Where’s The Beef – I Mean The Vision?

As part of its planning to deal with looming defense budget cuts, the Army is said to be offering up between 10 and 15 Active Component Combat Brigades and, possibly, another 5 to 8 Reserve Component Combat Brigades. The Marine Corps has contingency plans to reduce the number of infantry and artillery battalions. This week a memo by Undersecretary of the Navy, Robert Work, was leaked in which he suggested that his service might have to give up either the carrier variant or the STOVL version of the F-35. To date, the Air Force has remained silent on how they might absorb their share of reductions although the current Chief of Staff, General Norton Schwartz, recently observed that, “It is preferable to have a smaller superb force than a larger hollow one.”

Each of the services can probably get by with proportional reductions in response to mandated spending reductions of $400 billion dollars over the next decade. However, deeper reductions may be in the offing. If the automatic spending cuts imposed by the recently-concluded deficit reduction agreement are triggered, defense could face up to $600 billion dollars in additional reductions. No amount of trimming of force structure would be sufficient to address such a situation.

Neither DoD nor the services are prepared intellectually to deal with a worst-case budget scenario. The Pentagon has not provided the services with strategic guidance. As a result, the services are going to be left to their own devices to figure out how to deal with this category 5 budget hurricane. Without guidance from above, each service is likely to find itself with no alternative but to go after the budget share of the others in order to survive.

The last time the services faced a similar situation was in the run up to the first Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) in 1996. Then the Pentagon had been struggling with almost a decade of steadily declining budgets. It was in the process of absorbing a 40 percent reduction in force structure; the army went from 18 divisions to 10 and the Navy from nearly 600 ships to a little over 300. The future looked rather bleak, particularly if the services were restricted to their historic shares of the defense budget pie.

The 1996 QDR produced a spirited debate between the services about the future of warfare and their respective roles in it. Each proposed a contending vision of the future that, not surprisingly, emphasized the unique contributions of the service that formulated said vision. The Air Force, hoping to exploit decades of investment in precision and stealth, argued that the vision espoused by airpower advocates from Doughet, Mitchell and Arnold was now attainable and future wars could be won from the air. The Army, fresh from its successes in the Gulf War, asserted that strategic bombing had never worked and that defeat had to be imposed on an adversary and that meant taking territory, destroying armies and regime change. The Marine Corps emphasized the growing possibility of unconventional warfare. The Navy’s vision argued that large and protracted land wars were unlikely and that the U.S. could best exert strategic influence and employ military power from offshore.

What is interesting today is not the accuracy or inaccuracy of the services’ visions but rather the absence of any compelling case by any of them for their particular set of skills and capabilities. Rather than trying to make the case for the F-35 or a new aerial tanker, the Air Force better start worrying about making the case for retaining it as an independent service. To many observers the Air Force looks more like a provider of services — ISR, space launch and transportation — than a force intended to conduct independent operations critical to winning wars. The Army is at war with itself over whether to be a heavy force focused on large-scale combined arms operations or a lighter one optimized for counterinsurgency/stability. The Navy has attempted sporadically and without much success to make the case for sea control or securing the global commons. Absent a blue water threat such as that posed by the Soviet Navy it is difficult to argue that freedom of the seas is at risk. The Marine Corps continues to make the case for amphibious warfare which, some sixty years after the last such operation, seems hard to sustain.

Perhaps the services hope that by hiding in plain sight they can survive the deluge to come. However, each is likely to find that if they want to preserve a minimum viable force structure and set of critical capabilities, they will have to articulate a clear and compelling vision of the future of conflict and the central role they will play in that future. Unfortunately, future budgets are unlikely to be large enough to carry all competing visions forward. The outcome of the next clash of visions is likely to determine which of the services survive relatively whole and which are going to be in decline.