Well before Bill Clinton was re-elected to office, indeed long before
the Congress required a formal review of U.S. defense posture as part
of the Fiscal Year 1997 Defense Authorization Act, the Department of
Defense realized that such a review was inevitable. As early as 1995
Pentagon leadership recognized that it simply could not fund its
declaratory strategy, which called for supporting two major regional
conflicts (MRC) simultaneously. This strategy had accorded
insufficient attention to the seemingly endless expansion of
peacetime missions under the rubric of the catch-all phrase
"Operations Other Than War" (with its horrible acronym, OOTWA) that
marked the first Clinton term. Moreover, advertised savings from
infrastructure cuts, acquisition reform, and other longtime favorites
of budget cutters had failed to produce the extra resources needed to
support the two MRC force. Defense Department principals therefore
had no alternative but to reconsider the assumptions upon which it
had planned, programmed, and budgeted forces since Mr. Clinton's
first year in office. The Congressional legislation, drafted with
Pentagon input, merely added a bipartisan flavor to the bitter
strategic pill that the Defense Department's leadership knew it would
have to swallow.

But is a true strategic review likely to take place? There are few
indications that a thorough rethinking of American defense posture is
about to occur. The services, as well as related civilian agencies,
appear to be jockeying for programmatic and budgetary position in
much the same way as they did in the past. Long-standing panaceas
have not faded away either; on the contrary, the appeal of false
hopes seems greater than ever. Complicating an already gloomy
budgetary picture is the November 1996 decision to remain mired in
Bosnia, the Russian Duma's failure to ratify start ii, and increasing
pressures to deal with a ballistic missile threat that the General
Accounting Office asserts is nearer than the administration
acknowledges. Nevertheless, the very act of undertaking a Quadrennial
Defense Review, scheduled to be released this spring, affords
Congress and the nation a focused opportunity to ponder future
defense posture and strategy. It is an opportunity that should not be
wasted.

Can We Afford the Forces We Need?

The Congressional legislation mandating the review of American force
structure, coupled with an independent assessment by a "National
Defense Panel", cuts to the heart of the debate over military
sufficiency in the post-Cold War period. The Bush administration's
response to the changing international environment was to identify a
"Base Force" that postulated levels below which, the administration
asserted, the military could not defend America's interests
effectively. The Clinton administration's 1993 Bottom-Up Review (BUR)
carried the reductions authorized by the Base Force one step further,
while adding the strategic gloss of two MRCs. The bur was not
directed against any particular threat as Cold War force postures had
been. Nevertheless, the review posited scenarios that called for
essentially the same American response as did a Central Front war in
Europe. The enemy would launch a major cross-border land attack in a
region proximate to the sea, and with relatively little warning,
though enough of one to allow a major airlift of troops. In the bur's
case the enemy was twin-headed: North Korea would attack across the
38th Parallel; Iraq would attack Kuwait and/or Saudi Arabia. The bur
attempted to structure overall force levels by aggregating individual
building blocks--divisions, aircraft carrier task forces, and air
wings--that were required to meet these two disparate threats. It
also reflected America's proclivity to plan in terms of the past, in
this case our experiences in Korea and the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

In propounding the Base Force and the bur force, neither the Bush nor
Clinton administration looked squarely at America's changing
international situation, given the disappearance of what had been its
major adversary during the previous half century. In particular, the
bur did not address unfamiliar contingencies, and contained little
about the state of America's alliances; it merely noted their
existence. To be sure, it assumed that America expected to fight in
disparate future circumstances at the head of international
coalitions, but it postulated that U.S. "forces must be sized and
structured to preserve the flexibility and the capability to act
unilaterally, should we choose to do so."

More troubling was the fact that the Bottom-Up Review offered a force
that was simultaneously too much and too little for the roles the
United States was most likely to play during the early years of the
twenty-first century. America's two major crises of 1996--in Bosnia
and the Taiwan Straits--set parameters that highlighted the bur's
shortcomings at both ends of the military spectrum. On the one hand,
our ongoing involvement in Bosnia demonstrated that "peacekeeping"
was not a tertiary activity, as the bur had implied, but an ongoing
effort of serious political and budgetary significance. On the other
hand, the Taiwan Straits crisis of late winter indicated that the
forces identified in the bur fell short of those that would be needed
in major conflicts outside the scope of the Review.

The Bosnia operation indicated that the United States, for the first
time in its history, seemed prepared as a matter of course to
dedicate its military capacity in support of the principle of
collective security. The forces required to implement that principle,
within the rubric of multinational peacekeeping or peacemaking
activities, posed unique demands in terms of military skills and
materiel. The training and equipment necessary for these activities
no longer could be considered merely a "lesser included case",
subsumed within the demands of a potential war in Korea or the
Persian Gulf. Indeed, to the extent that peacekeeping promised to
become an increasingly dominant theme of American military strategy,
the Department of Defense would have to find funds to support that
activity. These funds would have to be either in addition to, or in
lieu of, those required by bur-driven force planning. Given budgetary
trends since the mid-1980s, it appeared that peacekeeping funding
would have to come at the expense of other capabilities.

As noted, however, the Bottom-Up Review also fell short of providing
for another potential set of requirements. Had the Taiwan Straits
crisis spun out of control, the United States could have found itself
at war with China. The role of ground forces, other than amphibious
forces, in such a confrontation would have been problematic; the
region is dominated by islands and littoral areas. Naval forces and
land-based aviation--if basing could be found--would have been taxed
to their limits. To the extent that ground forces were called for,
they would either have been of the amphibious variety or highly
mobile units that combined easy and rapid deployability with
considerable firepower. America's armored and mechanized forces would
have been largely superfluous to the conflict, yet they could not
have compensated for the removal of other forward and rapid deploying
units from other theaters worldwide. Thus, while the United States
might have been expected to prevail against China, it would have done
so at the expense of its ability to maintain its forward military
presence anywhere else in the world.

Yet the bur essentially preserved the Cold War allocation of forces
and resources among land, naval, and air forces. Its authors did not
consider that such an allocation could well be inappropriate to a
major regional contingency that was not a replay of the last
successful American war. Nor did it identify systems, such as the
Army's armored combat system, that could significantly increase the
flexible firepower available to ground forces. As in the case of
peacekeeping requirements, the resources needed to support a
contingency requiring greater levels of truly flexible forces could
only have come at the expense of other resources (and therefore forces)
validated by the Bottom-Up Review. Funding shortfalls, in a sense,
though, it would have been pointless for the Bottom-Up Review to
identify new needs since, in reality, there were insufficient
resources even to support the original bur-generated force levels.
The current resource shortfall stems directly from the philosophy
that governed the Clinton administration's basic approach to defense
matters during the first term.

President Clinton came to office emphasizing not only the priority of
domestic matters ("It's the economy, stupid"), but seeking both a $60
billion reduction in FY 1994-99 defense expenditures and a revised
approach to planning defense priorities. The Bottom-Up Review was
tailored to fit within budget ceilings that had already been framed
by the Office of Management and Budget for the future years of Mr.
Clinton's term. The OMB identified all but $13 million of the
five-year "savings" that the Clinton administration announced six
months earlier in April 1993, and promised to find the remainder
within the plan for fiscal years 1995-98. Forces and budgets seemed
to be in balance.

By the time of its public release, however, the bur was effectively a
dead letter. Within weeks of its appearance, budget constraints
forced the administration to lower its force level estimates from
those outlined in the Review. For example, the Review called for a
fleet of 346 ships by fiscal year 1999, whereas the administration
reported in January 1994 that it could at best support a force of
331. The bur likewise retreated from its postulated force of "up to"
184 bombers in fiscal year 1999, stating that it would be able to
field at most "approximately 140 bombers." The longer term budget
prognosis presaged a far greater gap between the bur's postulated
force levels and those likely to be achieved as a result of the
administration's resource plans. Estimates of the budget shortfall
varied from the administration's own belated acknowledgment in
December 1993 that it required an additional $25 billion through FY
2001, to estimates of shortfalls in excess of $250 billion through FY
2010. The latter foreshadowed a 50 percent reduction in active force
levels, thereby rendering the bur militarily unsustainable.

Essay Types: Essay