FORUM

Issues in Science and Technology, Fall 2005

He says the Navy's F/A-18 Super-Hornet is an "unneeded" tactical fighter. It, too, however, has significantly more range and combat capability than the F-18C/D that it is replacing. This difference appears in many aspects of total system design and cost, including, for example, the need for less tanker capacity to help the aircraft penetrate to distances such as those from the Indian Ocean to Afghanistan, as was necessary during the campaign to eliminate al Qaeda's established presence in that country. The bomber force alone couldn't carry that whole task, because its sortie rate is much lower than that of the carrier attack force.

Finally, he says that the Virginia-class submarine is no longer needed because the Soviet submarine threat has gone away. This disregards the facts that China has a significant number of nuclear attack submarines and that quiet conventionally powered submarines are proliferating in waters that U.S. and allied shipping and naval forces will have to transit in any Eurasian regional conflict.

In the strategic area, Peña proposes that we cut our armed forces in half and drop back to a strategy of letting our allies or other regional powers handle conflicts as they arise, with our forces on call if help is needed. This seems to neglect the fact that our ground forces are already stretched thin by operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, to which we are committed for an indefinite period. Where would the additional forces come from if we were called on to help in another regional conflict? Such conflicts are possible in Korea or over Taiwan, or even with Iran or Pakistan, should internal events in those countries turn them into regional antagonists threatening U.S. allies or other countries (such as Taiwan) over which we have extended our protective umbrella.

Peña makes light of the contribution that our 31,000 troops in the Republic of Korea (ROK) make to that country's defense. He notes that the 700,000-strong ROK army should be sufficient to defend against the million-man North Korean armed forces. This neglects the fact that the North Koreans once before in history demonstrated powerful fighting capability, and the possibility that scarce resources in that economically deprived country may be deflected from supporting the civilian population to keeping their armed forces in top condition to support the bellicose North Korean foreign policy statements. It also neglects the fact that the U.S. Army units in Korea are deployed to defend Seoul, which is only an hour or so march by armored forces from the North Korean border. Withdrawal of our forces would thin the ROK defenses against a formidable potential foe and unacceptably expose the most critical point in an ally's defenses and survival to imminent capture.

Peña quotes Harold Brown's Council on Foreign Relations task force as saying that China is 20 years behind us militarily, and he seems to rely on the subsequent statement that we can retain that lead. But he appears to ignore the very important conditional clause in the same statement: ". . . if the United States continues to dedicate significant resources to improving its military forces," and counsels stopping that continued improvement. He thus advocates giving China the needed breathing space to pull even with us, in the face of its threats to regional stability over Taiwan and its expressed desire to extend its maritime control 2,500 kilometers into the waters adjacent to its coasts-areas where we have many strategic interests, including those in Japan, Korea, South and Southeast Asia, and Australia/New Zealand.