Can Current Administration Oversee Necessary Defense Adaptations?

Threats to our national security are always with us. Because they endlessly mutate, preparation for our defense must be visionary, flexible and ongoing.

Can it be said, in current times, that the U.S. is successfully adapting its national defense priorities away from bygone nation-state conflicts toward what the National Strategy Information Center (NSIC) argues should be its top priority, that is, “irregular threats,” or aggression by armed groups in weak or failing states throughout the world where the U.S. military is carrying out differing missions?

This is the question that the NSIC addresses in a new report, and on which it gave a briefing at the Heritage Foundation. Accuracy in Academia‘s Bethany Stotts attended and noted NSIC President Roy Godson’s reply and supporting argument:

We see that there are some capabilities [cost-efficient, because they would be part of, not added to, the existing force] that we have been developing in a very ad hoc [unsystematic] fashion to some extent…we don’t have training programs in them, we don’t have the development of professionals who can utilize these capabilities in the way that we think the United States will need in the future.

These capabilities consist in:

1. Reorienting and restructuring military units whose primary mission is to prevail in these nontraditional irregular conflicts that the U.S. most likely will encounter;

2. Dominating intelligence derived from local knowledge in conflict zones to map the infrastructure of armed groups, thus gathering the evidence to neutralize the support structure and leadership of the groups, and the threat they pose to fragile democracies;

3. Units dedicated to civilian and military stability;

4. Strategic communication principles implemented by career specialists educated for this purpose, and

5. Political capabilities performed by small corps of trained professionals – military and civilian – with authorities, skills, and resources to forge coalitions among foreign state and non-state actors.

What are the “political environments” in which the U.S. would need the means and authority to develop these capabilities?

• War zones where the U.S. is the principal military force, e.g., Afghanistan;

• Non-war zones with significant U.S. presence (20-30 countries); and

• Zones receiving security assistance with little U.S. presence (40-50 countries).

According to Godson, “More than 50% of the world’s population live in these zones – failed/failing or ‘weak’ states.” Democratic or authoritarian, these states are to differing degrees “unable to control all their territory, maintain a monopoly over the instruments of force or perform core functions beginning with providing security for significant sections of their populations.” “When these conditions become severe,” he warns, “a state’s legitimacy seriously erodes, or even vanishes.” The resulting chaos is, of course, fertile ground for our enemies.

To prevent their advance, it is urgent, in the words of the NSIC’s Richard Shultz (who co-authored the report with Godson) major segments of the U.S.’s present force be “retrained and equipped with new skill sets to prosecute” these missions.

Does our political leadership have the vision and will to ensure such preparation for our defense? Does it have the fortitude to overcome likely opposition from entrenched military and other bureaucrats, contractors and other constituencies whose self-interest is better served by a more static, inflexible approach to preserving our security?

The NSIC would surely argue there is significant peril in succumbing to the temptation to keep fighting the last war.