Is this where the next economic growth spurt will come from ? (never mind the "other" consequences)
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Preview of 4 articles that MSNBC will air in the next following weeks.
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The title ?
The Secret Empire. The US military in the 21st Century
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IN WHAT IS shaping up to be a major housecleaning, the new defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, appointed Andrew Marshall to head up a strategic review of U.S. military capabilities. Marshall, a Pentagon veteran with an iconoclastic reputation, is known to favor a clean break with many of the weapons that helped win the Cold War.
According to officials and outside experts interviewed by MSNBC.com, the review is expected to recommend changes that until now were considered radical: shifting future defense funds away from the giant aircraft carriers, tanks and warplanes that now dominate the force toward a new generation of lighter, smaller, stealthier weapons.
Army armed with better technology
The Rumsfeld review, expected to be made public next month, affirms the thinking of many military strategists who have been arguing for a decade for a fundamental change toward a leaner, nimbler military. Supporters of this view also see these lightly manned and ultimately more expendable weapons as the missing element in America’s arsenal, and the tools best suited to fight the kinds of conflicts foreseen in the 21st century.
These new missions include:
Regional wars and support for peacekeeping missions.
Surviving highly capable missile systems in the hands of U.S. foes.
Strikes against terrorist bases deep inside hostile territory.
The need to be able to operate over the vast distances of the Asia-Pacific region.
PLAYING TO U.S. STRENGTHS
“Winning a conflict in Asia,” according to Elliot Cohen, a strategic warfare expert, “will mean long-range warfare, with dispersed, mobile or concealed basing, and the kinds of forces that can sustain a long, perhaps only intermittently violent, clash in the air, at sea and in space.” Andrew Krepinevich, a former Pentagon colleague of Marshall’s who now heads the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington, says the current U.S. lead in military power provides a unique opportunity to experiment with new ideas particularly well timed to the Rumsfeld report.
“As other countries grab onto technologies to make things difficult for us, we need to exploit our potential advantage — information and technology — which allows us to operate forces that are highly dispersed and highly integrated at the same time,” Krepinevich says. “You no longer need to concentrate combat capability in one platform like a carrier or one air base.”
In fact, many argue that concentrating so much power and so many American personnel on any platform or base invites catastrophe.
March 29 — The Pentagon’s strategic priorities are changing, and with them plans for new generations of weaponry. NBC’s Jim Miklaszewski reports.
“The knock on the military is that we’re always training to win the last war, not the next one,” said one senior military officer with knowledge of the panel’s work. “Could we build more big-deck carriers and Abrams tanks and still be untouchable? Maybe. But the smart thing to do is take advantage of the huge lead we have and really match our tools with the scary new world out there.”
Experts say the scope of the changes the military must react to in the near future will be more dramatic than any since World War II, which saw the advent of mechanized warfare, carrier warfare and bombing campaigns.
“For nearly half a century, the U.S. military organized itself to fight a short, extremely intensive battle in Europe from large fixed bases dispersed over relatively short distances,” Cohen notes.
WARNING SIGNS
The experiences of the 1990s — from the Gulf War to Somalia to Kosovo — provided ample evidence of the need for lighter, faster forces. The Army learned in Somalia and Kosovo the price of building its doctrine around the 70-ton M1A1 Abrams tank, which cannot be airlifted into battle in large numbers using the rough, smaller airfields of the developing world.
Planner's nightmares
Changes driving the military's 'transformation'
• the proliferation of cheap, powerful missiles;
• spread of satellite intelligence capabilities;
• sophistication of stateless terrorist groups;
• spread of nuclear weapons to Mideast and Asia;
• likelihood that Asia, not Europe, would be site of future conflicts.
No ground war ever developed in Kosovo, but had the U.S. decided to invade, the Army’s tanks would have taken months to show up. Even when the Abrams tanks had reached Albania’s main port, their weight would have collapsed 10 of the 12 bridges between the port and the Kosovo border.
As a result, the Army is now training “interim brigades” that would ultimately be outfitted with a new armored vehicle far smaller than the Abrams and capable of being shipped by air right into the combat zone. The Army’s heavy armored commanders scoff at this idea. But Army Chief of Staff Eric K. Shinseki has championed it and the Rumsfeld report is likely to endorse it.
Army armed with better technology
“You have to get to the battle to fight it,” said Brig. Gen. Paul Eaton, who commands one of the interim brigades now being trained at Fort Lewis in Washington State. “There are folks in the Army who say we’re just ‘dumbing down’ the heavy brigade. But we’re not designed to go up against tanks in open terrain. That will still take tanks. In the long run, though, we want to be smaller, faster and invisible, and just as tough.”
THE NEW MISSILE THREAT
The Navy, too, has found itself trying to adapt Cold War weapons to fight new enemies. Navy carriers effectively pounded Iraq during the Gulf War and Serbia during the Kosovo conflict. But the Navy also understands that improved missiles in the hands of its foes will mean the days of putting large aircraft carriers into confined waters like the Persian Gulf are numbered.
Coming Friday:
The collision of a U.S. spy plane and a Chinese fighter exposes more than the raw nerves of two great powers. The Cold War in Part II of The secret empire.
• Series front page
It is “unthinkable,” in the words of one Marine general, that an adversary will ever again sit back as Saddam Hussein did in 1990 and allow the kind of buildup that took place on Iraq’s border before the Gulf War.
“They will saturate the ports, railheads and airfields with missiles,” said the general, recounting the results of a war game in which a U.S. force attempted to prevent a Central Asian nation from being overrun. “With our current heavy tanks, short-ranged fighters and carriers forces,” the general said, “we simply had no way of getting to the battle.”
ENTER STREETFIGHTER
To equip the Navy to operate in dangerous coastal waters, Vice Adm. Art Cebrowski is championing a concept known as “streetfighter.” Cebrowski is proposing a new class of small, fast, lightly manned carriers, missile ships and submarines. Several catamaran-hulled designs are under consideration for these ships, including a 6,000-ton pocket aircraft carrier known as Corsair, and a 3,000-ton missile-laden attack ship called Sea Lance. Neither would replace existing vessels, but going forward, some believe they may do the kinds of jobs that larger warships won’t be able to perform effectively.
Cebrowski also understands that a political window has opened in Washington. “We have elbow room right now, and we should be using it to put ourselves another generation ahead of the competition, not perfecting the weapons that won the Cold War” he says.
RETHINKING BASES
The missile threat also affects U.S. military bases around the world. The Air Force and the Marines both operate under the assumption that their bases in places like Japan, South Korea, Saudi Arabia or Turkey will be available as staging areas in a crisis.
In the longer-term, however, many believe the missile threat to such bases — especially the threat posed by China’s increasingly large and capable force — will make them virtually useless in a crisis. With these missiles, writes Paul Bracken, an authority on defense and intelligence issues at Yale University, “Beijing not only turns America’s Asian bases into hostages; she also inhibits U.S. power in the whole Pacific basin.”
Meanwhile, the Air Force is spending $69 billion over the next decade to purchase 339 F-22 Raptor fighters, replacing the aging but still capable F-15.
While no one doubts the formidable capabilities of the F-22, Andrew Krepinevich notes that the new aircraft may be irrelevant if its bases are destroyed.
“No one is out there trying to build an air force to match the U.S. Air Force,” said Krepinevich. “If I’m an adversary, I’m not going to challenge you in the air, what I’m going to do is target your bases with missiles. You have to question the value of air superiority fighters against missile forces.”
Krepinevich and others also suggest that more money should be devoted to developing UCAVs — Unmanned Combat Air Vehicles — which would take pilots out of harm’s way. The technology for highly capable fighter drones is still years away, but given the service life of modern fighter aircraft — 30 years or more — Krepinevich says “the value of the F-22 may depreciate awfully quickly.”
PAINFUL CHOICES AHEAD
Such dilemmas make these changes painful to the military, which often fights for as much as a decade to get new weapons systems approved and is loath to see them pared back once production lines start to roll.
Yet the battle over the shape of the future military has been joined in a manner not seen in decades. Just as it took Nixon to go to China, it may take Rumsfeld and Marshall - a pair of Cold Warriors in their late 60s - to challenge the primacy of aircraft carriers, heavy tanks and fighter jets at the Pentagon.
Michael Moran is senior producer, special reports, at MSNBC. Part II of The Secret Empire, a look at the explosion in America’s commitments abroad since the Cold War ended, appears next Thursday, April 5.
Week I: In the Navy, size does matter
3 of 7
1. Interactive map: U.S. strategic view
2. Week I: Sacred cows in the cross hairs
3. Week I: In the Navy, size does matter
4. Week II: America's global embrace
5. Week III: Military role grows on home front
6. Week IV: Forward, march... into space
7. Week V: The threat over the horizon |
