Book offers new defense strategies for U.S. planners

WASHINGTON, Dec. 22 (UPI) -- "America's Defense Meltdown" is the title of a new book on military reform, edited by Winslow Wheeler and published by the Center for Defense Information. In it, some of the leading figures from the U.S. military reform movement of the 1970s and 1980s update their work and relate it to today's challenges, including those posed by Fourth Generation war.

The book is timely. For years, Chuck Spinney and I have said there will be no reform until the money simply isn't there anymore. If that day has not yet arrived, it is on the calendar. The combination of a severe recession or depression and vast New Deal-type public works programs in the U.S. national economy means something has to give.

As the largest element in the discretionary U.S. annual federal budget, defense spending is an obvious target. More, it is a worthy target, in that much of what we spend buys little or no capability. The problem is not only mismanagement but also outdated and fundamentally wrongheaded approaches to war.

The latter are the focus of "America's Defense Meltdown," although the book addresses financial and managerial issues. Here I want to focus on three chapters, the three most innovative -- I leave my own two chapters, on the U.S. Marine Corps and the U.S. Navy, for others to weigh. The first is Chet Richards' "Shattering Illusions: A National Security Strategy for 2009-2017."

In its first incarnation in the 1970s and 1980s, the military reform movement deliberately avoided the subject of strategy. It did so because the Cold War locked the United States into worshiping the great clay god of the Brussels-based North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which is to say into a continental strategy. Then, as now, a maritime strategy made better sense, but anyone who questioned the holiness of NATO was cast into outer darkness. So we bit our tongues and bided our time.

Now, with the Cold War over and the challenge of Fourth Generation war upon the United States, a debate over strategy is urgent. Richards launches it con brio, arguing that the U.S. government must determine what state militaries can and cannot do in a Fourth Generation world.

Then, the American people and their political leaders must stop asking our armed services to do things that are impossible for them, like turning fly-blown, flea-bitten Third World hellholes into Switzerland. More, the U.S. government should stop buying forces that are useless or worse for the types of conflicts the United States is likely to face.

Richards may disagree, but I think that in his chapter he moves closer to what I have advocated for years, namely a defensive rather than an offensive grand strategy. In any event, he puts the subject of strategy on the table, which is vitally important. Because a higher level of war dominates a lower, if you don't get your strategy right, no matter what you do at the tactical and operational levels, you lose.

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(Part 2: How to restructure the U.S. Armed Forces Reserves and National Guard)

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(William S. Lind, expressing his own personal opinion, is director of the Center for Cultural Conservatism at the Free Congress Foundation.)