Defense: A New Military -- StrategyDefense:
James Kitfield - National Journal
NATIONAL TRAINING CENTER, FORT IRWIN, Calif. -- The mission
was familiar enough. A company of the 3rd Brigade, 3rd Infantry
Division was ordered to secure a small town and detain a
scientist suspected of helping develop weapons of mass
destruction. But the villagers had heard rumors of an incident a
day earlier, in which nervous U.S. soldiers fired
indiscriminately into a crowd in a nearby town. So the locals
were not cooperating. Irate civilians were yelling in the faces
of U.S. soldiers, local police officers were refusing to obey
orders shouted in English to drop their weapons, and word was
coming over the tactical radio that insurgents had cut off
reinforcements for "Charlie Company." About that time, the
company began taking sniper and rocket-propelled grenade fire.
That's when the bad memories came unbidden to Capt. Vern
Tubbs, Charlie Company commander. "With all the confusion, I
started to get some flashbacks, like I'd seen this before,"
Tubbs said. "Only in Iraq, I was a lot more scared."
Less than a year after the 3rd Infantry Division fought its
way to Baghdad during Operation Iraqi Freedom, its 3rd Brigade
is already helping incorporate the lessons learned from that war
into the training regimen of the National Training Center, the
Army's premier training range for maneuver warfare. With its
wide-open vistas in California's vast Mojave Desert, and its
notoriously tough "Opposing Force" -- a crack unit of U.S.
soldiers trained to imitate the enemy -- the NTC was designed in
the 1970s to prepare untested Army units for the rigors of
combat. The 3rd Brigade's rotation through the NTC in late
January, however, is part of a larger and even more ambitious
Pentagon campaign to use the lessons learned so recently in Iraq
and Afghanistan -- and the momentum gained from those two
successful wars -- to fundamentally transform the U.S. military.
Indeed, the 3rd Infantry Division has only been back in the
United States a matter of months since its occupation of Baghdad
following its victory on the battlefield. But already Army Chief
of Staff Gen. Peter Schoomaker has made the division the
prototype for a "modular" redesign of the entire Army. (See
accompanying story, p. 314.) By the time the next 3rd Infantry
Division brigade rotates through the NTC later this year, the
brigade "will reflect a newer, lighter, more deployable
configuration," Schoomaker said.
Look an echelon higher than a single Army brigade, and the
theme of transformational change is even more pronounced. The
3rd Infantry Division's recent exercise at the NTC, for
instance, represents just one skirmish in a larger,
groundbreaking war game linking the Western training ranges of
all the individual armed services: the Army's NTC; the Marine
Corps' Twentynine Palms training ground in California; the
Navy's training center in San Diego; and the Air Force's Nellis
base and training range in Nevada. The focus of this
first-of-its-kind exercise -- itself a prototype for future
training exercises -- is integration of U.S. airpower so that it
can drop its bombs and destroy enemy targets in the path of, and
near to, fast-moving U.S. soldiers and marines on the ground.
The U.S. Joint Forces Command, which is the multiservice command
in charge of joint training, has singled out that capability as
perhaps the single greatest achievement of the Iraqi Freedom
campaign.
"When I first proposed integrating these separate exercises
into a joint exercise, I had a lot of fingers shoved in my chest
by people who were worried that I was going to compromise their
training," said Marine Maj. Gen. Gordon Nash. Nash is commander
of joint training at U.S. Joint Forces Command, which Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has empowered to act as the center of
"lessons learned" for the Iraq war. "My point to them was, I'm
not here to compromise your training; I'm here to enhance it."
With Air Force, Marine Corps, and Navy pilots having returned
from Iraq and Afghanistan as part of an integrated air power
component, the aviators are demanding training that reflects the
way they are expected to fight in wartime -- working together in
close support of ground troops. In the future, says Nash, major
service training rotations will increasingly reflect this
philosophy of joint operations. "In many ways, our forces can
fight together better than they train together, because they
fight jointly and tend to train unilaterally."
War and Opportunity
Look an echelon higher still, and the engine of the rapid
change rippling down through U.S. military ranks becomes even
clearer. In their first eight months in the Pentagon, Rumsfeld
and his staff in the Office of the Secretary of Defense were
largely stymied in their efforts to "transform" the U.S.
military into a more agile and rapidly deployable force.
Initially, the individual armed services resisted fiercely,
viewing "transformation" as a stalking horse for further cuts in
personnel and budgets.
Since the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, however,
Congress has appropriated $289 billion more for defense than
would have been spent had the defense budget been held to the
inflation rate, according to Steven Kosiak, a defense analyst
with the nonpartisan Center for Strategic and Budgetary
Assessments. Meanwhile, just in the nine months since major
combat operations ended in the Iraqi Freedom campaign, Pentagon
civilians have ordered the launch of a series of ambitious
initiatives that, taken together, represent a fundamental
makeover of a U.S. military that was already recognized as the
world's best. Those initiatives include rewriting the strategic
war plans that directly influence the size of the U.S. military;
reconfiguring both the global footprint of U.S. military bases
and the deployment and rotation models that lay at the center of
military life; recalibrating the mix between active-duty and
reserve forces; and reforming the process by which the
Pentagon's weapons-buying plans are vetted for relevancy to
"joint" war plans.
Retired Navy Vice Adm. Arthur Cebrowski is director of the
Pentagon's Office for Force Transformation. "You never want a
war, but if you're an advocate for military transformation and a
war occurs, it can prove a powerful catalyst and opportunity for
transformation. I think the U.S. military is seizing that
opportunity," Cebrowski told National Journal. "You can call it
necessity being the mother of invention. But under the kinds of
stress that wars create in military organizations, a certain
open-mindedness appears. Essentially, no one thinks of new ideas
quicker, or learns faster, than someone being shot at."
Senior Pentagon leaders make no apologies for pressuring the
U.S. Central Command, which oversees operations in the Middle
East, to incorporate transformational war-fighting concepts in
its war plans for Afghanistan and Iraq. Nor have they shied away
from using those wars and the adjustments they forced on the
armed services to seek even more rapid and permanent change.
"One might have expected the wars to put transformation on
hold, but in fact they allowed us to accelerate it," Deputy
Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz said in an interview. "The
battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq provided real-world
demonstrations of the value of some of these transformational
concepts, such as using Special Forces and small units to call
in devastating air power. As we've seen with the Army
reorganization of the 3rd Infantry Division, the dislocations of
war also give you a real opportunity to reshuffle the deck and
overcome some fears of innovation. Secretary Rumsfeld has
stressed, for instance, that we shouldn't just assume that the
forces that deployed for those wars would be put back in the
same places and configurations as before."
Meanwhile, the enormous stress that the Iraq war and its
aftermath placed on personnel and military organizations "create
a lot of incentives for us to use our people more efficiently,
and to stop doing things we should have stopped long before,
such as leaving forces on very extended deployments in places
like Iceland, the Sinai, and Kosovo," Wolfowitz said. "Finally,
trying to institute transformational change in a time of
declining budgets is more difficult, because in the past if a
service put a creative idea on the table it was often used as a
way to force it to get by with less money. We're in a different
kind of period now."
Indeed, many military analysts and experts interviewed for
this story believe that the crucible of two successive,
nontraditional wars, and the Rumsfeld team's relentless pressure
on the services to transform themselves, are forging a new U.S.
military mold that is fundamentally different from the Cold War
model of the past half-century. Some characteristics of the
force likely to emerge from that often-wrenching process are
becoming clear already.
As a whole, a larger proportion of a transformed U.S.
military force will be based in the United States. Instead of
living on permanent and comfortable overseas bases, troops will
deploy frequently to relatively austere staging areas around the
world. Each of the services is breaking down large, traditional
organizational units such as Army armored divisions, Navy
carrier battle groups, and Air Force wings into more deployable
"modules" that can be rapidly assembled and organized into task
forces tailored to particular missions. Those task forces, in
turn, will be more interdependent, with each service module
relying more on special capabilities that the other modules
bring to the fight. Those smaller forces will also rely more on
space-based communications and surveillance, long-range
precision bombs and missiles, and "just-in-time" logistics
capabilities to provide the support and lethality traditionally
associated with forward-operating bases and heavily massed
forces.
"To a large extent, we're moving away from the concept of
large, forward-operating bases with lots of infrastructure
around the world to a lighter footprint that focuses on lightly
manned sites and cooperative security locations that give us
much more flexibility," Douglas Feith, undersecretary of Defense
for policy, told National Journal. Feith returned recently from
a trip overseas to brief key allies on the Pentagon's new Global
Posture Realignment. His basic message: The fundamental lesson
of recent wars and the transformation effort under way is that
the number of U.S. troops stationed across the globe is less
relevant than the capabilities the troops can bring in rapidly
during a crisis. "Essentially, we believe that the events of
recent years have vindicated some of our ideas on
transformation, so we're taking advantage of this moment in
history to advance those ideas in a way that might not have been
possible in more normal times," Feith said.
Terrorist Strikes
During the Bush administration's first eight months in
office, before the war on terrorism began, Rumsfeld's
transformation efforts predictably foundered on the same shoals
that had doomed earlier efforts: a lack of money, and individual
service cultures resistant to radical change. The services,
which enlisted the help of their congressional allies, rejected
major force reductions or weapons cancellations that would fund
transformation. And in the 2001 Quadrennial Defense Review, the
Pentagon avoided making any painful decisions on scaling back
major programs.
"In those early months of the Bush administration, the
services refused to come onboard with the Rumsfeld agenda," said
Andrew Krepinevich, a longtime advocate of transformation and
the executive director of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary
Assessments in Washington. "Essentially, Rumsfeld and the
services went eyeball-to-eyeball, and Rumsfeld blinked."
As with so many things, however, the September 11 terrorist
attacks radically changed the transformation dynamic inside the
literally smoldering Pentagon. Service leaders who had been in
near-open revolt against the Rumsfeld team largely rallied
behind the Defense secretary and his assertive wartime
leadership. The senior Pentagon civilian leadership also sensed
a historic opportunity to test the revolutionary tenets of
transformational war on the battlefield.
For instance, Central Command initially proposed a slow
military buildup requiring many months and the insertion of a
large ground force into Afghanistan. Rumsfeld and his staff,
however, cajoled CentCom chief Gen. Tommy Franks into throwing
out the war plan and adopting an approach that emphasized small,
agile U.S. Special Forces units on the ground backed by
precision airpower and space-age communications and surveillance
systems. When the United States successfully routed Al Qaeda and
toppled the Taliban using such a war-fighting model, Pentagon
civilians were emboldened to try it on a much grander scale.
They were determined to make the Iraqi Freedom campaign the
definitive prototype for transformational warfare.
"There were a lot of discussions between Rumsfeld and top
leaders that we wanted the war plan for Iraq to reflect new ways
of thinking, because CentCom's war plans were two or three years
old, and they seemed very Industrial Age," said a senior Defense
Department official. "I don't remember a single instance when
Rumsfeld flatly told Franks that the force he requested was too
big. Rather, he would ask why the plans seemed so out of date,
and why did they require such a long buildup? Did we really need
to push so much force and equipment into theater? In the end, we
reached a consensus that speed and flexibility were paramount,
and that drove the plans toward a smaller force. The issue was
not the size of the force, but rather whether it was supporting
the diplomacy, and whether it could act with the necessary
speed," the official continued. "Franks's paradigm was
'overmatching power' -- emphasizing timeliness -- rather than
'overwhelming force,' with its emphasis on size."
Indeed, the war plan eventually settled on for Iraqi Freedom
relied on speeds of advance never before accomplished by
corps-sized armored forces. The plan gambled that advances in
precision-guided weapons and space- and airborne surveillance
systems would allow a relatively small, dispersed U.S. force,
fighting on a nonlinear battlefield, to quickly conquer a
country of 25 million people. It abandoned traditional doctrine
calling for a 3-to-1 ratio of attackers to defenders. Instead,
U.S. forces would use advanced technologies to pierce the
ever-present "fog of war," and mass destructive firepower
anywhere on the battlefield. Under the plan, forces would eschew
the need in traditional warfare to mass forces at the point of
attack. Such a transformational battle plan also dictated an
unprecedented degree of "joint dependence" between Army and
Marine ground forces and U.S. air and space power, and it relied
on the "just-in-time" delivery of critical supplies for forces
on the move.
After U.S. forces succeeded in toppling the Iraqi regime in
roughly three weeks with historically low casualties and
collateral damage, the Iraqi Freedom campaign quickly became
Exhibit A in Rumsfeld's efforts to accelerate transformation of
the U.S. military. In terms of instituting far-reaching changes
that would have certainly been resisted in the past, the
Rumsfeld team has been on a roll ever since.
"The 9/11 terrorist attacks, and wars in Afghanistan and
Iraq, certainly breathed new life into a transformation campaign
that was seriously languishing," said Ronald O'Rourke, a
longtime military analyst with the Congressional Research
Service. "The terrorist attacks focused people's attention on
why we needed to transform the military to meet new threats, and
the wars provided battlefield models that seemed to validate the
concepts that Rumsfeld and [his team] were talking about."
Rumsfeld's cancellation of the Army's Crusader artillery gun,
along with his firing of Army Secretary Thomas E. White and the
showdown with former Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki over
their defense of the gun, also sent a cautionary shot across the
services' bow. The message was clear: Standing in the way of
this secretary carried consequences. Since that showdown,
Rumsfeld has painstakingly put in place a senior military
leadership that largely shares his vision of transformation. He
personally interviews any general officer recommended for
promotion to three stars or higher.
"You can argue whether Shinseki was right or wrong on various
issues, but the inescapable fact is that he's gone and Rumsfeld
is still in power," O'Rourke said. "The services have gotten the
message that if you don't abide by the secretary's wishes, you
will be penalized, either through lack of promotions or program
cancellations. Essentially, the services have acknowledged that
this is a very strong secretary of Defense and [Office of the
Secretary of Defense], perhaps the strongest we've seen in
decades."
Yellow Flags
There's at least one potential drawback to all of this
"transformation": It has been subjected to remarkably little
outside scrutiny or independent analysis. For its part, a
stretched-thin U.S. military busy far from the Pentagon's E Ring
is preoccupied with the messy aftermath in Iraq and Afghanistan
and with the global war on terror. Washington's political and
media establishments, meanwhile, are also largely distracted by
Iraq and a looming presidential election. And the
Republican-controlled Congress, in an important election year,
seems little interested in an in-depth, "warts and all"
appraisal of the Iraqi Freedom campaign and its implications for
military transformation.
"That is an absolute constitutional function of Congress,
which shares a responsibility for raising and maintaining our
armies and navies, though Congress normally likes to shift that
responsibility," said retired Army Col. Kenneth Allard, a
longtime defense analyst. "In this case, Congress may not have
any choice, however, because these people in [the Office of the
Secretary of Defense] are temporary caretakers, at best, who
will be around for only a few years. There are a bunch of
unpleasant things out there on the horizon that come from asking
a 10-division army to do a 12-division mission, and they are
going to have to be dealt with."
Indeed, without rigorous congressional oversight or a
thorough analysis of the risks-versus-rewards trade-offs of
transformation, experts worry that the rapid and profound
changes now under way could lead to unpleasant and unintended
surprises. As Pentagon officials have rewritten U.S. strategic
war plans, they have touted the success of the three-week Iraqi
Freedom campaign. But relatively little analysis has been
conducted of the difficult aftermath in Iraq and whether the
war-fighting model actually contributed to many of the
post-conflict difficulties. Many military experts also caution
that the Iraqi army was too weak an opponent on which to base
such fundamental reforms.
There are also concerns that deployment and war-fighting
models now being contemplated by the Pentagon will put
unsustainable strains on the active and reserve forces, leading
to retention and recruitment crises. Finally, Rumsfeld and his
team overcame initial resistance in part by spending a lot of
new money. They thus avoided pitting major service programs
against each other and canceling many weapons programs. But such
a strategy has resurrected warnings from budget experts that
Pentagon civilians are steering the U.S. military down an
expensive path that future spending plans simply cannot support.
"There is an enormous bow wave of programs coming on line
over the next five to 10 years that are going to be chasing too
few dollars," said Dan Goure, a longtime defense analyst with
the Lexington Institute, a pro-defense think tank. "The fact
that all the 'lessons learned' coming out of Iraq seem to
perfectly reinforce [Pentagon] arguments for transformation also
raises the question of whether some of the good news on that war
is in fact too good to be true. I also worry about whether this
transformed U.S. military will, in fact, be a full-spectrum
force, or whether Rumsfeld and his team are creating a military
optimized for high-intensity combat but inadequate for
low-intensity or stability-operations scenarios such as we're
now seeing in Iraq."
Even given all those concerns, however, Goure still credits
the Pentagon leadership with aggressively pushing many valuable
reforms further than many experts thought possible. "In many
ways, Rumsfeld and his team saw transformation not only as an
opportunity, but also as a necessity in confronting new kinds of
threats," said Goure. "Thus they methodically put in place
military leaders who shared their vision, and they brilliantly
seized the bureaucratic and organizational high ground in the
Pentagon. Taking control of the strategic war plans was
critical, because it allowed them to control the risk
calculations that the military has used to sidetrack past
reforms. As a result, they have the potential to
institutionalize the most radical transformation of the U.S.
military really since the 1940s."
Nagging Concerns
Even some transformation advocates question whether
Rumsfeld's plans have enough checks and balances in place. The
transformation umbrella is casting an ever-greater shadow over a
growing host of initiatives, for instance, that have not seen
the light of independent scrutiny. "Without independent
analysis, we may never know the true lessons of the Iraq war,"
Krepinevich said. Clear troubles that arose with that campaign,
such as problems with logistics and supply, have not been
studied adequately, he says. "Basically, the Pentagon and U.S.
military are grading their own homework."
As just one example, Pentagon civilians directed the Joint
Staff to rewrite the classified Strategic Planning Guidance as a
result of lessons learned especially from the Iraq war. This is
the document that outlines the mix of forces that might be
called on in another war. These plans were revised for fighting
potential conflicts on the Korean Peninsula and in the Middle
East and are based on the assumption that such wars can be
fought more quickly and with fewer U.S. troops than previously
estimated. That change, in turn, allowed Rumsfeld's civilian
staff to resist calls for increasing the total troop strength of
the U.S. military, despite increasingly obvious stress fractures
resulting from deployments overseas, where more than half of
Army forces are now committed.
Moreover, a recent study by the National Defense University
strongly suggests that the Pentagon's new war-fighting model
fails to adequately take into account the manpower-intensive
work of cleaning up in the aftermath of regime-changing wars.
"Successes in Afghanistan and Iraq demonstrate that the new
war-fighting model is very successful in the first,
high-intensity phase of conflict, but there are unintended
consequences," said Hans Binnendijk, director of the
university's Center for Technology and National Security Policy,
which helped to produce the report. "In both instances, we
deployed relatively small forces very rapidly, and they won
quickly and in very dominant fashion with minimal collateral
damage. The result is, you end up in theater with far fewer
troops than in traditional wars, [and with] an enemy that is
defeated but not exhausted. And suddenly you are in a postwar
period without adequate forces or planning for the next phase of
nation building."
Thomas Donnelly is a longtime national security analyst now
with the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think
tank in Washington. "Rumsfeld doesn't really buy into all this
nation-building and stability-operations business, so he's
basically ignored what's happened in the aftermath of Iraqi
Freedom, because it forces a different answer than he wants to
hear in terms of Army strength. When he doesn't like the
answer, Rumsfeld typically changes the question," Donnelly said.
"If you seriously try to imagine what President Bush's
commitment to transform the Middle East with democracy means for
the military, however, it's going to be an incredible strain, as
we police a very screwed-up Iraq and this region for longer than
most of us will be alive. The services are in denial about the
implications of that."
During the recent war game at the National Training Center,
in California's forbidding Mojave, one senior officer stood
quietly aside, observing as the 3rd Infantry Division brigade
advanced in battle formation across a broad expanse of desert.
The sight brought back vivid memories. It's fair to guess that
no officer in the U.S. Army has thought longer or harder about
the true lessons of the second Iraq war than Lt. Gen. William
Wallace. As the V Corps commander, Wallace was in charge of all
Army maneuver forces during Iraqi Freedom, and he rode the 3rd
Infantry Division's wake of destruction all the way to Baghdad.
At times during that long march, Wallace indeed caught glimpses
of a new, faster, and more fluid style of warfare. He also knows
better than most that the war plan contained risks and gambles
that a more competent and determined enemy might have exploited.
"That war certainly changed my way of thinking, and I'm
pretty sure that's universal throughout the military," said
Wallace, who now heads the Army's Combined Arms Center at Fort
Leavenworth, Kan. "During the war, we all clearly saw the
advantages of fighting as a joint force. We now need to teach
our brigade and battalion officers, for instance, that they may
not need traditional levels of artillery support, because they
can count on U.S. airpower to deal with those kinds of threats.
While we need to be aggressive in incorporating those lessons
learned, however, I would caution at the same time that the Iraq
war was just one episode. It's just our most recent war. It
shouldn't be our only reference point."
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