Read THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES Online
Authors: Philip Bobbitt
THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES (55 page)
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In other words, we cannot decide which RMA to pursue, what force structure to provide, or what criteria to set for intervention until we have a clear idea of the threats we will face. Trying to answer these questions separately leads either to unstated assumptions that are not examined and debated or to ad hockery, where the decisions in each arena are taken as a matter of temporary expediency and a comprehensive strategy is replaced by rules sufficiently flexible always to permit citation but never to enable guidance. What is required is some explicit confrontation of what might be called the “ABC” problem.
“ABC” refers to the classification of potential competitors of the United States by a scheme that would be familiar to any society hostess. States belong to either an “A” list of peers such as Germany, Japan, France, or Russia, a “B” list that includes mid-level developing states with modernized conventional forces and primitive weapons of mass destruction such as Iraq, Iran, India, Pakistan, or North Korea, or a “C” list composed of militarily modest states—such as Libya, Serbia, Cuba—and nonstate actors, such as various terrorist, criminal, or insurgent groups that often pose threats to American national interests.
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The ABC problem may be stated as follows: should the United States focus on outdistancing potential peer competitors to such a degree that the position we now enjoy—of having no hostile peers—can be indefinitely extended; or should we instead focus on those states and conflicts that might threaten our vital interests in theatres of traditional importance to us such as Europe, Pacific Asia, and the Persian Gulf; or realign our thinking to focus less on conflicts like the Gulf War and more on conflicts like that in Yugoslavia, as well as economic, developmental, and nontraditional threats including terrorism and disease. (That is, which threats should drive U.S. policies— A, B, or C?)
The choices appear rather stark, so much so that thinking about U.S.
policy in this way has inevitably tended to coalesce behind the “B” option on the theory that the forces required to defeat “B” list adversaries are so substantial that they can always be made available for “C” type expeditions while, through constant modernization, presenting an imposing threat to any ambitious peers. The B choice seems less a total commitment than the others, which almost seem reckless if their bets about the future turn out to be wrong.
For example, an “A” threat strategy seeks an innovative, high-tech military using all the potential of the RMA's systems of space-, sea-, air-, and ground-based networks of sensors. These sensors would identify, track, target, and destroy enemy forces, putting the United States so far in advance of other states technologically that cooperation from our peers is almost their only rational strategy. The money for all this comes from a downsized force structure and a degree of specialization that may make the military almost irrelevant to low-intensity conflicts, however.
But what if this implicit guess about the future—that current threats like those posed by North Korea or Iraq are diminishing—is wrong? Are we really prepared to scrap the reliance on battle platforms (aircraft carriers, fighter jets) and combat manpower that has thus far been supremely successful? Can we afford to decommission whole armies, collapse traditional service distinctions, and give up forward bases on an assumption about future technologies? And what if allies and multilateral institutions will not take up the slack in handling humanitarian and peace-keeping operations? Then the “A” list strategy begins to look exceedingly narrow, even disabling. As the historian T.R. Fehrenbach remarks, “You may fly over a land forever; you may bomb it, atomize it, pulverize it and wipe it clean of life—but if you desire to defend it, protect it, and keep it for civilization, you must do this on the ground, the way the Roman legions did, by putting your young men into the mud.”
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To an even greater degree, a strategy that focuses primarily on “C” type threats is highly limiting. At the moment, none of the world's international institutions is capable of taking responsibility for world order, yet the threats to world order—as in Yugoslavia and Rwanda—typically arise within states, in contexts where the United States is loath to act alone. Moreover, “C” type threats are, by definition, those that least engage our national interest. To build an entire defense posture around them seems foolhardy.
So we muddle on, having settled on a strategy built around outdated concepts of conflict between nation-states, maintaining highly expensive conventional forces that are nevertheless not really capable of handling two major regional contingencies simultaneously, putting our resources into incremental modernization that increases readiness but does not really
exploit the potential of the RMA, repeatedly stripping forces configured for major conventional conflicts in order to use them—very expensively— in low-intensity conflicts for which they are not trained or equipped, refusing to look ahead to the day when a peer competitor leapfrogs our current technological advantage while we sink more and more funds into refurbishing plant and equipment that soon will be obsolete.
Although one could say with much justification that our current strategy owes more to General Ulysses S. Grant than to General Colin Powell, let's go back and look at the Viet Nam and Gulf War conflicts that were so fruitful for current doctrine. I propose that the “lesson” of Viet Nam was not that the war effort was insufficiently supported, used too modest means, etc., but that the United States had difficulty fighting an opponent who was hard to isolate from the civilian population and therefore difficult to target and track, whose shoestring logistics were hard to interdict, and whose political elites were far more disciplined than our own (perhaps owing to the greater centrality of the conflict for them than for us). Suppose that is the lesson of Viet Nam.
And imagine, too, that there is a lesson from the Gulf War, but not one for us so much as for our adversaries. The lesson is this: On behalf of nakedly aggressive territorial seizure, do not attack the United States with conventional armies, invitingly massed for an assault from a force you have permitted to project itself many thousands of miles to your frontier. Do not fight the United States, in other words, without weapons of mass destruction, without plausible political pretexts, without disguised forces, and without maintaining the initiative.
If these are appropriate lessons from the Gulf and from Southeast Asia, then the strategic doctrines we have derived from our experiences there are almost precisely wrong. Not only are we untrained for low-intensity conflicts, and heedless of the necessity to maintain our current military dominance over potential peer competitors, we are not even well configured to fight the “B” list adversaries who will adopt tactics we are unprepared for and shun the tactics against which we train. On the other hand, if we drastically reduce our forces in pursuit of either “A” list or “C” list objectives, doesn't that send an inviting message to those states like North Korea and Iraq, which continue to put enormous funds into the maintenance of large conventional forces, that perhaps this time a conventional confrontation with the United States can be won?
Book I has argued that periodic revolutions in military affairs bring about changes in the constitutional order and that this relationship is mutually affecting, that is, innovations in the constitutional order can also bring changes in strategy. Perhaps if we focus on the nature of the market-state, we may find some guidance as to which strategy to pursue.
The characteristics of a market-state may make it possible for the United States to devise a strategy of long-term dominance over peer competitors that will enable it to prevail in conventional confrontations as well as to field expeditionary forces. In 1992 a U.S. Defense Planning Guidance was leaked
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that called for the United States to prevent any military superpower from emerging anywhere in Eurasia. This objective—an “A” list strategy—was to be achieved through U.S.-led alliances and coalitions. Interestingly, the Guidance proposed that this could be accomplished with a Gulf War military, a highly dubious proposition.
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But the Guidance also suggested that the United States should aggressively pursue the enabling technologies of the RMA as a political deterrent to the emergence of a peer challenger in the next two decades.
Within this time frame, the United States may well face a challenger of significant economic, industrial, and technological potential, one that can also exploit the advantages of the information age for military purposes. A number of states are currently working in this direction, pursuing their own [military] revolutions based on, among other things, the acquisition and integration into their military establishments of long-range strike systems; weapons of mass destruction; space-based surveillance, targeting, and communications; and precision-strike munitions.
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The unique strategic demands of the market-state—especially its requirement to project overwhelming force without risking lives, and to exit dangerous involvements quickly—put a premium on the development of high technology as an arbitrageur of, and even a substitute for, human risk. This was clearly evident in NATO's air campaign in Kosovo, which could not have been executed successfully even a decade ago.
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The pursuit of these enabling technologies will face two hurdles: the reluctance to put money into research and development while downsizing the force structure; and the inertial tendency to invest in technical fixes for the tactics and organization of the present.
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Instead, the United States should use the RMA as a basis for changing its forces' roles and missions, leveraging from the promise of technology a rational basis for reorganizing the services. The RMA should not be treated as merely a happy event that is useful to our current strategic plan
ning but rather as both a driver and a reflection of the broad period of change in strategy and the international order that we are now entering. As Jeffrey Cooper has written:
The “Information Revolution” and the change to postindustrial economies… presage significant changes not only for the means of warfare, but also for the objectives of war. Increasing near-real-time global telecommunications, the rise of centrifugal forces within the [State], all raise questions as to the future objectives of interstate conflict, the appropriate strategies for pursuing national objectives under these conditions, and the operational means for conducting war.
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The nation-state's strategic objectives of total war against the opposing nation, destroying its mass armies and its industrial base, terrorizing its civilian population, and forcing capitulation should give way to more precise and limited objectives. With the decreasing importance of territory and raw materials, and the increasing role of knowledge and computation/ communications infrastructure, attacks will require more sophisticated weapons and forces and will aim at critical nodes—including leadership cadres—rather than the seizure and holding of territory. Indigenous mercenary forces can be used where ground action is necessary. At the same time, new peer competitors will be able to leapfrog the former superpowers tethered to vast, fixed, capital investments that require long periods of amortization, and instead more quickly acquire the power to strike with means that are more nimble and versatile.
This menacing fact also holds the most promise for an American RMA because it points the way to a solution to the underlying strategic dilemma. A forward-looking RMA can create the ability to strike at “C” list targets (as in the precision-bombing campaigns against terrorists like Osama bin Laden and states like Serbia) as well as “B” list forces because the “B” list competitors do not actually threaten the American homeland and therefore can be ceded the temporary territorial victories their large forces can seize while these forces are punished into political submission.
Some of the funds for this change can come from force downsizing. Once the two-major-regional-conflicts scenario is abandoned, it ought to be possible to maintain substantial forces abroad—100,000 in Europe, 100,000 in Asia, 20,000 in the Gulf—far more cheaply, while reducing the overall number of troops. Nevertheless, an RMA initiative (for these purposes) would probably augment the Pentagon's research and development funding by about 20 percent.
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The emergence of the market-state and the technology it has spawned can provide new incentives in international security affairs. These new incentives will, however, depend upon developing more effective means of
power projection (in the absence of secure foreign bases, for example) and framework intervention forces.
Just as the “revolution” in the constitutional order of the State will have an impact on national security policy, the RMA will bring changes in the operations and structure of states, in the mutual, two-way process we have observed in Part II.
The universal trend in market-states away from conscription toward a professionalized army (even if it sometimes exists side-by-side with a conscripted reserve force) is another feature of what is, in this case, misleadingly called “privatization” by the market-state.
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The “short-service conscripts… equipped with the products of a high-volume military [industrial] manufacturing”
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that were a notable innovation of the state-nation and whose use was intensified by the nation-state in the Long War are passing from the scene to be replaced with more educated, more highly trained professionals.
The market-state does not so clearly demark the military from the commercial as did the nation-state. In market-states around the world, government-owned defense industries are being sold, and tasks that were once the exclusive prerogative of military institutions are being privatized. Private contractors handled much of the logistical support for the U.S. interventions in Haiti and Somalia. Privately owned satellites are leased out for military and intelligence functions, to say nothing of the reliance of government on CNN and other news-gathering organizations. Today, almost all of U.S. Department of Defense communications go across the public switched network. The other side of this blurring of lines between the commercial and the governmental is that governments now can purchase weapons—perhaps fissile material, military expertise, and strategic planning—from a wide range of private sources, some of which, in a further blurring, are linked to corruption within governments. Thus the possibility exists that market-states that had been relegated to the second rank strategically by events in the Long War will be able to catapult into competition with the United States if they can generate the wealth to do so. Those market-states whose economies are technologically sophisticated will be able to quickly convert that sophistication into military power.
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The new market-states are transforming themselves by replacing
economies and cultures that were formed by the Industrial Revolution with new forms arising from the Information Revolution. The latter promotes the creation and use of knowledge, just as industrial machines enhanced the use of physical power and production. Market-states provide ideas and services—ideas about society and the development and use of technology, and services like education, medical care, and investment allocation—to each other and to the rest of the world. The United States has already found itself, in the Gulf War, in the position of providing intelligence and information to other states and selling its services as a war-making state. If it can maintain its legitimacy as a provider of collective goods to the community of market-states; maintain its lead in the development of new strategic technologies and learn to apply these new techniques to the problems of international security; and, most important, enhance its reputation as a legitimate and benign broker of those services, it will provide the model that other states, in the mimetic way we have studied thus far in this volume, will copy or, if they cannot copy, will react against with innovations of their own. Such a state sets the terms of competition.
Innovative leadership, like that which brought us the Nunn-Lugar legislation in 1992, can deploy the techniques of the market-state in a strategically significant way. As of mid-1998, Nunn-Lugar funds had provided $2.4 billion to destroy or convert Soviet weaponry. More than 4,800 nuclear weapons have been eliminated; more than forty large engineering projects have been undertaken to safeguard or dismantle Soviet weapons.
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Funds were provided to find new jobs for former Soviet nuclear scientists and engineers. Housing for former Soviet military personnel was subsidized so that they could oversee this effort. But while Nunn-Lugar is a shining example of what can be done, it is pathetically insufficient. Russia still possesses enough plutonium for 25,000 to 50,000 weapons and enough highly enriched uranium for 40,000 to 80,000 weapons,
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to say nothing of its immense biological weapons stocks. What is needed is a vastly enlarged program that pays Russian officials to quarantine weapons under U.S.-Russian supervisory auspices. Congressional efforts to impose careful auditing procedures, to prevent graft or unlawful diversions, should not distract us from the main objective. The market-state can—relatively cheaply—have far more impact, far more quickly than arms control agreements. On the other hand, if the United States doesn't buy these goods, some other state may.
The American military structure, however, is at present poorly organized to fully innovate in the direction of the change in constitutional order experienced by the State. As Eliot Cohen observed:
The United States may drive the revolution in military affairs, but only if it has a clear conception of what it wants military power for—which
it does not now have. Indeed when the Clinton administration formulated its defense policy in 1993 it came up with the Bottom-Up Review, which provided for a force capable of fighting simultaneously two regional wars assumed to resemble the Gulf War of 1991. By structuring this analysis around enemy forces similar to those of Iraq in that year—armor-heavy, with a relatively large conventional but third-rate air force—it guaranteed a conservatism in military thought…
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The current unwillingness of the United States to consider real challenges to its primacy from advanced market-states that may employ these strategic innovations is of course troubling. Current American deployments overseas are ludicrously low and in any case will be increasingly vulnerable to missile attack. They could not possibly serve any military function in a large conflict other than as a nuclear tripwire whose activation would immediately drive states within its theatre into major-state proliferation—that is, the proliferation of nuclear weapons to states such as Germany or Japan. The real function of such forces ought to be as expeditionary units configured for small scale, rapid interventions.
Should the United States direct the technological promise of an RMA to “A” list objectives? First, these new technologies may make possible the preemption of nascent programs of nuclear or other weapons of mass destruction. Precisely because the U.S. nuclear arsenal is effectively out of bounds for use, only very precise integration of intelligence and precision destruction could enable American conventional forces to destroy a hostile power's potential industrial development of chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons. Second, although we mustn't minimize the single terrorist attack sponsored by a state that disguises its role—imagine if the World Trade Center bombing had occurred with a nuclear device
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—the threat to a benign world order or to U.S. primacy within it is unlikely to come from the “rogue” nations of the Third World, but from stiff competitors who have the technology, technocracy, wealth, and world-dominating ambitions of the most (not the least) successful states. Several states are at work on applying the technologies of the information revolution to military affairs, just as earlier generations applied the machines of the Industrial Revolution to the making of war. Third, the RMA can lead to a complete recasting of the force structure,
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reshaping old forms of organization,
using machines in place of men and women who currently perform strictly mechanical tasks (a holdover from conscription when commanders thought labor was cheap), and stimulating investment in research and development. Fourth, technology and tactics appropriate to “A” list objectives can be adapted, as was seen in Kosovo and Afghanistan, to “C” list wars, so long as the capability for the projection of a land force with close air support capabilities is not entirely scrapped.
The fruits of the information revolution, however, will not be automatically transferred from the private sector to the very different applications required by the security needs of the market-state. To realize their full potential, these technologies must be combined with new tactics executed by new organizational structures. A military establishment content to fine-tune existing operating strategies, enhancing them only with superaccurate weapons of somewhat greater range and making these weapons smaller, cheaper, and more manageable, will scarcely reap the benefits of the developments that are underway.
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Not every application of the RMA is suitable to a market-state strategy for the United States. As Richard Betts has pointed out, the RMA runs the risk of reinforcing a high-tech, large-unit way of thinking in the armed services that was given such impressive validation in the Gulf War but which is less useful in unconventional conflicts saturated with civilians, and which invites asymmetrical attack. Most terrifyingly, because the United States is so well placed to exploit a high-tech RMA, conflict with a power such as Russia (over a dispute in Eastern Europe or one of the states of the former Soviet Union) or China (over Taiwan)—that is, with a great power whose vital interests are at stake in a territorial conflict—invites resort to nuclear weapons on the part of the American adversary, because almost no other option would be effective against a United States armed with advanced twenty-first-century technology. Considerations such as these prompted Eliot Cohen to observe, “the revolution in military affairs may bring a kind of tactical clarity to the battlefield, but at the price of strategic obscurity.”
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In the present, post – Cold War period, the enhanced power of conventional weapons—that is, nonnuclear weapons—will be of paramount importance, and indeed it is striking how little discussion there is in the RMA debate about the role of nuclear weapons. I believe this aversion to nuclear warfare has to do with the nature of the market-state and its evolution in response to the strategic innovations, including the use and threat of use of nuclear weapons, that won the Long War. We can anticipate that
the post cold war era… is likely to put a political (and military) premium on such non-nuclear means. Only further progress in integrating advanced technologies will provide the strategic reach, striking power, and maneuverability necessary to address the theater level of war without resort to nuclear weapons…
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The market-state, with its emphasis on efficiency and economy, demands that the military act within tight budgets, accept fewer casualties (even among enemy civilians), and not involve itself in potentially recrim-inative hostilities. Nuclear weapons haunt such a state because they are too devastating, and too imprecise; kill too many civilians; and, above all, because of their genetic and environmental consequences, make war into the state-destructive, revanchism-creating sort of conflict from which there is no return and, ironically in light of their lethality, no end. A state struck with nuclear weapons will never get over it, whereas the market-state wants to conduct a transaction and then to move on. The market-state depends upon bargaining, which an actual nuclear attack renders almost impossible. There is an apocalyptic savagery about a nuclear attack that calls forth all the atavistic bitterness that the cosmopolitan market-state wishes to be free of. These factors drive the market-state toward new technologies that promise an escape from the reliance on nuclear weapons.
Moreover, the market itself, from which much innovation derives, enhances the drive for technological advancement. While there is ample scope for U.S. defense expenditures on research, the market-state is nevertheless dependent on the private sector to create these technologies; this dependence will accelerate the pace of the RMA
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because the marketplace will quickly make obsolete communications technologies for which the U.S. government is the only purchaser.
The arrival of the market-state has imposed severe budget restraints on defense expenditures. The result is that the United States is tempted to simply define away the problems of a large conflict (and of small interventions) in favor of conflicts with states that greatly resemble Iraq. One wonders how many defense intellectuals and planners are thinking about major-state competition and conflict.
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If the United States is to sustain its competitive advantage, to put this in market-state terms, it will have to determine how best to reinvent a force structure that has hitherto been supremely successful—a difficult assignment. Yet this must be done in order to take advantage most efficiently of the options that new technology and the market are making available to that force structure and to its competitors. A radical restructuring of the armed forces may well prove to be our best means of sustaining its current primacy because the United States, as a culture, is relatively adaptable to change (even if the military subculture is less so). Doubtless it is also true that U.S.-led alliances and coalitions can prevent another military superpower from emerging in Europe or Asia, but it is unlikely that the United States will be called to such leadership
unless it is clear that we are fitted by a wide margin, militarily and in other ways, for the role. In an era in which our marginal economic advantage may be increasing but our share of world GDP is declining, this will require astute strategic planning. It is the very antithesis of this planning to assume that our main competitors in the world are Iraq, Iran, North Korea, and Libya.