The Last Warrior

by Andrew F. Krepinevich

  Despite their previous interactions Marshall was concerned about Aspin’s stated defense priorities. The incoming defense secretary wanted to emphasize planning for near-term threats. Aspin saw this as the only way to put a floor under rapidly declining defense budgets. With the Cold War over, the new president and members of Congress were talking about reaping a “peace dividend” through dramatic reductions in defense spending. The idea that the US military, now far and away the world’s most powerful, would need to adapt itself to sustain its advantage was simply not on Aspin’s radar, or on that of his closest advisers. To address the problem, in January 1993 Marshall sent a copy of the MTR assessment to Aspin. He also sent copies to the incoming deputy undersecretary of defense for policy, Walter Slocombe, and to Graham Allison, who had been tapped to serve as assistant secretary of defense for policy and plans.

  Quickly confirmed by the Senate, Aspin arrived at the Pentagon on January 21, 1993, the day after President Clinton’s inauguration. He was immediately beset by policy and personal challenges. One concerned Clinton’s campaign promise to accept homosexuals for military service. The controversial issue dragged on until December, when Aspin approved what became known as the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy.52 Gays could serve in the US armed forces so long as they did not disclose their sexual orientation. The new policy fulfilled Clinton’s campaign promise but by no means entirely resolved the issue.

  Aspin also found himself immersed in a crisis in the Balkans stemming from the breakup of Yugoslavia at the end of the Cold War. The country split into several new states, one of which was the multi-ethnic Socialist Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, formed in February 1992. The move was opposed by Bosnian Serbs, who established their own state with the support of the Serbian government. War soon broke out. The Croats and Muslims were badly outgunned, in part due to a United Nations resolution imposing an arms embargo on the region. Not wanting to oppose the British, French, and Russians, who also supported the embargo, President Clinton vetoed two congressional resolutions calling on the United States to lift it. He did, however, approve humanitarian aid (and, as later revealed, covert military assistance).

  Beyond these policy challenges Aspin also experienced major medical problems early in his tenure as defense secretary that limited his activities. A serious heart ailment put him in the hospital for several days in February, after barely a month in office. In March he returned to the hospital to have a pacemaker implanted.

  Given these short-term issues and developments, Marshall’s concerns about the MTR and innovation were consigned to the back burner. He discovered this in mid-March when Clark Murdock, one of Aspin’s aides from his days on the House Armed Services Committee, called to discuss the MTR assessment. As the new head of OSD’s Policy Planning Staff, Murdock was responsible for mid- to long-range planning.

  Murdock was known for his blunt manner, and his talk with Marshall proved no exception. He told Marshall that despite the assessment’s initial positive reception, “Most people are not with you on where we are on the MTR. Look at our prospective competitors, they won’t spend to get there.” The majority of senior Pentagon leaders weren’t worried about any major challenge to US military dominance arising anytime soon, he said; neither was Congress or the American people. And as for people concerned with the future of defense, well, those “people aren’t looking at the interwar period, they’re looking at the Gulf War” as a basis for shaping the post–Cold War military. At the end of the day, Murdock told Marshall, what the MTR assessment was talking about wasn’t going to help “diddly shit in Bosnia or Somalia, and that’s what people care about now.” Marshall responded by reiterating his view that the United States “can exploit the potential of the MTR to derive decisive advantages against smaller opponents and to hedge against or dissuade the rise of a peer competitor.”

  Murdock concluded the meeting by telling Marshall that his chances of getting a hearing for his ideas would improve if ONA worked through Graham Allison rather than by trying to go directly to the defense secretary. Aspin was reading what Allison was giving him, Murdock said, but he was also very concerned about the coming deep cuts in the defense budget. If Marshall could get Allison to sign a memo to Aspin saying that the MTR challenge did not require changes in equipment or additional investments but was primarily an intellectual challenge, he might get Aspin to sign up.53

  Afterward Marshall asked Krepinevich to draft a short memo from him to Allison along the lines suggested by Murdock, emphasizing the strategic importance of the MTR effort. Murdock took a look at the draft memo and told Marshall that to resonate with Aspin it needed to be redrafted to link the MTR to the findings of the recent Gulf War. The memo, Murdock said, needed to emphasize near-term implications of dealing with challenges along the line of the Streetfighter State, and using air power as a tool of compellance.54

  Marshall next sent Krepinevich to meet with Ted Warner, who was leading the new administration’s review of US defense strategy and programs, formally known as the Bottom-Up Review. Murdock’s views on the MTR were confirmed. Warner informed Krepinevich that he was less interested in the MTR than in how Marshall’s office might help him deal with near-term regional conflicts and peacekeeping contingencies, with emphasis on how to fight them more cheaply.55

  A series of meetings between Krepinevich, Warner, and Murdock followed. At times their discussions grew rather spirited. On one occasion Murdock told Krepinevich that if there was going to be a military revolution, it would be decided in the Pentagon. Krepinevich replied that if there was going to be an American military revolution that was up to the Pentagon, but how other nations would deal with the MTR was up to them. Murdock reminded Krepinevich that Congress was telling Aspin that to avoid major additional cuts to the defense budget the Pentagon needed to accord top priority to dealing with near-term threats. “Only a threat-based approach sells,” Murdock said. As for Murdock himself, he didn’t see that MTR was “doing a good job on low-intensity conflict.” As an example, alluding to the challenges US troops were encountering in their efforts to bring order to the Horn of Africa, Murdock noted, “The MTR didn’t do a goddamn thing for marines in Somalia.” While Krepinevich sympathized with the problems OSD’s leaders were facing, he saw Murdock’s objections as presenting a false choice. It was not a question of meeting either near-term requirements or preparing for a coming discontinuity in the character of warfare. Ways would need to be found to do both.

  During a meeting in which Krepinevich briefed Warner and his staff on the state of his research, Warner was incredulous at his statement that systems such as the Air Force’s joint surveillance and target attack radar system (JSTARS) would be vulnerable once the revolution had matured. Krepinevich’s point was that any aircraft based at a fixed point on land would become vulnerable to precision-guided weaponry, which offered accuracy independent of the range to the target. Warner had a hard time accepting that an expensive system barely in production and designed to last for decades would confront such a problem.56 He conceded that the MTR assessment had a logic to it, but that the challenge it presented was in the distant future. Krepinevich agreed, but also noted that the scale and scope of innovation involved meant that it would take a long time to bring about.

  This tension between the need to balance short- and long-term considerations was to persist over the next two decades, even as the US military’s dominance began to fade. While intellectually many senior civilian and military leaders appreciated the need to stay out in front of efforts to master the coming changes in warfare, for much of the 1990s declining budgets; the pressure to deal with the recurring crises in the Balkans, Haiti, and Somalia; and the rise of two nuclear powers, India and Pakistan, drew attention from the long-term issues of the MTR toward the problems of the moment. This tendency to focus on the immediate problems at hand would persist after the 9/11 attacks, when hundreds of thousands of troops and over a trillion dollars would be spent on fighting the wars in Afghanistan
, Iraq, and in global operations against terrorist groups.

  In late May 1993 Marshall and Murdock met again. The latter had good news to report. Aspin had read the assessment and saw value in it. The defense secretary wanted to know how to translate its findings into action.

  Marshall reiterated his position that, at least in the near-term, determining the way forward was primarily an intellectual problem for the military services. Deciding how they could best meet the challenges of the military revolution would not immediately require much in the way of funding, although some modest initiatives might be pursued. Murdock thought Marshall would be on safe bureaucratic ground in requesting funding for MTR war games and simulations. He might also get a high-level oversight body that would enable him to engage senior leaders and, if he were able to win them over, gain support for his efforts to get the services to accord higher priority to innovation.

  Hoping to generate stronger support for his efforts with Aspin, Marshall met with the Pentagon’s second-ranking official, deputy defense secretary William Perry. An engineer and mathematician, Perry had served in the Pentagon during the Carter administration as the undersecretary of defense for research and engineering. During Perry’s tenure in that position significant advances had been made in so-called stealth technologies that promised to reduce radically the radar signatures of aircraft. Over time Perry would often, with substantial justification, be described as “the Father of Stealth.” In the late 1970s he had also initiated the DARPA Assault Breaker program that demonstrated the technical feasibility of reconnaissance-strike operations using the Pave Mover radar and missiles with terminally guided submunitions. Assault Breaker’s success had led NATO to adopt Follow-on-Forces Attack as a mission concept.

  In August 1992, just after the initial MTR assessment was completed, Marshall held a meeting of all the then-living directors of defense research and engineering. Perry had participated and been supportive when Marshall made the case for prioritizing and institutionalizing innovation, and had agreed with Marshall that the issues raised by the assessment were the right ones. Yet Perry was also of the view that the military revolution had largely already happened, that it had emerged from the work he had done under Harold Brown on stealth and Assault Breaker during the Carter administration. Unlike Marshall, who believed the MTR was in its very early stages, Perry believed the opposite.57 While voicing support for Marshall’s efforts at the August 1992 meeting, as Aspin’s deputy Perry subsequently proved unwilling to advocate the need for major innovation, preferring instead to follow Aspin’s lead. Later, after becoming defense secretary in February 1994, Perry continued to regard stealth, precision-strike systems, JSTARS, GPS, and high-fidelity simulations for training as evidence of a nearly complete MTR.58 Marshall would have to change perceptions like these if the need for innovation was to be taken seriously by either the Pentagon’s civilian leadership or the military services.

  At the end of July 1993 Krepinevich completed an updated MTR assessment. Marshall read through the assessment and, over a weekend, dictated a memorandum in which he set forth his sense of how the MTR was progressing. The memo reveals his frustration with the Pentagon’s new leadership: “My impression is that a lot of people sign up to the notion that a military revolution is underway, but very few draw the significant consequences that flow from that belief” [emphasis added].59 Noting that Perry and John Deutch, the undersecretary for acquisition and technology, seemed “quite interested” in the idea that a military revolution might be possible, if not under way, Marshall’s memo sought to describe more fully “the kinds of things that might be undertaken if they and other top-level officials become convinced that, in fact, we are in the early stages of a period of major change in warfare.”60 Marshall restated his strongly held belief that, at least early on, the principal challenge was intellectual.

  The most important goal is to be the first, to be the best in the intellectual task of finding the most appropriate innovations in concepts of operation and making organizational changes to fully exploit the technologies now available and those that will be available in the course of the next decade or so. The most important thing that we can focus on in the next several years is the investigation of, and experimentation with, novel concepts of operation and new organizations to exploit the technologies available now and likely to be available in the next 20 years.61

  Marshall acknowledged that the United States had an enormous lead in military capabilities. But he also knew that in periods of disruptive change even a large lead could vanish quickly. The corporate executives at the Annapolis meeting had described how their dominant positions had evaporated almost overnight as the competitive environment changed. And there was plenty of historical research on past military revolutions to show how dominant military advantages could be lost in short periods of time, whether it was the Royal Navy’s huge advantage in naval aviation in 1918 or the US monopoly in nuclear weapons after World War II. What, he asked in the memo,

  [I]s our strategy for doing well? We have to think about [the] potential emergence of major threats in the future and how we could postpone their emergence. How are we going to deal with them as they emerge? How can we position ourselves to maintain our preeminent position? A large part of this preeminence will reside in superior ideas with respect to concepts of operation and organizational innovation. Indeed, being ahead in concepts of operation and in organizational arrangements may be far more enduring that any advantages in technology or weapon systems embodying them, although designing the right systems may depend on having good ideas about concepts of operations.62

  Marshall went on to raise several aspects of the emerging military competition he believed would be particularly important. In addition to the growing impact of long-range precision strike, a second aspect “that seems an area of major change is the emergence of what might be called information warfare.”63 The latter was especially challenging, he noted, because US modeling and simulations had done a very poor job of capturing partial or massive disruptions of command, control, and communications networks.

  Finally, alluding to the issues raised in the July 1993 MTR assessment, Marshall argued that the central military problems facing the US military in the first phase of the MTR, meaning the near-to mid-term, “are power projection and peace making,” dealing with emerging A2/AD capabilities and low-intensity conflicts.64 Beyond that he foresaw a second phase of the MTR as involving “the possible emergence of a major competitor or perhaps a coalition that may challenge us.”65 Over time it would become clear just how right he was.

  During the next few years, Marshall and his office became deeply involved in efforts to encourage the US military to explore the potential of what he now referred to as a revolution in military affairs. ONA would not be alone in this effort. In September 1993 Defense Secretary Les Aspin approved a DoD-wide initiative on the RMA. After succeeding Aspin the following February, Perry established a group to coordinate the effort.66

  To explore the possible implications of the RMA five separate task forces were formed: (1) Combined Arms and Maneuver; (2) Deep Strike; (3) Naval Forward Operations, Crisis Prevention, and Response; (4) Low-Intensity Conflict; and (5) Fostering/Institutionalizing Long-Term Innovation. Marshall was given leadership of the innovation task force with the explicit goal of trying to overcome the barriers to military innovation.67 The effort quickly absorbed most of his energies along with that of his small staff, leaving little time to pursue the sorts of balances ONA had concentrated on during the Cold War.68 Among other things, the initiative led to a number of efforts by the military services to explore various aspects of the RMA.

  For his part, Marshall continued to encourage scholarly research on military innovation. In 1996, with his sponsorship, Williamson Murray and Allan Millett published Military Innovation in the Interwar Period, a survey of the principal changes in war’s conduct during the years between the two world wars. After considerable back and forth with Marshall over the lessons o
f the individual cases, Murray and Barry Watts concluded in their final chapter that, as with net assessment, no methodology or set of rules could ensure innovation would succeed. Peacetime military innovation appeared to be a highly contingent endeavor in which factors such as visionary leaders with the talent to operate effectively in bureaucracies, and plain good luck could play—and often had played—decisive roles.69 From a management standpoint, “genuine innovation, like democratic government,” was rarely “a tidy process,” much less one that could be tightly managed and controlled by senior defense officials. Indeed, attempts to eliminate the inherent messiness—including the tendency for innovation to proceed in fits and starts—emerged as “one of the surest ways to kill innovation.”70

  Perhaps the most vocal senior military officer who supported the RMA in the mid-1990s was the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral William Owens. The Goldwater-Nichols DoD Reorganization Act of 1986 had made the vice chairman head of a special council on military requirements—the Joint Requirements Oversight Council (JROC)—and Owens’s inclination was to try to use it to address the emerging RMA from a joint perspective.71 Yet, contrary to Marshall’s instincts, Owens tended to emphasize the technologies underlying the RMA at the expense of the requisite operational concepts and organizational adaptations. Owens stressed how technological improvements in three areas—(1) sensors or ISR (intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance); (2) C4I (command, control, communications, computers, and intelligence); and (3) precision force—would be the heart of the emerging “American RMA.”72

  Owens’s support of this view of the military revolution led to the publication in July 1996 by the Joint Chiefs’ chairman, General John Shalikashvili, of Joint Vision 2010, a conceptual template or vision statement that committed the US armed forces to harnessing the potential capabilities of the system-of-systems to “gain dominant battlespace awareness, an interactive ’picture’ which will yield much more accurate assessments of friendly and enemy operations within the area of interest.”73 Despite Owens’s belief that DBA would dissipate the fog of war, Joint Vision 2010 stopped short of this claim, saying more sensibly that while DBA would improve situational awareness, decrease response times, and make the battlespace more transparent, it could not eliminate the fog and friction of war.74