Force is The Issue

s the United States enters the 21st century, it will be confronted by a set of challenges in the national security area that result not from the dawn of a new millennium, but from its failure to adapt sufficiently to the end of the Cold War. The most critical of these challenges will be what kind of military force this nation wishes to have and what role it wants the military to play in protecting U.S. interests in the world.

Answering that question during the Cold War was comparatively easy. The basic aim of U.S. foreign policy was to contain Soviet communist expansion through diplomacy backed by force or containment through deterrence. As former Secretary of Defense William Perry and former Assistant Secretary of Defense Ash Carter have noted, this policy was easy to understand but difficult to implement.

But in the 21st century, implementation may be the easy part. Deciding where to use force will be the hard part, involving a number of difficult and interrelated issues. These may be placed into four categories.

What to Spend

During the Cold War, the United States spent an average of about 7 percent of its gross domestic product on defense. During the 1990s, that figure dropped to an average of about 3.5 percent. Today, defense consumes less than 3 percent of our GDP. Similarly, during the Cold War, defense consumed an average of 30 percent of the federal budget. Since the end of the Cold War, that percentage has dropped below 15 percent. Moreover, spending for defense has declined by 30 percent in real terms since 1990.

Clearly, given the size and strength of our economy, this nation can afford to spend more on its defense. However, during the Cold War, particularly in the 1980s, large defense expenditures were accompanied by larger budget deficits. For example, in Ronald Reagan's first term, defense spending doubled, but the size of the federal debt more than doubled both absolutely and as a share of GDP.

For the last decade, the United States has made balancing the federal budget a high priority. One of the principal means of controlling the budget has been to put a cap on discretionary spending. Since defense accounts for slightly more than half of overall discretionary spending in the fiscal 2000 budget, any increase in defense must result in reductions in spending for items like education, health and housing. In providing for the first real increase in defense spending in 15 years, Congress in 1999 was forced to resort to several budgetary gimmicks in order not to make severe cuts in social expenditures.

While the United States is indeed spending a smaller percentage of its GDP on defense than at any time since before Pearl Harbor, the U.S. military is not in anywhere near as bad a shape as it was then. In 1939, the U.S. Army was the 19th largest in the world and one-tenth the size of Germany's, ranking between Portugal's and Romania's. Today the United States spends more on defense than the rest of the world combined and our weapons are at least a generation ahead of our nearest potential rival.

As National Security Adviser Samuel Berger noted in a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations last October, "Our military technology is so dominant that serious people actually lamented that we did not have enough casualties in the Kosovo conflict." Finally, while defense spending has indeed declined since the end of the Cold War, in fiscal 2000, in real terms it will be at about 85 percent of its Cold War average and will be higher than it was at the beginning of the Reagan administration.

Sizing Up

The second issue involves deciding on the appropriate size of our military forces. Since the end of the Cold War, the American military has been structured to fight two major regional contingencies (MRCs) simultaneously. This strategy was established in the Base Force report of 1991 and reaffirmed in the Bottom Up Review of 1993 and the Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) of 1997.

The two-MRC strategy postulates that in the post-Cold War era, military threats to the United States will come primarily from rogue states such as Iran, Iraq, Syria, Libya and North Korea, and that the United States needs to be able to handle at least two of these rogues simultaneously. Gen. Colin Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 1989 to 1993, reasoned that if we had only a one-war capability, North Korea, for example, might be tempted to take advantage of the United States while this nation was bogged down in the Persian Gulf.

However, maintaining the capability to fight two MRC's simultaneously is expensive, particularly if the U.S. military also has to deal with situations such as those in Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia and Kosovo. The Pentagon says it would need 400,000 people in 11 ground divisions, 10 tactical air wings and six aircraft carriers in each theater to prevail in two conflicts at the same time. Even with an increase in defense spending in the fiscal 2000 budget, the Joint Chiefs of Staff argue that there is a $50 billion gap between our strategy and projected resources over the next five years.

Others argue that planning for two MRCs is a needless luxury, like buying meteor insurance, and primarily a justification for maintaining a "Cold War-lite" force. This view is held by the congressionally appointed National Defense Panel (NDP) and the last two Air Force Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Tony McPeak and Gen. Ronald Fogelman. They point out that the two-MRC strategy defies both logic and history.

For example, when the United States was bogged down in Korea, Vietnam and the Gulf, no other nation took advantage of that fact by starting a conflict somewhere else in the world. Moreover, even if the United States were temporarily unprepared to engage fully in a second regional conflict because the bulk of its forces were bogged down elsewhere, the potential aggressor would have to know that the United States would eventually be able to bring awesome military power against it.

When to Deploy

The third-and most important-challenge for our national security decision-makers is deciding when to use our military forces. Starting with the last days of the Bush administration, when the military was deployed to the Persian Gulf on a permanent basis and troops were sent to Somalia, U.S. forces began to be deployed with increasing frequency and became the preferred instrument for implementing U.S. foreign policy. According to some estimates, the U.S. military has been used for unexpected contingency operations about once every nine weeks since the end of the Cold War. These missions have ranged from traditional military activities and war fighting (Korea, Kuwait, Taiwan) to humanitarian relief (Central America) and peacekeeping functions (Somalia, Haiti, Rwanda, Bosnia and Kosovo).

The increasing use of the military in these "operations other than war" has been justified by what has become known as the Clinton Doctrine. In a speech to NATO troops in Macedonia in June, President Clinton said, "Whether you live in Africa or Central Europe or any other place, if somebody comes after civilians and tries to kill them en masse because of their race, their ethnic background or their religion, and it is within our power to stop it, we will stop it. We should not countenance genocide or ethnic cleansing anywhere in the world." In that same speech, the President also expressed regret that the United States acted too slowly to stop ethnic slaughter in Bosnia and did nothing to halt genocide in Rwanda.

The Clinton Doctrine for employing military force runs counter to the ideas of Powell and other military leaders. Just as he had strong ideas about the criteria for sizing U.S. military forces, Powell also had strong ideas about the circumstances in which those forces should be committed. Powell argued that U.S. troops should be deployed only when three conditions were met: First, our political objective was clear and measurable; second, the country was prepared to use overwhelming force quickly and decisively to advance that objective; and third, military forces would be withdrawn when the objective was accomplished.

Powell and his military colleagues did not wish to see the U.S. military become involved in more Vietnams (1960 to 1972) or Lebanons (1982 to 1983), where the objectives were not clear and the military, in his view, fought with one hand tied behind its back. This approach to the use of military force, known as the Powell Doctrine, is directly at odds with the Clinton Doctrine. Under the Clinton Doctrine, the American military could be sent into hostile situations without a specific, vital national interest being involved and with the goal of achieving only such amorphous, open-ended objectives as stopping violence or building democracy. Whereas the Powell Doctrine attempts to draw lessons from the American experiences in Vietnam and Lebanon, the Clinton Doctrine seeks to learn from what occurred at Auschwitz in the 1940s and in Sarajevo in 1914. As U.S. Ambassador Richard Holbrooke noted in justifying military intervention in Bosnia and Kosovo, Europe cannot be peaceful and secure as long as war and ethnic hatred exist within its common space.

The differences between the Powell and the Clinton doctrines are profound both for the nation and the military. If our foreign policy is to be guided by the precepts of the Powell Doctrine, then the U.S. military should be of sufficient size and structure only to deter any current or future threats to our vital national security interests and should be employed only when these interests are directly threatened. On the other hand, if our foreign policy is to be guided by the Clinton Doctrine, the United States, in effect, would become a global policeman and would run the risk of stretching its military thin trying to accomplish virtually impossible goals, such as trying to change the political system of another country.

The U.S. military has placed itself in a difficult position. It has sized and structured itself to carry out the Powell Doctrine, that is, to deal with two major regional contingencies using heavy divisions (ground forces equipped with large tanks), nuclear powered aircraft carriers, and sophisticated combat planes. But it is being asked to implement the Clinton Doctrine, which calls for lighter, more agile forces. This dichotomy has created three kinds of problems:

• An investment shortfall. The Pentagon argues it needs to buy $60 billion worth of new equipment each year in order to replace its aging planes, ships and tanks and to maintain its technological edge over any potential rivals who might challenge the United States in the next century. However, the increasing number of deployments has forced the military to spend larger than anticipated amounts on operating and maintaining its current force. From 1995 to 2000, the Pentagon has been able to spend only about $45 billion a year buying new equipment, a 25 percent shortfall from what the Joint Chiefs say they need.
• Lack of readiness. As the U.S. military gets diverted into operations other than war, its readiness to carry out what it views as its primary task of waging two major regional wars simultaneously has declined. The Army leadership argues that a division spending the bulk of its time keeping sewage plants open in Kosovo will see its ability to engage in tank warfare in the Persian Gulf or on the Korean peninsula degraded.
• Recruitment and retention problems.The number of high school seniors willing to consider joining the military has dropped from 55 percent to 35 percent over the last decade. In 1999, the military fell about 20,000 people, or 10 percent, short of its recruiting objectives, in spite of the fact that it has lowered standards somewhat since the early 1990s and substantially raised the amount of money spent on recruiting and pay and benefits. Similarly, reenlistment rates for military members with critical skills, such as pilots, continue to fall, as the men and women with these skills spend more and more time away from home doing what they regard as nonessential tasks. In 1998, only one in 10 eligible carrier-based naval aviators accepted incentive bonuses to remain in the service. Members of the armed forces appear to be confused about whether they joined the U.S. Army or the Salvation Army.

Missile Defense

The final challenge for national security decision-makers is if and when to deploy a National Missile Defense (NMD) system. Congress voted in May 1999 to
deploy NMD as soon as technologically feasible. President Clinton has promised to make a deployment decision by June. The Pentagon says a system cannot be deployed before 2005.

Proponents of deploying NMD argue that the United States needs to protect itself from accidental launches by Russia or deliberate attacks by rogue nations as soon as possible. They are particularly concerned by North Korea's launch of a missile over Japan in the summer of 1998. Opponents argue that the technology of hitting a "bullet with a bullet" has not yet been proven and that deploying an effective NMD system will violate the Anti-Ballistic Missile treaty with Russia and exacerbate our relations with China. Such a violation will make it impossible for Russia to ratify START II, which will reduce the number of its strategic nuclear weapons by more than 50 percent, from 7,500 to 3,500. Indeed, Russian defense officials argue that Russia will deploy additional nuclear weapons if the United States goes ahead with NMD.

These issues should be addressed in the 2000 presidential campaign. Republican candidate George W. Bush appears willing to raise them. In a speech at the Citadel in September, the Texas governor came down squarely on the side of the Powell Doctrine, saying the U.S. military "needs the rallying point of a defined mission. And that mission is to deter wars-and win wars when deterrence fails. Sending our military on vague, aimless and endless deployments is the swift solvent of morale." As President, Bush promised to direct an immediate review of our overseas deployments in order to replace diffuse commitments with focused ones and uncertain missions with well-defined objectives. Moreover, the Republican front-runner promised to spend more money on defense and to deploy an NMD system at the earliest possible date.

This certainly is a welcome development. Since the end of the Cold War, the American people have allowed the politicians and experts to debate these issues without their input. The next President will be able to use the military more effectively in carrying out his foreign policy if he has the "advice and consent" of the American people. And he can make better decisions about how much and where to spend on defense if he knows when and how to use military force.

Lawrence J. Korb holds the Maurice R. Greenberg chair at the Council on Foreign Relations, where he is vice president and director of studies. During the Reagan administration, Korb served as assistant secretary of Defense for manpower, reserve affairs and logistics.