It's Going to Be a Bumpy Ride

by Thomas P.M. Barnett and Henry H. Gaffney, Jr.

The Navy is in for some heavy seas if its leaders fail 
to adopt a defense vision that gets them in the Washington game 
and positions them well with the star players—Senator Sam Nunn, 
Congressman Les Aspin, General Colin Powell, and President-elect Bill Clinton

COPYRIGHT: The U.S. Naval Institute, 1993 (January issue, pp. 23-26); reprinted with permission

Conspicuously absent . . .
from this year's election cycle was a coherent debate on the future of U.S. defense policy. Admittedly, in light of this country's domestic difficulties and the general improvement in the world security situation, this debate does not warrant priority right now. But since further big cuts in the defense budget seem inevitable—with renewed efforts to reduce the deficit and fund domestic programs—the next administration and Congress must provide some vision and fashion some policy consensus quickly if they are to avoid mindless reductions by budgetary incrementalism.

Actually, the term "incrementalism" is misleading. When the budget agreement's "fire walls" and "caps" dissolve, come consideration of the fiscal year 1994 budget, Congress will no longer be restrained from shifting defense funds to domestic programs. Capitol Hill may balance the reductions, because many principals there still believe in a strong national defense. But these cuts are likely to be anything but incremental. And if Senator Sam Nunn (D-GA) gets his way, a serious revision of roles and missions among the services will turn a downward glide path into dramatic changes. This is going to be one bumpy ride, and where the defense establishment will end up remains very sketchy.

 
Three Defense Visions

Three possible defense visions are out there, each suggesting a certain slant for military force structure into the next century. The incoming administration of President Bill Clinton and the new Congress, however, eventually will have to sort out just one, since they and the rest of us believe we cannot afford all three.

The visions carry the marks of how far their advocates peer into the future:

• The Transitioneers focus on the near term. They see a world minus the Soviets as still quite dangerous and seek to "assure the transition" to a safer era.
• The Big Sticks look ahead to the next regional dustup. They foresee some dangerous conflicts that could upset the new world order, and echo Theodore Roosevelt's advice to "speak softly and carry a big stick."
• The Cold Worriers take the long view. They worry that internal preoccupation will lead to the dismantling of U.S. military strength, especially in technology, which will render us helpless against the next "global threat," however remote that may seem today.

While the camps differ in the length of their visions, their arguments intersect over three basic questions:

• How much should we reduce the military forces inherited from the Cold War?
• How should we operate these forces in the new era?
• Most important, what future world do we seek, and how does military power help us get there?

The Transitioneers

The Transitioneers' answer to the size question is that the United States should hold onto what has proved to be the best military force in the world by protecting force structure over procurement. Their enemy is global fragmentation, punctuated by ethnic and religious conflicts. The Transitioneers' nightmare is the "Balkans scenario" spreading into the former Soviet republics, where the nukes are. The big backers here have been the George Bush White House and most top Pentagon officials, and their attitude has been "Why change a winning hand?"

As for operations, the Transitioneers emphasize forward presence and quick crisis response. That means troops stationed abroad and naval forces operating around the globe. Examples are "911 calls" involving humanitarian relief, antiterrorism, and rescuing U.S. citizens. Peacetime operations are the crux here, with Transitioneers focusing their day-to-day activities on hotspots of the world. Lately the Persian Gulf has been the focus, but now they are also agonizing over how the United States and other nations might seek to use military power to resolve the appalling situations in the Balkans and Somalia. It is not easy to be the 911 force-cum-SWAT team.

The Transitioneers' long-run strategy is maintaining U.S. access and influence around the globe. Why? The new world order is very shaky, despite the thwarting of aggression in the Gulf War. If this order is to survive at all, the world's sole superpower must lead the ongoing, often painful transition from the still-dissolving Cold War status quo. The Transitioneers' mantras are influence, stabilization, and deterrence, none of which is working in Yugoslavia or Nagorno-Karabakh right now, but may be working in Korea, Cambodia, and Central America.
 

The Big Sticks

The Big Sticks' approach to the size of military forces is that the United States should preserve the combat power needed to disarm regional bullies threatening our vital interests. Potential enemies include such well-known troublemakers as North Korea, Iran, Iraq, and Libya. Worst cases here are proliferation combined with religious radicalism—the nightmare of a united "Islamic Belt" stretching from Casablanca to Jakarta, armed with nukes. The Big Sticks' strongest advocates are Congressman Les Aspin (D-WI) and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Colin Powell, and their shared attitude is "Let's make sure America wins big when the call goes out." This sits well with younger officers and their families, who want to strike hard, not get killed, and come home soon, if they have to fight at all.

For operations, the Big Sticks stress the surge of power projection with bombers, naval forces, and expeditionary land forces. The concept here is to strike out from the U.S. homeland, dominate any regional battle space, and take the offensive at the time of our choosing. They would ensure that ample investments be made in mobility and lift. Day-to-day operations matter less to them than "regional contingencies," with Operation Desert Storm as the template. The Big Sticks focus on the Middle East, but they will go anywhere, anytime.

Citing the superpower status of the United States as prerequisite for any new world order, the Big Sticks focus on preserving core combat capabilities despite declining budgets. These warfighters look to scare off or squash most aspiring regional kingpins. In their view, this approach also keeps the peace so countries that wish to live in peace and prosper can forgo military buildups of their own. But the Big Sticks believe in international support and coalition operations, and will take the time to line one up before striking. The public reports on the Pentagon's Defense Policy Guidance reflect this rationale. Regional aggressors are anathema to the Big Sticks, while their mantras are credibility and decisive force.

The Cold Worriers

The Cold Worriers' view on the size of military forces is that the United States must move from guns to butter and renew itself internally to secure its continued global leadership. The enemy is uncertainty, plus U.S. complacency and retreat from the world. Their nightmare is a fiscally frail United States yielding to economic powerhouses in Europe and Asia. The Cold Worriers' loudest proponents are congressmen whose attitude is "Let's meet our real national security needs by putting America first."

While not isolationist, the Cold Worriers show little interest in managing current events with military power. Ethnic troubles? See Los Angeles. Proliferation? Try handguns, teenage pregnancies, AIDS, and crack. More internal definitions of national security count here, such as Senator Nunn's plan to have military personnel augment social programs. Viewing industrial jobs, military bases, and reserves as important political links to the public, the Cold Worriers turn the U.S. vision inward to its slow growth rate and decaying infrastructure.

For Cold Worriers, stemming global chaos is secondary to getting our own house in order. As for regional troublemakers, Team USA just waxed the world's fourth-largest army in nothing flat. In their opinion, the best way to keep our global leadership is to dispel the stench of decline. Things are safe for now, so they would take advantage and preserve those capabilities the United States needs most for building the military of the future. They are especially proud of U.S. technological prowess and do not want to lose it. The Cold Worriers' mantras are dual-use, industrial base, and competitiveness.

Connections to Strategy and Force Structure

Those are the highfalutin' national security concepts, but how do they translate into military strategy and force structure?

The Transitioneers favor the beat-cop or community-policing analogy: the United States must be out there deterring crime and promoting peace. Otherwise we get called in later to clean up the mess, usually at higher cost. Platform numbers count more than sophisticated weapons, since we need large numbers to cover the world on a regular basis. The Navy and Marine Corps are featured players in this posture.

The Big Sticks like the SWAT-team analogy: the United States gets called out only for the really nasty jobs that local authorities cannot handle. Warfighting and readiness are crucial, meaning we keep our edge in people and technology. The Air Force and Army are heavy hitters in this military, although naval forces may set the stage by arriving first and can contribute to the big effort as well from a different direction.

The Cold Worriers employ the analogy of the Lone Ranger armed with small, high-tech, silver-bullet forces. Keys include reserves, prototypes, limited production runs, and breakthrough technologies. The domestic side of defense spending plays heavily through jobs and spin-off technologies. The winners here include advanced platforms such as the V-22 tiltrotor aircraft, the Seawolf (SSN-21) submarine or its successor, the AX bomber, and any missile-defense system.

All three camps stress the unique U.S. capacity—and thus responsibility—for global leadership, especially in the security sphere. But the Gulf War experience, the new domestic atmosphere, and constrained federal budgets all conspire to force our political leaders to set priorities. It seems clear the United States cannot afford all three defense visions, nor does it make sense to assign one vision to each of the services. Hard choices will have to be made within each service, however, if they hope to keep pace with the public's still-evolving definitions of U.S. national security, not to mention surviving the likely budgetary bloodbath beginning in fiscal year 1994.

Looking at the Navy and Marine Corps

So how does the Department of the Navy play in these different visions, with their competing goals? One thing is clear: naval forces cannot go their separate ways anymore. They have been strongly admonished to join the nation. The Goldwater-Nichols Act, the riots in Los Angeles, and the Tailhook scandal all say that they have to be sensitive to U.S. culture and economy, and to work closely with their fellow services, the new administration, and Congress. Any other approach is just asking for trouble.

With the collapse of the Soviet threat, many defense experts foresaw a decidedly maritime slant to U.S. force posture—no matter what the budgetary outcome—since most of our overseas forces were being pulled home and even disbanded. By default, the Navy and Marine Corps would be the forces left out there to perform the great bulk of day-to-day security tasks. But as time passes, the United States still maintains sizable forces in Europe, Korea, and Japan, so it is not yet clear which are the prime forward forces. More evidence came during Desert Shield and Desert Storm, when the Navy and Marine Corps seemed disappointed that they were not asked to run the show all by themselves. The truth was that the United States could readily defeat a regional power like Iraq only by applying overwhelming force, that is, by using a very large portion of its military assets. Most telling of all, however, is the emerging reality that most of the messy situations cropping up in the Cold War's wake (Yugoslavia, Somalia, the Kurds, etc.) are conflicts internal to states, where the adversaries rarely pay much heed to naval forces steaming on the horizon, however menacing.

Since the Cold War's end, senior Navy leaders, as well as the surface community, have tended to favor the Transitioneer argument, because concepts such as presence, access, and influence pervade it and because it requires large numbers of platforms. They see naval forces as the only forces truly deployed forward—the glue of the Mediterranean and the Pacific. The tendency here is to believe the Navy can almost single-handedly assure the transition to a more peaceful world where commerce flows freely. After all, the United States is a maritime nation that communicates with the world only across the seas.

But as Desert Storm reminded the Navy and Marine Corps, the Big Sticks have the upper hand now, and the name of the game is overwhelming force applied in joint fashion both over land and from the sea. Desert Storm shifted the focus from numbers of platforms for open-ocean warfare to what you do with those platforms in littoral warfare to influence events ashore directly. The naval contribution can still be quite substantial, as Desert Storm showed, even if naval forces cannot do the whole job themselves. Within the naval communities, the Marines are most drawn to the Big Sticks' approach because of its emphasis on projecting power ashore, something that should force more blue-green integration (i.e., more blue support for green operations).

For now, this debate between the Transitioneers and Big Sticks has left the guardians of the U.S. military's finest technological achievement—nuclear-powered submarines—out in the cold. Subs were not a very convincing presence during the Persian Gulf crisis, and they could not deliver as many Tomahawks as surface ships could during Desert Storm. But they have emerged as the premier U.S. nuclear-deterrent force, which is warm comfort for the Cold Worriers. The submarine community also found surprise congressional allies who rose to defend the two or three Seawolf submarines under construction out of concern for the jobs (and votes) it represents for the country's economic (and their own political) future. Given their common fears about the industrial base, the Cold Worriers and the Navy could be natural allies in preserving and advancing technology for an unknown and possibly adverse future.

Finally, the much-troubled naval aviation community seems to be split between the medium- and long-term visions. Some aviators like the Big Sticks' emphasis on air power, but they fear the focus on jointness will diminish the role for carrier air. Others prefer the Cold Worriers' push for silver bullets, of which the AX would certainly be one, but worry that the new domestic focus will deprive the Navy of the large funds it needs to keep all those carriers stocked with such costly aircraft.

It is probably unreasonable to expect the Navy to be any closer to the consensus about the future of U.S. defense vision than either the government or the public. But while the Navy Department has expended much energy developing a new internal vision over recent months, the long-postponed budgetary debate over the post-Cold War U.S. defense posture has finally arrived. One hopes that reorganization and the White Paper " . . . From the Sea" will help the Navy join the fray, because the Base Force has clearly reached the end of its life span.

The Choices Ahead

We return to the basic point: these visions, taken together, are unaffordable. Choices and compromises are inevitable, especially within the Department of the Navy. Naval forces will probably find the broadest range of satisfaction if they cast their lot with the Big Sticks, rejoining the nation by becoming truly joint team players, as the White Paper has declared. They also can retain their first-class status as warfighters by maintaining their power-projection capabilities. If the touch choices are made on procurement (and they will be unpleasant), naval forces also should be able to improve their technology by preserving a reasonably good share of their current investment budget. The submariners have the greatest problem, but Congress is apparently not inclined to dismantle their technological base. So that capability may yet survive as we grope toward a better future.

Even under the most dire budgetary predictions, the United States will still have a Navy second to none, even with substantial reductions in platform numbers. This still sizable force will deploy freely around the world, maintaining its knowledge of the sea and coastal environments and staying in contact with the navies of other nations. Our sailors will not be deprived of their chance to see the world. And they will enjoy more harmonious relations with the other services and U.S. political leadership. But maintaining the best balance among ships, aircraft, modernization, readiness, and deployments will be tricky within the inevitably lower budget levels. The Department of the Navy will be able to manage such a feat only if it continues to regroup the various naval communities and plays the Washington game wholeheartedly.

Dr. Gaffney is Director of Concepts Development at the Center for Naval Analyses.  He was Director of Plans for the Defense Security Assistance Agency from 1981 to 1990.  Dr. Gaffney holds a Ph.D. in Government from Columbia University and served in the U.S. Navy from 1956 to 1959.

Dr. Barnett serves on the Research Staff of the Center for Naval Analyses. He is the author of Romanian and East German Policies in the Third World: Comparing the Strategies of Ceausescu and Honecker (New York: Praeger, 1992), and has written for both The Washington Post and The Christian Science Monitor.  Dr. Barnett holds a Ph.D. in Government from Harvard University.