Author Anthony H. Cordesman
November 5, 2008
Courtesy Of The Center for Strategic and International Studies
Synopsis:© 2008 Center for Strategic & International Studies. All rights reserved.
It is a minor miracle that no federal office building or Washington think tank has ever collapsed under the weight of unread transition studies. Presidents elect simply don’t have the time to read the flood of material they are sent, transition teams often spend more time job seeking than transitioning, and once new Administrations actually pick their team at the cabinet level, the cabinet member conducts his or her own transition effort.
It is important for President Obama and his team to understand, however, that they face a transition where they need to take immediate action in several key aspects national security. The new President elect is not going to have the time to meditate, have task forces examine broad changes in strategy, and think conceptually. As of January 20th, he will have to deal with the inheritance of ongoing wars and crises in many aspects of defense.
Immediate National Security Priorities
He must deal with the domestic and international financial crisis, but he will not have the luxury of focusing on a narrow range of issues. President Obama will be a wartime President from day one, and he will have to make immediate decisions and come to grips with immediate national security priorities:
* Immediate decisions on how to fight the Afghan-Pakistan War and deal with the Iraq War.
* Reshaping the FY2010 defense budget and future year defense program to create balanced, affordable programs.
* Dealing with the cost-containment crisis in defense procurement.
* Restructuring deployment plans to reflect new priorities in Afghanistan while dealing with recruiting and retention programs.
He must simultaneously deal with a crisis in US-Iraqi relations over the future role of US forces in Iraq, and a recommendation from his military commanders that some 20,000-25,000 more US troops be deployed in Afghanistan. There will be no pause in the terrorist pressure from Al Qa’ida in Iraq, a winter campaign will already be underway in Afghanistan, and the many of the details of an extraordinarily bleak NIE on the conflict in Afghanistan and Pakistan will almost certainly have become public.
The new President will also inherit massive problems in US defense planning, programming, and budgeting. While Secretary Gates has salvaged something from the Rumsfeld mess, he has not resolved a planning, budget, and management disaster that permeates every aspect of the Department of Defense. There will be an immediate need to compensate for nearly eight years of conceptual strategies decoupled from force plans, and budgets, poorly structured wartime budget supplementals, a grossly mismanaged procurement effort in every military service, and a failure to contain the cost of US defense spending.
Secretary Gates may be able to help with a better structure FY2010 defense budget submission, and an FY2010-FY2014 future year defense program FYDP that corrects some of these problems, but the onus will fall on the new Presidency. Restructuring and rebalancing the FYDP, procurement plan, and military manpower and deployment cycles will be critical priorities for immediate action.
Focusing On Real World Time Frames
Hopefully, the new President will understand that he has no time for mountains of well meant transition papers, with vague, undefined policy recommendations devoid of practical plans or any analysis of how to get the resources to implement them. President Obama will also realize he must focus on the now and the near term.
He will have to divide his decision-making priorities into two major time frames, and it is the action plan from now to FY2014 that will determine whether he can deal with ongoing wars and reverse the national security mistakes of the last eight years.
* Critical: Now to Mid-Term = Now to End of Next FYDP: FY2010-FY2014.
o "Bubble" or prediction point is less than a year on Afghan-Pakistan and Iraq.
o Cost containment crisis in defense spending already exists
* Intellectually Interesting: Long Term = FY2015-FY2030
o Simply cannot predict to these time points.
o But, procurement and reset decisions now have 15-25 year life cycles.
o Rebuilding forces has 5-7 year cycles
o Same for shifts in alliances, and US civil-military structures..
The time will come for detailed planning for the period beyond FY2014, but it will have to be the second or third year of the Administration, and such planning is valuable only as a “control” that makes current planning more realistic. No one can predict the details future US national security faces more than five years from now, and no longer term plan will survive engagement with reality.
Now To Mid Term Institutional and Resource Challenges To US Military Power
President Obama will inherit a wide range of immediate problems that are the legacy of Secretary Rumsfeld. He will also inherit what has become a failed planning, programming, and budgeting process. Left to their own devices, the current team of policy planners and service chiefs of staff seem to prefer vague conceptual strategies over real-world force plans, procurement plans, and program budgets.
The vacuous exercises to draft Quadrennial Defense Reviews over the last decade, and the equally meaningless conceptual strategy documents emerging from the Chairman of the Joint Staff and service chiefs, have made this all too clear. “Strategy” has become so decoupled from detailed plans and budgets, and from tangible, difficult decision making, that it has virtually lost its meaning.
This end result is that the new President and his Secretary of Defense will have to reshape the Department of Defense, and US national security policy, to deal with each of the following institutional and resource constraints:
* Decoupling of “strategy” from net assessment, force plans, modernization plans, realistic program budgets.
* Past failures in cost containment and to make affordable overall trade-offs in procurement, manpower, readiness, and reset. 20-25% underfunding of the current FYDP.
* Service irresponsibility and resource fights. Resource rivalry rather than effective joint planning and budgeting.
* Lack of effective civilian “partners” for the military in Iraq and Afghanistan and no prospect of getting them during the first term in office.
* Procurement-driven strategies that reflect major cost escalation, force cuts, cuts in procurement goals, delays in delivery and serious questions about future life cycle costs.
* Failure to adapt to the foreseeable squeeze on federal spending from rising civilian entitlement costs compounded by an unforeseeable economic crisis.
* Growing recruiting and retention problems that affect manpower quality and cost, not just numbers.
* The need to rebalance the overall structure and missions of active and reserve components for cost and manning reasons as well as evolving warfighting needs.
No one likes complex challenges, particularly when there is no way to avoid dealing with them simultaneously. Each of these problems, however, has already been neglected or deferred by the Bush Administration to the point where early action has to be taken. These are areas where the new Administration effectively ran out of time before it was even elected.
Now To Mid Term Contingency Challenges To US Military Power
The Obama Administration faces similar challenges in dealing with on-going problems and contingencies. Virtually every national security expert has their own list and their own solutions. However, virtually all experts agree that there are a wide range of areas where the new President will have to act almost immediately:
* Redefining the relationship between US national security efforts and the global economic system and “geoeconomics.”
* Creating forces strong and flexible enough to hedge against the inability to predict the balance of conventional, asymmetric, WMD, stability/nation building activity.
* Correcting the loss of credibility and support with traditional allies.
* Defining immediate near terms ways to improve security relations with regional allies: NATO, Japan-South Korea, GCC, Latin America, etc.
* Length and character of Afghan-Pakistan War.
* “Withdrawal” from Iraq.
* Iranian threats: Proxy, WMD, asymmetric, direct?
* North Korea.
* Taiwan-China.
* Containment of (improved security relations with?) Russia.
* Latin American tensions: Venezuela/Cuba.
* “War on Terrorism” = struggle against violent Islamic extremism.
* Nuclear, non-nuclear, missile defense, WMD terrorism.
* Energy security and restructuring the US posture in the Gulf/Middle East.
* Wild cards in the form of unpredictable tasks and threats.
Reality-Based Planning
Some of these issues can be deferred for a year or so, but none without cost and making the situation worse. All require tangible solutions in terms of clear operational or contingency plans, US military action or plans, and resources.
It is also critical for those advising the new President to understand that none of these challenges can be dealt with simply issuing conceptual plans, calling for dialogue, and using vague terms like “soft” or “smart” power.
This is easy to illustrate by examining two of the most immediate security challenges , even in outline form:
* Contingency requirements for dealing with Iran:
o Goes nuclear with LOW, LUA missile option.
o Diplomacy and/or preventive strikes cause dispersal and go biological.
o Spasm war in the Gulf or slow careful irregular war of attrition.
o Shi’ite crescent, dominate in Iraq, proxy war with Israel.
* Contingency requirements for dealing with the Afghan/Pakistan war:
o Religious, ideological struggle expands with or without kinetic victory in Afghanistan.
o Allies leave, Taliban becomes major military threat.
o Nuclear Pakistan implodes
o ANA/ANP force building fails, or governance fails, or economy fails, or all three.
There are too many credible possibilities in both these cases for the US to choose between “hard” and “soft/smart” power. Instead, it will need to constantly struggle to find the proper balance between them. Similarly, there is no credible way to choose between the future use of conventional versus irregular warfare. The US needs forces capable of doing both.
Long Term Institutional and Resource Challenges To US Military Power
The fact the new Presidency faces so many near term challenges does not, however, mean that it will have more than a year or so before its new team must also take on long term national security challenges. These challenges are harder to predict, but the long-term institutional and resource challenges to American military power will almost certainly include:
* Impact of FY2012 onwards entitlements crisis; size and structure of federal budget.
* Recreating effective defense planning structures and cycles.
* Making US force and procurement plans real and affordable.
* Deciding on tradeoffs in active/reserve/civilian/contract manpower.
* Hard, resource-driven future planning, programming, and budgeting trade-offs in “brains (manpower quality), boots (manpower numbers) and “toys” (procurement quality and numbers.).
* Ability to create forces that can perform both “hard” and “soft/smart” power functions.
* Ability to create forces that can fight/deter both conventional and asymmetric/irregular
* Post crisis US role in geoeconomics, new global economic structure.
* Real-world import, energy, trade vulnerability.
* Success in restructuring traditional, local, and regional alliances; Interoperability and allied force generation capabilities.
Long Term Contingency Challenges To US Military Power
These challenges will be matched by contingency challenges, many of which represent the broader and longer-term impacts of the now to mid-term challenges the US already faces:
* US success in global economic competition and “geoeconomics.”
* Impact of technology and arms sales: US lead and “edge” or near parity and diminishing returns.
* Unstable balance of conventional, asymmetric, WMD, stability/nation building activity.
* Competition or cooperation with China that may be dominant in Asia.
* Status of Russia.
* Europe: Working ally or largely separate agenda.
* Iranian threat: Proxy, WMD, asymmetric, direct?
* “War on Terrorism” = struggle against violent Islamic extremism.
* Nuclear, non-nuclear, missile defense, biological, WMD terrorism
* Energy security
* Wild cards
* Status of cyber, IT, EMP, financial warfare.
Getting Real
If these lists seem daunting, it is important to note that no new post-WWII Administration has faced a simpler world upon taking office. Moreover, each new Administration has had to deal with most of these challenges since the end of the Cold War.
The question is how realistic the new Obama presidency will be compared to the lack of realism in the Bush Administration. One key will again be to look beyond vague conceptual transition planning and focus on clear real-world priorities.
If one looks beyond the most immediate crises, “getting real” means:
* The will to face, and live, with complexity and uncertainty.
* Finishing the wars the US is already fighting.
* Building on existing strengths, reducing weaknesses, and “evolve:”
* Creating real strategies, plans, and budgets tailored to major missions and regions.
* Making defense plans, programs, and budgets integrated and affordable.
* Making hard trade-offs without abandoning key options.
* Seeking dual capable forces for “hard” and “soft” power; “conventional” and “irregular warfare.”
* Accepting the fact that the US status as “superpower” was always severely limited and these limits will grow; focusing on the need to build and rebuild partners and alliances.
* Dealing with the fact the US cannot prevent the rise of local or regional “peers” like Russia and China and must learn to live with them
* Accept the fact that the future will steadily limit the impact of US economic power and technology, not because America is weaker or declining but because other powers are growing more strong
* Focusing on strategic interests, not transforming the world.
The extent to which the Obama Administration acts on this basis, rather than the basis of the ideological extremism and failed management of the Bush Administration, will determine much of its success and the state of US national security. The US had pragmatic, reality-based Administrations for half a century following World War II, and had extraordinary success. It is time to return to that realism.
Associated Programs: | Burke Chair in Strategy Burke Chair on Strategic Assessment Burke Chair on U.S. Strategic and Defense Efforts |
Related Research Focus: | Defense Policy International Security |
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