February 28, 2011 | 3:12 pm |
Courtesy Of "The Danger Room"
The era of big land wars is ending. Any senior official recommending a large-scale deployment of U.S. ground troops to Asia, the Middle East or Africa “should have his head examined,” to quote Gen. Douglas MacArthur. Instead, get ready for a new epoch of air and sea wars. Those were the surprising remarks Defense Secretary Robert Gates delivered to an audience of U.S. Army cadets at West Point, New York, on Friday.
Surprising, because it was Gates himself who fought to expand the U.S. Army and Marine Corps in recent years, and who argued forcefully for greater focus on our current, large-scale, Asian land wars — even when that meant cutting some of the Air Force’s and Navy’s priciest big-war weapons in favor of new gear to support the Army.
But Gates also spent years quietly prepping the Navy and Air Force to step up, once today’s land wars wound down. In telling the Army that it’s time on point has passed, Gates is simply making public a contingency he had long prepared for. But that’s not to say the secretary is beyond criticism, or the Army immune to risk.
Speaking at a cold and snowy West Point campus, Gates delivered the good news first. “The need for heavy armor and firepower to survive, close with, and destroy the enemy will always be there, as veterans of Sadr City and Fallujah can no doubt attest,” the white-haired 67-year-old crowed.
Then, the bad news. “Looking ahead, though, in the competition for tight defense dollars within and between the services, the Army also must confront the reality that the most plausible, high-end scenarios for the U.S. military are primarily naval and air engagements – whether in Asia, the Persian Gulf or elsewhere.”
“As the prospects for another head-on clash of large mechanized land armies seem less likely,” Gates added, “the Army will be increasingly challenged to justify the number, size and cost of its heavy formations.”
In my experience, Army cadets are some of the most respectful people on the planet. Even so, one can imagine a lot of nervous throat-clearing as the secretary’s Kansas twang echoed in the chamber. After a decade during which the Army has borne the brunt of the fighting in two wars, losing around 4,000 soldiers in the process, Gates was telling the ground-combat branch that its most sophisticated capabilities are no longer needed — at least, not in large quantities.
Instead, the Army must be lighter, faster and more flexible. “The strategic rationale for swift-moving expeditionary forces, be they Army or Marines, airborne infantry or special operations, is self-evident given the likelihood of counter-terrorism, rapid reaction, disaster response or stability or security-force assistance missions,” Gates said.
But tanks, artillery and armored fighting vehicles? Not so much.
Gates’ argument is that America’s strategic goalposts have moved past today’s large-scale land wars. This is not an unreasonable position to hold. The most likely near-term security challenges cannot be addressed using armored divisions.
China and Russia, for example, are re-arming with new ships, subs and stealth fighters and exerting greater influence on their neighbors, mostly without mobilizing tank armies. Nuke-seeking upstarts such as Iran and North Korea have deployed ships, submarines, coastal artillery and even hovercraft in bold defiance of world concern. The Middle East and Africa are in the midst of profound changes that could shatter existing relationships with Washington and render large ground deployments untenable.
Gates has always advocated for an atmosphere of cool-headed realism in the headquarters of the world’s most powerful military. That means fighting the war at hand, whatever that war might be. “This is a department that principally plans for war,” he told our own Noah Shachtman two years ago. “It’s not organized to wage war. And that’s what I’m trying to fix.”
With the U.S. involvement in Iraq all but ended, and a staged withdrawal from Afghanistan possible in thenext few years, perhaps Gates is simply turning his attention to the next most-immediate conflicts. And those happen to be Cold War-style showdowns at sea and in the air (and in space). He even implied this might happen in a speech last year. “The weight of America’s deterrent and strategic military strength has shifted to our air and naval forces,” Gates said.
To that end, some observers believe the secretary is preparing the ground for a big reduction in the Army’s thousands-strong tank force.
This should not be read as a defense cut. Gates, who has described himself as an “old Cold Warrior” that “didn’t molt from a hawk into a dove” when he joined the Obama administration after two years under George W. Bush, has consistently argued against reducing the Pentagon’s overall budget, even during the darkest months of the recession. His recent “efficiencies” were really just efforts to move resources from less-urgent weapons programs to more badly-needed ones. Any money and manpower saved by eliminating tanks would probably get reinvested in the Army.
Indeed, Gates’ underlying conservatism is detectable across his policies, going back years. On more than one occasion, Gates warned against demobilizing the military after today’s land wars end. This expressed caution belies the secretary’s subtle hedging against the very emerging threats he outlined in his West Point speech. Looking back, it seems that Gates carefully avoided cutting too deeply into the Navy and Air Force, just in case America found itself facing major airborne and seaborne rivals.
Consider: while Gates curtailed the Navy’s multi-billion-dollar stealth destroyer program in 2008, he did so in favor of a larger fleet of the arguably more effective Burke-class destroyer. Moreover, this year the secretary actually increased the Navy’s overall annual shipbuilding slate to more than 10 ships — something that hadn’t happened in 15 years. He also shepherded a long-planned doubling of attack-submarine production starting in 2012.
Gates performed a similar trick with the Air Force. True, in 2009 he ended production of the $300-million-per-copy F-22 Raptor stealth fighter at just 187 copies, but only because he was committed to maintaining an Air Force fighter fleet that’s stealthy and numerous — and that meant funneling all resources into the potentially much-cheaper F-35 Joint Strike Fighter. Despite serious technical challenges, Gates has never wavered from his plan to build more than 1,700 F-35s for the Air Force. And just a few weeks ago he launched development of a new stealth bomber for the flying branch.
These are not the doings of a SecDef who was ever interested in shortchanging the Navy and Air Force. This, too, is a point Gates made years ago, as he defended his decision to truncate the F-22 program. “Contrary to what some have alleged, the purpose was not to reorganize and rearm the entire U.S. military to hunt insurgents and do nation-building or to fight wars just like Iraq and Afghanistan,” he said.
With his West Point speech, Gates might have been making his recent shift toward air and sea power more public, but it was a contingency he had long prepared for — and now believes is necessary. All the same, the secretary’s assessment of the Army’s usefulness might seem unfair to some. For others, it might even invoke the chilling specter of Gates’ “Transformation”-obsessed predecessor, Donald Rumsfeld.
Readers might be forgiven for hearing echoes of Rumsfeld’s doomed “net-centric” Army in Gates’ comments. There was a good reason Rumsfeld’s Army reforms stalled: traditional, big war ground forces are still really useful — even for so-called “low-intensity” operations, like counterinsurgencies. As both Iraq and Afghanistan proved, it’s the heavy weaponry that opens up a country for the lighter forces to chase guerrillas or rebuild shattered states. It’s the heavy weaponry that often protects those light forces. Your infantry may not survive without plenty of armor, in other words.
Inside sources tell Danger Room that the most likely outcome of Gates’ current thinking is a tweaks to the mix and balance of the Army’s heavy and light forces. Carefully executed, these changes could preserve the Army’s ability to fight future wars of all sorts, while still allowing the Air Force and Navy to take the lead in America’s overall defense posture.
But get the balance wrong, and the future Army could find itself ineffective and vulnerable — the very deficiencies Gates fought so hard to correct.
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