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Gates fights the last war
By Kori Schake
There is an interesting, if unsurprising bit of news in today's Post:
Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates is expected to announce on Monday the restructuring of several dozen major defense programs as part of the Obama administration's bid to shift military spending from preparations for large-scale war against traditional rivals to the counterinsurgency programs that Gates and others consider likely to dominate U.S. conflicts in coming decades.
Gates is setting a course to focus on counterinsurgency that will likely come at the expense of other military capabilities when budget trade-offs need to be made. The wars we are fighting do not refute transformation. Much of what Rumsfeld identified as the central advantages and central weaknesses of our military actually have been validated: our space infrastructure is too weak for the increasing demands we place on it; integrating battlefield information with long-distance precision strike allows U.S. forces to react with a dominating speed; and persistent surveillance is revolutionizing our operations.
Gates's emphasis on institutionalizing counterinsurgency sounds remarkably like fighting the last war, and too little effort has been directed toward redressing those vulnerabilities in U.S. military power most likely to produce losses in future wars. The United States is already reasonably good at counterinsurgency, as a result of the Iraq war, and the equipment has adapted relatively quickly despite a balky Pentagon bureaucracy. Gates is adopting a conservative approach that will make other, harder adaptations -- like handling cyber attacks -- more difficult in the future.
All of this comes at a time when, despite two years at the helm of the Defense Department, Gates did not put his stamp on the medium-term spending plans that shape America's defense effort. With the important exception of his emphasis on Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicle acquisition, he submitted two budgets and several supplemental spending requests that did not make hard choices. While questioning the need for some systems, Gates has continued to fund them. Indeed, he developed a FY2010 budget last fall -- after the election of his current boss -- that would have increased annual defense spending to $584 billion, a significant jump over even the Bush administration's sustained seven percent yearly spending increases.
These budgetary issues are important in their own right, but they also serve as a reminder that Gates's strategy for this year's Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) is focused on the wrong set of questions for defining U.S. defense policy. Last year, just as Obama was being inaugurated, Gates preempted the new administration's defense program by publishing a National Defense Strategy and excerpting it in Foreign Affairs. His strategy is a paean to "balance," but it and Monday's likely announcement will set a course for the QDR strongly weighted toward counterinsurgency. In judging that "the most likely catastrophic threats to the U.S. homeland ... are more likely to emanate from failing states than from aggressor states," Gates has set in motion a substantial revision to U.S. defense strategy that goes much further than institutionalizing counterinsurgency warfare capabilities or wrestling with the means of fighting and winning hybrid wars.
No president can relegate catastrophic threats to the homeland to second place in the hierarchy of defending our national interests. In determining that failing states are the major threat to the U.S. homeland, Gates has said the military means to prevent them from affecting our security is job number one. This will require a much different emphasis in the number and type of our military forces, and in the balance between them and the civilian agencies.
Gates's approach is likely to perfect our counterinsurgency capabilities, but seeing the excellence we have developed because of the wars we are fighting, even insurgents will surely probe for other vulnerabilities. And our future wars will not be waged exclusively against insurgents. Nor will they focused merely on stabilizing weak and failing states.
Rumsfeld denigrated the human element of warfare to focus on high-tech innovation. His successor is about to make the reverse mistake.
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I wish Secretary Gates the
I wish Secretary Gates the best of luck. Since he tenure at the Pentagon I have admired his sturdy hand and how he has managed business. His firing of the Air Force top brass was a signal that he understands what needs to be done and how to do it.
I am looking forward to his budget and expect he will support those programs that are essential for our future security and eliminate those that are at best marginal in value but high in cost.
It will be interesting to see what compromises he thinks he needs to make, hopefully few. You can expect the Defense Contractors and position lobbyists to be on the attack as well as those in a congress with economic concerns more than defense.
i guess you wouldn't have anything to say, if it wasn't critical
Eh, that wouldn't be the last war ... that would be the war we happen to be in just now.
Gates's approach is likely to
Gates's approach is likely to perfect our counterinsurgency capabilities, but seeing the excellence we have developed because of the wars we are fighting, even insurgents will surely probe for other vulnerabilities.
I consider this the most important point.
We make our decisions about what we'll be ready to handle. Then our enemies decide what sort of attacks to make. Of course we wind up fighting in the arena where we're weakest! How could it be otherwise? Our potential enemies concede the arenas where we're strong.
There's no right answer when we pick our strategy first and then our enemies pick theirs in response to us. The wrong answer isn't some particular mix of capabilities. The wrong answer is keeping the inertia that makes it so slow for us to change our capabilities.
One approach, we have to try to balance the needs, knowing that we'll get challenged wherever our potential enemies think their relative strength is the biggest. This is not good.
Another approach, we spend whatever it takes to be great at everything. That loses bigtime. How long can your military grow at 7% while your economy grows at 2%? The USSR did that for awhile....
We have to get quicker at adapting to challenges. We can't be ready for everything at the same time, but if we can change focus quickly then we can be ready for anything pretty quick.
Si se puede bring change to the Pentagon
I'm amazed that in the course of a week you've gone from advocating doing a better job of assigning limited resources to creatively address our most likely threats and channeling some defense funds towards strengthing other government agencies' capabilities in running competent nation-building efforts to exhibiting an appetite for Jurassic Pork and nostalgia for the Brave Old (Conventional) Army Team.
As Gates' policy and acquisition cohort tries to manage American hegemony in a perilous economic environment they recognize our power, which in the past has emanated from a dynamic political culture where adaptability was rewarded and creative destruction encouraged, should not be stymied by the sides supporting a rusting Iron Triangle, agents who act as testaments to the status quo and show willful ignorance of the security environment. These actors in the services, industry, and in Congress tend to ignore the number of commitments we are responsible for and the degree of difficulty in credibily maintaining them. Thus in their own self-interest they put roadblocks in our Nation's path to reaching a balanced strategy that forthrightly and in a timely manner manages risk often by forcing decision-makers to make inappropriate resource allocations, maintain unnecessary force structure, and preventing sufficient force deployments.
We are dealing with an "incomplete" market in the national security arena therefore we need a regulator to clear out the clutter and address our most immediate challenges. Let Gates act as that regulator and intelligently assign resources to mitigating threats his team assesses as priorities when those threats trend toward crossing a well-defined and understood threshold for tolerable risk.
Gates's emphasis on
Hell, Gates has already admitted as such. He has plenty of rhetoric about cutting the major programs so that he can have more funding to fight the current wars, which, since you plan these things on the scale of years and decades, amounts to eating the seed corn and fighting the last war.
Why there seems to be such a veneration for him, I'll never understand. It's not as if he played the most important role in shaping US COIN strategy in Iraq, and he hasn't been a sterling success in managing US capabilities in Afghanistan to date beyond the drone strikes. Now he's going to harm US conventional capabilities, undermining us precisely in our area of strategic advantage.
Christ, what a load of bullshit. "Failing states" are the biggest source of threats to the US homeland? Taliban-dominated Afghanistan was not a "failing state"; it was an oppressive, Islamic-dominated state. Pakistan's FATA is a failing state issue, but all our COIN abilities in the world don't do us any good if the Pakistanis get prickly and stop allowing intrusions into their sovereignty.
In fact, if we even want to get into countries to handle "failing state" issues, we need to have a strong conventional military.
Indeed. But in Rumsfeld's case, we could always retrain the conventional military people to do adequate COIN, like in Iraq. The reverse is almost certainly not the case with the Gates reforms.
Balancing Risk
Wrangling over the Defense budget proposals are all about "balancing risk." Secretary Gates and the administration are asserting that the current wars we're in will be the much more likely to continue and that other, more conventional threats, are diminishing or not likely. It is a huge bet and one that you don't know if you picked correctly until sometime in the future (likely--hopefully--when you are no longer in office). Unfortunately, if you bet wrong, the consequences are bad to catastrophic. Since there is little real growth in the defense budget (accounting for supplementals and out-year projections notwithstanding), something has to give. It is very difficult to not provide every tool that is needed in the current fight especially at the expense of a future unknown. We'll just have to "hope" the right bets are made. I just hate to have hope as a course of action.
Gates fights the last war (without DoD / Service help ?!)
Kori wrote:
"Rumsfeld denigrated the human element of warfare to focus on high-tech innovation. His successor is about to make the reverse mistake."
Since when have decisions about balancing people versus equipment ever been capable of being skewed quickly in one direction for any length of time ? DoD Research budgets were already cut last year in the budget plan, and let us not forget that US R&D efforts outstrip even today most of the rest of the world combined.
In terms of pet projects, I would suggest that Gates has co-opted the Services with each taking a share of the pain in terms of program cancellation, deferment of others etc. salami style.
It would be somewhat courageous to suggest that SECDEF can override the entire bureaucracy and vested service interests single handed, drive those recommendations through the White House and survive.
The April 6th briefing represents a delicate effort to balance defence-industrial, military-strategic and personnel issues in a period of high operational tempo - with, not against the armed forces. The last Democrat President arguably made that mistake which one could suggest is unlikely to be repeated.
p.s. Cancellation of the Presidential helicopter and likely passing the KC-X program to Boeing on industrial grounds will not be welcome in European defence-industrial circles following the Presidential charm offensive.
Kori, I don't think he is
Kori,
I don't think he is fighting the last war. I think he is simply trying to fight and finish the current war before it is finished.
Even so, the current war likely reflects what is on the "other side" of the "next war:" another project of nation-rebuilding and quelling insurrection. Any mission with objectives similar to what we have done in Iraq and Afghanistan, will involve such complex work.
The new budget cuts projects that either do not reflect lessons learned from these wars, or have simply not been producing results.
Overall, Gates's leadership of the Pentagon resembles practical, "do what works well," thinking that has been sorely missed since the Bush-41 days.
Take care all,
Ian Smith
We don't have a whole lot of
We don't have a whole lot of history about rebuilding societies.
After we defeated spain and took the philippines etc we didn't occupy spain. We did occupy the philippines but we didn't do any reconstruction there, we just burned things down and killed people until the resistance mostly gave up.
After we defeated mexico did we occupy them and rebuild their society? Only the northern half, that we annexed.
What did we do with the US south after the civil war? We occupied it for awhile trying to stop the KKK and failed, so we pulled the military out and let the unreconstructed southerners and the carpetbaggers reconstruct with private funds. After WWII we started putting money in and southern standards of living shot up pretty quick.
Throughout US history, after our wars we've usually signed a treaty and gone home. We did that with germany after WWI. There's one good example where something else might have been better.
WWII was our shining example of something better. We helped germany and japan rebuild and used them against the USSR.
We don't have a good example of that working since then. Korea maybe? Maybe kind of?
What do you call it when you keep doing the same thing and it keeps not working, so you try the same thing harder?