Over the past two decades, rather than guessing the geographic location of a fight, the military developed and maintained the two-war construct for defense planning. In 1993, Secretary of Defense Les Aspin initially proposed a "win-hold-win" construct, but eventually shifted to the goal of "maintain[ing] sufficient military power to be able to win two major regional conflicts that occur nearly simultaneously." In 1997, the Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) sought a military that was "able to deter and defeat large-scale, cross-border aggression in two distant theaters in overlapping time frames." In 2001, it became "capable of swiftly defeating attacks against U.S. allies and friends in any two theaters of operation in overlapping timeframes." In the 2006 QDR, "wage two nearly simultaneous conventional campaigns (or one conventional campaign if already engaged in a large-scale, long-duration irregular campaign)." Finally, in 2010, the Pentagon drove a stake through the two-war construct, and instead embraced "the importance of fielding forces that are versatile and that, in aggregate, can undertake missions across the full range of plausible challenges."
Governor
Mitt Romney criticized this shift in Pentagon planning last month, when he told a seemingly puzzled
and subdued crowd: "This president
has done something I find very hard to understand. Ever since FDR, we've had
the capacity to be engaged in two conflicts at once. He's saying, no -- we're
going to cut that back to only one conflict." Romney did not make any
predictions about what two wars the military should be prepared to fight, nor
has he repeated this line of attack against President Obama. Apparently,
prospective voters do not want to consider if the United States should be
prepared to fight one or two wars, when two-thirds of Americans opposed the wars
in Iraq
and Afghanistan.
What politicians and generals rarely say (on the record) is that the primary rationale for having an oversized military is not because of a balanced and carefully deliberated grand strategy, but to overcome the Pentagon's dismal record at forecasting conflict. In 1979, Lieutenant Colonel Robert McFarlane, who would become President Ronald Reagan's national security advisor, summarized this approach with refreshing honesty: "Having superior strategic military might has provided an enormous hedge for flabby thinking. We could afford less than optimal strategic planning because push was never going to come to shove. We have had the luxury of being able to be foolish."
The surest way to manage the uncertainty of flabby thinking is to organize, maintain, train, and equip an armed force that can undertake a range of potential requirements regardless of the international security environment or location. Even after it has withdrawn from Afghanistan by the end of 2014 -- under the Pentagon's current projections -- the United States will retain an Army of 490,000 active-duty soldiers, 18 divisions, 65 brigade combat teams, and 21 combat aviation brigades; a Navy of 285 ships, featuring 11 carrier battle groups that includes 10 air wings, 82 guided missile cruisers and destroyers, and 48 nuclear-powered attack submarines; an Air Force consisting of 54 combat-coded fighter squadrons, 453 air-refuelers, 150 bombers; a Marine Corps of 182,000 active-duty Marines; and a nuclear triad with 1,550 operationally deployed nuclear weapons and perhaps an additional 4,000 in reserve.
In short, that is plenty of military capability, especially in an era when the United States faces no plausible significant security challenges, and the world enjoys fewer violent conflicts, increased political freedom, and greater economic opportunity than at virtually any other point in human history. The U.S. military has what General Mattis described as "a built-in shock absorber, basically can go anywhere and do anything." However, there are tremendous economic and human costs to sustaining such an enormous, latent warfighting capacity. By having a defense budget ($525 billion, not including Afghanistan costs) that is more than 11 times that of the State Department budget, USAID budget, and all foreign assistance combined ($47 billion), you arrive at the "militarization of foreign policy" that senior military officials constantly lament.
Days after Dempsey told the Air Force ROTC cadet that the U.S. military would "skate to where the puck is going to be," he was asked a similar question by a submariner at the Naval Base Kitsap-Bangor in Maine. This time, Dempsey replied: "Here's my promise, you're not going to be bored. We'll find you something to do." Whether the something that the submariner is doing is strategically wise, it is a near certainty that the U.S. military will not know what it is -- or where it will take place -- beforehand.
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