Business As Usual? How Defense Decisions Are Made Posted by Gordon Adams

I have observed several times that the Pentagon’s recent Quadrennial Defense Review was, in fact three reviews stapled together. QDR I is a discursive and interesting speculation on how the world in which the military operates has changed. The threats are now rarely a peer competitor or major regional hegemon, armed to the teeth and challenging US dominance. Instead, they are asymmetrical – catastrophic attacks by small groups, insurgencies by enemies of our friends, terrorists attacking any available target, groups that would destabilize governments we support.

These threats come in smaller doses, some with significant consequences, if they succeed. The military response requires different forces from most of the ones we still have, as Iraq and Afghanistan are demonstrating – smaller ground forces units, larger and more agile special forces, enhanced human and technical intelligence, more unmanned ways of gaining intelligence and supporting forces. Pretty much unarguable stuff.

QDR II, which is echoed in the newly released National Strategy Review, is about how the US military cannot go alone in this new world, cannot conduct stabilization and peacekeeping missions on its own, and cannot carry out reconstruction as a purely military mission. It calls for stronger civilian capabilities in our own government and willing participation from far more allies than stepped up in Iraq in order to succeed. Again, a lesson drawn from recent experience.

QDR III, though, is the one that really matters. The strategic and budgetary rubber hits the road in force planning and acquisition, acquiring the capabilities we need to meet these new missions. QDR III appears to have been written by somebody other than the Office of the Secretary of Defense, and makes minimal reference to the other two. Here we find little discussion about how to incorporate forces of other nations, or their equipment, into US planning and little focus on tradeoffs between the new missions and the forces we have been buying for decades.

The acquisition strategy laid out in QDR III (and backed up by the FY 2007 defense budget proposal) walks away from the restructuring QDR I and II imply, and invests, instead, in the legacy force and equipment most of which we already deploy. We are treated to a generous diet of DDX, F-22, F-35, CVN-21, LCS, FCS, Virginia class submarines and the like.

QDR III was written by the services, who have a harder time abandoning business as usual. They were tasked by a distracted Office of the Secretary to do what they felt they needed to do to finish the QDR process. Left largely to their own devices, the services did what came naturally. A particular insight is offered by the briefing delivered by a senior Air Force official at Maxwell Air Force Base in January 2006, where he describes the “hard fought campaign” the Air Force carried out to reverse the desire of the Secretary of Defense to truly transform the force.

The officer noted that, as result of this campaign, the “QDR decisions are favorable to our modernization and recapitalization plans,” though it “wasn’t easy” to get there. Sure enough, as the briefing makes clear, the winners were the F-22, of which the Air Force will buy 183, rather than the 100 threatened by the Secretary. And a new tanker/cargo aircraft, which was “stalled” until the Air Force weighed in. And the Joint Strike Fighter, the Air Force variant of which might have been cancelled, but, after the Air Force did battle, will continue to have all three variants. All these classical procurements, and more, happened because “Senior [Air Force] leadership involvement made the difference.”

This outcome takes one back to the book written by former Washington Post correspondent George Wilson, whose title tells it all: “This War Really Matters: Inside the Fight for Defense Dollars.” The war that mattered, in this case, was the one to preserve business the way it has always been done. There is no doubt these capabilities are all technologically advanced and highly capable. The question is whether they reflect the right priorities for the threats of the 21^st century. The budgetary outcome may be very fine for the Air Force, but it may not be quite so fine for the capabilities the country needs for the asymmetrical challenges we face.

Comments

[Cal]

The military response requires different forces from most of the ones we still have, as Iraq and Afghanistan are demonstrating – smaller ground forces units, larger and more agile special forces.... Pretty much unarguable stuff.

Do we really need smaller ground force units? I'm not an expert, but I understand there's a fierce debate among Army officers on this point:

"You have to have sufficient density of combat power at the lowest levels, where the fighting occurs," says retired Army Col. Douglas Macgregor. "You have to be able to take casualties and keep fighting."

The new brigades, numbering 3,800 or fewer troops, "can't do that," he says. Macgregor and others note the newly reorganized 3rd Infantry Division, which deployed last year to Baghdad, was immediately augmented with battalions borrowed from other units.

We already have over 50,000 special forces. A few years ago the FBI estimated that there were only 200 hard core Al Qaeda agents around the world. Even if their "soft periphery" associates are 10 times that number, that means our special forces alone outnumber Al-Qaeda by 20 to 1.

Do you really think we need better odds than that?

[royce]

Is it so easy to draw a distinction between the legacy force and force that reflects the new priorities? It would help if you could describe the overall level of defense spending we should have (300 billion or 600 billion, etc.), then describe which programs aren't being funded that should be funded.

No matter what, we're going to need some kind of conventional military force. Some of the legacy systems have multi-role capabilities that are useful in both conventional and unconventional warfare. Which programs do you see not being funded right now that we should be funding?

[Jeff Younger]

Even if their "soft periphery" associates are 10 times that number, that means our special forces alone outnumber Al-Qaeda by 20 to 1.

Do you really think we need better odds than that?

Quantitative force calculations like this can be misleading. The US is constrained by the Geneva Conventions and other political restraints, but al Qaeda is not. They can use extremely effective small-unit tactics (impersonating civilians, impersonating medical personnel, exploiting Geneva protected sites, etc.) unavailable to US forces. Moreover, al-Qaeda suffers absolutely no political disadvantage with their supporters for using these tactics, while the US suffers grave political difficulties with Europe even when going above and beyond the protections of Geneva (like at Guantanomo). All of this complicates the situation to such an extent that every SO mission includes a team of lawyers. The tactical dilemma faced by SO forces is not quantitative, but rather political. So, yes. We do need better odds.

Do we really need smaller ground force units? I'm not an expert, but I understand there's a fierce debate among Army officers on this point:

There is a fierce debate. Instead of taking the very successful Marine Corps Componency model, the Army is simply creating new chains of command. The Marine Corps integrates a fully autonomous logistics component into each Task Force. The Army wants to keep its current supply-point logistics system at the Division-level and up. That won’t work for expeditionary warfare. The Army debate is off-center. Componency allows commanders to aggregate units into arbitrarily large formations depending on the mission, so the issue is not how big the units are but how they will cooperate to kill the enemy. Cooperation is a C2 and Logistics problem. Just screwing around with different command chains won’t fix that.

[J Thomas]

Jeff Younger, parts of your last post were written very very clearly. You laid out technical issues so well that nonspecialists would be able to follow them. You clearly know what you're talking about well enough to explain it. Well done!

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