U.S. Military’s Mission Frozen in Cold War Footing

When the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union disintegrated soon after, the United States was left as the world’s only military superpower, its soldiers better qualified, better trained and better equipped than any force likely to challenge them.

With no Cold War to wage, what should those forces do? Under what circumstances should the United States deploy them? Should it reshape them to reflect a world where the risk of nuclear holocaust has diminished but outbreaks of regional conflicts remain stubbornly common?

Six years later, despite a massive deployment in the Persian Gulf in 1990-91 and intense domestic debate over defense budgets, the U.S. military still has no widely accepted mission. Without an apparent political consensus on the size and shape of the armed forces, the Clinton administration has opted for an approach in which the defense budget has declined sharply while the military’s structure remains essentially unchanged from Cold War days.

But Harlan K. Ullman, a defense expert with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a nonpartisan defense-monitoring group, warns that if the United States tries to maintain its current force much longer on a declining defense budget, military preparedness will deteriorate.

The nation “has reached a crucial juncture in its history,” Ullman writes in a new book, “In Irons: U.S. Military Might in the New Century.” If a consensus does not come soon, he says, “the opportunity for imposing change or reform may be wasted, dissipated or simply lost.”

The issue is important not only for the nation’s security, but also for its domestic health. The Defense Department still consumes about 17% of the federal budget. Critics say some of that could be used elsewhere--or saved--if the force were reshaped.

After a high-level review, the Clinton administration declared in 1994 that it would seek to maintain a military force capable of fighting (and presumably winning) two major regional wars--in Iraq and on the Korean peninsula, for example--”almost simultaneously.”

To do that, it would keep a force of about 1.4 million troops--down 380,000 from that maintained by the Bush administration--with the same basic structure as during the Cold War. At the same time, it would take a bigger whack at defense spending than Bush had planned.

That policy has already begun to show signs of strain.

Peacekeeping missions in Somalia, Haiti and Bosnia quickly siphoned away funds needed to maintain overall military readiness. Forced to dip into its procurement budget to make up the difference, the Defense Department now faces a crunch in its programs for buying weapons and modernizing equipment.

Army Gen. John M. Shalikashvili, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has warned that unless the administration boosts its overall procurement budget--now $39 billion a year--to $60 billion a year by 1998, it risks hobbling the force a few years from now.

“We have been living on past modernization” funds appropriated during the Reagan administration, Shalikashvili told reporters last month. “But now it is time to terminate that.”

Indeed, outside critics estimate that the Clinton defense budget is likely to fall $50 billion to $150 billion short over the next five years if the administration continues its “two-conflicts” strategy.

‘Hollow Force’ Fears

Critics raise the possibility of a “hollow force” similar to that of the late 1970s, when the military looked good on paper but was plagued by serious shortfalls in training and equipment.

Defense Secretary William J. Perry contends that the Pentagon will make up any shortfall by closing unneeded military bases, streamlining procurement procedures and shifting some work to the private sector. But efforts to achieve these kinds of savings have been disappointing in the past, and few believe that Perry can close the gap this way.

Congressional Republicans have tried to ease the military’s financial strains by boosting the Pentagon’s procurement budget.

At the same time, however, they have also essentially accepted Clinton’s two-conflicts strategy. And, like Clinton, they have not developed a plan to revamp the force to face the challenges of the post-Cold War era.

To be sure, crafting a policy to meet today’s national security challenges may not be as easy as it once was. Marine Corps Lt. Gen. Paul K. Van Riper recalls that for most of the Cold War, Pentagon strategists simply took the latest intelligence assessments of Soviet forces and built the U.S. military to meet the threat.

Today, Van Riper says, “there’s no single, overriding threat to plan against,” and deciding what kind of force to have is more difficult.

Military leaders say they are happy with the current post-Cold War course. Gen. Dennis J. Reimer, the Army’s chief of staff, insists that both the two-conflicts strategy and the current force structure are correct and should be maintained, albeit with additional funds.

“If you let the Army get too low so that it doesn’t have the capability to handle two [major regional contingencies], you’re asking for trouble,” he said. “I’m comfortable with the [two-conflicts] strategy.”

Outside the government, however, many analysts argue that the two-conflicts strategy has become little more than a stopgap action, with a potential to become a real liability by sidetracking the effort to restructure the force.

Williamson Murray, a former Ohio State University military expert, contends that the two-conflicts strategy does too little to restructure the military for the future.

Instead, he argues, the changes so far have been designed “to save as much as possible of the old force structure” while putting off any attempt to take advantage of new military technology and the disappearance of the Soviet threat.

Security Strategy

Other critics fault the two-conflict policy for emphasizing larger-scale threats such as another Persian Gulf War or a North Korean invasion of South Korea--scenarios that they say are unlikely anytime soon--and not focusing enough on the kinds of smaller-scale missions that the military is more likely to encounter.

More fundamentally, outsiders charge that the president still has not propounded a clear national security strategy that spells out how the nation should use its military power. His long-awaited new national security strategy, unveiled a few months ago, contained little besides broad rhetoric designed to support the two-conflicts strategy.

While the administration has dispatched U.S. forces on a spate of overseas missions--in Somalia, Haiti, Rwanda and Bosnia, for example--Congress and much of the American public have opposed such deployments as unsuitable.

The 1993 debacle in Somalia--in which 18 Army Rangers were killed trying to capture a recalcitrant Somali clan leader--made both the military and Congress wary of sending troops to Bosnia. Analysts say a blowup in Bosnia could sour Americans on participating in such peacekeeping missions for years to come.

Shalikashvili worries that continuing political battles over whether to send U.S. troops into such relatively small-scale conflicts as Bosnia could “unduly tie a president’s hands” in dealing with international problems.

“Many of my colleagues would be more comfortable if we put up a sign outside the Pentagon: ‘We only do the big ones,’ ” he said. “[But] we’re moving into an era when it’s important that we maintain the capability to manage such crises.”

John Hillen, defense policy analyst for the Heritage Foundation, a traditionally hawkish group, says he believes that the two-conflicts strategy should be changed to provide a military that can win “1 1/2” regional conflicts--one major and one minor--at once.

Having overwhelmed the Iraqis in the 1991 Persian Gulf War, the United States is unlikely to have to fight another war the size of Operation Desert Storm, Hillen says, and the notion that America will have to battle Iraq and North Korea at the same time is “unrealistic.”

Hillen also contends that the military should be revamped to take better advantage of high-technology weapons in ways that will enable the United States to field far fewer troops and smaller units. “We ought to drop the [Army] division as a basic unit,” he argued.

On that score, Hillen finds wide support. Among many others, Adm. William A. Owens, the just-retired vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, argues that integrating high-technology satellite intelligence with precision-guided, long-range weapons could mold a 21st century military force that would be far more effective and smaller at the same time.

Also in this camp is Andrew F. Krepinevich, director of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, another nonpartisan defense-monitoring group.

“The debate shouldn’t be about thinking richer about defense--it should be about thinking smarter,” he said. “We can’t afford to throw money at the problem anymore.”

One likely scenario, Krepinevich says, is an attempt by Iran to block shipping in the Strait of Hormuz by using submarines and antiship cruise missiles. If Western countries intervened, Iranian forces would pester them by detonating oil wells, destroying water supplies and launching small, widely dispersed attacks against their troops, possibly with poison gas.

Cutting the active-duty force any further would require jettisoning some major weapon programs, possibly including the F-22 fighter, and eliminating so-called “redundancies” that have left two or more of the services performing jobs that one could handle alone.

Some critics fret that continued spending on the services’ pet programs, which they say have relatively little to do with the sort of combat now foreseen for U.S. troops, is preventing any serious change.

‘Forward Presence’

Also being debated anew is how much the United States needs to maintain its “forward presence”--by deploying aircraft carriers around the world and stationing ground troops in key hot spots--and how much further to cut the costly Army National Guard and Army Reserve.

For the moment, Perry insists that there are no plans to revamp either the strategy or the structure of the force. “I believe [in] this [policy] as firmly now as when we were” putting it together, he said.

But many defense experts expect another full-scale review of defense policy sometime in 1997, either by a new Republican administration or by the Clinton administration’s foreign-policy team.

Whichever way the election turns out, however, the effort seems likely to require a good deal of speed--and some serious leadership--in persuading both the country and the military to unite behind any new proposal.

“The driving issue in the long run is going to be coming up with a sense of mission,” said David R. Segal, a military sociologist at the University of Maryland. “For 50 years, it was the Cold War. We have not come up with a substitute for that.”

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The New Military

Today: Lack of widely accepted mission is hurting current preparedness and depriving the military of a chance to reshape itself for the next century.

Monday: The men and women of the U.S. armed forces, widely regarded as the most capable in the nation’s history, face an uncertain future.

Tuesday: Revolutionary changes in weapons will force the military to revamp both its basic strategy and its traditional structure.

The Changing Military

Since the mid-1980s, the number of U.S. troops has declined by 31% and defense spending has plummeted by 36% after the figures are adjusted for inflation.

SPENDING IN BILLIONS

2001 (Projected): $244.9

Note: In 1977 dollars to offset the impact of inflation

TROOPS IN MILLIONS

2001 (Projected): 1.42

Sources: Defense Department, Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments