by Hal Brands
What are the implications of the Department of Defense’s adoption of a one-war standard that is focused on defeating a great-power rival? Hal Brands and Evan Braden Montgomery discuss the gap between America’s global commitments and the military challenges it can realistically meet.
The main pillar of this strategy is a new approach to force planning, which outlines how the U.S. military should be built to fight. For more than a generation, the United States maintained a two-war standard to ensure that it could defeat a pair of regional adversaries simultaneously or in quick succession. Now, the Defense Department has adopted a one-war standard geared toward defeating a great-power rival. In other words, rather than planning to win multiple medium-sized wars, the Defense Department is preparing to win a single major war against a formidable competitor, one that can match (at least in some areas) American military might. This shift represents the most significant departure in American defense strategy since the end of the Cold War, and it has tremendous ramifications for a country that still has security commitments — and security challenges — around the globe.
The most obvious risk of a one-war standard is that America might need to fight more than one war at a time. In fact, a one-war standard could increase this risk by tempting an opportunistic adversary to use force in one theater while Washington is occupied in another. Proponents of the one-war approach offer a number of options for avoiding a second war, if possible, or fighting it, if necessary, but these options are not promising: They would leave the United States strategically exposed, militarily overextended, or much more reliant on highly escalatory options that lack credibility. And as America loses the ability to handle challenges in more than one theater, it will also lose leverage in peacetime competitions and diplomatic crises. In short, the one-war standard exposes a serious mismatch between America’s global commitments and the military challenges it can realistically meet — a grand strategy-defense strategy gap that may prove extremely damaging in war and peace alike.
Why This National Defense Strategy Matters
The Case for the One-War Standard
The 2018 National Defense Strategy thus signals that America must reshape its military for a new era. That shift is based on four key factors. First, and most important, are strategic considerations. Unlike in the 1990s or 2000s, when America’s main opponents were non-state actors or rogue states, Washington’s chief competitors now include resurgent or rising great powers — near-peer competitors, in Pentagon parlance — that pose a serious threat to U.S. military primacy and could seriously challenge American alliance commitments in key regions.
The one-war construct is significant because it breaks with every U.S. defense strategy of the post-Cold War era.
Finally, there is the influence of historical trends. If the one-war standard marks a departure from post-Cold War defense planning, it is nonetheless part of a longer-running pattern. Since the mid-2000s, the Defense Department has been gradually moving toward less expansive defense strategies in response to resource constraints and the growing difficulties of war.
The shift to a one-war standard was thus not undertaken lightly. It rests on a set of powerful and, in many ways, reasonable considerations. The trouble is that the National Defense Strategy also carries with it a great deal of risk and offers few solutions for how to manage it.
Can America Avoid a Second War?
The most obvious risk of a one-war standard is that the United States could confront two or more conflicts at the same time. This is hardly far-fetched given that the United States currently faces at least five potential opponents — China, Russia, North Korea, Iran, and several major terrorist organizations — across three separate theaters — Europe, the Middle East, and the Indo-Pacific — in addition to the possibility that unexpected events or crises, such as a massive chemical weapons attack in Syria, a civil war in Venezuela, or a natural disaster at home or abroad, could require the use of the American military.
A two-war scenario could occur organically, with two crises escalating to conflicts more or less independently, which happened in 1965 when the United States invaded the Dominican Republic to avert a feared Communist takeover at the same time as it was escalating its involvement in Vietnam. Alternatively, the fact that the United States has a one-war standard could actually make a two-war scenario more likely. If American troops were involved in a major contingency but the United States lacked sufficient reserves to fight other rivals, then revisionist actors might see a window of opportunity to alter the status quo in their favor and jump through it while they had the chance.
If American troops were involved in a major contingency but the United States lacked sufficient reserves to fight other rivals, then revisionist actors might see a window of opportunity to alter the status quo in their favor and jump through it while they had the chance.
A second argument holds that the United States need not deter a second war because it can simply choose to delay its military response and fight that second conflict after it has wrapped up the first. From this perspective, America’s most important consideration would be to concentrate on the business at hand — namely, winning the war that is underway rather than spreading U.S. forces too thin by trying to fight a pair of wars at once. After the United States has defeated Russia’s bid to dominate the Baltic states, for instance, it could turn its attention toward defeating Iranian aggression in the Persian Gulf or meeting a Chinese challenge in the South China Sea — with the understanding that it would have to roll back some gains that the second adversary made while America was otherwise occupied.
The delay argument also makes sense at first glance. The ability to fight conflicts sequentially instead of simultaneously might keep opportunistic aggressors in check because they know they will be on the receiving end of a U.S. response eventually. Yet, the virtues of postponing intervention are not as clear-cut as they might seem.
An even bigger limitation, however, is that the delay argument only makes sense when the first war is also the most important war — when it is a conflict against China or Russia, rather than against Iran, North Korea, or some other, lesser threat. In this case, the dangers of failing to win the first war would almost certainly outweigh the dangers of allowing aggression in a second theater to go temporarily unanswered. For instance, if the United States were fighting China and Iran tried to take advantage of the situation, few would disagree that Washington should focus on dealing with Beijing and only turn its attention to Tehran later.
The more significant concern is that swearing off wars against certain opponents comes perilously close to abandoning deterrence altogether.
That calculus would be scrambled, however, if the situation were reversed. If the United States was fighting a regional power like Iran when a great power like China decided to initiate a crisis, the second war would be far more strategically consequential than the first, and the costs of delay would probably be far higher. That would leave the United States with the choice of either breaking off the first conflict and fighting the second with a weakened force, or somehow trying to juggle two wars with a force designed for one. Put another way, opportunistic aggression may not be a challenge that America can afford to ignore.
There are, of course, many reasons to be cautious about committing U.S. forces against second- or third-tier opponents in lower-priority theaters. Adapting for an era of great-power competition certainly requires stricter prioritization and the more judicious application of limited resources. Yet, the discipline argument still falls short, and not solely because the U.S. track record when it comes to focusing on China and Russia (as opposed to, say, North Korea and Iran) is already mixed at best. The more significant concern is that swearing off wars against certain opponents comes perilously close to abandoning deterrence altogether. No one should want to see the United States spend blood and treasure unnecessarily, or in ways that weaken its overall strategic position. Yet, simply refusing to use force against second-tier opponents absent some truly extreme provocation signals that America cannot and will not respond forcefully to aggression short of the outrageous. That, in turn, is a recipe for the dissipation of U.S. influence and the destabilization of areas, such as the Korean Peninsula and the Middle East, that still matter to American security.
Strategy in the Second War
Yet, the prospect of mobilization raises questions of will and ability. If Russia and China both launched major, unprovoked assaults on U.S. interests, a large and rapid mobilization of America’s manpower and industrial resources might be politically feasible. It is not a given, however, that the public would support such a mobilization to fight limited wars that began in ambiguous ways in theaters thousands of miles from American shores. Adversaries, knowing this, could calibrate their aims and actions to increase the probability that U.S. mobilization and military intervention would be controversial at home. China, for example, could issue an ultimatum against Taiwan without actually firing a shot or use its coast guard vessels rather than its navy to provoke Japan in the East China Sea, while Russia might seize a small piece of territory in a Baltic state rather than occupy an entire country, and might use unmarked soldiers or contractors rather than uniformed military personnel. Under these conditions, would there be significant popular and political support for a U.S. military response, let alone for marshaling the extra personnel and materiel necessary to fight a pair of wars?
Risk-Taking, Decision-Making, and the Military Balance
The United States could unintentionally end up not with a one-war standard but a zero-war strategy, because committing the American military anywhere poses too great a risk to Washington’s commitments and interests everywhere.
It is true, of course, that there are also clear risks associated with not focusing intently enough on being able to defeat a single great-power adversary. If America cannot credibly claim that it can rebuff Russian or Chinese aggression because it has remained preoccupied with lesser threats, then U.S. geopolitical leverage in Europe and the Western Pacific will decline precipitously — as will America’s ability to deter conflict. Yet, in buying down this particular type of geopolitical risk, the one-war standard threatens to expose the United States to all the other risks that come from having a one-theater force in a three-theater world.
A Time for Choosing
The architects of the National Defense Strategy are right about one thing: The Defense Department cannot go back to business as usual if that means focusing on relatively weak rivals at the expense of transforming the military to deal with hostile great powers. A world in which the United States has the force structure to defeat North Korea and Iran but not the advanced capabilities and concepts needed to defeat China or Russia would be incredibly dangerous from the perspective of American alliances and geopolitical stability. To remain relevant in today’s global environment, any defense strategy must keep rival great powers in the crosshairs.
Yet, the Defense Department’s current approach is far riskier than it might appear. Pairing a one-war defense standard with America’s existing global commitments is a recipe for disaster. Without adequate military muscle to back up its threats and promises, Washington could grow so reluctant to uphold its security commitments that they become nearly worthless. Or it could try to enforce those commitments and fail. In either case, adversaries would have more incentives to challenge the status quo, while allies would have more incentives to look out for themselves. The United States could find itself fighting conflicts for which it is not prepared — or sliding, by default rather than by design, into a less ambitious grand strategy that compels it to stay on the sidelines as American influence plummets and international order erodes.
There is no magic formula for solving this problem. There are steps the United States can take to narrow the gap between its defense strategy and its global commitments: pushing allies to strengthen their defense capabilities, modernizing America’s nuclear arsenal and developing more limited nuclear options, improving the country’s mobilization base, and others. But Washington should be adopting many of these measures under any defense strategy, and, moreover, they still might not fully close the gap that the National Defense Strategy reveals.
The United States must decide soon whether to invest significantly more resources in stiffening the hard-power backbone of its grand strategy or scale back that grand strategy to better fit its defense capabilities.
In this scenario, the Defense Department would maintain at least a 1.5 war standard: It would combine the capabilities needed to defeat a great power like Russia or China with the capacity required to also fight a regional power war at more or less the same time. This approach would require simultaneously developing the innovative capabilities and concepts needed to deal with a great-power rival and preserving (or strengthening) the force structure, sealift and airlift, munitions stockpiles, and other assets needed to do more than one thing at a time. That might not be enough to avoid the nightmare scenario of facing overlapping great power conflicts, which would remain unmanageable without a far greater mobilization of American society as a whole. Nevertheless, it would help to deter regional-power aggression if the United States were fighting a great-power war (and vice versa), while also providing a cushion if a great-power war went worse than expected. It would not completely close the gap between America’s commitments and its capabilities, but it would narrow it and reduce the dangers it poses.
The flaws of the one-war standard can be thought of as the canary in the coal mine — the warning of greater perils and far sharper dilemmas to come. The United States must decide soon whether to invest significantly more resources in stiffening the hard-power backbone of its grand strategy or scale back that grand strategy to better fit its defense capabilities. What it should not do is assume that this choice between unpalatable options can somehow be avoided. The worst approach to dealing with any glaring strategic problem is to pretend that the problem does not exist.
Hal Brands is Henry Kissinger Distinguished Professor of Global Affairs at the John Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, and a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. His most recent book, with Charles Edel, is The Lessons of Tragedy: Statecraft and World Order (2019). He is currently writing a book on how history can inform America’s approach to long-term competitions with China and Russia.
No comments:
Post a Comment