“After Gates was confirmed as George W. Bush’s defense secretary in December 2006, he gave several speeches outlining major reforms that his successor should undertake–in weapons procurement, promotion policy, and the whole careerist culture inside the Pentagon. (With only two years in office, combined with a plateful of crises in Iraq and elsewhere, he knew he wouldn’t have time to take those steps himself.) When he stayed on at Barack Obama’s request, and thus became his own successor, many wondered whether he would turn his words into action. With this budget, he has begun to do just that.“
A holdover from the bookmarks of last week: Slate‘s Fred Kaplan offers a concise overview of the proposed Obama-Gates military spending reforms. (These are not spending cuts, by the way, despite what you may have heard — just some much-needed and long-overdue reprioritizing over at the Pentagon. I also like the idea of phasing out defense contractors in favor of presumably much more cost-conscious civil servants.) “This budget will not go down easily in the Pentagon or in Congress. The F-22, the DDG-1000, and the Future Combat Systems are the favored systems by much of the Air Force, Navy, and Army brass, respectively…The F-22 in particular is also a favorite of many legislators — the result of politically shrewd subcontracting that spread out production of the plane to key districts in 46 states.”
My question about “fighting the last war” is this: why are we assuming that “the next war” (since it’s a given there will be another one) will necessarily be about counterinsurgency? Isn’t that kind of thinking exactly what we mean by “fighting the last war”? What if the US needs to be to do an effective ground or air war, or even, perish the thought, actual national defense? And all the while we’re studying Petraeus’s manuals for how to occupy and subdue a country? Surely the fine military minds at the Pentagon are gaming out different scenarios of US national security interests in the future, and not all of them involve a successful invasion of, say, Syria or Somalia. Right?
I guess it all comes down to likelihood. Other than maybe another land war in Asia, which I’m guessing the powers-that-be have gamed out pretty thoroughly over the last fifty years, a counter-insurgency war like the ones we’re fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq seems far and away the most likely type of scenario we’ll be involved with in the future.
Such is the price of the Pax Americana. Since Russia collapsed, we have no “Big Enemy” left to fight. (Yes, ok, China…but if I had to bet on the next big land war in Asia, I might choose Pakistan.) But, no matter what happens, we can still probably expect to get involved in a lot of peacekeeping-style flare-ups around the globe.
In fact, if we were really serious about transforming our military for the next century, we’d start training our soldiers to be better peacekeepers. Right now, we’re 95% sword and 5% ploughshare. But, given the Pentagon turns like a battleship, I’m relatively content to see it start reprioritizing toward COIN conflicts at the very least.