America must reform its military doctrine and its force posture. We have drifted away from the kind of war that Americans support and can afford. We have failed to keep pace with change in global political, economic, and military reality.
The prospects for the use of nuclear weapons have changed faster than our thinking about them. Uses of non-nuclear military force in the last half-century have taught us some very expensive lessons about the misuse of force. Our past mistakes and the changing nature of nuclear war need to be taken to heart. A domestic dimension of national security threat has evolved that requires thinking that should be integrated into a comprehensive, integrated foreign and domestic US Military Strategy, something new to Americans.
Economic realities accompany the military ones. America can no longer afford to buttress outdated thinking with nearly open-ended military acquisitions. The abuses of the past, where politicians push military equipment that the military does not want or need, cost overruns are accepted as part of an out-of control acquisitions “game,” and the Executive Branch decides unilaterally to use force outside The American Way of War, are facing a stark economic reality. We cannot afford it.
Our current military policies are out of tune with the philosophical and moral outlook of the majority of Americans. Most understand that this nation’s greatness lies in being a beacon of freedom and opportunity, not in being an arsenal.
At our best, we import democracy into our melting pot. We do not export our ideas, or impose them on other cultures by force. For over fifty years, politicians have ignored these basic American concepts and the American military has tried to obey. We have been dragged into military quagmires where public tolerance eventually wears out.
A silver lining: past mistakes can lead us to The Edison Insight. Thomas Edison was asked early in his quest if he had succeeded in making a light bulb. He responded, “No, but I know a hundred ways not to do it.” By now, politicians have a mountain of data on how not to employ force. It is obvious that we need to return to the American Way of War.
The American Way of War is to answer genuine threats to the nation’s security by mobilizing massive force and crushing the enemy. We do not dabble with our children’s lives and the nation’s treasure. Politicians are quick to “play” with military “instruments” but the American people are not. Our doctrine and our force postures must be adjusted for The American Way of War, not for being a plaything of diplomats and politicians. The military element in our country’s power lies in the “Well-Regulated Militia” that the Founding Fathers understood must be rooted in the population. This point is even more salient now that the threat to our national security has a much more credible domestic component.
The good news is that we can deal with all of this. Reform of our strategy and force posture at costs that can be sustained is possible. The country is in the mood to do it. There are leaders in Defense who are quite capable of it.
What needs to be done?
First, current strategy and policy must be changed with a return to the American Way of War in mind.
This requires a non-assertive, deliberate, and defensive mindset. Politicians and Politico-military thinkers and diplomats must be disabused of the notion that our children in uniform, our missiles, and our aircraft carriers are “arrows” in their quiver or “tools” in their toolbox. This arrogant and ill-advised idea has been bandied around so long and so glibly that policymakers actually began to believe that nice, clean, “surgical” applications of the instruments of death are in consonance with American views of the use of force in international politics. They are not.
Americans see the military “tool” among the nation’s instruments of power more as a sledgehammer than as a scalpel. Americans, through their elected representatives in Congress, must formally declare a war that is in The American Way. When war is declared by due process, it will not be controversial. Americans do not need to be “led” for a just, moral use of force. Presidents have neither the duty nor the moral authority to declare war. They cannot justly substitute reasons, however “humanitarian” or “democratic” those reasons, for the Will of the People.
Policymakers have violated the American Way of War repeatedly for decades. The demand for due process before committing our troops will frustrate and annoy Presidents and Secretaries of State who want to play with toy soldiers. Americans have eventually rejected these violations, sometimes after enormous loss of life and treasure and after a diminution of America’s moral standing in the world.
Clearly, a major departure from the attitudes and behaviors of the last half-century is needed. It is time to change our thinking about the instruments of diplomacy, about the American role in the world, and the place of military force in both of these.
By the way, it is not only Presidents and Secretaries of State that must be reined in. “Hawks” are ever present throughout the political spectrum. They are motivated by economic greed, ideological conviction, political ambition, or just plain old-fashioned “bubba” mentality. These, when combined, are loud and powerful voices that can seem to suggest public support. They must be put to the test of due process. This is a minimum requirement: smart policymakers will remember that prolonged, indecisive conflict soon loses American support even when there seems to be consensus at the beginning of it.
None of this is meant to suggest that America should stop being a great military power. Military force should and will always be a crucial instrument of our diplomacy. Our military power is a large part of who we are on the world stage. The potential of that power lay behind our diplomacy. It has huge, inherent military impact on calculations of friends and adversaries. “Show of force” has utility because it relates the totality of our awesome potential to politico-military situations. America is at its best on the world stage when we speak softly and carry a big stick. The Shining City on the Hill is not the world’s arsenal, but it is also not a pushover.
We err when we think that little sticks work well for us. Our awesome military capacity is not easily divisible. We cannot take the military elements of that power and pick and choose how to apply them to force other nations to behave the way we want them to behave. Even if it works in the short term, it cannot be sustained for long in American public opinion.
Standoff use of military force, where we try to disconnect killing from dying, fails
to uphold American morality. Unmanned drones, cruise missiles hurled from afar, and “no-fly” zones are attempts to kill without dying. Americans will die, and kill, for their country if it is in danger, but we are not killers.
An All-Volunteer Force is a kind of standoff weapon. Privileged Americans are insulated from both the killing and the dying. This diminishes the soul of American power, and is not The American Way of War. Policemen are hired as volunteers and have a moral and just duty to kill if necessary without dying, but the American military is not a police force. Policies that permit a political class to keep its own children safe from war and educate them to join the class and send other people’s children to war are very fundamentally un-American.
We must come to grips with the fact that the economic, social and political “arrows” in our quiver, though they are slow and sometimes ineffective, are the tools that we have to use. We need to get better at using these in a world where new power centers are evolving.
American goals in the international environment should be long-term goals that are aimed at promoting and preserving our national security. Such goals rarely require the instant gratification of the use of force. They almost always require the patience and perseverance of diplomacy. Diplomacy requires tolerance of a world always in flux and almost never the war we Americans would like it to be. If it were, we would not be The Shining City on the Hill.
We have been off track for a long time and it will take a major effort to get back to The American Way of War. Strong leaders with courage and conviction need to come forward. It will take great courage not to resort to weapons and to conduct our foreign policy with frustratingly slow and often less effective instruments of power. It would require strong conviction to start the process of changing military strategy, force planning and budgeting to fit The American Way of War. It would be revolutionary change.
This change includes a totally different approach to the relationship of domestic and foreign forces and strategies. The Total Force approach has already exposed the fallacies in separating domestic and foreign forces. The American Way of War, and the Founding Fathers, understood that we are a reserve and militia nation at heart. A clearly articulated Doctrine that recognizes this is a good place to start. Making defense budget justifications and broad military policies and strategies conform to that Doctrine would be next.
Second, we must come to grips with the new nuclear age. The landscape for the potential use of weapons of mass destruction has changed dramatically while concepts for the conduct of war involving nuclear use have lagged behind. Our minds are still in the First Nuclear Age, but a Second Nuclear Age has already dawned. We are in danger of facing High Noon unprepared.
The old concepts, based on a Balance of Terror and dependent on a precarious acceptance of logic based on theories and “ladders” of escalation, are out of date. The potential players have changed, the weapons are not the same, and the probable scenarios are markedly different from the past.
Very important, the passage of time has combined with the new circumstances to erode the credibility of threats to use intercontinental nuclear weapons. A threat to commit mutual suicide is no longer believable between nation states, and it means nothing at all to rogue elements and terrorists. American domestic vulnerability to the latter has increased.
“Isolated” nuclear exchanges, separated from intercontinental nuclear arsenals, were considered in the First Nuclear Age, but most serious thinkers put little stock in them even at that time. Nuclear War at Sea or “Limited Nuclear War” in Europe or the Middle East, fanciful creations of the Sixties and Seventies, could become the nightmares of the 21st Century. Such wars, especially without initial involvement of major nuclear states, are clearly more likely.
Time, progress at nuclear arms control, the global reach of non-state movements, and tectonic shifts in global and regional power centers, have dramatically altered the nuclear weapons landscape. New plans and policies, and new public understandings, need to be in place before we are faced with a catastrophic nuclear event. We cannot predict what that event will be, the combinations and permutations grow steadily, but we can be far more prepared than we are now.
Third, we must adjust and modernize our force structure to serve an updated American approach to the use of force tailored to the way Americans understand and will support war. We have a strong base from which to begin.
Modernization and tailoring to fit a new American Military Doctrine can be done at a reasonable pace. Basically, we need to use up what we have while building and tailoring forces judiciously with lean structures and far more limited use in mind.
The implications of this to other state and non-state players in the world are huge and must not be misunderstood. It means we will not be the world’s policeman, and we will not be trying to make anyone over in our image. It has an element of “let the chips fall where they may” in it. It places vast responsibility on regional actors for their own neighborhoods.
It does NOT mean America ceases to be a leader in the world and does NOT mean that we fail to speak up on issues of morality and human rights. It DOES mean a reduction in our willingness to try to change behaviors with military force. This will be unsatisfying to ideologically inspired educated elites in America, but it will be just fine with the vast majority of our population and it will in the end increase the credibility of The Shining City on the Hill.
Forces for countering guerrilla warfare or “limited” interventions would be deemphasized. Forces built for “projection of military power” would exist to show the flag, but would not seek to plant our flag or impose our way of life somewhere else. Generally, forces for uses of military instruments short of war would be “spinoffs” of forces justified and maintained for war in defense of genuine threats to the homeland. Strategy, planning, and force building would be carefully tailored to The American Way of War.
This is not as simple as it might seem or as simplistic as detractors might charge. Some conflict with major adversaries short of direct, immediate threat to the American territory could certainly be seen as a genuine threat to the Homeland. For example, China will almost surely want to dominate trade and politics at its perimeter and on Asian seas in a manner intolerable to interests of the United States that could be considered “vital” in this century. Deterring or countering such a threat must be part of strategy, planning, and force building tailored to The American Way of War. This reality will affect the needed balance between standing and reserve forces, but it will not change the fact that an important shift toward the latter is clearly now in order.
The significant caveat in the previous paragraph is not meant to justify perpetuation of “domino thinking” where one setback inevitably leads to total failure. It is also not meant to justify repeats of trumped-up plans to use the American addiction to foreign oil as a reason to go to war. It is high time that America understands that we really do have the best political system on Earth and need not fear temporary popularity, even successes, of other ideas. Our energy addictions are indeed national security vulnerabilities, but they clearly can and must be addressed at home. They cannot be fixed by force of arms.
The capacity to mobilize must be re-thought and strengthened as capabilities and intentions to use military force at lower levels of conflict are reduced. This involves not just new approaches to reserve and National Guard forces, but a new concept for “core” standing active duty forces that exist primarily to execute The American Way of War. These will be smaller, highly professional, high quality, and high tech forces. They will not by any stretch of the imagination be inexpensive, but they will be leaner, smarter, and far more efficient than what we maintain today.
A new Doctrine does not immediately require the new force that should be in place in the next decade or two. It requires first and foremost a change in behavior. America needs to extract itself from ongoing conflicts, even at some costs. Deployments and military exposures around the globe need to be steadily, and not too slowly, diminished. It is true that there will be cases where we will not like the results of pulling out, and hawkish detractors will hurry to say that the sky is falling, but we must learn to deal with this.
Our diplomacy must and will grow to cope with the world without the constant application of force. In terms of military posture, we will gradually but surely find ourselves with more forces than we need, and we can retire, or mothball, forces in an orderly way.
A Military Doctrine that clearly relates our use of force to unambiguous, direct threats to our national security and survival would give us the time and resources to update our military posture for the middle of the 21st Century.
