Civil war continues to rage in Syria, violence escalates in Iraq, a barbaric terrorist attack was recently perpetrated on civilians in Kenya, and tensions escalate in India and Pakistan. As well, the global proliferation of precision-guided weapons poses new threats, and old threats grow with the rise of China’s military and Russia’s re-emergence on the world’s geopolitical stage
In the wake of almost a dozen years of fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq, and, based on the historical (99.999%) certainty of serious war in our future, how does the US protect itself militarily and wage war if necessary? Mounting global volatility, complexity, savagery and peril appears to make future military planning very difficult—but only if the approach is tactical in contrast to strategic.
Strategic Thinking
Let’s define strategy as the intellectual framework guiding individuals and/or organizations towards sustained success, which in turn can be defined as a sustainable outcome that is valuable and satisfying over time. Strategic thinking has been systematized into what this article’s co-author, USAF Col. (Ret) John A. Warden III, terms the “Prometheus Process.” Prometheus was the Greek god who gave man the capacity for forethought and the ability to make fire. In essence, Prometheus gave mankind the power to create the future, to strategize.
Strategic thinking has four main imperatives: (i) design the future, (ii) target for success, (iii) campaign to win, and (iv) finish with finesse. The illustration below renders these imperatives in journalistic terms:
Today, we will focus on a preliminary consideration of the first imperative. Determining the desired future, means creating an objective, measurable picture of the future we want to create, or the “Future Picture” in Prometheus-speak. This process begins with “Scoping the Environment,” which was done in broad strokes above regarding external systems within which the U.S. military operates.
Scoping the Environment and External Systems
We don’t know many of the specifics of a future war but with reasonable certainty we do know: (i) Our military enemies will be located at significant distances from the US; (ii) Our significant enemies (who can do real strategic damage) will be well-equipped with modern technology; (iii) For offensive and defensive reasons, given the increasing damage weapons can inflict with greater accuracy, there will be a high priority on bringing any conflict to a rapid, successful conclusion; (iv) Americans will find it morally appealing and practically advantageous to wage war with a minimum of destruction and casualties on both sides; (v) Most likely, there will be no military staging areas close to our opponents, which means we will fight from the U.S.
Scoping the Environment and Internal Systems
Critical internal systemic issues include budget cuts and rising personnel costs. According to the Congressional Budget Office, President Barack Obama will leave his successor a $20-trillion national debt. Worse, Obamacare might push that figure significantly higher. Also, estimates of the federal government’s future (unfunded) commitments in the form of pensions, social security, Medicare and so on range from $70 trillion to $86 trillion and beyond ($googolplex anyone?). Clearly government debt has become a major problem necessitating spending cuts, which politically can be delayed but not avoided. The military will lose the budgetary largess it has enjoyed for decades.
Already, via sequestration and the scale-down of war costs in Iraq and Afghanistan, the American defense budget had been cut by 21 percent after peaking in 2010. If current trends continue, the military budget will fall by a third in real terms by 2021.
As pointed out in a recent article, entitled, “Defense Cuts Conundrum: Weighing the Hard Choices Ahead,” published by the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, “without resource constraints, strategy would be unnecessary—the military could simply throw more money at all its problems. Limited resources thus create the need for strategy, and as resources become more constrained, strategy becomes more important.”
Even with unlimited budgets, strategy would still become crucial. If 100 cavalry officers brandishing swords on horseback would be useless against a modern tank, fielding 1,000 cavalrymen at much greater expense wouldn’t stop or even dent the mechanized beast.
The main driver of cost increases, other than typical wartime expenditures in materiel and so on, is military personnel. “From 2001 to 2012, annual compensation costs per active-duty service member grew 57 percent in real terms, not including war-related expenses or the cost of veterans’ benefits for injured or disabled service members,” wrote Todd Harrison in the article cited above. “This growth resulted mainly from higher than requested pay raises, new and expanded benefits, and skyrocketing health-care costs.”
This scenario is so critical that if the military continues to field forces at their current strength (1.4 million on active duty), “as currently planned, they could consume the entire defense budget by 2024, leaving no money for research and development or the procurement of new equipment,” Harrison estimated.
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