Pentagon’s 2-War Plan in Retreat

The Pentagon’s chief strategic planner says the military must focus increasingly on preparing to fight numerous small-scale conflicts around the world, rather than two major wars simultaneously--a shift that could dramatically alter the makeup of the armed forces.

The comments Wednesday by Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz come as the Pentagon is completing a comprehensive reassessment of the nation’s military priorities. The reassessment, due to be sent to Congress by Sept. 30, is designed to lay the foundation for a top-to-bottom reshaping of the size and deployment of naval, air and land forces.

The contents have been the source of intense speculation inside the military and in Congress, and Wolfowitz’s briefing provided the first public status report in months by a senior official.

Wolfowitz told reporters that the Pentagon plans to emphasize rapid deployments, striking quickly in such places as Bosnia, East Timor and Haiti, while maintaining the ability to win a single major war. For almost a decade, the Pentagon has deployed troops to fight two major regional wars at the same time.

“As over the last 10 years we’ve drawn down the force structure and increasingly built a force size around two major regional conflicts,” Wolfowitz said, the assumption has been that funding two majors wars was enough to cover a multitude of smaller wars. That strategy has “become increasingly inappropriate,” he added.

Senior military officials expect that such a shift would provide significant savings through personnel cuts, closing military bases and axing older weapon systems to free up money to modernize the armed forces and build a missile defense system.

But military officials in the field warn that, in fact, such a shift in strategy might require a sizable increase in forces, depending on the number and potency of regional conflicts for which the military would need to prepare.

And any call for shifting funding away from conventional forces is likely to engender a storm of debate and dissent on Capitol Hill, where lawmakers are deeply ambivalent about cutting weapon programs and military facilities that provide jobs for their constituents.

“On a strategic level, the implication of what they are doing is more emphasis on aerospace systems and missile systems and less emphasis on ground forces,” said Loren Thompson, a defense analyst at the Lexington Institute, a conservative military policy think tank.

“On a political level, they may not get to enact any of this because they have not connected their military strategy to a political strategy. Congress will hear the Pentagon’s plan and say, ‘No. Get lost,’ and that’s that,” Thompson said.

The formal requirement that the armed forces should be able to fight and win two major wars simultaneously dates to the early 1990s, when the Pentagon adopted it in the wake of the Cold War. The two-war strategy had been used to determine the size and capabilities of the U.S. military and to justify the need to keep 1.4 million troops on active duty.

The proposed changes are laid out in a document known as the “terms of reference,” which the Pentagon is using to guide a comprehensive reassessment of specific policy and budget requests for everything from how many aircraft carriers will sail the seas to how many fighter jets to fly to how many troops will be on the ground.

The terms of reference also incorporate for the first time plans to give the military expanded duties in combating terrorist strikes on U.S. soil, both through the missile defense initiative and through a larger role for the National Guard and Reserve.

While the document itself is classified, an executive summary of it was given to reporters Wednesday, even as Wolfowitz and other senior officials work to complete the reassessment.

The document has been long awaited as a vehicle for Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld’s vision for transforming the military.

But hashing out the details of the plan--the nitty gritty of how many troops the Pentagon would have to work with, where they would operate and what weapons they would have--has proven unexpectedly turbulent, as various spending pressures have come to bear, including the slowing economy, the $1.35-billion tax cut passed by Congress in May and the declining budget surplus.

“They gave the Pentagon this guidance to try to change this two-war framework, and the military services came back and said, ‘Lo and behold, it takes more people to do that than you need today,’ ” said Michael O’Hanlon, a defense analyst at the Brookings Institution.

“The money to do all this has to come from some place. . . . They cannot maintain the force structure and do all the new things that Rumsfeld wants to do. Now the struggle is between Rumsfeld and the uniformed services as to where the remaining money will go.”