United States' Military Must Evolve -- But How?

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates' proposal to reshape the American military has generated a lot of discussion. But it has not generated much surprise -- and for good reason.

In an important September speech, the president called for what he termed "a revolution in the technology of war." Future conflicts, he said, would be won or lost not by massed might, but by speed, stealth, and mobility. The military, he went on, must be reorganized along such lines -- and he promised to give the secretary of defense "a broad mandate to challenge the status quo and envision a new architecture of American defense for decades to come."

The man delivering that speech was not Barack Obama, but Texas Gov. George W. Bush -- in September of 1999.

Once in office, Bush directed Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to carry out a sweeping review of force structure aimed at producing a revolution in military affairs. Security futurists projected a vision of a highly mobile, highly networked array of forces that could move faster and hit more precisely than the traditional Army and Navy, which were still organized to fight the giant land and sea battles anticipated by Cold War defense doctrine.

Unmanned drones, lightly manned arsenal ships capable of operating in lit-toral waters, and special-ops forces would be better suited to fighting the asymmetrical conflicts against irregular forces that would be the hallmark of future warfare, went the thinking. Even before 9/11, Pentagon theorist Andrew Marshall -- the longtime head of the Office of Net Assessment, which is commonly described as the Pentagon's internal think tank -- was expressing skepticism about the F-22 fighter jet, whose production Gates recently recommended halting. Others argued against the usefulness of the M-1 Abrams tank, a 70-ton behemoth too large to be airlifted into close-quarter battlefields and too heavy to traverse many small bridges.

TWO WARS and a decade later, the current defense secretary, held over from the second Bush administration, is once again urging an overhaul. His recommendations are largely in line with the 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review, notes the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. But "while the [Defense] Department has articulated a new strategic approach in recent years, it postponed many hard decisions necessary to harmonize the defense program with that strategy," the CSBA says. The Obama administration seems to be suggesting the time for hard decisions has arrived.

That owes much to Obama's interest in shifting money to non-defense priorities. Still, nobody with his eyes open the past few years can doubt the importance of adjusting defense strategy to the growing problem of non-state actors. As experience in Iraq and Afghanistan has demonstrated, the U.S. remains supremely capable of trouncing conventional military forces in short order. Combating insurgents and terrorists has proved more nettlesome.

But there remains the ironic fact that reshaping the military into a more nimble enterprise is a remarkably slow and cumbersome project. Just as with past efforts, opposition will come from congressmen whose districts benefit from Pentagon spending on existing weapons platforms. And it will come from within the military itself -- even though Gates' plans, for all the sturm und drang, hardly qualify as radical. They call, e.g., for reducing the number of carrier strike groups by one -- from 11 to 10 -- over the course of the next three decades.

THAT RAISES another issue. Three decades ago, the U.S. was only four years out from fighting communists in Vietnam. At that time, to suggest America would one day be fighting Islamic extremists in Iraq and Afghanistan might have sounded like pure lunacy. So who can predict with confidence what enemies the U.S. will confront in 2040?

On the other hand, it is possible to overestimate the novelty of future threats. Russia's incursion into Georgia offers a reminder that large-scale land war in European theaters remains a distinct possibility. Many of the non-state actors most hostile to American interests thrive because they enjoy the backing of traditional nation-states such as Iran. Missile defense, originally conceived to counter Soviet ICBMs -- and now slated for reduction under Gates' budget -- remains relevant thanks to (e.g.) North Korea's recent test-firing of a long-range missile.

And thanks to China. Late last month the U.S. Naval Institute reported that the Chinese appear to have developed an anti-ship ballistic "kill missile" capable of destroying an aircraft carrier. Until now a carrier strike group has been the closest thing to invincible on the planet. But the Dong Feng 21, networked to satellites and unmanned drones that enable it to hit moving targets, could be a game-changer. According to the Naval Institute report, "Ships currently have no defense against a ballistic missile attack."

It's a clear certainty that the nation's armed forces must evolve. If only someone knew with clear certainty how.

My thoughts do not aim for your assent -- just place them alongside your own reflections for a while.

--Robert Nozick.

Contact A. Barton Hinkle at (804) 649-6627 or bhinkle@timesdispatch.com.