by Michael Horowitz
Download the full article: Maintaining American Military Power In an Age of Uncertainty
2011 is a critical year for the American military. With President Obama's original July 2011 deadline for assessing American progress in Afghanistan rapidly approaching, it makes sense to take a step back and think about the next steps for the American military. Sharp disagreements exist between those who believe that the United States should optimize its military for future counterinsurgency (COIN) campaigns like Afghanistan and Iran, and those who believe the United States should focus instead on its conventional capabilities. The decisions the United States makes now will influence its defense posture and military capabilities for the next generation.
This dialogue is taking place under the shadow of growing national debt and a lagging American economy, which will make the decisions taken over the next few years all the more important. Yet at the same time, the future is extremely difficult to predict. Predictions about the future of warfare are much more likely to end up in the dustbin of history than to accurately inform policy makers and planners.
One way to think about how the United States can position itself in future security environments and maintain operational flexibility involves understanding the financial and organizational requirements for adopting new military innovations, an approach called adoption capacity theory. In combination with the security environment, the adoption capacity constraints associated with potential changes in the character of warfare shape the costs and benefits of different response strategies for both state and non-state actors. We can predict the choices states make in response to a new innovation and the likely implications for the international security environment by focusing on the capacity of states to successfully meet the resource mobilization challenges and the organizational changes required to adopt a new innovation.
Download the full article: Maintaining American Military Power In an Age of Uncertainty
Michael Horowitz is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania. This article is drawn from his book, The Diffusion of Military Power: Causes and Consequences for International Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010). Thanks to Frank Hoffman, Michael Noonan, 1st Lt Frank Furman (USMC) and 2nd Lt Nicholas Francona (USMC) for their excellent suggestions.
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Phil, you make a good point in noting the tension between support high-tempo Cocom requirements for forward engagement operations versus the need for the services to have time and resources back in Conus devoted to experimentation.
But I wonder whether it is really a zero-sum trade-off between supporting forward engagement and supporting experimentation. Might experimentation greatly benefit from the "down-range" experiences of those forces that rotate through the Cocom's theaters on forward engagement missions?
V/r and s/f
Robert Haddick
I agree with the basic ideas presented in the primary necessity to be able to adapt to future warfare, in whatever form it evolves towards, rather than try and too narrowly predict them. However, I think the article understates the challenges the US will have in doing this. We not only have a probable upcoming era of relative austerity in defense spending, but we also have a foreign policy, and accompanying security strategy, that places great emphasis on forward engagement, "phase zero" operations, "persistent conflict" and/or theater security cooperation (choose your term). Even with a draw down in Iraq and Afghanistan, our combatant commanders have a demand to feed the exercises and engagements they desire.
This constant demand on forces in a deployment rotation, called on to support a potential fight today, creates the motivation to focus on training for what we know (or think we know) today, rather than broadly developing, and experimenting (and experimenting means we need to be able to fail as many times as we succeed) with different concepts, capabilities and technologies.
The "disruptive" advances of the past referenced in the paper (mechanized combined arms, carrier-based naval warfare, amphibious warfare--okay the last wasnt mentioned, but Im a Marine) were all developed in a time of fiscal austerity, but also in a time where active commitments by those forces were also very low.
As indicated above, in practical terms, the balance (or stress) in the US military today roughly falls along the lines of combatant commanders vs. services. The combatant commander is focused on the here and now, while the services have the responsibility for the longer term view. Using Christensons disruptive model, the combatant commanders wont demand the really new and disruptive capability as they will not know exactly how to plan for and utilize it.
s/f
Phil Ridderhof