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Transforming the U.S. global defense posture
Naval War College Review, Spring, 2006 by Ryan Henry
At the end of 2004, the world was witness to an event that no one could have foreseen. Even more startling than the shock of the Indian Ocean tsunami itself was the scale of its impact. But the very suddenness and speed with which the tsunami struck gave a glimpse of how valuable it is to posture our forces for uncertainty. Had the tsunami occurred in 1985, at the height of the Cold War, it is difficult to imagine that the United States could have surged the forces and logistical support needed to deliver food and water to the areas of the eastern Indian Ocean that were the hardest hit. It is even more difficult to imagine that the United States could have depended on an extensive network of partner nations to assist us in exercising our global responsibility to act. Only through the transformation of the U.S. military's capabilities and the growing flexibility of our overseas posture was the United States able to respond as quickly and effectively as it did during this crisis.
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The security environment at the start of the twenty-first century is perhaps the most uncertain it has been in our nation's history. This article focuses on the strategic realities that are driving the transformation of the American global defense posture to contend with that uncertainty, and the resultant changes the Department of Defense is working to bring about in our relationships and partnership capabilities around the world.
NEW STRATEGIC LANDSCAPE
The impetus for the transformation that put us in a position to respond quickly and effectively to the Indian Ocean tsunami was the emergence of a new strategic landscape. Since 2002, the U.S. military has been adapting the posture of its forces to address the key security challenges that our country will face in the twenty-first century. Traditional, state-based military challenges--for which our Cold War posture was optimized--will remain, but as the 11 September 2001 attacks revealed, a broader range of security challenges has emerged. The events of 9/11 showed the destructive potential of terrorists and the vulnerability of the United States and of its allies to unwarned attack. It showed the effectiveness of asymmetric methods in countering U.S. conventional military superiority and sounded an early warning of the approaching confluence of terrorism, state sponsorship of terrorism, and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) enabled by globalization. It focused our attention on a hostile ideology that openly advocates the killing of innocents for political gain, and it proved that globalization has made failed states and ungoverned areas in the most remote corners of the world grave dangers to our security.
The Secretary of Defense's 2005 National Defense Strategy provides a conceptual framework for understanding this new strategic landscape, which may be said to span four types of security challenges: traditional, irregular, catastrophic, and disruptive.
* Traditional: states employing military forces in well-known forms of military competition and conflict (such as major combat operations employing conventional air, sea, and land forces)
* Irregular: nonstate and state actors employing "unconventional" methods to counter stronger state opponents (for instance, terrorism, insurgency, civil war, and other methods aimed to erode influence and political will)
* Catastrophic: terrorists or rogue states employing WMD or WMD-like effects against American interests (for example, massive attacks on the homeland, collapsing global markets, or loss of key allies that would inflict a state of shock upon political and commercial activity)
* Disruptive: competitors employing breakout technologies or methods that counter or cancel our military superiority (e.g., advances in bio-, cyber-, or space war, ultra-miniaturization, directed energy).
As recent experience has shown, these challenges often converge and overlap. Our adversaries in Iraq and Afghanistan have employed both traditional and irregular approaches, and terrorist organizations like al-Qa'ida are posing irregular threats while actively seeking catastrophic capabilities.
THE BROAD VIEW OF "TRANSFORMATION"
President Bush came to office in 2001 with an aggressive agenda for defense transformation. He charged Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld with transforming the Defense Department for the challenges of the twenty-first century. The administration's sense of the changed strategic landscape led to a new assessment of our needed global defense posture. What is emerging from that assessment is the most profound reordering of U.S. military forces overseas since World War II and the Korean War. The key to understanding this realignment effort is transformation.
When he arrived at the Pentagon, Secretary Rumsfeld recognized the need for change. He understood that the strategic and operational environment today is defined by uncertainty, that the world is changing in relation to that environment, and that we need to view that world as it is and adapt to it as necessary. The threat-based planning system prevalent in the Cold War--through which we could project a seemingly predefined and predetermined Soviet threat and how to posture against it--had become obsolete. Overcoming our preconceptions of that era, Secretary Rumsfeld led the department in taking the first step of transformation by shifting away from threat-based planning and toward a capabilities-based approach that addresses the full spectrum of feasible threats. This approach posits that unlike in the Cold War, we no longer know precisely what threats we will face in the future, who will pose them, and where, much less when. However, we do believe there will be future challengers to American interests and to the interests of our allies and partners, and that we must plan against the kinds of capabilities potential adversaries may employ to exploit our vulnerabilities.
