Is such a shift feasible? Absolutely. Big reductions in the U.S. military are nothing new. The massive demobilization after World War II aside, active forces were reduced 40 percent in the few years after the Vietnam War and by another third right after the end of the Cold War. But the key is not so much in cutting as it is in redesigning and rethinking.
But what happens if the status quo prevails and the potential of this new round of changes in strategic affairs is ignored or misinterpreted? Failure awaits, at ruinous cost.
The most likely form catastrophe could take is that terrorist networks would stay on their feet long enough to acquire nuclear weapons. Even a handful of warheads in Osama bin Laden's hands would give him great coercive power, as a network cannot be targeted for retaliation the same way a country can. Deterrence will lie in tatters. If there is ever to be a nuclear Napoleon, he will come from a terrorist network.
Within the U.S. military, the danger is that senior commanders will fall back on a fatalism driven by their belief that both congressional and industrial leaders will thwart any effort at radical change. I have heard this objection countless times since the early 1990s, repeated mantra-like, all the way up to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Thus the mighty U.S. war machine is like a Gulliver trussed up by Lilliputian politicians and businessmen.
The irony, however, is that the U.S. military has never been in a better position to gain acceptance for truly transformational change. Neither party in Congress can afford to be portrayed as standing in the way of strategic progress, and so, whatever the Pentagon asks for, it gets. As for defense contractors, far from driving the agenda, they are much too willing to give their military customers exactly what they demand (rather than, perhaps, something better). If the U.S. armed forces call for smaller, smarter weapons and systems to support swarming, they will get them.
Beyond the United States, other countries' security forces are beginning to think along the lines of "many and small," are crafting better ways to "find," and are learning to swarm. Chinese naval thought today is clearly moving in this direction. Russian ground forces are, too. Needless to say, terrorist networks are still in the lead, and not just al Qaeda. Hezbollah gave quite a demonstration of all three of the new rules of war in its summer 2006 conflict with Israel, a virtual laboratory test of nation versus network -- in which the network more than held its own.
For the U.S. military, failing a great leap forward in self-awareness of the need for radical change, a downward budgetary nudge is probably the best approach -- despite President Barack Obama's unwillingness to extend his fiscal austerity program to security-related expenditures. This could take the form of a freeze on defense spending levels, to be followed by several years of, say, 10 percent annual reductions. To focus the redesign effort, a moratorium would be declared on all legacy-like systems (think aircraft carriers, other big ships, advanced fighters, tanks, etc.) while they are subjected to searching review. It should not be assumed that the huge sums invested in national defense have been wisely spent.
To most Americans who think that being strong on defense means devoting more resources and building bigger systems, this suggestion to cut spending will sound outrageous. But being smarter about defense might lower costs even as effectiveness improves. This pattern has held throughout the transformations of the last few decades, whether in farming or in industry. Why should the military be exempt?
There's real urgency to this debate. Not only has history not ended with the Cold War and the advent of commerce-driven globalization, but conflict and violence have persisted -- even grown -- into a new postmodern scourge.
Indeed, it is ironic that, in an era in which the attraction to persuasive "soft power" has grown dramatically, coercive "hard power" continues to dominate in world affairs. This is no surprise in the case of rogue nations hellbent on developing nuclear arsenals to ensure their security, nor when it comes to terrorist networks that think their essential nature is revealed in and sustained by violent acts. But this primary reliance on coercive capabilities is also on display across a range of countries great and small, most notably the United States, whose defense policy has over the past decade largely become its foreign policy.
From the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, to simmering crises with North Korea and Iran, and on to longer-range strategic concerns about East Asian and Central European security, the United States today is heavily invested in hard-power solutions. And it will continue to be. But if the radical adjustments in strategy, organization, and doctrine implied by the new rules of war are ignored, Americans will go on spending more and getting less when it comes to national defense. Networks will persist until they have the capability to land nuclear blows. Other countries will leapfrog ahead of the United States militarily, and concepts like "deterrence" and "containment" of aggression will blow away like leaves in the wind.
So it has always been. Every era of technological change has resulted in profound shifts in military and strategic affairs. History tells us that these developments were inevitable, but soldiers and statesmen were almost always too late in embracing them -- and tragedies upon tragedies ensued. There is still time to be counted among the exceptions, like the Byzantines who, after the fall of Rome, radically redesigned their military and preserved their empire for another thousand years. The U.S. goal should be to join the ranks of those who, in their eras, caught glimpses of the future and acted in time to shape it, saving the world from darkness.
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