Pentagon Wasting Assets

The Pentagon's Wasting Assets

by Andrew F. Krepinevich, Jr.

In Afghanistan, It's President Obama's War Now

The military foundations of the United States' global dominance are eroding

For the past several decades, an overwhelming advantage in technology and resources has given the U.S. military an unmatched ability to project power worldwide.

This has allowed it to guarantee U.S. access to the global commons, assure the safety of the homeland, and underwrite security commitments around the globe.

U.S. grand strategy assumes that such advantages will continue indefinitely. In fact, they are already starting to disappear.

Several events in recent years have demonstrated that traditional means and methods of projecting power and accessing the global commons are growing increasingly obsolete -- becoming "wasting assets," in the language of defense strategists.

The diffusion of advanced military technologies, combined with the continued rise of new powers, such as China, and hostile states, such as Iran, will make it progressively more expensive in blood and treasure -- perhaps prohibitively expensive -- for U.S. forces to carry out their missions in areas of vital interest, including East Asia and the Persian Gulf.

Military forces that do deploy successfully will find it increasingly difficult to defend what they have been sent to protect. Meanwhile, the U.S. military's long-unfettered access to the global commons -- including space and cyberspace -- is being increasingly challenged.

In China, the People's Liberation Army is aggressively developing capabilities and strategies to degrade the U.S. military's ability to project power into the region. Chinese efforts are focused on developing and fielding what U.S. military analysts refer to as "anti-access/area-denial" (A2/AD) capabilities, which seek to deny U.S. forces the ability to operate from forward bases. The large air bases in the region that host the U.S. Air Force's short-range strike aircraft and support aircraft are being targeted by ever-greater numbers of Chinese missiles. Chinese improvements in over-the-horizon targeting means that East Asian waters are slowly but surely becoming a potential no-go zone for U.S. ships.

Irregular forces are also gaining greater access to rapidly proliferating "RAMM" (rocket, artillery, mortar, and missile) capabilities. As they do, conventional military forces are finding it increasingly difficult to defend key fixed targets, such as military bases, critical economic infrastructure, and densely populated areas. The U.S. military has long enjoyed a near monopoly on the use of guided, or "smart," munitions. But now guided RAMMs ("G-RAMMs") are proliferating from powers such as China and Russia. As this continues, the ability of irregular forces to precisely hit critical points, such as airfields, harbor facilities, and logistics depots, will pose serious problems for the U.S. military's way of operating.

Cyberspace is another domain in which the U.S. military may face rapidly growing risk. Information technology permeates every aspect of its operations, from logistics and command and control to targeting and guidance. As this dependence has grown, so, too, has vulnerability to disruptions--especially disruptions of the battle networks linking U.S. forces.

If history is any guide, these trends cannot be undone.

Technology inevitably spreads, and no military has ever enjoyed a perpetual monopoly on any capability. The United States can either adapt to contemporary developments -- or ignore them at its peril. There is, first of all, a compelling need to develop new ways of creating military advantage in the face of contemporary geopolitical and technological trends. That means taking a hard look at military spending and planning -- increasing investments in areas of potential advantage while divesting likely "wasting assets."

But before questions about how to adapt military capabilities to future requirements can be considered coherently, there must be a new strategic framework.

The United States must pursue a more modest strategy than that advanced by the Bush administration in the wake of 9/11 -- one that reflects a better balance between goals and resources, reduces emphasis on wasting military assets, and involves the vigorous identification, development, and exploitation of new areas of advantage.

In general, Washington should adopt an indirect approach to addressing instability in the developing world, conserving the bulk of its resources for meeting other strategic priorities. Regarding traditional power projection, the United States should adopt an offsetting strategy whose objective is to parry efforts by China and Iran to deny the U.S. military access to East Asia and the Persian Gulf.

Finally, strong efforts should be undertaken to identify ways to preserve assured access to the global commons -- space, cyberspace, the seas and undersea.

Ignoring growing challenges to the United States' ability to project and sustain military capability overseas will not make those challenges go away. Sooner or later, they -- and their implications for U.S. security -- must be confronted.

A decline in the U.S. military's ability to influence events abroad may be inevitable; however, it should not be the result of indifference or lack of attention.

There are important strategic choices that the United States must make.

To avoid those choices now is simply to allow the United States' rivals to make them instead.

Andrew F. Krepinevich, Jr., is President of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments and the author of Seven Deadly Scenarios.

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