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April 4, 2002 11:20 a.m. How Much is Enough? What we’ve got.

ccording to an item on the Drudge Report of Friday, March 29, the Pentagon was apoplectic about a CNN story claiming "the U.S. military is not quite ready for another major war." The CNN report, filed on Thursday morning by Jamie McIntyre, stated that "the U.S. military needs more time to retool its ships, aircraft and weapons, restock munitions and rest the troops." Drudge quotes an unidentified administration official who says "this is one of the most unconscionable stories I've ever seen in my years in public life...How could CNN just tell the world how our troops now need a rest...The impression that has been left is: 'we are in retreat'....could they help our enemies any more if they tried?"

It is true that the media often tend to sensationalize the news, painting a picture darker than reality. But the unnamed Bush-administration official needs to grab the reins. CNN is only reporting what U.S. unified commanders have been telling Congress for weeks. On March 14, Gen. William Kernan, commander in chief of Joint Forces Command told the House Armed Services Committee (HASC) that "we are stretched. It is manageable right now, but we are stretched." He continued, telling the committee that "[the troops] are tired, sir. We are busy. We are busier than we have ever been."

Gen. Kernan's assessment was seconded by two regional-combatant commanders in testimony before the HASC on March 20. Adm. Denny Blair, commander in chief of Pacific Command told the committee that "we do not have adequate forces to carry out our missions [in the event that operations in Afghanistan] continue at their recent and current pace." And Gen. Joseph Ralston, Supreme Allied Commander, Europe, advised the HASC that he didn't have enough forces to meet the full array of missions for his region.

Of course, the combatant commanders were immediately contradicted by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and General Richard Myers, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Secretary Rumsfeld chided them for the "disservice" they had done by leaving the impression that the U.S. military was "overextended and exhausted." And Gen. Myers contended that "some unified commanders might feel they don't have everything they need to do everything they want to do" as a result of "prioritization decisions here in the Pentagon that have distributed resources perhaps differently than before 9/11."

Gen. Myers was being somewhat disingenuous. What the combatant commanders do in their regions is not what "they want to do." It is what national policy directs. There is always some degree of mismatch between the dictates of policy and the resources available. Such mismatches manifest themselves as "risk." Adm. Blair and Gen. Ralston were doing nothing more than conveying to Congress the increased risks they face in carrying out their responsibilities in light of competing demands arising from the war in Afghanistan. To do anything less would be a dereliction of duty.

In one respect, the response of the administration is understandable. After all, a staple of George Bush's 2000 presidential campaign was the charge that while the Clinton administration had reduced the level of defense spending and the size of the force, he had then employed the smaller force far more frequently than his predecessors. Candidate Bush argued that the increased employment of a severely underfunded force caused widespread problems for the military in terms of readiness, personnel, and modernization, adversely affecting morale, recruitment, and retention.

But the defensiveness of the Pentagon is ironic in light of the fact that DoD recently and quite publicly abandoned a force-sizing metric that had been in place since the Base Force of Bush the Elder, touting instead "capabilities-based" force planning. This metric, which underlay the Clinton Defense Department "Bottom-up Review" and the first congressionally mandated Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR), held that it was necessary for the United States to maintain a force that could fight two "nearly simultaneous" major theater wars (2 MTWs).

For a decade, the 2-MTW standard served as a punching bag for critics of military planning. Some charged that the 2 MTW led to a level of defense spending that was far too high. They argued that since the 2-MTW scenario was unlikely, money spent on defense could be diverted to other needs. Others contended that that the 2-MTW standard had evolved into a bureaucratic tool to maintain service and unified command claims to the defense budget and to protect favored service and unified command programs. One prominent defense intellectual called it a "strategy killer" and others labeled it an obstacle to "transformation."

Many of these charges were true. The Clinton-era Pentagon did appear to have fallen in love with the 2-MTW metric. The services and the combatant commanders did embrace it as the protector of their preferred programs. But even those who emphasize capabilities-based planning cannot avoid the question: How much is enough? What size force is required to execute the war plans?

To be of any use in the real world, a strategy must be implemented in time and space. Force planners are not dealing with abstract notions, but with real requirements associated with real geographic areas and problems that have the potential to affect adversely U.S. interests. The most common approach to establishing a force sizing metric is to use theater war scenarios, supplemented by the likely requirements for smaller scale contingencies.

Any realistic assessment of the current military situation cannot avoid the impression that the current force is in danger of being stretched too thin. Resources, after all, get used up in war and must be replaced. Afghanistan has consumed a large number of precision strike weapons. Accordingly, the U.S. defense industry is having to surge production of many systems, especially the Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) guidance kit that converts iron bombs into precision strike weapons. The military does face the problem of "high demand, low density (HDLD) systems, including unmanned reconnaissance aircraft and, aerial tankers for refueling strike aircraft, and many electronic warfare systems and command, control and communications assets. In addition, there is only so much military airlift available.

Does this mean that the United States can't conduct multiple operations? The answer is no, but doing so entails a higher level of risk than before. However, to reduce risks the White House and the Pentagon must take steps to reduce the impact of the elevated operational tempo generated by the current war on terrorism.

For one thing, the Army and the Air Force need to more fully adapt to the current security environment by developing and institutionalizing an "expeditionary mindset." During much of the Cold War, Army and Air Force war-fighting organizations were located either in the continental United States or close to the potential battlefield, e.g. Germany and Korea. Individual soldiers and airmen rotated from deployed units to the States and then back again. The Navy and Marine Corps, on the other hand, were quintessentially expeditionary, rotating entire units in support of forward presence and contingency operations, short fused emergencies requiring an immediate response. Several Army officers have argued that their service's personnel problems arising from high operations tempo are self-inflicted.

But reducing risk will also take more money. Of the president's proposed $48 billion increase in defense spending, only $20 billion goes to pay for the war against terrorism, and much of that is going for homeland defense. Of the remainder, $7 billion is for inflation, and over $11 billion is intended to cover increased health care costs and changes in retirement funding rules. Testifying before the Senate Defense Appropriations Subcommittee on February 27, Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz said that DoD would need $12.6 billion in supplemental funding before the end of fiscal year 2002 to execute the war on terrorism.

The current dustup reveals that while a "capabilities based" approach to force planning is fine, it cannot tell us how much is enough unless we match it somehow to time and space in real theaters and real war plans. It is also still necessary to hedge against uncertainty. While it makes sense under the circumstances to drop the 2-MTW standard as the Pentagon has, it also seems to be the case that "discrimination analysis," the use of a range of demanding scenarios to test the conventional wisdom, is unavoidable.

So there is merit to the CNN report that spun up the administration official cited by Drudge. Insofar as the current force is being asked to wage a war while still carrying out its pre-September 11 tasks, it will be stretched thin unless even more resources than currently planned are allocated for defense. On the one hand, combatant commanders face increased risk in executing their regional tasks. On the other, the obstacles to an attack on Iraq have far more to do with the "tyranny of distance" and the approach of summer than with the factors cited by CNN.

But the U.S. military has proven itself to be a learning organization. It has adapted to changes in the security environment. So it is not really helpful for the secretary of defense to chide his combatant commanders for telling the truth to Congress or for an administration official to claim CNN is aiding America's enemies by reporting what those combatant commanders have been telling Congress.

Owens is a professor of strategy and force planning at the Naval War College & NRO contributing editor.

— Mackubin Thomas Owens is a professor of strategy and force planning at the Naval War College & NRO contributing editor.