CNAS Releases New Report on Maintaining the U.S. Military Edge
Center for a New American Security (CNAS) Executive Vice President and Director of Studies Shawn Brimley has written a new report, While We Can: Arresting the Erosion of America’s Military Edge. In the report, Brimley argues that the U.S. military edge – particularly in regards to technology – is rapidly eroding. He then makes concrete recommendations for how to rebuild America’s military advantage.
America’s armed forces are the most highly trained, best equipped, and most experienced in the world, but the margin of their battlefield superiority is eroding. Whether our armed forces and international allies and partners are a determined dictatorship fighting for its existence, a rising power determined to flex its military power, or a former great power doggedly refusing to cede influence in its near abroad, beneath those headlines is a consistent trend that powerfully influences the nature global security competitions. That trend is the slow but steady erosion of America’s military-technical superiority, which U.S. policymakers have come to assume and our core allies depend on for their own security. Unless that trend is arrested, America’s armed forces will find it more difficult to prevail in future conflicts.
Modern American military strategy depends on technological superiority. This was a consistent pillar of strategy during the Cold War, the subsequent interwar years, and the wars of the post-9/11 era. American presidents are rightfully loath to send military personnel into the fray without a clear qualitative edge. What was once an element of deliberate strategy has, over the course of decades, evolved into a presumption of technological superiority.
This presumption stems from nearly thirty years of the United States enjoying an unrivaled military technical edge in conventional weapons. This edge was carefully honed by the adroit use of defense directed research and development spending, especially during the late Cold War. This military technical strategy – referred to as an “offset strategy” – spurred a revolution in military affairs and then a broader societal shift that thrust the world headlong into the information age. That underlying investment portfolio bequeathed advanced computer networking or what became the Internet; the global positioning constellation of satellites; stealth technologies; advanced intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) platforms; and precision guided munitions or “smart weapons.” The resulting U.S. monopoly on precision munitions and the efficient means of their delivery is among the reasons the United States stood alone and triumphant at the end of the Cold War and has enjoyed unrivaled military superiority in the decades that followed.
But as today’s Pentagon leaders are conveying with some urgency, this critical military-technical advantage is eroding, and the United States can no longer rest its defense strategy on the confidence that it enjoys a qualitative military edge against its potential future adversaries. That the United States can no longer base its military planning on its presumed technological superiority is a seismic disruption in military affairs – one not yet fully grasped by many in the defense community. American military-technical superiority is eroding because the technologies that underwrote that position have now proliferated widely through the international system. The United States must face advanced integrated air defense systems, stealth technologies, and, most problematically, precision guided munitions. The same technologies on which U.S. forces enjoyed a monopoly for decades are now central to the defense strategies of their opponents. This is terra incognita to U.S. defense planners, now several generations removed from their predecessors who worked under the daily threat of a near-peer competitor with global military reach.
While Pentagon leaders deserve credit for drawing attention to this challenge, there remains confusion throughout the defense community as to what is causing the loss of America’s military-technical edge and what exactly ought to be done to correct it. Discussions about the Pentagon’s “Third Offset Strategy,” the focus of this paper, are sometimes conflated with related efforts such as the “Defense Innovation Initiative” (DII); the “Long-Range Research and Development Plan” (LRRDP); or the Pentagon’s new office in Silicon Valley called the “Defense Innovation Unit – Experimental” (DIUx).
This paper attempts to provide a reasonably concise explanation of the basis of the need to reverse the decline of America’s military-technical superiority. It outlines a strategy to ensure that the U.S. armed forces can reestablish qualitative military superiority before it becomes irretrievable. The paper consists of four parts. First, it describes the emerging security environment and how it will shape tomorrow’s battlefields; second, it reviews U.S. defense strategy and how former Pentagon leaders dealt with past military-technical competitions; third, it outlines the nature of the upcoming challenges; and fourth, it offers a framework for how policymakers can pursue a coherent military-technical superiority strategy.
The full report is available here.