Dakota Wood
America’s military—engaged beyond capacity and in need of rebuilding—is at a crucial juncture. Its current “big-leap” approach to preparing for future conflict carries great risk in searching for revolutionary capabilities through force-wide commitments to major single-solution programs. The Heritage Foundation’s Rebuilding America’s Military Project (RAMP) recommends that the U.S. military instead adopt an iterative, experimentation-heavy approach that can achieve revolutionary outcomes at less risk through evolutionary improvements that build on each other until transformative tipping points are reached. Critical to this is a military culture that is immersed in the study of war and a force of sufficient capacity to prepare for the future while also handling current operational commitments.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
In preparing for future conflict, we must assume that the future is nonlinear and that force capacity is critical to nearly every preparation activity.
Military preference for generational leaps in capability incurs equally significant risks to ensuring that the force remains operationally relevant between leaps.
Successful preparation depends on experimentation, iterative modernization, warfighting-focused education, and a military culture distinct from civilian affairs.
This Special Report is the first in a series from The Heritage Foundation’s Center for National Defense that addresses the U.S. military’s efforts to prepare for future challenges. This paper establishes the framework to be used by the papers that follow that will individually address each military service.
[The] future is not preordained. This is the main reason why prediction is so difficult. There are decisions yet to be made, even about challenges that are well understood, along with chance events that will catch us unawares and developments already in train that have been inadequately appreciated.
Lawrence Freedman, The Future of War: A History (New York: Public Affairs, 2017), p. 287.
Introduction
On September 7, 2016, in a major speech outlining his views on national security, then-presidential nominee Donald J. Trump proposed rebuilding America’s military, noting its small size and unreadiness to deal with the maturing challenges posed by major states like China and Russia and the ongoing threat to U.S. security interests posed by terrorist and international criminal groups.2
Donald Trump, “Transcript of Donald Trump’s Speech on National Security in Philadelphia,” The Hill, September 7, 2016, http://thehill.com/blogs/pundits-blog/campaign/294817-transcript-of-donald-trumps-speech-on-national-security-in (accessed June 14, 2018).
Mr. Trump was not alone in noting worrisome trends and conditions. During the 2016 election cycle, nearly every major presidential candidate voiced similar concerns and policy objectives.
Since that time, leaders from both political parties in both chambers of Congress, as well as senior civilian and military officials in the Department of Defense (DOD), have noted the military’s deteriorated readiness, capacity, and modernity to shoulder the tasks of defending national security interests. Such tasks could include missions conducted under a broad range of circumstances, from conventional war between major powers to various forms of irregular warfare involving sub-state aggressors or terrorist groups to security operations conducted in partnership with like-minded states.
If the military truly has significant shortcomings in its ability to secure the country and its interests and must therefore be rebuilt, what should rebuilding mean? To answer that question, The Heritage Foundation suggests an approach to rebuilding America’s military power that holds the best prospects for success in the years ahead.
Analysts and defense pundits consistently say that the future cannot be known, yet they attempt to forecast the future based on observable trends, projecting those trends decades into the future in order to speculate on likely future conditions. In turn, the military services use those forecasts to inform modernization plans and related efforts meant to prepare them for future missions.
The Heritage Foundation’s Rebuilding America’s Military Project (RAMP) will provide a practical approach not only to reconstituting U.S. military power, but also to preparing the military for future conflict in a way that accounts most effectively for things that can and cannot be known. Included in the first category are advances in technology; the realities of defense acquisition; military service histories in experimentation and force development; the nature of competitions involving states, non-state entities, and affected populations; and historically rooted aspects of military affairs. The second category involves the specifics of all of these factors as they interact over time, invariably leading to outcomes and conditions that are impossible to know before they occur.
RAMP will be published in a series of five papers. This first paper sets the stage for the papers that follow with an overview of Heritage’s approach to dealing with “futures.” We begin by examining the critical importance of replacing the current “big-leap” approach to military preparedness with an iterative, incremental approach based on experimentation that would have a much greater likelihood of ensuring that the armed forces of the United States are properly prepared for the future than are those of America’s competitors.
Subsequent papers will address how such an approach would pertain specifically to each service and what opportunities exist for the U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps to develop and integrate new capabilities even as they execute current programs of record such as the F-35 fighter, B-21 bomber, Ford-class aircraft carrier, and Columbia-class ballistic missile submarine and undertake reorganization of their operational units and formations.
Importantly, RAMP does not attempt to predict specific outcomes, nor does it presume to know the pace at which adjustments to the force might occur. It also does not predict how competitors might change their forces and approaches to conflict. Rather, this approach recognizes that warfare—preparation for war as well as actual combat—is an interactive and highly volatile condition involving an unpredictable number of participants who act, react, and counteract in ways and for reasons that are unique to specific circumstances at any given moment. It is this dynamic nature of conflict and competition that makes preparing for war years in advance of its outbreak such a challenge.
Through RAMP, we propose a different paradigm for force preparation and modernization, a paradigm that involves an investment strategy for rebuilding America’s military that allocates taxpayer dollars to efforts with the greatest potential to generate meaningful combat power that is relevant to the world in which the military must operate. RAMP urges the military establishment to adopt a different way of thinking about its approach to ensuring that the Joint Force is able to defeat any adversary—not only today or next year, but on the battlefields that inevitably will materialize 20 or 30 years from now. RAMP calls on the U.S. military to shift its thinking from the 20-year leap approach—in constant pursuit of the next transformative moment—to a more iterative and evolutionary approach that will result in a force that is more consistently modern, mentally agile, spiritually resilient, and culturally confident, regardless of the nature of the enemy or the circumstances of combat.
Challenges to Rebuilding
During the past few years, a chorus of voices—voices from across the government and the military services and including national security analysts and commentators—has noted the deteriorated state of the U.S. military’s readiness for conventional war against a major adversary. The U.S. military is smaller, older, and less ready for large-scale operations today than at any other time in nearly 80 years or more, while challenges to U.S. security interests have grown in number and severity since the end of the Cold War.3
Comparisons of military force size vary depending on what is being compared. The U.S. Navy possesses the fewest ships since the beginning of World War I. The U.S. Air Force did not formally exist as a separate service until 1947. The United States Army Air Service was established in 1918, retitled as the United States Army Air Corps in 1926, and again retitled as the United States Army Air Force in 1941. Most comparisons between current numbers of platforms and units with their earlier cousins show that the capacity of the force is very small despite its modernity.
The military’s weakened condition is due in large measure to more than 16 years of unremitting combat operations in the Middle East and South Asia, a series of high-profile and very expensive modernization program failures during the 1990s and early 2000s, generally flat or reduced budgets since the end of the Cold War, severe cuts in defense funding imposed by the Budget Control Act of 2011, and general budget volatility over the past several years. At the same time, China and Russia have committed to updating and expanding their military capabilities and using their enhanced power to pursue objectives antithetical to U.S. interests globally, and Iran and North Korea have taken bold steps to exert dominant influence in their respective regions, working to overturn security arrangements long underwritten by the U.S.
To correct this situation, U.S. political leaders have committed to “rebuilding the military.” But this raises fundamental questions: Rebuild it to do what, with what capabilities, in what form, and with what capacity?
Finding answers to such questions means trying to anticipate the conditions for which the military must prepare. Assumptions must be made about potential adversaries, the circumstances that lead to war, the nature of conflict, and its scale and scope. Counterinsurgency operations against an enemy that lacks artillery, armor, aircraft, and ships is far different from large-scale conventional operations against a fully equipped major state. The military must assess whether various emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics, enable it to conduct major combat actions with a smaller force than previously needed or whether capacity will remain an issue in spite of new capabilities.
Forecasting the nature, location, and context of battles that may be fought 20 or 30 years in the future might seem a fool’s errand, but one cannot prepare for a war after the fact. If only from a material standpoint, the services must purchase new equipment to replace items nearing the end of their planned service life. With ships, aircraft, and tanks lasting 20 to 40 years or more, military leaders are compelled to make the most informed decision possible before committing vast sums of money to programs that must remain relevant in as many settings as possible for as long as possible.
That the future is unknowable in its details is true, but it is also true that facets of the future can be glimpsed because some elements that will comprise it (for example, demographic trends) can be seen today and are difficult to change. This is likewise true for the military, largely because it already has or is in the process of acquiring many of the tools it will use 20 years from now. The “known unknowns,” to borrow from Donald Rumsfeld, that frustrate serious planners comprise those things that are known to be highly volatile, the things that are so variable that even though one knows about them, one cannot predict what will become of them a year from now, much less 20 or 30 years from now.4
News Transcript, “DoD News Briefing—Secretary Rumsfeld and Gen. Myers,” U.S. Department of Defense, February 12, 2002, http://archive.defense.gov/Transcripts/Transcript.aspx?TranscriptID=2636 (accessed June 12, 2018).
Technology and specific human behaviors fall into this latter group.
When dealing with these “known unknowns,” two critically important factors, seldom addressed in service documents, come into play: nonlinearity and capacity. In The Future of War: A History, Lawrence Freedman sensibly observes that “the future is not preordained” and cannot be predicted because it evolves from the interaction of people with events.5
Freedman, The Future of War, pp. xvii–xix and 277–287.
While history and statistical modeling can point to reasonable probabilities, they cannot state with certainty that a specific condition will arise. Because specific individuals will occupy key positions in the future and public reactions to future events and conditions will be determined by the specific individuals who comprise society at that time, the ability to prepare for the future depends on the ability to adapt to changing conditions as awareness of them evolves.
The surest way for a military to keep pace with changing conditions is to experiment constantly to see what “new” means in practice and to maintain competence in the warfighting skills that history has shown to have enduring value. So too must the military remain routinely engaged with the world to know what and how conditions are changing and to be in a position to shape events favorably along the way.
Nonlinearity. Analyzing observable trends and using methodologies that explore possible alternative futures are useful in trying to peer into the future. The military establishment regularly attempts to understand trends in and their implications for everything from potential causes and likely locations of conflict to the progress of various technologies and how they may affect the conduct of military operations. Defense planners know that however good any weapon, sensor, or platform (ship, plane, or vehicle) may be, new technologies will alter conditions so that targets are harder to find, systems are easier to detect, opposing forces are separated by greater distances, and advanced capabilities are more affordable and more widely available. Given finite resources and the time it takes to develop, field, and become proficient with new tools, the military services emphasize understanding where trends may lead so that the tools of war are relevant and effective for as long as possible.
Such efforts often create new problems, however. In the attempt to ensure that major defense programs cover as many potential challenges as possible, equipment requirements tend to become more expansive in scope and scale. This leads to complexity in design, greater challenges in development and production, extended time to field, and increased cost. Along the way, everyone involved in the process—from the services to manufacturers, supporters in Congress, and senior Administration defense officials—becomes heavily invested in the program. Ultimately, a major program accumulates so much momentum that canceling it is difficult even if conditions turn out to be very different from those that were originally anticipated.
A similar pattern of nonlinearity occurs in trend and threat analysis. Throughout the Cold War, for example, the Soviet Union remained a consistent pacing threat against which the U.S. military assessed challenges and developed capability and employment concept solutions.
During the 1990s, with the Soviet Union gone and states like China and Russia yet to emerge as serious challengers to the U.S., military planners adopted a capabilities-based approach to modernization rather than a threat-based approach. This method envisioned capabilities that would be desirable regardless of the opponent, which led to a host of programs premised on the promise of future technological advances that included comprehensive situational awareness and assured information exchange among highly distributed forces, widespread use of unmanned systems, and long-range munitions of great precision.
Unfortunately, many of these programs were overly aspirational and ended in cancellation. The technologies of the day were not sufficiently mature to produce usable capabilities within tolerable budgets and timelines.
The September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks refocused the military on counterterrorism and, a few years later, counterinsurgency operations. Real-world problems such as detecting, protecting against, and neutralizing improvised explosive devices (roadside bombs) and identifying militants and their support networks within large civilian populations demanded the full attention of the U.S. defense establishment, overriding concerns about and preparation for conventional war.
Within this strategic context—the immediate demands of counterinsurgency/counter-terrorist operations and the lack of a major state competitor as assessed by the defense/national security community—an entire body of work and futures forecasting arose that emphasized the nature, likelihood, and future challenges of conflict short of large-scale conventional war. Futurists predicted that war would involve some variation of irregular warfare, variously described as (among other descriptors) hybrid, gray zone, ambiguous, or asymmetric—anything but large-scale, conventional, state-vs.-state conflict akin to World War II or the Korean War. Or so the argument went.
To the frustration of many military futurists, competitor state powers have arisen while the U.S. has remained fixated on irregular wars. China, Russia, North Korea, and Iran have emerged as serious threats to U.S. interests in key regions, throwing the services’ views of what future conflict would be like into disarray. This is especially true with respect to the Army and Marine Corps.
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