Because the president has yet to articulate a formal national security strategy, the defense review is the clearest statement we have of his inward-looking orientation. The QDR's formulation of "America's global role" is telling: "America's interests are inextricably linked to the integrity and resilience of the international system." This stands American strategic culture on its head; past presidents saw that the integrity of the international system depended upon the resilience of American power. But in the Obama view, international politics is not a competition for power, but an exercise in cooperation. As the review puts it, we "advance our interests by reinforcing the rights and responsibilities of all nations."... and go read the article for the historical perspective in the intro and the 4 Ps.
This is an intellectual justification for allowing the U.S. military to continue to atrophy. America's armed forces are significantly smaller than they need to be, and the major weapons systems they operate were fielded in the Reagan years. In 1990, the U.S. Army had 780,000 soldiers on active duty and operated the "Big Five" weapons systems: the M1 Abrams tank, the M2 Bradley fighting vehicle, the AH-64 Apache attack helicopter, the UH-60 Black Hawk troop transport helicopter, and the Patriot air defense missile. Twenty years later the Army is only 70 percent as big; it can't meet its commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan without mobilizing about 100,000 National Guard and Army reservists. It operates the same Big Five, having failed five times to field a replacement ground combat vehicle, twice to field a new howitzer, and once to introduce a new armed scout chopper. Tens of billions invested in research have yielded very little procurement, except the Stryker wheeled vehicle and the Mine-Resistant, Ambush-Protected "MRAP" monster trucks that may not be very useful after Iraq.
The Navy has fallen to less than half of the 600-ship peak of the late 1980s. The Obama administration has slowed the pace of aircraft carrier production, which would be a bigger problem except that the Navy doesn't have enough planes to fill up the decks it has. The Navy is also suffering a serious identity crisis. It should be responding to the rapidly growing capabilities of the Chinese Navy, particularly the massive number of submarines and land-based missiles that pose an imminent and lethal threat to U.S. carriers and surface combatants. But instead of preparing to rule the sea lanes of the western Pacific and the Indian Ocean--where a huge proportion of international shipping passes through several chokepoints--the Navy prepares itself for tsunami relief and the suppression of piracy. There's nothing wrong with providing relief (imagine Haiti without the U.S. Navy) or repelling boarders, but those aren't the primary missions for a "blue-water" navy.
The Air Force also is developing a split personality. It is coming to embrace its small-war role, particularly when it comes to unmanned systems like the Predator. But in almost every other respect, the service has fallen on hard times. The 1990s, the time of Operation Desert Storm and the Kosovo war, look in retrospect like the golden age of airpower. The future looks like a nightmare. The Obama administration's decision in last year's budget to terminate the F-22 Raptor program, combined with technological and program-management problems with the F-35, raises previously unthinkable questions about the American ability to assert air superiority in a modern air defense environment. Another lethal combination--corrupt procurement officials and congressional efforts at procurement "reform"--has delayed by almost a decade the Air Force's replacement of its 40-year-old tanker fleet. The current budget contains, at last, some funding for a new bomber to replace the B-2 and the old B-52, but the money is only for studies; a new bomber, be it manned or unmanned, is decades off.
At least the QDR does not shy from recognizing that "first and foremost, the United States is a nation at war." But this makes its fundamental failing all the more apparent: The review ducks the basic question of defense planning, How much is enough?
That's a first. There have been four previous QDRs, if you include the 1993 "Bottom-Up" Review, and while each answered the question slightly differently, each at least gave the services basic guidance. And each defined a specific force-sizing construct, most often built around a variant of the traditional "two-war standard," the idea that the U.S. military, with its global responsibilities, needed to be able to conduct at least two large-scale operations at the same time.
Perhaps not surprisingly for an Obama administration product, this review prefers nuance and complexity to clarity and simplicity. In place of a force-sizing construct, it offers a force-sizing philosophy. The philosophy itself isn't wrong, just vague. Rather than winning two wars, the military must "aggregate capacity" to "balance risks" across four "priorities." In the Pentagon, the philosophy is known as the "Four Ps"
Another article looks at President Obama's approach to the wars and compares to previous wartime democratic presidents.
Suddenly and surprisingly, we have a Bush-like Obama Doctrine. To the applause of liberal hawks and formerly critical neocons, the president declared in his Nobel Peace Prize speech that the U.S. will continue to wage war—though naturally, only “just” war—anywhere and against anyone it chooses in a never-ending struggle against the forces of evil. His antiwar supporters can take seats on the sidelines. It’s all reminiscent of John F. Kennedy and the prescient George Ball, and afterward Ball and Lyndon Johnson. In the early ’60s, JFK—reluctantly, we are told by his admirers—decided to send 16,000 “trainers” to Vietnam to teach the South Vietnamese how to play soldier and to stop the Communists from sweeping over Southeast Asia. Vast quantities of money and assorted advisers were shipped without accountability to the corrupt gang of thugs running and ruining that country.
Ball, the one dissenter in Kennedy’s entourage, pleaded with JFK to recall France’s devastating defeat in 1954 at Dien Bien Phu and throughout Indochina. “Within five years we’ll have 300,000 men in the paddies and jungles and never find them again,” he warned the liberal icon in the White House. But JFK thought he knew better, caustically answering, “George, you’re crazier than hell. That just isn’t going to happen.” Ball would also press Lyndon Johnson to stand down in Vietnam before he destroyed his presidency, domestic agenda, and more importantly the lives of tens of thousands of American soldiers and their families, not to mention a few million Southeast Asians. But LBJ wasn’t going to be the first president to lose a war and be blasted by pugnacious home-front warriors. Failing to stop the North Vietnamese would sooner or later have us fighting them on Waikiki Beach, or so the Cold War line went. Ever since then, we have continued to hear about regional menaces that supposedly, if left unchecked, will threaten vital U.S. interests or even Americans at home. Ronald Reagan employed that rationale in defending the proxy war in Central America waged by U.S.-backed Contras. George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton extended the tradition of intervention, sending troops to theaters of combat as far-flung as Panama, Kuwait, and the Balkans, while the second Bush launched invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. They have all been war presidents.
But Barack Obama was going to be different, or so my fellow antiwar liberals— and a few antiwar conservatives— hoped. He was to herald the end of that uncompromising and unilateral era of preventive war. The hundreds of thousands who joyously greeted the president- elect in Grant Park or the 1.5 million at his inauguration were ecstatic with anticipation. Left-wing pundits wrote excitedly about FDR’s One Hundred Days and projected great plans onto the new Man From Illinois. In countless articles, Republicans were declared brain dead, and the Bush- Cheney policies that got us into Iraq, Afghanistan, and the torture business were buried.
One year after those celebrations, it’s the neocons cheering, seeing in Obama’s policies a vindication of the late administration. Who would have dreamed that following Obama’s West Point speech announcing 30,000 more troops destined for Afghanistan, William Kristol would laud Obama in the pages of the Washington Post, writing, “the rationale for this surge is identical to Bush’s,” and praise the Democratic president for having “embraced the use of military force as a key instrument of national power”? War makes strange bedfellows. Michèle Flournoy, Obama’s under secretary of defense for policy, has been invited to speak about the president’s hopes for a new Afghanistan on a panel led by Frederick W. Kagan at the American Enterprise Institute, the heart of neoconservatism.
Why did Obama buy what the hawks sold him? What if he had leveled with the nation and acknowledged that, however obnoxious and cruel the Taliban may be, they pose no danger to the United States? What if he had vowed that we would not dispatch tens of thousands of additional troops to a civil war in an agrarian, impoverished, largely illiterate country divided by tribal loyalties?
It was not to be. Instead, as New York Times columnist David Brooks stated approvingly, “With his two surges, Obama will more than double the number of American troops in Afghanistan.” Charles Krauthammer was direct and sharp: “most supporters of the Afghanistan war were satisfied. They got the policy; the liberals got the speech”—and no say in the construction of that policy.
After West Point and Oslo, neocons saw Obama as a more coherent Bush, an electrifying orator who had dazzled antiwar Democrats and independents and then promptly dumped them. When the New York Times printed a photo of the men and women who helped Obama reach his decision to escalate, not one dove was present.
By: Brant
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