EVENTS

Date:	Monday, April 11, 2005
Time:	9:15 AM -- 3:00 PM
Location:	Wohlstetter Conference Center, Twelfth Floor, AEI 1150 Seventeenth Street, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036

April 2005

The Future of the United States Army

Few institutions of American power have borne greater burdens or faced greater challenges in the post-September 11 world than the United States Army. While the Pentagon leadership has long called for a smaller, lighter Army, the realities of Iraq, Afghanistan, and the war on terrorism have created an unprecedented crisis in America’s land forces, which are increasingly undermanned and overstretched. Can the U.S. Army be saved before it reaches its breaking point? What is the strategic purpose of American land forces, and how should they be structured for the missions they face? How large should the Army be, and what kind of procurement, equipping, and training do its soldiers need in order to defend against present and future challenges to American national security? These and other questions were considered at an April 11 AEI conference.

Panel I: Strategies and Missions

Eliot A. Cohen
Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies

The U.S. Army is in the midst of one of its periodic watershed moments, in some sense analogous to the multiple transitions it underwent during the twentieth century from a constabulary army to a framework army to a mass army to an all-volunteer force. During each of these transitions, the army made judgments as an institution about the future that frequently turned out to be inaccurate. For instance, in the wake of Vietnam, the army deemphasized its capability to wage unconventional warfare--precisely the kind of combat it now confronts in Iraq. In this regard, however, the army is no more flawed than any other human institution; simply put, the future is and always has been profoundly unpredictable.

Today, for instance, it is plausible to imagine a future in which the U.S. Army has only limited engagements after Iraq. However, it is equally plausible to imagine a future in which the U.S. Army must undertake large expeditionary commitments in various parts of the planet. Given this unpredictable international environment, what might the army learn from its past watershed moments in planning for the future?

First, the army should avoid withdrawing from the strategic sphere into the tactical sphere. In essence, this is what Maj. Gen. Emory Upton advocated for the army after the Civil War and what the Army in fact did after Vietnam.

Second, the army cannot assume that future warfare will be entirely conventional or entirely unconventional. It may involve intensive campaigns like Desert Storm, and it may also involve major counterinsurgencies such as in Iraq now. Above all else, the army must be willing to engage in serious, dispassionate, and unflinching scrutiny of its present experience in Iraq--successes, failures, and the widely varied performance of different units.

Third, the army must recognize the importance of versatility in its personnel, in particular its senior officer corps, and the role of the institutions that think about and educate the army. Rumors that the Army War College will be closed and moved to Fort Leavenworth suggest that the army’s leadership does not grasp the importance of its educational institutions. The sharp decline of officers with advanced civilian education and the decreasing quality of official army narrative and history are further evidence of this trend.

Finally, the army must maintain its links to American society. A foolish pursuit of efficiency has pushed the army to consolidate into a few mega-bases disproportionately centered in the southern United States; this means there will be less of an army footprint around the country. Similarly, the U.S. Army failed to seize the opportunity after the September 11 attacks to get Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) detachments open at elite universities. There should be a large number of young Americans who have had the experience of serving in the military and then going on to careers in other fields.

General John M. Keane
U.S. Army (Ret.)

In the post-Cold War but pre-9/11 era, the U.S. military was moving toward a new kind of war that leveraged advances in information technology and precision weapons. The September 11 attacks changed military transformation by revealing that America’s adversaries are also capable of thoughtful innovations of their own. The radical Islamists have a grand strategy to transform the entire Muslim world and overthrow the global status quo; they want to feed on local grievances and integrate them into their broader ideological conflict.

This war presents an opportunity to make rapid transformational change within the army. The truth is, change comes more rapidly during war than during peace. When World War I broke out, the United States had a frontier army, without a singular division construct. Twenty months later, sixty-four divisions had been formed and trained, and forty-eight were put into France. World War II and Vietnam also brought tremendous change to the army.

The U.S. Army’s foremost priority today must be to adapt to the threat of irregular warfare, which strikes at the heart of American military weakness. Since 1975, the U.S. military has not organized for irregular war and lacks the necessary doctrine and training. To address this, the army must invest more in its intellectual capital, involving the academic community and others to help better understand the Muslim world and radical Islam. The army must also place greater emphasis on urban warfare, both conventional and unconventional; there is a greater degree of sophistication on the tactical level than on the strategic level in this arena.

The size of the army should be expanded as needed. In particular, there is a pressing need for more Special Operations forces, military police, civil affairs units, and linguists. It is also necessary to revamp the Cold War intelligence system to be better suited for irregular warfare. Specifically, more analysts should be put on the tactical and operational levels--simply because that is where most of the information is. The army also needs a new paradigm for personnel.

Even as the army transforms for irregular warfare, it must also retain credible deterrence against traditional challenges in North Korea, Iran, China, and other contingencies. The army also has valuable contributions to make to the defense of the homeland, missile defense, force protection, and consequence management.

Finally, the U.S. Army must sustain the all-volunteer force. The preeminence of the U.S. Army in the world today is directly related to the decision in the mid-1970s to transition to an all-volunteer force. It is an inspirational thing to see how people who want to be a part of this institution, who are motivated and attracted by its values, are transformed by their service. Nonetheless, the U.S. Army could be forced to move away from an all-volunteer force because sustaining it becomes too much to bear. If the U.S. government enunciates a grand strategy for dealing with the war against radical Islam, it can also come forward and ask the American people to sacrifice.

Colonel Robert Killebrew
U.S. Army (Ret.)

The U.S. military has become very good at campaign planning, with an excellent battle force, but it no longer understands how to link battles to strategic victory. There are four reasons for this: First, there is nobody left in the defense establishment who remembers the last war the United States truly won--World War II. Second, since the advent of containment during the Cold War, the United States has deliberately limited its conflicts and the resources it puts towards them. Third, the Defense Department, since the day it was founded, has had an infatuation with technologies that promised to minimize the human costs of war. Lastly, there was incomplete military reform in the 1980s, which established a vocabulary about centers of gravity, decisive points, exit strategies--but accomplished little beyond the level of campaign planning.

This focus has put the U.S. Army at a disadvantage since 1945, with land combat an unlimited liability that most defense thinkers have tried to avoid. To the extent defense planners tried to solve this problem, it was with technology. In addition, in the push for jointness in the U.S. military, the argument for land power came to be seen within the army as betrayal of that higher principle.

Irregular warfare is in the Army’s future through the foreseeable future. At the same time, great power competition has not gone away, nor have nuclear weapons; at some point in the future, the U.S. Army is going to face nuclear weapons on the battlefield, whether in conventional or irregular combat. This geopolitical environment creates two kinds of war that the army must be ready to fight. The first is the “you break it, you buy it” kind of war. When the U.S. Army enters a country to replace its government, the United States effectively owns that country for as long as it takes to fight and win a decisive war, install a friendly government, raise an army, do whatever social engineering is possible, and leave; these are long-term commitments. The other kind of war is a geographic raid: a rapid, in-and-out operation of the sort beloved by war gamers. The former is more likely to be the prevalent model, however, and Iraq is the wake-up call in this regard.

Lieutenant Colonel Ralph Peters
U.S. Army (Ret.)

In the technical services of the U.S. Navy and the U.S. Air Force, people support systems; in the U.S. Army and Marine Corps, however, systems support people. A paradox of the high-tech 21st century is that America’s security problems are fundamentally, intractably human problems--meaning that the army and marines are going to be gainfully employed for a long time to come.

The fundamental problem with the current American way of war is its constant attempt to narrow the definition of war; Operation Iraqi Freedom sought to take down a regime without breaking windows and consequently, the enemy was never persuaded of their defeat. At the same time, America’s enemies are ever expanding their definition of war; certainly for the Islamist terrorists there are virtually no limits on what is acceptable.
Consequently, the U.S. military needs to restore a sense of realism about warfare.

The range of army missions is likely to continue to expand, with future combat falling into three subcategories. The first, lowest level involves strategic raids. The second level--missing from U.S. doctrine--consists of punitive expeditions; were the U.S. military to have to go back to Somalia to deal with al Qaeda training camps, does it really want to try to build a Somali society? The third level is full-scale invasion, sometimes followed by occupation. It is imperative that policymakers tear themselves from the mentality that, if the United States breaks something, it must not only repair the windows, but repaint the house and provide a pension to its inhabitants.

The premier military challenge facing the U.S. Army is logistics, not weapons or personnel. The army needs to be much more agile and mobile. Rather than operating from fixed locations, the U.S. military should return to the mentality of the frontier cavalry, which was always on the move. The army must also reach a keener appreciation for the role of the media as a third combatant at which it cannot strike back. Lastly, the army needs to look beyond the Middle East, given the many potential opportunities, crises, and threats elsewhere in the world. The United States has a global army, and it must think like one.

Panel II: Force Size, Force Structure, and Force Posture

Michèle Flournoy
Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS)

In examining the force structure of the U.S. Army, there are three key variables to consider: the demand for soldiers, the supply of soldiers, and the current mismatch between these two quantities. Demand for well-trained and capable American soldiers is likely to remain high for the foreseeable future, and the U.S. Army must recognize that there are a multitude of plausible future scenarios in which a U.S. president will feel compelled to intervene to protect and advance U.S. interests. Not all wars are optional.

On the supply side of the equation, the central issue is whether the army’s reserve components should be treated as an operational reserve or as a strategic reserve. Beginning in the 1990s, the National Guard began to be used as an operational reserve covering rotations for long-duration stability operations, but they were never restructured for that purpose. With the demands of Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as the steady-state demands from homeland security missions inside the United States, both the Army Reserve and the National Guard have become fully a part of the rotation base. The question is, is this an appropriate use for the reserve component?

It is undeniable that the current force is under enormous strain. The active duty army is forecast to miss its April recruitment target--the continuation of a trend that began in February when the army missed its monthly goal for the first time since 2000. This year’s National Guard enlistment is 25 percent lower than expected.

The army has a number of options to address the mismatch between supply and demand for its troops. Option one is to stay the course and assume that demand is going to drop substantially in the near future. Option two is a radical rebalancing of the planned force, premised on the belief that runaway personnel costs within the military are creating a looming budgetary and manpower crisis. This would involve a specialty-by-specialty scrub of the army, particularly the reserve component, getting rid of as much of nonmilitary capability as possible and moving high demand capabilities from the Reserves into the active duty force. Option three is to combine a radical rebalancing of the force with an increase in its size by at least another seven brigades (30,000 men), keeping the reserve component as an operational reserve. This would reduce operational risk to an acceptable level, but it remains uncertain whether this larger force can be recruited and sustained. Regardless, the cost will be substantial--at least $10 billion for building the new structure and $40 billion for additional training and equipment, plus recurring personnel costs. Option four is rebalancing the force and increasing the size of the active army to a much greater degree and returning the reserve component to its traditional role as a strategic reserve. This would require even higher costs and greater recruiting challenges. 

None of these are attractive options, but defense planning frequently involves such hard choices. On balance, option three--radically rebalancing the army while increasing its size and managing the reserve component as an operational reserve--is likely the most practical.

Frederick W. Kagan
U.S. Military Academy at West Point

For all intents and purposes, the United States is not a “nation at war.” Defense spending has not been realigned since the September 11 attacks, and operations in Iraq and Afghanistan have been funded with supplemental appropriations, as if U.S. military commitments to these countries were temporary. A nation at war would prioritize the capabilities needed to win the conflict it is in over the development of systems that are designed to fight wars twenty years in the future. Instead, the Defense Department and the Bush administration have done everything in their power to protect transformation at the expense of current missions.

Whereas during the Cold War, the U.S. Army was meant as a shield behind which the nation could mobilize in the event of a Soviet attack on Western Europe, it is important to recognize that the active force is today called upon to fight and win the global war on terror. The army is one of the largest bureaucracies in the world, and bureaucracies are by their nature inefficient. During the 1990s, it was assumed that transformation could be funded by wrenching inefficiencies out of the Pentagon’s bureaucracy--“trimming the fat,” so to speak. Instead, by placing pressure on the defense establishment to function with maximum efficiency, transformation has actually made it more conservative and ineffective.

Historically, the army has tended to focus on war fighting to the exclusion of other missions, such as stabilization operations. Iraq is by no means the most challenging counterinsurgency mission that the army could be dispatched to fight; indeed, it should be expected that future missions could be harder. From the standpoint of the insurgency, it does not matter how many brigades the army has; what matters is how many soldiers it has. As long as the army is operating under its current manpower limits, it will not have sufficient resources, no matter how they are organized. Another 100,000 soldiers should be added to the active force, not just in combat forces. The institutional army should also be increased in size--in particular, the intellectual institutions of the army.

Expanding the army is going to be difficult and expensive, but dire predictions were made about the transition to the all-volunteer force in the 1970s as well. Ultimately, these institutional challenges can be overcome if U.S. leaders and the U.S. public recognize that the nation is at war and must act accordingly.

Major General David C. Ralston
U.S. Army, Director of Force Management, G-3

The U.S. Army faces a prolonged period of conflict with great uncertainty as to what the nature and the location of that conflict will be. As a result, it must become more flexible and rapidly deployable, and there are several initiatives that the army is undertaking to this end. The first is to redesign the army’s organization and redefine its culture. The army is also seeking to relieve the stress on the force by creating new modular units and altering the way in which force rotation is structured. The army is also investing in Future Combat Systems (FCS) and rebalancing between the active and reserve component forces.

Approximately 100,000 personnel are being reapportioned inside the army between 2004 and 2009, reducing field artillery by 34 percent, heavy engineers by 25 percent, and armor by 43 percent. In their place, the army is increasing the number of military police by 46 percent, civil affairs by 14 percent, and military intelligence, at least at the tactical level, by 200 percent.

It is absolutely imperative that the army continue to have access to the reserves and National Guard. The reserve forces are being used today considerably more than ever in the past, and they have fought magnificently. More than ever, the United States enjoys an absolutely seamless army between the National Guard, the reserves, and the active force--and this should be preserved.
 
Major General Robert Scales
U.S. Army (Ret.)

Many in the defense policy community would prefer to prepare for conventional conflict with a peer competitor such as China rather than confront the realities of the war the United States is actually in. In fact, the U.S. military and the U.S. Army specifically must be able to cover as much of the conflict spectrum as possible, because the enemy will exploit whatever piece of the spectrum our forces cannot dominate. This, in turn, means that the army cannot afford to be a homogenous force, but rather, must be made up of many different component parts, each of which will have a special place along the conflict spectrum. The future army should include an operational maneuver element that is equipped with FCS, and a phalanx force that is equipped with Abrams tanks. At the same time, greater attention must be paid to integrating army aviation and infantry into modularity.

The army must be able to reach and sustain itself at the farthest corners of what MIT strategist Barry Posen calls “the contested zone,” the most remote and inaccessible places in the world, where cell phones do not work and network-centric warfare has little or no impact. The army must also find new and better ways to exploit command of the commons. The U.S. military does a magnificent job of controlling the air, sea, and space, but does a terrible job at exploiting its control.

The army must also recognize that its mission is not to win a campaign or execute an effective operational maneuver, but rather, to win wars. The war on terror is a war for wills; the object is to control not just the information spectrum, but the hearts, minds, and the wills of the people. The army, in conjunction with the Marine Corps, must understand that the center of gravity in this effort is at the tactical not the operational or strategic level. Consequently, the army’s small units must be transformed, with particular attention on small unit tactics.

Keynote Speech

General Peter J. Schoomaker
Chief of Staff, U.S. Army

Rick Atkinson wrote a book, Army at Dawn, that describes the military operations in North Africa in 1942-1943. At that time, soldiers were arriving on the battlefield with no weapons; bazookas were being distributed to troops that had not been trained to use them; and tanks on the battlefield were so underpowered and outgunned by the enemy that they were literally sitting ducks. And this was two years after Pearl Harbor.

The history of how the United States has gone to war in the past is very interesting, especially as it provides a context for defense transformation and the broader challenges the U.S. Army faces today. As he looked at what was happening in North Africa, General George Marshall remarked, “Before the war, I had all the time in the world, but no money. And now I have all the money in the world and no time.” This element of time is a serious factor in attempting to change an institution like the U.S. Army.

It is also important to remember that the U.S. Army is a force provider. It organizes, trains, and equips according to requirements articulated by the commanders in the field and approved in the Pentagon. There is a certain amount of latency in this process, and it also requires a great deal of anticipation, vision, and projection into things that are frankly unknowable.

For the army, transformation is a journey that involves not only the material dimension of warfare, but doctrine, organization, training, leadership, the structuring of installations, and much else. Successful defense transformation has often been born of failure. In the case of the Special Operations community, transformation in no small measure is the result of the failed hostage attempt in Iran a quarter century ago; almost every aspect of what exists today in Special Operations did not exist at the time of that Iran mission, and it took decades to build.

It is important to develop an army that is balanced across the entire spectrum of conflict, which is capable not only of dominating in traditional forms of warfare, but also in non-traditional missions, such as stability and support operations.

The United States has typically invested in land power by buying high and selling low--a flawed approach. Over the last fifteen years, 300,000 soldiers were cut from the active force. Now the task is to grow back 30,000 of them. That takes time and is expensive, but it is also necessary, because land power is crucial to the war in which our nation is engaged. There were elections in Iraq and Afghanistan because there were troops on the ground. It is going to be a long time before it is possible to influence people and control populations without putting soldiers on the ground.

The challenges the U.S. Army faces are winnable. In World War II, the U.S. population was less than 140 million, of whom almost nine percent were in uniform. Today, the requirement is for 0.4 of one percent of a population that is twice as large. It is inconceivable that the United States would be unable to do that.

Panel III: Doctrine, Training, and Equipping

General Barry McCaffrey
U.S. Army (Ret.), U.S. Military Academy at West Point

In order for the U.S. Army to conceive of the appropriate doctrine and capabilities, the broader defense and security policy community must first identify the threats against which it must defend, deter, mitigate, or defeat. At present, there is no consensus on the threat matrix. How should the U.S. military and the U.S. Army specifically set its priorities?

The first priority for the military and the army should be the deterrence, defense, mitigation or retaliation against weapons of mass destruction. The second priority is to preserve the high-intensity combat capability of the U.S. Army. Even if there is a low probability of a war with North Korea in the next thirty-six months, it is still critical that the army is able to carry out that mission. The third priority is the capability to carry out punitive raids, seize key political objectives, evacuate humans in peril, and wage counterinsurgency; this requirement also encapsulates peacekeeping missions. Finally, it is also necessary to build a new, larger National Guard that is capable of carrying out homeland security missions. This is a non-army mission. Rather, the United States needs to build a Gendarmerie Nationale, a federal marshal service capable of doing law enforcement, and a FBI modeled after the British MI-5.

Michael Vickers
Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments

The question is not whether U.S. Army transformation is happening, but rather, whether it is focused on solving the correct set of problems. The two flagship elements to army transformation are modularity--an organizational redesign of the army from thirty-three to forty-three or forty-eight active maneuver brigades, and equivalent growth in the Army National Guard--and Future Combat Systems--comprising some eighteen separate major systems of manned ground vehicles, unmanned ground vehicles, autonomous systems, unmanned aerial vehicles, and command and control communications and intelligence systems.

Army transformation has been animated by three goals: the quest for strategic speed, the perceived ability and desire to engage and destroy an enemy at a distance, and expanding the rotation base for protracted irregular warfare. All three of these “drivers” are problematic, however. Strategic speed is not a significant weakness for the army. If the first portion of Operation Iraqi Freedom had taken four days as opposed to nineteen days, the U.S. Army would still be at the 99th percentile in terms of its ability to remove a medium regime in conventional war. Strategic speed is also largely irrelevant in irregular warfare. Speed does kill, but it is operational speed; it is not how fast U.S. forces got to Iraq, but rather, how fast they moved once there.

Even more problematic is the Army’s desire to kill at a distance. If jointness is to be taken seriously, this should be an Air Force mission. Modularity is certainly a good thing, but there are size limits as well as strategic limits on the army’s ability to carry out protracted occupation; 20-percent increases in the size of the force do not address the problems posed by Iran or Pakistan. 

The FCS program is on schedule and on budget, with a great deal of promising technology, and it is absolutely correct to spin them off into the current force. However, it may make sense to delay spinning off the major platforms of FCS, particularly manned combat systems, where further advances in lethality, survivability, and mobility need to achieved.

To make army transformation more relevant, it should focus on three challenges: projecting ground power against a nuclear-armed adversary, urban warfare capabilities, and capabilities for protracted transnational and intrastate irregular warfare. In particular, it is risky to assume that missile defense or high-speed, shallow draft vessels are going to solve the problem of operational insertion against a nuclear-armed adversary for the army. Regarding irregular warfare, the United States is confronting both a globally distributed, transnational adversary and insurgents whose operations are largely confined to individual countries. To defeat the global adversary will require an expansion of both Special Forces groups and Special Missions units. These forces must also be realigned away from Latin America, Europe, and Africa toward Asia, the Middle East, and South Asia.

Some have argued for creating specialized stability operations units, but this is impractical because of rotation base requirements. Rather than having one or two units that specialize in stability operations, it is better to use general purpose forces. It would also be helpful to combine the various capabilities--FCS units, Stryker units, and light units--at a lower level in the force structure than currently planned. This is what the marines do, and it will help in creating hybrid forces between high-end combat and irregular warfare.

Brigadier General David Fastabend
U.S. Army, Futures Center, U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command

It is said that the U.S. Army has made bad decisions over time, and that is certainly true; the question is why. The nature of the army’s mission is that it is in a duel with a thinking, adaptive adversary; the future is thus not only unpredictable, it is counter-predictable. The choices the army makes drives adversaries to go in other directions. It is correct that the army moved away from irregular combat after Vietnam and instead concentrated on the threat posed by the Soviet Army--but imagine if the army had done otherwise and instead remade itself as the best counterinsurgency force on the planet. Rather than video of Osama bin Laden picking his way up the mountain trail with an AK-47 over his shoulder, he would be in a T-72 tank.

A decade ago, the army did not imagine that it would be in a global protracted conflict without mobilization; war was always viewed as a singularity, an episodic event. There have also been unanticipated opportunities, such as the willingness of the other services to apply combat power to the land problem.

In anticipating the future of warfare, it would be foolish to assume that it will be exactly like today. There is evidence that hyperkinetic threats will become more important, with weapons that can unleash a huge amount of kinetic energy on a target. Consequently, it would be unwise for the army to rely entirely on passive armor. Additionally, the army must consider the counter-access problem.

On doctrine, the U.S. Army is working quickly to reenergize counterinsurgency doctrine. Normally, the doctrine process takes four years; in ten months, an interim counterinsurgency manual has been generated. It takes time to internalize doctrine, however. Soldier training has also changed. When combat is episodic, it is very hard for an institution to resist the temptation to take a little risk in the way it trains soldiers. But now the average time between soldier graduation and the first time that he is in physical danger is forty-three days. Furthermore, the warrior ethos must be instilled throughout the Army, because everyone is exposed to danger; there is no front line, no rear line, no safe convoy. Leader development is not completely broken, but there is a lot to do. The Army War College is conducting its Agile Leader Study, examining at the nature of the threats today and in the future and determining whether the right competencies are receiving emphasis. There is a push to introduce greater attention to culture, media, and the interagency process to army education and training. Lastly, the army is making significant strides in materiel, with the Rapid Equipping Force and the development of counter-mortar activity, nonlethal capabilities, and UAVs.

Michael O’Hanlon
Brookings Institution

There are a range of contingencies that the U.S. Army must consider in planning for its future. Some of them may seem outlandish--but then, few would have predicted four years ago that the United States would be in a protracted war in Afghanistan. In much the same vein, the U.S. Army should plan for a Chinese invasion of Siberia, although the probability of this happening is extremely low; by contrast, the military should not plan for a Chinese invasion of the Korean peninsula. The U.S. Army should also plan for an invasion of North Korea--a scenario that would be exponentially more demanding than the current mission in Iraq. A scenario that is less demanding on ground forces, but still incredibly important, is a potential conflict in the Taiwan Strait. Taiwan could still involve considerations of American ground forces, for instance, if U.S. forces in Okinawa are threatened directly by the Chinese and the Japanese need help protecting them.

Another set of missions involves collapsed states. It is possible that large fractions of Indonesia could collapse and that Jakarta would ask the U.S. military to help in restoring order. Indonesia is six to eight times more populous than Iraq; even a fraction of that country being destabilized would demand a very large operation. There is no doubt that a larger country requires proportionately more American or coalition troops to stabilize.

Another mission might involve an Indo-Pakistani war over Kashmir and its ensuing internationalization. Another problem is collapsing Pakistan--a country of 150 million people with maybe twenty to fifty nuclear weapons and many important Islamic fundamentalist groups. A collapsed Pakistan is the national security equivalent of perhaps a direct assault on the United States--certainly it is worse in terms of direct implications for our security than even an attack on NATO partners.

An invasion of Iran on the model of Iraq is almost undoable, based on the size of the country, but it is possible to imagine pressuring that regime with military force, including airstrikes. Other contingencies for the U.S. military might include restoring order in Saudi Arabia following a coup or implementing an international trusteeship for Palestine. The last two scenarios are in Africa: a limited humanitarian mission in Darfur or a broader stabilization mission in a huge country like Congo.

Major Donald Vandergriff
U.S. Army and Georgetown University

The U.S. Army has proven itself time and again adept at training soldiers and officers, but training is far less vexing a challenge than education. While the army of 2005 needs adaptive leaders, education of its future leaders is often based on Industrial Age concepts of war. While the Army’s rhetoric indicates that it recognizes the need for cultural change, there is a noticeable gap between rhetoric and reality.

What is needed to address this gap is the parallel evolution of the army’s education system and army culture itself, in order to create leaders capable of making decisions based on the current threat. Changing the army culture will make the fighting force more effective, particularly in this age of asymmetric threats. The demands on army leaders are higher than ever across the board and at all levels of rank and seniority. The army has correctly recognized the need to further professionalize its officer corps, but changes in education and culture must be implemented more quickly. The ROTC program is based on the dated assumption that there is significant time to train leaders. This must be modified, and the program must become more academically rigorous to ensure that commissioned officers are as qualified and prepared as possible.

The army must also move away from the current “machine” model of officer promotion. This system emphasizes quantity of officers rather than quality in response to current and projected demands, as well as force structure changes. It may result in more officers, but the caliber of these leaders is not what it should be. Competence suffers and experience falls, which can have significant strategic, tactical, and operational impacts. In a time of protracted war, the army needs decisive and adaptive leaders. The current educational and cultural paradigms will not suffice, and pains must be taken to evolve both as soon as possible.

AEI research associate Vance Serchuk prepared this summary with AEI interns Lauren O’Leary and Elena Alberti.