Gen. James "Hoss" Cartwright, who was under question during a Senate hearing on his renomination as Vice Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (kudos to the Obama administration for keeping him there), let slip this gem about how the QDR is working its assumptions for future defense scenarios.
“The military requirement right now is associated with the strategy that we are laying out in the QDR, and it is a departure from the two major theater war construct that we have adhered to in the past and in which this aircraft grew up. I mean it grew up in that construct of two major theater wars, and both of them being of a peer competitor quality,” Cartwright said.
“The strategy that we are moving towards is one that is acknowledging of the fact that we are not in that type of conflict, that the more likely conflicts are going to be the ones that we—similar to the ones that we are in in Iraq and Afghanistan, but that we do need to have a capability against a major peer competitor and that we believe that the sizing construct, one, demands that we have fifth generation fighters across all three services rather than just one and that the number of those fighters probably does not need to be sufficient to take on two simultaneous peer competitors, that we don’t see that as the likely. We see that as the extreme,” he told Chambliss.
This is a Great Thing. As the DOD Buzz article notes, many analysts agree that this was never a realistic planning assumption - we never had the force structure or resources to effectively execute two nearly simultaneous major regional conflicts. It was a political gambit to warn North Korea not to cause trouble when we were in the Middle East, and a convenient excuse for the services to inflate their force requirements above what they really needed. Setting a lower requirement doesn't mean that US forces cannot deploy and be effective in two or more theaters - hell, we've been doing that for the past decade despite lacking the necessary manpower and equipment to meet the mythical 2-MTW requirements (see here for pro and con discussion).
There will be those neocons out there screaming about how this decision will "weaken" the US military to a point where it cannot police the entire world 24-7, pushing back evil "rogue states" and other near-peer adversaries to "promote democracy." They need to step out of the Cold War - this day and age, we need "smart power" and allies to get things done, and that's not a bad thing. It's - dare I say - more realistic to focus on one major conflict while managing other smaller contingencies. If carried through, this has a real chance of getting our military forces into the right posture that they need. It will be very interesting to see this QDR report's language - when it comes out in February 2010 - and more interesting to see how the Obama administration intends to change our military to that much-desired post-Cold War strategy.
McNamara's recent passing renewed my interest in watching Fog of War, something that I had been putting off since learning the documentary. The quote that rang out to me the most is the following:
"If we can't persuade nations with comparable values of the merit of our cause, we'd better reexamine our reasoning." Robert S. McNamara Fog of War
Posted by: Cesar | 16 July 2009 at 12:42 PM