What Secretary Gates failed to mention, however, is that at that time:
- The United States had suffered over 40,000 combat deaths in Vietnam—roughly ten times the number suffered to date in both Afghanistan and Iraq—triggering an ongoing series of large-scale demonstrations in the United States;
- The United States had invaded Cambodia, setting off mass domestic protests in the United States (to include the Kent State incident);
- Soviet pilots were flying combat missions over the Suez Canal as part of an undeclared War of Attrition with Israel; and
- The Soviet Union was engaged in a massive nuclear arms buildup—unconstrained by any arms control agreements—that posed a direct, existential threat to the survival of the United States and its allies.
I daresay that despite the challenges confronting us today, few would gladly trade them for the situation we confronted nearly forty years ago. As the PNSR admits, “no single challenge rises to the level of the Cold War’s potential “doomsday” scenario . . . .”5
If the challenges we confront are not fundamentally more severe, are they fundamentally different? If so, this alone could establish the need for major reform of our national security structure.
The challenges we confront today are quite different in form from those we confronted during the Cold War, and greater in scale from those we confronted during the decade following the Cold War’s end. The rise of radical Islamism and other transnational threats (e.g., drug cartels) and their growing access to highly destructive capabilities, the proliferation of nuclear weapons (and other weapons of mass destruction) to states in the developing world, the rise of China, and global warming are different in many ways from past challenges.
Drawing upon this, the PNSR makes the case that:
It is clear, then, that most major challenges can no longer be met successfully by traditional Cold War approaches. We cannot prevent the failure of a state or mitigate the effects of climate change with conventional military forces or nuclear weapons. The national security challenges inherent in a widespread international financial contagion or a major pandemic do not lend themselves to resolution through the use of air power or special operations forces.6
In a report that is remarkable in so many respects, this statement stands out as somewhat disingenuous. Military forces could not address any of these types of challenges during the Cold War either, although they did, in a number of cases, prove essential to preventing a state from becoming a failed state or succumbing to subversion.7
During the Cold War the United States employed other instruments of national power, depending upon the situation. Economic power was crucial to the success of the Marshall Plan, and economic coercion helped bring about an end to the Suez Crisis of 1956. Major development programs, like the Kennedy administration’s Alliance for Progress, were initiated. Diplomatic power was employed to create the most formidable network of alliances the world has ever seen. During this period we witnessed a series of influenza outbreaks, such as the Asian Flu and Hong Kong Flu, that killed tens of thousands. Alas, we were not prepared then, nor are we now, for the kind of pandemic influenza (the “Spanish Flu”) that killed millions at the end of World War I.
5 Project on National Security Reform, Forging a New Sword, p. v.
6 Ibid, p. vi.
7 Examples where the U.S. military was instrumental in preventing state failure or combating subversion are Greece (late 1940s); the Philippines (early 1950s); the Dominican Republic (1965); and Bolivia (1960s).