EVENTS

Date:	Friday, June 10, 2005
Time:	9:30 AM -- 11:30 AM
Location:	Wohlstetter Conference Center, Twelfth Floor, AEI 1150 Seventeenth Street, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036

June 2005

The Military We Need: The Defense Requirements of the Bush Doctrine

As the Pentagon prepares its first post-9/11 Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR)—the critical strategy document that will shape the U.S. military for years to come—the Bush administration confronts difficult choices about the future of defense transformation. On June 10, distinguished defense panelists, AEI fellows Thomas Donnelly and Fred Kagan, and keynote speaker Ryan Henry, principal deputy under secretary of defense for policy, examined the following questions: What priorities should the QDR set for defense transformation, and how radically should it seek to change the American way of war? What ideas and insights should guide the QDR, and how can the broader policy community judge its success? How have the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan altered assumptions about the military we need, and how will they impact the QDR process?

Thomas Donnelly
AEI

The work presented today is intended to be a general appraisal of the QDR, a yardstick by which to measure the Pentagon’s final product. The QDR has the potential to help us connect our military means to our strategic ends.

President George W. Bush has articulated a bold national security strategy but, in doing so, has failed to delineate how he intends to achieve his strategic goals. By taking on the responsibility of transforming the political order in the Middle East and establishing liberal democracies in Iraq and Afghanistan, America must correspondingly reevaluate its military strategy--the means by which to achieve our ends.

The Bush administration’s National Security Strategy identifies two paths by which to preserve the liberal global order. First, we must transform the Middle East. Second, we must address how to shape the rise of China. In doing this, the administration must ask itself whether “regional” issues are, in fact, peripheral events, or if such events will dramatically impact the international community.

In order to realize our grand strategy, we must decide which regions demand our immediate attention. We must maintain the momentum of transformation in both Iraq and Afghanistan. We must evaluate how to address China’s growing global power.  Will we favor engagement or commitment? Unlike the Soviet Union during the Cold War, China, an economic powerhouse, offers to contribute to global economic growth. We must decide if China’s rise as a global power should be considered to be a regional or a global concern.

What missions will the Bush administration’s strategy require? First and foremost, the military must defend the American homeland. The U.S. government must be prepared to challenge enemies not only within America’s borders but also anywhere throughout the world. We can assume that our commitments to Iraq and Afghanistan will be “long hard slogs” requiring major troop commitment. With regard to China, forces must be stationed regionally so as to acquire the ability to strike and respond rapidly should the circumstances demand. The Bush administration should also be concerned by the acquisition of nuclear weapons, not only by North Korea and Iran, but also by non-state entities. An effective QDR will take all of these challenges into account by evaluating how the United States can realize its strategic objectives with its limited means when confronting these issues.

Michael Vickers
Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessment

In the upcoming QDR, the Department of Defense will--according to its public statements--correctly identify the challenges facing United States international security. First, the QDR will successfully identify as its main priority the defeat of Islamic extremists.  Second, the military must defend the homeland from threat or attack. Third, it must consider the rise of major powers with disruptive capacities, such as China. The QDR should examine all of these threats with regard to America’s long-term capabilities, understanding that these challenges will not be short term in nature but rather can potentially demand extensive commitment.

The global war on terror is hardly concerned with the greater Middle Eastern region alone. Threats posed by radicals and terrorists can be found all over the world, not just in Iraq. Correspondingly, our military must be capable of asserting a global presence and rapid response to any circumstance. We must be capable of both conventional and non-regular warfare.  Furthermore, the Department of Defense must not make the mistake of assuming that democracy is the answer to all the global challenges facing the United States. We cannot and will not invade and occupy our way to democratic liberalism.

The wars which we will conduct must strive to maintain American military superiority across the board. Furthermore, the preemptive defeat of terrorism and the denial of sanctuary to terrorists must be the military’s foremost priority. The failure of the United States to challenge Afghanistan’s Taliban during the 1990s was colossal in nature.  We cannot risk making such a mistake today. To do this, the military will have to confront both conventional and irregular threats and be prepared to employ limited means for large ends.  Special Operations and Intelligence will be vital forces in the war on terror, while the army and the marines will have to prepare for contingency operations and non-conventional warfare.

The QDR is fundamentally important to the transforming challenges faced by the United States military. As we evaluate this review, we must accept that we are a nation at war and, as a consequence, we must correspondingly alter our strategy and capabilities from those adopted during peacetime. We will face potential non-conventional, catastrophic, and disruptive challenges, all of which require novel approaches.

Daniel Goure
Lexington Institute

This document provides an important argument in favor of the reevaluation of national security and defense strategy. Likewise, Donnelly’s work similarly emphasizes that the security of the nation can be equated with the preservation of the Pax Americana.  As we strive to extend the American empire, we must characterize ourselves as desirable allies. By offering particular military capabilities to potential partners, we will be able to define areas of common interest and pursue our strategy with international support.

The military requirements of today’s challenges are immense. How can we successfully challenge growing threats in the greater Middle East and Asia? As we identify global challenges, we will require a more strategically deployable and operationally agile army. Furthermore, the QDR should address logistics transformation. Because the private sector plays such an important role in military support, such as Halliburton and its Logistics Civil Augmentation Program contract, the military must also address in the QDR how transformation will alter or impact its relationship with private sector contractors and support.

We must also be concerned with losing our competitive advantage. How can the military meet its recruitment goals if it is falling behind its objectives daily? How can we revolutionize the navy so that it is able to maintain absolute dominance in blue water? How should we alter our military strategy as we confront hostile, nuclear-armed adversaries? The global war on terror demands that we address all of these issues, among others, in order to maintain our competitive advantage.

Michèle Flournoy
Center for Strategic International Studies

The QDR is an extremely important document, particularly because Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has invested significant energy in producing a work which will address America’s current military strategy. Concerned about his legacy, Rumsfeld intends to use the QDR to leave his mark on the Department of Defense.

Transformation, an issue which will inevitably be addressed by the QDR, has become a necessity in the post-9/11 world. Our military is currently over-invested in traditional warfare and under-invested in irregular warfare. In this context, however, we must address the serious fiscal challenges which will complicate the process of transformation. With runaway personnel costs, growing problems with recruitment and retention, and increasing recapitalization costs, we have the makings of the perfect storm within the Department of Defense. At the same time, we must transform the force in order to handle a broader range of challenges, particularly regular warfare, catastrophic threats, and disruptive challenges.
 
Disturbingly, the Department of Defense lacks a decision-making methodology which would allow it to analyze risks. Because we are unable to confront every challenge, how do we decide what threat demands immediate attention? The Department of Defense must develop a framework by which to minimize, manage, and evaluate risk.

How do we judge whether the QDR is successful? We can evaluate this document as follows: First, does the QDR strive to create a force capable of meeting short-term demands?  Second, is the force adequately resourced for long-term threats?  Third, will the described force be sustainable? Last but not least, will the military as a whole be financially sustainable?  In order to properly evaluate all of these questions, the Department of Defense must work with other agencies--such as the Department of State-- to perennially review our nation’s national security strategy on an interagency basis.

Ryan Henry
Principal Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Policy

This QDR has examined the state of military strategy and affairs in an environment of war. September 11 and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have inevitably shaped the department’s thought processes. Members of the Defense Department agree that the debate over network-centric issues is irrelevant. Instead, we must focus on the inherent value of adaptability in the force.

This defense strategy has been assembled by a powerful leadership team. The attitudes of the members of the Department of Defense have created a QDR which is fundamentally driven by leadership. Furthermore, the advantage provided by the implementation of new tools--such as capabilities-based planning--allows us to analyze our military and defense strategies with novel approaches. 

The Defense Department understands that the war on terror demands extensive commitment.  By the same token, the military must be prepared to face a variety of different challenges throughout the world, such as the threat posed by emerging powers. We hope that a rising China will travel down a benign and non-nationalistic path. We also hope to work with powers such as Russia and India, which play increasingly important roles as rising members of the international community. 

The Department of Defense has, since its last QDR, increasingly addressed the challenges posed by uncertainty. We know that our forces will be called to defend American national security, but we do not know how, when, why, or where they will be deployed. We can point to the tsunami off of Indonesia as an event which the United States could never have predicted, and yet we responded to this crisis immediately and efficiently.  Within one week, 17,000 servicemen and women were dispatched to the area. Using a sea-based approach, we left no footprints in the region and successfully coordinated our efforts with those of NGOs and the United Nations. As a consequence, the United States has helped to fundamentally change Indonesian attitudes towards America.

This administration understands that it cannot fight the war on terror alone. We must work with regional and international powers in order to achieve our objectives. As we execute a variety of operations, the contributions of alliances will help to ease the stresses placed on our forces. In this world of myriad challenges--threats which are traditional, irregular, catastrophic, and disruptive in nature--we must be prepared to work with the international community and face any threat before it explodes into a full-blown conflict.

AEI research assistant Melissa Ann Wisner prepared this summary.