Introduction
During recent testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Defense Secretary William Cohen declared, “I can sum up our vision to you in one word: transformation.” Indeed, since the Cold War’s end, the objective of transforming the US military has increasingly gained currency. Senator Sam Nunn, one of the most respected members of Congress on matters of national security, argued that “We must reshape, reconfigure, and modernize our overall forces — not just make them smaller.” Both the Defense Department’s Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR), and the National Defense Panel (NDP), an independent body of national security experts, declared transforming the military a top priority.

There appears to be a consensus among senior national security officials that a military transformation is needed. Yet the United States remains predominantly focused on maintaining a force posture oriented on waging two nearly simultaneous conflicts similar to the Persian Gulf War, both in terms of scale and character. The QDR yielded three future US force “options” for consideration. But these options did not represent different U.S. defense programs; rather, they essentially offered the choice of executing the existing defense program at three different rates of change. In summary, far from striking out in a bold, new direction, the QDR ratified a future course that was set principally by the momentum developed over forty years of Cold War with the Soviet Union. The result is a slightly smaller, but similar US military as compared to the one called for by the QDR’s proximate ancestors, the Clinton Administration Bottom-Up Review (BUR) force, and the Bush Administration Base Force.

Interestingly, neither the Defense Department nor the NDP offered a definition of transformation. Transformation can be defined as innovation on a scale sufficient to effect a military revolution. A military revolution can be defined as a fundamental shift in the character of the military competition that is stimulated by a sharp increase in the quantitative (i.e., human or fiscal) or qualitative (e.g., technological) inputs available to military organizations, which, when combined with innovative operational concepts and associated new force elements, produces a discontinuous leap in military effectiveness, typically of an order of magnitude or greater.

Those calling for transformation offer several common themes in support of their position. One is that the geopolitical revolution that became evident with the Soviet Union’s collapse has presented the US military with a different set of primary challenges, to include coping with terrorism, peacekeeping, and the danger of the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. A second theme is that the military revolution that will bring about a discontinuous change in the character of conflict may come sooner than expected. Given this view, the US military must transform or risk being at a severe competitive disadvantage in the post-transformation military regime. Advocates of this view frequently cite the interwar period of the 1920s and 30s—a period that saw the development of strategic aerial bombardment and integrated air defense networks, the rise to dominance of naval aviation, and the development of mechanized air-land operations (i.e., blitzkrieg)—as an example of the scope and magnitude of the changes likely to come. The Joint Chiefs of Staff have attempted, with limited success, to capture the changing character of warfare in their publication, Joint Vision 2010.

Why the discontinuity between words and deeds? There is no simple answer to this question, no single source of the problem. It is only by examining a range of factors that some tentative conclusions may be drawn.

Success Breeds Complacency
In the last decade, the United States military has won the Cold War, emerged victorious in one of the most lop-sided military campaigns in history during the Persian Gulf War, and became generally regarded by informed observers as the world’s preeminent military. This sense of overwhelming predominance, combined with the fact that the US defense budget dwarfs that of any other state, has led some senior defense officials to conclude that only the United States military is fiscally and technically capable of effecting a large-scale leap in military capability. Thus while verbal homage is paid to the concept of transformation, the Pentagon has adopted a “Wells Fargo” approach to the challenge: it will be accomplished in “slow stages.”

This “gradualist” approach worked well during the Cold War, when the threat was well understood and technology was progressing at a relatively leisurely pace. But this condition no longer obtains. Today as they scan the horizon and peer into the next century, US military leaders confront an array of challenges that, in many instances, will differ dramatically from those they encountered in decades past: electronic strikes against the blossoming information economy, precision attacks with smart weapons, the large-scale use of ballistic and cruise missiles, and the prospect of war in space. These developments, and others, will likely transform warfare—and require a transformed US military to deal with them.

While the Pentagon has been slow to match its call for transformation with action, the American public has demonstrated in poll after poll a general indifference toward national defense, which is, in turn, reflected in the attitudes of many elected representatives. Consequently, there are members of Congress who seem more concerned with the effects of defense allocations on the economy of their individual districts than on national security. Furthermore, President Clinton has not provided any significant support, let alone pressure, to bear upon the Defense Department in the name of transformation.

This is regrettable, as transforming a large military organization is a difficult and time-consuming process, often taking several decades to bring about. The US military thus finds itself in a race against time — the time needed to effect a transformation matched against the time its competitors will need to develop “asymmetric” strategies to defeat today’s American “way of war.” What is required is not apathy but, rather, a sense of urgency.

No Clear Challenge
The United States military faces no major challenge to its supremacy, and it seems difficult for many to imagine one emerging in the foreseeable future. In the absence of a challenge to meet, a threat for which to prepare, or a “problem” that must be solved, it becomes very difficult to generate the momentum to sustain military transformation. The experience of major military change in the last century seems to offer some support for this view. In the 1920s and 30s, the US Navy focused most of its attention on deploying the fleet across the Pacific Ocean to East Asia, in the event of a war with Japan. This contingency helped focus the Navy as it engaged in the process that transformed the fleet from the battleship-centered battle line to the aircraft-dominated carrier battle group. During the same period, German army leaders spent much of their time trying to solve the problem of static warfare in Western Europe, which helped them focus on how best to apply rapidly advances in mechanization, aviation, and radio into what became known as blitzkrieg.

In its December 1997 report, the National Defense Panel (NDP), did present several very different operational challenges in an attempt to focus transformation planning.¹ Among these challenges are: the ability to project power in the absence of forward bases (i.e., ports and airfields); to control urban areas in peacekeeping operations; to control space; and to defend the American homeland from nontraditional forms of attack (e.g., chemical and biological attack by irregular forces). The Panel further declared the US military must actively pursue a transformation process if it is to be prepared for these emerging challenges. However, to date the NDP’s recommendations have not generated much sense of urgency, or transformational focus, in the Pentagon.

Refighting the Last War
In the absence of a clear challenge, military organizations sometimes fall into the trap of anticipating that the next war will be very much like the last. Unlike other large, competitive organizations (i.e., corporations) the US military receives feedback on its effectiveness rather episodically. The US military’s last major conventional war data point is the 1991 Gulf War. Its previous major conventional war occurred nearly forty years earlier, in Korea. There seems to be a natural tendency to “baseline” performance against the Gulf War experience. All the Services performed well beyond initial expectations. Perhaps it comes as no surprise, then, that much of the wargaming that supported both the 1993 Bottom-Up Review and last year’s QDR were oriented on “Desert Storm-like” contingencies in the Persian Gulf and on the Korean Peninsula.

Relying on experiences from a seven-year old conflict to determine forces for future contingencies in a rapidly changing competitive environment seems unlikely to provide the kind of insights needed for military transformation. This seems particularly true in power-projection operations, where the US military’s traditional methods of deploying air and ground forces at or through ports and airfields is almost certain to be held at risk by the growing proliferation of satellite services and missile technology. Satellites will allow even regional rogue states to monitor US deployments, and (unless one makes heroic assumptions regarding the effectiveness of missile defenses) hold them at risk through the employment of large numbers of ballistic and cruise missiles. Senior US military leaders have voiced strong concern over their ability to deal with such a contingency. General Ronald Fogleman, then Air Force Chief of Staff, observed that:

Saturation ballistic missile attacks against littoral forces, ports, airfields, storage facilities, and staging areas could make it extremely costly to project US forces into a disputed theater, much less carry out operations to defeat a well-armed aggressor. Simply the threat of such enemy missile attacks might deter US and coalition partners form responding to aggression in the first instance.

Over the past ten years, it has become evident that proliferating weapon and information technologies will enable our foes to attack the ports and airfields needed for the forward deployment of our land-based forces.

I anticipate that the next century will see those foes striving to target concentrations of troops and materiel ashore and attack our forces at sea and in the air. This is more than a sea-denial threat or a Navy problem. It is an area-denial threat whose defeat or negation will become the single most crucial element in projecting and sustaining US military power where it is needed.

[I]s, by far the trickiest part of the American operational problem. This is the proverbial “Achilles heel.” India needs to study the vulnerabilities and create cover ant overt bodies to develop plans and execute operations to degrade these facilities in the run up to and after commencement of hostilities. Scope exists for low cost options to significantly reduce the combat potential of forces operating from these facilities.

In its report, the NDP questioned strongly the relevance of each of the military services’ most cherished modernization programs under these “post-transformation” circumstances: the Army’s upgrade of its Abrams tanks and its new Crusader artillery system, the Navy’s new Nimitz-class carrier; and the tactical aviation modernization programs of the Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps. The Services, however, have found it difficult even to contemplate that those combat systems and organizations that have worked so well in the past may be less central in a post-transformation regime.

Nor is the vision of a Military Revolution, fueled extensively by advances in information and information-related technologies, necessarily a comfortable one for the military’s “warrior” class. For example, the satellites that are critical to today’s military operations are controlled by clusters of men — and women — sitting in air-conditioned rooms thousands of miles away from most of today’s trouble spots. The Military Revolution will also likely see greater emphasis on unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and less reliance on pilots over time, threatening both the ethos and the long-term dominance of the Air Force’s pilot culture. “Information warriors” that defend our electronic infrastructure while attempting to undermine the enemy’s, are likely to be “on loan” to the military from Silicon Valley during crises and war (and may not even have to leave their office cubicle to perform their mission). To be sure, “warriors” will always be central to success in war, but as this transformation proceeds they will likely find themselves relying increasingly on — or even in some instances being displaced by — some distinctly “non-warrior” elements to accomplish the mission. If history is any guide, the “warrior” culture will likely prove reluctant to accept a growing role for such “nontraditional” warriors.

Short Tenure of Senior Leaders
The major US military innovations and transformations during this century were characterized by support from senior military leaders whose tenure was far greater than is typically the case today. This makes intuitive sense, since innovation often takes considerable time, and military revolutions tend to occur over several decades. Admiral William Moffett, who headed up the Navy’s Bureau of Aeronautics during the critical infant years of naval aviation, served in that position from 1921 to 1933. Admiral Hyman Rickover, father of the nuclear navy, led the Service’s program for several decades. General Hamilton Howze, the leader in the effort to create the only new Army division in the last half century — the Airmobile (now Air Assault) Division — served in a series of positions directly related to air mobility for nearly a decade.

Individuals do matter in successful military transformations, and they matter a great deal. For example, the choice of General Hans von Seeckt as head of the German Army following World War I as opposed to General Walter Reinhardt was crucial to the Reichwehr’s development of blitzkrieg. Simply stated, von Seeckt had a vision of military transformation centered on elite, highly mobile, mechanized forces, while Reinhardt believed static warfare would dominate future conflict as it had in the recent war on the Western Front. Von Seeckt also served in his position for seven years, allowing sufficient time for his vision to take root. Had Admiral Jackie Fisher not been First Sea Lord from 1904-10, it is doubtful that the Royal Navy would have moved so aggressively in divesting itself of over 150 ships of the passing military regime, while plunging forward with the revolutionary HMS Dreadnought and fast battle cruisers.

The opportunity to institutionalize a process for change is arguably far more difficult for today’s military leaders. Senior officers shuttle from one position to the next, completing “touch-and-go” assignments often after only a year or two. Four years is the maximum time a senior officer can serve as a chief of Service or as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS). Thus, today’s leaders barely have enough time to enunciate a vision of transformation, let alone institutionalize a process for achieving it. Short tenures also have a way of promoting emphasis on near-term problems and solutions. People are naturally concerned with things not going wrong on their “watch.” They also want to point to clear accomplishments when they depart their positions. One suspects that they also are loath to start something during their tenure whose ultimate fate will rely on the good will of their successors.

Antiquated Analytic Tools
Most of the Defense Department’s analytic methodologies that help determine military requirements were developed during the Cold War, to include the wargame models that played such an influential role in the QDR deliberations. These models, such as TACWAR, are highly limited in their ability to incorporate effectively the information dimension of warfare, which is a driving force behind the need for military transformation.

Reflecting their Cold War heritage, these models tend to emphasize attrition (as opposed to maneuver) warfare and linear operations along well-defined “front lines”—characteristic of the kind of military operations many experts anticipated twenty years ago had war erupted between the Warsaw Pact and NATO. But many US military leaders today do not see future war resembling these operations, and thus view these “legacy” models as being unhelpful at best, and likely counterproductive to military transformation. In short, current models, with their focus on past forms of warfare, by and large, tend to be biased in favor of traditional military operations, and thus act as a barrier to transformation.

The Defense Department also continues to place great reliance on systems analysis, introduced during Robert McNamara’s tenure as Defense Secretary, to determine future requirements. Systems analysis tends to focus on the cost-effectiveness of various options, with the intent of arriving at the most efficient solution. It also focuses on the near-term future, particularly on the six-year period covered by the Future Years Defense Plan. This approach may have worked well during the Cold War, where the threat was immediate, the time horizons arguably short, and technology was not progressing at the breakneck pace it is today. But the twin geopolitical and military-technical revolutions that are the basis for transformation have created a far higher level of planning uncertainty. Whereas generating maximum near-term efficiencies may be realized by assuming away uncertainty about the future to identify the best solution, this also runs the risk of planning for the wrong future.

Simply put, a defense plan that is very efficient for a specific future may produce a very ineffective military if the future turns out quite differently from what is expected. The Maginot Line built by France in the interwar period would no doubt have been both an efficient and an effective use of defense resources if the static trench warfare that characterized the Western Front in World War I dominated in 1940 as well. When it became clear that blitzkrieg, and not World War I redux, was the future, France was left with no viable alternatives against the German onslaught. Today, systems analysis may be helpful in determining an efficient “mix” of the three new tactical aircraft in the Pentagon’s modernization plan, which is based primarily on Gulf War-era contingencies. But systems analysis is not especially useful in capturing the uncertainties of the longer term, or “post-transformation,” competitive environment. Yet these aircraft are expected to be in service for two or three decades. As US access to forward bases increasingly is placed at risk, the value of tactical aircraft may depreciate rapidly, leaving the US military with relatively ineffective air forces.

Training
Field exercises are the ultimate “wargame,” coming as close as the military can get to the experience of war. In the past, field exercises have proven critical to the success of military transformation. The US Navy could not have developed the principals of carrier battlegroup operations without the series of Fleet Problems undertaken during the 1920s and 30s. The German military, in developing the blitzkrieg, relied heavily upon its own field experiments. Moreover, during its period of disarmament following World War I, the German Army carefully studied the field experiments of other militaries, especially the British, while testing tanks and aircraft covertly in the Soviet Union.

Unfortunately, US military field exercises are rarely joint, and typically do not focus on post-transformation operational challenges (e.g., projecting power in the absence of forward bases). The QDR declared that the number of man-days to support joint exercises would be reduced by 15 percent. However, pressure from congressional leaders has led the Pentagon to charge Atlantic Command (ACOM) with responsibility for joint experimentation. This represents encouraging development. Still, it remains to be seen how well joint experimentation will be supported, in terms of troops and exercise funds. The ability of ACOM to focus its experiments on the post-transformational challenges outlined above will also be a key to future success.

The Budget
How does the defense budget hamper transformation? On the one hand, the US defense budget, which this year will likely be set at roughly $271 billion, seems more than adequate to support the transformation of the military, at minimal risk to near-term readiness. To the extent the US public thinks about defense, consolation seems to be drawn from the fact that America’s defense budget far exceeds that of any other nation—indeed, by some measures it exceeds the combined budgets of all the other great powers. If the budget is viewed as a kind of “insurance premium” to cover near- and long-term security risks, as it is by some, a budget in excess of a quarter trillion dollars a year should cover it.

Unfortunately for those espousing the “insurance premium” view of defense budgeting, military transformation is closely linked to the shape of defense investments, as well as their magnitude. For example, if one examines French and German military expenditures during the twenty years following World War I, it shows France enjoying a clear lead for nearly the entire period. Yet Germany was able to transform its military to execute the blitzkrieg form of war and defeat France in a campaign lasting all of six weeks. An examination of the US Navy during the same period would find its budgets constrained by the Great Depression. Nevertheless, during this time the Navy was able to lay the groundwork for the carrier-dominated battle fleet, while Japan was able to do the same with an industrial sector less than one-fifth that of the United States! Sadly, much of the defense budget debate today revolves around the question “How much is enough?” to sustain the smaller but similar US military. A more important question to ask is “How wisely are we investing?” in order to support the goal of transforming the US military to meet the very different kinds of challenges it will begin to confront over the next decade.

The budget problem is made worse still, as the US military today seems afflicted by a condition known as the “Volunteer’s Dilemma.” Its primary attributes are a defense program that cannot be sustained by current and projected budgets, and a national security leadership that favors near-term military capability over long-term readiness. The result is that, to resolve the program-funding mismatch, Defense Department leaders have continually shifted funds programmed for modernization to support current operations. This almost certainly is subversive of efforts at Service transformation. When, for instance, in 1994 the Navy “volunteered” to go below its authorized fleet size in order to free funds to develop future capabilities, senior defense officials took much of the anticipated savings to offset budgetary shortfalls.

The lesson has not been lost on senior military leaders. When it came time for the Quadrennial Defense Review, the Service chiefs quickly realized that the process was primarily a budget “cut drill,” designed to bring the program-budget mismatch into balance. Consequently, the Services sought to protect existing programs and forces, rather than running the risk of losing budget share if they reduced near-term capability to support military transformation. Given this incentive structure, it is little wonder the QDR produced a “smaller but similar” military compared to its BUR predecessor. Of course, should senior DoD leaders themselves attempt to restructure the budget to support transformation, they would likely encounter strong resistance from the president’s Office of Management and Budget and, ultimately, the Congressional authorization and appropriation process. Yet the president, as commander-in-chief of the armed forces, and the Congress, in its role of supporting armies and maintaining a navy, have clear responsibilities to nurture and support the transformation for which they, or their senior aides, have been calling for.

The Defense Acquisition System
With few notable exceptions, the Defense Department’s acquisition system remains oriented, as during the Cold War, primarily on large-scale serial production of military equipment. Yet the history of successful military transformation over the last century is characterized by an emphasis on avoiding system “lock in” during these periods of rapid technological progression and relatively high uncertainty, while promoting “wildcatting” whenever possible. The former term refers to buying large quantities of long-life equipment whose value may decline rapidly during the shift in military regimes. An example would be buying battleships during the interwar regime shift. The latter term pertains to experimenting on a broad scale with limited numbers of emerging systems to identify their prospective value in the post-transformation regime. Examples of this are the three classes of carriers (but only four carriers in all!) built by the US Navy in the interwar period, and the over sixty types of attack aircraft the Army Air Corps experimented with during that same period.

To be sure, buying in bulk helps keep unit costs down, an important consideration for a military whose force structure is overly large for the kind of modernization effort planned by the Pentagon. Correspondingly, canceling a major new system, with its substantial research and development costs, is anathema in today’s military. Indeed, Service program managers are evaluated primarily on their ability to move their system into large-scale production. This produces a bias on the program manager’s part to avoid taking the kind of risks that produce innovation in favor of “safe” design choices. However, the incentives to reduce costs, while laudable in many respects, also serve to undermine transformation by limiting “wildcatting” and promoting “lock in.”

The Defense acquisition system’s ability to support transformation also suffers from a dramatic shift in the size and character of the defense industry that sustains it. As demand for defense products declined dramatically with the Cold War’s end, the industry was left to consolidate itself under what was, until only recently, a laissez-faire attitude on the Pentagon’s part. The consolidation has dramatically reduced the number of suppliers — and bidders — for the Defense Department. For example, only two major aircraft manufacturers remain to compete for defense business. Fewer competitors, combined with the Pentagon’s preference for buying a relatively small number of systems in great quantities, does not augur well for innovation, let alone transformation.

The Process
A vision of a dramatic shift in the US military must be supported by a process that translates a vision of the future competitive environment into action. Yet a strong case can be made that the process by which the Defense Department develops strategy and translates it into the planning guidance that shapes military programs and, ultimately, budgets has broken down. The Department’s PPBS — planning, programming, and budgeting system — while quite logical in theory, has declined to little more than an annual “budget drill.” The Defense Planning Guidance (DPG) that is intended to guide planning and budgeting is routinely produced too late to be of value, and is generally ignored. Its planning scenarios typically reflect a future that is little more than a linear extension of current contingencies, and not the transformed environment envisioned by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Defense Secretary. The DPG’s inability to influence the allocation of defense resources is reflected in the budget shares of the military services, which have remained astoundingly stable over the last forty years, despite major changes in strategy, technology and the geopolitical environment.

Efforts to remedy the problem have met with limited success. The Joint Requirements Oversight Council (JROC), designed to compete military programs across Service boundaries and in emerging mission areas (e.g., information warfare) has had no significant effect on the allocation of defense resources. The Goldwater-Nichols reform legislation of 1986, while promoting greater cooperation among the Services (“jointness”), also strengthened the role of the military’s “warfighting” commanders-in-chief (CINCs) at the expense of the Services. But the CINCs, who must deal with today’s threats, have a relatively short-term focus as compared to the Services, who are responsible for the long-term training and equipping of US forces. The small but growing rumblings on Capitol Hill about the need for a “Goldwater-Nichols II” legislation is indicative of the growing belief that perhaps it is the process, and not the people in charge or the budgets that are allocated, that is most in need of change.

Prospects for Transformation
The barriers to transformation, while formidable, are not insurmountable. There is growing interest in Congress for action on transformation issues. As noted above, General Hugh Shelton, the JCS Chairman, has responded to congressional pressure for joint experimentation as a means of determining how to solve emerging operational challenges by tasking ACOM with that responsibility. There is growing talk—and some bipartisan coalition-building—in the corridors of the Capitol to examine a fundamental restructuring of the way the Defense Department does its strategic planning, programming and budgeting; its determination of requirements; its training; and its command structure.

Finally, the QDR’s inability to resolve the large, and growing, mismatch between the defense program and the defense budget could, in a few years, produce the kind of budget “crunch” that forces dramatic change, much as the British financial problems in 1904 helped sustain Admiral Jackie Fisher’s transformation of the Royal Navy. The Pentagon’s budget shortfall, now running at some $10-20 billion a year, will likely balloon to between $25-40 billion a year by the middle of the next decade. Readiness shows clear signs of slipping, and force modernization can only be delayed for so long. The hard choices will become increasingly difficult to avoid.

Conclusion
There appears to be general agreement concerning the need to transform the US military into a significantly different kind of force from that which emerged victorious from the Cold and Gulf Wars. Despite many assertions to the contrary, however, this support has not been translated into a defense program supporting transformation. As discussed above, the causes for this disconnect between the words and deeds are varied, but are primarily of the US defense establishment’s own making. While there is growing support in Congress for change, the “critical mass” needed to effect it has not been achieved. A new administration in 2001 may provide the badly needed impetus for military transformation, but such leadership is hardly assured. Thus one can only conclude that, in the absence of a strong external shock to the US defense establishment, surmounting the barriers to transformation will likely prove a long, arduous process.

1. The author was a National Defense Panel member.