Mind the Gap

CHAPTER ONE

All Aboard
 Assessing the Problem and Its Multi-Tier Solution

As every rider on the London Underground knows, failure to "mind the gap" between moving train and platform entails considerable risk of injury. Both the image and the hazard apply all too well to the growing separation between the military strategy, capabilities, and technology of the United States, on the one hand, and those of its closest military partners, the NATO allies, on the other. This chapter analyzes the reasons for this gap and outlines a strategy for closing it, without slowing down the American train.

Avoiding a Choice Between NATO and the RMA

To many U.S. defense analysts, the train--a.k.a. the "Revolution in Military Affairs" or RMA--is not moving as fast as it could and should be. We are among those who believe the United States should pursue more energetically the capability to project decisive force while reducing the risk of high casualties. If it does not, the threat of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in the hands of such hostile states as Iraq, North Korea, Libya, and Iran might confront a future American President with prohibitive dangers to U.S. troops. This could leave the United States militarily "superior" yet unwilling to protect its global interests. In turn, declining U.S. credibility could embolden hostile states to bully their neighbors, threaten international peace, and assault U.S. interests.

In essence, the RMA is the use of information technology to gain strategic advantage by networking one's forces, gaining complete knowledge of the battle, and striking from any range with near-perfect precision. These capabilities permit forces to be dispersed, yet integrated, thus less vulnerable, harder for the enemy to engage, and able to use lethal weapons from all ranges against all targets. As important as the hardware of the RMA may be, innovative doctrine, tactics, training, and organization must be developed and refined in an open-ended process of transforming military operations for the information age.

For the United States, the strategic case for the RMA is strong. Its global interests and responsibilities provide the motivation; its success in key information technologies, especially data networking, provide the potential. Nevertheless, U.S. implementation faces obstacles. For instance, the Department of Defense (DOD) has proposed a new round of base closings to fund investments in the RMA; however, Congress has yet to approve. DOD, for its part, is proceeding cautiously in replacing proven doctrines with untested ones; understandably, it insists on first experimenting not only with new technologies but also with new tactics and ways of organizing. In light of the deliberate approach taken by the U.S. defense establishment, the option of further slowing the American RMA train to permit the allies to step on board is not one we could support.

Even with the tentative U.S. approach toward the RMA, the transatlantic gap in military technology and capability is widening. The use of information technology is far more extensive in U.S. forces than in European forces. The quality of U.S. precision-guided munitions (PGMs) and C4ISR (command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance) has improved greatly since the Gulf War, whereas European forces still remain incapable even of the type operations that U.S. forces conducted in 1991. While this divergence has not prevented the successful NATO peacekeeping operation in Bosnia, most U.S. and European officers and analysts would agree that allied forces today could provide little help in a more demanding and violent engagement. Thus, ironically, the more severe the threat to interests shared by the United States and Europe, the less likely that a true U.S.-European coalition will respond.

That danger is within sight. As the United States opens the RMA throttle in the years to come, the gap could become a gulf. Thereafter, only modest coalition operations (e.g., peacekeeping in Europe) will be feasible. Such a prospect is not so alarming that it should cause the United States to apply the brakes to its RMA. But, as we will explain, it would harm U.S. interests. Indeed, the option of proceeding with the U.S. RMA while leaving the Europeans at the station is hardly better than stopping the RMA to close the gap.

Not that stopping the RMA would close the gap. Serious disparities already exist and could persist even if the United States postpones creating an information-age force. The U.S. military has more firepower and is more mobile than European militaries--quite an important difference in an era when the principal military need is to project large-scale strike power at great distances. Moreover, because the U.S. military is expected, if need be, to do battle with dangerous rogue states in the far corners of the world, it is more combat-ready than most European forces, whose warfighting mission has become vague since the Soviet threat went away. Whereas U.S. forces are geared to destroy any forces that threaten U.S. interests, allied forces are not. So a sizeable gap already exists because of the asymmetry in U.S. and European strategic perspectives--global versus territorial--and the corresponding disparity in power projection and strike capabilities. If the allies now fail to follow the United States into the RMA, the gap will grow to the point where U.S. and European forces cannot operate well together even if they deploy together.

The allies' lack of the requisite military capabilities is but one of the reasons why the United States has virtually sole responsibility for defending common European-American security interests, e.g., in the Middle East or elsewhere outside of Europe, where they are most likely to be threatened. Europeans in general, Germans most of all, have an aversion to projecting power beyond their borders. In modern history, European experience in using force other than to defend the homeland has ended badly, notably, in imperialism and world wars. The resulting mind-set explains why a decade ago some allies criticized U.S. retaliatory strikes against Libya for sponsoring terrorism, why in 1991 no German troops joined the Gulf War coalition, and why today Europeans (the British aside) have qualms about the use of force to compel Iraq to abandon its WMD programs.

Aware of the allies' lack of inclination and ability to project power, the United States has assumed in both of its official post-Cold-War national defense reviews--the 1993 Bottom-up Review and the 1997 Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR)--that the Europeans would not provide significant forces in a major theater war (MTW) outside Europe. Accordingly, the United States maintains ample forces independently to defend important shared interests, such as securing world oil supplies and confronting hostile states that seek WMD. As long as the United States has the means to defend shared interests without allied help, the Europeans lack the incentive to make the sacrifices such help could require.

A vicious circle is at work. Because it cannot bank on the Europeans to join in projecting power to defend common interests, the United States makes it unnecessary for them to do so. Because they are not needed, the Europeans, already skittish about such a controversial strategic mission for their forces, fail to invest in the capabilities and technologies that might begin to satisfy the Americans that it is prudent to include allies in their plans to project power. This lets the Europeans off the hook, and so on.

Under these circumstances, even U.S. abandonment of the RMA would not, in and of itself, reverse the divergence in strategy and capabilities that now exists. All the more reason for the United States not to decelerate. Moreover, as long as it believes it cannot count on the allies anyway to provide large forces for major wars, the U.S. defense establishment will view bringing them along on the RMA as desirable but not essential. As the train pulls out, eventual efforts by the Europeans to embark will be less likely to result in compatibility with U.S. forces. Therefore, now would be an excellent time to break the vicious circle--perhaps the last chance.

Closing this gap might not be enough to rebuild a credible NATO military coalition, but it is necessary. If another war broke out in the Persian Gulf tomorrow, the European allies would be able to contribute no more and no better forces than they did seven years ago, when they sent all the suitable forces they could yet had only a cameo role.1 If such a war broke out, say, seven years from now, especially if the United States pursues the RMA but the allies do not, the alliance could be militarily irrelevant.2 Allied forces would be unable to take full advantage of U.S. battlespace information, augment U.S. standoff strikes, or fit into the seamless integration of U.S. ground, sea, air, space, and cyberspace sensors, platforms, and weapons. U.S. military commanders would sooner marginalize than integrate them, lest they get under foot. Because of the opportunity cost, U.S. airlift capability might not be allocated to moving allied forces to the fight. What a pitiful end to the great military coalition that was prepared to wage World War III with the Soviet Union and has kept peace in Bosnia!

No amount of American hubris can alter the fact that such a prospect, for that matter the current situation, is bad both for the Atlantic alliance and the nation. The United States has a strong preference for militarily effective, not just politically symbolic, coalition warfare, involving especially the United Kingdom, France, and Germany. Provided they are capable, coalitions spread the risks, sacrifices, and casualties, enhance overall muscle, and of course help satisfy the American people that their young men and women are not being asked to police the world alone. Moreover, to the extent allies can contribute a sizable fraction of the capabilities required for one or another major theater war, the United States will find it easier and more affordable to be ready to respond to the myriad other contingencies that could arise in these unpredictable times. But if the allies are increasingly incapable of operating in a combined force with the United States, the responsibility to protect common interests cannot be fairly shared.

The United States has the economic resources and technology to maintain adequate forces to meet high-priority security needs even if the allies are left behind and NATO decays as a military alliance. But its forces already are stretched thin by global missions in peace, crisis, and war. Moreover, the unilateral--arguably, inequitable--responsibilities imposed by such a state of affairs would weigh heavily, perhaps too heavily, on American shoulders. The United States needs (and should ask its closest friends, who happen also to be its formal allies) to contribute more, not less, to the defense of common interests in and beyond Europe. If the allies fail to do so, whether because they will not or cannot, the American public might tire of the risks and costs of global leadership. The bubble of confidence, indeed cockiness, among the U.S. foreign policy elite, inflated further by RMA potential, could burst if the American people rebel against excessive sacrifices. The assertive internationalist and interventionist policies favored by that elite already extend to the limits of public support; any perception that its richest and closest allies are free riders will accentuate both unilateralist and isolationist tendencies within the United States.

Additionally, without a greater allied military contribution, the United States could come to be seen abroad as the global "bad cop," too reliant on the use of force while others stake out the high ground of peaceful restraint. Such a pattern is already evident in the "dual containment" of Iraq and Iran. As a consequence, the United States could become the most likely target for terrorism and other threats by rogue states and groups, which of course would further test the willingness of the American people to bear heavy responsibilities for international security.

This transatlantic schism could turn fatal to the alliance in the event of a violent conflict with a WMD-armed rogue over shared interests, in which European forces fail significantly to respond alongside U.S. forces, especially if high American casualties result. Well short of such a crisis, the disparity in U.S. and European capabilities and strategy can cause the United States and its closest friends to work at cross-purposes in peacetime. Even now, the United States is more determined than its European allies to prevent Iraq and Iran from acquiring WMD precisely because U.S. troops, not European troops, will be the ones exposed to such a threat. Until they face the military consequences, the allies will be less inclined to try to isolate the regimes in Baghdad and Teheran, to threaten the use of force to combat aggression and terrorism, and to forego commerce with them.

The long-term peril to the alliance posed by the gap should not be underestimated. The future rationale for maintaining a U.S. military presence in Europe can no longer be that Europe needs protecting.3 The main strategic advantage of keeping U.S. forces in Europe in the new era is that they can work with allied forces and then deploy from bases there, allies at their side, to contingencies in adjacent regions, for example, Southwest Asia. If U.S. forces cannot fight with, and can barely work with, their allied counterparts because they are technologically incompatible, and if the American public perceives the allies as shirking responsibility for defending common interests, keeping large-scale U.S. forces in Europe will be a hard sell.

We are witnessing not just a military-technological gap but a strategic-political one--the two compounding one another. If the gap can become a gulf, it can also become an ocean, in figurative and literal terms. Closing the military-technological gap would not totally mend the U.S.-European partnership. But it would create the capability for joint action and shared risk, which in turn can engender a more common outlook, better-coordinated--thus more effective--policies, and mutual confidence, now sagging. Such a prospect is all the more reason to worry that the gap is not shrinking but growing and could become harder to close as the United States accelerates its RMA.

Therefore, a way must be found to turn divergence into convergence as the RMA proceeds. This would require that the American RMA become an Atlantic RMA. But how? On the assumption that what will produce convergence is roughly the opposite of what is causing divergence, it is essential to go beyond the symptoms and understand the cause before prescribing the cure.

What Is Causing the Gap?

Asymmetry in Strategy--and Paradigm. Most criticism of European defense efforts these days focuses too much on the size of allied defense budgets and not enough on how little military and security value the Europeans get for the money they spend. The fact that the United States spends roughly 60 percent more on defense than the European allies--over 100 percent more per capita--aggravates the divergence but is not its cause. The heart of the problem is that the United States is under pressure to use the potential of the information age strategically, and the allies are not.

The United States, as noted earlier, is poised to harness key information technologies--microelectronics, data networking, and software programming--to create a networked force, using weapons capable of pinpoint accuracy, launched from platforms beyond range of enemy weapons, utilizing the integrated data from all-seeing sensors, managed by intelligent command nodes. By distributing its forces, while still being able to concentrate fires, the U.S. military is improving its mobility, speed, potency, and invulnerability to enemy attack.4 By trading technology for "labor," the numbers of military personnel needed by the United States, in total and in any given operation, are declining, even as the skill required of each of them is increasing. The United States has within its reach the ability to prevail in any foreseeable conflict by virtue of its ability to see, comprehend, and control all aspects of the battlefield.

In addition, the United States is just beginning to reform the management of its defense establishment to take advantage of the technology and best practices of the information age just as many commercial firms have done, to their competitive benefit, over the past decade. The cost of infrastructure should begin to come down for the United States, as more and more support services are procured from private industry, as internal defense organizations import innovative practices from the business sector, and as structures and processes are altered to take full advantage of the new technology. In addition to the RMA gap that is beginning to open, a transatlantic divergence in "military business affairs" could be opening as well.

Already, the United States is outspending its European allies in investment--R&D and modernization--by two to one. Insofar as the United States can reduce the number of personnel involved in support services and other infrastructure costs, it can further increase its investment in RMA-type forces and technology. Meanwhile, the Europeans are saddled with excessive personnel, facilities, and support costs--in effect consuming resources badly needed to improve quality and to modernize. Thus the ability of the United States to manage its defense resources better could also add to the gap.

In a broad sense, the U.S. military is ready to do over the next 15 years what well-run American--and for that matter European!--corporations have done over the past 15: rethink and revise the way they are organized and function in order to harness information technology for decisive advantage. The fact that many of those firms had become bloated, sluggish, unfocused, and unfit to face foreign (mainly Asian) competition gave them, at least those with the brains and guts to admit it, a powerful motivation--survival--to change themselves in order to master the new technology. Those who remade themselves now use information technology strategically; those who merely painted the technology over their old way of working fell behind, technologically and financially.

The U.S. military establishment, though far from unfit or inferior, also has a compelling reason to transform itself. It has a national mandate to be able to project enough conventional strike power to render any enemy defenseless and ready to quit, whenever and wherever U.S. interests need defending. The need to deploy quickly and to neutralize the WMD threat argues for dispersion and increases in standoff strike capabilities, which translate into a reduction in the forces that must be placed in the immediate theater. The advantage of being able to hit any target with any weapon from any platform, irrespective of range, armed service, or medium, argues for perfecting battlefield awareness, target detection, and weapon guidance. To meet such requirements, the successful application of information technology is important enough to justify major shifts in investment, doctrine, and training. Absent such compelling needs, the RMA is mere gadgetry.

How does this compare with the Europeans? Taken together, the allies have the world's second most potent and sophisticated military capability. They spend $160 billion a year on defense, with which they maintain 2.5 million men under arms and an array of high-performance weapons and platforms. Yet, the allies invest far less than the United States in advanced military information systems, in research and development (R&D) of new technologies in general, and in recruiting, retaining, and training high-quality personnel.5 In effect, the allies have a somewhat smaller version of the forces they relied upon to defend their land from Soviet aggression. European forces are professional, tough, and well-led. But they are far less useful now that the threat to Europe has abated.

European militaries are not challenged by the same mission as their American cousins, i.e., to be able to destroy the forces and infrastructure of any distant rogue that threatens important allied interests, even if it brandishes nuclear, biological, or chemical weapons. Therefore, they face no imperative to improve their projection capability, to strengthen their standoff precision-strike systems, to integrate their sensors, to network their forces, and to enhance their joint-warfare capability. Because they do not face the chilling prospect of having to operate against rogue states armed with WMD, they are under little pressure to invest in their own RMA, especially at a time of declining defense budgets.

Consequently, the majority of European forces are still immobile and incapable of the "dominant maneuver" and "information dominance" that have become, deservedly, the sound bites of the U.S. military. Lacking a compelling reason to increase defense spending or pare their manpower and support structures, the allies cannot find a spare mark, franc, or lira--soon, "euro"--for building information-age forces. In sum, the United States is moving not only at a different velocity but also in a different direction, with different priorities, based on a different philosophy than its allies in modernizing its forces to exploit the new technology. Keeping with the metaphor of our title, as the U.S. RMA begins to pull away, the allies must choose between the platform and the train.

It is not clear to us--or, we fear, to many allied governments--just what strategic purpose European forces are meant to serve. Since only a small fraction of European forces are truly mobile, and the requirement for immobile forces is only a small fraction of current European end-strength, even the total size of allied forces is mysterious. While the allies have been content to leave out-of-Europe missions to the Americans, they are well aware that the threat of major war in Europe or aggression against Europe is gone. Why the Europeans have over 50 divisions that cannot be projected is harder to understand than why they have only a handful that can.

Perhaps the sheer irrelevance of the old territorial defense mission is a disguised blessing. If the Europeans genuinely believed in the enduring importance of that mission, they would be locked into a set of priorities more or less opposite to those of the United States--and that much harder to budge.6 At least the Europeans are not dedicated to perpetuating massive territorial defense as a top strategic priority; rather, they seem to be prisoners of inertia--more aimless than aimed in the wrong direction. Indeed, some European governments--those of the UK and France, for example--have come to appreciate that until they can restore public comprehension of why military forces are needed, the decline in defense spending will continue.

Some European militaries are being reoriented toward power projection missions, though their reduced defense budgets make overall progress nearly imperceptible. The British have moved the furthest, building on a long record of stressing expeditionary forces. The French, with an interventionist tradition of their own, have a plan to shift from border defense to power projection, but it remains mainly that--a plan. The Germans, especially reluctant because of their history, have earmarked two divisions for use in distant operations, but only one at a time, and primarily in peace support missions; most of their forces have yet to be reoriented.

The European pace of change is much slower than even the hesitant speed with which the United States began the RMA. Having a sense of strategic direction, the U.S. Defense Department is able to justify new investments. For example, the U.S. military establishment can translate growing alarm about Saddam Hussein's WMD aspirations into a political warrant for RMA procurement and R&D. Lacking both a sense of direction and a sense of urgency, the Europeans will find it hard to win popular support for defense spending in general and RMA investment in particular.

The gap is not merely one of different stress on information technology. It is one of paradigm. The United States military is just now plunging into the information age; the bulk of European militaries remain squarely in the previous age. The state of the industries that serve their respective militaries reflects a similar divide, posing another obstacle to closing the transatlantic gap.

Asymmetries in Industry, Technology, and Markets. Motivation aside, the U.S. military benefits from a sturdier industrial base and a more responsive technological base than exist in Europe. The declining number but growing size of consolidated American defense systems corporations--e.g., Lockheed Martin, Raytheon-Hughes, Boeing, Nothrop-Grumman--contrast with the smaller and more numerous European defense firms. Despite an otherwise integrated European market, European defense companies mostly operate on a national scale. Every major European nation remains sufficiently attached to its sovereignty to want to keep at least one major defense contractor.

But even if, at the wave of a wand, European defense industry could be restructured to resemble American defense industry, the gap likely would persist. It is not clear that a highly concentrated defense industry is necessary in implementing the U.S. RMA. Meeting the needs of the RMA requires not so much a concentrated defense systems industry as a vibrant information technology market and a defense industry, however structured, that is agile enough to buy the best from that market.

Indeed, transatlantic differences in defense industries mask the significant fact that the U.S. information technology is stronger than Europe's. Consequently, so are the devices, subsystems, software, networks, services, and skills this industry makes available to the U.S. military market via the large defense system prime contractors. As its dominance in the on-line services market shows, the U.S. information technology industry is usually the first to bring key new products to market. In turn, U.S. defense contractors generally possess stronger design, engineering and integration capabilities than the smaller European defense contractors. This is not because the Americans performing these functions are superior to their European counterparts, but because the market demands more of the former than of the latter. Quite apart from the large size and small number of major U.S. defense contractors, they are better at what they do and have easier access to better information technology than their European allies.

Finally, both the U.S. defense contractors and U.S. information technology firms are more competitive than their European counterparts in world markets. Indeed armaments and information technology are two of America's best export performers. With greater market shares at home and globally, their costs are generally lower than those of European competitors, and that translates into lower prices and higher profit margins.

These stronger U.S. defense and information technology industries in turn are being impelled by their military customers to meet the needs associated with the U.S. power projection and strike missions, needs that will become more challenging still as the United States confronts the problem of WMD-armed adversaries. As a result, the task of networking U.S. units, platforms, weapons, sensors and commands--i.e., creating an information system of systems--will pose a significant new challenge to U.S defense and information technology industries. In sum, the United States must and can develop smarter weapons, better communications, and more sophisticated sensors than its European counterparts.

So another vicious circle is in play. European forces cannot acquire information-age capabilities from industries that are not able consistently to provide them at affordable prices. Because of their physical limitations, European forces cannot be assigned demanding new missions, which does not much bother Europeans who have a distaste for such missions anyway. Without strenuous tasks, European militaries will not require their suppliers to become more inventive and efficient. This compound effect of weak demand and weak supply is making it harder for the allies to keep up with the United States.

The NATO Experience

The current situation contrasts with the basic military compatibility achieved by the United States and the European allies during the Cold War, motivated by the common problem of deterring Soviet aggression and by the belief that neither Western Europe nor the United States alone could match the Warsaw Pact's forces. Even during the Cold War, the United States had more sophisticated military capabilities than the rest of NATO, though not so much as to make coalition operations impossible.

In the two decades after the Vietnam War, the United States invested heavily in technologies that would enable it to project power, penetrate enemy airspace, and use strike forces to thwart a large-scale armored offensive. It felt compelled to do so; for while the United States had sunk untold billions into the Vietnam War, the Soviet Union had steadily improved its conventional threat against Western Europe. In addition, by 1980 the United States faced the growing danger of a challenge, Soviet or otherwise, to oil-rich Southwest Asia, in light of the fall of the Shah, the invasion of Afghanistan, the Iran-Iraq war, and the defenselessness of the Saudi Arabs.

Consequently, the United States developed ways of defeating Soviet air defenses (e.g., stealth and cruise missiles) and an arsenal of precision-guided anti-tank and extended-range air-to-air munitions. It also beefed up its ability to deploy large forces over great distances, as well as to conduct joint--especially air-land--warfare and to bring to bear its superior overhead surveillance and other sensor technologies. These priorities led to improved strike systems and command, control, communications and intelligence systems. The United States was, in effect, getting a running start at the process of transforming its forces for the information age--namely, the RMA.

Meanwhile, the European allies, being preoccupied with the defense of their borders, concentrated on relatively stationary "main defense formations." They improved these capabilities in the 1980s, with vigorous prodding from Washington, and joined the United States in selective transatlantic defense cooperation programs (e.g., AWACS). But they were not concerned with strengthening their ability to dispatch large forces, to strike deep and from afar, to integrate and utilize the output of highly advanced sensors, and to manage integrated, fast-moving operations with improved command and control. So today, they face the RMA from a standing start.

Nevertheless, because defeating a Soviet attack on Western Europe required the United States and its allies to fight side-by-side, both had no choice but to maintain compatible and roughly comparable capabilities. When confronted by the Soviet threat, the United States and its NATO allies had a common strategic motivation, confronted a similar set of military operational challenges, required technical interoperability, and conducted at least modest defense industrial cooperation. As will be discussed later in detail, they succeeded in Europe, but this experience has not yet been carried over to meet new challenges.

It is no accident that the programs and habits of practical cooperation invented by NATO to foster transatlantic military compatibility and interoperability now lie fallow. The NATO force-goals mechanism, which is supposed to hold members accountable for building and maintaining forces on which the alliance depends, is atrophying. With the United States committed to power projection and the Europeans still largely concentrating on European defense despite the lack of threats in Europe, NATO force planning is trapped in the inertia of the Cold War. Unless its institutions are reformed, NATO will not provide the inducement or the process--the will or the way--to reverse the divergence in U.S. and European military capabilities and technology.

The divergence will grow as the U.S. military begins to make technical decisions for future C4ISR networks that will allow all its own forces to wage seamless joint warfare. With the need to support joint warfare already daunting, the United States is giving little attention to the challenge of facilitating European integration into these systems.7 Moreover, with the allies moving so slowly to create power projection forces and to utilize advanced information technology, why should the United States slow down or alter its own crucial integration efforts?

The NATO peacekeeping experience in Bosnia did not reveal the full extent of the gap. U.S. and allied forces have been able to work around the growing discrepancy between them largely by enabling the coalition to use information acquired, processed and disseminated by the United States. While that ad hoc experience is not adequate for the long run, it should be mined for pointers about how to close the gap, operationally and programmatically. Bosnia shows that U.S. and allied forces are highly resourceful in collaborating, given the good habits gained in NATO, and that American C4ISR assets and outputs are of great value to coalition partners. But Bosnia has not tested the alliance's ability to deploy rapidly, maneuver and strike decisively, and yet minimize losses. Moreover, U.S. and allied forces have worked mainly in separate, largely autonomous sectors; they have not had to conduct true "combined" operations. The Bosnia effort is a source of encouragement; but it is not a real test of the ability of the United States and the allies to wage intense coalition warfare against a determined and dangerous enemy far from Europe.

The United States does not depend on its European allies, or on NATO, to meet its most urgent and demanding global defense needs--not as it once depended on them to help defend Europe from Soviet aggression. The fact that it cannot count on them only encourages the United States to maintain its independent capabilities and to pursue the RMA with or without the Europeans. Until the allies show an inclination to contribute to meeting a broader spectrum of defense needs that reflect the security of shared global interests, NATO will exert marginal influence over U.S. military planning, including the direction and speed of the RMA and the design of the system of systems. As a result, the characteristics and standards of military technology will be decided by the U.S. defense establishment.

Sketching a Strategy

Neither halting the RMA nor ignoring the gap is acceptable. How, then, should European and American forces be tied together as the RMA proceeds? What should be the overall strategy for closing the gap?

At a minimum, as U.S. RMA networks arise, allies could be shown how to become "plug-compatible"--namely, by meeting U.S. information standards, perhaps with U.S. technology, according to the U.S. operating doctrines implied by U.S. architecture. European forces could become users of the information gathered, processed, and distributed by the United States, provided they accept standards that will ensure this information is intelligible to their systems.

Such an approach might be feasible in technical terms, and sharing information might be easier than sharing information technology. However, it is hardly a way to convince Europeans that they are strategic partners, not followers. The United States should be a leading partner, not a master. The United States does not want allied governments, military forces, and defense corporations to begin viewing it the way the rest of the computer industry views Microsoft. Moreover, even if the allies are able to receive intelligible data from U.S. sensor networks, European militaries will have little to contribute to the coalition if they have not tailored their combat forces and doctrine to deploy, maneuver, and strike RMA-style.

Another alternative would have European forces perform the "muck and bullets" work--i.e., provide the bulk of ground troops, and thus potential casualties--while the United States furnishes intelligence, air mobility, standoff strike forces, intelligence, communications and, of course, command. This would not close the gap so much as reduce its effect. But it would not work politically or militarily. The Europeans will not accept such an asymmetric division of labor; indeed, it would run afoul of one of the most fundamental and valuable principles on which the cohesion of Atlantic Alliance depends: the indivisibility of risk. In addition, "traditional" ground forces, of the current European sort, cannot operate effectively with RMA ground or strike forces. So this division of labor would, over time, make coalition operations less, not more, feasible.

The option we favor, broadly stated, is for U.S. and European forces to be able to perform together all the operational tasks required by current U.S. military strategy: power projection, information dominance, decisive maneuver, and strike--tasks that drive the U.S. RMA and could also drive a NATO RMA. This option requires, first, that the Europeans develop forces that can perform such tasks, and second, that the United States and Europeans can perform such tasks together. In this option, NATO has a crucial role in ensuring that the United States "designs in" the option of coalition warfare to its RMA plans and networks, and that the Europeans meet the force goals and standards that would make them technological, strategic, and political partners.

Choosing this option will require a sustained effort to reverse several developments that have caused divergence. This cannot be done by NATO communiqués. There is no single, silver bullet--e.g., European defense industry consolidation, or the United States "sharing" the fruits of its military technological investments. Rather, a multi-tier strategy is needed, involving:

Implementing this strategy will require cooperative activities--traditional and untraditional--involving U.S. and European political consultations, military planning, force experiments and exercises, industrial ventures, and research collaboration. Through such activities, progress on each tier will facilitate progress on the others. Clearly, agreement on which military problems require priority attention would be easier if the distance between U.S. and European global strategic perspectives were narrowed. Agreement on network architectures would be easier if the first two tiers were successful. Market opening and industrial cooperation would be aided by greater political and military harmony. But this is unrealistic; indeed, a strategy of cascading agreement from top to bottom is a formula for progress too slow to stop the gap from growing. Because major success on any tier will be long in coming, work must proceed concurrently on all of them. As progress is made on each level, it will reinforce progress on other levels.

The following four chapters are organized around such a strategy. They will diagnose the deficiencies and offer prescriptions for all of the levels, working from top to bottom. The goal is not to convince governments to "approve" the strategy--to think that this would solve the problem is to misunderstand it. Instead, the goal is to motivate military commanders and planners, government officials, defense thinkers, corporate strategists, and researchers on both shores of the North Atlantic to begin talking and thinking together, and roughly alike--perhaps along the lines of this book--and then acting in ways that pull the United States and Europe together rather than apart as the RMA moves into higher gear.


Notes

1 John E. Peters and Howard Deshong, Out of Area or Out of Reach? (Santa Monica, California: The RAND Corporation, 1995).

2 The coalition of the Gulf War was more a political than military coalition; in the ground campaign, only UK forces were "combined" with U.S. forces and used in a critical assignment.

3 After all, there is no threat to Europe; and in any case, with an economy larger than that of the United States, Europe does not need to depend on U.S. protection. Even the possible need for future peacekeeping within Europe, à la Bosnia, is not a credible argument for keeping a significant fraction of U.S. combat forces in Europe.

4 The exception could be if nuclear or biological weapons are used by the enemy or by both sides, which might have a nonlinear effect on the conduct and course of conflict.

5 See Richard Kugler and Tony Vanderbeek, "Where is NATO's Defense Posture Headed?" Strategic Forum, no. 133 (February 1998).

6 Analogously, the old mainframe computer companies that were not simply slow to move toward distributed processing, but instead determined not to do so, are now all out of business.


Table of Contents  |  Chapter 2