William R. Hawkins is Senior Fellow for National Security Studies at the U.S. Business and Industry Council.

The proposal by a gaggle of antiwar Democratic Senators for a “no confidence” vote on Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was prompted more by Rumsfeld’s comments at the annual American Legion convention on August 29 than by the controversy that has surrounded his strategy and tactics from the early days of the Iraq occupation. At the convention, Rumsfeld compared those who want to “cut and run” from Iraq to those who had advocated appeasement towards Nazi Germany in the 1930s, with “more of a focus on dividing our country than acting with unity against the gathering threats.” He asked, “With the growing lethality and the increasing availability of weapons, can we truly afford to believe that somehow, some way, vicious extremists can be appeased?” Clearly, the answer is no. The irony is that the most prominent political attack on Rumsfeld has come when he was right – if inflammatory, not earlier when he was wrong.

Rumsfeld’s real problem is that his “visionary” theories about a Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) based on short, high-tech campaigns has been discredited by the Iraq and Afghan experiences. It is a truism in military lore that no plan survives contact with the enemy, but movement along the learning curve in Rumsfeld’s circle has been slow.  

The rapid invasion of Iraq, which was supposed to prove the operational effectiveness of the new RMA and to set the U.S. military on the path of “transformation,” has become a nearly four year campaign against sectarian insurgents and foreign terrorists. It has not been possible to reduce ground force levels. A fierce debate has generated a rough consensus that more troops should have been deployed initially to prevent the formation of new centers of resistance in the vacuum that followed the removal of the Saddam regime, as well as to deter Iran. Though the conflict has been waged at a low level, it has still stretched U.S. Army and Marine units thin, and heavily taxed the Reserve and National Guard, in order to sustain the war effort.

Even a year into the Iraq campaign, Rumsfeld was still talking about his “10-30-30" plan. This had major forces deploying to a distant theater in 10 days, defeating the enemy within 30 days and then being ready for redeployment somewhere else within another 30 days. This overly optimistic concept also had an impact on economic planning.

The 2005 Annual Industrial Capabilities Report to Congress still stated that “DoD policy generally is to fight with the weapons on hand.” Short wars do not require industrial mobilization, so national security is less of a concern when corporations “globalize” their production, reducing domestic capabilities by outsourcing key components to a heterogeneous group of foreign countries.  In April 2003, the Army Transformation Industrial Base Study claimed, “Collectively, contractor-owned facilities and Army ammunition plants have the capabilities to meet current and future Force requirements.” Yet, when the post-invasion insurgency in Iraq escalated, it became necessary to import ammunition from Canada and Israel, as well as find new domestic suppliers. The need to add protection to vehicles also led to a need to import armor plate. There was also a shortage of precision-guided weapons – the backbone of the transformation concept – most of which have imported components.

The concept of an RMA came from those historians who have argued that a major transformation in the way wars were fought took place during the 16th-18th centuries. The historical debate is about more than the timing and pace of military change. It is also about whether the RMA concerned only new weapons and tactics, or is more about changes in society and government that make it possible to raise, equip, deploy, and sustain advanced military forces.  

Russell F. Weigley’s The Age of Battles examines the quest for decisive warfare in early modern Europe, i.e., the era from the Thirty Years War through the Napoleonic Wars. He argues “strategists hoped by means of battle to secure decisions in war, and thereby to secure the objects for which men went to war with a quickness and dispatch that would keep the costs of war reasonably proportionate to the purposes attained.” This same desire animates today’s strategists. “Yet, the age of battles nevertheless proved to be an age of prolonged and indecisive wars,”concludes Weigley – an observation that fits today’s world as well.

The conflict most associated with the flowering of the earlier RMA was the Thirty Years War, which takes its name from its excessive length, as does the Seven Years War, which is heralded as the first truly world war. The wars of the French Revolution and Napoleon lasted a quarter century. At the end of the 19th century, many thought war had become too costly to be prolonged, or to even be contemplated, World War I, however, did not see the soldiers come home “before the leaves fall.” It lasted four years with unprecedented violence and social mobilization. Theorists of airpower and blitzkrieg were determined to break the stalemate of the trenches, creating an RMA that would allow a return to the mythical age of decisive battle. The result was World War II, which lasted longer than WW I and covered even larger global theaters of struggle.

Increases in wealth and population have led to increases in the scale and duration of war. This is a true RMA, one that has spread across the globe.  Iraq and North Korea today have populations larger than France under Louis XIV, and Iran’s population is equal to that of Imperial Germany on the eve of World War I.  And all have access to the marvels of the techno-industrial age. Thus, even third-rate powers can possess, under determined leaders, the strategic depth to sustain military operations for long periods – as did both Iran and Iraq in their 1980-1988 conflict.  North Vietnam refused to terminate its aggression against South Vietnam until it achieved victory, despite heavy casualties and a series of lost battles.

In Rumsfeld’s RMA, there would be no more wars like those of Korea, Vietnam, or even the Gulf War.  As Army General Tommy Franks, a true believer in the RMA who devised the Iraq invasion plan, states in his memoirs, “The days of half-million-strong mobilizations were over.” Rapid maneuver, highly accurate firepower, and attacks from many directions, all empowered by new technology, were supposed to substitute for large numbers of troops and equipment. Thus, there was no need to rebuild the Army, which had been reduced by 40 percent between the Gulf and Iraq Wars – or protect the military-industrial base, which had been “consolidated” after the Cold War, and then gutted by the “free trade” notions of a Democratic and a Republican administration relying on a supposedly harmonious world.

It is the emphasis on technology’s being a substitute for numbers, rather than an enhancement to capabilities, that makes the current RMA different from that of early modern Europe.  The earlier RMA had marked improvements in artillery and infantry firearms.  Francis Bacon claimed gunpowder weapons ranked with the compass and the printing press as the three most critical discoveries in human history.  But what gave the emerging Great Powers their real advantage was the ability to deploy much larger armies.

Over the course of the 16th and17th centuries, armies expanded by a factor of ten, from Philip II’s 40,000 to Louis XIV’s 400,000.  The ability to both field larger armies and equip them with modern weapons came from the increase in wealth available to central governments as a result of first the Commercial Revolution, and then in the 18th and 19th centuries, the Industrial Revolution, which saw the further expansion of the scope of military operations across the globe.

Even non-state actors, such as al-Qaeda and the Taliban, can continue to field dedicated followers with sufficient arms and other equipment (much of it available commercially, like cell and satellite phones) to remain a threat for years. The latest flare-up in Lebanon is only another episode in decades of civil war and foreign intervention, within the larger framework of the constant assaults on Israel since its founding. And the number of long-running wars and insurgencies in Africa is proof that even abject poverty has not prevented the proliferation of modern conventional weapons, nor dampened the will to use them.

The objective of national strategy should be to possess the capacity to sustain a major effort until the job is done, not merely generate great bursts of activity that cannot be sustained in the face of protracted opposition. The Western notion that war is an abnormal state of affairs, to be resolved by mutual agreements so that peace can resume, has no place in the culture of radical Islam. To fundamentalist Muslims, war is perpetual. If campaigns of conquest are not possible, then ghazi (raiding) warfare is to be conducted. This is more than mere “terrorism.” It is the tradition of weakening bordering communities by attrition until conquest is possible. It has been the common practice of Muslim empires over the centuries, and is now quite evident in Iran’s strategy to dominate the region.

And behind Iran (and North Korea) sits China, giving them diplomatic, economic and military aid.  If Washington is deterred from acting against Tehran or Pyongyang, then Beijing has little to worry about.  As the prominent military writer Ralph Peters has argued, “A war with China, which our war games blithely assume would be brief, would reveal the quantitative incompetence of our forces as our assault on a continent-spanning power swiftly drained our stocks of precision weapons, ready pilots, and aircraft.”  But then “transformation” is not about fighting a Big War.  The late Admiral Arthur Cebrowski headed the Office of Force Transformation (OFT).  “He was advocating that we need to get off the focus on the big war and the big enemy. . . . He’ll be one of the guys known for pushing the focus off China,” according to Thomas P. M. Barnett, a former OFT staffer who has embraced “globalization” and economic interdependence with Beijing.

The good news is that the OFT is being closed down, and Barnett is now complaining that the “China threat is being reshaped by the Pentagon as it's last-ditch rationale for every system still in the pipeline.” In other words, the lessons of the real-world Iraq, and elsewhere, are being studied.  Hopefully, this will lead to policy changes that will position America for continued global preeminence.

The test will be whether the Bush administration comes up with the money needed to “reset” the Army by repairing or replacing damaged equipment (particularly armored vehicles) and by funding a shipbuilding program that will take the fleet above 300 warships. “Clearly China poses a challenge to the sizing of the U.S. Navy,”says Sen. John Warner (R-VA).  Warner  has also noted that Navy admirals testifying before the Senate Armed Services Committee, which he chairs, are “very concerned” that the present 288-ship fleet is much too small. The present fleet is half the size it was under President Reagan.

The tone of the annual assessments of China’s rising strength put out by Secretary Rumsfeld’s office indicates that he is aware of the danger, but it is not yet clear whether he understands what it will take to meet the challenge. Defense spending increases of only five percent a year in time of war, after the drastic cuts of the 1990s, have been a very modest effort. Any slackening of interest in expanding the armed forces would indicate that the administration has not learned the right lessons of the last five years, nor accurately seen the shape of the 21st century ahead.

The United States needs a military establishment with the depth and numbers for protracted, low-level campaigns; decisive operations against regional states; and high-end deterrence to maintain a favorable global balance of power.  Decades of economic growth should have made it easier to both expand and transform the military, as was done in the 1980s.  Indeed, the real history of successful RMAs has been the ability to expand the armed forces as wealth, populations, and technology advance.  That fact highlights the economy a major component of national security.  Thus, the laissez-faire approach of the Bush administration towards foreign threats to the American industrial base, undercuts the ability of the United States to maintain its “revolutionary” leadership in the military sphere.

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