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« Back to The Future of Warfare main page    Transcript for: The Future of WarfareTHINK TANK WITH BEN WATTENBERG#1133 The Future of War FEED DATE: NOVEMBER 20, 2003 Eliot Cohen & Paul Davis Opening Billboard: Funding for this program is provided by... (Pfizer) At Pfizer, we’re spending over five billion dollars looking for the cures of the future. We have 12,000 scientists and health experts who firmly believe the only thing incurable is our passion. Pfizer, life is our life’s work. Additional funding is provided by the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the John M. Olin Foundation, the Bernard and Irene Schwartz Foundation, and the Smith Richardson Foundation. Hello, I’m Ben Wattenberg. Since the end of the Cold War, there have been arguments from outside and inside the Pentagon about the future of war. Today, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld is a staunch advocate of transforming the military into a faster, lighter, more deadly force. Thanks to new technology, America already enjoys unmatched air superiority, complete control of the flow of battlefield information, and the ability to strike with frightening precision. But in an era of terrorists and guerillas, a time that our guest Eliot Cohen has called 'The Fourth World War,' are we properly armed for the new situation? To find out, Think Tank is joined by... Eliot Cohen, Director of the Strategic Studies Program at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, a consultant to the Defense Department, and author of 'Supreme Command: Soldiers, Statesmen and Leadership in Wartime.' And... Paul Davis, a senior scientist at RAND and former senior executive in the Office of the Secretary of Defense who has written extensively on defense Planning and military transformation. Most recently he is the author of 'Deterrence and Influence in Counterterrorism' The topic before the house: The Future of Warfare... This week on Think Tank WATTENBERG: Uh, Paul Davis, Eliot Cohen, welcome to Think Tank. Eliot you refer to the think tank to a coinage of yours the fourth World War. I wonder if you could start out by telling us what you meant by that. ELIOT: Yes. WATTENBERG: This jargon-filled world of the military. ELIOT: Well, um, I uh, I guess I quoted that in the - it was a piece in the Wall Street Journal um, shortly after September 11th and I was saying what are we gonna call this war, because it is a war and uh, there were a number of names that seemed to me to be wrong. You know, the 9/11 war - well it began before 9/11, and so on. And - and it seemed to me that World War Four was not a bad way to think about it. WATTENBERG: It sure isn’t. ELIOT: With - with - with World War three having been the Cold War and then telling you that you can have a long conflict, which is many respec - in certain respects non-violent. In which things other than military force play a very large role. WATTENBERG: You’re talking about the Cold War? ELIOT: Right. Uh, and we were up against a uh, a militant ideology. So that - and - and I think it - it indicates some of the magnitude of the task. WATTENBERG: Paul what is the so called revolution in military affairs? It - it - it’s been talked about in this city for a long time. PAUL: Right. Well it - there’s a little history that’s useful which is that the Soviets had a concept called the military technical revolution of which there had been several, one of which was the nuclear weapons. But in the uh, late ’80s, early ’90s uh, the Department of Defense, particularly uh, Andrew Marshall, um, Director of Net Assessment started emphasizing that major change driven by technology also had to involve changes of organization and changes of process: what you do, how you think about things. And so the issue became [unintelligible] the nature of war fighting going to change or the nature of our - of our armed forces going to change, should it, and that became the - the big debate. WATTENBERG: Have - have - have we changed in the last few decades? ELIOT: Well we’ve changed a - a lot of things uh, but you know I think the uh, it’s a glass half-empty/half-full sort of - sort of question. I think there’s - there’s - there’s no question we’re much better sharing information, we’ve got much better weapons, uh, there’s much more jointness, the different services work together probably a lot better than they have before. On the other hand, a lot of the same old formations are still around, the same basic units. WATTENBERG: ...for example, what - what... ELIOT: Well, say thinking of uh, ground forces primarily in terms of divisions, you know, formations of fifteen or twenty thousand soldiers uh, each built around three or four brigades. These are focus of organization that in some ways go back to napoleonic times. WATTENBERG: What - what’s wrong with - with having divisions? ELIOT: Well, uh, one argument is that that’s... WATTENBERG: I mean every American is proud of you at one time we had big red ones shoulder pads or whatever. That’s a division, isn’t it? ELIOT: That’s uh, right. In our system the divisional identity’s uh, quite strong. [One - one possibility something that um... WATTENBERG: Did I reach for the wrong shoulder? I did. ELIOT: Well it depends on which - whether you’re certain combat uh... WATTENBERG: Oh, right. ELIOT: The... WATTENBERG: I - I - I - I served in the air force as a sports journalist in San Antonio, Texas of Lackland so that’s how I defended my country in - in the mid ’50s, in the air force - as an - as an airman, second class so watch out... ELIOT: There - There’s honor in that, too. I think there - there are a couple of things - I’m - I’m not saying we should get rid of divisions, but maybe a division should look very different than it - it does now. One possibility is simply - and the - and actually the current Chief of Staff of the army is pushing this... WATTENBERG: Who is that? ELIOT: Uh, General Pete Schoomaker. WATTENBERG: Right. ELIOT: Who’s very interesting. He comes from a Special Forces background. He’s not as much from the conventional military. That really - the important unit of account is the brigade that’s a lot lorried down, that you can have more of them perhaps within a divisional structure... WATTENBERG: How many people - how many people in a brigade? ELIOT: Several thousand maybe. WATTENBERG: Couple thousand. ELIOT: And - and uh, one of the problems in thinking - thinking big the way we have, thinking - divisions say is that when you think about what it takes to conduct military operations, you create uh, such high requirements that it - it paralyzes you. And two examples, initially uh, Secretary Rumsfeld seems to have had trouble getting plans for Afghanistan that didn’t involve taking a long time ’cause were gonna send a heck of a lot of forces. Of course we did a remarkable event with Special Forces and CIA operatives. The other uh, story which is a story from uh, uh, the Kosovo War is task force hawk. You know, when the army tries to get ready to send twenty helicopters, twenty-two... the idea was to send twenty-two apaches - apache attack helicopters over and by the time they - they figured out all the support that they would require it was going to be a force of thousands of soldiers and tremendously cumbersome. An - an enormous amount of uh, logistical tail, as they say, to support it and - and that - I mean they ultimately ended up not doing anything useful in the fight. There were two of these uh, I think they lost two helicopters in crashes. And they never - they never really engaged with the Serbs. So part - part of the idea is to create a force that’s more - more agile uh, and that you can actually do things with more easily. That’s just I think one - one... PAUL: There’s another whole facet of that which is that uh, the battlefield is spreading out now because the weapons are so precise and accurate that you don’t need to have the same density of people to do the same job and conversely it’s harder to find out how to use the large formations when you get them because a brigade can cover a lot of territory now and um, battalions can cover a lot of - so the - the future probably lies in smaller units with extremely high capability. But more of the small units that we had divisions or - or uh, in the case of the air force uh, wings and in the navy uh, carrier battle groups - so we’d like to have more smaller, faster, extremely capable units that provide some of this agility and... WATTENBERG: That - that the President or the Secretary of Defense could say 'We just heard X, Y, Z. Go!' And things start moving. PAUL: Yeah, that’d be uh, a practical example here if - if with the traditional army we wanted to send one brigade to a place it would pretty well take up the whole division just for support structure so we’d be losing a lot and then because there’s always a division that is training and a division that’s just been through an operational assignment and sometimes it’s a ratio of three or four people to get one who’s really active and ready to be deployed. So the - these very large units... WATTENBERG: And what - what - what would you prefer? You gotta - you gotta have some support. Somebody’s gotta write sports for the base newspaper... PAUL: The smaller - smaller units with the uh, very high quality equipment and uh, and very good support, but there are fewer people to support. Now this is only good for certain kinds of wars, let me emphasize. That’s gonna be presumably one of the uh, things we’ll come back to. WATTENBERG: Well let’s get down to the - to - to the real basis of what’s troubling the American people. Is - as the military is currently conformed, uh, is it conformed in such a way that maximizes our strengths to deal with global terrorism? I mean that’s really the question that’s facing us, isn’t it? ELIOT: That - I would - I would say no, but in - in some ways for good reason. The - the American military is optimized to deal with conventional kinds of problems first and foremost, and then secondarily I’d say with nuclear kinds of challenges. Uh, if... WATTENBERG: Those things may still happen notwithstanding the fact... ELIOT: Absolutely. Uh... WATTENBERG: You can’t just say 'Well, now we’ve got global terrorism'. ELIOT: Precise - precisely. I mean for - just take for example our relationship with China. Even if you know, of course there’ll never be an open conflict but one of the ways that you’d make sure that there isn’t an open conflict is if people are quite convinced that in a conventional conflict the advantages are all on one side, so you’re not gonna get away fr - uh, from that. There - there is a serious problem in that um, I think it’s fair to say, particularly of the United States army had - the experience of Vietnam was so terrible that there’s a great desire to distance themselves from anything that really smacked of counter-insurgency or counter-guerilla warfare. Although there are pockets of real excellence in the army in dealing with that kind of war and although they’ve had to do a lot of peacekeeping and so on, there’s - there’s been a tendency to define that as not our job. Now I think that’s changing. I think the young Majors and Lieutenant Colonels coming out of Iraq right now for example are gonna have a very different view of what the army oughta be doing. PAUL: This has been less true of the marines. The other thing I’d say on that counterterrorism thing if - if we want to optimize our national resources for global counterterrorism, much of the effort has to be not in the Department of Defense but something much larger. It’s - it’s uh, in my view it’s a networking of police forces all over the world, allies over the world as well as military and uh, to the extent that we imagine. WATTENBERG: We’ve just put up a huge increase in military spending, haven’t we - uh, added a hundred billion dollars to a four hundred billion-dollar pot basically? Is that roughly the numbers? PAUL: Four hundred billion, yeah. ELIOT: We’re roughly at the four hundred billion-dollar. WATTENBERG: We went from three to four, I’m sorry. ELIOT: We went from three to four, but you just put that in perspective. That’s increasing the American defense budget by about ten times the Australian defense budget. WATTENBERG: The increase alone. ELIOT: The increase. WATTENBERG: Is - is - is it true, I’ve seen this figure around, Paul that uh, America spends more on its military. Is it true, Paul, I’ve seen this number bandied about - that America spends uh, more money on its military than all the other nations combined? PAUL: I don’t know whether it’s all. It used to be that the next five and then Russia sorta went away and so at this point I - I don’t know. It - it could even be everybody. I haven’t looked at that in a couple years. WATTENBERG: But - but PAUL: But it’s... WATTENBERG: But we spend a lot. PAUL: Now having said that, the fact that our military can prevent invasions; that it can destroy entire navies and air forces and do terrible things to countries, uh, I think that the existence of that capability and its use will probably be quite valuable just as the navy has been a - a valuable over the years in crisis without ever a shot being fired. But I don’t actually expect to see a war like that for quite some time. ELIOT: I think that - that’s a really important point um, you know, having these tremendously powerful conventional forces prevents things from happening. You know, it doesn’t occur to people to um, I don’t know - uh, try to charge tolls in the Straits of Malaga, you know or something like that...they know we would stop it and we could stop it quite easily. WATTENBERG: Is - is - is the uh, is the defense budget in the whole appropriations process that goes with it uh, given this - this new in - given this new increase uh, is - is that uh, of sufficient amount? Will we have the money to handle this stuff - this - this new military? PAUL: If you look into the future uh, the budget is still not worked out. They - depending on - still is not prepared to pay for what it intends to buy and so some of the tough choices, which will be reducing the numbers of things we buy and the number of units and changing the - the structure of some of the formations so that they’re - are getting smaller and more capable uh, that - that still is mostly for the future, but you can see it happening. The - in the army’s uh, work for example, much of the emphasis is on brigade operations. And this is going to lead inevitably down the pike to um, to having a - a large number of brigades but fewer overall people. WATTENBERG: One thing that we’re hearing about now again and again uh, is that the U.S. military is stretched too thin; that we’re in so many countries from the Balkans to Iraq to Korea and etcetera, etcetera, and you see these numbers tossed around - we’re in fifty countries, we’re in seventy countries, which seem to me like that may be the military attachŽ’s office. I - I - I don’t think that we’re really deployed in - in that many uh, numbers but in point of fact we’re really all over the world, aren’t we? PAUL: Yes. ELIOT: And - and we’re gonna be all over the world for quite awhile. I mean that - I think one big piece of the puzzle is because - it’s not just the word target for people all over the world. It’s because of our power to include our milit - our - not only our military power but our economic power, our social power, cultural power if you will. Uh, we’re going to be sucked into conflicts everywhere, whether we want to or not. In many ways that’s the - one of the lessons of Yugoslavia. But there’s - there’s really no place in the world where we can really a - completely avoid getting engaged in the local politics so we are gonna be all over the place. ELIOT: I think that to get - directly to your question, particularly with Iraq right now there’s no question that the uh, the army in particular is overstretched. But for the air force things are much more back to normal. In fact in some ways things are a little bit easier for the air force ’cause they no longer have to patrol these no-fly zones over uh, southern and northern Iraq. WATTENBERG: Right. ELIOT: The navy’s pretty much the way it usually is. The marines have just come off a major effort in the Gulf and they may have to go back. It’s the army that is really um, under a lot of stress and that’s something that’s gonna have to be watched very carefully. WATTENBERG: So - so I mean getting back to the basic question - are we overstretched? PAUL: Well, if you’re asking technically, we’re very fragile right now because the army couldn’t do much more. It is overstretched. If you’re asking whether it is an acceptable thing for a short period of time, that depends on what you think the future is and what the policy is and that this has been a very unusual circumstance and so I don’t - I don’t think you can draw the conclusion that we need a larger armed forces for the future than we have now just because we’re overstretched for awhile in Iraq. WATTENBERG: Is - is this - if you try to get a - some kinda historical perspective uh, I guess in the early 1980s uh, people like Gary Hart and Bill Cohen were - were talking about this sort of lean, clean, mean, new military. Has that come about? ELIOT: Well they had a different idea. In fact their - theirs was a kind of anti-technology bias. You know, their - for example their favorite airplane was going to be the then understanding of the F16 fighter which was gonna be a daylight fighter for dog fighting uh, and the whole idea was they wanted simple technology and so a lot of those folks read books which in retrospect were kind of silly. Uhhh, talking about how you want low tech and you don’t want really fancy airplanes like the F15-E strike eagle - things like that. That’s - that’s just turned out to be dead wrong. There- there’s been - there was a pervasive underestimate of the importance of technology. I think here what you’re saying is really you know, if you strip everything away you’re seeing a fundamental reaction to two big developments. Uh, the first is the information age which has hu - it’s had huge effects in our civilian minds. It’d be astonishing if it didn’t have huge effects on our - on the way the military works in terms of the weapons you deliver; in terms of how you communicate information; in terms of how the organizations function. That’s - that’s all there. So that - that’s - that is a big central fact. The other big fact of course that we’re wrestling with and in the way that we’re still wrestling with is the end of the Cold War. And a very different set of missions for the American military because of a very different American role in international politics. And I think this - the Secretary of Defense in particular deserves a lot of credit for finally saying, 'You know, let’s look at our overseas basing structure. It made sense for the Cold War. Does it really still make sense now?' Course the answer is no, it really doesn’t. WATTENBERG: I mean you - you -People - people are turning to the military to provide in the Iraq situation uh, relief workers and police officers and diplomats and translators. Are - are we overloading the Department of Defense? I mean... PAUL: Well, first of all it’s just - they’re not trained for that. They - it isn’t that they can’t adapt. They can adapt to some degree. But if you take real war fighters like the 82nd airborne or the 101st or the marines, these people are trained to be very good at war fighting and they were not really prepared to go out and win friends on the street, although they adapt and... WATTENBERG: They’re killers. That’s what they... PAUL: Well, they - they do adapt and they do become pretty good at it but it’s - it’s inefficient; it’s not what uh, we uh, we contracted for and there are people who are better at it. ELIOT: See I - I have a very different view of that by the way. Um, I think if you look... WATTENBERG: Yeah, we’ve had too much agreement here. ELIOT: Uh, friendly disagreement. Um, I - I think if you look at the history of what military’s doing including our own military, they do this sort of stuff all the time. You know, if you look at some of the things we did in Central America, if you look at what we did in the Philippines - if you look at the United States Army on the frontier they were doing a lot of what we think of as peacekeeping and humanitarian intervention... WATTENBERG: You mean the U.S. Western frontier. ELIOT: Absolutely. They - I mean part of the time - a lot of - part of what the U.S. Army found itself doing just by what you see in the movies and or - or might think is what’s keeping the settlers and the Indians apart, uh... WATTENBERG: Drawing up treaties which the State Department would then ignore, but... ELIOT: Well, or actual - or dealing - or dealing with treaties that nobody on the ground really wanted to pay much attention to. So there - there is - there’s a long, long tradition of the military doing things which it has now defined as unmilitary. The - the Marine Corps is a little bit different. The Marine Corp in uh, 1940 published something called The Small Wars Manual which is a really interesting book which is - which the marines uh, to their credit have still kept in print, which talks about what the marines do in this kind of conflict and you know, you read it and it sounds an awful lot like what they’re doing in Iraq. Obviously there are limits to what you can have the military doing, but I think the idea that - that we are just people who apply enormous amounts of violence and we don’t do peacekeeping or counterinsurgency or any of the rest of that, it’s just flat out wrong. They’ve always done it and they - they’re - there’ll be times when you’re going to need them to do it. PAUL: But as follow-up - I’m - actually I agree with everything Eliot said, unfortunately but the - the part that he left out is where in our armed forces we have the people who are best suited for these things is the reserve force. And uh, so we have an active force that is prepared for war and then we have lots of reservists who have everybody from the - the psychological operations to the MPs. WATTENBERG: And - and - and they are complaining because their tours have been extended and uh, mon - the money isn’t enough, I mean that’s a familiar complaint uh in the armed - in the armed service. PAUL: Yeah they certainly don’t - don’t yeah, they don’t mind being called up for emergency but as the tours get longer and longer it’s a problem. And so if - if we think that’s the future and uh, Eliot is absolutely right that historically that has been a - a mission in the military, then there would - should be some restructuring to [chuckle] take some of the uh, the war fighting slots away and uh, put more people who are currently reservists in the uh, in the active units. That’s not very popular and there - there are downsides but that is - there are a lotta people who believe that that should be done. I’m - I’m not sure I do, but it... ELIOT: My - my impression is that’s actually part of where the uh, Secretary of Defense wants to go is to have more civil affairs unit - it used to be the case that all the civil affairs units, military government, was in the reserves and there’s been a move to move some of that more into - need to move it more into the active force. What is a departure actually is to take the reser - the reserves have always been there; the national guard has been there for homeland defense and for the big emergency, you know, the big war where you have to call everybody up and you send them overseas. The - the big departure since 1991 I would say is that we’re now getting used to the idea of routinely calling up reservists, sending them overseas to fight in limited liability wars which are not great conflicts on the scale of... WATTENBERG: What - what - what - what example of a limited liability war. That’s a - that’s a good one for... ELIOT: Well it’s - I mean it - it is I think a war like in Iraq. It’s not do or die and like World War II. It - it - it’s - it’s a war which is much more contentious kind of conflict, domestically. It’s a war where there were good arguments on both sides. I was in favor of doing it at the end but it was - this was not an easy call to make and traditionally we have been very reluctant to - to require reservists to go off to those conflicts. They’ve taken volunteers, say the Spanish/American War - they did that. Even the Mexican War. But the idea that you would just call up reserve units and ship them off, that’s been something we’ve - we and actually the Europeans also have tended to stay away from. Now we may be in a different place where you can do that. WATTENBERG: How - how ’bout this I - idea that people talk about that we oughta be uh, outsourcing some of these really civilian tasks? PAUL: We are doing an amazing amount of outsourcing now that people don’t talk about very much. WATTENBERG: Except when it comes to Halliburton or someone like that... PAUL: If there’s a scandal people will talk about it, but uh, but - but there are contractors all over the Middle East, including Iraq, doing everything from repairing equipment to providing supplies so I don’t know how much more outsourcing can be done. I think that’s an idea that has been pretty heavily assimilated; maybe too much in some respects. WATTENBERG: Who’s in charge of the whole thing? Now you get into the - I mean you have a whole world. You have policemen and relief workers and outsourcers and oil companies and so on and so forth. Other than the President, who’s - who’s running this - this... ELIOT: That’s part of the problem, isn’t it? Um, you know, the - one thing that’s striking about Iraq and that’s a departure, say from the way world um, things worked in uh, Germany or Japan after the war is we have the head of a civilian authority uh, Ambassador Bremer and we have a military commander, uh, General Sanchez. In Germany there was one guy. It was General uh, Lucius Clay. WATTENBERG: Are - are there a series of - of examples uh, historically where we have really beaten terror? ELIOT: Yeah, Malaysia is an example, but in the Philippines the Hook insurrection was - was beaten. You know, you could argue Greece was the same thing. You know, even in Central Latin America the story is a - is a - a mixed story. Um, so no, I - I mean I - I don’t - I don’t think that there’s anything necessary about the idea that uh, a western power’s gonna be defeated. WATTENBERG: So - so terrorism is has a - a - a - long and terrible history but it - it has been beaten in the past. PAUL: Absolutely. Ah, you haven’t heard about the Red Brigades lately. The uh, even the uh, even the IRA which is still around in mutated form, it - is certainly much less a presence today than twenty years ago. WATTENBERG: Okay. On - on - on that note, uh, we thank you uh, for Think Tank, Eliot Cohen and Paul Davis. And thank you. Please, uh, remember to send us your comments via email, it’s what makes our program better. For Think Tank, I’m Ben Wattenberg. Announcer: We at Think Tank depend on your views to make our show better, please send your questions and comments to New River Media, 1219 Connecticut Ave NW, Washington, DC 20036 or email us at thinktank@pbs.org. To learn more about Think Yank, visit us online at pbs.org and please let us know where you watch Think Tank. Funding for this program is provided by... (Pfizer) At Pfizer, we’re spending over five billion dollars looking for the cures of the future. We have 12,000 scientists and health experts who firmly believe the only thing incurable is our passion. Pfizer, life is our life’s work. Additional funding is provided by the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, the John M. Olin Foundation, the Bernard and Irene Schwartz Foundation, and the Smith Richardson Foundation. 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