June 22, 2001

MEMORANDUM TO: OPINION LEADERS

FROM: TOM DONNELLY -- Deputy Director

SUBJECT: Defense

Appearing before Congress yesterday, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld made it clear that the Bush Administration is set to shift the course of U.S. military strategy. In his testimony, Rumsfeld criticized the “two-war standard” that has been the core of American military planning and strategy throughout the post-Cold War years. Despite the fact that the U.S. military stands without peer -- and allies and adversaries alike take American “hyperpower” as the fundamental fact of international politics -- Rumsfeld complained that “the current strategy cannot be said to be working.”

Yet this view was unanimously repudiated by the witnesses who appeared before the House Armed Services Committee one day before the defense secretary. In fact, it is remarkable that such a politically diverse panel agreed that the two-war standard should remain the basic tenet of U.S. force planning:

• “As a global power with global interests,” said Michele Flournoy, an assistant secretary of defense in the Clinton Administration, “the United States needs a military that can be decisively engaged whenever and wherever our vital interests are challenged. We must continue to have a multi-theater strategy and multi-theater capabilities.”

• Said defense analyst Michael O’Hanlon of the Brookings Institution: “Being able to handle overlapping crises or conflicts in two different places is a sound strategic pillar on which to structure U.S. military forces.”

• Andrew Krepinevich of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Analyses agreed that the two-war metric “should not be scrapped,” but, in fact, should be expanded include a broader range of scenarios, such as the defense of Taiwan.

• Concluded Yale historian Donald Kagan (also co-chairman of the Project’s comprehensive defense study, Rebuilding America’s Defenses: Strategy, Forces and Resources for a New Century): “We must always be prepared to deter and defeat major theater adversaries, and real preparation in this area must mean the ability to defeat two such threats at the same time. Because of the danger of self-deterrence, the truth is that a ‘one-war’ capability is really a ‘no-war’ capability.