Transforming the Military

William E. Odom

From Foreign Affairs, July/ August 1997

Article preview: first 500 of 3,703 words total.

Summary:  Secretary Cohen's defense review is out, but the flaws in the Pentagon's military planning are still glaring. Haiti, Bosnia, NATO expansion, stability in Korea, keeping Iraq in check-all these are primarily army and air force missions. Yet the army has been reduced by about 40 percent, while the navy has been cut back far less and the marines hardly at all. Advances in technology make the marines' expeditionary role and the navy's aircraft carriers obsolete. Defense doesn't need more money; it needs to reallocate resources. As it stands, the United States is paying more for a military that can do less.

William E. Odom, Lieutenant General (Ret.), is Director of National Security Studies at the Hudson Institute and Adjunct Professor of Political Science at Yale University.

MISSION MISMATCH

America's defense does not require a larger budget, but rather a major reallocation to meet the challenges of the post-Cold War world. Facing up to this politically divisive issue will be difficult, but the subject ought to be aired before the contending parties fall back on the easy option of increased spending. The congressionally mandated Quadrennial Defense Review was issued in May, and Sen. Joseph Lieberman's (D-Conn.) amendment to the last defense bill requires a preparedness report to Congress. The QDR's recently announced recommendations include only trivial cuts in naval combatants and aircraft, a woefully disappointing result. Faulty rationalizations for inappropriate force structures have marred previous official reviews, including Clinton administration Defense Secretary Les Aspin's bottom-up review and Bush administration Defense Secretary Richard Cheney's base force concept. The same can be said of recently departed Defense Secretary William Perry's valedictory article, "Defense in an Age of Hope," in the November/ December 1996 Foreign Affairs.

Perry espoused a U.S. strategy for managing conflict that rests on three lines of defense: preventing threats from emerging, deterring threats that do emerge, and defeating with force those that breakout into conflict. While in principle it makes excellent sense, as elaborated, Perry's analysis fails to address four serious problems: regional prioritization of U.S. interests, inadequate means for dealing with nuclear proliferation, a mismatch between missions and forces, and unexploited technology. Since Perry's article, Secretary William Cohen has released his report on the Pentagon's military planning and outlook. While Secretary Cohen's report identifies regions of importance and defines missions for each, it remains to be seen whether he is merely nodding at the notion of regional priorities or is willing to articulate significant change. The same flaws that blemished the Pentagon's planning when Perry left office are still glaring.

PREVENTION AND PROLIFERATION

The forward deployment of U.S. forces in the Middle East, Europe, and northeast Asia is no less critical now for the prevention of war than it was during the Cold War. Perhaps unintentionally, Perry appears to apply the preventive portion of his strategy to just about every region of the world. This broad view will be difficult to sell to Congress and the public, especially when it concerns countries in Africa, South Asia, Southeast Asia, and South America. By failing to prioritize among regions, Perry provides little idea about how to husband limited military resources, inviting isolationist criticism and internationalist disillusionment.

On the proliferation of nuclear weapons, Perry's approach is far from comprehensive. He stresses dismantlement of existing nuclear arsenals and extension of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty. But what if these means fail, as they already have in several cases? By backing the Clinton administration's adherence to a limited theater ballistic missile defense, Perry only partially explains how a threat from proliferation, were one to arise, would be defeated.

While dismantling the Russian nuclear arsenal may be desirable, it is wholly impractical in the near future. Letting Russia's arsenal decay in its silos may prove a better approach. Moscow is too ...

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