The Struggle to Transform the Military

Max Boot

From Foreign Affairs, March/April 2005

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Summary:  The fighting in Iraq has exposed the limits of Donald Rumsfeld's transformation agenda. The U.S. military remains underprepared for dealing with guerrillas, and such unconventional threats will grow in coming years. The next stage of military transformation must focus on training large numbers of infantry for nation building and irregular warfare--and Washington must make that task a top priority.

Max Boot is a Senior Fellow in National Security Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and a member of the U.S. Joint Forces Command Transformation Advisory Group. He is writing a history of revolutions in military affairs over the past 500 years.

REVOLUTION, INTERRUPTED

Donald Rumsfeld's tenure as secretary of defense will continue to be marked by his attempt to transform the military into a lighter, nimbler force better able to take advantage of new technology and respond to new threats. Despite (or perhaps because of) the rancor he has generated within the Pentagon, Rumsfeld has managed to shake up a hidebound institution that, if left to its own devices, would probably prefer to endlessly refight the 1991 Gulf War.

The continued fighting in Iraq, however, shows the limits of what he has accomplished. The U.S. military is superb at defeating conventional forces--as its three-week blitzkrieg from Kuwait to Baghdad in the spring of 2003 demonstrated--but not nearly as good at fighting the kind of guerrilla foes it has confronted since. To be sure, many of the current problems in Iraq result from Rumsfeld's failure to send enough troops there and from the precipitous disbandment of the Iraqi military. But they also reveal more fundamental shortcomings in U.S. capabilities for dealing with unconventional threats.

Many policymakers and military officers will no doubt react to the problems in Iraq by trying to eschew this type of conflict in the future. Just as there was an aversion to fighting guerrilla wars after Vietnam (manifested in the Powell Doctrine), there will be a similar backlash after Iraq, no matter how it turns out. Most U.S. soldiers understandably prefer to focus on what they do best: beating conventional foes in the open field.

Unfortunately, the United States cannot determine the nature of its future wars; the enemy has a vote, and the more evident the U.S. inability to deal with guerrilla or terrorist tactics, the more prevalent those tactics will become. There is a limit to how much "smart" weapons can achieve against a shadowy foe. Recall the ineffectual cruise-missile strikes on targets in Sudan and Afghanistan in 1998, which served only to highlight U.S. weakness. Defeating terrorism, as Washington has learned in Afghanistan, requires putting boots on the ground and engaging in nation building. Yet it is precisely those areas in which the United States remains weakest and that Rumsfeld's high-tech defense transformation agenda has neglected. Strengthening those capacities should be the goal for the next stage of military transformation, and continuing that revolution should be a top priority in President George W. Bush's second term.

ENCUMBRANCES OF EMPIRE

Whether or not the United States is an "empire" today, it is a country with interests to protect and enemies to fight all over the world. There is no finer example of how to do this cheaply and effectively than the British Empire. In 1898, it maintained only 331,000 soldiers and sailors and spent only 2.4 percent of its GDP on defense, considerably less than the 3.9 percent the United States spends today. This puny investment was enough to safeguard an empire that covered 25 percent of the globe.

The British Empire's most easily emulated strength was advanced technology, a product of the Industrial ...

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