Future Peer Competitor?

[Ski]

Define peer competitor first. Then a comparison, if any, can be made.

Agree with you about the industrial base, and some brief research I did on the subject a couple of years back said they're already facing a significant brain drain as the class of 60s era engineers and scientists retires.

I didn't mean to turn this into an F-22 thread, though my sympathies are with SWJED and the rest of the skeptics. We'll probably face conventional war again in the near future, as you noted, but will it be a peer competitor? Whether it's China, Russia, Iran, North Korea...none of these countries can match us in terms of technology and ordnance delivery. Being able to defeat them strikes me as being vastly different from devoting the majority of our procurement budget, and maybe the majority of the defense budget period, to arming for some Pacific showdown with the Chinese. Can anyone provide a halfway plausible peer competitor within 20-30 years?

[Rob Thornton]

I thought about this last night since I think this is a much bigger question then on of F-22s or new riflemen – I believe it gets to the question of technology vs. people. Its not that this is an either or, but is a question of how much you invest into one vs. the other to meet our security needs now and for the future (for the sake of defining the future, lets stay inside the 2025 time frame).

Before considering that question though let’s consider the way in which military (and if you want to, you can include diplomacy and economics) force is applied toward policy ends. If you are a state (& I think these days we can include non-state) there are three agreed upon uses for behavior modification of people we can’t get along with, or whose own policy or goals are at odds with your own – you can deter, you can coerce, and you can compel. We’ll define deter by saying you have taken actions which portray your strength and indicate that your interests will support your willingness to cross from passive to active. Coerce is more difficult because for me it floats between deter and compel – but these are actions that can be rescinded more easily but still hold the potential that you are willing to compel behavior. In my mind air and sea power are great tools for coercion. Compelling someone has to offer the threat of physically removing them – this is where I’d argue that to compel requires a robust land component capability. Some will take issue with the definitions – that’s healthy, and certainly different advocates & acolytes may put their services’ capabilities in all three blocks – but I believe in order to take and hold ground indefinitely requires physical occupation of it – not with a sensor and not the airspace above it. Put simpler my physical size can deter, my anger might coerce, but to compel I need to lay hands on somebody.

Now let’s consider Iraq, Iran, small wars & big wars. Personally if we have to have wars then I prefer small wars as an alternative to big wars – there is historical evidence that big wars kill more people and destroy more stuff then small wars. So limited wars with limited means kill less people. This is not to say they don’t have big consequences, especially for the people involved.

Is it coincidence that the White House is exploring the possibility of reducing troops as early as 2008? I’d submit that while Senator Reid is willing to call it a political victory brought about by Democratic pressure, it is probably more of a national security concern. I’ll come back to this at the end.

By our own writings on this site, writings in the press by retired and active duty military professionals and civilian security experts, our land component (and the other components in supporting them) capabilities are stretched to a great degree in their policy role (compelling the insurgents, terrorists and our enemies) in Iraq, Afghanistan and other places around the globe. We can go back to the decision to request more troops and the request and subsequent decision to increase the size of the Army and Marines to acknowledge that. I’d propose that our enemies and friends can read and come to their own conclusions, and that our ability to compel is constrained at the moment by our policy objectives in Iraq (I use Iraq since sustaining significant troop levels there raises OPTEMPO and induces strain on every aspect of our means & will to compel). Our current object of policy – a stable Iraq that is U.S. friendly and can ease the strain on global energy needs by both producing and not destabilizing the Persian Gulf region is worth the effort in terms of preventing larger security concerns in the future. It also speaks to the moral aspect of war and our commitment to our ideals – an ally that is not willing to see it through is kind of a self-interested fair weather friend.

So, what are the tools available currently to deter, coerce or compel the Iranians from realizing and employing a nuclear weapon (or acting through a third party like Hezbollah), other states seeking advantages, or even non-state organizations seeking to exploit the current situation? If we look at Iran, which components would we rely on right now to move from deter to coerce? Is it a ground component that is sprinting to maintain its current commitments? Or, is it the USAF and USN who we’d task to conduct limited strikes against targets deep within Iran in order to signify our intolerance for their goals?

Following that line – don’t you think Iran knows that? What has been one of their largest investments in military acquisition recently (we are speaking conventionally, not nuclear)? The answer is, front line, state of the art (by anybody’s technological standards but perhaps our own) Anti-Aircraft technology in massive amounts and phased throughout the country enroute to their dispersed nuclear sites to deter us from that option (I'd add that they include curring favor through trade benefits with powerful states, cooperation on Iraq, and an immense IO campaign for the will of the U.S. Public by denying their true reason for pursuing nuclear power). They understand that in order to get to their sites we’d have to invest an awful lot of something to make it credible. They understand that as we weigh that out, it may not be worth it for us – all they have to do is show us the stakes to make it a difficult decision. To remove the ADA threat will require massive amounts of sorties by survivable A/C to first neutralize the ADA threat – to that end the Iranians are also investing in other capabilities. To know for sure if the ADA is neutralized I think you’d have to occupy the ground for SAM sites surrounding the Air LOCs with ground forces to (something we’d be hard pressed to do right now without changing the scope of our commitment to Iraq). I think DoD understood that when they were pursuing the use of ICBMs with conventional war-heads as a deterrent – its hard to defeat an ICBM – but that has its own problems – how do you know what’s inside if you are say Russia, China or India trying to decide on a reaction?

Given that line of thought – and the likelihood that we are going to be caught up in small wars, COIN & COIN like activities in order to prevent extremism and other Non-State threats which are also national security issues of prime importance, then the USAF and USN require the best technology to mitigate the lack of being able to commit a credible ground component to that action. In my view having to compensate for lack of fully rounded capability with technology is a tough row to hoe, but at least it is an option. On the other hand, ignoring the use of technology to gain an advantage by solely investing in a large ground component is also very dangerous – go back to comparing armor in WWII, or how we deterred the Soviet numbers in the Cold War.

This is not an easy question, but we do have to look beyond the moment and consider how we employ military force and to what ends in order to decide what capabilities to invest in. We have competing requirements – mass and technology. As I’ve said before, I believe the best investment is in quality people because without them you get a mass of automatons and technology that is unusable. Without quality people the reason we use military force is subject to being lost for want of a nail. What we need to do is look for innovation where possible and feasible, and uses that adapt existing materials and technologies in ways that offers us advantages and cost less then pursuing a totally new line of thought. It is not always the case – you can only adapt on old idea so far, but in many cases it is possible. This provides us options where we can pursue other technologies or COAs at a more affordable rate. To use a great planning cliché, perfect is often the enemy of good enough.

[tequila]

Of note: Annual Pentagon report - Military Power of the People's Republic of China 2007.