After the November 1996 election, the United States began a major review of national defense strategy. Much of the current debate revolves around the questions: How many and which major regional conflicts (MRCs) should the United States be prepared to fight, and how many forces are needed to get the job done? These are the wrong questions--or, rather, only part of the question. The right one is larger: How can the Department of Defense (DoD) best build a defense posture for pursuing U.S. strategic objectives in this era of flux and opportunity?ö

The answer, we believe, involves planning and building a U.S. force posture to meet three tests. The "posture," which involves not just the forces but also patterns of deployment, readiness, and operations, should be able to (1) prevail in highly diverse war-fighting contingencies, large and small, sudden and not so sudden (slowly developing); (2) shape the future international security environment; and (3) adapt to changes in strategic conditions. This chapter describes a framework for defense planning that emphasizes and unifies these tests.[1] It provides a new prism through which to view and assess alternative defense postures. We intend our proposals to be practical to senior leadership; yet, they are radical in urging basic changes in the way the DoD does business.

The central precepts of our approach are as follows:

• DoD's toughest challenge is to confront geopolitical, technological, and budgetary uncertainty that is unprecedented in the post-World War II era. The challenge requires setting enduring strategic goals, which include but go beyond war-fighting goals, and assuring that the evolving defense posture always points toward those goals.

• A key element here is that the very nature of warfare is changing, in ways not yet fully understood. This means that DoD has the difficult task of deciding how and at what pace to transform and recapitalize U.S. forces to provide contingency capabilities for a new era of warfare and adversaries who learned from Desert Storm.

• Although preparing for possible contingencies is DoD's core concern, the United States--because of its international and technological strength--can also shape the future environment to some degree, not just react to it. To do so means integrating DoD force planning with U.S. foreign policy more broadly than comes naturally within the threat-based planning framework. As part of this, we see the need to strengthen our overseas presence and coalitions because the perimeter of U.S. interests is growing, not shrinking.

• Finally, the defense posture must be not only superior but strategically adaptive because the international and military environment will continue to change, as may national priorities.

In this chapter, we review traditional "threat-based planning" and its shortcomings. We then describe our alternative framework and identify broad force-posture options that should be assessed within it. Finally, we summarize preliminary analytical results.

THREAT-BASED PLANNING AND ITS SHORTCOMINGS

Background

Since the early 1960s, the DoD has assessed the defense program in terms of how many wars could be fought concurrently with the envisioned forces. It has had defense programs geared to 2-1/2 wars (1960s), 1-1/2 wars (1970s), multifront global war with the Soviet Union (1980s), and, lately, two MRCs.

Under each of these, the DoD has used "point threat scenarios" as test cases for Service programs and overall force structure. Figure 4.1 illustrates what such a scenario might look like today, using notional numbers.[2] It assumes that Iraq invades Kuwait, after which North Korea invades South Korea (the reverse might be assumed instead). Not only are the adversaries specified, but so also are many scenario details--even the chronology. This scenario may be one good test case, but it is clearly inadequate unless it is a bounding case or truly representative of all likely contingencies. Today's MRC scenarios are neither. They suppress uncertainty rather than force us to face up to it, and they do not satisfactorily measure the adequacy of our force posture.

Figure 4.1--Schematic of a Threat-Based Planning Scenario

In 1993, Secretary of Defense Les Aspin considered alternatives to these scenarios, including suggestions from GEN Colin Powell to focus more on generic war-fighting needs. But Aspin chose to stick with the threat-based approach because he judged it necessary in convincing Congress to support an adequate defense program--and because Iraq and North Korea were convenient and credible villains, whom we have no hesitation to label as such. Aspin expected inside-the-Pentagon planning to go well beyond the point scenarios. His Bottom-Up Review made clear the limited purposes intended for the test cases.

In practice, however, DoD remains "hooked" on the simple formula of optimizing for the official scenarios (e.g., in building forces that get to the region just in time to prevail in those scenarios). The threat-based approach is seductive. It provides a single, simple yardstick against which to measure the adequacy of U.S. forces. It is therefore easy to explain and thus to gain public support for defense, especially when the threats are real and vivid. It also allows the DoD to coordinate planning across Services, demanding that all of them build forces to satisfy needs of the planning cases.[3] In sum, the threat-based approach makes it easier to get everyone, from the Services to the Congress, to march to the same drummer--even if the drumbeat is rather arbitrary or too limiting.

Problems of Framework

Whatever its attractions, the point-scenario threat-based approach is wrong for our era. This is not a mere defect in the esoterica of defense planning. The problems are real and serious:

• Inappropriate Peacetime Posture. Selected U.S. force elements (units) are being run ragged in operations having essentially nothing to do with the planning scenarios that have determined the "posture" (i.e., not only the active and reserve force structures, but also deployments, readiness levels, and priorities). As a result, we have witnessed serious operational stresses, confusion in the ranks about mission, hasty improvisation, and occasional sub-par performance--despite having the best military technology and personnel $260 billion per year can buy.

• Achilles' Heels. Even if war actually occurred in the Persian Gulf, Korea, or both, our adversaries would likely try to exploit Achilles' heels that do not even show up in the standard planning scenarios. Potential adversaries already know better than to confront our forces as in Desert Storm. We are more vulnerable to military failure than is generally realized.

• Failure to Assess Adaptivity. Too often, DoD studies of force and weapon options focus on optimizing for the point planning scenarios and a baseline of numerous detailed assumptions. This is quite pernicious, since the results are then strongly biased by the semiarbitrary assumptions, which are often the result of compromise in committee.

• Political Fragility. The defense budget would be quite vulnerable politically if the Iraqi or, more likely, the North Korean threat were suddenly to vanish. In such a case, would we immediately cash in half our force posture as many would surely suggest? Certainly not, and for good reasons. But then why not make those good reasons the basis for our defense program in the first place?

• Questionable Suitability for the Future Strategic Environment. Will the forces we are developing, measured against today's two threat scenarios, be able to deal effectively with new adversaries, allies, regional alignments, technologies, and missions? Quite possibly not, and changing the posture quickly will be impossible without years of preparation.

Planning Under Uncertainty

How One Plans Under Great Uncertainty. Whether in business, sports, or war, the school solution for dealing with uncertainty is to embrace planning for adaptiveness. This is intuitive to modern U.S. chief executive officers, football coaches, and field lieutenants; it is DoD that is peculiar in having focused on point cases. This said, we still have to know what our military forces might need to do. A call for unbounded adaptiveness would amount to calling for a blank check. This drives us back to where all good planning should begin, with objectives.

National Objectives for Planning Future Forces. Drawing on recent statements by Secretary William Perry and General John Shalikashvili, we can encapsulate key ideas in the useful mantra "promote, prevent, defeat," which suggests three national security objectives: creating conditions to avoid conflict, deterring and otherwise preventing aggression when it is threatened, and defeating it when it occurs. For thinking more specifically about defense programs and postures, we suggest three related and supportive investment goals to ensure that, despite current uncertainties, future postures will permit us to promote, prevent, and defeat:

• A force posture robustly sufficient at all times for a wide range of contingencies ("operational adaptiveness")

• A force posture that can influence favorably how the world evolves--to help "shape the environment," as an element of U.S. foreign policy

• The capacity to change our military posture over time as trends and events dictate ("strategic adaptiveness").

Figure 4.2--Testing Force Postures

• Iraq versus Kuwait and Saudi Arabia

• Iran closes the Strait of Hormuz

• Iran and Iraq versus Kuwait and Saudi Arabia

• Russia versus Ukraine

• Russia versus Poland

• Russia versus the Baltic states

• North Korea versus South Korea

• North Korea and China versus South Korea

• China versus unified Korea

• China versus Taiwan

• China versus Vietnam

• A "next Bosnia" in the Balkans

• China seeks to control East Asian ocean regions

• Civil war in Cuba

• Civil wars in Algeria, Mexico, etc.

Figure 4.3--Moving from Point Assumptions to Scenario-Space Testing

The second step is to recognize that each political-military scenario (e.g., Iraq invades Kuwait and Saudi Arabia) has innumerable variations, differing in warning time, allies, military strategy, force levels, force effectiveness, weather, terrain, and even the algorithms assumed in war games used to assess capabilities. Thus, for each political-military contingency, there is an entire scenario space of operational circumstances. Exploring this scenario space would be of interest only to "modeling wonks" except that uncertainties about operational circumstances (e.g., warning time or the fighting effectiveness of defending allies) are very large and have profound effects on the military capabilities needed to prevail. Indeed, it is, if anything, more fruitful to examine a large scenario space for one or two threats than to examine a long list of threats with fixed assumptions about the operational circumstances of each.

Fortunately, with modern processing power, thoughtful design, and appropriate models, we can now conduct such scenario-space exploration quickly. Figure 4.4 illustrates some findings from such analysis. It shows one slice through the database of simulated outcomes, one that shows effects of varying the time of deployment relative to D-Day (x axis), the nominal effectiveness of tactical-aircraft sorties (y axis), and the suppression of tactical aircraft sorties (e.g., by chemical attack or dense air defenses) (z axis, into the paper), while holding many other variables constant. Figure 4.4, then, shows only 240 of some 100,000 outcomes of a simulated war with Iraq over Kuwait and Saudi Arabia, where white is a good outcome and black a bad one. It is assumed in these cases that Saudi ports and airfields are initially threatened (e.g., by ballistic missiles or irregular infantry with shoulder-fired missiles) and that the Strait of Hormuz has been mined. In these cases, unless the United States commences the deployment of forces roughly a week or so before the war begins, it has to defer deployment of main forces and instead concentrate early activities on seizing and securing ports and clearing mines. This would give the advancing Iraqi forces nearly a week of additional time before the United States could fully engage them; the results turn out "black" (i.e., bad). Chapter Six suggests a number of force-improvement measures to mitigate these problems, but our point here is methodological.

Figure 4.4--An Illustrative Contingency Analysis for the Persian Gulf (shading of cells measures quality of outcome: dark is bad)

Environment Shaping. Environment shaping entails using U.S. military forces to help create international security conditions such that it will be unnecessary to fight to protect our interests. Here, we are making more explicit and methodical the familiar notion--reflected in Secretary Perry's recent statements--that U.S. force posture is, or at least ought to be, related to U.S. foreign-policy goals (see Perry, 1996).

One important goal is promoting stability (e.g., by strengthening and enlarging alliances and by building new cooperative relationships). Another goal is to prevent instability by reducing incentives for interstate competition and by deterring potential rogue countries from contemplating aggression. A related goal is discouraging regional states from attempting to compete militarily with the United States (e.g., by convincing them that the United States could trump any such effort).

Analyzing systematically a given defense program's contributions to environment shaping begins by being reasonably precise in identifying environment-shaping objectives and the capabilities and activities that might contribute to them. To test alternative programs, we use a version of multiattribute utility analysis, akin to methods used in business planning.

Our analysis so far has centered on future U.S. overseas military presence and the contributions of our closest allies. The result has been to demonstrate the potential leverage of low-cost increases in overseas military infrastructure, prepositioning, and especially foreign-military interactions (FMI) and security assistance, such as training, exercises, and education. Such activities are regularly underfunded in all three of our key theaters (East Central Europe, the Greater Middle East, and East Asia). Yet funding these measures requires diversion of budget dollars, and the tradeoffs are sometimes painful or politically unpopular.

Admittedly, these methods involve subjective judgments. But any effort to bring analytical rigor to consideration of the international environment must necessarily do so, and in-depth research and analysis can increase the quality of such judgments. Such partially subjective methods are far better than excluding crucial "soft" issues from force planning or than treating them but relying on impressions and loose conjectures about cause and effect. At a minimum, our approach allows decisionmakers and their staffs to question and change assumptions readily, observing--during the course of a meeting--how this affects conclusions about cost and effectiveness. As illustrated notionally in Figure 4.5, which reflects qualitatively the results of a recent study, decisionmakers may reach some of the same conclusions about priorities even when they approach the subjective-judgment problem from different perspectives. People with different perspectives make judgments about the value of various increments of capability or activity for improving the environment-shaping objective. The model then combines many such inputs and computes the relative cost-effectiveness. Figure 4.5 reflects notionally the conclusion mentioned above, that FMI and security assistance have the highest leverage, even if one can argue about how much value they have. Actual results vary with theater, the baseline assumed (e.g., how many forces are already forward deployed), and the individuals consulted. Consensus is not always possible, of course, even on rank ordering.

Figure 4.5--Notional Cost Effectiveness Conclusions About Contributions to Environment Shaping

Strategic Adaptiveness. Even with skillful U.S. efforts to shape the environment, there is sufficient flux and uncertainty in international politics and in technology that we cannot count on today's favorable strategic conditions to endure. DoD has seldom treated strategic adaptiveness as an explicit issue in assessing the defense program. It now seems critical to do so, because we are entering an era in which perceived military needs and military operations could shift drastically--perhaps repeatedly and in different directions--over the course of the next 20 to 25 years.

To evaluate strategic adaptiveness, we use the same basic methodology as for environment shaping. We can identify many of the developments that might require adaptations, for example

• Branches
  
  --Korean unification
  --Chinese military buildup and threatening behavior
  --NATO expansion
  --Defense budget
  --Proliferation of missiles, weapons of mass destruction (WMD), inexpensive air defenses, advanced mines, etc.

• Shocks
  
  --Japan "goes independent"
  --New Arab-Israeli war
  --Hong Kong situation explodes, spreads
  --Russia moves against Baltic states, Ukraine, or Poland
  --"Surprise" cuts in defense budges, disrupting program
  --Revolution in Saudi Arabia
  --Actual use of WMD against the United States, its forces, or allies.

Figure 4.6--A Logic for Strategic Planning Under Uncertainty

Integration Using Portfolio Methods

Our methods create a more complete set of tests for assessing alternative force postures: war-fighting capabilities, environment shaping, and strategic adaptiveness. But the challenge of integrating, or balancing, these three considerations remains. Integration is what our top civilian and military leaders attempt earnestly to do. But it is not easy, and the leadership needs a new concept and method for unifying the strands.

We believe that an investment portfolio is the right metaphor. Like individuals and firms, national defense must balance multiple goals, stretching from the present day to the distant future, with numerous risk-benefit considerations in mind (Table 4.1). Also, national defense, like the financial world, has a variety of instruments for achieving these objectives (Table 4.2). The challenge is to assemble a portfolio of defense assets that best achieve our national goals, both today and tomorrow. Just as a financial investor normally wants many different types of stocks, bonds, and other investments as a function of its financial purposes, so also will DoD want a diverse portfolio of military assets and activities, as a function of its strategic purposes. The question is how to determine the composition of the portfolio.

Financial-World Concerns	Defense-Planning Concerns
Long-term capital gains	Restructured and recapitalized forces for the middle to long term
Uncertainty about when to plan to cash in gains (end of expansion cycle, retirement age, etc.)	Uncertainty about when new forces will be needed
Short-term liquidity	Near-term readiness for contingencies and other military operations
Risk management on all time scales give uncertainties about market, economy, and government regulations	Risk management on all time scales given uncertainties about future threats, budgets, national strategies, and political constraints by Congress or foreign states

Table 4.2

Parallels Between Financial- and Defense-Planning Instruments

Financial-World Instruments	Defense-Planning Instruments
Diversification	Broadening missions
Mergers and acquisition	Forming coalitions
Divestitures	"Letting go" of industrial base for obsolete capabilities
Special-opportunity investments	Addressing Achilles' heel problems
Hedging (R&D, stock options)	Hedging (e.g., R&D, prototype units)
Regular rebalancing of portfolio	Regular rebalancing of emphasis across contingency capabilities, environment shaping, and strategic adaptiveness

A business manager must revisit the portfolio continually to assess what shifts among investment instruments are indicated in light of changes in goals or the external environment. Similarly, if near-term threats seem worrisome, the secretary of defense may want to emphasize contingency capability heavily, with environment shaping coming second and strategic adaptiveness little more than a reminder not to be caught off guard if strategic conditions change.
By contrast, if the greater dangers seem to be in the middle or long term, the secretary would give relatively more weight to environment shaping and strategic adaptiveness.

The strategic portfolio framework encourages decisionmakers to assemble options differently than in the past. Although secretaries of defense have long been concerned about adaptiveness and about tradeoffs between the short and long terms, their planning framework and the measures of effectiveness used in the Planning, Programming, and Budgeting System (PPBS) are inadequate. In our construct, the secretary would insist that every program review treat all three of the investment objectives--explicitly, in parallel, and with short-term versus long-term tradeoffs treated analytically. In many ways, this intuitively obvious proposal is radical. It would change the terms of debate and give the defense program and its description a more long-term and strategic character.

Arguably, the portfolio approach would be suitable even in a seemingly stable and predictable world. In an era of uncertainty, even with our best efforts to manage the environment, it is the key to ensuring that our plans and our forces can be changed gracefully if need be.

CONCEIVING ALTERNATIVE FORCE POSTURES

This three-part adaptive framework, integrated by portfolio management, will not by itself generate alternative force postures. It will only test the options the policymaker or planner wishes to test. What should those alternatives be? Most of the current debate revolves around the two-MRC assumption, readiness, and force size as measured by numbers of divisions, carrier battle groups, and wings. But we believe the most important question facing the DoD involves modernization strategy, in the broadest sense. We see at least three philosophically different force-posture alternatives (or investment strategies) worthy of evaluation:

• Option 1. Conservatism, Near-Term Emphasis, and Expected Evolution. This alternative would combine caution about technology's promises with emphasis on continuity in U.S. international engagement. By and large, it would feature a posture with only marginal changes in force structure, end strength, "capital-to-labor" ratio, and overseas presence and with little modernization beyond that needed to replace aged weapon systems and platforms. It would preserve the present balance among ground, air, and naval contributions to joint operations. It would reflect a belief that today's international security environment is relatively risky, with the longer-term future to be heavily discounted. This alternative, then, would stress near-term readiness and deemphasize long-term investment. Such investment would occur and be sustained only if budget levels were high, probably higher than today's. In that case, the posture would evolve over time.

• Option 2. Embracing the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA). Opposite this might be an alternative unreservedly embracing what some call the RMA. It would transcend current force configurations and increase reliance on long-range precision weapons and information dominance for waging war without deploying large traditional forces into war zones where they would be highly vulnerable to missile attack by both conventional and mass-destruction weapons. It would feature smaller, leaner, and dispersed maneuver forces and fires, rather than large armored formations. The approach would stem from the belief that the future of warfare is relatively clear and the need to prepare for it great. It would treat the current security environment as a respite from serious threats and a window in which to invest toward what could be a more dangerous future. It would subordinate structure, readiness, and overseas presence to R&D and modernization.

• Option 3. Tilting to the Future, Cautiously. A third alternative would be a compromise--a "tilt toward the future." The United States would set a high priority on beginning the transition to a force structure with some of the same elements envisioned under the RMA option--in particular, more emphasis on light units capable of rapid deployment, dispersed operations, and exploitation of long-range fires from both air forces and ground or sea platforms. The priority would be on using them to address the Achilles' heel related to short-warning attacks and opposed entry. The pace of transition would be "deliberate." Individual system choices would be adjusted over time, depending on threat development and the success of newly fielded units. This alternative would maintain high levels of overseas presence for the sake of environment shaping, although it would use somewhat different forces and reduce the number of people per unit. It would trade end strength for R&D, innovation, and recapitalization, although less radically than Option 2.

The choices highlighted by these options should be central to the upcoming strategy review. Therefore, the options are good ones, although not necessarily the only ones, to test in the three-part framework we have constructed.[8]

ASSESSING THE OPTIONS

Depicting a framework is one thing; applying it with analytical underpinnings is another. We have begun but not completed that. But we can describe broadly what we envisage, starting with a notional summary assessment of alternative force postures that would be shown after a full-scale strategy review. Figure 4.7 shows this as a familiar "stoplight scorecard" in which shades of gray correspond to war outcomes ranging from bad (black) to good (white).

Figure 4.7--Notional Scorecard Assessment of Force-Posture Alternatives

This figure may seem complex at first, but it is actually nothing more than a distilled result of applying the strategic portfolio framework notionally (i.e., the assessments shown are based on preliminary analysis).

• Each cell shows the assessment of a given force posture (row) for a given test (column).

• Along rows, we have alternative force postures, which fall into three groups representing the three different portfolio philosophies mentioned above. For each, we have versions for budget levels of $260 billion, $230 billion, and $200 billion.

• The columns relate to the objectives discussed earlier (war-fighting capability, environment shaping, and strategic adaptiveness). There are groups of columns for Europe, the Greater Middle East, and East Asia; within each of these there are three "cases" (A, B, and C), which test the force posture in increasingly demanding ways. The "A cases" are relatively favorable, akin to usual planning scenarios. The "B cases" involve short warning times and just-in-time rapid deployment with opposition, and the "C cases" involve having to fight our way back into a theater and recover ground. These cases are composites of the many tens of thousands of cases examined in the scenario-space analysis. There is a column summarizing capabilities for various combinations of two simultaneous MRCs. The last two columns show how well the given force posture would score in shaping the environment and in strategic adaptiveness.

The idea, of course, is to test a given force-posture alternative in many ways and to provide a unified visual display of all the major factors policymakers need to integrate. Whether such a depiction is substantive or merely creative art designed to support preconceptions depends on the depth of the analysis that decides the shade of each cell, using the methods described above. Providing that depth is the thrust of our current work.

By "adding up the colors," one can turn the stoplight chart into a graph of the overall quality of the posture versus the budget level. Figure 4.8 shows a notional result with one particular portfolio weighting of war-fighting capabilities, environment shaping, and strategic adaptiveness. By contrast with Figure 4.7, it shows a band of values (also notional) for each option, the band representing uncertainty about the effectiveness of high-technology systems and their suitability for future wars. The hypothesis suggested by Figure 4.7's notional numbers is that Option 1 (conservative evolution) may look reasonably strong for high budget levels but quite bad for lower levels. If one is confident about the "RMA options," then Option 2 looks good generally, and dramatically so for lower budget levels. Option 3, the tilt-to-the-future case, not surprisingly, is in the middle.

Figure 4.8--Capabilities Versus Budget Levels (Notional)

Figure 4.8 is not entirely notional. After all, a recapitalized force exploiting modern technology (e.g., precision strike, information systems, and mobility) would presumably use fewer people and be more resilient to budget changes than the current force, which evolved during the era of large-scale sustained armored conflict, small numbers of precision-guided weapons, and highly imperfect knowledge of the battlefield. Also, our analysis indicates that military capabili-ties will drop rapidly with further decreases in the budget unless there is a substantial reengineering and reduction of infrastructure. In any case, debating the kinds of ideas displayed here would be useful. Our point is not that we know the answer, but rather that decisionmakers should be looking for the kinds of insights we offer notionally here.

Observations

As discussed in Chapter Six, there is every reason to believe that U.S. forces will outclass those of regional adversaries for the next 10 to 15 years. Such adversaries could prove very troublesome in contingen-
cies by virtue of their exploiting U.S. Achilles' heels and adopting so-called asymmetric strategies that play more to their strengths than to U.S. strengths. However, there are numerous measures that the United States can take in posturing its forces that would reduce vulnerabilities, many of them associated with short-warning attacks. The most fundamental difficulty for the next 10 to 15 years, we believe, relates to dealing with WMD. With this exception, contingency capabilities should be adequate. The more challenging decisions involve investment and restructuring.

The Gordian Knot: Thinning, Not Cutting, Force Structure

A core problem facing the DoD is the apparent resistance to reducing active force structure. The current structure is already underfunded, the notorious acquisition holiday has already lasted too long, and there is arguably a need to begin a fundamental, perhaps revolutionary, recapitalization. The real questions are how much and how fast. This said, we must expect that DoD's funds will remain severely limited and that even heroic efforts to reduce infrastructure and acquisition overhead will have less payoff than optimists expect, except perhaps over the long term. This implies to us that force structure must be a significant bill-payer for what is needed. Our analysis indicates, however, that this need not be nearly so troubling as it often is. Given the enormous improvements in command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (C⁴/ISR); mobility; and lethality of systems, and given the modest nature of current regional threats, it should be possible to reengineer forces so that smaller units take on the functions that larger units (e.g., brigades taking on division functions) previously accomplished. Further, some functions (e.g., running ships) should be possible with fewer people. All of this would be normal reengineering in an industrial setting.

It follows that the terms of debate should be focused not on reducing major formations (e.g., reducing from 10 to 6 active Army divisions, or from 11 to 6 carrier battle groups), but rather on reducing end strength, changing what constitutes our major formations, and altering the active-reserve mix. It may well be that we should have 10 army divisions, but with one-third fewer people and more emphasis on light forces and long-range fires; that the "capital ships" of the future should include Aegis cruisers and arsenal ships rather than only carriers; or that active Air Force wings should be fewer or smaller than in the recent past.[9] None of these measures would constitute disengagement or disarmament, which would have harmful effects on the security environment. If the United States truly improves its posture by reengineering, we should have enough influence to convince our adversaries and allies of that, even though they might at first equate reduced numbers with disengagement.

THE NEED FOR UNUSUALLY STRONG LEADERSHIP

As we have indicated, we believe that the biggest challenges are (1) breaking with the point-scenario, threat-based planning of the past; (2) shifting the focus of the program so as to contribute more to the "strategic" objectives of environment shaping and strategic adaptiveness; and (3) beginning to transform and recapitalize the force posture for the next--and likely very different--era of warfare, which should be distinguished from merely modernizing by replacing old equipment. Such changes are unlikely to happen easily.

It is possible, of course, that the DoD is a unique organization immune to the maladies that affect other nations' armies, corporations, and government agencies. Perhaps the military Services will push ahead with all deliberate speed in making the fundamental planning and doctrinal changes that are needed. These changes are plausible if the defense budget is raised enough so that there are "new" funds. Or perhaps the Services will even sacrifice current force structure to free the funds necessary for recapitalization. However, in our view, such a rosy scenario is at best a theoretical possibility. Far more likely is that, without firm guidance to the contrary, the Services will hold onto force structure tenaciously. When budget crunches occur, one after another, important experiments will be routinely deferred or forgone, as will some next-generation weapon systems. The future will be lost through "salami slicing."

To put things a bit differently, we are on the one hand greatly encouraged by the vigor and innovation being shown in all of the Services. All the building blocks for transformation and recapitalization are visible, as the result of enlightened R&D and the most talented armed forces that the world has ever seen. However, sweeping change is painful and disruptive; it does not occur without strong top-level leadership insisting upon it. In DoD, it will require exceptional and sustained leadership by the Secretary of Defense and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

The alternative may be to find ourselves in 20 years with a run-down version of a military force structure suited to the 1980s rather than a first-rate, versatile, and adaptive military force designed for the next century. If we build the latter, we stand a better chance of staying in front of would-be adversaries and wanna-be hegemons, and we can guide international and technological change. In such a case, the world might go decades without the kinds of major wars that so darkened the history of the 20th century.

REFERENCES

Davis, Paul, David Gompert, and Richard Kugler, Adaptiveness in National Defense: The Basis of a New Framework, Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND, IP-155, 1996.

Perry, William J., Annual Report to the President and the Congress, Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, March 1996.

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[1] This is a somewhat shortened and slightly modified version of a RAND issue paper, Adaptiveness in National Defense: the Basis of a New Framework, published in August 1996. It was generated in a cross-cutting project for the Office of the Secretary of Defense, Joint Staff, and Defense Agencies.

[2] The DoD has sometimes provided additional scenarios reflecting, e.g., lesser regional conflicts. It has always exhorted the Services to consider a range of cases in developing programs. In practice, however, attention has centered on a "big scenario" analogous to Figure 4.1. This is of concern to the DoD, which is considering changes.

[3] This said, the Navy and Marines have always sized forces for presence and crisis-response, not just MRCs.

[4] From time to time over the years, the DoD has tried to include sensitive scenarios or to include purely generic scenarios raising similar challenges. Unfortunately, these laudable efforts have sometimes been criticized with accusations that DoD was trying to create threats.

[5] The measure of effectiveness used can have a strong impact on conclusions. For example, ability to conduct counteroffensives would highlight the value of Army units, while stopping an attack might be most easily accomplished with more air forces or allied ground-combat capability.

[6] For a more detailed application and discussion of this approach, see Chapter Six.

[7] The American industrial base is, of course, an enormously valuable hedge. In only a very few instances, however, does the DoD need to take special protective measures.

[8] Many possible "strategies" are currently being discussed. These include reducing forward presence and relying upon power projection from the United States; relying more heavily on allies; trimming forces to meet a reduced, 1-1/2-war criterion; and various types of deliberate disengagement. National missile defense plays a prominent role in some of the strategies.

[9] The Air Force has already reduced the size of its fighter squadrons.

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