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“Everything old is new again,” assesses Michael Bruno of Ares after checking out the Hadley/Perry alterna-QDR. Its principal criticism of the 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review is that the document didn’t invest significantly enough in the Navy and the Air Force. And it’s not wrong. After all, the 2010 QDR recommended cuts to both services’ program priorities and expressly devoted its emphasis to the ground forces and immediate, manifested priorities and threats like Afghanistan, terrorism and cyberattack.
The question for Steve Hadley and Bill Perry is why the Gates Pentagon should go back to the same solutions for the same strategic framework of big state-based threats that characterized the U.S. defense posture in the second half of the 20th century. It’s not like Gates & company neglect the Navy and the Air Force and their missions in the 2010 QDR. It’s that the Pentagon made an effort to think through what their missions are and ought to be beyond deterring giant states that aren’t going to confront us any time during the horizon. I’ve seen good arguments from the U.S. Naval Institute’s blog and Commander Salamander that the Gates Pentagon lacks a sufficient vision for the Navy in the early 21st century. (And for a great behind-the-scenes account of the debates within the Navy over maritime strategy, here’s a must-read.) What I haven’t seen is a compelling argument for why Gates’ shift in emphasis is inappropriate.
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Actually, I think the Defense establishment needs to do the MOST thinking about the near-term future of the Navy. It seems pretty obvious to me that in the next ten years or so we’re going to see missile technology that essentially eliminates the viability of surface combatants in any classic state vs. state confrontation. The only way you can counter this threat is to develop near 100% effective terminal phase ABM defense. And this is highly unlikely, at least in the same ten-twenty year time frame.
So you have this likelihood that by 2025 we’re going to be effectively out of the aircraft carrier business. And since the dominance of American military forces is largely premised on air superiority (enemies can’t mass armor, artillery or troops, nor can they support or supply ground forces from the air), this radically reduces America’s ability to mount expeditionary actions, and thus reduces her ability to project power.
Now, in the long run, these kind of strategic technological advances might be good, in the sense that they make large scale conflicts that much more difficult, just as nuclear weapons have made them that much more dangerous.
So yeah, some actual thinking about the role of the navy in the near and medium term future might be appropriate at this point…
mikey
“There should be no peace dividends.” That is what the Secret Government tells us. What a pack of jackals! What a tubload of neo-con war criminals. Here is the list of baby killers who tell us no peace, war forever.
Stephen J. Hadley, Co-Chairman
Richard Armitage J.D. Crouch Charles Curtis Rudy deLeon Joan Dempsey Eric Edelman Sherri Goodman David Jeremiah George Joulwan
William J. Perry, Co-Chairman
John Keane Richard Kohn John Lehman Alice Maroni John Nagl Robert Scales James Talent Paul Van Riper Larry Welch