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Published Airpower Journal - Summer 1989
Maj Gen Perry M. Smith, USAF, Retired
I would like to acknowledge my debt to Herman Kahn. During the two years preceding his death in 1983, I was with him quite often. He always seemed ahead of his time, always searching for a better future and working hard to reach it. His ability to extend his intellectual grasp beyond the present, his keen interest in retrospective histories, and his willingness to devote his time (in early 1983) to concentrate on long-range prospects for the Air Force all contributed to my thinking and planning, both then and now.
THIS article seeks to yank people out of a mind-set that assumes that an extrapolation of the present into the future Is good enough for purposes of planning and making strategy.1 This aim is particularly important because the pressures for continuity of planning and policy will be quite strong now that George Bush is president. Most long-range planning assumes that things will pretty much remain the same in the future. Thus, all we have to do is examine a few variables, such as technology and the changing nature of the Soviet threat, and we will be able to make good forecasts, plans, and programs. Because we and our allies in Western Europe assume that the Soviet Union will remain the predominant adversary for the foreseeable future, there is little point in spending time thinking about emerging adversaries. This mind-set has served us well in the past because the Soviets have remained the big threat; however, it is time to go through the agonizing process of identifying other potential adversaries as our relationship with the Soviet Union changes.
Continuation of current planning, strategy, and policy will not be adequate if the United States aspires to be the preeminent actor on the world stage during the next century. Over the next two decades, we can expect explosive technological transformations in the developed world together with changing patterns of economic, financial, political, and military interplay among all nations. Good old American pragmatism and muddling through by the use of tiny, incremental steps to avoid risk are no longer tenable practices. We need visionary leadership, innovative strategic planning at many levels of government, and risk taking--both in Washington and internationally. Unless we set specific, long-term goals and priorities and stick with them, we are doomed to slide--like dinosaurs--into a morass of post historic mud.
Planners must consider a number of alternatives for the future so that planning and programming will involve more than a simple extension of current practices into the distant future. For instance, they should consider a possible collapse of the world's major economies, leading to a worldwide depression. If this should occur, planners must anticipate the emergence of radical leaders who promise simplistic solutions to desperate populations. They must study the lessons of the 1930s so that democratic states--though weakened by the depression--can prevent the rise of any future Hitlers or Tojos.
Further, we should allow for a Soviet Union that would be both economically and militarily formidable as well as one that is considerably less threatening. A stronger Soviet Union might serve to strengthen our system of alliances but might also require us to increase spending on national defense. On the other hand, a weaker Soviet Union could undermine our alliances and probably lead to a considerable reduction of US forces stationed over seas.
We must also examine possible new threats and pay particular attention to those involving high technology. The United States would then have to respond by pursuing a sustained, vigorous program of research and development to be competitive in this area. Clearly, dramatic changes in the next 20 years will make forecasting, planning, and programming more difficult and challenging than it has been since the end of World War II. One danger is that the US military may begin to resemble the French military of the 1920s and 1930s; that is, we may learn the wrong lessons from previous wars and make the wrong choices regarding our options and the development of strategies, doctrines, and tactics. Equally disastrous, we may become so preoccupied with routine, day-to-day activities that we will not think, conceptualize, and plan. In any case, we must not allow budgetary austerity, doctrinal rigidity, bureaucratic infighting, and Washington "activity traps" to prevent us from doing some creative thinking and bold planning. If our planning is nothing more than the extrapolation of present policy, we will soon be in serious trouble. We should examine our long-range plans to see if they lave the same goals and priorities as our short-range plans and programs. If they do, the long-range plan is probably of little value.
The United States has been rather fortunate, in that its principal adversary--for all its impressive military power--has for over 40 years remained a mediocre military threat in terms of technology, a modest economic competitor, and a model of diminishing attractiveness to both developed and underdeveloped nations. The massive Soviet military threat has been worrisome indeed and Is likely to remain so for some time. But in many areas, the Soviet Union has lagged behind the United States--particularly in its incorporation of modern technology into military systems.
For example, the introduction of the F-15--representing a revolution in aviation technology--to Europe in 1977 created a US advantage over Soviet and Eastern European aircraft and aircrews that seemed almost insurmountable, at least for a few years. We have continued to widen the gap in some areas, but the Soviets have managed to close it in others. Although they have made some progress on their own initiative, many advancements are the result of their stealing our secrets. Significantly, none of our progress derives from our stealing their secrets. Any nation that must rely heavily on pilferage is doomed to lag behind in its military capability. Despite Department of Defense (DOD) budgetary squeezes, lengthy research and development cycles, and a highly politicized system of programming, budgeting, and congressional approval, the United States will likely stay ahead of the Soviets in overall military technology for at least the next 20 years.
Further, the Soviet political and economic system is so badly flawed that it will not be able to deal as creatively with the information/computer age as will the United States, Japan, Korea, and a number of states in Western Europe. This weakness, which is endemic to all totalitarian or authoritarian systems, will have an even more pronounced effect on Soviet economic and military strength in the years to come. For example, the personal computer (PC) is making an enormous impact on many nations. As of 1988, the Soviets had approximately 200,000 personal computers--most of which are primitive by our standards--but Americans are buying that many PCs per month. The best memory chip that the Soviet Union can mass-produce has a 32-kilobyte capacity, whereas the United States and Japan are now mass-producing megabyte chips. Furthermore, the telephone system in the Soviet Union is so unreliable that the use of modems, electronic mail, and electronic bulletin boards is only a dream. In view of the state of computer technology in the United States, Japan, and much of Western Europe, we can see why many international economists consider the Soviet Union one of the underdeveloped nations of the world.
If a high-tech threat from some nation other than the Soviet Union should emerge in the next couple of decades, the United States will have a very difficult time staying ahead of that threat. Hence, we should begin to devote some time and effort to dealing with the possibility of emerging threats--nations or alliances of nations that would compete with us across the entire spectrum of national power and not just in military and political areas. We must shift our attention, at least in part, away from the Soviet Union and develop strategies, weapon systems, tactics, and doctrines that will allow us to deal with different and potentially more dangerous threats. The arms races that we will be engaged in by the year 2010 will not necessarily lead to war, but one or more will be high-tech races, and it is time we began to prepare for them.
What follows is a brief retrospective history of the more important highlights of the next two decades, looking back from the autumn of 2010.
The fall of Gorbachev in the early 1990s remains, almost 20 years later, an important event in world history. From the perspective of 2010, we can now fully understand why the hard-liners tossed him out. Because of the rioting throughout the Soviet Union, the demands for independence from ethnic groups, and the rise of Islamic fundamentalism within the Soviet state. the hard-liners felt that they had no choice. The pattern of 1,000 years of authoritarian control over a diverse population overcame the few years of openness and freedom of expression that Gorbachev encouraged. An additional rationale from the hard-liners was that they feared people who were not under tight control. Historically, Russian and Soviet leaders have favored compliance over consensus. When the hard-liners realized that they were losing both elements, Gorbachev was removed.
After Gorbachev was ousted, tight controls on the population returned, but "putting the genie back in the bottle" caused much agony and bloodshed. The Soviet political and economic system paid a very high price for the return to tight authoritarian control: (1) many of the country's best and brightest people fled in the 1990s and are now making significant contributions in Western societies (the United States has been the nation of choice for about 50 percent of the émigrés); (2) because the Soviet military played a prominent role in restoring order, training in the more traditional military skills suffered for a few years; and (3) Soviet ethnic groups, who were so brutally suppressed in the 1990s, continue to harbor a residual hatred of the military.
Since the and of glasnost and perestroika, the Soviet economy has stagnated. Access to personal computers and copying machines remains a privilege for trusted elites, and the flow of ideas and information throughout the society is almost as difficult now as it was in the period prior to Gorbachev. The Soviet Union has had a terrible time dealing with the information/computer age, which has now been in full bloom in developed nations for more than a decade. (Historians now date the entry of a country into the information/computer age from the time there is at least one computer and one communications modem in 50 percent of the country's households.) Japan and the United States entered this information/computer age in the 1990s, and a number of Western European and Asian nations reached it soon after the turn of the century.
In the past 20 years, the road for the Japanese has been quite rocky in a number of ways. There has been a resurgence of anti-Japanese feeling throughout East Asia and, to a lesser extent, in the United States and Western Europe. In addition, the Japanese have experienced a considerable brain drain, as many of the more talented, younger Japanese have taken lucrative positions in the United States, Western Europe, Brazil, Canada, and elsewhere. This exodus, in combination with the heavy social overhang of a large elderly population, has slowed the rate of economic growth in Japan to about 3 percent in the first decade of the new century.
In fiscal year 2011 the Japanese will spend slightly more than 3 percent of their gross national product (GNP) on defense. Although they do not have nuclear weapons, most knowledgeable observers give them credit for having a capable military, ranking second worldwide in overall technological capability. The Japanese motivation for this slow but steady military buildup was quite complex. First, the United States encouraged the Japanese to bear a larger portion of the defense burden in East Asia. Further, the reduced faith in American deterrence, the increased power and prestige of the People's Republic of China, the diminished memories of Japanese militarism during the 1930s and 1940s, and the natural tendency of an economic superpower to have a defense posture adequate to defend vital interests all had some effect on this buildup. In fact, the Japanese now make the best fighters, helicopters, tanks, destroyer-sized surface ships, radars, sensors, lasers, and photonic systems in the world.
A fascinating arms competition is going on between the United States and Japan for the high-tech side of the arms-sales business. Underlying that competition is the potential for a high-tech military arms race. However, much depends on the evolution in political and economic relationships during the second and third decades of the twenty-first century. Up to now, the first decade has seen more cooperation than competition between the United States and Japan. Japanese leaders, realizing how important the American market is to their economy, have fought hard against the wave of emerging nationalism in Japan. But the fact that the United States and Japan are now the world's greatest superpowers, militarily as well as economically, makes the status of their relationship an extremely important and delicate issue for the foreseeable future.
China has avoided the return to totalitarian control that took place in the 1990s in the Soviet Union. Many factors have helped the Chinese avoid most of the turmoil of openness (1) over 90 percent of the Chinese are ethnic Hans, and the dissident minorities have not been a major problem, except in a few outlying areas; (2) Maoism did not experience a major resurgence, largely because of the "never-again" attitude that emerged from the Cultural Revolution; (3) the Chinese have a cultural affinity toward entrepreneurial pursuits; and (4) communism was not the predominant political system in China long enough to overcome the centuries of Confucianism that preceded It.
But the Chinese evolution toward a freer society has been costly in one sense. The baby boom of the late 1990s and the first decade of the twenty-first century produced many two- and three-children families that pushed the population of China past the 1.5 billion mark in 2008. China's very considerable economic growth has been offset by this increase in population, and the per capita GNP has risen only modestly. More significant from the point of view of defense policy is that feeding, housing, and clothing 1.5 billion Chinese takes up most of the nation's energy. The Chinese military remains quite large and China is clearly an important regional power, but it has not been able to catch up with the United States and Japan in technological capability. Further, military training remains generally second rate, largely because of a lack of funds for operations, maintenance, and a rigorous training regimen. As in the past, many Chinese soldiers spend at least half their time and effort planting, nurturing, and harvesting food for themselves and their fellow soldiers.
The two most significant pieces of legislation of the first decade of the twenty-first century were the passage of a value-added tax law and a law mandating that no passenger automobile powered by petroleum products would be built in or imported to the United States after the year 2014. The value-added tax, which is now at 7 percent, was quite helpful in solving the chronic budget deficit that had plagued our country since the early 1980s. In retrospect, this law--in combination with the line item veto and the 30-cent federal tax on gasoline--renewed the confidence of the world's financial centers in the health of the American economy and helped stabilize the dollar at 100 yen and 1.50 deutsche marks.
Breakthroughs in solar-cell technology (the Japanese hold the key patents), heavy pressures from environmental groups, and a few terribly hot summers all played a role in getting congressional approval of the radical legislation on private automobiles. Most of us already have at least one electric car, and many of us have a solar car. Nevertheless, much oil is available because world consumption has been decreasing in recent years and because better technology helped locate additional sources of petroleum throughout the world prior to the passage of the automobile law.
The population of the United States has passed 300 million. The relaxing of restrictions on immigration in the early 1990s to alleviate a shortage of workers in the United States seems to have paid off, in that the quality of immigrants in the past 20 years has been higher than in any comparable period. Moreover, the flow of talented young people from Korea, Japan, Taiwan, India, and especially China has contributed significantly to our ability to make scientific progress over the past two decades. The Impressive work ethic of these immigrants has inspired many Americans to increase their own intensity and productivity.
Thirty percent of US businesses, real estate, banks, private universities, and nonprofit corporations is now owned and operated by the Dutch, British, Germans, Japanese, Koreans, and others. Their managerial talents, combined with the entrepreneurial skills of Americans, have helped sustain the growth of the American economy at an average of 3 percent per year--some what higher than the 2.5 percent growth of the first nine decades of the twentieth century. Hence, the American economy remains the largest in the world, with the Japanese a close second and all other nations considerably behind. The Soviet Union, for instance, has slipped to fifth place.
Changing threats as well as changing economic and political realities have made planning and programming even more challenging than in the past. Justifying a large US military budget each year since the turn of the century has been quite difficult since the Soviet Union, mired down with internal problems, is perceived as a nuclearly armed Ottoman Empire--more to be pitied than feared. The US defense budget has slipped below 4.5 percent of the GNP, and the size of the active duty military is down to 1.5 million and still declining. Enlightened military and civilian leaders in DOD, aware of changing threats, have correctly decided to reduce force structure in order to maintain excellent training, a decent pay and benefits program, and a stable retirement system--the incentives required to recruit and maintain a highly motivated and professional military force. Further, the military services have shifted a greater portion of the defense budget to research and development in order to compete in the super-high-tech arena. And the most delicate exercise of all has been to carry out a vigorous arms competition with high-tech countries that remain our friends and allies.
Systems resulting from compartmentalized programs that were initiated in the 1980s and 1990s are now deployed in considerable numbers by operational commands. Most of these black (clandestine) programs emerged from the US Air Force. That service's experience, in dealing with various compartmentalized programs (many in the space and surveillance arenas) in the 1960s and 1970s facilitated its development of so many black programs in the 1980s and 1990s. There has been a greater willingness to be doctrinally innovative in those black programs taken in white (open) ones. For instance, compared to the white programs of the 1980s and 1990s, the commitment to manned systems in black programs has been markedly reduced.
In the past 20 years, some important conceptual and doctrinal developments have changed the military services and their interaction with each other considerably. A key ingredient of this doctrinal evolution has been the role of the Joint Staff in the development of joint doctrine as well as the greatly enhanced power of the chairman and vice-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Only now can we judge the revolutionary impact of the Goldwater-Nichols Law of 1986. For example, military reformers have attained many of their goals: each service academy cadet and midshipman spends a full semester at another academy, each new flag officer spends a full year at the restructured National War College, and each commander in chief in the field is a product of the Joint Staff system. Clearly, the relationship between military services is more harmonious than it was from 1946 to 1986. The services are showing a willingness to work cooperatively and to develop joint doctrine that will serve the greater good of the nation.
In particular, the Air Force has become more important in some areas of warfare and less important in others. In the late 1980s, both the National Defense University Press and Pergamon Brassey's published The Air Campaign by Col John Warden. This book had a considerable impact on the thinking of leaders from all the military services as well as on civilian leaders in DOD. Warden argued that air superiority would be the primary combat mission in the airline battle of the future, pointing out many examines of the primacy of this mission from the history of warfare. Additionally, a series of analytical histories of air combat began to appear, and by the early logos the US Air Force, for the first time, began to develop all intellectual base firmly grounded on historical, wartime experiences. The use of experience in combat as a proving ground for the development of doctrine and theories of war--something that is so well understood by leaders from other services--began to become part of Air Force methodology by the mid-1990s. Although acceptance of Warden's concepts was difficult for all of the military services, it is quite well established in the year 2010. Developments in technology and the evolution in doctrine have placed air power in the forefront as far as conventional warfare is concerned. However, space and naval systems now dominate the nuclear arena, and highly trained soldiers and marines dominate the low-intensity arena.
Returning to the late 1980s and the era of the Bush administration, we need to reexamine the various elements of national power in light of present-day realities and the challenges and opportunities of the future. Economics has finally forced its way to the top of the national agenda, and the new president must subordinate all other issues to getting our national economy in order and solving the problem of our trade deficit.
This focus on the economy will be traumatic for many military people who correctly see national security as our most important priority bill who incorrectly see it in narrow terms. National security is not just guns, ships, and aircraft to meet a well-established military threat; it is also a robust national economy. In order to bring the national budget into near balance, the military will have to take some budgetary cuts well beyond those that Frank Carlucci mandated. Those people who argue that we must build our military solely in response to military threats are misinformed and fail to serve the nation. The "threat" is becoming more and more an economic one, and the stakes--our national sovereignty--are enormous. Aggressive divestiture of obsolescent systems, organizations, doctrines, and tactics--as well as the cancellation of one or more major procurement programs--will be necessary between now and the mid-1990s, or we will have a very "hollow" military. A historical parallel may be in order. President Jimmy Carter's cancellation of the B-1 in 1977 was a blessing in disguise, for it allowed the Air Force--in a time of great budgetary austerity--to buy the fighter and attack aircraft that it so badly needed to shore up its conventional capability.
The second major imperative for the future is clearly technology, but not just military technology. We must find incentives to dramatically increase innovation in civilian technology so that we can compete with the aggressive technologists in other nations. The most important of these civilian technologies is in the area of energy production. We must take aggressive steps, including tax incentives and seed money, to pursue opportunities in superconductivity and solar energy. A somewhat less important technology that we must pursue just as aggressively involves waste disposal and pollution control. If the United States can make breakthroughs in these two related areas, the world will beat a path to its door. For example, the Corning Glass Works of Corning, New York, makes ceramic filters for catalytic converters in automobiles. Corning is the only company in the world that makes this device, and now that nations around the world are passing laws that make pollution-control devices mandatory, Corning sales are booming. So, for all the right environmental reasons as well as the great opportunity for export sales, we should hotly pursue these technologies.
Budget-based national strategy can be a dangerous approach because it can weaken us appreciably; however, national security planning and programming based almost exclusively on expectations of military threats can bankrupt the United States. What is the answer? Fundamentally, we must reassess our national strategy. We must reduce our formal and informal commitments throughout the world, gradually but systemically bringing a sizable number of troops home unless the host nation is willing to pay much more of the costs of having them on its soil. We must seriously reexamine our quasi-alliances and slowly reduce the burden of these arrangements.2 We must begin and sustain a serious and systematic divestiture to rid ourselves of the "coast artillery cannons" as soon as possible. (To use the coast artillery analogy, we should have divested ourselves of that mission and equipment in 1925, when it was clear that aircraft carriers would be the primary capital ships of the future rather than in 1942, when we finally made a concerted effort to close down the 16-inch gun units throughout our nation and our territories.) We must open up all of our compartmentalized programs to divestiture teams so that they will be playing with a full deck of cards. (An examination of the divestitures--in the early 1980s--of the Titan missile, the B-52Ds, and the mid Canada radar line may give the divestiture.) We must look for innovative ways to fund programs, including having the Japanese, Germans, and Koreans underwrite some of our major programs, such as the one involving the C-17. We could propose a buy-lease arrangement whereby foreign sponsors fund the procurement program and the United States agrees to lease the airplanes from those sponsors. After 25 years, the sponsors could take over the airplanes, or the United States could extend the lease. Granted, this is a radical approach, but there are many advantages to this type of arrangement.
In 1941, even though the world was in flames, we did not have the force structure, the training, the alert posture, or the intelligence coverage to deal with the surprise attack at Pearl Harbor. But we did have a long-term grand strategy and military strategy that served us well once we entered the war. Thanks to such visionary leaders as Gens George Marshall and Henry "Hap" Arnold, we were able to identify and analyze our enemies, establish strategic priorities for Europe, and create the necessary war plans, logistics support plans, and procurement programs.
Today the situation is largely reversed. We have the training, intelligence resources, force structure, and alert posture that were sadly lacking that Sunday morning in 1941. But we do not have the long-term strategy and plans that will serve as beacons for our decision makers. In the late 1930s and early 1940s, we had the time (and, more important, took the time) to think, plan, and make decisions based on these plans. We must return to this pattern of careful, long-range planning and strategy making. We need to identify, nurture, promote, and take full advantage of the George Marshalls in our midst.3
Notes
Contributor
Maj Gen Perry M. Smith, USAF, Retired (USMA; PhD, Columbia University), is general editor for Pergamon-Brassey's series on future warfare. During his 30-year service in the US Air Force, he commanded the F-15 wing at Bitburg, West Germany; was the director of plans on the Air Staff: and served as commandant of the National War College, of which he is a graduate. General Smith is the author of Creating Strategic Vision; Long Range Planning for national Security, Taking Charge: Making the Right Choice, and Assignment Pentagon; The Insider's Guide to the Potomac Puzzle Palace.
Disclaimer
The conclusions and opinions expressed in this document are those of the author cultivated in the freedom of expression, academic environment of Air University. They do not reflect the official position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, the United States Air Force or the Air University.
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