Section 5

Implications for U.S. Security and Defense Policy

Despite official recognition of globalization as a major factor in the international system, most components of the U.S. Government have been slow to adapt structures and processes accordingly. Security, economic, science and technology, and law enforcement policies that are essential to coping with the challenges of the global era are still developed largely in isolation from one another. These policy streams are generally integrated only at the highest levels and only when necessitated by a crisis. A better response will be needed if the United States is to cope effectively with the Global Century.

Globalization is not bringing geopolitics to an end. Many traditional forms of geopolitics remain active on the world scene, and in some places, globalization is giving rise to new stresses and turbulence in the international system. Taming both the old and new geopolitical dynamics, which would allow for positive effects of globalization to advance, is a key challenge of statecraft. The intelligent use of military power and maintenance of security partnerships with cooperating allies and partners are key to achieving this goal.

USS Cole en route to home port after terrorist attack in Aden, Yemen. U.S. Navy (Pat S. Draham)

A Flexible Global Security Architecture

International mechanisms and institutions for coping with the challenges of the global era remain asymmetric. Just as economic globalization has outpaced other forms of globalization, international economic and financial institutions, as well as a number of specialized agencies of the United Nations (for example, health and telecommunications), have well developed procedures and norms. In contrast, security institutions and arrangements have remained largely regional and generally anemic, with the exception of the transatlantic region. This disparity between economic and security institutions is likely to persist for some time. Development of truly global security norms has proven quite difficult, as recent debates over military action against Serbia and sanctions against Iraq have illustrated. The UN Security Council can function in certain cases. Its structure, however, is outdated and frequently incapable of action. Security Council reform should be a priority of a U.S. strategy for the global era.

The lag in the development of new security structures calls for further strengthening of the instruments for regional cooperation and security to contain or reduce existing threats and prevent the emergence of new ones. Alliances and alignments will remain a pervasive feature of international politics for some time to come, even as they adapt to changing circumstances. Noteworthy is the success of this adaptation in Europe, where the Partnership for Peace (PFP) and the Euro-Atlantic Partnership Council have allowed NATO countries to build a network of political and military cooperation with an increasing number of nations. The success of these efforts has been helped tremendously by the incentive of membership and its security guarantees. While the Alliance has begun reforming its policies and military capabilities for new missions outside its borders, faster progress is warranted in the coming years. The Defense Capability Initiative provides a means to pursue this goal, as does the EU effort to create forces for various contingencies when NATO declines to act.

Pakistani Shaheen-I missile on display. AP Wide World Photos (M.K. Anwar)

This process of building coalitions can be pursued elsewhere, particularly if such efforts build on existing alliances and patterns of cooperation. In Asia, the U.S.-Japan and U.S.-Korea alliances are slowly being adapted to meet the needs of an emerging, more complex security environment. However, as the current Commander in Chief, Pacific Command, has recognized, neither these alliances nor new regional structures may be well suited to new tasks and may not be optimal in certain contexts. Perhaps new patterns of cooperation in bilateral and limited multilateral settings can be drawn upon in times of need to form variable geometry coalitions. New security communities, based on shared interests in the global era, can be developed to enable a wide group of states to work together to safeguard these interests. For the United States, this will require some adaptation of standard operating procedures. Rather than expecting a diverse array of Asia-Pacific partners to adopt U.S. or NATO standards and procedures, as has happened with PFP, the U.S. military will need to develop mechanisms to allow a diverse array of forces to join it in coalitions.

Peacetime Shaping and Crisis Response

What will be the role of military power for dealing with a world of promise and peril? The world has changed a great deal since the last U.S. defense reviews of 1993 and 1997. The answers chosen then no longer suffice now, and they may be even less relevant in the years ahead. New requirements, missions, and priorities are arising faster than is commonly realized. The challenge is to respond to them even as U.S. forces are transformed with new doctrines, technologies, and structures borne of the Information Age. U.S. defense planning must be dynamic and flexible. U.S. forces will need to remain the world's best--ready, modern, and combat capable. Equally important, they will need to be capable of responding adeptly to unanticipated changes in their theaters of operation.

Globalization's effects on international security require a shift in U.S. defense strategy from continental Eurasia to a greater focus on the southern and eastern regions of the Eurasian land mass, North Africa, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia and Oceania. The growing turmoil in this contiguous southern belt is acquiring greater strategic importance because it can have a detrimental impact on global economics and stability and trigger U.S. security commitments. Significant engagements are also possible in sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America for humanitarian and certain security interests. Coping with these needs will require maintenance of military capabilities to project power rapidly, with a dominant effect, into the outlying world; continued forward presence; and the enhancement of military cooperation with allies and partners. This new strategy will also need to cope with the further proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. New challengers, both states and some nonstate actors, will have more sophisticated weapons and will also be capable of conducting asymmetric operations.

The term strategic chaos implies the opposite of permanent structure and order. It means a situation of great confusion, disorder, and fluidity that is capable of erupting into a wide variety of political conflicts and wars. Regional thugs and bullies will remain key contributors to this strategic chaos. Iraq and North Korea may evolve peacefully or they may not. Other medium-sized countries may also flout global norms in the coming years. Such powers as China, Russia, and India might also play roles, not necessarily as aggressors, but instead in the capacity of assertive geopolitical challengers to the U.S.-led security system in their regions. In this setting, accelerating WMD proliferation threatens to play a major destabilizing role, not only by giving potential aggressors added leverage to intimidate neighbors, but also by leaving many other countries chronically unsure of their security. Conventional military power likely will remain the instrument of choice for most wars, but often, violence will not take the form of classical state-to-state conflicts. The recent collapse of the former Yugoslavia and several African states into savage ethnic war, tribalism, and local violence may be a forerunner of things to come in several places.

B-2 refueling during orientation flight. U.S. Air Force (Scott H. Spitzer)

Force Structure and Military Plans

U.S. military power often will be called upon to help dampen this strategic chaos, and especially to rebuff direct threats to vital U.S. and allied interests. This agenda seems likely to give rise to a wide range of new missions, often in unfamiliar geographic locations, that promise to challenge the capacity of even well-prepared U.S. forces. In the past, defense plans typically have been fixed and stationary, focused on protecting a few vital strategic zones from attack. These zones were defended by a combination of overseas-stationed forces, reinforcements from the continental United States, and well-prepared allied forces. In the future, this time-tested formula often will not be applicable to challenges. Swift power projection likely will become the dominant U.S. response mechanism. The current overseas military presence may change in the coming decade. While large U.S. forces may remain stationed in Europe and Northeast Asia, they often will be called upon to deploy elsewhere and to serve as instruments of power projection that join with forces from the United States. Often military operations will not be continental or peninsular, but instead maritime and littoral; that is, they will come from the sea and air and occur at places near oceans and seas. Forces from allies and partners often will be present, but many times, full preparations for combined operations and integrated commands will not have been made. Nor will adequate bases, facilities, and infrastructure always be available. These new conditions, often less favorable than those of the past, will dictate fresh approaches to U.S. force operations and doctrines.

To avoid the risks of overload and overextension, defense plans will need guidance by a sense of limits and priorities in how national interests are defined. Even so, the mission of shaping global security affairs in peacetime likely will remain important and will acquire new dimensions in response to WMD proliferation and other forms of strategic chaos. U.S. forces will continue working closely with those of allies and partners, not only to create interoperability but also to assure friendly governments of their security and the credibility of U.S. guarantees. The main change is that these shaping missions likely will be conducted with a broader set of nations than in the past, including in new geographic locations. U.S. forces also will continue to perform outreach missions to former adversaries and to other countries that lack close ties to the Western alliance system. In addition, they might often be called upon to assert power in classical geopolitical ways, that is, by maintaining regional power balances and deterring predators from destabilizing conduct. The exact mixture of strategic shaping missions will depend upon how the future unfolds, but most likely, their size and frequency will impose major demands on the military.

The crisis operations and wartime campaigns carried out by U.S. forces are also likely to change contours. If the past is prologue, U.S. forces likely will be called on to perform a host of small-scale crisis interventions, peace operations, and humanitarian missions. Although the exact magnitude of these missions will depend upon national priorities and external events, U.S. forces will need to possess the special assets needed to carry them out. The Armed Forces will need to remain prepared to wage major theater wars (MTWs), but such future conflicts may be carried out in different locations than those anticipated today, and they may be driven by different goals and combat operations than now planned. Wars larger than today's MTWs, possibly involving use of WMD systems, are also possible. The key point is that the range of potential conflicts facing U.S. forces is likely to widen. The combination of a widening conflict spectrum and a broader geographic focus makes future defense planning more complicated than in the past.

Soldiers protecting public building in Haiti.

In the Persian Gulf and Kosovo wars of the 1990s, U.S. forces were so dominant that they were able to defeat their adversaries with few losses to themselves. Their continued superiority will remain critical, but it should not be taken for granted. Future wars may be waged under less favorable political and physical settings. Adversaries will not be able to match U.S. military power over the next two decades, but they may aspire to contest it locally in order to pursue their strategic goals. They likely will pursue asymmetric strategies, and they may gain access to modern weapons and information systems that can challenge the ability of the Armed Forces to gain forced entry, control the skies and seas, and maneuver freely on the ground. This prospect reinforces the need to continue modernizing the U.S. military and otherwise improving its warfighting capabilities.

Flexible and Adaptive Forces

How many U.S. forces will be needed to perform these future missions? For the past 8 years, the military has been sized to wage two MTWs simultaneously. The strategic calculus has been that, if U.S. forces can meet this standard, they will be large enough not only to defend the Persian Gulf and Korea, but also to handle their other multiple missions. While future forces should remain capable of concurrent wars, the two-MTW standard is coming to the end of its useful life. The rationale of anchoring the entire U.S. defense posture on two simultaneous major wars no longer commands widespread political consensus. Beyond this, a principal drawback is that the two-MTW standard allegedly leaves the military too narrowly fixated on its two canonical scenarios. The consequence may be insufficient attention to a broader set of requirements, for example, carrying out commander in chief (CINC) engagement strategies, generating forces for lesser crises and operations, and being prepared for different regional wars, including those in unexpected places.

Troops investigating mortar attack on Kosovo village. U.S. Army (Todd M. Roy)

If the two-MTW standard is to be broadened, a candidate may be a new standard that embraces three purposes: carrying out normal military missions in multiple theaters short of war; preparing to fight and win a single MTW in various places, including WMD conflicts; and maintaining a large insurance policy for more and larger conflicts. Rather than organize U.S. forces into two rigid packages, this approach would create a flexible array of packages that could be selected as the situation warrants. During peacetime, the forces could be divided among the various CINCs at home and abroad, but then concentrated to meet wartime needs. Some wars may require medium-sized strike packages; others may require a single MTW package; more demanding situations could necessitate two MTW-sized postures. In this way, U.S. forces could respond strongly to crises and wars of varying sizes and locations, while not sacrificing their capacity to continue performing other important missions.

Regardless of the standard chosen, the key point is that U.S. forces will need to be highly flexible and adaptive. To meet emerging requirements, future U.S. forces likely will remain similar in size to today's, but some new assets may be needed in specific areas. One pressing requirement is to create more low density/high demand units so that there will be enough special assets to handle not only peacekeeping but also warfighting--for example, special forces, construction engineers, command, control, communications, and computers, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (C⁴ISR) units, and defense-suppression aircraft. The Army seems unlikely to need more active divisions and brigades, but it might need more deep-fire assets, support units, and ready Reservists. The Air Force may require more support aircraft and strategic transports. The Navy is calling for a buildup from today's 316 battle-force ships to 350 ships, including more submarines and carriers to meet peacetime deployment needs.

While the future size of U.S. forces will need review, there is widespread consensus that joint operations should continue guiding military doctrine. Recent experience has shown that joint operations are fundamental to gaining maximum strength, flexibility, and synergy from the Armed Forces. Joint Vision 2010 and Joint Vision 2020 create a far-sighted framework with their precepts of precision engagement, dominant maneuver, focused logistics, and full-dimensional protection. The task now is to employ the U.S. Joint Forces Command and service experimental efforts to create the appropriate information systems, new structures, and operational practices. As these joint efforts proceed, the services will face the challenge of innovation in their forces and operations. Now that airpower has come of age, the Air Force will strive to preserve its mastery of the skies, while employing its aircraft and munitions to influence the land battle through precision strikes, including against mobile targets. With its networking efforts underway, the Navy will be endeavoring not only to maintain sea dominance but also to influence events ashore in peace and war. As the Army digitizes, it will be striving to create mobile brigades that can deploy quickly yet bring adequate weapons along with them. Success in these service efforts will play a major role in shaping the future effectiveness of joint operations in intense combat.

Delivering relief supplies in Mozambique. 1st Combat Camera Squadron (Cary Humphries)

Clearly, joint operations should guide the allocation of forces to CINCs for their operation plans (OPlans). While Kosovo suggests that some wars can be won with air and naval forces alone, Desert Storm required large ground forces as well. By allocating large forces from all services, DOD can ensure that each CINC has the diverse assets to select the proper mix for the occasion. Indeed, selective force tailoring may be the future norm. Today's canonical MTW scenarios produce OPLANs calling for large forces--multiple divisions, fighter wings, and carrier battle groups--to be deployed over a period of months to halt an enemy attack and later to launch a decisive counterattack. This model may apply in some occasions, but not all. Some conflicts, such as counter-WMD scenarios, may require medium-sized strike packages to be deployed faster than now planned. A proper array of response options can be created by having each major regional CINC develop a family of OPLANs that reflects the potential conflicts in each theater. Creating a flexible capacity to respond to a wide range of wars--including those quite different from canonical MTW conflicts--may be more important than fine-tuning the ability to wage two wars at once.

Although current U.S. forces provide a diverse array of assets for flexible and adaptive plans, they will need to be improved further. The likelihood that the world will remain turbulent necessitates a continued emphasis on maintaining high military readiness during the near-term and mid-term. Yet U.S. forces will also need to modernize to maintain their superiority, especially for the long term. Currently, public attention is focused on homeland defense, national missile defense, and theater missile defense--all of which can make a contribution to security if carried out wisely. Equally important will be the accelerating procurement effort aimed at buying new conventional weapons to replace aging systems. Acquisition of new combat aircraft is the most visible measure, but modernization of ground and naval weapons will be taking place as well. DOD also will need to buy modern information systems, smart munitions, and war reserve stocks. In addition, it likely will need to fund new overseas bases, facilities, and prepositioning in order to facilitate operations in new locations. Such measures may escape public notice, but they are critical to future military strength.

Increases in the defense budget can help DOD address its changing requirements. But to the extent that money and manpower are less than ideal, DOD will need to set priorities in its forces, programs, and improvement efforts. It also will need to economize where possible by consolidating, streamlining, and otherwise adopting modern business practices so that costs of supporting forces are lessened. Prioritization will be needed in another way as well. With globalization and other trends giving rise to an ever-widening spectrum of missions, the risk is that U.S. forces will be stretched too thin, resulting in a diminished capacity to perform key operations well. Setting priorities in this arena will not be easy, but it is the best way to get maximum strategic value from the military in peacetime, crisis, and war.

Globalization is greatly reshaping international security affairs. For the United States, it is giving rise to a variety of new strategic requirements, defense priorities, and military missions. More fundamentally, it is eradicating the premise of continuity and predictability in defense planning. Transformation will require constant adaptation to keep pace with rapid change.

Boarding merchant vessel in Arabian Gulf. U.S. Coast Guard (Alice Sennott)

Growing Demands on Naval Forces

During the Cold War, U.S. maritime operations often were seen as supportive of continental operations. This trend emerged because naval forces were able to control the seas, but land and air forces faced great threats in such vital places as Central Europe, Korea, and the Persian Gulf. The accelerating dynamics of globalization are giving maritime operations a position of growing emphasis today in the U.S. strategic calculus. One reason is that the oceans and seas are now playing an important role in the modern world economy. A huge portion of commerce transits the world's sea lanes. Another reason is that security affairs often are taking place over water. The task of building an Asian security architecture, for example, is heavily one of determining how continental powers and island nations are to relate to each other across large seas.

A third reason is military. The Navy likely will not face a major naval rival for sea control anytime soon. But many future military operations will be launched from the seas, will take place in littoral areas, and will be carried out against adversaries with modern forces capable of defending their shores and offshore zones. For these reasons, a strong Navy and Marine Corps will remain a key component in U.S. strategic thinking for a globalizing world.

Naval forces are well suited to the challenges of the global era. Their inherent flexibility allows them to perform a range of likely missions, from peacetime presence and engagement to crisis response and countervailing military action. They often provide assured access during crises in the period before land and air forces can arrive and also offer a hedge against loss of overseas basing. Naval forces have a distinct advantage in crisis response, given the rapidity with which they can transition from peacetime presence missions to wartime operations. Peacetime Navy presence and overseas engagement activities will remain critical. Operations in the littoral areas and with coalition partners will become increasingly important, and the pace of these operations will require effective exploitation of the latest information technologies.

A robust Navy structured with carrier battle groups, amphibious ready groups, strategic ballistic missile submarines, and new systems will be needed in the coming years. While naval forces will retain significant tactical and operational autonomy, they will be increasingly dependent on national and other service assets for technical support, particularly in the critical areas of C⁴ISR. Sustained improvements of the Navy through such systems and smart munitions are warranted, as are steps to counter the threat posed by mine warfare and quiet submarines. The Marine Corps will have to be prepared to achieve rapid success with minimal destruction in urban environments; with hostile populations, as well as with military or quasi-military defenders; and under the watchful eye of the international media.

The Coast Guard has been in the vanguard in coping with many of the challenges of the global era, including not only operations against narcotics and smuggling, but also the negotiation and enforcement of conventions for maritime safety and environmental protection. Globalization, with its attendant growth in legal and illegal trade and transit, is placing new demands on the fifth service, such as monitoring pollution of vessels at sea, controlling immigration, protecting fisheries, conducting humanitarian operations, and coping with asymmetric threats to coastal areas. This trend will require recapitalization of aging deep-water capabilities. Moreover, the Coast Guard, as a multimission law enforcement, humanitarian, and regulatory agency, as well as a military service, is well suited to support CINC theater engagement, particularly with emerging democracies that are building limited coastal defense forces.