Military Officer - December 2006 - (Page 74)

would be most useful in tracking terrorists in remote areas of Africa and Central Asia? Dealing with a destabilized Pakistan or Saudi Arabia — al-Qaida’s two principal targets? Thwarting radical Islamist attempts to smuggle a nuclear weapon into the U.S.? Conducting persistent extended searches for North Korean nuclear-tipped missiles emerging from their caves to launch an attack? Deﬂecting the efforts of China’s submarines, 10 years hence, to threaten the U.S. Navy’s ability to defend Taiwan from coercion or aggression? Clearly it is the infant initiatives spawned by the QDR, which cost but a fraction of the legacy programs whose It seems likely that the four services have important roles to play in addressing direct, catastrophic threats to the American homeland. principal focus is on traditional forms of warfare that the QDR rightly notes are of progressively less relevance. Yet most of these worthy initiatives are underfunded — or not funded at all. Other promising programs, such as creating an “advisory corps” to train other militaries in the war against radical Islamists, have been sacriﬁced altogether. In a case of “robbing Peter to pay Paul,” the Army has had to scale back its force modularity plans to divert soldiers into the SOF units. Although the effort to increase the military’s SOF capability is laudable, scaling back the Army force structure seems unwise given its current high deployment levels. As noted above, the QDR performs a great service in identifying security challenges that in some cases are very different from the “two Desert Storm” planning metric that has shaped much of the defense program since the Cold War’s end. In so doing, the QDR implies some ﬁrstorder decisions or adjustments to the defense posture: ■ The Army and Marine Corps need to place top priorities on irregular challenges to our security, with prin74 MILITARY OFFICER DECEMBER 2006 cipal emphasis on capabilities associated with foreign military assistance, special operations, counterinsurgency, counterterror “man-hunting,” and human intelligence. ■ The Air Force and Navy need to reorient themselves on existing and prospective disruptive challenges (e.g., China), placing primary emphasis on countering emerging anti-access/area-denial capabilities and threats to the global commons (e.g., space, the “infosphere,” the maritime domain). It seems likely that the four services have important roles to play in addressing direct, catastrophic threats to the American homeland. These include defense against ballistic- and cruise-missile attack, border control, defense against delivery of WMD through nontraditional means (e.g., capabilities for identifying, tagging, and tracking these weapons), and consequence management. Military operations over the past 15 years have demonstrated that when America’s enemies challenge us in traditional warfare, as in the two Gulf wars and in the Balkans, air power can play an important, if not dominant, role. While all four services should maintain a signiﬁcant residual capability for traditional warfare, the Army and Marine Corps should be able to migrate more capabilities into other challenge areas than either the Air Force or the Navy. In addition to rebalancing service forces and capabilities to address irregular, catastrophic, and disruptive challenges to U.S. security, the military needs to undertake key institutional changes. Among them are: ■ refocusing the professional military education system to emphasize the study of Asia in general and radical Islam and China in particular. Irregular warfare is also in need of increased emphasis; ■ changing the focus of intelligence operations to place much greater emphasis on human intelligence than in the recent past; ■ ensuring that today’s ofﬁcers become “biosciencesliterate” owing to the prospect of biological weapons becoming available to hostile non-state entities that may prove difﬁcult, if not impossible, to deter; ■ continuing to transform the training infrastructure to better account for irregular, catastrophic, and disruptive challenges to U.S. security; and ■ restructuring the force to enable sufﬁcient forces to be sustained in protracted irregular conﬂict. The Navy and Marine Corps long ago established a rotation base for their forces. More recently, signiﬁcant progress is being made in this area, with the Air Expeditionary Forces and the Army’s modularity initiative. However, these forces are oriented primarily toward traditional challenges. Finally, more effort will be needed in areas where the QDR is effectively silent, such as: ■ developing a strategy for the defense industrial base that fosters innovation while addressing [CONTINUES ON PAGE 81]

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Military Officer - December 2006

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