By Dov Zakheim
Secretary Gates is on the Hill today to defend his decision, before a not entirely friendly audience, to cut some heavy weapons systems and invest more instead on irregular war. He is right to press for capabilities that are important to those wars -- unmanned aerial vehicles, for example. Still, Gates has overcompensated for irregular wars. And by emphasizing cyber warfare, which represents the most sophisticated technologies that could be launched against us, he is implicitly conceding that we must worry about major peer competitors. The cutbacks in major conventional systems, notably naval systems, seem out of "synch" with the emphasis on cyber warfare. Similarly, cutbacks in airlift programs, and of the C-17 in particular, are inconsistent with increases in Army end-strength.
Gates appears to assume that no peer competitor could emerge within the next fifteen to twenty years. Yet both Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia both became superpowers within a shorter time frame: it took Germany less than a decade from Hitler's rise to power until the fall of France; the Soviet Union took less than two decades from Lenin's death to the defeat of Germany. Taking Moore's law into account, the pace of military growth is potentially much greater than it was some seventy years ago. We could confront a conventional threat within fifteen years -- and perhaps even sooner.
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