Disruptive challenges and accelerating force transformation

Joint Force Quarterly, July, 2006 by Terry J. Pudas

The Department attempts to compete on the very best capabilities. I say let's compete on the basis of cost and cycle time.... Learning rate turns out to be a great competitive advantage and allows the Department to move forward. Information gets shared more broadly, as we compete on time, and performance will actually go up.

--Vice Admiral Arthur K. Cebrowsld, USN

Broadening military capabilities--that is, improving and changing at faster rates than our potential competitors--is a key objective of U.S. defense strategy and the military transformation process. The ability to maintain a competitive advantage depends not only on the Nation's manpower, fiscal resources, industrial capacity, and technology prowess, but also on the ability to outthink and outlearn adversaries, thereby making it more difficult for them to design and build military capabilities that threaten the United States and its allies.

In information age operating environments, where rapid change and ambiguity are the norm, this competitive advantage often depends on the availability of multiple effective options. (1) If U.S. military forces can accelerate the rate of transformation to generate more actionable and effective options than potential opponents, narrow the range of potential successful actions that opponents believe are available to them, and maintain initiative by implementing effective options, then they will be able to impose overwhelming complexity on opposing decisionmakers.

While many Department of Defense (DOD) programs claim to be transformational, relatively few contribute to accelerating the transformation rate. The key to identifying programs and claims on resources that can accelerate the transformation rate and reduce or eliminate the threat of disruptive (and other) security challenges depends on a common set of new metrics, including generating higher transaction rates within and among U.S. forces, achieving faster learning rates by U.S. forces, creating and preserving options in military competitions, and creating overmatching complexity in relation to adversaries or would-be adversaries.

The Four Security Challenges

The conceptual core of U.S. defense strategy rests on the four security challenges described in the 2005 National Defense Strategy (NDS): traditional, irregular, catastrophic, and disruptive. (2) In turn, the NDS provided an essential strategic foundation for the conduct of the 2006 Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR). While acknowledging that U.S. military forces maintain significant advantages in traditional forms of warfare, the NDS argues that our enemies are more likely to pose asymmetric threats--including irregular, catastrophic, and disruptive challenges--to the United States and its multinational partners in the years ahead (see figure 1).

Figure 1

Four Security Challenges

Traditional

challenges posed by states employing recognized
military capabilities and forces in well
understood forms of military competition
and conflict.

Irregular

challenges from those seeking to erode
American influence and power by employing
unconventional or irregular methods.

Catastrophic

challenges from adversaries seeking to paralyze
American leadership and power by
employing WMD or WMD-like effects in surprise
attacks on critical, symbolic, or other
high-value targets.

Distruptive

challenges from adversaries who seek to
develop and use breakthrough capabilities
to negate current U.S. military advantages in
key operational domains.

To "operationalize the National Defense Strategy ... senior civilian and military leaders [within DOD] identified four priority areas" as the focus of the QDR: "defeating terrorist networks; defending the homeland in depth; shaping the choices of countries at strategic crossroads; and preventing hostile states and nonstate actors from acquiring or using WMD [weapons of mass destruction]" Figure 2 illustrates the ongoing shift within DOD to the type of capabilities and forces needed to address irregular, catastrophic, and disruptive challenges, while maintaining those capabilities and forces required to deal with traditional challenges. (3)

[FIGURE 2 OMITTED]

The four security challenges are interrelated. Equally important, none of the four challenges is subordinate to, or a lesser included case of another. All have important claims on resources because it is their interaction that poses the greatest national security challenge to the United States. This is a significant change to longstanding U.S. planning assumptions regarding priorities, resource allocation, and military requirements.

The NDS and the QDR Report emphasize the goal of broadening U.S. military capabilities, underlining the need to develop ways of meeting both present and future dangers quickly. Transformation is a necessary component of dealing with each of the four challenges. It has been difficult, however, to reach a consensus within DOD regarding the rate of transformation needed to cope with each of these challenges. While the Secretary of Defense and other senior leaders have consistently sought to increase the rate of force transformation, some have expressed caution, arguing that we cannot afford to increase the rate of transformation too dramatically as we fight the war on terror and that the department might actually increase the risks to U.S. forces by going too fast. The current transformation rate represents a careful balance between benefit and risk in U.S. force planning.