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Deleted ScenesDeleted Scene #25Chapter Six: The Global Transaction Strategy Section: You're Ruining My Military! Commentary: This twenty-fifth "deleted scene" is a significant cut. It would have appeared atop of page 302. With #23 and #24, this deletion almost constitutes an alternative reading of the section, one in which I get far more down and dirty about when interventions can and should happen, and answer the question about how many we can likely do given the current force. Again, I know Mark Warren saw this as too much detail on a basic point more easily transmitted to the average reader in the edited form we offer this section (which, as you may note, is fairly short), but I include it here for readers who want that additional detail. Deleted Scene: How Big an Interventionary Workload Can DOD Handle?[TEXT BEGINS] This list of rogues is not all that terribly long, as I have noted time and time again. Of the roughly 120 states in the Gap, only about a dozen will qualify for this designation at any one time. As for the larger category of failed states, there is typically a good two dozen that qualify for that list at any one time, meaning that when we work Gap security, we worry with only about a quarter of the states there, and we deal with only those at the top of our list. Will the list ever get any shorter? Not really, but the targets will get smaller over time. Of course, overlaying this list of rogues to be addressed is the ongoing global war on terrorism, but that additional task does not expand our to-do list so much as strengthens our sense of prioritization. Our sense of priority in extending the Core's security rule set is crucial on a number of fronts: diplomacy with the rest of the Core's major powers, U.S. domestic politics, and the sheer load limits of the Defense Department. In terms of diplomacy, we must send clear signals to the rest of the Core that the removal of the security threat in question is a win-win situation, meaning good for the Gap as a whole and good for the Core as a whole. Our choices must avoid the perception that America's security interests are being met while those of the rest of the Core are not. That perception will have less to do with the coalition that fights the war than with the coalition that guarantees the subsequent peace. In other words, America must work to dispel the notion that only those states which fight the wars get to participate in the aftermath. Our coalitions should not only be "come as you are" affairs, but likewise "come when you want." Frankly, as we have already seen in Iraq, the blood spilled in the war waged is too soon matched by the blood spilled in the peace kept, so the notion that we should close our posse's membership list upon instigation of hostilities reflects a shortsighted strategy of pettiness and vindictiveness, not real global leadership.1 Our priority must likewise reflect a sense of America's political load-bearing capacity at any one time. Of course, the more win-win situations we create with our interventions, the more likely the size of our coalitions will grow, thus reducing our overall burden. But there is still a sense of what the American political system -- not to mention the American public -- can stand in terms of continuing burden or frequency of interventions. Does this mean Washington must make its case for interventions one situation at a time as far as the public is concerned? By and large, yes. But it also means any administration needs to demonstrate that while our plate may always seem full, it is successfully rotating the menu over time. In short, any administration must avoid the sense of a cumulative build-up, and instead project the image of working its way through a list over time. This means any intervention must progress in two senses: first, it must progress from America's responsibility to the world's responsibility, typically exemplified by the creation of a UN peacekeeping mission; and second, it must progress from a conflict situation run largely by the Pentagon to a nation-building situation run largely by the rest of the U.S. Government. Until both conditions are met, the intervention in question remains on the Pentagon's ledger, which can only grow so large before the White House will start begging off interventions, like we saw with Liberia in the summer of 2003. Finally, our sense of priority must reflect the sheer personnel limits of the U.S. military, and here is where we get to those fears about "ruining the military." As my mentor Hank Gaffney likes to say, the U.S. military is constantly stretched in three competing directions: taking care of its people and maintaining its institutions, managing the world as it finds it, and constantly modernizing its force for future war. This tug of war between past legacies, current responsibilities, and future dangers is what Gaffney calls the "three-way stretch."2 There is no perfect balance between the three. However, the main struggle is typically between those who want to build the force of tomorrow (the Pentagon) and those who must manage the world as they find it (the commanders in the field). In that eternal struggle, the Pentagon typically favors great restraint in choosing where to intervene, because it fears the budget will be eaten up as far as procuring future weapons and platforms (e.g., ships, aircraft, tanks) is concerned. The commanders in the field, naturally, feel the need to manage security situations presented to them, so they tend to favor action over inaction. What usually loses out in this struggle is the maintenance of the institutions, meaning training and readiness, infrastructure upkeep (especially military housing), and the wear and tear on personnel and their families due to the tempo of operations -- otherwise known as quality-of-life considerations. So technology gets bought, and interventions get launched, but the personnel wear out in the end. This is the tale of the 1990s: we bought one military, operated another, and abused our people in the process. Now, the answer of the transformation advocates has long been to pursue technological advances in the here and now so as to limit not only the duration of wars but the number of people involved -- thus managing the three-way stretch as a whole. This is a smart strategy, but it only addresses the war side of the equation, not the management of the peace that follows. So America fights a war in Iraq with great efficiency, but attempts to manage the aftermath -- as critics correctly allege -- "on the cheap." But it is crucial to maintain the distinction here between how well the Pentagon wages war and how poorly it plans for peace. The reason why the Pentagon is so good at war is because that is what it is designed to do: wage war within the context of war. All the "other stuff" has always taken a back seat to that "core warfighting capability." So MOOTW, or military operations other than war, has long been the neglected step-child of strategic planning. For example, we spend more on a single new combat jet than we do on non-lethal weapons in their entirety. This is what gets you a military that can topple Saddam Hussein's regime in weeks, only to end up later firing live rounds into a crowd filled with women and children in order to keep the peace. This also gets you combat troops angry at being left behind in postwar Iraq when they were told that the road home ran through Baghdad ("Just win baby!"). Then there are the reservists and National Guard who thought they would only be sent overseas for major wars (meaning never) and now find themselves trying to run a country the size of California without nearly enough civil affairs specialists and military police. So when a terrorist attack kills U.S. combat troops guarding some electrical generation plant, Congress's first question is, "Why are combat troops performing guard duty?" Good question, but no good answer from the Pentagon other than to deflect any debate on whether America needs a larger army. Now, the military can and does grouse plenty about these unfair situations, especially the reservists and National Guard who feel they were sold a bill of goods in terms of their enlistments. But the sad fact remains that the three-way stretch is not a result of the Pentagon being starved by Congress for funds, but simply a consequence of the choices the Pentagon has made over the post-Cold War era. By planning primarily for war within the context of war and the "big one" with the "near-peer competitor," Pentagon strategists generated their own institutional "train wreck." Of course, Congress is guilty as well, because members there likewise preferred the big-ticket procurement items that led to fabulously large defense contracts for their states and districts. I mean, would you rather vote for a giant new carrier built in your home state or a bunch of crowd control equipment? These enduring biases have yielded a U.S. military that is almost too good at warfighting for its own good, when the goal of shrinking the Gap demands so much more. In effect, we need more civil affairs personnel out of the Pentagon and fewer drive-by regime changes. That means the Pentagon has to realign its spending priorities more toward all those "high demand, low density" assets associated with war within the context of everything else. Does this mean the U.S. must reduce its warfighting capacity and thus endanger U.S. servicemen and women whenever they are forced into combat? Not if the transformation gurus deliver on all those promises of generating a smaller combat force that packs the same old wallop. So, if the transformation advocates wanted a strong rationale for pushing their agenda, they now have it: we need a smaller combat force so we can have a larger constabulary force. This is why the news stories about the military seem so confusing right now? I mean, if you are the average American reading this stuff, it certainly cannot make sense. On the one hand, America is more powerful than ever, but on the other hand we seem more overstretched than ever. We fight wars with minimal casualties but cannot keep the peace without daily losses. Our wars are shorter than ever and cheaper than ever, and yet our troops stay overseas longer than ever and our defense budget is rising. How can all these things be happening at the same time? [1] It took about 6 weeks of war in Iraq to yield 138 U.S. combat deaths, and about three times that length of time (1 May to 26 August) to yield 139 post-conflict combat deaths. [2] This three-way stretch is further described in Thomas P.M. Barnett, "Life After DoDth or: How the Evernet Changes Everything," Proceedings of the U.S. Naval Institute, May 2000. [TEXT ENDS] |
Putnam, 2004 |
