On August 21, as President Bush's summer vacation was winding down,
senior Defense Department officials traveled to Crawford, Texas to
brief the chief executive on military spending plans. In a dozen
densely-packed charts, the Pentagon's director of program analysis and
evaluation, Dr. Stephen Cambone, described how the defense
establishment was being reoriented to cope with emerging threats.
The
briefing went well. Although Bush was not conversant with some of the
programs discussed, he found the overall approach faithful to the
defense priorities that he had set forth both before and after entering
office. Since those priorities anticipated unconventional attacks on
the American homeland, the events of 9-11 have tended to reinforce the
President's belief that his Pentagon team was on the right track.
Areas
targeted for spending increases in the Crawford briefing included
chem-bio defense, persistent surveillance of "fleeting" targets,
information operations, protection of space assets, joint electronic
aircraft, and cruise-missile defense (a complement to ballistic-missile
defense). Areas identified as potential billpayers for these new
investments included force structure, business practices, and virtually
every major weapons-development program inherited from the Clinton
years.
You'd have to be pretty obtuse not to expect such
tradeoffs. Since he first addressed defense in a speech at the Citadel
three years ago, Mr. Bush and his advisors have hewn to the same
"transformational" course regardless of what critics said. While the
programmatic consequences of that vision are only now becoming visible,
there has already been a dramatic shift in the way military services
package their spending proposals. The services know that if they can't
connect programs to the new paradigm, they're toast.
"Paradigm"
is a good word to use here. The term was popularized by Thomas Kuhn in
the 1960s, when he employed it to identify contending worldviews in
scientific revolutions (like Copernicus' challenge to geocentric
astronomy). Kuhn noted that new paradigms often gain a following for
emotional reasons, or because they seem to answer burning questions,
only to be discredited later.
Is that what will happen with
military transformation? Maybe. There are important flaws in the way
the Pentagon is currently pursuing transformation that raise doubts
about its long-term benefits.
First of all, transformation is
said to be "capabilities-based" rather than threat-based. The result is
that it favors lowest-common-denominator technologies like networks
that can be plugged into any conceivable scenario. But a close look at
how the Pentagon plans to use the new technologies reveals implicit
assumptions about future threats -- assumptions that make the
technology look more robust than it really is. Clever adversaries won't
have much difficulty coping with many of the systems currently deemed
transformational.
Second, it is unsettling to see policymakers
with limited technical credentials making such bold claims for the
transformative power of emerging technology. At its inception in the
first Clinton Administration, transformation was a relatively modest
initiative pushed by policymakers with
impressive scientific
credentials. Now it is an all-embracing concept being pushed by people
with much less grasp of the relevant technologies. In other words,
transformation has become an ideology.
Third, the internal
Pentagon processes shaping transformation exclude many of the players
with a stake in the outcome, including those with the greatest
operational and technological expertise. Complaints from senior
military officers about the practical consequences of decisions are
frequently dismissed, and even participants in the secretive inner
circle risk being ostracized if they don't show proper fealty to the
new paradigm.
Fourth, because key choices are being made in
isolation from the organizations that will have to implement them,
there is little likelihood they will be sustained beyond Rumsfeld's
tenure. This top-down approach compounds the mismatch between political
rhythms and development cycles which results in promising programs
being killed just as they approach fruition. The rapid purging of John
Lehman's protˇgˇs and ideas once he left the Pentagon should be a
lesson for those who think they can dictate outcomes without eliciting
the buy-in of stakeholders.
Finally, and most ominously,
transformation has become the latest pretext for deferring
modernization of the nation's military arsenal. The Bush Administration
inherited a rapidly aging force desperately in need of renewal after a
decade of depressed procurement spending. The Crawford briefing
acknowledged the urgent need to replace aerial tankers and jamming
aircraft, but failed to explain the broader problem.
By
questioning the value of next-generation development programs such as
the F/A-22 multirole fighter without offering a viable alternative,
transformation potentially impairs military preparedness for decades to
come. While it may be feasible someday to accomplish key missions with
novel technologies, those technologies are not ready for prime time
today. Robbing focused, near-term requirements to fund nebulous ideas
for the future could result in disaster.
The Bush Administration
embraced military transformation before taking office, only to find
that most of the interesting concepts had already been developed by its
predecessors. In trying to offer something new and distinctive, it has
backed into an extreme variant of transformation that is out of step
with military needs and the institutional setting. Unless it reconnects
with reality, history will remember transformation as a costly
distraction rather than a revolutionary paradigm shift.
Loren
Thompson is Chief Operating Officer of the Lexington Institute and
teaches in Georgetown University's Security Studies Program
