probably should be done from the air and space.

From these premises, the structure of a 21st century defense begins to emerge. It consists of:

• A world-supreme Air Force evolving, as pledged in the service’s doctrine, into a space and air force, conducting independent operations and rendering vital support to all the other branches and the unified commands.
• A Navy with its own world-supreme air and missile capabilities, true to its new doctrine of supporting the land campaign, and also capable of protecting oceanic commerce from terrorist and limited disruptions.
• A globally-deployable Marine Corps, perhaps a few thousand people larger than at present, capable of handling what the Commandant, General Charles Krulak, calls the “three-block war” – operating in an environment where you provide humanitarian assistance on one block (or stretch of countryside), separate warring factions on the second, and duke it out on the third.
• A somewhat smaller “three-tiered” Army, with strong equivalent reserve and National Guard segments. The first tier consists of a thoroughly modernized force package for “conventional” war. No lesser missions. The second tier, less modernized but still supported by high-technology, handles lesser contingencies, including humanitarian and peace-keeping operations, and is available for combat. The third tier: enhanced special operations. Much of this tiering already exists de facto; some will happen because there’s no money to modernize more than a fraction of the present force. It’s time forget the fiction of “general purpose forces” and make a virtue of necessity.
• Finally, a new set of arrangements for homeland defense, including full utilization of an enhanced National Guard.

All in all, a simple assessment; a simple prescription. But in defense planning, as in war, simple things become very complicated. And one vital area – the relationship between this people and its military – has become both complex and volatile. This is unfortunate, since an effective 21st century defense will require a relationship very different than the mess now prevailing.

To be continued.