The Big Three:
Our Greatest Security Risks and How to Address Them
2. Preventing Major Military Competition
For a long time our highest security priority has been to deter attack by an adversary with military capabilities comparable to ours. One strand of this effort remains: we need to continue to achieve nuclear deterrence. But the absence of a peer conventional competitor permits us to refocus our main efforts. Our most difficult and important challenge will be to reduce the likelihood of major military competition reemerging. The aim is not to prevail over a competitor; it is to avoid a competition.
If we accept this goal, we need a strategy clearly focused on achieving it. Such a strategy operates at two levels. It needs to be general, affecting our relations with all possible competitors, and it needs to be particular, directed to reducing the likelihood of competition with specific countries. Strategies affecting particular nations are beyond the scope of this essay, but the general strategy can be described.
A strategy designed to reduce the likelihood of military competition must have military, economic, and diplomatic components. These are not radically different from policies now in place, but their conceptual underpinning is different. The predominant error of our time may be mindless pursuit of old goals when we are playing a new game. A more sharply and soundly defined understanding of what we are seeking will change our emphasis and better direct our efforts.
The new approach would complement the existing doctrine of deterrence with a strategy of dissuasion, with the aim of discouraging others from military competition with us. Our predominant aim is not, as in the past, to diminish the influence of competitors, but rather to lessen their inclinations to engage in destructive military competition. Seen in this light, our military priorities and our economic and diplomatic initiatives take on different emphasis.
Long-term military investments are the foundation of dissuasion. Because military investments frequently do double duty as mechanisms of deterrence, it is natural to defend new investments in old terms, but shifting the focus from deterrence to dissuasion casts some military measures in a clearer, and more compelling, strategic context. Three examples make this point:
Why our military presence abroad should be continued as a means of dissuasion, even though it is becoming less relevant as a mechanism of deterrence
How emphasis on near-term readiness and maintenance of a large force structure at the expense of modernization is ill conceived because it excessively focuses on deterrence
How investments in quality of life and higher pay for non-ed officers may be better justified.
After considering these examples, this discussion will turn to diplomatic and economic tools that can be used in support of a strategy of dissuasion.
The United States now maintains approximately 100,000 troops in Europe and a similar number in Asia, and every 6 months we deploy some 20,000 sailors and marines in carrier battle groups, amphibious ready groups, and smaller groups of ships to every corner of the globe. Are these efforts justified by a theory of deterrence?
At one time they were, and, in some places and to some extent, they still may be. In the four decades after the Second World War, the Soviet Union threatened Western Europe, and there were two major land wars in Asia. Today, an unrestrained Iraq, Iran, or North Korea could attack its neighbors, but it may well be questioned why American troops in Europe, Japan, or Korea are required to counter these threats, given the strength of our allies and weakness of our opponents. Such questions will intensify if, for example, Korea reunifies, Russia persists in its weakness, or less-hostile regimes replace our present opponents in the Middle East.
American presence around the globe is justified, however, if it dissuades others from massive military investment. Without Americans in Asia, for example, it is likely that both the Japanese and the Chinese would greatly accelerate armament as a result of concerns about one another. Moreover, our assurance of the flow of commerce, in general, and oil, in particular, allows these and other nations to integrate their economies into world markets without establishing large navies. In this manner, we disconnect economic power from military power and thereby diminish the arguments and incentives to invest in military might. On the Continent in Europe, in the Mediterranean, and in the Middle East, American presence moderates the military buildup and the military ambitions of regional powers that could become super powers, if they pursued regional aggression. In the long term, accordingly, American presence buys security not merely for our allies but for America itself, and not merely for today but also for the future. These are not deterrent investments, as deterrence was understood during the Cold War, but dissuasive investments, and as such they are well warranted.
We need a "dissuasive" strategy of investments as well as operations. A technologically outdated military establishment invites military competition. Avoiding this risk is not just a matter of expenditure. It relates, above all, to the kind of investments we make and to our openness to innovation. Even after the fall of the Soviet Union, the dominant emphasis in the early 1990s on readiness and maintenance of large forces was implicitly responsive to a model of deterrence. Large, ready, and available forces deter present competitors, but a strategy of dissuasion would increase the emphasis on development and modernization. The greatest temptations and opportunities to compete with us will arise if another nation is more adept than we are at absorbing powerful and rapid technological innovations.
For example, semiconductors have doubled in capacity every 18 months since coming of age in the 1960s. If this continues, we will confront a hundred-fold increase in computing capability between now and 2009. These are civilian technologies, and our opponents have access to them. Our risks are grave if these opponents prove to be more adept than we are in harnessing them to military ends. On the eve of World War II, the German Wehrmacht managed just such an application by combining commercial developments in the internal combustion engine and in telecommunications to produce the military equipment and doctrine for a new way of war: blitzkrieg. The British armed forces, for their part, quickly assimilated the infant technology of radar and used it to win the Battle of Britain.
Our strength is also our problem. Innovations that boldly exploit rapidly evolving technological opportunity are often impeded by an excessive commitment to present priorities. As in industry, there is much talk, and indeed sincere endorsement, of the need for innovation in our defense establishment, but the experience of industry is suggestive. For example, in the 1950s, several established companies held the beginnings of the semiconductor industry in their hands, but—in less than the 30-year horizon posited in this article—they lost their positions. Their failure can be traced to not decisively reallocating resources from the product lines of the present to those of the future.
In retrospect it should be no surprise that manufacturers earning handsome profits from vacuum tubes had difficulty embracing semiconductors. Dramatic innovation demands not merely reallocating resources, but also cannibalizing long-favored bureaucratic children to feed the hungry new arrival. The problem in innovation is not securing acceptance of the new; it is establishing a willingness to surrender the old. This is particularly difficult when the indicators of payoff are ambiguous. Everyone is willing to flirt with the future; few will truly embrace its uncertainties at the expense of a comfortable present.
Within the Department of Defense, the present is comfortable and the past is misleading. Nothing seduces like success: why change when your existing method of business has just proved itself a winner in a prolonged contest? Unfortunately, this contest points us in the wrong direction. The Soviet Union was a substantial opponent, but it was not, by and large, an innovative one; it was an enemy characterized by bulk, not agility. As a result, we could usually maintain an operational advantage even though our development and acquisition systems were ponderous. While our bureaucracy, commendably, settled for no less than being superior to its Soviet counterpart, regrettably, it also did not need to be more than that. Consequently, while commercial industry transformed its management processes to facilitate rapid decisionmaking and innovation, DOD came more to resemble the Soviet systems it defeated than the private sector systems evolving elsewhere. If DOD is to foster an intense commitment to innovation it will have to overcome decades of habit.
A white-hot commitment to innovation is especially hard to achieve in our national security establishment. When the product is security, it should not surprise us that its purveyors are risk averse. Currently predominant theories of deterrence focus on near-term risks, which reinforces existing organizational biases. In our military, rewards and incentives are for present performance; tours are so short and the budgeting process so extended and unstable that major innovation is difficult to sustain. The fear is to be unready now, not to be unprepared for the future. In Congress, the strongest incentives are to continue spending on products that constituents now produce and on infrastructure that sustains constituents in their present jobs. As a result, we remain too committed to business as usual. Instead, we should realize that our predominant priority should be to avoid the emergence of a major competitor.
How do investments in the quality of life and better pay for our service members relate to concerns about the development of a major competitor? This relationship is powerful because a career professional military force is one of the longest lead items that an opponent who challenges us would have to replicate. Decades are required to develop senior noncommissioned officers, colonels and captains. If we retain a high proportion of the best of these for 25 years or more, we make it apparent to others that competing with us is a long and difficult task. Losing these men and women forfeits that advantage. Propensity to stay in the military is most powerfully shaped by the professional challenges servicemen and women encounter and the equipment, training, and esprit with which they meet these challenges. Beyond this, however, investment is warranted in pay and other basics that affect commitment to military careers, because these expenditures are not just benefits to our military personnel but are also contributions to our national security.6
Similarly, a stronger case needs to be made for the power of economic and diplomatic tools as key elements in a strategy of dissuasion. In the context of such a strategy, these are tools of integration and not, as they were during the Cold War, of isolation. In the midst of a military competition, military defense demands dominant attention; political and economic tactics are secondary. Absent a military competition, the tools are more balanced. If military competition is to be avoided, integration is at least as important as deterrence.
Our treatment of Germany, Japan, and Italy after World War II stands as the shining example of the rewards of integration. Marshall Plan expenditures and substantial American investment made these countries into allies, not competitors. This is the right precedent, but differences in circumstance make it difficult to apply. Though we may proudly recollect the Marshall Plan and the revitalization of Japan as acts of magnanimity and manifestations of our generosity, these activities were catalyzed by a need for partners in the face of economic difficulties and Communist threats. The Marshall Plan was not announced until 1947, two years after the surrender of Germany. Before the Soviet threat was clearly recognized (and labeled as such in Churchill's 1946 "iron curtain" speech), allied plans to keep Germany from endangering peace called for limiting its postwar economic and military power. Similarly, postwar plans for Japan did not aim to build a strong ally; the most important catalyst to Japan's post-war recovery was the Korean War.
Moreover, our deep involvement with the affairs of these nations was as an occupying victor after an extraordinary military conflict. This gave us both the power and the motivation to address their reconstruction. We were engaged, and we well knew the price of indifference. We also knew that the struggle of the preceding years was over. Surrender and occupation marked the end of the old era and left no doubt that the new one would be different.
These catalysts for action are not now present. Farsightedness and will even greater than was achieved in the Marshall Plan are required if we are to help such recently hostile nations as Russia and China, particularly when we do not have to compete with another power for their loyalties. These are highly imperfect, corrupt, authoritarian, and potentially hostile nations; the natural inclination is to follow the policy of the past, to isolate them, or at least to be indifferent to them, until they become more like us. Giving priority to their integration means taking the Cold War strategy we once successfully applied to isolate the Kremlin and turning it inside out.
We cannot say with assurance that aid will place Russia on a path toward normality, and it cannot be proven that China's intertwining with the world economic system will secure a peaceful future. Whether China emerges as a major military competitor to the United States will depend on factors we cannot control. Particular circumstances will and should affect our tactical judgments about particular overtures (for example, when and under what conditions to provide funding for Russia, or to admit China to the World Trade Organization). Our overarching strategy should be rooted in the proposition that investing in the development of China and Russia as full partners in the world system will be more effective, less expensive, and vastly more benign than another arms race.
Imaginative and dedicated pursuit of the goal of "integration" would also produce diplomatic initiatives as sweeping as those undertaken by the Cold Warriors who created NATO. Traditional arms control measures, like the START treaties, usefully lower levels of weaponry and therefore of risk, but their primary goal is to police the risk, rather than to eliminate it. Similarly, whether well or ill advised, NATO expansion that does not include Russia is at best irrelevant to; at worst it retards the integration of a major competitor.
Integrative efforts deserve higher billing, and the seeds of such a program are present. America pursued such a policy when, in the face of some resistance and difficulties, it made Russian troops a part of the Implementation Force created to police Bosnia. The NATO "Partnership for Peace" program, the Nunn-Lugar Legislation, the resulting "Cooperative Threat Reduction Program" with Russia, recent agreements to share information with Russia about missile launchings, and agreements to avoid incidents at sea with the Chinese are integrative. With these as illustrative initiatives, the broader goal of avoiding military competition should be articulated and concerted efforts taken to devise steps toward that end.
The particulars of any such program are debatable and difficult to establish, but the efforts are warranted. In the long term, the most important question about this period of opportunity will be whether we used it to avoid future military competition. Our aim should not be to win; it should be to avoid the competition. Only with our concerted effort, imagination, and willingness to take risks will the 21st century look different from its predecessor, which was plagued by military competition.
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