Force Planning and Strategy: Keeping the Horse Before the Cart

by

Gordon Adams

Based on a panel presentation before the
National Defense University Joint Operations Symposium

Meeting Key U.S. Defense Planning Challenges

November 16, 2004

The Clinton era national security policy was criticized for lacking an overarching strategic vision. Instead, deployments of U.S. military forces to such locations as Haiti, Rwanda and the Balkans put the United States in the position of being a “global police officer,” intervening in disputes everywhere that were not vital to U.S. interests. Moreover, according to the critique, the Administration overstressed the military through repeated deployments and by tasking them to perform missions – particularly nation-building – that were peripheral to their warfighting task. Finally, it was argued, once the forces had been deployed on peacekeeping and nation-building missions there was no exist strategy in place to bring them back.

How times have changed. Today, in addition to substantial deployments in Asia and Europe, the United States has nearly 200,000 troops tied down in the Gulf region, primarily Iraq, with 50 percent of its combat forces on overseas missions and 60 percent of the Army overseas. Virtually all of the Army’s combat brigades were, are, or will be in Iraq over the space of two years. Over 180,000 reservists have been called up, with 40 percent of them deployed overseas.[1] America’s military is clearly hard pressed, as an endless string of journalistic reports makes clear.[2] Moreover, the military has not only been asked to perform nation-building and reconstruction missions, for the past two years it has taken primary responsibility for those missions in Iraq.

More broadly, and, in the long run, more significantly, the Defense Department is engaged in a full-scale review of the size, structure and global deployment of U.S. military forces. The review of overseas basing, in particular, involves a potentially dramatic restructuring of current deployments, with substantial forces returning to the United States, moving further South in Korea, and potentially being forward based in former Warsaw Pact countries, the Gulf and parts of Central Asia.[3] Other governmental institutions and private think tanks are also exploring options for revising U.S. forward military basing, in the light of events over the past four years.[4] Some analysts in the private sector have proposed dramatic restructuring of U.S. forces, based on the way they have been used repeatedly in recent years.[5]

There is now a cottage industry on U.S. military forces, where they are and what they are and should be doing. The Defense Department is making significant decisions about their size, location and mission, looking at moving them to new bases in new countries on the basis of new military relationships. The strategic foundation for these decisions, however, is not transparent. The military cart has been put in front of the strategic horse, with deployments preceding decisions about relationships, goals, alliances, and overall U.S. national security strategy.

To be fair, there is the appearance of a strategy. The National Security Strategy, supplemented by authoritative statements on terrorism and weapons of mass destruction, provides some strategic rhetoric that supposedly guides the Administration in its national security decisions.[6] Defense Department documents that do not directly derive from these National Security Council statements also provide some military details.[7] Neither set of documents, however, provides a clear strategic rationale connecting current force planning to these broader concepts of the U.S. strategic intent.

Put most simply, the military is planning a redeployment of armed forces that will enable a military response to the threats of terrorism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, wherever they may occur. The watchwords are “capabilities,” rather than specific threats, and “flexibility,” a clear statement that the intended targets for the use of U.S. military forces are not known in advance.

In the absence of a clear link between the two, it seems to be up to the DOD and the military to “figure it out,” prepare for the worst, and maximize the geographic spread of the military footprint. The default position is that the military seems to have the tools and the need to resolve this broader strategic issue.

There is a grave risk for national security inherent in leaving such strategic decisions to the military and an equally grave risk for the military itself: overstress, and mission explosion (rather than mission “creep”). If terror and proliferation are the threats and the military, and its deployments, the strategic answer, the threat of terrorist attacks and efforts to acquire nuclear weapons are only likely to grow, making the strategy a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The problem with this approach to strategy is that the threat has been defined in a way that it will never go away and will likely grow. Terror, of course, is not an “ism,” it is a tactic chosen by groups seeking various means of achieving their political objectives. A national security strategy framed around killing terrorists and their cells is a “Sorcerer’s Apprentice” strategy. Each time we take the military axe to the terrorist broomstick, we create two more broomsticks in its place, justifying further chopping of the two, who then become four. While tackling terrorist organizations is important and the military is one tool to use in that effort, until we have dealt with the basic source of terrorism, the threat will be constant and the risk will grow.

Leaving this responsibility to the military means that the military will be continuously, even increasingly, overstretched and operating in a widening circle of hostile locations.

The “right place” to base the military becomes a constantly shifting and growing objective, with more deployments in more places to follow. To borrow another metaphor, if we use only the hammer, not only will every situation look like a nail, there will be a constant need for more hammers. The only limit to this strategy is the willingness of the political system to accommodate ever-growing risks and ever increasing budget deficits.

Before we proceed down the road of re-basing U.S. military forces without a strategy, it is worth considering whether there is an alternative vision, one that embeds military capabilities and missions in a broader strategy of leadership and engagement; one that uses all the tools of U.S. statecraft, instead of just one of them. Perhaps it is time to put the military capability in its rightful place in our national security strategy.

The context for such a strategic vision needs to be defined. The phenomena in front of our eyes – terrorism and weapons of mass destruction - are symptoms, not the disease. While these threats are real, the current strategy offers no vision of how to ensure, in the long term, that international security is less troubled by terrorists and that the desire to acquire weapons of mass destruction has declined.

There are powerful underlying trends in international security affairs, trends that spawn terror and create the demand for nuclear weapons. Unless these are addressed, and soon, we will find ourselves playing the “sorcerer’s apprentice” for a long time, indeed, at great cost and sacrifice. Addressing these trends requires an integrated use of all the tools of statecraft and a long-term engagement with other states and organizations, even those that are not “like-minded,” especially the latter. And it requires looking at our place in the world with greater objectivity than is the case today.

The Underlying Global Trends

A broader national strategy would start with the three strategic challenges facing the United States and the rest of the globe. These challenges are interrelated and constitute the source of the insecurities that have led to terrorist tactics and a growing desire for weapons of mass destruction.

The first challenge is the inequities that have arisen in the global economy. The increasingly globalized economy and the information and communications networks that are part of that economy, has brought a revolutionary change to the quest for global security.[8] The most important facet of that change is the emergence of three classes of nations, as the World Bank put it, the globalized, the “new globalizers,” and the poor or the “haves,” the “soon to have,” and the “have nots.”[9]

While the “haves” face few security challenges among themselves and the “soon to haves” (like Poland, Mexico and China) are moving that way, it is less promising to be part of the “have nots.” These nations are concentrated in regions that are the source countries for terrorist and proliferators of nuclear weapons. This global economic reality is probably the most critical long-term threat to U.S. national security policy. From a security perspective, high rates of unemployment, population growth and hopelessness, create a fertile breeding ground for the near-term security threat of terrorism on which the Administration has focused. Asking the military to police this part of the world is no solution. Meeting the challenge of global inequality requires a broad and international engagement through international financial policy, trade policy, and a dramatically restructured international assistance policy.

The second challenge is that of governance. The region of the “have nots” coincides with the countries where governance is brittle, authoritarian, weak, unstable, or non-existent. This challenge was masked during the Cold War, but now stands exposed from Indonesia, where the feeble light of elections flickers, through Pakistan, where brittle governance poses a serious regional (and possibly global) security challenge, to the Middle East, where brittle, autocratic governance clearly conceals high risks of social and political instability, as now seen in Iraq.

Calling for democracy in these countries, while laudatory, is an inadequate answer to the challenge and not just because we may not like the results of “democracy” in some of these countries, including Iraq. Democracy may not answer the need for “effective” and “responsive” governance, which can deliver the domestic security, social and economic goods the populations of these countries seek and require. Responsive and effective governance, let alone democratic, has been far too hard to find from southern Africa, through the Middle East, Central and South Asia and Southeast Asia. Authoritarian, brittle, weak and corrupt governance is too frequently the rule, which only reinforces the problem of global inequality.

The third challenge is the surge of ethnic and religious hatred – “tribalism” in various forms - that has swept up much of the same region. The end of the Cold War also exposed these conflicts and today the whirlwind is upon all nations. National security policy rarely recognizes tribal beliefs and religion as security issues, despite the ethnic clashes of the past decade. But belief systems and ethnic self-identity are now among the most powerful forces fueling conflicts around the world. The “clash” of Islam with Christianity is only one manifestation; the conflict over Kashmir displays a different version, as does the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Conflicts of “tribe” are similarly inflammatory, as the anguished history of the Balkans indicates. This part of history has clearly not ended. If anything, it has grown more intense, as even the recent U.S. elections have shown.

What is to be done?

These three long-term challenges are the “stewpot” in which terrorism and the desire for ultimate weapons is brewed and thus pose the core strategic challenges the United States faces today. The self-defeating weakness of U.S. national security policy today is the failure to recognize these fundamental challenges and to craft a strategy to deal with them that uses all the tools of statecraft we have at our disposal. Instead, policy-makers have left it to the military to deploy in such a way as to deal with the consequences of these challenges. No sensible strategist would approach these challenges in this manner. As Sun Tzu put it: “supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting.”[10] Recent U.S. policy has left it to the war fighters to sort it out.

We have shirked on the use of our diplomacy. The Secretary of State should have been embarrassed by the ill-informed brief he was called on to present at the United Nations when it came to justifying the war in Iraq. A decision for war had clearly been made before the diplomatic options were exhausted. The job of Iraqi reconstruction was handed to the military, which was manifestly unprepared for the task, untrained to carry it out, and inappropriate for the mission. The Defense-State interagency turf struggle, normal in the best of times, became a scorched earth battle like few remember, to the clear detriment of an integrated national security strategy. We have reluctantly acceded to European negotiations to hold back Iran’s efforts to acquire weapons of mass destruction, having nothing but a military option to put on the table. Negotiations over North Korean nuclear weapons are stymied because the United States cannot resolve its indecision about whether to threaten war or conduct diplomacy.

The economic tool of U.S. statecraft has also taken a back seat. Trade agreements are the only element of economic statecraft that have received attention, and mostly on the margins of the international trading system. Yet, if we are to make progress in closing the gap between the “haves” and the “have nots,” international financial policies, trade, and economic assistance are going to be essential tools. Yet the federal budget deficit and the current account deficit have both grown to historic levels with little more than a shrug from national security policy-makers and there has been no U.S. leadership to reform the international financial system. While U.S. bilateral assistance spending has grown, that growth has focused on one health issue – AIDS -, a new development program (the Millennium Challenge Corporation) which will provide support for the “soon to haves,” not the most troubled “have not” states, and on budgetary subsidies for Afghanistan and Pakistan, linked to the war on terror. As a result, the U.S. now has six economic assistance programs - MCC, USAID, DOD military assistance, State Dept. economic support funds (ESF), State’s AIDS office, and Treasury’s spending on multilateral development banks – but no overarching strategic design for these programs to confront the long-term problem of economic inequity.

Our intelligence tool has also been misused and unreformed. The 9-11 attacks were not anticipated and the warning signals were buried in a tangle of interagency coordination problems.[11] What “truth telling” the intelligence community may have wanted to communicate about Iraqi WMD was lost in the fog of the intention to go to war and preconceived notions about the justification for that war. The intelligence community may have always communicated the intelligence the White House wanted, but it does not seem to have provided what the White House needed to hear. The long-term challenges our national security faces demand effective intelligence, integrated into a strategy. Shuffling the boxes, which is the current debate, will not ensure we obtain such intelligence, and may be a distraction.

The machinery that tells the world about America – public diplomacy - is another key element in a grand strategy. According to the Defense Science Board, U.S. public diplomacy has been under funded, underutilized and ineffective in the “war on terror.”[12] As the DSB report goes on to point out, selling an unpopular policy is an uphill battle: “Muslims see American policies as inimical to their values, American rhetoric about freedom and democracy as hypocritical, and American actions as deeply threatening…. In other words, they do not hate us for our values, but because of our policies.”[13] For public diplomacy to be fully effective, it needs to have a better product to sell, adequate funding to do the job, and be integrated into a strategy.

The final tool in the statecraft toolkit is the military. Military force is a necessary, but not sufficient, support function in a national security strategy. While it can be the horse on which effective diplomacy rides it has, today, been made the lead horse on the team, leading to over-commitment and overstress of the forces. Although the military services have accepted this broad mission, they are not the best suited institution for reconstruction, governance and economic policy. Nor should we expect them to be – these tasks are inappropriate and beyond the end strength and capabilities of the military services, however well-intentioned. Governance, economic reconstruction, and law enforcement are simply not core tasks for the military; combat and security are their proper task. We are damaging this essential tool by using it inappropriately and asking it to take on the task of grand strategy, which is not its mission.

This is the fundamental problem with the force planning and basing studies currently being carried out in the Defense Department; they are disconnected from a strategic view of the goals and missions of America’s grand strategy, because there is no grand strategy. Military planners are simply filling a void. Crafting such a strategy will both give the military an appropriate and clear sense of its mission and it will make much more clear where in the globe and in what numbers the military tool is needed to re-enforce U.S. strategic goals.

Military planning today is systematically handicapped by the near collapse of the interagency process in the U.S. government, the only instrument for achieving the synergies needed for a grand strategy to be created. Iraq war planning exposed this collapse; little has been done to repair it. As much as the Clinton national security policy has been criticized, in key policy decisions, such as the Haiti invasion, the interagency process functioned effectively, each agency taking its appropriate piece of the mission, while the White House ensured that turf issues were deconflicted in advance. This interagency textbook was written the 1990s; it would be useful to have today.

The absence of such a strategy can also be seen in the ad hoc approach being taken to America’s alliances and partnerships. A proper place for alliances in the strategy will also help clarify the location and roles of the U.S. military. Tackling the agenda of economic inequality, brittle or anarchic governance, and tribal strife is impossible, if the U.S. approach is “my way or the highway.” Creating such strategic relationships is essential to strategy; it is not about “global tests” or “permission slips.” No grand strategy is possible without friends, allies, and working relationships even with those wary of our leadership and intentions.

Moreover, these alliance relationships must be more than simply convincing allies to “cooperate” by signing up to U.S. policies. The exchange for their support is taking their views into account. Failing this, the United States will have few allies and many more places we have to deploy forces, as the slow erosion of the coalition in Iraq demonstrates. A policy of “my way or the highway” is likely to leave the U.S. military alone on the road.

The military’s task even in the narrow framework of the war on terror and proliferation, has been made more difficult by the squandering of good will that has taken place since the 9-11 attacks, as testified to in any number of polls done outside the United States.[14] The very first step in an integrated strategy will be to enlist the participation and cooperation of a very wide array of actors – allies, international organizations, governments, even the wary, in support of tackling these underlying problems.

The Art of Listening: The Hegemon’s Dilemma

There is one other dimension to U.S. grand strategy, without which we cannot “win” the war on terror, prevent proliferation, or deploy forces appropriately, let alone tackle the underlying agenda that drives these threats. We seem congenitally incapable of seeing the world through anybody’s eyes but our own. While we may not agree with the framework through which the Europeans, the Asians or the Islamic world see global security and the role and actions of the United States, until we understand that framework fully, any strategy will be counter-productive, creating the very opposition we seek to overcome.

For U.S. grand strategy to be effective and for our forces to be welcome where they are truly needed, we need to begin to see ourselves “from the other guy’s point of view,” instead of consistently seeking to impose our own views on the rest of the globe as a “benign hegemon.” This is the strategic adjustment Americans, even policy planners, may find it most difficult to make.

From the viewpoint of the rest of the world, the U.S. is not the designer of the global framework; it is another actor, a big one, but an “independent variable.” The United States has acted in and on the world for more than two centuries. It is not an “exceptional nation,” unlike any other, nor the “indispensable nation” championed by a former Secretary of State. Moreover, not every nation sees the international security agenda the same way we do.[15] The sooner we get past our blinders, the easier it will be to tackle the broad agenda and win the support of others in doing so.

We are the most militarily powerful country in the world and have a history of global interaction, involvement, support, invasion, intrusion, and cooperation – a web of experience that links us to the rest of the world. We are, and have often been, the “elephant” of which the ants are wary.

Throughout our history, we have been eager to see ourselves myopically, as the “good guy”, always acting with righteous intent, always with the best interests of everybody else in mind. We rarely see ourselves the way the other guy sees us; we rarely understand that what we do and have done in the past, has had an impact on their lives, on how they view security, on how they view us. And we are startled, then, in our a-historic way, when disapproval of our policies rises around the world. Yet that is precisely where we are today. It is not our values that are in question with the rest of the world; it is our policies and our behavior.[16]

From the regional perspective in the Middle East, the problem of U.S. policy is that it is seen as an effort to ensure low cost oil by supporting authoritarian monarchies, stationing troops in the region, and lecturing them about democracy. We are seen as the nation holding Muslims in detention without formal charges, and refusing to push for a settlement between Israel and the Palestinians. While the U.S. may have reasons for all these policies, they do not sell in the region. No public relations effort will be able to turn that reality around. Our intentions may seem benign to us, but they can be and often are read in the region as demands, orders, instructions, and, worse yet, hypocrisy. Continuing these policies has the effect of bringing groups like Al Qaeda active and passive support from the Muslim population, all of whom care about these issues.

Arguing “the facts” more vehemently will not solve this problem, as if we were talking to a non-American who will understand if only we yell loud enough. Until we get past seeing the Islamic world and its reactions as “crazy” or “misinformed,” our policies will not succeed there, or anywhere else and our military forces will encounter, even create problems, wherever we seek to base them. Pentagon deployment planning is likely to be received elsewhere in the world with suspicion and mistrust, not open arms. And those deployments will become targets for those, like Al Qaeda, who mean us serious harm.

Conclusion

American national security is in greater danger than we think. The absence of a long-term grand strategy, the failure to focus on the global challenges that under gird terror and efforts to acquire nuclear weapons, the failure to integrate and use all the tools of statecraft, the alienation of potential allies and supporters, and a narcissistic myopia about our role in the world combine to challenge any and all U.S. efforts to exercise global leadership. Military force planners who, with the best of intentions, plan the redeployment of U.S. forces to achieve greater capability and flexibility are running headlong into this dilemma. As a result, the sensible mechanics of force planning could create exactly what they seek to avoid: a reduction, rather than an enhancement of U.S. national security.

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[1] See Carl Conetta, Charles Knight, Melissa Murphy, “Is the Iraq War Sapping America’s Military Posture?: Cautionary Data and Perspectives,” Project on Defense Alternatives, October 22, 2004, at www.comw.org/pda/041022milops.html, and Century Foundation, “Legions Stretched Thin: the U.S. Army’s Manpower Crisis,” 2004, http://www.tcf.org/4L/4LMain.asp?subjectID=1&ArticleID=490

[2] See Mark Mazzetti, “U.S. Military is Stretched Too Thin, Defense Board Warns,” Los Angeles Times, September 30, 2004.

[3] Department of Defense, “Background Briefing on U.S. Global Defense Posture,” June 9, 2004, at www.defenselink.mil/transcripts/2004/tr20040609-0843.html.

[4] See Congressional Budget Office, Options for Changing the Army’s Overseas Basing, May 2004 and Andrew F. Krepinevich, “The Thin Green Line,” CSBA Backgrounder, Washington DC: Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, August 14, 2004.

[5] See Thomas P.M. Barnett, The Pentagon’s New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-First Century, NY: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 2004, which proposes splitting the US military into two forces, one for military combat operations, and the other, a “system administrator” force, playing the global policing role.

[6] White House, The National Security Strategy of the United States of America, Washington, DC: White House, 2003; White House, National Strategy to Combat Weapons of Mass Destruction,” December 2002; and White House, National Strategy for Combating Terrorism, February 2003.

[7] For DOD, see Department of Defense, Quadrennial Defense Review Report, Washington, DC: DOD, September 31, 2001, and DOD, Office of Force Transformation, Military Transformation: A Strategic Approach, Washington, DC: Fall 2003.

[8] See Ellen Frost, “Globalization and National Security: A Strategic Agenda,” and Richard Kugler, “Controlling Chaos: New Axial Strategic Principles,” in Frost and Kugler (eds.), The Global Century: Globalization and National Security, Washington, DC: Institute for National Strategic Studies, National Defense University, 2001.

[9] See World Bank, Globalization, Growth and Poverty, Research Report 23591, Washington, DC: World Bank, January 2002.

[10] Sun Tzu, The Art of War, James Clavell (ed.), NY: Dell, 1983, p.15.

[11] See National Commission on Terrorist Attacks on the United States, The 9/11 Commission Report, NY: WW Norton, 2004.

[12] Defense Science Board, Report of the Defense Science Board Task Force on Strategic Communications, DOD, Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology and Logistics, September 2004, available at http://www.acq.osd.mil/dsb/reports/2004-09-Strategic_Communication.pdf

[13] Ibid., pp.45-6.

[14] See, for example, Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, A Year After Iraq War: Mistrust of American in Europe Ever Higher, Muslim Anger Persists,” March 16, 2004; German Marshall Fund, Transatlantic Trends 2004, Washington, DC: 2004; Program on International Policy Attitudes, Public Opinion on the US Presidential Election and US Foreign Policy, Washington. DC: September 8, 2004, Zogby International, Impressions of America 2004: How Arabs View America; How Arabs Learn About America, Washington, DC: 2004.

[15] See, for example, Emmanuel Todd, After the Empire: The Breakdown of the American Order, NY: Columbia University Press, 2003, and Roger Cohen, “The War on Terror: An Obsession the World Doesn’t Share,” New York Times, December 5, 2004, Week in Review, p.1.

[16] “Anonymous,” aka Michael Scheuer of the CIA makes this same point in arguing that US counter-terrorism policy is doomed until we recognize that Al Qaeda opposes the US because of its policies in the Middle East, not because of US values. See Anonymous, Imperial Hubris: Why the US is Losing the War on Terror, Washington, DC: Brasseys, 2004.