Irregular Challenges and the Emerging Defense Debate

[SteveMetz]

I attended a very interesting "Meeting America's Security Challenges After Iraq" conference at RAND Washington yesterday. This brought together the flower of the DC wonkocracy/punditocracy (plus me). There were 50-60 total participants. It's very likely that a number of future senior OSD people were there. The CJCS and VJCS each spent an hour with us; there were at least four other 4 stars and five or six 3 stars in attendance. So many 2 stars and 1 stars that some of them had to sit in the back of the room with note takers. The vast majority were Air Force with a sprinkling of Marines (and I hesitate to use the words "Marines" and "sprinkle" in the same sentence).

This was sponsored by Project Air Force at RAND and the Center for Naval Analysis. There were a number of great presentations by people like Frank Hoffman, Bruce Hoffman, Andy Krepinevich, etc. Two take aways: 1) there was an amazing panel on the defense budget led by Ken Krieg. It's chilling just how big the gap is between the services' projected future budgets and every realistic projection on likely budgets. Even simply cutting top acquisition programs wouldn't fix this. The most frightening drop off is in R&D. 2) We are going to see mounting debate (probably AFTER the presidential election) as to whether we should sustain a grand strategy focused on "irregular stuff" or move toward what strategists call an "offshore balancing" strategy where we may intervene in failed states with nukes or oil, but we don't hang around to try and re-engineer them.

Of course, this effort is led to some extent by the Navy, but more by the Air Force. I'm an Army guy but I'm also a Republican with libertarian leanings, and I can't say that I find this idea a bad one. It's clear that right now we have a classic and debilitating means/ends mismatch in our strategy. Our strategic objective is stabilizing and re-engineering Islamic states, but we don't have even the military to do that, much less the other government capabilities. A few people like my friend Tom Donnelly are arguing that we need a massive capability increase. I really think that's unlikely and it's much more probable that we'll simply adjust our strategy and get out of the business of re-engineering other nations.

There are interesting political dynamics in this debate. The political right is still largely behind President Bush's strategy which focuses us on irregular challenges. But I'd have to think the China focus of the "off shore balancing" strategy would resonate with some. I'm not getting a sense of where Democrats fall on this. About the only consistent theme I'm hearing there is that we need more emphasis on training/advising, and working with allies. That doesn't address the big question: what do you do if prevention and multilateral approaches fail? Do you intervene unilaterally or near-unilaterally and attempt to re-engineer, or do you contain and cauterize?

Anyhow, I'm sure you'll hear MUCH more on this during the next five years.

Nota bene: that was my first exposure to the Chief and the Vice. I was very impressed. Best top team we've had for a long time in my estimation.

Other nota bene: leaving a motorpool car in the Pentagon City parking garage at 0730 does not guarantee you can find it at 1900. There's 45 minutes of my life I'll never get back. I did succeed in setting off the panic alarm in it, but it took me another 15 minutes to figure out what level it was on (while it merrily honked away).