Ten years after the Cold War's end, the United States military has settled on what
could be called Cold War Lite. We have a fighting machine that, while somewhat slimmed
down, is still trained, equipped, and structured to fight a peer enemy (Russia) in a
bipolar world under wide-open geographic conditions, like the plains of central Europe or
the deserts of the Middle East.
Yet these are the least likely war scenarios we face today. We are not likely to find
another enemy as obliging as Iraq was to fight us using Soviet military doctrine and
technology under the ideal conditions of the Persian Gulf deserts. After all, Desert Storm
was the son of all Cold War battles - the Fulda Gap moved to the Euphrates delta. Instead,
the world today is in the midst of dramatic changes that will lead us not just to more
small-scale humanitarian interventions, but to "high-end" warfare characterized
by lighter, faster, stealthier weaponry.
In 1940, a similar dramatic shift occurred. France thought it had the right defense for
the right time and place in its Maginot Line. Perfectly positioned for static trench
warfare, France was taken by surprise when Hitler introduced what the military calls an
asymmetric counter, or unexpected response: the Blitzkrieg. Fast-moving German Panzers and
Stuka dive-bombers transformed warfare and vanquished France in six weeks. The cost of
being unprepared for an unforeseen use of new technology was devastating.
At century's end, the United States likewise faces a dramatically shifting threat
paradigm which raises major questions in military planning: Will we continue to write
budgets that tinker at the margins of old ones, or will we fundamentally rethink how we
spend today's money for tomorrow's warfare? If we don't make the latter choice, we could
see ourselves falling behind the curve of modern warfare and - worst case - even losing
our superpower status with its global reach and credibility.
Two forces in the military planning community and in Congress are currently in conflict
over which choice to make. One force is driven by the traditionalists who continue to
invest in what is essentially an upgraded, modernized version of a Cold War military. This
static approach is partially a product of service rivalries - each general and admiral
wants an arsenal as good and big as his peers'. The debate is also mired in classic
political maneuvering: Members of Congress defend the existing interests, and the defense
contracts, of their constituents. The political inertia reinforces the military inertia.
Against this way of thinking, a second force consists of the defense modernizers who
favor "leap-ahead" technologies and see a different kind of warfare in America's
future. This school of military thought no longer considers massed forces and overwhelming
firepower as the key indices of future military superiority. It recognizes that
proliferation of missile technology and advances in commercial surveillance and
communications will soon allow our adversaries, even the poorer ones, to level ' the
playing field against us. The Pentagon's Defense Science Board has concluded that even
nations with austere, Third-World budgets can create a formidable missile force. With
off-the-shelf satellite imagery available for commercial downloading, they will be able to
see what we see and strike from long distances with precision weaponry - without investing
in the heavy armored forces, air fleets or carrier navies that only great powers can
afford. These future competitors need not own expensive platforms and the associated
infrastructure to frustrate U.S. war aims and deny us the ability to aid allies. They just
need to invest in technologies that exploit our weaknesses. Think Milosevic with missiles.
This raises profound questions about weapons procurement and how we shape our defense
budgets for the coming century. The answers are not obvious even to the modernizers, since
it is not simply a matter of tilting the funding away from heavy armor toward high tech.
Indeed, the answer lies not in selecting this or that piece of hardware or even software.
It lies not in one weapons platform or another - not even in one doctrine or another. It
lies instead in accepting uncertainty.
The salient feature of the Cold War was certainty; we lived in a bipolar world with a
clear set of threats: land warfare in Europe, nuclear attack by intercontinental missiles,
a possible invasion of Korea or Taiwan. Today the type of warfare we face is already
changed; Kosovo, East Timor, or Rwanda may preoccupy us more than Russia or China.
Tomorrow it will change even more. But the fact is that we do not know exactly what it
will look like; our potential adversaries can be countries (North Korea) or terrorists
(Hamas) or an eccentric billionaire with a messianic mission (Osama bin Laden). In short,
we live in uncertainty.
To hedge against uncertainty, we must invest in multiple research and development
(R&D;) streams that ensure success on some fronts despite failures in others and that
give us the flexibility to deal with constantly shifting military asymmetries. We must go
down many research roads at once. And we must be willing to pay the price by reversing the
continued decline in our R&D; budgets, which have slid below 12 percent of military
spending. Instead, these budgets should be increased by 50 percent or more.
Beyond giving ourselves a range of choices at the end of a typical 10- to 20-year
R&D; cycle, investing in a variety of military options will keep our adversaries off
balance. They will be unable to foresee, as they so easily can today, the architecture of
our strengths (e.g., stealthy aircraft, tank-on-tank warfare) and weaknesses (e.g., our
inability to insert armored ground forces overseas rapidly). By keeping our planning
trends open-ended across a broad front, we will force them likewise to make choices, not
knowing where we will end up when it comes time to buy and deploy the fruits of our
R&D.; This is the dynamic approach necessary to military superiority in the 21st
century.
A key advantage of this dynamic of uncertainty is that it helps us avoid three R&D;
pitfalls: lock-in, false starts, and "silver bullets."
- Lock-in is the error of having tied one's future too tightly to a single technology or
weapons system that suddenly becomes obsolete - unexpectedly overtaken by another
breakthrough. All one's eggs are then in the wrong basket.
- False starts are research paths that don't pan out. Thus the importance of
simultaneously pursuing multiple options, with the necessary budget support, in the full
understanding that some programs will hit dead ends.
- The "silver bullet" approach is expecting too much from a single big idea -
such as missile defenses. Today's revival of the national missile defense program runs the
risk of seeming to congressional budget-makers like a silver bullet, or panacea, for the
future. Worse, concentrating too big a share of the R&D; budget on missile defense
could generate a fourth pitfall - allowing one segment to hog all the money, thus limiting
the dynamism and variety of our research program.
Promoting dynamic uncertainty is an asymmetric counter to the weaker players' strategy
of neutralizing our strength with their own novel strategies. Choosing the other path -
continued procurement of weapons designed for an outdated strategic reality - deprives us
of this dynamism and creates the risk that currently envisioned weapons will not survive
in future battle environments. Rather than creating bigger and better successor weapons to
our existing arsenal, we should be doing research "out of the box." The new
weapons for a new threat will probably tend toward lean and swift rather than slow and
mighty. Instead of another 70-ton M-1 Abrams tank that is unable to move through the
narrow streets of Kosovo villages, planners should be looking at a 20-ton, high-speed,
stealthy tank with long-range strike capabilities. Instead of a new, large, manned bomber,
we should develop more small, unmanned bombers with sophisticated digital targeting
systems.
Dynamic uncertainty requires a dramatic increase in the role of software, satellite
communications, and real-time reconnaissance. This will mean that military R&D; will
increasingly dovetail with commercial research for civilian applications. Already
Microsoft, whose products are as ubiquitous as ballpoint pens in everyday life, is a major
defense contractor.
Businesses understand the dynamic of innovation in the fluid environment of the
marketplace. Changing opportunities and emerging threats force them to hedge their risks -
known and unknown - by investing in new capabilities. Unlike the military, however,
businesses can adapt in at least three ways. One is to boost internal R&D; spending to
create new technologies or products, some of which will prove useful while others will
remain on the shelf. The famed AT&T; and IBM laboratories are examples of this
approach. Another way is to buy other companies that have conducted the R&D; already,
so that the firm can focus on integrating the results into its own product lines. Major
pharmaceutical companies engage in this behavior when they take over start-up bio-tech
firms that successfully patent a new drug but don't have the resources to bring it to
market. Finally, firms can buy new capabilities outright, which usually means buying other
companies that have the new capabilities - product and marketing - fully developed.
Microsoft did this when it bought the company that created Hotmail, the now-famous free
Internet-based e-mail program.
The Defense Department can effectively mimic only the first of these options, in the
hope that its R&D; will produce the right capabilities. But without hedging, that is a
high-risk strategy. It tells potential challengers how not to shape their new forces and
how not to operate them. So the hedge becomes boosting military R&D; accounts.Whatever
the size of the defense pie, the R&D; slice needs to be bigger. This means reversing
the decline of the budget from $37 billion in 1995 to $31 billion in 2005.
As we make decisions for the 21st century, we must not allow ourselves to drift into
the same position of vulnerability as France in 1940, which failed to foresee and adapt to
profound changes in the nature, style, and tools of warfare. Preparing for an uncertain
world 10 or 20 years hence means beginning the research and development today.
