WHITHER THE RMA: TWO PERSPECTIVES ON TOMORROW'S ARMY Paul Bracken Raoul Henri Alcalá July 22, 1994 ******* The views expressed in this report are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy of position of the Department of the Army, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government. This report is cleared for public release; distribution is unlimited. ******* Comments pertaining to this report are invited and should be forwarded to: Director, Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army War College, Carlisle Barracks, PA 17013-5050. Comments also may be conveyed directly to the Conference Organizer, Dr. Earl H. Tilford, Jr., commercial (717) 245-3234 or DSN 242-3234. Copies of this report may be obtained from the Publications and Production Office by calling commercial (717) 245-4133, DSN 242-4133, FAX (717) 245-3820, or via the internet at [email protected]. ******* All Strategic Studies Institute (SSI) monographs are loaded on the Strategic Studies Institute Homepage for electronic dissemination. SSI's Homepage address is: http://carlisle-www.army.mil/usassi/. ******* These papers were originally presented at the U.S. Army War College Fifth Annual Strategy Conference held April 26-28, 1994, with the assistance of the Office of Net Assessment. The Strategic Studies Institute is pleased to publish the papers as part of its Conference Series. FOREWORD In April 1994, the Army War College's Strategic Studies Institute hosted its Fifth Annual Strategy Conference. The theme was "The Revolution in Military Affairs: Defining an Army for the 21st Century." After fourteen of the nation's leading defense scholars presented papers on the role of technology in warfare, Dr. Paul Bracken and Colonel Raoul Alcala concluded the conference by offering their views of the Army's future. Professor Bracken contends that the Army of the 21st century will be shaped by domestic concerns as much as by external threats to American security. While economic power has increased in importance in international relations, military power as traditionally conceived remains a dominant factor in determining the status of nations. Colonel Alcala holds that there is a connection between ideas and principles. He argues that doctrines will provide the basis for force structure, training, and weapons acquisition. Colonel Alcala maintains that the Army's ability to stay intellectually ahead of the technology will be, perhaps, its greatest challenge in the next century. To contribute to an informed debate about the 21st century Army, the Strategic Studies Institute presents the views of these respected defense intellectuals for your consideration. JOHN W. MOUNTCASTLE Colonel, U.S. Army Director, Strategic Studies Institute BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES OF THE AUTHORS PAUL BRACKEN is Professor of Political Science and Professor of International Business at Yale University. He teaches in the areas of comparative politics, international relations, and international management, and is coordinator of international studies at the Yale Management School. Before joining the Yale faculty in 1983 he was at the Hudson Institute, New York, for 10 years where he led a broad range of policy and economic studies. Dr. Bracken is the author of The Command and Control of Nuclear Forces, and Reforging European Security and many journal articles dealing with defense planning, Asian security, and crisis management. He is working on a book, entitled High Command, on the evolution of large military organizations and their effects on the state system and international relations over the past 500 years. A member of the Council on Foreign Relations, Dr. Bracken received his B.S. in engineering from Columbia University and his Ph.D. in operations research from Yale University. RAOUL HENRI (ROY) ALCALA heads a consulting firm, Alcala Enterprises, which specializes in national security and foreign policy issues. He retired from the Army in 1991 after four years in charge of the Army Chief of Staff's Assessment and Initiatives Group. As a White House Fellow during the Ford and Carter administrations, he served as a special assistant to the Federal Energy Administrator and to the President's National Security Advisor. A graduate of the U.S. Military Academy, he holds masters degrees from Yale University in international relations and political science. His most recent publications include a policy paper for The Atlantic Council of the United States: The United States, NATO and Security Relations with Central and Eastern Europe; studies for the RAND Corporation, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and Science Applications International Corporation on military strategy, technology, doctrine, training, and force structure, and on Persian Gulf lessons learned. He is a Senior Fellow of Business Executives for National Security. FUTURE DIRECTIONS FOR THE ARMY Paul Bracken The best way to think about a Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) comes from a statement often heard in business strategic planning circles: It is easier to design the future than it is to predict it. To think about a revolution in military affairs as a predictive problem misses many of the most important parts of such an exercise. The responsibility of the national security community is to consider the impact of such a development precisely because it is a national security community. Other nations may move in this direction, and if ours does not, some extremely serious imbalances could follow. Although the end of the cold war is recognized by all, and although the unique conditions of the Gulf War are understood not to characterize all future U.S. conflicts, a considerable gap exists between saying these things and actually absorbing them into our institutions. This conference is about taking a step in this institutional redirection: making the change from talking about revolutionary change to having it influence the Army's day-to-day actions. In an article published a few months ago I argued that current thinking about national security was too constrained by immediate issues. Downsizing of force structure, budget reductions, Bosnia, and other issues were all very real problems requiring a great deal of leadership and management to properly deal with them.1 But there was a subconscious tendency to use these immediate issues as signposts of the future, even though little evidence existed to support such a use. From many years of experience in long-range planning at the Hudson Institute came some difficult lessons learned. The hardest single feature in conducting long-range planning and brainstorming sessions for both government and private sector clients was to divorce oneself from current conditions. In the 1960s, for example, a great many planning studies were built around a continuation of the `youth revolution' of that decade, the introduction of new lifestyles, tastes, and social norms. In the 1970s many planning studies were premised around various solutions and outcomes to the energy crisis. By then the youth movement had been forgotten, just as in the 1980s the energy crisis had been forgotten. With the end of the cold war it is understandable that immediate issues would be analyzed as future signposts. In the absence of other guidance there is not much else on which to base planning. But if anything seems certain it is that in not too many years a new equilibrium in U.S. military spending will be established, the situation in Bosnia will be accepted, and that new dangers will loom on the nation's horizon. Yet another aspect of change needs to be emphasized: the inability of people who have been involved in a field for most of their careers to preserve their capacity to be intellectually surprised. A tendency exists in large organizations for members to see the world in terms of an unsurprising repetition of bureaucratic turf grabs, interdepartmental feuds, and self-serving individual behavior. Economist A.O. Hirschman has written that in the field of Latin American economic development too many experts have been unable to see the dramatic changes that have taken place. Instead, they see an out-of-date world defined by government incompetence, civil-military tensions, and technological backwardness. While these exist, important transformations have occurred in political and economic structures, capital markets, and civil control of the military. If the U.S. Army must maintain one attitude, it is the capacity to accept new ideas and patterns of thinking. Cycles. The Army can partly construct its future, but it also must accept certain features of its external environment. Quite often the confluence and superposition of these features of the environment defines the future which actually occurs. For example, in the 1930s the Army found itself in a world where 1) technology in the form of the internal combustion engine created new opportunities for fundamental changes in military strategy and tactics; 2) international relations among states were turning to a more predatory structure with the rise of the communist and fascist dictatorships; and 3) the industrial structure of the United States was changing to permit dramatically new and increased kinds of mobilization, as well as a newly skilled type of soldier who could read, drive a truck, and follow complicated orders. It is unlikely that had not all three of these developments materialized, the nation would have achieved the success it did in World War II. There is a tendency to want to reduce complex institutional behavior to simple one-dimensional characterizations: "revolutionary technology holds the answer to the future of war," or "without any external threats there is no need for advanced strategic thinking." In fact, something much more complicated takes place involving the interaction of unrelated cycles of trend development. The job of leadership in any institution is to examine the internal and external organizational environments and decide what are the most important cycles affecting them. Strategies must then be formulated to manage the relationship of these, one to the other. The Army leadership in the 1930s had to think not just about the revolutionary implications of the tank, but also of ways to mass produce tanks, train people to repair them, and leverage off other parts of the enormous (relative to Germany and Japan) U.S. industrial base to produce a congruent force structure with a tooth-to-tail ratio that made sense. With this perspective it is useful to consider `cycles' in key technical and environmental areas. Cycles do not imply predictable periodicity, but rather significant changes in underlying structures that are in most respects unpredictable. Technology. This probably receives more attention than any other part of the Army's environment. The cold war against the Soviet Union was fought as a virtual war through technological innovation designed to deter military expansion and risk taking. A large technical in-house community has been created. There is a strong tendency for institutional momentum to continue to operate in this manner. This is not the place for a technical forecast in the dynamic fields of computers, communications, or information technology. Army thinking in this area emphasizes the importance of information, and especially of information dominance over an opponent.2 Whether this is the right way to look at technology cycles is not clear, but experience in the Gulf War and a perceived likelihood that the United States can exploit such an advantage because of its capacities in computers and telecommunications remains a powerful motivating force, one which, in addition, looks to the future rather than the present. A key question in this area is whether the current technological defense community created to innovate during the cold war will remain the best way to do so in the future. The Department of Defense is going through the process of an `acquisition reform,' in which it is estimated that somewhere between 35 - 40 percent overhead rates are attached to the defense acquisition process. With declining defense budgets the overhead costs which once were tolerable are no longer so. Industrial Structure Changes. In the United States, the military can only be as strong as the underlying economy. During World War II the military gained leverage from the industrial economy. During the cold war the Pentagon gained leverage from the strong technical base, both in industry and academia. To the extent that a revolution in military affairs is actually underway, the relationship between it and the rest of the U.S. and world economies must be explored. Here something of a paradox may be facing the United States. Against a foe whose strategy and technology were well understood, the Soviet Union, there could be clear objectives to optimize against. This meant that a stable research and development infrastructure could be supported and cultivated. This infrastructure contributed mightily to containment of the Soviet Union. But in a different security environment a new set of military-industry relationships must be forged. Against a more nebulous set of objectives it is not at all clear that the current R&D infrastructure is what is needed. With its large in-house laboratory and arsenal system, and with a relationship to the private sector that goes through specialized prime defense contractors, the current system has an exorbitant set of overhead and transactions costs associated with it. Thus, the present contracting budget climate may present real opportunities to deconstruct and re-engineer the U.S. defense industrial base. Another way of putting it is that the budget environment may force technological and industrial changes in the Army's relationship to the larger civilian economy that would not otherwise be politically feasible. Rather than decrying adverse impacts of reduced defense expenditures, it may prove to be the case that the creative destruction of these old relationships is a necessary precursor to full Army participation in the revolution in military affairs. There is historical precedent for this viewpoint. In the 1890s and early 1900s the United States was a rising world power, and it took a supply and logistics debacle in the Spanish American war to spur Congress to eliminate the corrupt old bureau system of service supply.3 But what followed was not so much designed from scratch as superior, as one which intrinsically relied on new capacities of the American economy in administration, professional management, and scale economies. The result was a system that was by no means perfect, but which possessed an ability to respond to large crises, something demonstrated in World War II. What are some of the new trends in the American economy that could bear on the Army's participation in a revolution in military affairs? One of the most striking features is the increase in efficiency arising from the appearance of tens of thousands of smaller firms, compared to the Fortune 500, which are the incubators of technological innovation. A tendency to think of the familiar giant corporate names as the engines of the U.S. economy remains, but this view is a decade out of date. The computer revolution has produced a wholesale restructuring of industrial organization, whereby smaller firms have been able to capture economies of scope as well as flexible economies of scale.4 This has produced a move toward strong regional economies, places where these smaller firms thrive for reasons of infrastructure availability, concentration of technical personnel, and flexible relations among actors.5 In a related trend the main arena of technical innovation has shifted to the commercial from the government sector. In the 1950s it was the government, principally in DoD but also in other agencies like NASA, that produced the early jet aircraft, computers, and materials breakthroughs. It is now well appreciated that the U.S. Government is a much smaller consumer of these than the private sector. However, it is less well appreciated that the main source of innovation has shifted to the private commercial sector. The U.S. Government, at least currently, maintains a large collection of laboratories and research facilities which it seeks to convert to other purposes. The existing defense industrial base cannot keep up with the private market in producing innovative solutions to problems. But the real question has less to do with the proper disposal of the cold war defense industrial base and everything to do with creating something new. Military planners are confronted with the difficult issue of thinking about a new industrial era, just as planners were in the early part of this century as they confronted their industrial era. This is probably the area in which the revolution in military affairs is in greatest need of thinking. There are cycles in the relationship between public and private sectors. At certain times government research leads the private sector, and at other times it lags behind it. By all indications we are in a period of private sector leadership, and this is the location of innovation that all of the services must look to for the future. This represents a cultural shift for the services which during the cold war could rely on in-house research establishments to keep them supplied with weapons, ideas, and innovations. A considerable change in outlook will be needed for the Army and for the other services if they are to relate to this different shape of the U.S. economy. Associated with this trend is what in business schools is referred to as true multinational companies, companies where national borders represent little more than lines on a map. Companies like GE, Siemens, Philips, and, increasingly, even Japanese firms, disperse their skills and research around the globe. Old notions, such as the need to source domestically, may be hard to change, but they are no longer meaningful in today's global economy. As one example, the most advanced battery research in the world doesn't take place in any one national facility. Rather, it is dispersed in joint venture consortia with specialists from many countries working together in Europe, Japan, and the United States, sharing information among firms. For the U.S. government to try to beat this with an in-house government laboratory, hampered by civil service and acquisition rules, and not exposed to the competitive pressures of the marketplace, is well nigh hopeless. Organizing the mass of technical capability in today's world will be very different than dealing with a handful of defense and industrial giants as prime contractors. The services' entire approach to acquisition will have to be changed, something which will include standard notions of acquisition reform, but which will go far beyond them. The essence of the problem is to open up the Army (and all of the services) to these new industrial structures. Army people will have to be expert on what is going on in the private sector in many different areas, and can no longer become specialists in compliance to outdated and inefficient congressionally mandated purchasing rules. There are several different ways to go about this, and a great deal of experimentation will have to occur to reach a comfort level acceptable to the Army. No one has the answer to these new relationships. But it seems clear that there will be far more outsourcing of research and development and that a new cadre of industrial specialties will have to be created. The reason for outsourcing research and development will not be to save scarce dollars per se, but rather to revitalize existing organizations by introducing new sources of information and new ways of looking at problems. The Army will need to develop "architectural knowledge teams"--in-house specialists who are experts in the latest technical developments, but who understand that to get something done they do not have to do it themselves in a government controlled laboratory. Rather, they can save money, time and get a better result by using the private sector. In a few years, the idea of posting Army officers to commercial establishments will be routine, even though these establishments seemingly have nothing directly to do with military research or production. Strategic sourcing will be elevated to a much higher status than it currently has, and a thorough overhaul of training and education in the methods of strategic alliances, outsourcing, fluid contracting, and preservation of architectural knowledge will be necessary. It may be useful in this respect to suggest a long-term Army issue related to these industrial trends, but one which requires immediate decisions. At the present time the Army is actively participating in a congressionally mandated base realignment and closure (BRAC) review. The way this is conceived is similar in all of the services: what they can dispose of with least pain. What is not considered is what structure the Army should move toward, rather than what it should move away from. The Army should think through one of the trends mentioned above, the emergence of regional economies built on innovation and attainment of a critical mass of technical personnel. These private sector "sticky regions"6 are very likely to be the "Ruhr Valleys" of the next century, and the Army must consider ways to have some presence in them if they are to harness the potential of the new industrial era to the revolution in military affairs. Strategic and International Trends. Whether classified as future "threats" or as part of the emerging security environment, strategic and international trends clearly have a profound impact on the Army as an institution. Here an especially strong tendency exists to view current problems as indicators of what the long-term future will hold. A tension exists today between conceiving future conflicts as being variants of the war against Iraq, or in terms of more likely contingencies which, while quite different from one to the next, entail a more politically-controlled use of force, emphasize special low-intensity operations, and have as their goal the restoration of order in disintegrating nations and states. There can be little doubt that these latter contingencies, exemplified by Somalia and Bosnia, are very likely to continue in other parts of the world. The disintegration of the Soviet empire and the extraordinary momentum of Third World population growth promise no shortage of crises. Rather than predicting where crises might occur it is better to stipulate that they will occur somewhere, and that it is not possible to consider them as lesser included cases of larger regional military contingencies. Although different perspectives exist about whether the United States should build its military planning on threats of a regional character (North Korea, Iraq, Iran, etc.) or so-called peace keeping operations (Bosnia, Somalia), another kind of competitor now receives only scant attention, with little more than a dismissal of it as a possibility. This is a peer competitor in the sense of a major power which could threaten the security of the United States by challenging us in important parts of the world. Over the past 100 years we have faced five such competitors: Britain in the last century, and then Imperial Germany, Imperial Japan, Nazi Germany, and Soviet Russia. An issue that needs considerably more thought is how the collapse of communism has created a situation where a replacement world ideology of capitalism will change the structure of international relations. While at first glance the triumph of capitalism seems like a victory for the United States, a broader perspective is needed in thinking this through. The question can be asked "Will a capitalist China, or India, or Russia, or whatever, create more problems for the United States than did their communist or socialists predecessors?" An unwarranted assumption is that capitalism means democracy, and that because democracies do not fight one another the United States will be a long-term beneficiary of this trend. But the relationship between these economic and political concepts is highly complex. The Soviet Union, in fact, is the distinctive exception to the rule that America's previous peer competitors had important aspects of capitalism associated with their economic systems. Large private business enterprises dominated the political landscape of Japan, Germany, and Britain when they were in competition with the United States. This contributed to their dynamism.7 The issue could as easily be looked at another way: capitalism means that once poor countries will become rich, and they will do so in a way that uses modern technology supported by market allocations that is likely to be more efficient than the Soviet Union was. Capitalism does not equate with democracy, it only equates with private ownership and use of markets. Indeed, the very gap between capitalism and democracy has been the principal source of tension in modern Europe since before World War II. The world is now going through the greatest expansion of bringing new people into the world marketplace than at any time in history. Adding the populations of Russia, China, and India two billion people once excluded from capitalism are now being thrust into it in a very short time. When this transformation has occurred in other places it has produced enormous upheavals. Consider the history of 19th and early 20th century Europe when enormous class and national tensions were catalyzed and manipulated for strategic ends and led to the disasters which took place in Europe before 1945. There are no necessary reasons why this should occur again, but there are reasons to take this trend as a good one for constructing signposts about the character of America's strategic future. The argument that the extension of capitalism to most of Asia will produce comparable change to what its extension to Europe did is at least as plausible as the argument that history is at an end