It's unlikely to get anything like the attention it deserves in the mass media, especially the television news. But the Pentagon is undergoing its regular Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR). And the implications for the foreseeable future are huge. So far, it sounds as though the Pentagon plans to incorporate essentially no new counterinsurgency capabilities, still hoping against hope and experience that more and more refinements of conventional war capabilities will give the US all the military ability we need.
Meanwhile, the Army Reserve and National Guard are set to be downsized, because the Iraq War and how reserves have been used in it have knocked recruiting down drastically. The Army itself is stretching itself to the max in order to keep 135,000 troops in the field in Iraq, a war that, in Andrew Bacevich's words, may be unwinnable in a strictly military sense.
Don't get me wrong. I don't want to see the US beef up its counterinsurgency capabilities on top of everything else the military is doing and then go all over the world intervening in civil wars and overturning regimes that are annoying the Presidential party at any given moment. The instincts of the officer corps to stay out of counterinsurgency wars is not bad in itself.
But there needs to be a serious look at "right-sizing" the US military. It's beyond my imagination that we need to keep spending more than half the military budgets of the entire world. Bacevich has suggested that we could set a target of spending as much as the 10 next-highest military spending countries combined and still make substantial cuts to the military.
What? Cut the military budget in the middle of the endless War on Terror? That's what would happen if the Congress, our "press corps" and the public were to take a good, hard look at the defense budget while placing the actual defense of the US as the top priority. It's hard to see how incredible boondoggles like Star Wars ("missile defense") would survive.
And the QDR process so far seems to invision mostly a continuing push for "full spectrum dominance" relying of whiz-bang technology - and a very heavy reliance on airpower. The latter needs to be seriously reexamined, because it has a great deal of potential for "blowback". We see that in the ever-more-frequent reports aboutthe US dropping a 500-lb. bomb on a house in an Iraqi town. The initial reports normally site the military's official good news that 10, 15, 25 "terrorists" were killed. Then the reports start coming in from neighbors and reporters that most if not all the dead were civilian noncombatants. All of whom then have a clan obligation to take revenge for the unjustified murder of one of their kin.
Military analyst William Arkin writes of the QDR that Bombing is in the Air Early Warning blog 01/27/06:
The QDR also continues the development of current unmanned bombing vehicles, and restructures the Joint Unmanned Combat Air System (J-UCAS) program to develop remotely controlled aircraft carrier-based bomber capable of being aerial refueled "to expand payload and launch options, and to increase naval reach and persistence."
Earlier this month, General Dynamics Electric Boat completed conversion of the first of four former Trident nuclear submarines as cruise missile firing boats, each able to carry up to 154 Tomahawk cruise missiles. All four will be fielded by the end of next year.
We've got B-1, B-2, and B-52 bombers, which themselves are being modernized and made more capable for long-range strike. We've got the new multi-gazillion dollar F-22 stealth fighter just being fielded, which last I looked was claimed able to penetrate any defended airspace. We have cruise missiles galore able to be launched from ships, submarines and bombers. We have aircraft carriers, new missiles and bombs, another new fighter -- the Joint Strike Fighter -- coming down the pike. We even have "black" and boutique weapons -- lasers, high powered microwaves, computer network attack, and electronic warfare -- that can be used to deliver long-range strikes on targets.
So where in the hell, and what in the hell, do we need to bomb in the future that we can't already get to?
Those are exactly the kinds of questions Congress needs to be asking, and in a serious way.
Arkin also gives us a heads-up about the QDR's preferred new term for "the war on terrorism" (GWOT): Goodbye War on Terrorism, Hello Long War Early Warning blog 01/26/06.
Defense experts want the long war to be the new name for the war on terror, a kind of societal short hand that will stand shoulder to shoulder with the Cold War, promoted to capital letters, an indisputable and universally accepted state of the world.
"This generation of servicemembers will be in what we're calling the Long War," Army Lt. Gen. Ray Odierno, assistant to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said earlier this week.
"Our estimate is that for at least the next 20 years … our focus will be … the extremist networks that will continue to threaten the United States and its allies."
Perpetual war for 20 years or so. By then, the Iraq War will have gone on for so long that that there will be another 20 or 30 years worth of menace out there so the Long War can continue.
But the Long War is not expected to consist of successful counterinsurgency operations. No, we'll have a useless megaback Star Wars system and 20 more years of preparation to vanquish Soviet Army Central pouring through the Fulda Gap in Germany in a conventional war.
And, of course, unlimited "wartime powers" for Republican Presidents would have to remain in place for the duration. By the time the Long War is done, maybe people will have forgotten about all this personal liberty nonsense Americans once took for granted. But I suppose if it's true, as Bush and his loyalists keep repeating, that "they hate us for our freedoms", then if we do away with our freedoms entirely, they will no longer have any reason to hate us, right?
Among other good observations in that post, Arkin writes:
The Bush administration has been in panic mode since 9/11, and though it has tripped upon sometimes improved articulations of what it is doing to respond to the scourge of modern terrorism, it has both the wrong vision of the severity of the threat and it has shown itself, in four years of fighting, that no matter how much it articulates that the United States and the world must use all aspects of their power to thwart and defeat terrorism, the Bush administration is only comfortable with the military response, and it is only really happy with secret operations.
The Quadrennial Defense Review now exhorts the military to reform and retool to fight the long war, in everything from its business practices to its training. The backdrop of what the Pentagon is arguing is clear: Whatever constraints exist in the current world to fight need to be changed to increase operational flexibility. "New and more flexible authorities from the Congress" are needed. Old laws, like old Europe, need to be chucked overboard.
Arkin also gives us an example of that secrecy instinct: Rumsfeld's new war plan Early Warning blog 01/25/06. In discussing the decision to make Special Operations Command (SOCOM) a separate "command" structure that is designed to go after terrorist operations anywhere in the world, he tells us calmly about one of its distinguishing characteristics: it reports directly to Rummy, while the major services report up through civilian Secretaries of the separate services:
But SOCOM has a peculiar position: It is intrinsically a secretive organization that can not even convey the most trivial information about its activities without great pain. It is a military command not a military service and thus though it acts like the Army or Navy, it doesn't have a civilian Secretary. SOCOM is only accountable to the office of the Secretary of Defense.
Outside of operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, we don't really know what SOCOM has done since 9/11, and we don't really know how well it has done. We hope that it is out there being successful finding and disrupting -- killing -- terrorists. But without much information because of the inherent secrecy and then without an effective legal mechanism for outside oversight, we can neither assess the effectiveness nor satisfy any concerns that the "war" is being conducted in accordance with our values.
That's right. Rummy now has his own secret army, reporting directly to him.
Noah Schactman at DefenseTech.org has also been looking at the emerging news on the QDR: QDR: China Tops Iraq, Osama? 01/24/06.
“The United States' experience in the Cold War still profoundly influences the way that the Department of Defenseis organized and executes its mission,” the QDR notes. “But, the Cold War was a struggle between nation-states, requiring state-based responses to most political problems and kinetic responses to most military problems. The Department was optimized for conventional, large-scale warfighting against the regular, uniformed armed forces of hostile states… [Today] many of the United Slates' principal adversaries are informal networks that are less vulnerable to Cold War-Style approaches... Defeating unconventional enemies requires unconventional approaches.”
But it does not require, apparently, a wholesale change of direction. 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.
No comments:
Post a Comment