Strategy Makes A Comeback

Secretary Gates presented his recommendations for the restructuring of our armed forces to the president today. Overall, it's a sound, bold new plan. The best thing about the plan is that it comes from a strategic view, not politics, ambition, or...whatever the hell it is we base our procurement on these days.

The Big Winner in all of this is the small-wars crowd, while the Cold Warriors take quite a thumping. Gates summarized the strategy that the force will be built on as: "we must rebalance this department's programs in order to institutionalize and enhance our capabilities to fight the wars we are in today and the scenarios we are most likely to face in the years ahead, while at the same time providing a hedge against other risks and contingencies." Short and sweet, that means small-wars, crisis repsonse, counterinsurgency and the like is the new "meat and potatoes" of our armed forces. The Cold Warriors who wanted to maintain a high-end force that could hand China's ass to it with 0 casualties are not going to get what they want. Which is as it should be, since major wars are rare and becoming rarer, while our military in constantly invovled in crisis response and small wars.

Last week, in his statement to the HASC, Thomas Barnett aptly described this choice:

It is my professional opinion that the United States defense community currently accepts too much risk AND casualties AND instability on the low end of the combat spectrum while continuing to spend far too much money on building up our combat capabilities for high-end scenarios. In effect, we over-feed our Leviathan force while starving our SysAdmin force, accepting far too many avoidable casualties in the latter while hedging excessively against theoretical future casualties in the former. Personally, I find this risk-management strategy to be both strategically unsound and morally reprehensible.

Gates shares the same sentiment:

But, it is important to remember that every defense dollar spent to over-insure against a remote or diminishing risk – or, in effect, to "run up the score" in a capability where the United States is already dominant – is a dollar not available to take care of our people, reset the force, win the wars we are in, and improve capabilities in areas where we are underinvested and potentially vulnerable. That is a risk I will not take.

Here are the highlights of the recommendations:
*Army and USMC come out ahead in personnel.
*Moar Choppars for the army, lots more ISR, including UAVs and some turboprops that I'll need to look into. I'm guessing relatively cheap aircraft with modern IR sensors.
*Improved air/sea lift capabilities
*Reaffirmed committment to LCS
*F-35 comes out as a winner
*F-22 to end at 187.
*Land and Sea Based theatre missile defenses reaffirmed (winners: SM-3, THAAD. Losers: Alaska, ABL, Multiple Kill Vehicle)
*Reaffirmed KC-X
*Replacement for Ohio SSBNs
*NO NEW (nuclear?) BOMBERS
*10-carrier Navy
*CG-X delayed
*DDG-1000 ended at 3, DDG-51 class restarted
*Reduced procurement of the surface fleet
*Amphib programs delayed (this surpises me)
*VH-71 Cancelled
*CSAR-X Cancelled
*FCS to be replaced with a new program

ACQUISITION REFORM
*Wants mature technology requirements, realism in anticipating threats, end requirements-creep
*more acquisition staff, greater oversight, stricter contact terms

For the most part, this looks like a very sensible plan. My only major concern is that we over-emphasize air supremacy over what we do when we have that supremacy. Between the F-22 and F-35, it makes some sense that the F-35 comes out the winner, but what we really need are dedicated CAS aircraft (although, to be fair, the plan does call for an increase in Army helicopters) and high-endurance bombers. The report does say no new bombers, but I'm not clear if they mean no bombers at all or no new bombers as part of our nuclear forces. I don't think we need nuclear bombers; SSBNs and ordinary strike aircraft can take care of that. What I don't want, however, are high-end aircraft like the F-22 and F-35 loitering over countries like Afghanistan or Iraq waiting for a call to go drop a JDAM on some insurgents, burning millions of dollars of jet fuel while they wait. I want a cheap aircraft like a dedicated CAS plane or a high-endurance plane like a bomber (more loiter time=less sorties=less operating costs and less wasted fuel) or even a high-endurance armed UAV to do that. The good news on this front: increased ISR, including UAVs and high-endurance turboprops. The bottom line is that once you have air supremacy, you don't need to be flying every mission with superfighters that can handle MiGs, SAMs, jamming at the same time while supporting the troops on the ground. You can fly the support missions with cheap planes designed for the specific missions they're going to be performing. Something like an A-10 or AC-130, even a B-52. Just have a few superfighters flying CAP on the borders to keep the airspace safe for the support aircraft and you're golden.

I'm also having some difficulty reconciling how Gates says his missile defense focus "on the rogue state AND theater missile threats" while funding only the theatre-defense programs but not those designed to protect against long range missiles from, e.g., Iran or the DPRK. I would be OK with focusing the technology on the theatre threat, while leaving the long range threat from the rogues to deterrence/preemption/anti-proliferation, but that's not what Gates said.

Those gripes aside, this is a very welcome change.