Chapter Nine

Conclusion: Effective Defense Reviews

To foresee a victory which the ordinary person can foresee is not the acme of skill....The skillful commander takes up a position in which he cannot be defeated and misses no opportunity to master his enemy. Thus a victorious army wins its victories before seeking battle; an army destined to defeat fights in the hope of winning.  --Sun Tzu⁴⁹⁹




In order to ensure future victories, the United States has routinely conducted assessments of its defense policies and force structure. The Quadrennial Defense Review in 2001 will be one in a long line of reports, all of which have attempted to identify the battle space that will be contested and the enemies who will contest it. Generally, such assessments attempt to go beyond the vision of the future as predicted by a team of experts and extrapolations made from the latest intelligence analysis. The result is a myriad of competing assessments, each inevitably reflecting the inherent biases of individual participants and sources.

This survey has attempted to derive a consensus concerning the probable outlines of future conflicts from the current group of competing assessments. Mindful of the potential for bias, it has also sought to identify dissenting viewpoints and potential wildcard events. The goal is to develop a baseline consensus of the probable future, but at the same time identify those unpredictable catastrophic events--or predictable but unlikely developments--against which hedging strategies could be adopted as a form of national defense insurance. Here is where the discordant views of the dissenters are most valuable; they lead to plans that can also cope with alternative futures. The dissenting viewpoints are tools against complacency. In the vernacular of the military pilot, they prompt us to continually scan our instruments throughout the flight, ensuring that conditions are indeed as they appear to the eye. Likewise, the sum of dissenting views and unanticipated wildcards cause us--like prudent navigators at sea--to check the track laid out on the chart. We look not just for the effects of set and drift in pushing us off course, but examine the validity of the chart itself. What uncharted features might suddenly appear to put all our planning at risk?

At the same time, it must be recognized that there are issues on which a consensus cannot be developed. These are the issues that need to be debated if any defense review is to be effective. For example, should the United States prepare now for the coming of a military peer competitor? The consensus is that one will not develop before 2025. Yet, history suggests that the appearance of a challenger for international dominance is just a matter of time. Through values, planning, and fortuitous circumstances, the United States has emerged from the 20^th century as the sole superpower. It is not likely to do so at the end of the 21^th century by muddling through or complacently following an unadjusted track.

Some are concerned that the choices made today are ones that could provoke the very competition we seek to avoid. Whether it is possible to develop cooperative defenses with potential military rivals may be an issue worth examining, even as we admit that there is a very narrow set of circumstances in which they could be applied. One size of international policy never fits all, as British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain found at Munich, to the sorrow of the world. Perhaps prudent defense planning requires a blend of the two views in order to deal with a sudden change in circumstance--sort of a cooperation-plus-containment approach that seeks to encourage our fondest hopes at the same time it retains the means of prevailing in our worst nightmares.

Likewise, the future of space forces or information warfare--both points of contention--is worthy of open debate prior to the shifting of resources from overseas basing, forward presence forces, or any other legacy system or posture deemed vulnerable in an emerging world. Vulnerable does not always equate to unnecessary. Even though the consensus is that information warfare will become more important in future conflicts, it is not the most important or decisive element. The coming of information warfare may not be cause for celebration, if the United States and its allies remain the most vulnerable, and if conflicts consist primarily of ethnic atrocities carried out by low-tech means. It should be remembered that the worldwide media broadcasts of the body of an Army Ranger dragged through the streets of Mogadishu were a prime cause of the American withdrawal. But they had little effect on ending the civil war in Somalia.⁵⁰⁰

If the consensus proves true, and WMD and elaborate antiaccess systems become fixtures of the future battlefield, war will become more difficult, but not necessarily less likely. All the information systems in the universe may not prevent increases in casualties and destruction. In fact, information warfare may simply make WMD and other current technologies more valuable. A nuclear EMP burst could devastate the eyes and ears of any technology-dependent force and temporarily ground the entire inventory of long-range systems.⁵⁰¹ This realization should encourage a debate on the extent to which the United States should transform its military. Perhaps the United States should maintain a certain inventory of low-tech troops, ships, and analog systems that, like the apocryphal French colonial troops, could stand and fight while the electronic storm swirling around them blew over.

Other trends may require the expenditure of additional resources. But in the reality of defense resource constraints, the assignment of resources to take on a selected emerging threat means that there will be some threat not addressed. Perhaps, in accounting for risk, prudent defense planning requires the rejection of ever-increasing efficiencies. Not every trooper should be trained in urban warfare, even in the face of continuing urbanization. Not every corporal needs to be trained to the level of becoming a "strategic corporal" able to assume command of a squad under the most chaotic of conditions.

The debates that defense reviews engender are always messy. The media makes quite a sport of pointing out the conceptual disunity and lack of jointness among the "squabbling" services. Rarely mentioned is the fact that defense policy in a democracy was meant to be contentious and inefficient. To debate up until the very moment the guns sound was always considered a healthy thing. This is in clear contrast to the policies and procedures of authoritarian regimes. As Chinese Communist Party Chairman Deng Xiaoping advised his political and military strategists: "Don't debate...Once debate gets started, things become complicated."⁵⁰² But powerful militaries that don't debate, such as the German Wehrmacht or Soviet armed forces, seem to end up on the wrong side of history, defeated by a future they did not anticipate.

Americans like debate and generally view the future as complicated, even while striving to predict it. QDR 2001 will also be complicated, as will its successors. But one of the ways we can begin getting to the issues worthy of debate is to start from a consensus view of the characteristics we expect to find in the future security environment.

We can assess the likelihood of alternatives while remaining open to the discussion of the unlikely and unpopular. If this survey manages in some small measure to facilitate the assessment of the future security environment for QDR 2001, then it will have been well worth the effort. More importantly, if an assessment of the future security environment is taken seriously during the QDR in formulating defense policy and force structure recommendations--and not simply relegated to boilerplate in a report--the next presidential administration, and the Nation, will be well served.

We cannot predict all possible wars. But we must be able to survive them. And no one will survive without plans that include some comprehensive assumptions about the future security environment.




Table of Contents  |  Appendix A  |  Endnotes