“Two Wars” No More – Part II

This is the second post in a three-part series on the DOD decision to shift away from the “two-war” planning scenario that has been used as the predicate for the size and composition of the US armed forces since the end of the Cold War.  This somewhat arcane force-planning factor is likely to have significant repercussions for national security policy.

 

In Part I, we looked at the consideration of our standing obligations and OPLANs in relation to elimination of the “two-war” basis for sizing our armed forces.  The other major category of considerations that intersect with our force-sizing construct is that of basic national assumptions about grand strategy and warfighting styles.  In Part II we will look at the issue of grand strategy.

In the realm of grand strategy — as distinct from simple defense preparedness — America’s oldest and most fundamental objective for national strategy has been secure and open trade, enforced wherever we consider it necessary and find ourselves able to.  We have regularly resisted the attempts of regional actors to restrain trade, close it off, gain exclusionary control over it, or extort tribute for trade privileges.

In the earliest days of the Republic, our first expeditionary war was waged against the Barbary pirates of the Mediterranean, who, in collusion with local potentates ashore, were holding our trading ships for ransom.  This national interest predated even the Monroe Doctrine, and involved the Eastern hemisphere.  Urging Japan to open her islands to trade, with the Perry expedition in the 1850s, was another major initiative in a related vein, but one of the most celebrated was our announcement under McKinley of the “Open Door” policy on China, a “free trade for all” policy intended to prevent European and Asian powers from claiming parts of China and imposing exclusionary trading schemes.

Since WWII, a key element of our secure-trade strategy has been keeping major global chokepoints – the Panama Canal, the Strait of Malacca and South China Sea, and the chokepoint belt running from the Strait of Gibraltar to the Red Sea, into the Gulf of Aden, Arabian Sea, and Persian Gulf – quiescent and open for free access by everyone.  This enduring objective of our national strategy is even more fundamental than keeping energy supplies secure.  It is, in fact, the single most important thing the world has depended on America for since 1945, and is tightly interwoven with the nature of our polity.  As a consensual democracy whose most basic stance with the world is one of offering trade, and open cultural and economic exchange, we use our power to enforce not exclusionary regimes, but access for all.

Energy supplies are one aspect of trade, and a very important one.  But they are not, in fact, “the name of the game.”  Well before oil and gas were even in commercial use for internal combustion, threats to maritime trade drove us across the Atlantic for our first expeditionary war.  It is the secure and open trade itself – a condition that we have consistently regarded as necessary for all, to achieve our own security – that constitutes America’s first and most basic national strategic interest.

America has swung back and forth over time, in and out of comparative isolationism.  But we always come back to the necessity – and to a sense of the basic goodness and desirability – of trade.  For this reason, the other most fundamental objective of our national strategy relates to both trade and territorial security against attack:  that is, the security of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans as quiescent bastions.  Technology made it necessary to approach this objective proactively in the wake of the Pearl Harbor attack, and the global war on shipping in WWII.  But the world’s greatest oceans cannot be comprehensively patrolled 24/7, by even the largest navy or the best-equipped air force.  Nor can even satellite surveillance guarantee the maintenance of quiescent conditions across large bodies of water.  The principal means of securing the great oceans that flank our shores has been concluding our core alliances on their other sides, in Europe and the Far East.

Even today, the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, if bordered by hostile powers, would constitute existential threats to North America.  Trade routes must make it all the way across them, and into and through the Afro-Eurasian land junction, to be meaningful to our economy.  In terms of direct threats of force against North America, the oceans are either for us or against us; there is no middle ground.  Hence, the nations on the other sides of our flanking oceans have to be made allies, if possible, or at the very least, neutral and non-hostile.

Threats to those allies become threats to our secure buffer zone, which drove the implementation of our policy of “containment” in the Cold War.  The policy did not work particularly well from the standpoint of the border nations that found themselves subverted by Soviet-client insurgencies, since we tended to accept faits accomplis regarding many of them (e.g., in Eastern Europe, China, and Africa), an armed truce in two (Korea and Germany), and an absolute loss of territory in Vietnam.  But our own buffer remained, to the end, unbreached, with the exception of Cuba’s subversion by Castro – not a dismissible problem, by any means, but a lower-level threat we chose to live with.

Since, in particular, the rise of transnational Sunni terrorism and the Iranian revolution of 1979, it has become increasingly the case that the center of the Eastern hemisphere radiates a threat of a different kind out to our buffer-zone alliances in Europe and the Far East.  We have tended to focus, in the US, on the ability of transnational terrorists to move stealthily and pose unconventional threats to us in North America.  But it is equally important that radical Islamism can, through both subverting nation-states and using their means of power, threaten our allies as well, and our trade and theirs.  We can forget, when it has been awhile, that one of our chief values to an ally like Japan or South Korea has been keeping the trade routes they depend on open through the Middle East:  during the Iran-Iraq War, or when Libya menaced shipping in the Mediterranean and Red Seas, or when we actively deterred the USSR from widening the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, during which trade through the Middle East hung by a thread.

Performing this function means as much to us as it does to our allies; in this matter, the significance is indivisible.  We either perform this function, or our allies will have to begin seeking agreements with whichever power will guarantee them access to resources and trade, even if they have to pay tribute for those benefits.

And – so will we.

There is no independence for America without our network of alliances, and the force commitments that keep them, and our trade, viable.  Because of our unique geographic position, the development of our grand strategy has emphasized, first, enforcing the conditions for open and secure trade.  This posture has evolved naturally, with the decades of war and foreign pressures, to a policy of expeditionary force deployed forward, to protect the interests of our trade, and of the alliances that keep our trade routes quiescent, and make the oceans a bastion for us, rather than a pair of vulnerable exposures.

Our process of defaulting to this construct has been shaped mainly in the context of proximate, single-vector threats – or in the case of the Soviet Union, a unified global threat.  Americans are not, on average, natural geostrategic thinkers, neither clearly understanding the essentially maritime-trading nature of our geopolitical situation, nor typically seeing the relations of states in the interlocked, zero-sum manner natural to land powers, like Russia and China (or the Germany of a century ago).  We are more comfortable with ideological abstraction, on the one hand, and specific local problems to which we can find pragmatic solutions on the other.  The hybrid realm of geostrategic politics, in which patterns of interrelationship, influence, and shifting opportunity are paramount, tends to sneak up on us.

So it is not my argument here that the grand strategy we have long operated with was developed with full or deliberate consciousness of its most basic features.  We have been more likely, at any given time, to think of ourselves as protecting very specific interests, seeking to spread democracy, allying ourselves with other democracies, fighting off “perils” described in often jingoistic tones, containing a global existential threat, or leading a “concert of nations.”  The process of pursuing these avowed purposes has gradually established us in our true role, shorn of ideological or ephemeral justifications:  that of, essentially, a “hegemon by negation.”  Our function, assumed first on behalf of secure and open trade, has been to bust regional exclusionary schemes, and suppress incipient attempts at them.  Sooner or later such schemes always pose a threat:  to our trade, to our allies, and eventually even to our territory in North America.  In our hegemonic role since WWII, we have not attempted to control the resources and trade of others, but to discourage the emergence of rival hegemons who – like Germany and Japan in the 1930s, and the Russia and China of today – would attempt to.

The assumption that we would continue to discourage pop-up hegemons, or the conditions of instability and potential conquest that foster them, has underlain the two-war force-sizing construct since its inauguration.  Realistically, with all of Russia, China, Iran, the Arab Middle East, North Korea, and even a growing cadre of radicalized and unifying nations in Central America, with ties to the aspiring Asian hegemons – given all these actors still in the global mix, it is a just question whether being resourced to respond with decisive force in only one major conflict at a time will support continuation of the same grand strategy.

There is justification for asking whether elimination of the two-war construct means that the objectives of our grand strategy have changed.  A survey of global conditions in 2009 suggests that we could be challenged, in very short order, to signal which one major war we intend to be prepared for.  As sclerotic as the two-war construct has often been, the world has not really changed so much since 2006, when the last QDR was reported out, that we can really suppose there is no possibility of our wanting to exert decisive, conventional force in both the Middle East and the Far East, on simultaneous or overlapping timelines.

Force size could well be the deciding factor for a president faced with enforcing maritime sanctions on Iran, while containing the backlash from that, and the emerging prospect of China preparing an imminent subversion of Taiwan.  Both would require pulling forces off other tasks and dedicating them until decisions had been achieved.  To be credible efforts and have any hope of achieving decision, both operations would require major aggregations of forces.  Perhaps, if all goes well, the amount and types of conventional forces – naval, air, and special operations – procured for a “family of wars” construct would be sufficient to achieve decision relatively quickly.  Forces committed for the defense of South Korea, however, might well have to be drawn below OPLAN-effective levels for the duration; the Mediterranean and Red Sea left with a very low presence of US forces; and little or nothing remaining to address an invasion of Honduras by Nicaragua and Venezuela.

We must also consider the loss of the deterrence factor, with force-sizing that does not envision more than one major conflict, pursued in a conventional, decisive manner, at a time.  The credibility of our force options is a key element of our overall political credibility; and as Truman and Reagan demonstrated, at opposite ends of the Cold War, threatening credible force can make an aspiring expansionist give up his purpose, before the mayhem has gotten underway.  The size and general disposition of America’s armed forces are no secret, and the officer corps of Russia, China, Iran, and others spend their days figuring out where we are, and what kind of force we both can bring to bear, and intend to bring to bear, on any given situation.  We cannot make credible, deterrent threats with forces we do not have.

A final vulnerable aspect of this shift in our force-sizing concept is that it tends to help a potential enemy plan against us.  If our construct allows for one major conflict, the enemy’s most effective strategy is simply to arrange two for us.  Given that the most likely areas for eruption of a major conflict are at either end of Asia, with Russia, China, and Iran in between, we should think long and hard about dismissing this possibility.  It is another feasible prospect that could complicate the pursuit of our baseline grand strategy, with a “family of wars”-sized armed force.

Perhaps the baseline strategy is not one we wish to continue pursuing.  If that is our decision, however, we should make it explicitly and politically, rather than by default, as the defense-technical supports are withdrawn from beneath it.

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In the final section, Part III, we will consider the issue of America’s “way of war,” or warfighting style.