John Cole points to former President Bill Clinton’s remarks on Larry King last evening about the war in Iraq. He draws especial attention to this:

But in a way, the fact that we have now succeeded with this strategy also shows its limits, because we don’t have the troops to do this all over the country.

And it shows you that ultimately this is a political problem that has to be solved by the Iraqis themselves. Furthermore, I don’t see any alternative consistent with the responsibilities for national security to a substantial withdrawal of troops this year, because the military is so overstressed.

If we had a big national security emergency now, we would be virtually compelled to meet it with Naval and Air Force forces, because the Army, the Marine Corps, the National Guard, the Reserves are all overstretched, all deeply stressed. There are Naval personnel now, substantial numbers of them who have been trained in weapons fire, infantry tactics, even guerrilla warfare, trained, in effect, to be a second army because we are so overstressed.

This passage shows Clinton’s skill at the art of rhetoric. It is, however, grossly misleading. Yes, the military is stressed by the high opstempo — as it was during the 1990s when Clinton was sending them to parts unknown on missions having little if anything to do with U.S. national security. Yes, the Navy is training some people in infantry tactics. No, they’re not related.

Then-Chief of Naval Operations Vern Clark directed the creation of a “brown water” force to increase the Navy’s role in counter-terrorism two years ago (”Implementation of Chief of Naval Operations (CNO) Guidance—Global War on Terrorism (GWOT) Capabilities.” Director Navy Staff Memorandum of July 6, 2005).

This was almost entirely a bureaucratic ploy to increase Navy funding in an era where expenditures for non-GWOT functions were a hard sell. The Defense Department was in the midst of Don Rumsfeld’s transformation effort and the recent Quadrennial Defense Review was focused on a Department that was ready to fight the terrorists. Clark’s order took heed of this environment.

See, for example, a Navy League report from June 2005:

Pentagon experts and defense analysts expect the capital-intensive Navy and Air Force to see their programs pared back — as they did in a $30 billion round of budget cuts over the next six years that were handed out in December — and redirected toward the Army, Marine Corps and Special Operations Forces. A classified analysis in April by the Office of the Secretary of Defense and Joint Staff, for example, suggested the Navy’s planned aircraft carrier fleet of 11 ships be reduced to 10 and the savings used to pay for new capabilities.

Where the services were vocal about their particular agendas and out to protect select capabilities in previous QDRs, Rumsfeld is running the show this time and parochial schemes have largely been subsumed.

Meanwhile, the Navy has drafted a new strategy of its own: “Navy’s 3/1 Strategy: The Maritime Contribution to the Joint Force in a Changed Strategic Landscape.” This narrative captures ideas that senior service officials have expressed since January when Adm. Vern Clark, chief of naval operations, declared the Navy was not well suited to deal with challenges of the future.

The Navy is working to figure out what changes are in order for its blue-water fleet, which is designed to fight a conventional enemy on the high seas. Until the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the Navy prepared for two major theater wars with the expectation that all other missions — from humanitarian relief to peace-keeping to counterterrorism — could be accomplished with the organizations, equipment and skills at hand.

Prepared by the Navy’s Information, Plans and Strategy staff at the Pentagon, the draft strategy acknowledges that the likelihood of major war on the high seas has significantly diminished. While maintaining the ability to conduct a major combat operation the Navy must be prepared to deal with a wider array of maritime security operations, including stability operations, the global war on terrorism (GWOT) and homeland defense.

The draft strategy anticipates a “limited number” of new requirements will take shape to fulfill these missions, and that some existing capabilities will need modification to keep them relevant in the new strategic landscape, “while other capabilities will need to be expanded in scale to meet the challenges of the post-9/11 security environment.”

To enhance its ability to contribute to the GWOT category, the Navy will enhance its theater security cooperation. “The maritime dimension of the GWOT — the ability of terrorists to exploit the seas — requires the U.S. Navy to operate in a manner analogous to that of the British Navy in the 18th century during its campaign against piracy,” the strategy states. The idea is to improve the proficiency of navies around the world at policing their own regional waters, freeing the U.S. Navy to work elsewhere.

[…]

The Navy, accordingly, is planning to adjust its near-term investment strategy to better handle future missions in the global war on terrorism, a move that service officials hope will anticipate recommendations from the QDR. The service is boosting spending on technologies and programs that will improve its ability to conduct network-centric operations and fund the first of a new fleet of expeditionary logistics ships that can be used as floating bases to launch thousands of ground troops and their equipment ashore.

“That’s exactly where we’re looking to fund,” said Vice Adm. Joseph Sestak, deputy chief of naval operations for warfare requirements and programs.

The effort continues under Clark’s successor, Admiral Mike Mullen, making the hard sell to Congress in 2006 and earlier this year.

As retired Captain Patrick Roth notes, this is merely the Navy getting back to its roots rather than some radical departure.

Up until the 1970s, competency as naval infantry—sailors performing as infantry, and sometimes providing land based artillery support—was an integral part of the Navy’s operations and mission.

· The use of sailors as infantry (and as artillerymen ashore) was common during the 19th century. At sea boarding was a recognized tactic. Likewise, landings and operations ashore were normal. Marines were a minority and landings were generally a ships company evolution, i.e., involving both marines and sailors.

· Use of sailors as infantry was part of the late 19th century great debate by naval reformers over the direction of the Navy. The debate centered on how to best use “our officers and men as efficient infantry and artillerymen,” not around the desirability or utility of use of sailors as infantry. Everyone in the Navy accepted that the use of sailors as infantry was a required Navy’s competency.

· Sailors performed as infantry a lot: at least 66 landings and operations ashore on distant stations during the 19th century; 136 instances in the Caribbean and Central America during the first three decades of the 20th century; numerous times on China Station and elsewhere. Using sailors as infantry ashore was what the Navy’s primarily did during the Seminole Wars and the War with Mexico. It was the Navy’s most valuable contribution during the Philippine Insurrection. Operations ranged from election security, pacification, peacekeeping, land convoy escort, protection of roads and railroads, occupation, and guard duty to large-scale major combat operations against regular Army forces.

The SeeBees and other Navy personnel are performing ground functions in stability operations around the world, including the Horn of Africa, and they’re performing Vietnam-style riverboat patrols in Iraq. They’re also performing other jobs well within their existing capabilities, as announced last February:

The additional sailors will take on existing roles in the combat arena as medical corpsmen and in special operations roles, with more SEAL teams in some cases, [Adm. Mullen] said.

Other duties will include security roles, with some 500 sailors expected to take over operations at a prison inside the country, Mullen said. He would not say which facility the sailors would take over.

While not giving specifics, Mullen said sailors with expertise in disposing of explosive ordnance will also be brought in. Such teams are used in disposing of the countless weapons caches found in the country as well as assisting in roadside bomb removal.

This isn’t a measure of desperation but merely a realignment of the force to perform real-world missions of the type that will likely be the norm for years to come. This is long overdue.

One fallout of the Don Imus firing is that his charity ranch for sick kids may go under, reports AP’s Deborah Baker.

Don Imus’s banishment from the public airwaves also deprives him of a critical platform to raise money for the sprawling Imus Ranch, where children with cancer and other illnesses get a taste of the cowboy life. Before he was fired last week for calling the Rutgers University women’s basketball team “nappy-headed hos,” Imus pointed to the northern New Mexico ranch to make his case that he is “a good person who said a bad thing.”

With Imus out of a job, some wonder whether the pipeline to charity money will eventually dry up. Just as corporate sponsors backed away from his radio show, “I think you’ll see a similar effect on the charity, where the corporate donors will find a less hot-button charity to support,” said Trent Stamp, president of Charity Navigator, a New Jersey-based charity watchdog group.

Imus said he and his wife Deirdre are round-the-clock surrogate parents to the youngsters who spend a week at the property, nearly half of whom are from minority groups and 10 percent are black. “There’s not an African-American parent on the planet who has sent their child to the Imus Ranch who didn’t trust me and trust my wife,” he said on his show. “And when these kids die, we don’t just go to the white kid’s funeral.”

Kansas horseman Rob Phillips says he still plans to give the ranch proceeds from a 500-mile charity race he’s staging this fall. But Phillips worries that without Imus’s radio forum, the ranch and other charities will suffer. “He had a capability to get on the air and raise a tremendous amount of money for these causes,” Phillips said. “I don’t see anybody else doing that.”

Stamp said donations may increase in the short term because of the heightened attention — “the celebrity factor ratcheted up to a new level.” The Imus show’s annual two-day fundraising radiothon, benefiting the ranch and two charities that refer children to it, had raised more than $2.3 million as of Friday, according to Deirdre Imus, who hosted Friday’s show. But in the long term, Stamp predicted the firing would cause “irreparable harm.”

Now, as Radley Balko noted recently, this may not have been the most efficient charity anyway. Baker notes that,

It’s an expensive operation. The ranch hosted 90 children from March 2005 through February 2006 and spent $2.5 million — or about $28,000 a child — according to its most recent federal tax filings. That’s at least 10 times what the Make-A-Wish or similar camps spend on kids, largely because the Imus operation is a year-round, working cattle ranch, Stamp said.

It’s also rather comical to have kids working on a cattle ranch and then serve them a vegan diet. After all, production of meat, dairy products, and leather are why people raise cattle. A ranch is a large operation if the only goal is to play with your pet cows.

Still, people willingly gave their money to the operation and by all accounts the kids enjoyed a rather unique experience. While money is fungible there’s no guarantee that all the money Imus would have raised will go to another charity, let alone that this particular group of kids will benefit.

Retired Army LTC Andrew Krepinevich has a devastating critique of the recent Quadrennial Defense Review in the current issue of Military Officer, the trade journal of the Military Officers’ Association.

Especially interesting is his assessment of how the Pentagon plans to allocate its not-all-that-scarce budget. He notes that there are several big ticket items that are crippling the ability to fund much-needed programs that are holdovers from a much different strategic era:

• The Army’s Future Combat System, projected to cost nearly $150 billion, was conceived to exploit information technologies to defeat enemy tank forces at a distance – but none of our existing or prospective enemies are building a new version of Saddam Hussein’s Republican Guard armored force.
• The Navy’s DDG-1000 destroyer, at roughly $4 billion a copy, is a firepower platform. Yet the naval challenge from China, if it comes, will be centered on its submarine force, a threat against which the DDG-1000 is irrelevant.
• The Pentagon’s F-35 fighter program is by far the most expensive program in the defense budget, at more than $250 billion. These fighters are designed to sweep enemy aircraft from the skies and strike targets on the ground. But al-Qaida has no air force, and the most worrisome strike systems being fielded by China, North Korea, and Iran are ballistic missiles, not fighter aircraft.
• The Marine Corps’ V-22 aircraft, designed to hover like a helicopter and fly like a plane, has become so expensive that it cannot be built in large numbers. Meanwhile, the aging helicopter fleet the V-22 is designed to replace is wearing out at an alarming rate, owing to the high pace of operations in Iraq.

The Pentagon’s unwillingness to scale back these programs, or in some cases terminate them, will allow them to generate “program momentum.” As they consume ever more funding, their constituencies in the military, Congress, and the defense industry will grow. Consequently, other QDR initiatives that might enable our military to meet new threats risk being starved of funding in their infancy. Among the most promising are:

These make it much more difficult to find more important and less costly programs:

• a one-third increase in the number of SOF battalions, America’s most heavily deployed units in the war against radical Islamists;
• a new long-range strike aircraft designed to loiter for protracted periods over the battlefield, whether searching for terrorist targets in remote areas or missile launchers deep inside Iran or China;
• programs and forces to cope with detecting, tracking, and disabling WMD, particularly nuclear weapons that enemies might attempt to smuggle into the U.S.;
• medical countermeasures against bioterrorism threats (here the Pentagon is adding $1.5 billion over five years – less than half the cost of a single DDG-1000 destroyer);
• modernizing our air tanker refueling fleet to replace aging aircraft that date back to the 1950s. These aircraft have been in great demand since the Cold War’s end. Their ability to refuel reconnaissance and strike aircraft in flight helps in the effort to maintain something approximating an “unblinking” eye over the battlefield to search and engage high-value targets such as terrorist leaders, “loose nukes,” or mobile missile launchers armed with WMD; and
• increasing our submarine production to send a clear signal to China as well as our allies that Beijing cannot expect to threaten U.S. freedom of action in an area of vital interest or coerce America’s friends and allies in East Asia.

Which set of capabilities best reflects the QDR’s assessment of the principal challenges before us? Which would be most useful in tracking terrorists in remote areas of Africa and Central Asia? Dealing with a destabilized Pakistan or Saudi Arabia – al-Qaida’s two principal targets? Thwarting radical Islamist attempts to smuggle a nuclear weapon into the U.S.? Conducting persistent extended searches for North Korean nuclear-tipped missiles emerging from their caves to launch an attack? Deflecting the efforts of China’s submarines, 10 years hence, to threaten the U.S. Navy’s ability to defend Taiwan from coercion or aggression?

Clearly it is the infant initiatives spawned by the QDR, which cost but a fraction of the legacy programs whose principal focus is on traditional forms of warfare that the QDR rightly notes are of progressively less relevance.

It’s easy to see why this misalignment occurs. The military services generally and the Air Force and Navy especially are built around technologically impressive weapons platforms that require years of R&D. If we guess wrong, it is incredibly difficult to acquire them in time for an unexpected war. We’ve learned that lesson time and again at the cost of considerable American blood.

Of course, we continually need to re-learn the lesson that a force designed around beating the most modern, powerful military foe imaginable is not automatically capable of shifting gears and fighting asymmetric battles against guerrillas.

Military operations over the past 15 years have demonstrated that when America’s enemies challenge us in traditional warfare, as in the two Gulf wars and in the Balkans, air power can play an important, if not dominant, role. While all four services should maintain a significant residual capability for traditional warfare, the Army and Marine Corps should be able to migrate more capabilities into other challenge areas than either the Air Force or the Navy.

In addition to rebalancing service forces and capabilities to address irregular, catastrophic, and disruptive challenges to U.S. security, the military needs to undertake key institutional changes. Among them are:

• refocusing the professional military education system to emphasize the study of Asia in general and radical Islam and China in particular. Irregular warfare is also in need of increased emphasis;
• changing the focus of intelligence operations to place much greater emphasis on human intelligence than in the recent past;
• ensuring that today’s officers become “biosciences-literate” owing to the prospect of biological weapons becoming available to hostile non-state entities that may prove difficult, if not impossible, to deter;
• continuing to transform the training infrastructure to better account for irregular, catastrophic, and disruptive challenges to U.S. security; and
• restructuring the force to enable sufficient forces to be sustained in protracted irregular conflict.
  The Navy and Marine Corps long ago established a rotation base for their forces. More recently, significant progress is being made in this area, with the Air Expeditionary Forces and the Army’s modularity initiative. However, these forces are oriented primarily toward traditional challenges.

Addressing these challenges remains an uphill struggle. As noted previously, the Services have an interest in the current model. So, too, does Congress, which loves to spend large sums on acquistion programs that pump money into the civilian economy, especially in the states and districts of powerful committee chairmen. Defense intellectuals and the Special Operations establishment, the strongest advocates for the contrary position, are in a very weak position to combat these institutional forces.

Via OTB roving correspondent Richard Gardner.

Mark Williams of Technology Review has an interview with RAND defense analyst John Arquilla on “Technology and the Future of Warfare.” It is scheduled to appear on their website next Monday but they have sent out a preview to some of us who blog on such things. [Update (3/23): They released the Web version early. Full content is here.]

The tone is set by Williams’ intro:

In 2007, the Pentagon’s budget will exceed the combined military spending of every other country on earth. In round numbers, according to the Quadrennial Defense Review – or QDR – unveiled this February, the Department of Defense will spend over $440 billion next year, supplemented with another $120 billion for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. It would be nice, therefore, if the Pentagon’s four-year plan for how its strategic priorities and force structure align with its budget made for less schizophrenic reading.

For the QDR lucidly explains, on the one hand, that the threats American forces confront today are asymmetric: catastrophic attacks by small groups, insurgencies by enemies of U.S. allies, and so on. It espouses the ‘transformation’ of America’s military: whereas industrial-era U.S. forces, depending on ‘big platform’ weapons systems like aircraft carriers and tank regiments, took half a year to mass in the field for operations like the first Gulf War, the QDR insists that the new military will be networked, lean and nimble, using special ops and robotics for rapid global responses.

On the other hand, the 92-page document calls for $84 billion of weapons spending, mostly for items like the F-22 and F-35 fighters, DDX and LCS warships, and the CVN-21, the Navy’s next-generation super-carrier, which will start construction in 2007 and be bigger than today’s Nimitz-class carriers. Overall, despite a 15 percent increase in Special Forces and investments in new systems like drone aircraft, the Pentagon continues to embrace military giantism.

That we spend more than everyone else combined has been, depending on how one does the accounting, true for a number of years. Sadly, the mismatch between grand strategy and force structure is over a century old. Indeed, I wrote a dissertation on the subject over a decade ago.

The good news is that the Defense Department has undeniably made substantial progress toward becoming a lighter, more joint, better networked force than it was in 1991 and, indeed, 2001. Unfortunately, it has a long way to go and there are a number of institutional and cultural barriers to change. Not least among these is that, when engaged in traditional force-on-force battles, our force is not only the best on the planet, by a substantial margin, but the best in history. More importantly, though, there has been a mindset going back at least to the middle of World War II that technology is the savior.

Arquilla argues, “Over this past quarter-century, we’ve reinforced an old industrial-policy military with hardware that makes increasingly less sense, spending most on things that provide the least return. The principal argument for that is ‘we have to keep the big, old-style military because we might fight a big, old-style war one day.’ But in the future the bigger you are, the harder you’re going to fall to ever-more accurate weapons.” While that may be true, it has not borne out in reality. Again, we are unmatched in large scale battle; the problem is in the murkier areas of counterinsurgency and stability operations.

He argues that the Navy is the most backward of the Services, still mired in the concept of warfare at “eyeball range” despite it having been obviated by technology decades ago. This is my impression as well–the Navy has long been regarded as the most hidebound and inflexible of the Services–but I think Arquilla undersells the doctrinal shift toward fighting in the litorrals that has been underway since the early 1990s. Still, my knowledge of naval warfare is incredibly limited.

Arquilla credits the Air Force for being the most wholehearted embracer of defense transformation–but thinks it’s transforming in the wrong direction.

The Air Force seeks to use technology to validate a questionable concept: strategic bombardment. Now, we’re almost a hundred years into the era of strategic bombing. In that time, you can count on the fingers of one hand how many such campaigns ever succeeded. Yet the Air Force continues to try to make this work. Shock and Awe – which did nothing besides spurring some Iraqis to join the insurgency– is the linear descendant of strategic, round-the-clock carpet bombing in World War II, of Curtis LeMay’s ideas and of Operation Rolling Thunder in Vietnam. Strategically, it’s a trail of tears. Yet the Air Force is still on it.

In technological terms, in fact, they’re taking a fatal upward turn. Every Air Force general I talk to says to me, ‘We’re going into space.’ For them, that’s the ultimate high ground. They want to make strategic bombing work from space with bombers that climb into orbit, then drop directly on a country somewhere,. They’re even talking about moving small numbers of troops very quickly – a ‘starship troopers’ approach. The Air Force is bedazzled by the technology of going into space and hopes this will somehow validate strategic bombardment. In fact, they’ll create a catastrophe if they start an arms race in space.

I agree wholeheartedly, as would the late Carl Builder, Arquilla’s former RAND colleague, who argued that the Air Force culture had always centered around “toys.”

Arquilla thinks the Army, sadly, is headed in the same direction:

It bothers the hell out of me that Future Warrior is focused simply on throwing enough technology at the individual soldier to make him invincible, like the armored knight of the middle ages. I think it’s like the related Future Combat System for Army vehicles – largely a wrong-headed approach. The Future Combat System has so far not been thought of as a real system of interconnecting parts. With these programs, we’re really de-emphasizing the connectivity part of military effectiveness. That’s unfortunate. The more your people are interconnected and work skillfully with each other, the more effective they are.

Many in the Army feel the same way.

As to Iraqi counterinsurgency and the war against al Qaeda,

The terrorists have a technology strategy designed to get the most effective, most usable tools out there for their use. They’ve learned to ride the rails of our technology to strike at us. One area of short-term research that the U.S. is emphasizing is the effort to deal in a technological way with the problem of the improvised explosive device. Of course, our opponents have figured out a variety of systems allowing them to detonate these weapons in a way that cannot be jammed. I can’t talk in more detail, but these leaderless networks we’re fighting in Iraq are giving as good as they get in technological terms.

The real answer is about understanding the enemy as a system and trying to pull that system apart. But we’re not doing that. We’re going simply for the technological fix and that’s one reason we’ve had so much trouble with these IEDs. Since we’re spending so much on military affairs, maybe some of that should be directed towards technologies that will break our opponents’ communications. In World War II, there was an investment in creating the first high-performance computers, for that very purpose. Today, it may be an investment in creating the most effective quantum computing or figuring out how to structure the vast ocean of data that masks the movements of al-Quaeda on the Net and the Web. We need a new Bletchley Park [the country house where the German WWII codes were broken], if we’re going to win this war.

So, oddly, the most seemingly low tech enemy is the one that requires the most high tech solution?

TR: Aren’t our enemies in Iraq an entirely human network? It’s not clear that breaking into their Internet communications ….

JA: Oh, but they don’t exist without the Web and the Net. You don’t move around that country easily and even the old-school Baathist insurgent elements rely on the Web. A networked insurgency doesn’t have anything like a traditional leadership. Most of the leadership they get is by going on websites, where they share information very quickly.

TR: Could we take down the Net in Iraq and would it have the effect of downing the insurgency to a significant degree?

JA: You could end all Internet access in Iraq and it would in many ways cripple the insurgents, in terms of slowing them down tremendously. But you’d also cripple reconstruction.

TR: So, in other words, we should data-mine Net exchanges within Iraq?

JA: There you go. The great figure in all this is Admiral John Poindexter. He suffered from his vaguely Orwellian-seeming tendencies and his connections with the Iran-Contra scandal. But the truth is he’s had the most important ideas in decades about how to revolutionize intelligence-gathering. He understands the Web and the Net. He’s one of the original, great military computer scientists and it’s a tragedy that his ideas were discredited for very poor reasons.

TR: Why were those reasons poor?

JA: We live in an era when the power of small groups and individuals has expanded beyond our imaginations. We live in a virtually transparent world. The truth is that to have more security we have to give up some privacy.

I understand information warfare at a very high level but this this is well beyond my expertise. It is interesting fodder for debate, however.

Two articles from the Feb. 15 edition of the London Guardian help flesh out the future direction of U.S. military policy, as outlined in the recently published Quadrennial Defense Review.

In “America’s Long War,” (p. 19) Simon Tisdall and Ewen MacAskill summarize the report thusly,

Looking beyond the Iraq and Afghan battlefields, US commanders envisage a war unlimited in time and space against global Islamist extremism. “The struggle … may well be fought in dozens of other countries simultaneously and for many years to come,” the report says. The emphasis switches from large-scale, conventional military operations, such as the 2003 invasion of Iraq, towards a rapid deployment of highly mobile, often covert, counter-terrorist forces.

Among specific measures proposed are: an increase in special operations forces by 15%; an extra 3,700 personnel in psychological operations and civil affairs units – an increase of 33%; nearly double the number of unmanned aerial drones; the conversion of submarine-launched Trident nuclear missiles for use in conventional strikes; new close-to-shore, high-speed naval capabilities; special teams trained to detect and render safe nuclear weapons quickly anywhere in the world; and a new long-range bomber force.

The Pentagon does not pinpoint the countries it sees as future areas of operations but they will stretch beyond the Middle East to the Horn of Africa, north Africa, central and south-east Asia and the northern Caucasus.

The cold war dominated the world from 1946 to 1991: the long war could determine the shape of the world for decades to come. The plan rests heavily on a much higher level of cooperation and integration with Britain and other Nato allies, and the increased recruitment of regional governments through the use of economic, political, military and security means. It calls on allies to build their capacity “to share the risks and responsibilities of today’s complex challenges”.

The Pentagon must become adept at working with interior ministries as well as defence ministries, the report says. It describes this as “a substantial shift in emphasis that demands broader and more flexible legal authorities and cooperative mechanisms … Bringing all the elements of US power to bear to win the long war requires overhauling traditional foreign assistance and export control activities and laws.”

[...]

The Pentagon planners who drew up the long war strategy had a host of experts to draw on for inspiration. But they credit only one in the report: Lawrence of Arabia.

The authors anticipate US forces being engaged in irregular warfare around the world. They advocate “an indirect approach”, building and working with others, and seeking “to unbalance adversaries physically and psychologically, rather than attacking them where they are strongest or in the manner they expect to be attacked.

They write: “One historical example that illustrates both concepts comes from the Arab revolt in 1917 in a distant theatre of the first world war, when British Colonel TE Lawrence and a group of lightly armed Bedouin tribesmen seized the Ottoman port city of Aqaba by attacking from an undefended desert side, rather than confronting the garrison’s coastal artillery by attacking from the sea.”

In “The UK’s Role: A Close Ally, But No Influence,” (p. 19) Richard Norton-Taylor laments the growing capability gap between the United States and its allies, which increasingly makes even the UK a junior partner.

Military commentators, meanwhile, say the US may place greater emphasis on smaller, more flexible, units – notably special forces – but it is also developing more powerful weapons systems, which Britain cannot deploy because it does not have the money or know-how. “The American way is still ‘money will buy you technology’,” Lord Garden says. “The British way is getting the right people.”

Paul Rogers of Bradford University’s school of peace studies points to the Pentagon’s proposal to modify Trident missiles and turn them into long-range conventional weapons, almost certainly including bunker-busters. “The US will be able to target accurately almost anywhere in the world in less than an hour of a decision being taken. That’s phenomenal,” he says.

Though the US will keep its B-52 bomber force, the Pentagon paper says in future 45% of America’s long-range strike force will be unmanned. Attacks by drones – with weapons fired by a touch on a computer thousands of miles away – have serious legal implications, British commanders and analysts warn. “The US is less concerned with sovereignty than ever,” Professor Rogers says.

Critics, however, argue that the QDR once again underwhelmed in its vision and failed to make hard choices. This is true even of administration allies.

The QDR seems to be consistent with the Pentagon’s program decisions, said Heritage Foundation defense analyst James Carafano. Even so, the document ducks long-range challenges and doesn’t always spell out the Pentagon’s short-range vision.
“Everybody can say everything came out of the QDR. You have the right to be skeptical,” Carafano said.

The QDR vision calls for adding more combat soldiers and buying more unmanned aerial vehicles to supplement its new fighters and warships. The report doesn’t address where the money will come from, particularly since slowing stealth fighter production to keep the line open two extra years will drive up costs. “At the end of the day, the F-22 just winds up being more expensive. It just pushed all the hard things to the out years, and it really didn’t address that,” Carafano said.

Brookings fellow Michael O’Hanlon, however, thinks this is unfair.

To assess a QDR fairly, one first needs to remember that in government, unlike in think tank work or punditry, it is often better to promote boring but sound policies rather than flashy but poorly conceived proposals. In the writing world, we are scored for our creativity and our boldness, and being wrong once or twice is OK if every so often a really good idea comes along. In making official government policy, the tables are turned — especially on national defense.

[...]

For all the talk of revolution and radical change, for all the specific new initiatives under Mr. Rumsfeld and his predecessors, we have reached a certain degree of consensus and stability in post-Cold War defense policy reviews. The military that emerges from this QDR will be nearly identical in size and quite similar in structure to what Les Aspin conceived a dozen years ago. The two-war scenario underpinning it has been modified and described in terms of “capabilities based planning” rather than threat-based planning, but is not far from Mr. Cheney’s 1992 proposal.

For Mr. Rumsfeld, a self-styled revolutionary, this may be damning with faint praise. But for a nation that could benefit from a degree of continuity, and bipartisan consensus, in at least one aspect of its public policies, this may not be so bad.

Still, for those hoping for major restructuring, it is disappointing. As regular readers know, I was not among those who held such hope. My doctoral dissertation, began in 1994, studied the defense transformation process from the earliest days of the Republic (technically, the separation of the Navy Department from the War Department in 1798) and found amazing consistency over the years in the nature of the bureaucratic struggle. There is simply too much at stake and too many players in the game for radical, sudden changes to occur.

InsideDefense [January 31 edition, subscription only] reports that, “One of the most significant results of the 2005 Quadrennial Defense Review will not be found in the final report or in the Pentagon’s accompanying fiscal year 2007 budget request.” It is a major change in the process by which force structure and procurement is conceptualized.

Central to the QDR’s recommendations regarding changes to front-line capabilities is a refinement of a key component of the National Defense Strategy called the “force planning construct.” This forms a basis for all contingency plans and is a core justification for the composition of the armed forces, as well as the number — and types — of ships, aircraft, trucks and tanks the services require.

The QDR adjusts the force planning construct to better account for the post-Sept. 11, 2001, strategic landscape by focusing on three areas: homeland defense; the global war on terrorism, renamed the “long war” in the review; and conventional campaigns.

The new force planning construct underscores the significance U.S. military planners now ascribe to stability and reconstruction missions. “For the foreseeable future, steady state operations, including operations as part of a long war against terrorist networks, and the associated rotation base and sustainment requirements, will be the main determinant for sizing U.S. forces,” states the draft QDR report.

The construct is predicated on the ability of the U.S. military to defend the homeland and maintain its presence in a number of regions around the world. At the same time, U.S. forces must be capable of conducting two simultaneous major operations, with one of them being a large-scale stability and reconstruction campaign like the current Iraq and Afghanistan missions, and the other being a major conventional war. “While we are saying we can handle two major campaigns, we now realize one of them may be of a prolonged, irregular nature,” said the senior defense official. The construct calls for U.S. forces to surge to a “win decisive” level of effort in one of these campaigns.

Pentagon leaders believe that various policy levers can be pulled to affect the “elasticity” of U.S. forces, increasing their flexibility to carry out a wider range of missions, the senior defense official said. These policies include decisions tethered to mobilizing the force, framing the rotation base of each service, setting operational criteria, determining the U.S. military presence around the world and weighing what portions of the force to forward-deploy vs. what pieces to keep in training and education.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his senior leadership team were in a unique position in crafting this QDR. They were the first Pentagon incumbents with a chance to conduct such a sweeping assessment of U.S. military capabilities in two decades. As such, they were able to leverage four years of thinking about the new strategic landscape and benefit from a National Defense Strategy issued last March, at the outset of the review.

They also were able to build on a major budget decision abruptly handed down on Dec. 23, 2004, which many believed marked the unofficial launch of the 2005 QDR — and, the thinking went, would serve as a bellwether for dramatic changes to military investment plans. More than $55 billion was slashed from the Pentagon’s fiscal year 2006 to 2011 weapon system investment roster in that program budget decision, which touched nearly every big-ticket weapon system in the Defense Department’s inventory. That budget action effectively shifted tens of billions of dollars from Air Force and Navy programs to the Army. Many interpreted that as a sign the QDR would further cut expensive Air Force aircraft programs and Navy ship programs to boost spending on ground forces shouldering the lion’s share of responsibility in Iraq and Afghanistan.

This is important. While few cuts were made to major weapons systems, there was a realignment in the way increases were handed out.

For decades, despite radical changes in the size of the force and the nature of the threat posture, the proportion of Defense spending allocated to each of the Services remained almost perfectly static. Finally recognizing that the ground forces are bearing the brunt of current operations and forecast future operations–and actually realigning the budget to account for that–is big, indeed.

It’s about time.

Mark Mazzetti reports that the soon-to-be-released Quadrennial Defense Review reads as if the Iraq War never happened.

The U.S. military has long been accused of always planning to fight its last war. But as the Pentagon assesses threats to national security over the next four years, a major blueprint being completed in the shadow of the Iraq war will do largely the opposite. The military went into Iraq with a vision that a small, agile, and lightly armored force could win a quick preemptive war. Although the U.S. easily crushed Saddam Hussein’s army, the subsequent occupation has proven far costlier in lives, money and international standing than most expected. As a result, the U.S. military has no appetite for another lengthy war of “regime change.”

And while some new lessons will be incorporated into the Pentagon review, the spending blueprint for the next four years will largely stick to the script Pentagon officials wrote before the Iraq war, according to those familiar with the nearly final document that will be presented to Congress in early February.

Iraq “is clearly a one-off,” said a Pentagon official who is working on the top-to-bottom study, known as the Quadrennial Defense Review. “There is certainly no intention to do it again.”

For more than two years, Army officials have been fending off questions about whether they have enough troops to complete their mission in Iraq and racing to get armor plates bolted onto Humvees and supply trucks to defend against homemade bombs. But in the Pentagon blueprint, officials are once again talking about a futuristic force of robots, networked computers and drone aircraft. And they are planning no significant shift in resources to bulk up ground forces strained by the lengthy occupation of Iraq.

A one-off?!

On the contrary, it is the likely conflict type that will occupy the United States military for the next generation.

These are the major conflicts involving U.S. forces since 1990:

(A much more exhaustive list can be found here.)

It becomes quickly apparent that “traditional” wars, where we go in with large maneuver armies and fight against a similar enemy, defeat him, and go home are the one-offs. We have had, by my count, exactly one of those: Desert Storm.

That is being rather generous, since Desert Storm was quickly followed by two major humanitarian protection operations and half a dozen minor aerial bombardment operations in the succeeding twelve years. Not to mention a second major war that still occupies U.S. forces.

I share Rumsfeld’s vision of a high tech, mobile, flexible military. The idea that it will be used only for the types of wars we would prefer, however, is sheer fantasy.

Update: The editors at DefenseTech rounds up other coverage of the QDR and concludes,

Terrorist-type threats will get some new attention. But the Defense Department isn’t about to optimize for that threat, the way it did for the Soviet Union. Big money will continue to be spent on fighter jets designed to duel with the Soviets and destroyers designed for large-scale ground assaults. Grunts on the ground won’t get much more than they do now. The war on terror may be “long.” But, apparently, it’s not important enough to make really big shifts.

Marc Danziger is also puzzled by this and observes, “Today, as we’re playing ‘blink’ with Iran, the idea that we wouldn’t send a signal by starting the budget process with funds for – say – 150,000 more troops makes no sense whatsoever to me.”

Loren Thompson is not pleased, either. He notes, however, that it is mostly “a status quo document” and that focusing on the deviations from present policy gives the incorrect impression of radical change. That’s a good point. Having written a PhD dissertation on this topic, I can attest that change comes at glacial pace.

One conservative crititic of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld says he will leave at least one important positive legacy: the transformation of the department into a net-centric environment.

Analyst: Advanced Networks To Be Rumsfeld Legacy (Defense Today, p. 1, $)

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld may depart his post soon, but his push to infuse the military with netcentricity should be remembered as a positive legacy, a well-known defense analyst said. Many in Washington want Rumsfeld to step down, including much of the White House staff, according to Loren Thompson, of the Lexington Institute, a Washington-area think tank. [...] “With his second quadrennial defense review wrapping up, Rumsfeld is undoubtedly asking himself why he needs to put up with all us fools for three more years anyway, so a near-term departure seems probable,” Thompson wrote in a brief.

But Rumsfeld should be applauded for his interest in netcentricity, Thompson said, noting that netcentricity will figure prominently in the final report on the Quadreennial Defense Review (QDR) that the secretary is to receive in draft form on Dec. 23. An every-four-years exercise, the QDR is a top-to-bottom evaluation of U.S. military needs and capabilities. “The report reiterates core themes of Rumsfeld’s transformation framework, stressing in particular the virtues of `netcentricity,’” Thompson said.

“Netcentricity is the economical way of describing network-centric warfare, an innovation that Rumsfeld appropriated from the Navy early in his tenure to explain how previously balkanized military forces could be integrated into a unified enterprise using information technologies. The basic idea is to create a resilient network of global links that will enable all elements of the joint force to communicate instantaneously, getting whatever information is needed to warfighters in whatever form they need it. This is a genuinely new approach to warfare, as its late progenitor, [Adm.] Arthur Cebrowski, often pointed out to those who failed to grasp its potential,” he added. “Netcentricity enables extraordinary leaps in military performance, leaps that will eventually save millions of lives and billions of dollars. But netcentricity is still in its infancy, and Rumsfeld has poured so much money into pursuing it that traditional tools of warfare like submarines and bombers have been neglected. Rumsfeld’s successor will have to figure out which initiatives are worth continuing, and which are redundant or unworkable.”

Rumsfeld’s legacy will be largely wrapped up in the Iraq War, simply because of the scope of that effort and the political controversy that has surrounded it. If it turns out well in the long run, he’ll get credit for it despite mistakes; if it turns out poorly, he’ll be blamed regardless of his positive contributions.

Still, in terms of the big picture role of the SECDEF, Thompson is likely right. It may well be that another SECDEF at this juncture would have pushed the net-centric concept ahead, given that the surrounding technology (Service Oriented Architecture (SOA), most notably) was ripe. But Rumsfeld has been an especial enthusiast of the project and rammed it through despite the natural reticience of the senior service staffs who would have preferred the money be put into major capital projets.

Related:

Admiral Arthur Cebrowski Dies from Cancer
Thinking Outside the Box
Net-Centric Troop Assignments
Pentagon Drops Internet Voting Test
Transforming HumInt
Improving Combat Supply System
Peacekeeping Force
STANDING STABILITY FORCE
JOINT CHIEFS TALK

Dana Priest has a lengthy discussion of the CIA’s “secret” Counterterrorist Intelligence Centers (CTICs) and the relationship between counterterrorism, espionage, and diplomacy.

Foreign Network at Front of CIA’s Terror Fight (WaPo, A1)

The CIA has established joint operation centers in more than two dozen countries where U.S. and foreign intelligence officers work side by side to track and capture suspected terrorists and to destroy or penetrate their networks, according to current and former American and foreign intelligence officials. The secret Counterterrorist Intelligence Centers are financed mostly by the agency and employ some of the best espionage technology the CIA has to offer, including secure communications gear, computers linked to the CIA’s central databases, and access to highly classified intercepts once shared only with the nation’s closest Western allies. The Americans and their counterparts at the centers, known as CTICs, make daily decisions on when and how to apprehend suspects, whether to whisk them off to other countries for interrogation and detention, and how to disrupt al Qaeda’s logistical and financial support.

The network of centers reflects what has become the CIA’s central and most successful strategy in combating terrorism abroad: persuading and empowering foreign security services to help. Virtually every capture or killing of a suspected terrorist outside Iraq since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks — more than 3,000 in all — was a result of foreign intelligence services’ work alongside the agency, the CIA deputy director of operations told a congressional committee in a closed-door session earlier this year.

The initial tip about where an al Qaeda figure is hiding may come from the CIA, but the actual operation to pick him up is usually organized by one of the joint centers and conducted by a local security service, with the CIA nowhere in sight. “The vast majority of successes involved our CTICs,” one former counterterrorism official said. “The boot that went through the door was foreign.”

The centers are also part of a fundamental, continuing shift in the CIA’s mission that began shortly after the 2001 attacks. No longer is the agency’s primary goal to recruit military attaches, diplomats and intelligence operatives to steal secrets from their own countries. Today’s CIA is desperately seeking ways to join forces with other governments it once reproached or ignored to undo a common enemy. George J. Tenet orchestrated the shift during his tenure as CIA director, working with the agency’s station chiefs abroad and officers in the Counterterrorist Center at headquarters to bring about an exponential deepening of intelligence ties worldwide after Sept. 11. Beneath the surface of visible diplomacy, the cooperative efforts, known as liaison relationships, are recasting U.S. dealings abroad.

I’ve certainly seen references to these CTICs before, although never such a lengthy discussion. Indeed, an advanced Google search reveals no previous mentions in the NYT or WaPo.
To the extent they are supposed to be “secret,” though, one wonders how Priest got enough information for a four (web) page article.

Conceptually, this is an obvious move. Given that virtually all terrorists are based outside the United States and most now operate independently of state sponsorship, the teaming with foreign governments is a natural. This also gives lie to the “we’re only fighting terrorism through military means” meme that simply refuses to die.

The last-ditch effort to reject the Base Realignment and Closure (BRAC) has failed 324-84, clearing the way for the BRAC Report to become law in mid-November.

A plan to close and reconfigure hundreds of military bases is sailing through Congress, on track to take effect next month in a blow to communities hoping for an eleventh-hour reprieve.
In a long-shot attempt to halt the first round of base closings in a decade, the House planned a vote today on a proposal to reject the final report of the 2005 Base Closure and Realignment Commission (BRAC). Even base-closing opponents considered the effort certain to fail, like Congress’ attempts to stop the four previous rounds.
To kill the process, the Senate also would have to veto the report, and the chances of that happening are slim to none.

However, I’m sure the lawsuits by states upset about the elimination of National Guard units will continue.

Now that BRAC is effectively done, next up on the military list is the Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR). The previous one was completed near 9/11, and swiftly became outdated and ignored. This will be Secretary Rumsfield’s vision to transform the Defense Department, like he attempted before 9/11.