Hello all – this is Michael Kraig of the Stanley Foundation, taking the place of Christopher Preble for this week. 

I’ll start off the festivities by expounding on my favorite theme of late: the extremely limited utility of the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA), and the larger issue underlying it, which is the idea that US national security and global security can be based on the perfection of deterrent, threat-making, and warfighting capabilities.

To start, it’s good to remember what the RMA ultimately means: a better ability to track, identify, and destroy targets of strategic or tactical value, in order to assure victory in warfare.  So a first place to start is asking, “to what degree does the ability to destroy targets at any time, anywhere, provide security for the average US citizen?”  This basic question usually gets lost in the jumble of acronyms and impressive-sounding concepts such as Full Spectrum Dominance.

My thesis is that the RMA is the conventional extension of a once-nuclear military strategy and nuclear operations (STRATCOM now is in the conventional surveillance and warfighting game, that is, the mission of “global strike,” not restricted to nukes alone), and that by sheer inertia and bad/absent policy guidance, has become our de facto national security strategy (not just our military doctrine or defense posture). 

If there were true bipartisan agreement on a wider national security strategy, the technical and tactical utility of spending billions on R&D and procurement for fighting the next major power war would be judged on its true merits toward fulfilling that strategy.  The problem is, in the absence of such agreement, the RMA, as an extension of nuclear deterrence and warfighting doctrine/operations, essentially has become our national security strategy – at least if one judges things by our budgetary choices (as the existentialists say, “you are what you do”).  The 1996 brief by Harlan Ullman and James P. Wade on Shock and Awe, in short, is not just a tactical military doctrine; due to the strategic vacuousness of Clinton years NSS’s and the purposeful machinations of the Bush Administration, what should be a tactical tool is in fact our entire approach: identify an enemy; coercive that enemy to make them back down (they have no legitimate interests we should consider recognizing or satisfying); destroy that enemy’s will to fight; achieve victory (or convince them to back down without hostilities); and then achieve policy aims through total subjugation of the enemy (regime’s) demands and interests.

This assumes, of course, that the primary threat to US security is an enemy regime; and moreover, that the interests, goals, ideology, and demands of said regime are not based at all on the popular will of the people – as laid out succinctly by CATO analysts Stanley Kober at a recent Stanley Foundation dialogue. 

The foundational problem with this approach is that increasingly, nationalism in the Developing World, based on a rise in economic prosperity coupled with a great deal of alienation due to the dislocations of globalization on local cultures, is reaching new heights – even in authoritarian states.  It is simply not accurate to say that states/regimes who disagree with US goals and values will quit their disagreements once the big bad wolf is deposed – not just for Iraq, but in cases throughout the Developing World, as former intelligence analyst Graham Fuller has recently pointed out.    

At a more concrete level, there is even a question whether the highest-price toys actually do what they are supposed to do: precisely destroying targets so as to save US troops’ lives while decimating the enemy’s will. In a recent presentation by Stephen Biddle of the Council on Foreign Relations, based on in-depth study fo the Afghanistan and Iraq campaigns in 2002-03, he concludes that  ”[T]he effectiveness of standoff precision technology tends to be highest against opponents that are pretty easy to deal with in other ways anyway.”  In brief: when high-tech, expensive weapons did their job, it was against badly-concealed or poorly trained forces that could have been just as easily dispatched (with low risk) by more traditional conventional weapons or by ground troops; while when this weaponry failed, it failed against exactly the “hard cases” (well-trained and concealed forces) that most needed to be destroyed in order to save troops’ lives.    

In recognition of these problems, many say it is time to quit using the same military hammer for all nails, and we should confine ourselves to a “hedge” for the low-probability event of another major state-to-state war (a war of necessity, that is, not a war of choice such as Iraq).  As Michael O’Hanlon and Fred Kagan have recently pointed out,

“The priority placed on gathering and disseminating targeting data and striking the targets thereby identified has proven clearly inadequate in complex urban, post-conflict, counterinsurgent, and stabilization operations….A more discriminating and economy-minded modernization strategy would equip only part—not most or all—of the armed forces with extremely sophisticated and expensive weaponry. That high-end component would hedge against new possibilities, such as an unexpectedly rapid modernizing of the Chinese armed forces.”

The problem is, a) everyone has disagreements of what “hedge” means; and b) once this notion is turned over to the Services and to Congress, the inertia of pursuing absolute perfection in precision-strike, full-spectrum-dominance warfighting capabilities means that there is no practical, obvious limit to either funding or goals. 

In regard to (a), if you are a traditional balance-of-power (neo)-Realist, then off-shore balancing, deterrence, and preparations for war are actually the largest part of your national security strategy, hence, “hedge” means funding heavy conventional weaponry procurements, forward basing in Asia, and technical improvements across the board; see for instance the concrete military recommendations of China-expert-Realist Robert Ross, (pp. 5-8), where forward bases with the latest F-22 and other stand-off strike vehicles should be pursued with vigor.  See also Barry Posen on “Command of the Commons”, where his recommendations for sea dominance essentially approves of most if not all major space, air, and sea heavy conventional warfighting procurements/improvements.  (It should be noted that when I asked Bob Ross to talk about limitations on space weaponization in his Policy Brief for us, given that the latter might cause rather than avoid conflict with China, he refused to recommend any such limitations in his final draft). 

And this segues into (b), which is that once the mission of deterrence, dissuasion, and warfighting is turned over to the bureaucrats and those on the Hill (of either party), there is no clear guidance of any kind on what constitutes a viable minimum capability – i.e., on what risks we are willing to take in regard to major power war in order to divert funds to other uses such as foreign aid, peace enforcement, responsibility to protect (Rwanda situations), post-conflict reconstruction, diplomatic capabiliites, and so on.  No President of either party has provided any clear instruction on what level of uncertainty and imperfection of warfighting capabilities the US is willing to live with – despite all the talk in DC by experts about “integrated” defense and national security budgets.  (Integration means trade-offs between opportunities and risks). 

Under the current planning and budgeting framework, in short, the overarching military goal of perfection of warfighting and capabilities for military victory has not itself been bounded within clear, delimited parameters.  Thus, it should not be surprising that “hedge” can mean a new global strike bomber; global missile defense; new Striker brigades that have a largely conventional warfighting goal; more surveillance satellites; space weapons; improved nuclear warheads; improved nuclear missiles; new submarines and destroyers; new fighters; hyper-sonic cruise missiles; and anything else the imagination can conjure.  And so…the “hedge” becomes a very slippery slope indeed, where pursuit of perfection in warfighting/victory capabilities continues (as in times past) to take up the lionshare of $$, away from stabilization, diplomacy, preventive activities like arms control, foreign aid, and homeland defense items like port security. 

And this seems to me the central dilemma: what clear, concise, and rational boundaries can be put on pursuit of the RMA?  What are the boundaries of the hedge?  When does preparation for the low-probability event of traditional, major power war become dysfunctional, and hurt rather than help US security?  Only when policymakers and military planners alike attempt to answer this question (or merely ask it) will we start down the road of a truly integrated and holistic national security strategy. 

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