The myth of the two-front war: over-preparing for a two-front war that will almost certainly never occur is costing us billions

Washington Monthly, March, 1997 by Lawrence J. Korb

Since the end of World War II, the United States has decided that it is in our national interest to maintain a large standing peacetime military. But the appropriate size and shape of a peacetime military force is a subject of acrimonious debate in this country. The debate is so heated because the outcome determines how much this nation will spend on defense as well as the roles and missions of each of the four armed services. This debate promises to occupy much of the time of William Cohen, Clinton's new defense secretary. Before outlining the choices confronting Cohen and the country, it may be useful to discuss briefly how this issue has been handled over the past half-century.

In the 1950s, President Eisenhower, fearful of bankrupting American society and of the power of the military-industrial complex, limited the military to a fixed percentage of GDP and adopted a policy of relying on nuclear weapons to make up for any perceived shortfalls in the size of the conventional forces. The Kennedy administration felt the military should be able to fight simultaneously two major conventional wars, one in Europe and one in Asia, as well as handle a minor contingency in the Third World. This necessitated a large increase in force size or structure and in the level of defense spending even before the war in Vietnam.

In the early 1970s, Richard Nixon eliminated one of the major wars from Pentagon contingency planning and slashed defense forces and spending accordingly. Ironically, Nixon used the defense dividend to double aid to state and local governments, index entitlements, and establish EPA, OSHA, and AMTRAK. (No wonder Mark Shields calls him our last liberal president.) This "one and a half war" policy remained in effect until Ronald Reagan adopted a strategy of horizontal escalation, which postulated that any war with the Soviet Union would automatically be a world-wide conflict, not confined just to the European theater. This enabled Reagan to rationalize increasing defense spending by over 50 percent in real terms in his first four years in office.

The military strategies of each of our Cold War commanders in chief was subject to intense criticism during his time in office. Eisenhower was criticized for relying too much on nuclear weapons and for allowing a "missile gap" to develop; Kennedy for embracing a strategy more ambitious than his budget; Nixon and Carter for spending too little on defense and thus creating a hollow military; and Reagan for spending far more than was needed to get the Soviets to call a halt to the Cold War.

When the Soviet Empire began to collapse in 1989, General Colin Powell, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, fearful that Americans would demand "too large" a peace dividend, developed the Rogue Doctrine. This doctrine postulated that in the post-cold war era, the military threats to the U.S. would come from rogue states like Iraq, Iran, Syria, Libya, Cuba, and North Korea, and that the U.S. needed to be able to handle at least two of these rogues simultaneously. Powell reasoned that if the U.S. had only a one-war capability, North Korea, for example, might be tempted to take advantage of the U.S. while this nation was fighting a war in the Persian Gulf. Handling these two major regional contingencies (MRCs) simultaneously, Powell argued, would require a force structure and spending level approximately 25 percent below the 1990 level, but more, in inflated adjusted dollars, than was spent in the Nixon and Carter years, and about 90 percent of the average level of defense outlays in the entire cold war period.

In the 1992 campaign, candidate Bill Clinton and then House Armed Services Committee Chairman Les Aspin (D-WI) criticized Powell's approach as top-down and promised that a Bottom-Up Review (BUR) would yield a smaller and less costly military. When Clinton took office, he installed Aspin in the Pentagon to do his Bottom-Up Review. But when the BUR was completed, Aspin came out with essentially the same force structure and budget levels as Powell, and more in real dollars than either Nixon or Carter.

This year, under pressure from the Republican Congress, which argues that there is a mismatch between the strategy and the amount of resources made available by the Clinton administration, the Pentagon is revisiting the two-MRC strategy in a process called the Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR). Because it may have such a large impact upon the amount and distribution of defense spending, the QDR is generating considerable controversy. Within the Pentagon, the administration, on the Hill, and in the policy community, to date five different viewpoints have been expressed.

One group of analysts supports the Powell position that the U.S. has no choice but to retain the two-regional-war strategy. To do any less would not only jeopardize our vital national security interests, but would undermine our status as a world leader and global superpower. Secretary of Defense William Perry, in his last days in office, argued that the two MRCs is an existential fact. According to Perry, we do not have a choice about two MRCs because we cannot wish away the reality that we might be faced with two regional conflicts simultaneously. Not surprisingly, Perry's position is most strongly supported by Army Chief of Staff Dennis Reimer. He argues that the threat of war in Korea and the Middle East means that the nation cannot afford to relax its two war scenario and thus must maintain a large army.