Limited Options Will Lose Wars

One of the greatest challenges facing senior policy- and decision-makers during the Cold War was to prevent situations where the national leadership would be compelled to use nuclear weapons as the only means for achieving major foreign policy goals or protecting vital American interests. To do this, we needed a wide variety of choices. Controlled escalation, if required, and dominance over the threat, if necessary, were the guiding precepts. Thus military leaders provided a broad range of military capabilities on land and sea, in air and space.

It is now somewhat ironic, in a strategic environment of much greater geopolitical uncertainty than the Cold War, that defense plans and programs seem to be leading toward a much more limited range of capabilities. I fear that we are involved in a rationalization process based on the illusory notion that technological advances can be decisively applied to nearly all military and political affairs. This approach is no more valid today than it has been in the past.

In the final hours of the Gulf War in 1991, President Bush and his key advisors elected to end the conflict and not attack deeper into Iraq. There were many choices available, including continued air strikes, further ground attacks and increased special warfare actions. I had no objection then, nor do I have any today, regarding the decision that was made to end hostilities. Others have a different view. But the major point about the decision process is that the president had a very wide and very deep set of options from which to select. He was not constrained by decisions made years earlier, when none of us envisioned a desert war in Iraq. To the contrary, he was the beneficiary of many resource and capability decisions made previously in response to different threats. We must expect to be surprised in the future, and we must keep our options open.

Today and in the very near future, the national leadership will be more constrained than their predecessors were in 1991 because of the seemingly insatiable desire to narrow our military capabilities and fight by “remote control.” This desire is fueled by the hope for victory without risking an American life; the ageless quest for bloodless conflict. Whether this goal is viable, those who seek it have pushed the nation toward smaller forces and stockpiles of “silver bullets” such as “smart” cruise missiles, which, as we saw last year in Iraq, may not be able to influence events in a meaningful, much less a decisive way.

The questionable nature of the high-tech goal has been challenged in another significant way in recent years. Whether restoring order in Haiti or in Bosnia, highly trained, well-disciplined soldiers have achieved important strategic objectives with little loss of life in the force or in the host population. At the same time, those citizen-soldiers have helped advance ideas of service, order and respect for properly constituted authority. The “collateral advantage” that accrues to our nation when it solves a problem by deploying people is more remarkable than any reduction in “collateral damage” that might be achieved with better technology in weapons. Our people are much smarter than our bombs ever can be.

In an uncertain world, our national leaders will need flexible and adaptable forces that are credible, usable, lethal, and, when deployed, decisive. We must not become so enamored with the promise of technology or the desire to protect our own forces that we limit the options of decision-makers, forcing them to make choices with unforeseen or undesirable consequences.

Balance is the key. The need for options means that we cannot pursue technologically sophisticated programs at the expense of other, less glamorous aspects of the defense program. What we have learned in the years since the end of the Cold War is that we will be engaged every day around the world in operations ranging from major regional conflicts such as Desert Storm to small groups of service men and women teaching their counterparts in fledgling democracies the appropriate role of the military in a democracy.

The paradox is that in our quest to create a defense force potentially capable of fighting a conflict with no American casualties, we may be creating one so limited in capability that our civilian and military leaders’ only options are costly ones. Given that we are no better at predicting the future today than we were in 1989, we need to consider carefully the lessons of the past seven years and give future leaders the choices they are likely to want and need.