Content provided in partnership with
Government Industry
Transforming the U.S. Armed Forces: Rhetoric or Reality?
Naval War College Review, Summer, 2001 by Thomas G. Mahnken
It would be wrong to view the services as uniformly opposed to fundamental change. Rather, each service is split between traditionalists and elements who are enthusiastic about new ways of war. One recent survey of the U.S. officer corps revealed significant splits over the character and conduct of future wars as well as over the urgency of change. (39) The Defense Department needs to identify and nurture forward-looking constituencies. The starting point should be an intellectual map of the services, one that identifies and locates both support for and opposition to new mission areas. Such a map could assist the Defense Department's leadership in channeling resources to those portions of the services that are most enthusiastic about emerging warfare areas. It could also assist the department in evaluating the adequacy of military career paths.
- Most Popular Articles in News
- The Ten Best Laptop bags
- Tata plans cheapest-ever car for Indian market
- GLOBALIZATION AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF UNDERDEVELOPMENT OF THE THIRD WORLD
- Corn is good for you; Corn is not only a tasty treat, but also a cereal that ...
- THE 50 BEST STYLISH HANDBAGS TO CARRY
- More »
The Defense Department also needs to devote additional resources to experimentation. In particular, the services should advance from the stage of war-gaming innovative concepts to acquiring small numbers of the weapon systems involved and developing concepts and organizations for their use. The Navy, for example, should purchase a squadron of STREETFIGHTERS to form an operational test bed for network-centric warfare. The Marines, for their part, should establish experimental units dedicated to projecting power in the face of capable access-denial defenses and to conducting military operations in urban terrain.
More generally, the Defense Department should begin redistributing resources away from legacy systems of declining utility and toward new ways of war. The Pentagon should scale back or cancel weapons that are heavy or have limited mobility, highly detectable signatures, and limited range; it should increase funding for long-range precision strike, stealth, and C4ISR (*) systems. The department should also increase substantially the funds it devotes to research and development.
Today's defense budget is split fairly equally between the services. While such an arrangement minimizes interservice friction, it is not particularly conducive to innovation. Indeed, there is a strong argument to be made that interservice competition can be an engine of change. One way to promote innovation would be to force the services to compete for funds based upon their ability to meet current and anticipated operational and strategic challenges. These challenges would include the need to assure access to regions of critical importance to the United States; gain and maintain information and space superiority; protect against nuclear, biological, chemical, and information attack; and conduct military operations in urban terrain. In order to ensure that the American armed forces meet these emerging challenges, the secretary of defense should set aside a significant portion of the military's procurement budget for innovative programs.
The service secretaries are a potentially powerful but generally underutilized constituency for change. They have it within their power--through control of promotion boards and officer assignments--to have enduring impacts on their services. They should wield this power to ensure that officers associated with emerging warfare areas, such as space and information warfare, enjoy opportunities to rise to senior leadership positions.
