Size Military to Strategy, Not Vice Versa
ecent comments by public officials and leaked drafts have created ambiguity about what our national military strategy actually is. In some instances involving foreign policy and military options, ambiguity has great merit, but it has considerably less to recommend it as an approach for internal planning. When it comes to the difficult and demanding practice of crafting guidance for developing necessary military capabilities and forces, clarity of purpose is critical.
The issue at hand is this: Does the United States aspire to be able to fight two major theater wars nearly simultaneously? Most in the defense community thought the two-war strategy concept to be the defining concept around which force structure justification, readiness standards and investment plans revolved. Now some senior officials are im-
plying we have never had such a policy, while others have suggested that if we did, we soon won't. This is an important issue deserving resolution. Why? Because the answer drives everything in the Defense Department from operational plans, to modernization strategy, to annual budgeting. This most fundamental piece of national security guidance determines whether our forces are too large, too small or appropriately designed.
Why does so much depend on this single issue? As an old adage warns, "If you don't know where you are going, any road will take you there." Building a technologically advanced and operationally capable military force requires guidance from national leaders on how they view the strategic environment and how they plan to respond to its demands. A national security strategy, from which a military strategy is theoretically derived, should serve two functions. First, it should articulate policy. The strategy signals to possible adversaries that we are focused on the challenges they pose. Second, it provides guidance to the numerous government agencies with national security roles. Cabinet officers and their staffs benefit from having a general idea of how they should orient their efforts. The very process of crafting a strategy forces interagency coordination and potentially provides a device for allocating responsibilities.
The current status of both the process and its products suggest that these rather modest objectives are not being well served.
Planning or Afterthought?
To force national leaders to address such issues, the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Defense Reorganization Act required the President to annually submit to Congress a national security strategy report. The idea was first proposed in the report of President Ronald Reagan's Commission on Defense Management, chaired by former Deputy Defense Secretary David Packard.
The Packard Commission recommended the National Security Council provide guidance for the Defense Secretary that included a statement of national security objectives, a statement of priorities among these objectives, and a statement of major Defense policies. The intent was that the Defense Secretary would use this guidance to prepare a fiscally constrained national military strategy that the President would approve as his Defense program and budget.
Executing this logical concept has been a challenge. With the end of the Cold War focus on the Soviet threat, articulating a global national security design has become more difficult. The Bush administration left the task to its successor. But the Clinton administration began reducing the Defense program without first developing either a national security strategy or a national military strategy.
To its credit, the Clinton administration did later articulate a reasonably solid national security concept. The 1993 Bottom-Up Review (BUR) conducted by Defense Secretary Les Aspin recognized numerous challenges in the post-Cold War world. Having just emerged from Desert Storm, the Middle East remained a major security concern, as did North Korea in Asia. The BUR concluded, "it is prudent for the United States to maintain sufficient military power to be able to win two major regional conflicts that occur nearly simultaneously." Iraq and Korea were used as notional scenarios for determining the size and composition of the forces required for this approach, which became known as the "2 MRC strategy." The concern was that the military strategy of the BUR was not based on any announced national security concept. It was another nine months before one was published.
The 1994 Commission on Roles and Missions criticized this sequence and recommended that each new administration conduct a Quadrennial Strategy Review (QSR), described as an interagency "comprehensive strategy and force review" directed by the NSC. The second Clinton administration, encouraged by Congress, conducted a Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) but not the broader strategy review. Seemingly as an afterthought, the National Security Council published a new National Security Strategy on May 16, 1997, just three days before the QDR was released. The release dates suggested that the two documents were produced simultaneously rather than sequentially.
Curiously, the 2 MRC strategy from the BUR was reworded in the QDR. The new document declared, "As a global power with worldwide interests, it is imperative that the United States now and for the foreseeable future be able to deter and defeat large-scale, cross-border aggression in two distant theaters in overlapping time frames, preferably in concert with regional allies." The new National Security Strategy used nearly identical words. Based on recent experience in Haiti and Bosnia, the QDR added the need for American forces to be able "to conduct successfully multiple smaller-scale contingency operations worldwide, and
. . . then deploy to a major theater war in accordance with required timelines." Again, the NSS closely followed this wording, saying, "U.S. forces will remain multi-mission capable and will be trained and managed with multiple missions in mind."
Despite the changed wording from "2 MRC" to "2 MTW," and the substitution of "overlapping time frames" for "nearly simultaneously," senior officials strongly suggested there was no change in the fundamental approach. But was there?
Two Wars at Once
At a Senate hearing on April 29, 1999, during the air campaign against Kosovo, Sen. Robert Byrd, D-W.Va., asked Deputy Defense Secretary John Hamre, "I've heard it said that we have the resources to fight two wars simultaneously. Do you believe that? And does it make any difference where those wars are fought, and with what countries?" Hamre replied, "we have never said we can fight two wars simultaneously." The surprised Byrd spoke for many when he responded, "I've been under that impression for a long, long time."
A few weeks later, a draft of the NSC's new National Security Strategy appeared in the media. The draft suggested that the two wars envisioned would not occur simultaneously, allowing time for U.S forces engaged in the first conflict to "swing" to the second. This concept sounded much like the "win-hold-win" approach to fighting the two conflicts initially proposed during the BUR, but later rejected in favor of the "nearly simultaneously" approach. It seemed to embrace the approach advocated by the Air Force, and seen by many as a rationale for reducing active Army force structure under the assumption that air power alone could halt an invading force.
A few weeks later, however, everything had come full circle. In the Joint Statement on the Kosovo After Action Review, Defense Secretary William Cohen and Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Hugh Shelton said, "it is imperative that the United States, in concert with its allies, be able to deter and defeat large-scale cross-border aggression in two distant theaters in overlapping time frames. In short, we must be able to fight and win two major theater wars nearly simultaneously."
Force Fit
What is going on here? Although some remain uncomfortable with such a scenario-based approach towards force sizing and structure, the basic criticism was that the Clinton administration had not fielded a force large enough or agile enough to meet the demands placed on it. One authority suggested that the administration's strategy was too big for its force and that the force was too big for its budget. In short, there was a serious disconnection between ends and means largely because the force was created and sized before the strategy was announced, and the two never have been fully reconciled. Indeed, the 1997 National Security Strategy and QDR increased the demands on the force by adding small-scale contingency and multi-mission requirements, while further decreasing the services' size. And by avoiding any significant restructuring, the stress on units increased markedly. Accordingly, senior leaders increasingly described the two-war strategy as "high risk."
These recent efforts to reduce the size of the strategy by changing the assumptions behind it are defensive. Principally, they are intended to protect the force structure from further reductions should one of the possible scenarios disappear, most likely Korea. Although the BUR clearly articulated that Iraq and Korea were illustrative, many began to assume they were definitive and that if the North Korean threat disappeared, so would half the force structure. Dropping the "nearly simultaneously" wording, and implicitly reducing the strategy, would seemingly make the existing force structure more consistent with declared intentions and presumably more politically defensible to those wanting to reduce it because it was too large for one war or increase it because it was too small for two.
The United States should retain a two-war strategy and size and design forces to implement it with moderate-to-low risk. The administration and Pentagon need to emphasize that American interests continue to be worldwide, and many are
under increasing pressure. If Saddam Hussein's regime collapses in Iraq, and Kim Jung-Il falls in Korea, they will easily be replaced by major strategic challenges in Iran, China and elsewhere. There is no shortage of stressful "illustrative scenarios." Retaining a capability for strong military responses in distant places will serve as an important deterrent.
Public's Reluctance
At the same time, the United States must avoid deterring itself. Many forget that the vote in the Senate to authorize the use of force against Iraq in January 1991 was 51-47. Given the clarity of the challenge, this was an extraordinarily close outcome reflecting the general reluctance of the American people to resort to arms. Would the vote have been different if Senators were also concerned that a major effort in Iraq would leave us incapable of responding elsewhere? Could that additional concern have changed three votes, and ceded the territory and wealth of Kuwait to Iraq?
Our forces need to be significantly transformed, and our operational concepts reconsidered, if we are going to have the capability to meet such a demanding strategy within projected Defense budgets. The Packard Commission and others have advocated developing a security strategy from which the military strategy can be developed. This requires a logical, sequential process. To date, we have demonstrated limited ability for getting the horse in front of the cart.
Col. M. Thomas Davis retired as the Army Chief of Staff's chief of program development in 1997. He is the author of Managing Defense After the Cold War (Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, 1997) and is directing a study of PPBS for Business Executives for National Security.