Army Chief of Staff Hints ‘Two-War’ Strategy Is Thing of the Past
John M. Donnelly, CQ Today,
May 30, 2009 -
The comments by Army Chief of Staff Gen. George W. Casey Jr. come as many in Congress are befuddled about the assumptions about future wars that undergird the changes in Pentagon spending proposed by Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates .
Casey, a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said after a speech this week at the Center for Strategic and International Studies that the chiefs have discussed the need to move beyond a strategy built on a military force capable of fighting two “major combat operations,” or MCOs, in different parts of the world.
Currently, he said, the military is not prepared to fight two major wars while also fighting two counterinsurgencies. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have shown the goal to be currently unachievable, Casey said.
“The reality of it is, with the amount of forces we already have deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan, one of those MCOs is already kind of off the table,” Casey said, later adding: “The reality of the commitment is we don’t have the ready forces available to do everything that we would have liked to do under a two-MCO scenario.”
“One of the major things we’ve discussed among the chiefs particularly is the need to change the force-sizing construct, because we don’t think it’s as relevant as it once was,” he said. “But what do you change it to — that’s the hard part.”
He said that whatever threats the military is configured to meet, it should retain a core of 10 Army brigades and Marine Corps regiments ready to be deployed in war zones.
Casey’s comments lend credence to what many security experts have surmised but senior Defense officials have only hinted at: that the U.S. military is stretched too thin to meet its own strategy; that strategy has been discredited by reality; and that it is likely to be jettisoned when the Defense Department later this year writes its Quadrennial Defense Review, a study of strategy and forces.
In Search of Strategic Clarity
There is a growing concern among defense committees in Congress about the strategic assumptions behind the Pentagon’s budget request.
Rep. John M. McHugh of New York, ranking Republican on the House Armed Services Committee, told Gates at a May 13 hearing that if the secretary did a lot of analysis for the fiscal 2010 budget submission, “we have absolutely no clarity, visibility or insight into that analysis.”
Uncertainty over the strategy that informed the defense budget request was illustrated recently when the officer who advises the Joint Chiefs of Staff on forces and budgets, Vice Adm. Stephen Stanley, met on two occasions this spring with House Armed Services Committee aides. Both times he said the U.S. military had enough fighter jets to fight its most challenging MCO, which aides inferred meant China.
The fact that Stanley seemed implicitly to say that the size of the fighter force was being measured against one war was considered telling by aides on both sides of the aisle. They inferred that a change in the two-MCO strategy had already been made during the construction of the fiscal 2010 budget, and that the shift would be ratified by the Quadrennial Defense Review.
Casey and other military officials have stressed that no such change has occurred. But Casey’s and Stanley’s statements suggest to many in Congress that a shift has already occurred unofficially.
“We must shift our focus away from organizations that are primarily designed to win conventional war, because that’s not what we’re going to be doing for the rest of the century,” Casey said.
Gates himself, in his May 13 testimony, hinted that the two-war strategy’s days were numbered. “My view is that since 1991, it’s been important to look at a world that’s more complicated than two MCOs,” he said. “And the fundamental question facing the QDR is: How do you account for a world that is not accounted for by two MCOs? That will have huge resource implications, but it will also have enormous strategic and force-sizing implications. But that’s a very overdue kind of thing.”
Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Michèle Flournoy told reporters May 20 that the two war strategy is “on the table for discussion” in the upcoming defense review.
If the military’s size and shape were not determined by the two-war requirement, it could better prepare to fight insurgencies, conduct nation-building operations and take on a diverse set of potential adversaries, including terrorist groups and organizations like Hezbollah that have access to high-tech weaponry. On the other hand, many argue, the military needs to retain the capability to wage war against nations, including potentially more than one at a time.
The Pentagon’s task is to develop a strategy that captures “the diverse range of the kinds of challenges we may be called up on to deal with at any one time,” Flournoy said.
Online: CQ Today
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