August 26, 1999

MEMORANDUM TO: OPINION LEADERS

FROM: GARY SCHMITT

SUBJECT: Defense

Having stumbled through a war it did not plan for in the Balkans and with Chinese saber-rattling over Taiwan growing louder by the day, the Clinton Administration appears to be laying the groundwork to justify a further decline in defense capabilities. As reported by Rowan Scarborough in Tuesday's Washington Times, the White House National Security Council is circulating a new draft national security strategy that challenges the Pentagon's accepted standard for preparing forces capable of fighting and winning two nearly simultaneous major wars. Predicting that wars in two theaters are unlikely to occur at the same time, the draft strategy concludes that "a second foe would need time to decide to take advantage of heavy U.S. military engagement in the first theater and then to mobilize and deploy its forces for an attack. Our strategy is to seek to halt the second aggressor's advance, while concluding operations in the first theater."

This draft strategy marks the return of the infamous "win-hold-win" strategy advanced in the early years of the Clinton Administration. When in 1993 it became clear that planned defense budgets would not provide sufficient forces to execute its own two-war strategy, the Administration floated the "win-hold-win" approach in an effort to justify its planned defense budget cuts. The purpose of the new draft strategy is certain to be the same.

But the shortcomings of this strategy are fatal. As the Pentagon itself concluded in the 1997 Quadrennial Defense Review:

If the United States were to forego its ability to defeat aggression in more than one theater at a time, our standing as a global power, as the security partner of choice, and [as] the leader of the international community, would be called into question. Indeed, some allies would undoubtedly read a one-war capability as a signal that the United States, if heavily engaged elsewhere, would no longer be able to help defend their interests.

And, of course, once having backed ourselves into this strategic corner, the practical result would be for Washington to avoid any confrontation that might expose the United States and our allies to that predicament. In short, a one-war strategy can quickly become a no-war strategy.

The ability to respond in a timely way to multiple security crises remains a fundamental measure of America's superpower status. The events of recent years prove how chaotic and violent the post-Cold-War world has become. Not one of the major U.S. military operations since the 1990 Persian Gulf War was accounted for in the official two-war calculus: not Operation "Allied Force" against Yugoslavia, which taxed the U.S. Air Force as much as any "major theater war;" not the continuing commitment of U.S. forces in the Balkans and the Persian Gulf; not any of the other peacekeeping operations of the Clinton and Bush years. Nor, for that matter, is any U.S. military response to Chinese actions against Taiwan considered in U.S. force planning. In a world where U.S. armed forces are deployed three times more frequently than during the Cold War, where the readiness of the overall force is plummeting, and America's technological edge is eroding through a failure to innovate, the real question to be asked about the two-war standard is not whether it is too much, but whether it is too little.

The Republican presidential candidates now auditioning for the job as commander-in-chief all profess to make the revitalization of America's armed forces one of their top priorities. But the time is at hand to move beyond rhetoric to the harsh realities: in truth, the task of retooling the military for the needs of the 21st century may well be more difficult -- and as expensive -- as the task faced by Ronald Reagan after an earlier "decade of neglect." Conservatives should reconcile the growing gap between strategic ends and military means not by a retreat from American global leadership, as the Clinton Administration proposes in its new draft strategy, but by building and sustaining the new forces needed for a new era.