Americas Defense Meltdown - IT Acquisition Advisory Council

Col. Chet Richards • 35all but the original inhabitants. Until 1917, we saw little need to engage the nationsof Old Europe on their home territory.Time and technology march on, however, and by the early 20th century, ourocean moats had shrunk to a week’s steaming and it was clear that in a few years, theAtlantic and Pacific would join the English Channel in the list of barriers that couldbe crossed in hours or even minutes.After World War II, the argument was made that because our oceans no longershielded us, we needed a capable defense structure available on very short notice.For this reason, post-war administrations decided to maintain a standing militarycomparable in size to the largest anywhere, ready to defend the country from threatsfrom any direction, and to form alliances whose members we would assist in defendingthemselves from threats from any direction.Types of Military ThreatsThese threats consisted of three broad types, and this classification is important forexplaining the proposed changes in defense policy. First, there were the conventionalforces – the tanks, airplanes, soldiers, ships, and so on like we faced in World WarII. They could wreak enormous damage and kill huge numbers of people – fatalitiesin the 50 to 70 million range are often cited for World War II – but they took sometime to do it. Because they needed large numbers of trained troops and vast suppliesof expensive weapons, they made up (and still make up) the majority of the world’sdefense budget.Then there were the nuclear forces. They were relatively cheap, in comparison toconventional forces. 25 Like conventional weapons, nukes could cause considerabledamage, but they could do it in seconds. By the mid-1960s, there were enough ofthese in the arsenals of the major nuclear powers that the survival of the human raceitself was doubtful, should they ever be used. 26After a brief skirmish over which service would monopolize the nuclear advantage,nuclear power reinforced the traditional individual-services way of war that dominatedthe Cold War. The Goldwater-Nichols Act had created the combatant commands,such as Central Command and Pacific Command, and had given them operationalcontrol of the forces in their areas of responsibility, but the money – and along with itthe power to determine how the forces would train, equip and fight – remained withthe service bureaucracies that, for the most part, were not motivated by the needs ordesires of the combatant commanders.Finally, there was “none of the above,” the “unconventional” threats, primarilyinsurgencies, that manifested themselves in “low intensity conflicts.” The militariesof the developed world tended to ignore them at least as far as spending money on“special forces” to engage in them, on the grounds that “if we can lick the cat, we canlick the kitten.” 27 As one Army officer recently put it, the U.S. military considered