Pentagon: How about we plan on one war at a time

A little-noticed New York Times story says that the Pentagon is considering major changes in its quadrennial Defense Policy Guidance Review (DPGR), due out early in 2006.

The Pentagon’s most senior planners are challenging the longstanding strategy that requires the armed forces to be prepared to fight two major wars at a time. Instead, they are weighing whether to shape the military to mount one conventional campaign while devoting more resources to defending American territory and antiterrorism efforts.

The Defense Policy Guidance Review can have an enormous impact on US foreign policy as well as on its military posture. In 1992, for instance, Lewis “Scooter” Libby, now Dick Cheney’s chief of staff, and Paul Wolfowitz, former number two man in the Bush II defense department, working under the guidance of then-secretary of defense Dick Cheney, produced a draft DPGR that introduced what is now known as the Bush Doctrine: the reservation of our right to pre-emptively cream anyone we think is a threat or might become one. The document is described in a 1992 Washington Post story reproduced here.

Though noting that “the passing of the Cold War reduces pressure for U.S. military involvement in every potential regional or local conflict,” the document argues not only for preserving but expanding the most demanding American commitments and for resisting efforts by key allies to provide their own security.

In particular, the document raises the prospects of “a unilateral U.S. defense guarantee” to Eastern Europe, “preferably in cooperation with other NATO states,” and contemplates use of American military power to preempt or punish use of nuclear, biological or chemical weapons, “even in conflicts that otherwise do not directly engage U.S. interests.”

…

The central strategy of the Pentagon framework is to “establish and protect a new order” that accounts “sufficiently for the interests of the advanced industrial nations to discourage them from challenging our leadership,” while at the same time maintaining a military dominance capable of “deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role.”

“While the U.S. cannot become the world’s ‘policeman,’ by assuming responsibility for righting every wrong, we will retain the preeminent responsibility for addressing selectively those wrongs which threaten not only our interests, but those of our allies or friends, or which could seriously unsettle international relations,” the document states.

In September of 2000, the Project for a New American Century (PNAC) released its flagship document, “Rebuilding America’s Defenses,” in which many of the principles espoused in the 1992 DPGR are reflected and expanded upon. Although PNAC has been described as merely a think tank “which has a staff of five and issues memos on foreign policy,” the signatories to its statement of principles include many current and former senior members of the Bush administration — Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz among them — along with the president’s brother, Florida governor Jeb Bush. And “Rebuilding America’s Defenses” (which draws a bead on Iraq) can be looked upon as the seminal foreign and military policy document to this point in the administration’s tenure.

The document describes the military’s core missions as follows:

• defend the American homeland;
• fight and decisively win multiple, simultaneous major theater wars;
• perform the “constabulary” duties associated with shaping the security environment in critical regions;
• transform U.S. forces to exploit the “revolution in military affairs.”

Iraq, one gathers, was meant to be a rather large scale but short term constabulary assignment.

What the Times story says is that defense planners are giving serious consideration to scrapping that ability to fight “multiple, simultaneous major theater wars” in favor of a military suited to fight one theater war and make the possibility of another one thoroughly unpleasant to any potential combatants.

The policy probably represents to at least some extent a triumph for Don Rumsfeld, who refuses to consider enlarging a military that is in the process of demonstrating our inability to fight two wars even now, when that strategy is still in force. What the planners are apparently recommending is a streamlined Army of the sort that would have been more effective in Iraq — i.e., conventional troops on the ground with guns but supported by more Special Forces, linguists, cops and civil affairs specialists — and a less conventional war-oriented Air Force and Navy, absent the major new high-tech aircraft and warship projects the two forces are pursuing now.

Civilian and military officials are trying to decide to what degree to acknowledge that operations like the continuing presence in Iraq – not a full-blown conventional war, but a prolonged commitment – may be such a burden that it would not be possible to also fight two full-scale campaigns elsewhere.

In effect, the unusual mission in Iraq, which could last for years, has not just taken the slot for one of the two wars; it has upended the central concept of the two-war model. It is neither a major conventional combat nor a mere peacekeeping operation. It does not require the full array of forces, especially from the Navy and the Air Force, of a conventional war, and it takes far more troops than peacekeeping ordinarily would.

We are not taken with some of the wording in the story — “the unusual mission in Iraq” seems an overly polite way of describing a planning and foreign policy blunder of epic proportion — but the apparent recognition of what Iraq has done to our military, and the reflection on foreign policy that recognition appears to have spurred, is refreshing. Any effort to nudge the administration back toward participation in the reality-based community is to be encouraged.

On the down side, an official change in the two-war policy would be an overt acknowledgement to any potential opponent that we can’t effectively manage two major conflicts at once, but one can assume they read the newspapers and have already figured that out.

So what does all this mean? Among other things it suggests that a memo from British defense minister John Reid that was leaked to London’s Daily Mail, in which he described US and British plans to dramatically reduce the number of troops each country has in Iraq, is probably an accurate forecast of what we’re going to see during the next 6-12 months; a suggestion bolstered by another New York Times story quoting Iraqi prime minister Ibrahim al-Jaafari as saying that Iraqi forces are ready to assume responsibility for security in a number of cities.

A more unsettling question is what the administration plan to do with the 60-80,000 troops the Reid memo indicates will be at their disposal sometime next year, and to whom they plan to do it.

Please stand by.

================

UPDATE: Knight Ridder’s military analyst, Joe Galloway, has some trenchant comments on the reported policy changes.

FURTHER UPDATE: Apparently it’s now called the Quadrennial Defense Review.