One of Washington’s favorite parlor games involves guessing which of the president’s key advisers may be departing and the identities of those who might replace them. At the center of this game is U.S. Defense Secretary Robert Gates, who is widely rumored to be departing his post sometime this year, perhaps as soon as this summer.
As Gates is arguably this country’s finest defense secretary ever, his will be a hard act to follow, and this has only heightened the speculation regarding who might succeed him.
Whoever takes the reins at the Pentagon will face a formidable array of challenges, including a defense budget that is almost certain to decline, perhaps substantially, in the coming years as Washington tries to come to grips with the country’s rapidly weakening fiscal standing.
Moreover, while military budget cuts are characteristic of periods following the end of a war, such as Korea and Vietnam, or when the threats to the nation’s security diminish substantially, as occurred at the Cold War’s end, the opposite is occurring now.
Consider that while U.S. forces are drawing down in Iraq and should begin withdrawing from Afghanistan in the not-too-distant future, it is far from clear they will leave a less threatening situation behind than what exists today. While the Obama administration has opened a third front in Libya, there are broader risks in the Mideast as a number of states make the volatile transition from authoritarianism to proto-democracies.
If that were the next defense secretary's only problems, they would be formidable enough. However, there are other storm clouds visible on the security horizon.
China is clearly engaged in a major effort to shift the military balance in the Western Pacific to the point where U.S. guarantees to its allies in the region may no longer be credible, and countries in the region might be compelled to accommodate Beijing as East Asia’s hegemon. To this end, China is building up its missile forces to threaten the major U.S. bases at Kadena on Okinawa and Andersen on Guam.
The Chinese military has already demonstrated the ability to destroy satellites in low-Earth orbit and, along with its cyber weapons, threaten the coherence of the American military’s battle networks.
Should Iran acquire nuclear weapons, the world will be confronted by an inherently unstable Israeli-Iranian competition. Ballistic missile flight times between the two countries are less than 10 minutes, leaving little time for early warning and command-and-control systems to enable an effective response — assuming both countries have the resources and technical expertise to build, maintain and operate them.
Confronted with a Persian Bomb and an Israeli Bomb, who is to say that Turkey and the leading Arab states will forgo their own nuclear capability? Pakistan, which may soon be producing far more plutonium in its reactors than it can consume locally, may seize the opportunity to extend its own form of nuclear umbrella to some of the gulf states. In the meantime, it remains the world’s most unstable nuclear state.
Cyber weapons have been used by states for espionage purposes and by criminals for profit. Yet they also have the potential to inflict catastrophic damage at the strategic level — for example, by taking down power grids or disrupting financial systems — and they could do so with little or no warning.
Oddly, the U.S. military is charged only with defending the “.mil” domain, even though many critical elements of America’s war-fighting posture, especially the defense industry, remain beyond the protective mandate of the newly created U.S. Cyber Command.
The value of commerce at sea can no longer be measured purely in terms of the cargo in merchant ships’ holds. The combined value of oil rigs, wellheads, pumping stations and fiber-optic cables along the U.S. continental shelves runs into the trillions of dollars. Many of these assets are, in military parlance, relatively soft or vulnerable targets.
In recent years, the U.S. military has lost its near-monopoly in guided, or smart, weapons to major states like China. In the coming years, even non-state groups seem likely to acquire guided mortars and rockets. As they do, it will transform irregular warfare, making military operations in the developing world far more risky than they are today.
In brief, the spread of guided weapons, the proliferation of nuclear weapons to unstable states in the developing world and the rapidly growing menace of cyber warfare suggest a future in which the U.S. military’s current ways of projecting power and defending the American homeland are likely to be severely challenged.
Arguably the U.S. has not confronted such a combination of growing security challenges from such a weak economic position since the 1930s. And although history rarely repeats itself, it often “rhymes.”
Before the next secretary of defense calls in his green eyeshade staff, as he undoubtedly must and will, he should first have some sense of how — or if — the U.S. military can meet the challenges outlined above, and the implications for the defense program.
Absent such an effort, there is a high risk that false economies will be realized while our military remains organized, trained and equipped to meet the familiar, comfortable challenges our rivals are abandoning in favor of those described above.
As Sir Francis Bacon observed, “He who will not apply new remedies must expect new evils.”