BY THOMAS E. RICKS
JANUARY 5, 201
Best Defense regular columnist
Capabilities Based Planning. It just rolls off the tongue, doesn’t it? Pure poetry.
Not really. It’s haute jargon, Pentagon style, the kind of defense concept that mystifies outsiders and repels invaders. And though the concept predated Donald Rumsfeld’s tenure, he embraced it and enshrined it in his 2001 Quadrennial Defense Review as a tool to promote transformation of the military. But this is not purely a history lesson: The ghost of that jargon past still haunts the 2015 defense budget Congress just (finally) passed.
Let me decode the term, or at least what it means to me: “we didn’t know who the enemy was anymore but wanted really big weapons programs, anyway.” Or in Rumsfeld’s own words: “A capability-based strategy [is] one that focuses less on who might threaten us or where we might be threatened, and more on how we might be threatened and what we need to do to deter and defend against such threats.”
It didn’t start out as such a bad idea. The end of the Cold War did not mean it was safe to mothball U.S. armed forces. Forgive my pessimism, but war seems to be an inevitable corollary to the human condition. One of the great tasks of nations is how to stay out of wars and if that’s not possible, how to win them. But it can take decades to build new military skills and weapons, so not knowing what threats the nation might face in the future was an investment challenge, not a vacuum.
Enter capabilities based planning. It was not necessarily the wrong approach, but it allowed much room for artificial selection; we wanted to build a high-tech, “networked” military, therefore that was the kind of foe we focused on.
What that sometimes meant in practice was no outer boundary on technological complexity. Say what you will about threat-based planning, it does come with a certain amount of discipline. But if the point in developing a new gun is to make it the most awesome gun it can be, how exactly it’s going to defeat a real-life enemy or how the United States is going to afford to buy, operate, and maintain it may get lost in the shuffle.
And in the years since Rumsfeld’s first QDR, the Defense Department has wasted billions of dollars on what former Secretary of Defense Gates called “exquisite” programs: The Army’s canceled Future Combat System, the USMC’s canceled Expeditionary Fighting Vehicle, and the Navy’s curtailed and canceled next-generation destroyer and cruiser programs. The Air Force’s truncated F-22 program gets an honorable mention, since it was actually initiated in the Cold War. These were all beautiful, breathtaking machines, but their technical complexity and high cost turned out to be a culminating point. Or in the case of the Navy’s Littoral Combat Ship and the Air Force et al’s Joint Strike Fighter, they lumber on in the FY 2015 budget.
Unfortunately, as the military cliché goes, the enemy gets a vote. On September 10, 2001, even as Donald Rumsfeld was declaring a “war on bureaucracy” and calling for military transformation, the actual enemy was voting to sidestep U.S. military strengths altogether. In the years since, the conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria have proven that even relatively technologically unsophisticated foes can be dangerous for U.S. interests, and that expensive solutions may be neither effective nor sustainable against such cheap threats.
But there are other threats to consider. North Korea seems to have a habit of acting up during the holidays, and this year’s special gift was a thinly veiled cyber strike team threatening kinetic attacks against U.S. civilian targets. An economically imploding, belligerent Russia just last month successfully tested a new intercontinental ballistic missile close to Alaska’s Aleutian Islands; the missile is capable of traveling 5,000 miles and carrying up to ten nuclear warheads. And while China and the United States should have zero interest in going to war against each other, given the mutual high stakes, take a look at the very sophisticated military they are developing if you’re tempted to be complacent. These are some of the real dangers and potential threats the nation faces, and we need a real defense to deal with them – not a rafter of handsome turkeys that actual, nimbler foes can dance right around for a lot less money.
So, while we hear a great deal about the importance of acquisition reform, and it is certainly important, these procurement disasters were not really the fault of the acquisition workforce. It was strategic ambiguity, requirements creep, and the push to “transform” and “revolutionize” the military without any particular adversary in the sights that spawned such messy acquisitions.
RIP, capabilities based planning.
The Hon. Sharon Burke is a senior advisor at New America, where she is working on a book to be titled The Energy of War. From 2010-2014, she was the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Operational Energy. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Department of Defense or the U.S. Government .
Tom note: This column inaugurates what we hope and pray will be a regular feature of the blog by her, under the title “THE PENTAGONER.”
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