America is a global power with global interests. Its military is meant first and foremost to defend America from attack. Beyond that, it is meant to protect Americans abroad, allies, and the freedom to use international sea, air, and space while retaining the ability to engage in more than one major contingency at a time. America must be able not only to defend itself and its interests, but also to deter enemies and opportunists from taking action that would challenge U.S. interests, a capability that includes preventing the destabilization of a region and guarding against threats to the peace and security of America’s friends.
As noted in the 2015
Index, however, the U.S. does not have the right force to meet a two–major regional contingency (
MRC
major regional conflict (see MTW, MCO)" class="glossaryLink " style="box-sizing: border-box; border-bottom-width: 1px !important; border-bottom-style: dotted !important; border-bottom-color: rgb(0, 0, 0) !important; color: rgb(0, 0, 0) !important;">MRC) requirement and is not ready to carry out its duties effectively. Consequently, the U.S. risks seeing its interests increasingly challenged and the world order it has led since World War II undone.
How to Think About Sizing Military Power
Military power begins with the people and equipment used to conduct war: the weapons, tanks, ships, airplanes, and supporting tools such as communications systems that make it possible either for one group to impose its will on another or to prevent such an outcome from happening.
However, simply counting the number of people, tanks, or combat aircraft that the U.S. possesses would be irrelevant because it would lack context. For example, the U.S. Army might have 100 tanks, but to accomplish a specific military task, 1,000 or more tanks might be needed or none at all. It might be that the terrain on which a battle is fought is especially ill-suited to tanks or that the tanks one has are inferior to the enemy’s. The enemy could be quite adept at using tanks, or his tank operations might be integrated into a larger employment concept that leverages the supporting fires of infantry and airpower, whereas one’s own tanks are poorly maintained, the crews are ill-prepared, or one’s doctrine is irrelevant.
Success in war is partly a function of matching the tools of warfare to a specific task and employing those tools effectively in the conditions of the battle. Get these wrong—tools, objective, competency, or context—and you lose.
Another key element is the military’s capacity for conducting operations: how many of the right tools—people, tanks, planes, or ships—it has. One might have the right tools and know how to use them effectively but not have enough to win. Given that one cannot know with certainty beforehand just when, where, against whom, and for what reason a battle might be fought, determining how much capability is needed is an exercise of informed, but not certain, judgment.
Further, two different combatants can use the same set of tools in radically different ways to quite different effects. The concept of employment matters. Concepts are developed to account for numbers, capabilities, material readiness, and all sorts of other factors that enable or constrain one’s actions, such as whether one fights alone or alongside allies, on familiar or strange terrain, or with a large, well-equipped force or a small, poorly equipped force.
All of these factors and a multitude of others bear upon the outcome of any military contest. Military planners attempt to account for them when devising requirements, developing training and exercise plans, formulating war plans, and providing advice to the President in his role as Commander in Chief of U.S. military forces.
Measuring hard combat power in terms of its adequacy in capability, capacity, and readiness to defend U.S. vital interests is hard, especially in such a limited space as this
Index, but it is not impossible. Regardless of the difficulty of determining the adequacy of one’s military forces, the Secretary of Defense and the military services have to make decisions every year when the annual defense budget request is submitted to Congress.
The adequacy of hard power is affected most directly by the resources the nation is willing to invest. While that investment decision is informed to a significant degree by an appreciation of threats to U.S. interests and the ability of a given defense portfolio to protect U.S. interests against such threats, it is not informed solely by such considerations; hence the importance of clarity and honesty in determining just what is needed in hard power and the status of such hard power from year to year.
Administrations take various approaches to determine the type and amount of military power needed and, by extension, the amount of money and other resources to commit to it. After defining the national interests to be protected, the Department of Defense can use worst-case scenarios to determine the maximum challenges the U.S. military might have to overcome. Another way is to redefine what constitutes a threat. By taking a different view of major actors as to whether they pose a meaningful threat and of the extent to which friends and allies have an ability to assist the U.S. in meeting security objectives, one can arrive at different conclusions about necessary military strength.
For example, one Administration might view China as a rising, belligerent power bent on dominating the Asia–Pacific. Another Administration might view China as an inherently peaceful, rising economic power, with the expansion of its military capabilities a natural occurrence commensurate with its strengthening status. The difference between these views can have a dramatic impact on how one thinks about U.S. defense requirements. So, too, can policymakers amplify or downplay risk to justify defense budget decisions.
There can also be strongly differing views on requirements for operational capacity. Does the country need enough for two major combat operations (MCOs) at roughly the same time or just enough for a single major operation plus some number of lesser cases? To what extent should “presence” tasks—the use of forces for routine engagement with partner countries or simply to be on hand in a region for crisis response—be additive to or a subset of a military force sized to handle two major regional conflicts? How much value should be assigned to advanced technologies as they are incorporated into the force?
Where to Start
There are references that one can use to help sort through the variables and arrive at a starting point for assessing the adequacy of today’s military posture: government studies and historical experience. The government occasionally conducts formal reviews meant to inform decisions on capabilities and capacities across the Joint Force relative to the threat environment (current and projected) and evolutions in operating conditions, the advancement of technologies, and aspects of U.S. interests that may call for one type of military response over another.
The 1993 Bottom-Up Review (
BUR
Bottom-Up Review" class="glossaryLink " style="box-sizing: border-box; border-bottom-width: 1px !important; border-bottom-style: dotted !important; border-bottom-color: rgb(0, 0, 0) !important; color: rgb(0, 0, 0) !important;">BUR), conducted by then-Secretary of Defense Les Aspin, is one such frequently cited example. Secretary Aspin recognized “the dramatic changes that [had] occurred in the world as a result of the end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union…[altering] America’s security needs” and driving an imperative “to reassess all of our defense concepts, plans, and programs from the ground up.”
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