Finding a Strategy to Serve Our Interests : Defense: Over time, America can make impressive cuts in the Pentagon budget and still have impressive capabilities to conduct the mission.

Politicians and pundits warn that the major cuts now planned for the Pentagon budget will damage U.S. security unless they are guided by a clear strategy. A strategy sets priorities among the country’s political interests and among military forces that serve those interests. What are our interests today and what is their priority?

First, we wish to deter nuclear attack on the United States or its allies by the Soviet Union. Second, we want to make it difficult for the Soviet Union to seize by conquest sufficient industrial resources to overwhelm our own economic and technological potential in a sustained arms race. Finally, we want to cause as much international peace in the world as we can--especially among powers that by virtue of size, technology or fanaticism could wage very intense wars that could spread and in some unpredictable way harm American or allied interests.

What forces best serve these interests, and which ones serve poorly, or not at all?

To deter nuclear attack, the United States requires a large and redundant ability to retaliate, even in the event that an adversary mounts the most effective surprise attack that he can. Ten years ago, many national security experts well-represented in the Reagan Administration considered such an attack to be a plausible Soviet move. Soviet leaders were viewed as ruthless lovers of military power who would view the deaths of tens of millions of their own people as an acceptable price to spread socialism by the sword. Elaborate nuclear war-fighting capabilities were desired by U.S. planners to threaten the thousands of hardened Soviet military targets that the leaders in Moscow were asserted to value more than their people.

There is little historical evidence to support such a view. Recent events have further undercut the rationale for counterforce. Whatever else Mikhail Gorbachev’s political and economic reforms have shown, they have demonstrated that the Soviet Union is in fact quite sensitive to the welfare of its people and to the costs of warfare. Given this sensitivity, most common-sensical people would say that an ability to destroy the 100 largest Soviet cities under any circumstances would deter any Soviet leader from starting a nuclear war. Today, U.S. nuclear forces could now obliterate hundreds of cities and hundreds of military targets under virtually any circumstances. Some weapons programs, such as the Trident submarine and missile, should be completed to protect the U.S. retaliatory capability and to ensure its flexibility, but the small intercontinental ballistic missile (Midgetman) and the Stealth bomber should not.

Strategists have debated for years the requirements of extended deterrence--protecting our allies on the periphery of the Soviet Union from possible conquest. At the outset of the Reagan Administration, it was believed that only the ability of the Atlantic Alliance to refight World War II would deter Soviet attack.

But an open-ended conventional war-fighting capability is both unattainable and inadvisable. Our NATO allies intentionally maintain stocks of conventional weapons and munitions to fight intensively for only 30 days. For them, NATO’s conventional capabilities serve to buy time for diplomacy and nuclear threat to bring the Soviets back to reason--and that is the purpose ours should serve. Our allies believe that by depriving ourselves of capabilities for sustained conventional resistance, the Soviets must make a big gamble--to start a conventional war on the assumption that the West will surrender rather than use nuclear weapons. Europeans never thought the Soviets had the ice water in their veins to make this bet, and they believed that depriving ourselves of a long-war capability actually strengthened deterrence. U.S. strategists disagreed, but given recent developments in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, this disagreement is no longer reasonable.

U.S. conventional forces do serve the cause of international peace. Our naval presence in the Persian Gulf helped contain the Iran-Iraq war. The technological quality of U.S. weapons, and the high standard of tactical training of our forces, create the potential to weigh in on one side or another in conflicts from the Korean peninsula to the Middle East.

Thus the precise conventional force structure merits close attention--there are no magic answers. Washington should certainly cease investment in conventional war programs: ammunition, replacement weaponry, reserve troops and sea-control forces for an East-West conventional war lasting longer than 30 days. It is hard to see how our essential missions could require the current Army and Marine Corps ground force structure--32 active and reserve divisions that could mobilize more than 1 million men and women; the current Air Force active and reserve structure--37 wings with nearly 2,500 combat aircraft; or the current Navy air force structure--15 carriers and nearly 1,350 fielded combat aircraft (including Marine aviation). I judge that our requirements for crisis management and deterrence in Europe, and “peace-causing” abroad can be met with an active and reserve conventional force structure two-thirds the size of the current one.

The foregoing strategy should permit a defense budget 25% to 35% lower than the present one. This cannot efficiently be achieved in one year, but it should be in five. These cuts would leave the United States with very impressive capabilities to deter a nuclear attack at home, deter conventional and nuclear attack on our most vital and vulnerable allies--the Europeans and the Japanese--and remain an important influence for international peace.