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McNair Paper 60, April 1999, The Revolution in Military Affairs: Allied Perspectives

The American Strategic Challenge

The United States is a global power in a regionally diversified world. Its key allies include all the most significant economic powers in the world. American economic and cultural influence is a significant global force promoting American power, perhaps more as an empire than as a nation-state. But the challenge of working with allies in shaping a new global policy is perhaps more difficult than running an American counter to Soviet power. As the United States seeks to define its global policy for particular regional settings, it is frequently in conflict with its core allies in those regions over both regional policy and its implications for the management of global affairs.

Associated with regional differentiation within the global economy is the growing significance of regional powers within the non-Western world. Iran and the Gulf States in the Middle East, Taiwan and China in the Far East, South Africa on the Horn, and Brazil, Chile, and Argentina in South America are all part of a diversified global economy within which regional powers seek to protect their security and enhance their global significance.

The proliferation of the technological base for the global economy carries with it the diversification of global production of modern arms as well. Although the United States has the only global projection military, proliferation of military technologies will make it harder for land-based forces to operate within specific regional settings in the years ahead. With no peer global competitor, Americans could confuse global capacity with military supremacy within regional settings.

The United States is in a unique historical position within an unprecedented historical epoch: the growth of global interdependence depends in part upon the need to protect the infrastructure of developed economies, yet only the United States as a global power can shape regional coalitions to provide for the defense of the European-Asian-American zone of economic development and security.

A key complication for the new strategic environment comes from the changing nature of power itself. The enhanced interdependence of the developed economies has seen the emergence of a zone of security in need of protection from outside turbulence. Only the United States possesses the global reach to protect this zone, and the need to build effective coalitions among the developed states for operations to meet specific regional challenges is a key requirement for U.S. policy in the years ahead. Global reach and regional coalition building are twin requirements of U.S. policy.

On the one hand, the United States might like to build a global system of security, fitting key allies within an overall division of labor to defend that system. On the other hand, such an effort generates resentment of the United States as a global hegemon and the only global superpower and as such undercuts U.S. power and works to benefit those who might seek to play on the hegemonic theme to knit together an anti-American coalition in the years ahead. This resentment can crystallize into hostile actions against "occupying" U.S. land-based forces, e.g., the attack on Khobar Towers.

In effect, the United States is custodian of a transition from a bipolar superpower world to a new globally interdependent world of shared responsibilities and co-authority with key regional allies in shaping a new world order. The difficulty rests with the United States playing the custodial role in the transition with key regional allies without generating anti-Americanism. Equally important is for key U.S. allies to meet their obligations to build greater capacity to defend the common good and not engage in the luxury of petty criticism of U.S. performance while themselves not fielding capabilities necessary for the common defense tasks.

The challenge is to expand upon or to build effective regional networks by shaping a common defense system against key threats to interallied and American interests. U.S. ability to defend its interests is largely defined by tools of intervention and participation with key allies or with key powers in regions. Its role is shaped by its regional networking capacity. What makes the United States a global power is its ability to leverage relations in one region with another-i.e., its ability to reach beyond itself in one region to engage the participation of other states in other regions. It is not a superpower in the sense of bringing overwhelming force to bear in a hegemonic or unilateral fashion without regard to the ability to work with other states in a given region; it is a networking regional role needed by the United States to defend its interests. In this effort, the United States needs to balance two key dynamics:

The need to have unilateral capabilities to protect national interests
The need to be able to participate in, lead, or contribute to allied coalitions.

If the United States emphasizes only national capabilities and reforms it may not be able to share the challenges of extended defense. If the United States plans only for allied operations it may not have the requisite tools to protect national interests. Balancing the two is critical for effective leadership in the new global situation.

The dynamics of change in allied and U.S. Armed Forces intersect in either the enhancement or reduction of coalition capabilities through their combined forces. From a U.S. standpoint, changes in U.S. forces can:

Enhance national capabilities but reduce multilateral capabilities (e.g., via technological innovations that create powerful military options but that are not easily compatible with allied or potential coalition partners)
Enhance coalition capabilities by providing means not available to other partners on a national basis (e.g., space-based intelligence means)
Create forces that are powerful triggers to coalition formation
Provide tools for participation in coalitions led by others.

Balancing these choices is critical for effective leadership in the new regional networking environment. Regional defense networks are developing around specific common interests. The term network is used rather than alliance, because the developing networks may not have the same obligations as alliances, and they include bilateral arrangements plus other nonmilitary organizations. The implication for the United States is that networks may develop wherein the United States has little or no input; consequently, multinational actions by other nations, including traditional allies with minimal consideration for U.S. interests, could become more frequent. U.S. options in a crisis could be reduced accordingly.

For the United States to play an effective military role in the new global setting of regional networking, several capabilities need to be combined effectively.

If these challenges were not enough to deal with, the shift in defense technology and its relationship to commercial firms is shaping the new environment as well. The RMA is reshaping the type of defense technology to be deployed in new systems in the years ahead. The role of information technology, sensors, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV), satellites, and long-range strike technologies is so profound in reshaping the new military environment that a revolution in technology is unfolding.

In addition to the dramatic changes in the defense industrial base and the RMA, there is a shift in the manufacturing model underlying defense production. Sometimes this change is referred to as the commercialization of defense technology. Governments will rely upon commercially available technologies to reduce defense costs or to require the bundling of commercial components with military platforms to enhance the viability of defense resources.

Governments are the buyers of military systems and as such are monopolistic or oligarchic clients for firms. The firms themselves seek to become global players and not simply to act as suppliers to single national governments. The shift to global competition and to the greater reliance on high technology produced in the commercial sector means that defense firms will become mixed firms providing a range of products with increasing commercial content.

The research and development (R&D) model underlying defense is changing as well. The British provide a particularly clear example of a government focusing upon changing to a new R&D model. The new "smart procurement model," as the British call it, underscores the need to move from the reliance upon sequential to concurrent development. Instead of a long process of moving from product development to deployment through a sequential process, the new concurrent development model puts products into the field earlier and seeks to upgrade them in the process of deployment. The new model focuses upon modular platform design with life-cycle upgrading in the force enabling packages operating on the platform, notably those for electronics and weapon systems.

A new manufacturing model underlies the new defense industrial system of the 21^st century. Rather than firms competing to provide alternative end units, firms are now competing to provide for the entire process of development and deployment. A new manufacturing redesign process is becoming intertwined with the reliance upon global firms seeking to use commercial technology wherever possible to meet military means. The challenge for governments in dealing with the twin processes of the emergence of a new manufacturing model and globalization of technology is guiding this process in directions that give them both cost- and militarily effective weapon systems in the years ahead. For the United States, the challenge of the convergence of the developments identified is a difficult one.

First, dealing with region-specific challenges-both in terms of threats and cooperation with allies-requires an enhanced capacity to work with coalition partners and greater, not lesser, interoperability. But the emphasis upon an RMA may increase the gap dramatically between the United States and its core allies.

Second, the economic difficulties that core U.S. allies are facing in Europe and Japan mean that for the next few years the disparity between U.S. defense dollars and allied financial resources will grow. This in turn exacerbates the tension between coalition requirements and RMA efforts by the United States.

Third, emphasis upon a more commercial and global look to defense firms as they seek to become global high-technology enterprises will dramatically increase the problems of co-development with allies and export controls on the resulting military products. The "new" defense firms in the United States and elsewhere will seek to co-develop weapons; the old U.S. system of export controls that sought to control the process case by case for third-party sales will be severely challenged.

In other words, the United States is the core architect of the Euro-Atlantic-Asian zone of security, not as a hegemonic power but as a networking power. The strategic challenge is to shift from extended deterrence of the Soviet Union to extended defense of U.S. and allied interests. At the heart of this challenge is the reshaping of allied capabilities to provide for a division of labor that reflects economic strengths and global responsibilities.

The fundamentals of U.S. strategy in this unique historical situation require combining global reach with regional networking and deftness in putting together coalitions of the willing to meet specific threats to regional allies. The blending of military and diplomatic skill in shaping a new world order is a key U.S. burden in the sense that no other extant state can do so. At the same time, the United States must avoid a heavy-handed approach, because doing so will make it difficult to operate in the specific regional settings of the increasingly diversified yet interdependent world of the 21^st century.