The Last Warrior

by Andrew F. Krepinevich

  From a US perspective the saving grace up until fairly recently has been the fact that no other country has had the technology, resources, or inclination to try to match the United States in precision-strike and battle networks. Only over the last decade or so have China’s development of anti-access/area-denial (A2/AD) capabilities38 based on long-range sensors, highly accurate ballistic and cruise missiles, and the pursuit of “informationized” operations has begun to pose a serious challenge to US power-projection forces in the western Pacific. Even so, China’s A2/AD capabilities, while exploiting MTR technologies and weaponry, are regionally focused, whereas US precision-strike capabilities can span the globe. Consequently Marshall’s view has consistently been that a mature MTR regime has not yet arrived, and will only do so once “the other guys would have a lot of the same precision-strike capabilities” as the United States.39

  Nevertheless, the 1992 MTR assessment was prescient in anticipating a growing challenge to long-standing US approaches to overseas power projection. Whether in Europe and the Pacific during World War II, in Korea during 1950–1953, in South Vietnam and Thailand during the Vietnam War, or in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait during the 1991 Persian Gulf War, the United States’ approach to projecting power has been the same: American forces would deploy into the theater of operations through major ports and air bases that were effectively sanctuaries from enemy attack. Then, once forces had been built up to a sufficient level, offensive operations would be undertaken against the enemy, using ground forces and strike aircraft operating from forward bases. This basic approach was again utilized in the Second Gulf War in 2003. Foreshadowing the emergence of A2/AD threats, the assessment warned that the price of projecting power in this manner

  will change markedly as this military revolution matures. Forward bases—those huge, sprawling complexes that bring to mind such places as Malta, Singapore, Subic Bay, Clark Air Base, and Dhahran—will become great liabilities, not precious assets. The reason is simple: as Third World states acquire significant numbers of . . . [long-range strike] systems (i.e., ballistic and cruise missiles, high-performance aircraft) and enormously more effective munitions (i.e., smart bombs; nuclear[,] chemical, and biological weapons), these bases will become very lucrative targets.40

  Thus,

  Rather than deterring potential aggressors, these bases’ “sudden” vulnerability will deter their owners [i.e., countries hosting US forces at these bases] from acting to deter or thwart aggression. Their occupants will find themselves in the uncomfortable (and certainly unintended) role of hostages to the growing military capabilities of Third World nations. Rather than acting as a source of assurance to friends and allies in the region, these bases will be a source of anxiety. . . . Rather than a source of stability in a crisis, the bases will likely encourage one side or both toward pre-emptive strikes: either against the base before its assets can be dispersed, or against the potential aggressor in an attempt to disarm it of its . . . [long-range] strike capability.41

  As for naval forces operating close to an enemy’s homeland, the assessment found that

  Forward-deployed naval forces may be able to offset the future liabilities of forward bases, but only partially and probably not for very long, as currently configured. The traditional carrier task force or surface action group possesses neither the mobility nor the stealth to function as the spear tip of forcible entry operations.42

  Although these and other problems were anticipated in ONA’s 1992 and 1993 MTR assessments, two decades later the US military is still searching for ways to deal with them. The Air Force’s posture remains heavily biased toward short-range fighters and fighter-bombers tied to a few increasingly vulnerable overseas forward bases, while the Navy continues to accord primacy to aircraft carriers equipped with short-range strike aircraft for force presence and power projection. These institutional preferences have persisted even though China, the country Marshall had identified in 1987 as the United States’ next major rival, has continued fielding increasingly advanced A2/AD capabilities. These observations underscore the difficulties of bringing about innovative changes in large organizations.

  ONA’s 1992 MTR assessment raised the possibility that the paths various American competitors might choose in adapting to the emerging changes in warfare could be different from that taken by the US military. One possibility was that the US military might retain a substantial advantage in long-range conventional precision strike for a decade or more, which turned out to be the case. This reading of how the MTR could unfold led directly to Admiral William Owens’s notion of dominant battlefield awareness (later dominant battlespace awareness or DBA), which envisioned the emerging US “system of systems” providing near-perfect information on enemy forces throughout an area roughly the size of North Korea, thereby dissipating the fog of war.43 ONA conducted a number of war games and simulations aimed at exploring DBA. However, these efforts raised more questions than they answered.44 Worse, as Marshall and Krepinevich realized early on, crushing American dominance in long-range precision strike was likely to incentivize adversaries that could not compete with United States in this new way of warfare to be drawn to nuclear weapons as a way of offsetting American conventional dominance.45

  A second possibility of how the MTR might unfold was that the United States would eventually face one or more competitors with comparable precision-strike capabilities. In that case, as Marshall suggested in 1993, “long-range precision strike” would become “the dominant operational approach” of militaries sufficiently advanced to exploit the MTR and would play prominent roles in power projection, war at sea, and in space.46 In other words, future wars between major powers could be decided primarily by opposing reconnaissance-strike complexes engaging one another over long distances and achieving information dominance would become increasingly central to the outcomes of battles and engagements.

  Yet another possibility was that in the interim lesser US adversaries might devise other, less sophisticated ways of offsetting the US military’s enormous advantage in precision strike. Krepinevich labeled this kind of enemy the “Streetfighter State.” What he had in mind was a Third World enemy that combined “some of the sophisticated technologies of the Cold War era with . . . unconventional strategies and operational concepts” and a willingness “to accept a disproportionate amount of punishment (to include collateral and environmental damage) if necessary to accomplish its strategic objectives.”47 To achieve its objectives the Streetfighter State would

  pursue its plans for aggression by emphasizing the social dimensions of strategy. That is to say, the aggressor would attempt to exploit those aspects of the U.S. social culture that would inhibit the effective application of American military power. Specifically, acts of aggression would be low-intensity in nature and ambiguous in execution, with emphasis on terrorism, subversion, and insurgency. The objective would be to commit acts of aggression in such a way that they fall beneath the threshold that would trigger a U.S. military response.48

  Given its early lead in exploiting the MTR, the 1992 MTR assessment judged this sort of opponent to be the “most formidable threat” the US military was likely to face over the next ten to twenty years, a prediction that has been amply borne out in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Ukraine.

  The first person to receive the July 1992 MTR assessment was Paul Wolfowitz, then the undersecretary of defense for policy. His response was encouraging. With Wolfowitz on board, Marshall sent the assessment to a veritable who’s who of the Pentagon’s top leaders. Copies went out to Defense Secretary Richard Cheney, and to the country’s senior military leaders, including the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Army and Air Force service chiefs, among others.

  Marshall expected the assessment to generate “a lot of resistance and flak.” So he was pleasantly “surprised at the degree to which people tended to agree that we were probably in a period” of revolutionary change.49 Encouraged by the response, Marshall directed Krepinevich to undertake a
nother cut at the assessment and pursue further research on military revolutions. The target for the next version would be late 1993 or early 1994. To get the word out and solicit more feedback he asked Krepinevich to begin presenting the findings of the MTR assessment in national security venues outside Washington, DC. That fall Krepinevich spoke at Sam Huntington’s Olin Center at Harvard, the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) in Monterrey, California, and the Los Alamos National Laboratory, among other venues. Like Marshall, Krepinevich was met with general acceptance of the idea that an MTR was possible, along with some helpful suggestions. Huntington, who heard the MTR presentation at an NPS conference, pressed Krepinevich to look more broadly at the Streetfighter problem, as did Rear Admiral Dennis Blair, then serving in the Joint Chiefs of Staff’s J-8 directorate, which was responsible for providing the Joint Chiefs with assessments on new capabilities and nontraditional warfare areas.

  Vic Reis encouraged Marshall to convene a high-level meeting to explore aspects of innovation. On November 10, 1992, Marshall and Krepinevich drove to Annapolis, where the meeting would be held the following day. At dinner that evening Marshall voiced his impression that feedback on the MTR assessment had been so encouraging that the issue was no longer whether a military revolution was possible; rather, the question was: What should be done about exploiting it? Terminology was a concern, however. Krepinevich recalled that his MTR presentation at the Naval War College had been introduced as the “military technology revolution.” But as the assessment had stressed, the most difficult and important component of the MTR was not technology, but how to develop appropriate operational concepts for the new military systems and to organize forces to best employ them. By the summer of 1993 Marshall began referring to the “revolution in military affairs” as opposed to the “military-technical revolution” for precisely this reason.

  The focus of the November 11 meeting was innovation in large organizations. Marshall had invited leaders from the corporate world who had struggled with how to stay ahead of the competition in rapidly changing business environments: Dr. James McGroddy from IBM, Dr. Richard Roca of AT&T, Dr. Ivan Sutherland of Sun Microsystems, and Dr. Robert Spinrad from the Xerox Corporation. Joining them were senior Pentagon military leaders—the audience Marshall most wanted to convince of the need for a vigorous program of innovation. The Air Force was represented by General Merrill McPeak, its chief of staff. The Marine Corps sent a future commandant, Lieutenant General Charles Krulak, then serving as head of the Marine Corps Combat Development Command. The Army was represented by its vice chief of staff, General Dennis Reimer who, like Krulak, would soon become head of his service. Reimer also brought along Major General John Tilelli, who would succeed him as vice chief of staff. Also attending was Vice Admiral William Owens and Rear Admiral Dennis Blair. Several key members of the OSD staff, including Paul Wolfowitz and Vic Reis, were also present.50

  Marshall opened the meeting by noting that there had been an “amazingly good response” to the assessment, especially since in the long term “it gores everyone’s ox.” He went on to say that the assessment identified “a long list of areas in which we should focus.” They ranged from evaluating prospective competitors to examining the potential of computer-driven simulations to support imaginative war gaming, and enhancing individual and unit training. Above all, Marshall said, was the need to identify ways to institutionalize innovation. War colleges could play a key role, he noted, again emphasizing that the assessment found the greatest challenges during past periods of revolutionary change had been primarily intellectual, not technical.51

  After some brief comments by Vic Reis on how emerging technologies could support innovation, the industry participants discussed innovation in the business world. McGroddy led off, comparing innovation to a breakpoint—like water freezing when its temperature drops to 32 degrees Fahrenheit—whereupon everything seems to change very quickly. Progressive advances in information technology had created such a breakpoint for IBM. The proprietary technologies that had been a major source of IBM’s competitive advantage were now being eclipsed by other technologies that were available to all. So, he asked: Where do you derive competitive advantage? How do you differentiate? His answer: It’s in the application! When the technologies are available to all, it’s in the way you apply the technology.

  McGroddy asked the military leaders present: What technologies will you choose to emphasize? In what way? He declared that corporations that successfully innovate have organizations that are willing to take major risks. If you do not take risks, you cannot change. From his vantage point, McGroddy concluded, many organizations fail to change until crises force them to do so. This was especially true of highly successful military ones because, thankfully, they are not constantly at war and thus do not benefit from constant market feedback like corporations.

  McGroddy was followed by Roca, who emphasized the need to think about what measures of effectiveness would define the new competitive environment. This starts, he declared, with identifying what you are trying to do. What are your objectives? From that, you ask yourself: How will I measure success? He cited AT&T as an example. It had undergone a culture shock after losing its telephone monopoly and having to deal with serious competitors. Prior to losing its monopoly AT&T had measured its success in terms of providing “universal service” that maximized the number of subscribers, not by the profits generated from its customers. After AT&T was broken up some executives simply could not make the mental transition from the old business model to a new and very different one. Those executives were retired because they could not accept, let alone pursue, new measures of success.

  Sutherland, following Roca, emphasized the need for creative destruction, which he argued was essential to innovation. He advanced two key measures of success for the military in pursuing innovation: a willingness to let certain parts of a service “die” or fall into “bankruptcy”; and the foresight to promote and protect individuals who showed a knack for innovation from the organization’s “antibodies,” as he called those who benefited from the status quo and thus sought to prevent any change in it.

  Spinrad was the last to present, and used his firm as a case study to reinforce McGroddy’s views. As IBM had done with computers, he said, Xerox had developed a near monopoly in the copier business. It also had the deepest pockets when it came to research and development. Nonetheless Xerox was attacked by innovative competitors and saw its market share fall to 20 percent, though it had since recovered to 40 percent. Alluding to the point made by Roca, Spinrad said Xerox dramatically changed its measures of success when it began losing its monopoly. Formerly his company had focused on minimizing cost and meeting detailed product specifications. Now, he declared, the firm’s independent variable was “time to market.” Product specifications and cost were dependent variables.

  Following a mid-morning break, the military leaders gave their presentations. Their observations were generally in line with the main themes of the MTR assessment and did not challenge the arguments about the prerequisites for innovation made by the industry participants. The industry participants were generally unimpressed by what they heard from the senior military officers. Sutherland, for one, expressed amazement at their relatively benign reaction to the ongoing advances in information technology, noting that by the year 2000 something the size of a small matchbox would be able to record images, and that remotely guided robotic “rats” could be made to carry payloads—sensors or weapons. How did the military intend to exploit these new capabilities and defend itself against them? By 2000, Sutherland added, computing power would increase by three orders of magnitude. The military, he said, needed to move beyond generalizations about advances in information technology to examine specifically how these advances could best be applied to their advantage—that is, to engage in creative destruction, create winners and losers, and let some parts of their organizations, like the horse cavalry of old, die out.

  At the conclusion of the presentatio
ns Marshall felt that the industry executives had given the military leadership a very different way of looking at the challenges of innovation, along with some stern warnings as to how even the most dominant organizations could be brought low in a period of dynamic technological change. But were the generals and admirals merely paying lip service to innovation, or were they truly committed to the changes necessary to lead their services into a new era of warfare? Some senior military leaders, notably Army chief of staff General Gordon Sullivan, subsequently made a real effort to go into business with Marshall on the MTR. But even with a service chief on board, substantially changing the overall direction of an entire military service proved extraordinarily difficult.

  The 1992 presidential election produced additional resistance within the Pentagon to Marshall’s efforts to foster innovation in the military services. Eight days before the Annapolis meeting Bill Clinton was elected president, turning George H. W. Bush out of office after one term. With the change in administrations came changes in the Pentagon’s senior civilian leadership, along with some shifts in the military’s senior ranks.

  By late November the president-elect was filling out his cabinet. He nominated Les Aspin, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, to be defense secretary. During his time in Congress Aspin had earned a reputation as an expert on defense issues. Following the 1991 Persian Gulf War he had engaged several members of RAND’s staff in an ambitious effort to craft a post–Cold War US defense posture. Among them was Ted Warner, who would become assistant secretary of defense for strategy and threat reduction, a position that placed him in a position to identify future US defense requirements. Over the years Aspin had also approached Marshall several times for assistance in tackling issues pertaining to military strategy and policy. The ONA director had always tried to be helpful, and the two had developed a friendly, if not close, relationship.