by Sir Timothy Garden
The new marching orders for the American military are expected in the next few days. George W.Bush made it clear, and to the surprise of many, that he was not going to increase the defence budget until a review had been carried out. His Defense Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, announced his priorities for action as improving quality of life (pay, housing and other benefits) for the troops, pushing ahead with missile defence, and thirdly exploiting new technologies.
All of this has poses a familiar problem.. Despite the US defence budget’s gigantic size of nearly $300 billion (some ten times larger than the UK), it is near bankrupt. The Congressional Budget office reported last year that defence needed an extra $50 billion each year just to sustain current capabilities. How is Rumsfeld going to square the circle?
Currently US force structure is based on the assumption that they must be able to cope with two near simultaneous major operations. The logic is that there might be a Gulf War style conflict which requires a major US force to be deployed. Seeing an opportunity, another hostile power might think that the US would be unable to cope with a second problem. Thus China might attack Taiwan unless the US has the capability to cope there as well in the Gulf. The assumption that these two events would not happen at the same time allows one set of strategic transport to be used for deployment to two theatres of operations. These assumptions are all arguable, but they have sustained a large army, navy, air force and marine capability.
Over the past ten years, there have been some key changes to the way that the US conducts warfare. The Gulf War saw the use of a prolonged air campaign as the main instrument of force. As a result of this approach, the subsequent ground war lasted only 100 hours. Experience in Somalia confirmed in American eyes that ground operations in distant parts were to be avoided as far as possible. Kosovo in 1999 was seen as proving that air operations could offer a low risk way of conducting high intensity warfare, and that ground troops could be relegated to a peacekeeping role after the war was won. It it also showed that some of the air strikes could be conducted from the US on a worldwide basis.
All of this is likely to be shaping Rumsfeld's thinking. He will need a lot of extra money to fund missile defence development. Current levels of armed forces cannot be sustained without yet more money. He wants a technology revolution in the way the military fights. It seems likely that projecting power from the air and at great distances will be uppermost in his mind. If B2 bombers with precision attack weapons can threaten anywhere on the earth's surface while based at home, the two war scenario becomes less daunting.
In planning for the future, defence planners have a tendency to assume that, given time, potential enemies will develop similar capabilities. This means that the scenario builders are already talking of the day when airraft carriers are no longer safe platforms, and when the main battle tank is too vulnerable to use. If this thinking is influencing Rumsfeld, the US Army, Navy and Marines will have good reason to be fearful for their share of the future resources.
There is one more element to these changing views of how to project power. Two years ago, Rumsfeld wrote a report on future military use of space. He believes that the US is currently both dependent and vulnerable in space. This month he has appointed a new air force senior general to pull together all the space activities. The USAF has been wargaming the use of weapons in space. It seems likely that the US will want to start defending its satellites, and may begin researching the use of space based weapon systems for the global projection of power.
A future US capability based on long range air power and space systems would be a very different defence arrangement from today. To it would be added an increasingly complex layered defence against missile attack. The air force and perhaps a new space force would get the resources at the expense of land and sea activities. The implications for allies would be enormous. The technological gap would widen. Other NATO nations would be relegated to become the peacekeeping forces to hold the ground after the US had brought a hostile regime to book. It is unlikely that Europeans would be happy to take this division of tasks.
The political infighting, particularly by the losers in the funding proposals, will make such a radical change difficult to push through. However from the top of the Bush Adminstration individual procurement decisions are likely to be shaped by this kind of thinking. It may mean that the Joint Strike Fighter, which is key to the UK's future aircraft carrier programme, may be a possible casualty to the new US thinking.