Marching to a New Tune

With the events of the past few days, it appears that there has been a real change in the way the United States handles it's defense policy. What direction is our military taking into the future?

Only a few hours ago, the Secretary of Defense Robert Gates announced a new direction forward for the Pentagon. In it was not simply a change of rhetoric, but a change in direction. Because the change came from a bureaucrat, it is possible that much more of the change will actually be implemented, which means that we might very much see some real changes to the U.S. military in the next few decades.

The change is moving things forward in a few different ways. The biggest is that it is reversing the long-standing trend of cuts to active-duty military personnel. No longer is the path toward eventually phasing out the human aspect entirely, but rather it is realizing the extensive needs of the human element in the irregular wars we've been fighting (after all, drones can't go house to house and ask residents to give out names of terrorists like real people can). As well, there's a focus of moving towards increasing special ops, as well as more translators, and social studies majors embedded in military units.

But what's more important than what's put in is what's left out. The highlight of the chopping block was the Future Combat Systems program. Basically, for the first time since the New Model Army, a major military was being redesigned from the ground up in a cohesive way. One protocol for networking vehicles together, one protocol for weapon specs and military doctrine to use them. Rather than being hodge-podge upgrades, this was going to be a clean-sweep, followed by a set-piece American army.

The problem, other than it's massive budged overruns and startling lack of progress, was what it was designed to do. Specifically, it was designed to fight a major war with contemporary major powers.

The problem, of course, is that none of the other major powers have made any real strides in their military capabilities in over 20 years. The U.S. ended the Cold War 2 or 3 steps ahead of everyone else, and, due to research over the past 20 years, are now more like 10 or 12. In short, the U.S. already HAS the ability to crush any possible combination of major powers in a conventional war, and that would only happen in the first place once it somehow became okay to engage in such a war in the age of nuclear weapons.

There is still, however, the vague threat of developing industrialized powers. Iran, for example, could be persuasively argued to be trying to make a nuclear weapon while North Korea just attempted another ballistic missile test.

The thing we have to remember, though, is that the U.S. as far as military technology is concerned, is where it is due to 50 YEARS of cold war defense spending as the most productive nation on the planet. North Korea, on the other hand, is using a way smaller resource base, and has spent much less time. The U.S., for example, was able to put a satellite into orbit after 10 years of trying. North Korea, on the other hand, has spent the past 10 years since their first disastrous taepodong test (that blew up less than a mile off the launchpad) reworking the rocket into one that can unreliably fail and discharge its payload somewhere in the Pacific Ocean.

This new move by the pentagon shows that someone down there understands that we already have the ability to crush everyone, and the most threatening states (conventionally speaking), are ones that are so far behind our current capabilities that if we stopped now, it would take centuries for them to catch up.

But what does this all mean? Firstly, it means that the Department of Defense is FINALLY coming to the realization that, even though we've had a long time since our last major war, the next major war is still an impossibly long way into the future. As well, it signals a turning away from the idea that technology wins wars to the idea that technique wins wars. It's going to be the trained counter-insurgent, not the trained F-22 Raptor pilot that will really be winning our wars in the future.

As such, with a change in doctrine, capabilities, and funding, the U.S. will be much better handled to win wars like Iraq and Afghanistan in the future. Of course, in theory, it also gives everyone else a chance to catch up to us, military-technology-wise. Once a relative single, overarching hegemon in the field of global power is gone, conflict among major powers is not only possible, but likely. This conflict, however, would still be deterred by the threat of nuclear weapons (unless people have actually gotten rid of them in the far future). As such, major war will only be possible if several major actors catch up AND technology neutralizes nuclear weapons.

Given the fact the the U.S. is the only country seriously attempting to neutralize nukes (through it's variety of anti-missile systems), and it's joining the rest of the developed world that isn't really making conventional weapons upgrades, a move in the direction that the Pentagon is currently taking seems more than prudent.

For further reading, click here or here.