The military must move beyond preparing its entire force to address one or two particular kinds of threats as it did in 1993.
In 1993, the Defense Department conducted a “Bottom-Up Review” to determine the major threats worldwide and how the U.S. would meet them. The U.S. had just won the Cold War and defeated Saddam Hussein’s military in Operation Desert Storm.
It was also at a time when the U.S. military reigned supreme. It had the world’s best Navy, best networks, best precision strike weapons and no major superpower to challenge it.
The world has changed since then, largely due to the economic rise of China and other burgeoning powers, and the proliferation of advanced weapon technologies to countries such as Iran and non-state groups like Hezbollah. The U.S. military, however, has not kept up, according to a new report.
“The last really significant change to policies DoD has adopted … was developed during the 1993 bottom-up review,” says Mark Gunzinger, a former member of the National Security Council and deputy assistant defense secretary for Force Transformation and Resources from 2004 to 2006.
“Precision-guided weapons have proliferated. Other technologies have as well,” he says. “Now we see competitors taking advantage of those capabilities.”
Gunzinger, now a senior fellow at the D.C.-based Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, wrote a new report released Thursday entitled “Shaping America’s Future Military: Toward a New Force Planning Construct.” In it he argues that America faces conditions similar to what prompted the 1993 review. And it’s about time for another one.