on airfields, surface-to-air missile sites, and vulnerable command-and-control nodes—have become liabilities more than assets and must be dispersed, hidden, or eliminated.
Once the ground conflict begins, enemies must, they understand, use superior mass to offset the lethal firepower and precision technology of Western armies. They will capitalize on the positional advantages of the defensive in or near their own territory. As they gain confidence, they will search for opportunities to mass sufficient force to achieve local successes. As in the Kosovo air campaign, they will seek to frustrate Western ground forces with just enough modern weaponry to extend the campaign indefinitely. A few precision cruise missiles against major logistic bases will add to the casualty rates that Western militaries must explain to their citizens. The object will not be decisive victory but stalemate. A prolonged stalemate will erode Western political support for the conflict.
As non-Western militaries develop concepts for defeating the U.S.’s firepower-centered method of war, the character and composition of their forces are changing. The Cold War impulse to clone Western force structures is disappearing. Foreign militaries are taking on their own identities. The mountains of metal, consisting of expensive yet often second-rate land, sea, and air machines that serve as lucrative targets are rapidly vanishing. In particular, non-Western armies are becoming lighter.
Evidence of this trend can be found on the shopping lists of emerging militaries. Instead of sophisticated aircraft and blue-water navies, most are pursuing cheap weapons of mass destruction and the methods of delivering them. Acquisition of sea and land mines, as well as distributed air-defense weapons, suggest that the intent of these militaries is to keep potential enemies at bay. Most expenditures and attention go to land forces, because in nondemocratic states armies provide political legitimacy. They are also useful instruments for waging regional wars of aggression, and they are sure means for suppressing internal dissent and thwarting troublesome outsiders.
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So I’m here today to say that climate change constitutes a serious threat to global security, an immediate risk to our national security.
—President Barack Obama
The least successful enterprise in Washington, D.C., is the one that places bets on the nature and character of tomorrow’s wars. The industry remains enormously influential and well financed, because everyone in Washington knows that bad bets cost lives and waste trillions. As our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan wind down, the services, defense industries, and their supporting think tanks, along with Congress, academia, and the media, continue the search for a new and imaginative view of wars to come. Virtually without exception, they get it wrong—and only in Washington are bad bets rewarded rather than punished.
The future-gazing industry grew apace with the emerging dominance of the United States military after World War II. Since then, two generations of failed future-gazers have made the term “intelligence failure” a hyphenated word. Perhaps at no time in our history has a single governmental function been so singularly (and rightfully) vilified. From 9/11 to the appearance of the Sunni insurgency in 2003, to the more recent return of the Taliban and the profoundly disturbing and unexpected arrival of ISIS, our intelligence agencies have left a sorrowful trail of missed guesses and informational black holes. In fairness to current political leaders, our poor record in forecasting threats has a long and uninterrupted provenance that has led to tragic strategic surprises. Korea caught Truman completely by surprise and unprepared for war. Kennedy and Johnson would never have gone to war in Vietnam had they suspected that the price would be sixty thousand dead. Saddam’s surprise invasion of Kuwait in 1990 was an intelligence meltdown of the first order. In 2003, Saddam never had weapons of mass destruction.
Failure to predict the time, place, cost, duration, intensity, and nature of the threat has cost the nation dearly in lives and treasure. Every aspect of defense policy and management is dependent upon anticipating properly whom we will fight and, equally, whom we should ignore. Poor threat prediction has too often led to the purchase of weapons and development of forces ill suited to the exigencies of future battlefields. Failure cannot be ascribed to want of effort. Without question, the most engaging sport inside the Beltway is “threat analysis” by legions of academics and think-tank gurus. The collective bill for intelligence prediction is somewhere north of fifty billion per year. Satellites, drones, planes, and computers spend millions of hours looking and counting. Tens of thousands of well-credentialed analysts work tirelessly, interpreting the data in an effort to divine the future.
Threat prediction fails, in part, because the process is done today using methodologies inherited from the Cold War and hardwired into a bureaucratic process that virtually guarantees failure at every turn. These methodologies generally divide themselves into five analytical “schools.” The culture that spawned each school shapes the nature of the inquiry. The sum of the processes practiced by these schools exerts a subtle influence that inevitably identifies future threats more like the enemies we want to fight than the enemies we have fought consistently since the end of World War II.
The “Scenario Development School” is the fastest-growing cottage industry inside Beltway think tanks. Threat prediction using “scenarios” involves a process as simple as it is deceiving. Pick one of the usual suspects with serious military capabilities who sits athwart a piece of ground of strategic importance to the United States and then encourage the stimulation of excuses for going to war with him. Since the end of the Cold War, the list of usual suspects has been monotonously consistent: China, Iran, and North Korea (with, in the background, Russia as the nostalgic favorite). Again, the problem with the scenario approach has been that, try as the pundits might (and they really try—particularly at budget time), they have not been able to elevate the overt intentions of these actors to a level approaching imminent danger.
The “Emerging Technology School” consists of frightened and well-remunerated techno-warriors who constantly scan the threat horizon anxious to alert the security community to enemies who they sense are harnessing the diabolical genius of homegrown weapon makers. To be sure, we must guard against being surprised by leap-ahead technologies in the hands of an enemy, particularly enemies who pursue nuclear weapons technologies. But too often, the technological fear mongering has led to a “Chicken Little” effect that has proven both illusory and very expensive. Technological fear mongering comes from cultural arrogance that assumes our enemies put the same trust in technology that we do. Battlefield experience in the American era strongly suggests that we have been surprised and bested on the battlefield not by superweapons but by enemies who have employed simple technologies creatively. Our combat deaths have been suffered mostly from mortars, mines, and machine guns in Korea and Vietnam and by many of these same weapons adapted to war in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The “Capabilities-Based Assessment School” seeks to perpetuate the Cold War status quo by accepting the impossibility of predicting the threat. The capabilities approach argues for flexibility as the safest means for dealing with the ambiguity of today’s conflict environment. Security comes from creating a huge military toolbox from which weapons and forces can be retrieved and tailored to meet unforeseen threats. Adherence to the capabilities school begs the question: How can we justify spending fifty billion on a predictive process so ineffective that it abrogates the very purpose of its existence?
The “New Concepts Masquerading as Strategy School” is my personal favorite. Futurists inside the Beltway frequently fall victim to a new idea expressed as a “war-fighting concept.” Remember “shock and awe”? This concept grew out of our victory in Desert Storm. It was premised on the ridiculous idea that U.S. killing technologies would prevail against any enemy. Fear of precision bombing would strike at the psyche of a cowering foe. He would be awed and shocked enough to give up after an overwhelming demonstration of U.S. precision
