So let's look at the specifics of the plan as Secretary Gates set forth.
Broadly speaking, Gates outlines proposals that bolster the troops and their families to keep our all-volunteer force intact. Our personnel are what make our military outstanding--not the technology. The technology just makes our personnel all the more lethal.
Second, he outlined proposals to help win the war we are in now--Iraq, Afghanistan, and the war on terror (or whatever they're calling it now).
Third, he outlined proposals that keep our conventional power going, but which rely on the assumption that we face no real conventional miltiary threats to us in the medium term.
I'll skip over the first part. That won't be up for debate and is great as far as I'm concerned. We have to keep our quality people in the service and make up for the sacrifices they've made the last 7 years.
So let's look at the purchases to win the war we're in.
We'll increase intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance assets, including armed UAVs and manned platforms, including fixed-wing aircraft and bolstering our ability to field helicopters. This essentially helps recreate an Army Air Corps. I'm fine with this.
We'll increase our special forces by 5% and add money to train and equip allied forces to fight terrorists. This is our first line of defense and is fine.
We'll go forward on the expensive Littoral Combat Ship intended to fight in the green and brown waters near land and expand ships designed for in-theater support. This is intended to support ground forces ashore. I have serious concerns over putting LCS in coastal waters, as I noted in my first impression of our defense priorities.
We'll halt at least temporarily our expansion of the Army's combat brigades to 45 rather than 48 as we'd planned. This will marginally reduce our rotation base to provide extra troops to avoid stop-loss use and is intended to avoid weakening our brigades. This "hollowing" would not be a threat with sufficient funding, but if the funding isn't there, this is probably wise.
These categories all fall under the category of fighting the war we're in now, as I stated. This is our focus. This is the focus of Gates and he is keeping faith with our personnel in making sure they have the resources to win.
The problem with our funding plan comes in the category of fighting the wars we are assuming we don't need to worry about. The basic assumption is:
Lat year's national defense strategy concluded that although U.S. predominance in conventional warfare is not unchallenged, it is sustainable for the medium term, given current trends.
So, on the assumption that we can coast on past procurement with acceptable risks, we'll cut back on new weapons in the medium term.
We'll halt F-22 production at 187, accelerate F-35 production, and retire 250 older fighter aircraft. I guess I'm fine with this. I don't feel as qualified to judge pure air matters, but we are clearly dominant in the air now. We'd be hurt if an enemy attack knocked out half our F-22s at the start of any war, but barring that we're probably fine with the planned Raptor fleet as the cutting edge of our air superiority effort.
We'll stop production of the C-17 fleet and buy a replacement tanker fleet (KC-X). I'm fine with the latter but worried about the former. Our airlift assets have been highly used. And with our Afghansitan Surge taking place into a landlocked theater, I'd be more comfortable with more transport aircraft.
We'll work on our next ballistic missile submarines but delay any work on a new strategic bomber. And we'll add to our cyber-warfare capabilities. Given that we may reduce nukes with a new agreement with Russia, these decisions seem fine. The cyber-warfare capabilities are vital as we've seen lately.
We'll bolster theater missile defense and Navy Standard-3 missile defenses useful against the theater-range missiles we are most likely to face in the medium term while downgrading missile defense against intercontinental ballistic missiles, counting on what we have built already (mostly in Alaska) to be enough. I'm not sure what this means for the Europe-based force we plan. This worries me. ICBM technology is mature and our enemies can get this capability far easier than we can expand and improve the new anti-ICBM capabilities we have built. What if we time an enemy's acquisition of ICBM capability incorrectly and they put an atomic warhead on a few missiles?
We'll eventually let our carrier force slide to 10 carriers from our current 11 (which has already slid from 12 recently). We'll hold off on future (and expensive) large warships while building more of our existing class of missile destroyers. We'll hold off on additional large amphibious warfare ships. Of all our services, I'm least worried about our Navy. It rules supreme. And I think carriers--the ultimate in platform-centric naval warfare--are on a glide path to beng obsolete in the decades ahead (perhaps many decades) as potential enemies gain improved network-centric warfare capabilities.
[Oops, I skipped over the Army specifics. Gates proposes slashing the Future Combat Systems. They just don't have the passive protection that Iraq combat has shown we need. Non-vehicle technology in the program will be "spun out" to the entire Army instead of focusing on a subset of the Army as a Future Force. Also, he wants to figure out what to do with all the one-dimensional MRAPs we've bought. Designed to be resilient against IEDs, they are not ideal for other forms of combat. But we invested a lot in them and they're brand new. I mention the FCS issue in the earlier post linked above. I did say the wonder tank won't be built. And I've droned on about the armor and weight issue enough, I suppose. But we do need to put designs for replacing the M-1 and M-2 in place. Those vehicles are outstanding, can be upgraded, but are getting old. Spinning out the supporting FCS technology to the entire force is great. But I don't know why we need to use the MRAPs when they aren't appropriate just because we bought them and they survived the war. Consider them investements in keeping our troops alive in combat and be grateful we could do that.]
So on the whole, I either agree with or understand and agree with the rationale for most of the decisions. Yet I'm still uncomfortable with the whole package. For one thing, I agree that preparing for a future war cannot suck resources for the current war. If we have to make a choice, I'd choose winning the war we're in now and taking risks for the future. But with the amount of money we're spending on a faux domestic problems, lack of money for long-term defense spending is not the issue. The administration has simply decided not to spend the money for future wars. That's the basic problem.
But we've made that decision to reduce defense spending and make sure this reduction doesn't affect the current war. Given this, the reason for my worry about the long-term spending is the whole "medium term" basis for all these decisions to slight our future (medium term) defenses. We assume no enemies will match us in the medium term. This is undoubtedly correct. But this also sounds too much like we're instituting the British Ten Year Rule from 1919.
It was a perfectly reasonable rule when adopted by the British government in 1919, which stated the British would not face a war in the next ten years. The rule was formally abolished 13 years later, in 1932. But defense spending did not rebound from its post-1919 collapse, and when war broke out in 1939, the British only barely proved they'd done enough to withstand the German offensive in the opening of the war.
Certainly, we won't face such a dramatic collapse in defense spending that the British military endured in the 1920s. My worry is whether we will do any better than the British did in recognizing when our version of the ten-year rule no longer holds true. When our national debt is scheduled to skyrocket even under optimistic administration projections, will we actually ramp up our defense spending once the medium term is over in order to maintain our military superiority? Or will we just continue to act as if the medium term never ends? That's what the British did. But they had the Arsenal of Democracy to back them up when they found themselves at war without the military they needed. We don't have such a back-up source of arms.
We've just instituted the Medium Term Rule on our defense spending. The problems that will flow from this plan won't show themselves in the near term. We can coast on our past progress in building the best military in the world. But have no doubt that our military strength will erode, and this means we are accepting risks in case we have to fight a conventional war in the medium term despite our assumption that we can still win such a war.
We won't cancel the Medium Term Rule until it's too late to do any good.
