Our national military strategy can't be anything but based on these two factors:
Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Joseph Dunford on Wednesday previewed a soon-to-be-finalized National Military Strategy, saying that developing international alliances and projecting power to faraway places will be the two key tenets of the classified document.
Our allies and enemies are overseas, so of course having allies and getting to where our enemies and allies are remain the basic pillars of what our military does.
And of course, to keep allies they have to believe we will arrive in time to help them.
The problem comes if our military again focuses on the strategic mobility issue by thinking that lightening up our Army to speed and ease deployment to faraway places is the highest priority of our military.
I thought that nonsense was behind us, but I fear it is returning.
A misplaced focus on lightness conflicts with the very real observation that American victory is not pre-ordained.
My fear is that tenet of force projection will lead us to abandon survivable vehicles and robust units able to endure casualties to keep fighting.
I wrote about this for our armored fighting vehicles 18 years ago when the light FCS was the rage and focus of lots of money (see "Equipping the Objective Force").
And in an essay intended for the 10th anniversary of Desert Storm I noted that fact for the Army as a whole:
Technologically superior heavy forces and air power decisively prevailed in Desert Storm after a laborious deployment to the Gulf. With lighter and fewer but technologically superior troops, we expect to deploy globally from CONUS and smash any enemy rapidly and with few casualties. Desert Storm, updated to Information Storm, will become a Global Storm. Our Information Storm cannot become global without tradeoffs. If we lighten the Army too much and optimize it for stability operations, our troops will be shocked if we must fight even a single MTW, let alone something worse. Training to beat the Soviet first team provided tremendous benefits when we faced a lesser opponent such as Iraq. Now we train for lesser threats and too many question whether that is overpreparing.
What we ultimately should have learned is that 1991 was made possible by more than a decade of work that rebuilt the post-Vietnam United States Army from its nadir and focused it on conventional warfare to defend Europe and South Korea. Although this was a narrowly focused mission, because of its excellence the Army was able to win on the offensive in the desert at the end of a long logistics tether away from major established bases. Desert Storm demonstrated that a good combat-ready Army can adapt to unfamiliar situations. We should certainly have learned that our ability and willingness to put combat-ready soldiers on the ground translates into real power. Without that power, there will be no new Army storms worthy of the name.
Deploying somewhere fast just to be quickly defeated by more capable enemies is no way to project power or reassure overseas allies. Remember, our distant enemies won't lighten up to reach nearby and overland theaters of war.
As I wrote in the post introduction to that essay about the unhealthy focus on light air deployable vehicles:
I was skeptical of the Stryker as a replacement [for heavy armor] though I conceded that having a medium force to bridge the gap between leg infantry and heavy mechanized forces was in order. I did draw the line at some of the criticisms like complaints that the vehicle could not drive off the ramp of a C-130 in fighting form. What kind of cluster would we be getting into if our troops have to fight their way off the plane ramp? [emphasis added]
We will never have the airlift to dispatch and sustain enough troops to win in that kind of near-disaster environment.
Remember, we have allies. That's one of the factors our national military strategy will be based on. If we can't deploy by sea in time to help them win, we and our ally are doing something horribly wrong well before the first American units begin to deploy overseas.
Don't try to lighten up our troops to fly to rapid disaster.
If our allies are that vital for our national security, forward deploy troops and equipment as we did in Europe during the Cold War and as we did for so many decades in South Korea. And make sure that the lines of communication to deploy enough military power to win are secure.
There are no shortcuts to having the most power on the battlefield first.
