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21st Century Warfare Will Outstrip the Capabilities of Our Declining Defense Industrial Base

By William R. Hawkins
Monday, October 08, 2007

Testifying before the House Armed Services Committee on September 26, Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Casey made a statement that finally sets in perspective nearly two decades of ill-founded thinking about the state of world affairs.

Casey told the members of Congress, “We live in a world where global terrorism and extremist ideologies are real threats.  As we look to the future, national security experts are virtually unanimous in predicting that the next several decades will be ones of persistent conflict – protracted confrontation among state, non-state, and individual actors that use violence to achieve their political and ideological ends.  Adversaries will employ propaganda, threat, intimidation, and overt violence to coerce people and gain control of their land and resources....Many of these conflicts will be protracted – ebbing and flowing in intensity, challenging our Nation’s will to persevere.”

The general’s words describe the normal state of the world throughout history.  But America’s leaders forgot about the lessons of the past in the alleged afterglow of the Cold War.  As late as 1999, with trouble already brewing in many hot spots around the world, President Bill Clinton claimed that “perhaps for the first time in history, the world's leading nations are not engaged in a struggle with each other for security or territory.  The world clearly is coming together.” He was about to leave on a tour through Asia, where China’s rise was gathering steam and its quest for raw materials to fuel its booming economy and military was sending shockwaves through the region, and the world.

The attacks of September 11, 2001 were a wake up call, arousing many from this dream world, but not Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his policy cohorts.  The details don’t need to be repeated here concerning Rumsfeld’s minimalist “short-war fallacy” regarding Iraq planning, or his dogged resistance to rebuilding the U.S. armed forces, which the Clinton administration had dismantled.  Both the country and its soldiers continue to pay a high price for Rumsfeld’s airy notions about how wars “should” be fought, as opposed to how they needed to be and actually are fought.

The error of believing that wars will be short, and that the troops will be “home before the leaves fall” is as old as war itself.  The spread of industrialization, however, has deepened the economic capacity of even secondary powers to sustain military operations, while the heightened spirit of nationalism (often drawing on ethnic or religious fervor) has bolstered the willingness of people to fight on even under adverse conditions. The eight year Iran-Iraq conflict is but one example.

A renewed sense of realism in military planning must extend to economic planning as well.  The “short war fallacy” – coupled with unrealistic and ill-advised trade policies – left America with an inadequate defense industrial base and no vision as to how to reconstitute the nation’s strategic manufacturing capabilities.

The Army Transformation Industrial Base Study, released in April 2003 – the same month that Baghdad fell to American forces – concluded, “Collectively, contractor-owned facilities and Army ammunition plants have the capabilities to meet current and future Force requirements.” Yet, when the Iraq insurgency materialized, it became necessary to import ammunition from Canada and Israel, as well as find new domestic suppliers.  Existing domestic production had been maxed out.

Two years into the Iraq War, the Pentagon’s 2005 Annual Industrial Capabilities Report to Congress still insisted, “DoD policy generally is to fight with the weapons on hand,” a posture that made concern for the size and responsiveness of the industrial base irrelevant  Yet, the same report stated, “Support to current warfighting operations requires adding armor protection to unarmored vehicles and fighting positions.  Throughout 2004, the Army assessed domestic armor production capacity as at least adequate to meet all military requirements.  However, in late 2004 the Army decided to accelerate all programs to completion....the Department subsequently determined there was insufficient domestic capacity to meet all of the Defense Logistics Agency’s armor plate steel requirements and authorized a domestic source waiver to ensure timely availability.” The waiver allowed the Department to buy armor plate steel from foreign sources.

Today, the Army has put into production Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicles.  The MRAP is a whole new class of armored vehicles of various types to replace, not merely up-armor, the Humvee, a vehicle never intended to operate in the military environments generated in Iraq and Afghanistan.  Appearing at the same hearing as Gen. Casey, Secretary of the Army Pete Geren noted that his service has requested 10,000 MRAPs, and that these were in production at several sites.  It is hoped that 4,100 will be in service by the end of 2008.  This a very slow rate of production, given that Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has made their acquisition a top priority.  But new production lines must be built from scratch.  And the Army is not the only service that wants the MRAP.  Also on order are 3,700 for the Marine Corps, 544 for the Navy, 697 for the Air Force, and 333 for the Special Operations command.

The notion popular in the 1990s, that the United States military would only need light forces for UN peacekeeping missions, has been swept into the dustbin.  The heavily armored M1 Abrams tank has proven a workhorse in Iraq, as has the M2 Bradley mechanized infantry carrier (though it has also been improved with the use of Israeli-supplied reactive armor kits – another innovation our planners did not think of).  The Stryker wheeled fighting vehicle, originally deployed as a test bed for the lighter vehicles of the Future Combat System (another 1990s idea), has also had additional protection added in the field.  We are still a long way from “post-industrial warfare”– another buzz word best forgotten.

And where heavy weapons go, so must go support elements to fix, repair and evolve the systems in response to events that never remain constant in combat.  Geren mentioned in his testimony that “approximately half of the personnel currently deployed in Iraq are contractor employees.” These are not just mercenary security personnel like Blackwater.  They are mainly in the logistical tail of the fighting forces.  Just as American industry should be the most reliable and responsive source for weapons and support equipment, it must also be the source of the  contractors who keep the gear operating.  Foreign outsourcing is not a prudent option where national security and the safety of American troops is at stake.

U.S. Army leaders are preparing for up to 15 more years of war and have an emerging “persistent conflict” doctrine, which is already changing strategy and procurement plans, a top Army general told Defense News (Oct. 1).  “It’s not just about Iraq and Afghanistan”, said Lt. Gen. Michael Vane, who directs the Army Capabilities Integration Center, a division of the Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC).  “We see protracted confrontations by state and non-state actors that are fueled by expanding Islamic extremism, competition for energy, this whole business of globalization, the climate and demographic changes that you see occurring, and the increasing use of violence to achieve political and ideological outcomes by these state and non-state actors.”

If the military and the industrial base behind it are having trouble meeting the demands of what are, by historical standards, small wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, what must be done to prepare for the potentially larger conflicts just over the horizon? Gen. Casey testified, “The current demand for our forces exceeds the sustainable supply.” Not only is manpower overextended, but also, “equipment has been used at a rate over five times that programmed,” reported Casey. Secretary Gates, in stark contrast to Rumsfeld, has called for expanding the Army by 74,000 soldiers, though even this is only a fraction of the number cut by Pres. Clinton. These additional troops will have to be armed and equipped by industry.

The references by both generals Casey and Vane to struggles by “states” over “resources” is not just a reference to Middle East oil.  As the Pentagon’s 2005 annual report on Chinese military power argued, Beijing’s growing need for foreign sources of metals and fossil fuels is a “driver of strategy.” Natural resources account for 60 percent of China’s total imports, pushing Beijing into closer ties with a variety of unsavory regimes, such as Iran, Burma, Sudan, and Venezuela.

The United States will have to modernize and expand its military industrial base, as well as its armed forces to meet the challenge from a fast-growing China, which already has set its sights on becoming the “workshop of the world.”  As the prominent military writer (and retired Army Lt. Colonel) 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.”

Geren told the House committee, “We never want to send our soldiers into a fair fight.” Absolutely correct, but the kind of national advantages we need do not just drop from the sky.  They are the result of realistic planning and sustained effort – and not just by the military but the nation as a whole.

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