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| Five modern military myths |
| 2013-11-19 |
| The constrained defense budgets, ending of the Iraq war and forthcoming troop withdrawal from Afghanistan have led to soul searching among senior defense leaders about what missions and capabilities the U.S. military should pursue. The Pentagon has tried to do this in a structured way with the Defense Strategic Guidance of January 2012, the Strategic Choices and Management Review of August 2013, and the Quadrennial Defense Review process currently underway. Defense planning for a relative peacetime environment is difficult enough, but doing so with uncertain budget scenarios is especially challenging. As Jamie Morin, the nominee to become director of the Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation office, told a Senate hearing last month, the military is doing future years defense planning "with absolutely no idea what we're going to be doing in 2014." And yet, senior defense leaders seem to have few problems articulating a vision for what sort of military the United States requires for the future. A careful review of their recent comments reveals five particular assumptions that are rarely questioned by Congress, the media or many defense analysts. These assumptions about the military's future are worth bearing in mind during upcoming congressional hearings, and as Congress and the White House agree upon the latest overdue defense budget. Meanwhile, Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel has even gone so far as to claim: "We are living in a world of complete uncertainty." This goes too far, for if there is really no ground truth or predictability in the world, how can the Pentagon begin to develop the concepts, scenarios or force planning constructs that defense planning is based upon? The secretary recently elaborated that the rebalance "was exactly the right thing for all the reasons that anybody who knows anything about Asia -- the demographics, the people, the markets, the economies." Hagel's deputy Ashton Carter has described that region as "so obviously a part of the world that will be central to America's future," and "the part of the world that is going to more than any other define the American future." The Asia pivot or rebalance has become the preeminent rhetorical feature of the Obama administration's foreign policy, even as its specific lines of effort remain underdeveloped. Hagel has similarly termed cyber as "probably the most insidious, dangerous threat to this country," which "will require that we continue to place the highest priority on cyber defense and cyber capabilities." Likewise, Carter described this suite of stand-off capabilities as "so important to our future operations." It is remarkable that defense leaders, who acknowledge an inability to forecast future conflicts, claim to hold a remarkable prescience about what weapons will be required to fight unidentifiable foes. Meanwhile, Gen. Odierno has repeatedly emphasized that those claiming land wars are obsolete are fooling themselves: "I see nothing on the horizon yet that tells me that we don't need ground forces." Given that every president since Ronald Reagan has deployed several thousand ground troops for regime change or multi-year stability operations, it would be accepting tremendous risk to discount Odierno's prescient warning. This, of course, assumes that U.S. partners will remain partners, and continue to act in alignment with U.S. national interests. Moreover, it assumes that they will foot the bill for collective security, when in reality the percentage of American and its allies' military spending is projected to continue falling. What is perhaps most unsettling the Pentagon's defense planning process is not only the absence of budget predictability from Congress, but also the lack of an updated National Security Strategy from the White House. That document serves as the reference point for national security priorities for all U.S. government agencies. Spend time with military officials and their staffs and they can all quote from memory those sections that guide the offices where they work. The five assumptions detailed above require further scrutiny from interested citizens, but they also deserve clarifying guidance from the Hill and White House. |
| Posted by:Pappy |
| #6 Frozen Al- To fight and win America's wars. That is the only critical mission.... Everything else is fluff from my perspective. |
| Posted by: 49 Pan 2013-11-19 23:22 |
| #5 We are always well prepared for the last war. Its the next one that comes out of the blue and kicks us in the ass. |
| Posted by: Elmusort Hupusolet3774 2013-11-19 22:59 |
| #4 * "Partners and Allies will pick up the slack" > that's what the US thought before WW1 + WW2 + Cold War. Just sayin. * "The Military is largely done wid Land Wars" > thusly, CHINA-VS-JAPAN,PHIL/ASEAN SEA WAR(S). China + short war. VERSUS * "We [USA] can't afford it" > thusly, CHINA-VS-INDIA LIMITED OR FULL CONVENTIONAL = NUCLEAR? WAR. PROTRACTIVE = MUTUALLY DESTRUCTIVE??? China + long war. In case thingys don't go smoothly initially for China + PLA agz the US-Allies over in NE Asia/ECS + SCS. THe ABOVE IS CALLED BEING MILPOL "DIALECTIC/ DIALECTICAL", + is why the US is wrong to presume that no more major or protractive wars will ever be fought again. |
| Posted by: JosephMendiola 2013-11-19 21:24 |
| #3 The military should have 3 missions: 1) Win wars. 2) Win battles. It is possible to win a war while losing battles, but it cost a lot of blood and material. 3) Win battles with as few casualties as possible. Everything else is superfluous. Future fights will be cyber, drone and special operations-centric. Future fights will be whatever the enemy thinks gives the best chance of victory. I remember pilots stopped training for dogfights in the 1950's. Then came Vietnam. We need to make sure we don't lose the skills we developed to win wars. |
| Posted by: Frozen Al 2013-11-19 12:11 |
| #2 Hagel has similarly termed cyber as "probably the most insidious, dangerous threat to this country," which "will require that we continue to place the highest priority on cyber defense and cyber capabilities." And yet we buy all of our computers from the enemy. |
| Posted by: Ebbang Uluque6305 2013-11-19 11:58 |
| #1 File under "Things never change" - The present confusion in the civilian mind and the true military mind respecting the purposes of armies and limits of warfare is attributable to many circumstances. Among them, no doubt, is the character of military history as it has commonly been written. Ordinary citizens are lacking in the raw experience of combat, or deficient in technical knowledge, and inclined to leave the compilation of military records to “experts” in such affairs. Writers on general history have tended to neglect the broader aspects of military issues; confining themselves to accounts of campaigns and battles, handled often in a cursory fashion, they have usually written on the wars of their respective countries in order to glorify their prowess, with little or no reference to the question whether these wars were conducted in the military way of high efficiency or in the militaristic way, which wastes blood and treasure. Even more often, in recent times, general historians have neglected military affairs and restricted their reflections to what they are pleased to call “the causes and consequences of wars”; or they have even omitted them altogether. This neglect may be ascribed to many sources. The first is, perhaps, a recognition of the brutal fact that the old descriptions of campaigns are actually of so little value civilian and military alike. Another has been the growing emphasis on economic and social fields deemed “normal” and the distaste of economic and social historians for war, which appears so disturbing to the normal course of events. Although Adam Smith included a chapter on the subject of military defense in his Wealth of Nations as a regular part of the subject, modern economists concentrate on capital, wages, interest, rent, and other features of peaceful pursuits, largely forgetting war as a phase of all economy, ancient or modern. When the mention the subject of armies and military defense, these are commonly referred to as institutions and actions which interrupt the regular balance of economic life. And the third source of indifference is the effort of pacifists and peace advocates to exclude wars and military affairs from general histories, with the view to uprooting any military or militaristic tendencies from the public mind, on the curious assumption that by ignoring realties the realties themselves will disappear. This lack of a general fund of widely disseminated military information is perilous to the maintenance of civilian power in government. The civilian mind, presumably concerned with the maintenance of peace and the shaping of policies by the limits of efficient military defense, can derive no instruction from acrimonious disputes between militarists, limitless in their demands, and pacifists, lost in utopian visions. Where the civilians fail to comprehend and guide military policy, the true military men, distinguished from the militarists, are also imperiled. For these the executioners of civilian will, dedicated to the preparation of defense and war with the utmost regard for efficiency, are dependent upon the former. Again, and again, the military men have seen themselves hurled into war by ambitions, passions, and blunders of civilian governments, almost wholly uninformed as to the limits of their military potentials and almost recklessly indifferent to the military requirements of the wars they let loose. Aware that they may again be thrown by civilians into an unforeseen conflict, perhaps with a foe they have not envisaged, these realistic military men find themselves unable to do anything save demand all the men, guns, and supplies they can possibly wring from the civilians, in the hope that they may be prepared or half prepared for whatever may befall them. In so doing they inevitably find themselves associated with militaristic military men who demand all they can get merely for the sake of having it without reference to ends. Vagts, Alfred, History of Militarism, rev. 1959, Free Press, NY, pp 33-34. |
| Posted by: Procopius2k 2013-11-19 09:08 |