Congressman Jack Murtha (D-Pennsylvania) a few weeks back described Defense Secretary Robert Gates as "lacking strategic vision". While quite a few phrases come to mind when I think of Jack Murtha, strategic visionary isn't one of them. The reason for Murtha's grumpiness, it seems, is that he didn't like the speech that Gates delivered at the National Defense University the other week on his frustrations with the Pentagon bureaucracy. The trouble, he said, was that
our conventional modernization programs seek a 99% solution in years. Stability and counterinsurgency missions—the wars we are in—require 75% solutions in months. The challenge is whether these two paradigms can be made to coexist. The key is to make sure strategy and risk assessment drive the procurement, rather than the opposite.
I don't know whether that's visionary, or even needs to be, but it sounds rather sensible. It also sounds like the sort of thing of which we'll be hearing more.
At dinner the other week, a friend from from the naval staff lamented the lack of analysis behind the tribulations of the Zumwalt destroyer (pocket battlecruiser, überzerstorer, whatever) program. The concept was justified with minimal staff work, and it has been virtually cancelled with essentially none. He was annoyed with both the bureaucracy on the one hand, and the flag officers and politicians on the other. The former had failed to provide the meaningful output of that vaunted interagency process needed for decision-making, while the latter were becoming all too willing to make decisions without consulting their staffs.
Without taking a stand on the Zumwalt program (though I've done so elsewhere), I can say that I don't find this completely troubling myself. Just about eighteen months ago, Bob Gates and his Army Secretary, Pete Geren, decided to turn the purchase of a few hundred blast protected vehicles for bomb-disposal squads—the JERRV and the HEV—into the purchase of over ten thousand for the infantry. Neither purchase was made because the procurement people in the Pentagon and its satellite offices around the US wanted them. They were made because the troops in Afghanistan and particularly Iraq wanted them, and because the politicians in charge eventually came to see blast-protected vehicles as a strategic weapon: one that would win the war simply by drastically limiting US casualties. And that is what has happened.
At a strategic planning meeting I attended a few weeks ago with one of my clients, a retired brigadier commented that the US Army's chief of staff was keen to get back to normalcy in training and equipping his forces after the wars are finally over. I noted to the group that earlier that week at the AUSA exhibition, I visited the booth of the US Army's Asymmetric Warfare Group, where I learned that their motto translates as normal is a cycle on a washing machine. On the flight on the way back, I finished reading Jeffrey Record's Fighting Goliath: Why Insurgencies Win. At the end, he (somewhat gratuitously) complains that the United States government should avoid fighting insurgents because (1) the US military isn't good at it, and (2) US interests are rarely meaningfully threatened by them. By following that advice, he noted, the US could have avoided involvement in Lebanon, Somalia, Bosnia, and Iraq.
Record's advice is interesting, but think about what it would portend. If not for fighting insurgencies, what would be the point of the US Army? Really, the only point at which that service has been needed since the end of the Cold War, excluding the campaigns which he mentions, was in Kuwait and Iraq in 1990–91. Back in the early 1990s we used to see off-the-cuff arguments every few months as to why the US only needed "one land army". These assertions were always directed at the supposed extravagance of maintaining a large corps of marines, but in the absence of large force structure requirements for counterinsurgency, the same question could be asked about the Army. The Marines thrive on that expeditionary stuff, the fewer, smaller, small wars for which smaller numbers would be required.
Record's advice is also thus probably pointless, and for two reasons. First, federal politicians invariably want to do something, regardless of the actual relevance to North American or European security. Ronald Reagan had to do something about Lebanon, G.H.W. Bush had to do something about Somalia, and Bill Clinton had to do something about Yugoslavia (as long as no one got hurt). When this last ambition was questioned, Madeleine Albright openly wondered what the point of the military was if she couldn't use it, and Colin Powell (in his own words) nearly had an aneurism.
Second, no one is about to disestablish the US Army in favor of a Marine Corps and a National Guard, but to paraphrase a former army chief of staff, the threat of irrelevance will probably drive the generals to do something themselves. It's no wonder that the Army has just released a new manual on stability operations. While the Navy and the Air Force have a Chinese threat for which to plausibly prepare, there's a real land-war-in-asia problem associated with using the Army in that arena, except to help defend Taiwan from ballistic missile attack. Terminating China's ocean commerce, after all, would be enough to strangle its economy of petroleum, and end its hegemonic ambitions.
Then again, Saddam's misadventure in Iraq was unpredictable, and any army must prepare for the unpredictable. The Georgian experience over the last few years has also been instructive: deploy a quarter of one's Army, trained primarily for counterinsurgency, to Iraq, and then watch the president of the republic try to use the other three-quarters to invade a territory guarded by a hugely powerful neighbor. Events as these are the data behind Gates' strategic reasoning: even with a half-trillion dollar budget, the US armed forces cannot do everything, but they will want to be capable of doing a lot of different somethings. As he noted in his speech, tanks can rout insurgents, and billion-dollar warships can be use to hunt down pirates. It is possible, though, that less expensive and more tailored kit can accomplish these small war missions more effectively, and still be employed for some big war missions.
As always, I ask what this means for contractors. If one accepts the assertion that the Fulda Gap is a matter for the history books, then it would be unwise to build the business case for one's enterprise off large vehicle orders in the Future Combat Systems program, or the sight of CGNXs sliding down the ways on a semi-annual basis. If one further accepts the assertion but that enough Fallujahs will recur to fill the pages of another Small Wars, then building a business to maintain and upgrade those MRAPs that will have to remain in the inventory could make some sense. Building a blast-protected vehicle with better cross-country mobility and fuel economy than the Stryker (Piranha-III) could be a real winner. Getting drone aircraft to refuel in flight, or providing them some measure of situational awareness, would similarly be useful for both the big wars and the small wars.
In the armored vehicles business, most staffs are capable, and most facilities capitalized, for either sort of development and production. That's not quite true in aircraft manufacturing and shipbuilding, where the firms that have succeeded in building the big things aren't generally those that have succeeded in the smaller ones. So far, the big money has been found in the big systems, but that is changing: one glance at the funding trajectory of unmanned aircraft in the US military budget tells that story. So, it's more than arguable that some military contractors ought to be more flexibly capitalized and organized. But what does that mean in practice? We all have a lot of work to do to find out.
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