The commission’s task was an enormously difficult and ambitious one. Moreover, it was made all the more difficult by the decision to limit the report’s recommendations and findings to areas where consensus could be reached among the panel’s 14 members.

Overall, the commission performs a modest, but important, service in outlining a range of US security interests and strategic objectives. Unfortunately, it comes up short in its most important (and difficult) task: crafting a strategy for preserving US security in what it rightly observes is a rapidly changing, and increasingly challenging, security environment. As discussed at the end of this analysis, fundamentally, strategy is about setting priorities and making choices between competing alternatives under conditions of limited resources. Unfortunately, the commission fails to clearly set strategic priorities, make choices among competing alternatives for achieving its objectives, or provide a meaningful indication of the resources that would be required to achieve its objectives. Yet these actions are inherent to crafting a strategy.

The commission does raise a number of important issues in its report. But it generally does not provide meaningful guidance concerning those issues. This critique focuses on ten of the policy areas identified in the report that could have major implications for defense strategy and budgetary requirements:

• Homeland Defense

• Missile Defenses

• Two-War Strategy

• More Money for Defense

• Power Projection and Future Forces

• Preemption and Nuclear First Use

• Geopolitics

• Role of Allies

• Intervention Criteria

• Space and Cyberspace

Preventive diplomacy—to prevent, through diplomatic and other means, unconventional attacks on all states, and an effective and enforceable international ban on the creation, transfer, trade, and weaponization of biological pathogens, whether by states or non-state actors;

Strikes against terrorist financial and logistical infrastructures to foil terrorist plots and deny terrorists sanctuary and possibly preemptive strikes against WMD capabilities;

The development of methods to defend against other, covert means, of attacking the United States with weapons of mass destruction and disruption;

A bolstering of programs to ensure continuity of Constitutional government.

Despite the fundamental importance the commission attaches to the emerging challenge of homeland defense, for the most part, it does not differ significantly from the policies of the Clinton Administration. Where it does, the commission is vague on why such a departure is needed, or what it would entail, in terms of both an “actionable agenda” and the resources required to implement it, as well as its overall feasibility. In the many areas where the commission appears to agree with current policy, it does not acknowledge its endorsement. Where the commission departs from current policy it is vague on the specific actions that it would recommend.

In addition, some of the commission’s recommendations, however desirable, may be unrealistic. For example, the commission advocates sweeping arms control treaties aimed at precluding the use of all biological pathogens by states and non-state actors, but does not acknowledge the dubious enforceability of such pacts.

The commission is also extraordinarily vague on how it proposes to defend the national information infrastructure—the emerging national security challenge of strategic information warfare merits only one, obscure reference on the need to develop defenses against weapons of mass disruption. Why programs to ensure continuity of government are more paramount today than they were at the height of the Cold War similarly go unexplained.

Missile Defenses
The commission states that the United States should “build national defenses against a limited ballistic missile attack to the extent technologically feasible, fiscally prudent, and politically sustainable.” It is difficult to argue with the use of these criteria, which are similar to those articulated by the Clinton Administration. As potentially serious as the threat of ballistic missile attack from a rogue state is, it does not represent the only, or probably even the most dangerous, threat to US national security. Nor is a national missile defense (NMD) system likely to prove more than partially effective. As such, it is important that any decision on NMD deployment take into account not only the technological feasibility of such a system, but also its budgetary costs and implications for relations with US allies, as well as Russia and China.

However, while the commission’s conclusions concerning NMD are sound, as with some of its other findings, they appear to offer little practical guidance for policymakers. The commission offers no opinion about whether the NMD system now being considered by the Clinton Administration would be “technologically feasible, fiscally prudent, and politically sustainable.” Nor does it offer any clues as to how these generic criteria should be applied in practice. Although the commission is mandated to look out 25 years, it also fails to discuss either the prospects or pitfalls associated with space-based and other futuristic NMD technologies. To its credit, the commission does note that, to be effective, an NMD system would have to be supplemented with defenses against cruise missiles and covert means of delivering WMD. But it provides no direction as to how efforts to develop such capabilities should be pursued or the level of resources that should be devoted to such efforts.

The commission also advises that the “United States should build comprehensive theater missile defense [TMD] capabilities.” This finding, too, is difficult to argue with. The threat posed by theater-range ballistic missiles is immediate, widespread and growing. However, the commission fails to discuss the broader implications of the proliferation of theater-range ballistic missiles (as well as cruise missiles) for US power projection capabilities.

While in some ways easier than the NMD mission, the TMD mission is also extremely demanding. Even a “comprehensive” TMD system is likely to be only partially effective. Moreover, the cruise missile threat is currently far more serious at the theater level than the national level. This means that the US military’s traditional way of projecting power into forward regions, through the use of in-theater air bases and ports, may be much more difficult in the future. But, beyond its support of TMD, the commission is silent on how the US military might prepare to meet this new challenge.

The Two-War Strategy
The commission has significant reservations regarding the Department of Defense’s (DoD) two major theater war (MTW) standard. The commissioners assert that the two MTW standard for sizing forces is not producing the capabilities needed for expeditionary interventions and stability operations, which the commission argues are different from those required for major theater war. The commission does not suggest, however, what it would put in place of the two MTW standard. Nor does it discuss the problems that may arise with key allies and friendly states (e.g., South Korea and Saudi Arabia) that such a shift in US declaratory strategy might engender. The commission implies that US failure to produce forces more suitable to the security challenges of the 21st century stems from the sizing metric DoD employs, rather than from institutional inertia within DoD. The commission apparently discounted the force structure demands embodied in the current US approach to overseas presence, which is the principal determinant of our maritime force posture. The commission also seems to accept uncritically the assumption that current US forces are sized properly for overlapping contingencies in the Persian Gulf and on the Korean Peninsula. However, the problem posed by the current MTW requirement may have more to do with outdated operational approaches and metrics than it does with an excessive standard. In short, the commission fails to separate the standard from the metric, and to separate both from the general problem of innovation.

More Money for Defense
The commission concludes that, “Given the demands now placed upon this nation’s military, or those anticipated in the next quarter century, it is evident that modern forces equal to these demands cannot be sustained by current levels of spending.” It is certainly true that implementing the force structure, readiness and modernization goals included in the administration’s current defense plan will require a substantial increase in funding for defense over the coming decade. CSBA estimates that, over the next five years, DoD’s costs are likely to exceed the funding levels projected in the administration’s defense plan by some $25-50 billion, with the gap growing to $25-50 billion a year over the longer term. Thus, if the commission is arguing that the current plan is necessary to meet US security requirements, its assertion that more money must be provided for defense is clearly correct.

On the other hand, the commission also calls into question some of the main “cost drivers” of DoD’s budget, including use of the two-MTW metric for sizing US forces. If the United States were instead to adopt a one-MTW requirement, to maintain the two-MTW requirement at a greater level of risk, or change the metric by which the forces needed to carry out the two-MTWs are sized, it might be possible to adequately sustain the US military without a major increase in funding. More fundamentally, because the commission fails to articulate a clear national security strategy, or define what new forces are needed and what legacy forces could be eliminated, it is impossible to say whether implementing such a strategy would require more or less funding than currently projected for defense. Finally, since the commission also stresses the importance to US national security of many non-military factors (e.g., promoting social cohesion, economic competitiveness, technological ingenuity, energy independence, and education), its recommendation to increase funding for defense would seem better grounded if their report also included some discussion of the relative importance of military versus non-military contributions to national security.

Power Projection and Future Forces
The commission reaffirms the view that the ability to project power globally is fundamental to US national security strategy. The commission asserts, in seeming agreement with the National Defense Panel and numerous other studies, that projecting power may be considerably more challenging for US forces in the future. As a result, it suggests that future US forces must be characterized by stealth, speed, range, accuracy, lethality, agility, sustainability, and reliability, and be supported by superior intelligence if they are to operate effectively in future power projection environments.

The commission also argues that the US will need five kinds of forces in the emerging security environment—nuclear capabilities to deter and protect the United States and its allies from attack, homeland security capabilities, conventional capabilities necessary to win major wars, rapidly employable expeditionary/intervention capabilities, and humanitarian relief and constabulary capabilities. In addition, the commission concludes that the US is currently not fielding the capabilities that will be needed for the varied and complex contingencies now occurring and likely to emerge in the years ahead. The commission, however, does not specify what it believes is wrong with current US forces, and what steps need to be taken to correct those deficiencies.

It fails to describe the size and composition of the force structure that it believes will be required, or whether the era of “general purpose forces” is coming to an end. Also omitted is a discussion of the division of labor that between future active and reserve forces. This is especially important given the commission’s call for increased emphasis on homeland defense.

Preemption and Nuclear First Use
The commission raises some provocative issues with respect to the future defense posture. For example, in discussing WMD proliferation, the commission asserts that “the magnitude of the danger posed by weapons of mass destruction compels this nation . . . to consider carefully the means and circumstances of preemption.” This is heady stuff, raising the specter of US preemptive strikes on states (or groups) suspected of producing WMD, similar perhaps to the Israeli air strike on Iraq’s nuclear reactor at Osirak in 1981. Having advanced this provocative statement, however, the commission offers no insight as to how it arrived at its conclusion. Both the means to achieve this capability and the circumstances under which the capability is to be employed are left to the reader’s careful consideration.

The commission repeats this approach in discussing the first-use of nuclear weapons, declaring that we must “take into account both the potential US need to respond to chemical and biological threats with nuclear weapons . . . .” The commission’s assertion that the United States should explore the need to respond to the threat of use of chemical and biological weapons with nuclear weapons is most provocative. It implies not only the first-use of nuclear weapons, but pre-emptive first-use against a non-nuclear threat. Unfortunately, the commission does not offer an explanation of how it reached this conclusion, or of how such operations are to fit within an overall US military strategy.

Geopolitics
In the realm of geopolitics, the commission’s most notable finding was its recognition of India as a potential emerging great power. The commission’s focus on China, Russia, and India suggests a shift in the locus of strategic competition to Asia, although the commission does not explicitly state so, nor does it discuss how the US might exploit this emerging strategic environment should renewed strategic competition ensue.

The commission states that “it is a critical national interest of the United States that no hostile hegemon arise in any of the globe’s major regions, nor a hostile global peer rival or a hostile coalition comparable to a peer rival,” but seems to expect that a continuation of current policy (e.g., engagement with China, Russia, and India) will ensure this end. The commission asserts that the United States and its allies should support the continued independence and territorial integrity of the newly independent states of the former Soviet Union, but avoids indicating whether its identification of these states among the many others in the international system would constitute a security guarantee. The commission similarly likewise asserts that the domestic stability of some states (Mexico, Colombia, Russia, and Saudi Arabia) is of major importance to U.S. interests, but curiously omits others that might fit the same criteria (e.g., China, India, and Pakistan).

Role of Allies
The commission notes both the continued importance of alliances to US national security and the changing nature of those alliances. Perhaps most importantly, the commission concludes that the United States must adapt “alliances and other regional mechanisms to a new era in which America’s partners seek greater autonomy and responsibility.” The commission’s recognition that the United States cannot simply follow a business-as-usual approach to its allies, or assume that its Cold War alliance structure will remain intact without modification in the future, marks an important contribution to a debate that too often gives short shrift to alliance considerations.

However, once again, the commission provides little practical guidance for policymakers. For example, its finding that “the United States should be prepared to support the evolution of an independent European Union [EU] defense policy in a manner consistent with the unity of the Atlantic Alliance (emphasis added),” would be far more helpful if it were supported by some sense of what such an acceptable EU defense policy would look like. Similarly, the commission provides no indication of how the changing geostrategic environment might provide opportunities to find new allies or render some existing alliances less important.

Intervention Criteria
Deciding if and when the United States should intervene with military force is both a critical and very difficult question. It is an especially important question today, given concerns that the US military may be overextended due to its involvement in various peacekeeping and other contingency operations. In an effort to better identify those situations in which military intervention might or might not be appropriate, the commission offers a set of criteria to be used prior to any commitment of US forces. Specifically, the commission proposes use of the following five criteria:

• when US allies or friends are imperiled;