The Last Warrior

by Andrew F. Krepinevich

  * TOA is the amount of funding the Defense Department is authorized to obligate to spend in a given year. DoD also tracks budget authority and outlays.

  *“Gosplan” is an abbreviation of Gosudarstvenniy Komitet po Planirovaniyu (State Committee for Planning).

  *In the 1980s many US military officials believed that the Soviets could mount an offensive against Iran and the Persian Gulf without redeploying forces earmarked for operations in Central Europe.

  * The fact of war’s nonlinearity is neither new nor novel. It can be linked to modern chaos theory, which addresses how small changes in initial conditions can produce highly divergent outcomes.

  † NATO’s Central Front forces were organized into the Northern Army Group (NORTHAG)—Belgian, British, Dutch, and West German units—deployed along the border between the two Germanies from Denmark to near Bonn; and the Central Army Group (CENTAG)—US and West German forces—which assumed responsibility for covering the border down through the German-Czech border.

  ‡ The term layer cake comes from the arrangement of NATO corps forces, which were aligned from north to south, giving the appearance of a layer cake.

  8

  THE MILITARY REVOLUTION 1991–2000

  The next twenty years are likely to be a period of transition to what will be a new situation in the global political-military game. . . . [T]he management of our relations with China and Japan will be a major aspect of U.S. strategy. . . . [as will be coping with the] military technical revolution.

  ANDREW MARSHALL

  The abrupt and surprising end of the Cold War generated new challenges for Marshall and the Office of Net Assessment. The Soviet Union’s breakup seemed likely to consign Russia to the sidelines for a considerable period of time. This left the United States with a wide margin of military superiority. At the same time, the internal logic that had long united ONA’s Cold War balances had evaporated along with the USSR. Almost overnight the issue of what key military balances to assess became a genuine question to which there were no immediate or obvious answers.

  But even before a diminished Russian Federation had succeeded the Soviet Union, Marshall was already anticipating how the security environment was likely to change over the next couple of decades. In a September 1987 memo he sent to Iklé discussing the work he and Charlie Wolf were doing to support the Defense Department’s Commission on Integrated Long-Term Strategy Marshall wrote: “[T]he world really is going to be quite different twenty years from now. . . . [T]he structural changes connected with the rise of China and the military technical revolution do not seem to be getting across to the Commission or to the other working groups as fully as they might. Their focus appears still to be on the Soviet Union, the US-Soviet competition, the European theater, etc.”1 By contrast, Marshall suggested to Iklé, in the decades ahead US strategy will have to deal with a rising China as well as changes in warfare stemming from the military technical revolution.”2 These two issues—the rise of China and the military-technical revolution (MTR)—would dominate much of ONA’s work over the next quarter-century.

  Since the 1960s Soviet military theorists had been writing openly about their belief that scientific-technical progress produces successive revolutions in military affairs (RMAs). Marshal V. D. Sokolovskiy’s Soviet Military Strategy, which first appeared in 1962, argued that just as airplanes, tanks, and massed artillery linked by radio had given rise to a new operational concept—blitzkrieg—that revolutionized land warfare during World War II, so, too, had “modern nuclear weapons” ushered in another RMA during the 1950s and 1960s.3 By the 1970s Soviet theorists were anticipating that “automated reconnaissance-and-strike complexes, long-range high-accuracy terminally guided combat systems . . . and qualitative new electronic control systems” would bring about still another military-technical revolution. The common characteristic of these revolutions was the dramatic increase in the combat potential they offered to those militaries that exploited them. Moreover, Soviet military theorists argued, the advantages for those militaries that embraced the new ways of fighting first could be decisive.4

  Marshall thought it crucial that the Defense Department determine whether the Soviets were right. Three issues animated his concern. First, if the US military also came to the conclusion that disruptive changes in the character of warfare were likely over the next several decades, then it would need to engage in a period of intense innovation to develop competence in the new warfare regime. Second, whether or not the Pentagon leadership agreed with the Soviets that a new MTR was under way, as long as the Soviets thought so US policy makers would have to take that into account when pursuing efforts to deter Soviet coercion or aggression. Third, if the United States and the Soviet Union had fundamentally opposed views on the character of future warfare, it would be important to identify ways in which the United States could hedge its bet against the possibility of being wrong, lest the Soviets gain a major advantage in the military competition.

  Marshall felt the Soviets were onto something. During his work on the future security environment for CILTS he, Charlie Wolf, and their working group concluded that the Soviets were “correct in their assessment that the advent of new technologies” would revolutionize warfare.5 With this in mind Marshall began tapping his modest research budget to fund historical assessments of how military innovation had occurred during past periods of revolutionary changes in warfare. He contracted Williamson Murray and Allan Millett, two eminent military historians at the Ohio State University, to explore innovation between the two World Wars when major changes in how wars would be fought had occurred.6 Leading the revolution on land was the German military, which developed the blitzkrieg form of warfare by leveraging developments in mechanization, aviation, and radio communications. At sea the rise of naval aviation led to the battleship’s being displaced in World War II by the aircraft carrier as the capital ship of the major naval powers. Land-based air power also came into its own during the interwar years 1918–1939, enabling the emergence of an entirely new mission: strategic aerial bombardment. To defend against the strategic bombing of a country’s war economy the British (and later the Germans as well) leveraged modern sensors and communications to field integrated air defenses—the first modern battle networks. Marshall hoped this research would provide some clues as to why some militaries were able to exploit a major shift in warfare while others—to their great peril—lagged behind.

  Around the same time he encouraged Steve Rosen to explore the topic of military innovation. Rosen’s award-winning book Winning the Next War7 would be an important source of insights on the factors that enabled, or retarded, innovation in military institutions. Marshall also suggested to Jim Roche and Barry Watts that they might consider examining what he saw as problems associated with the metrics, or measures of effectiveness, used to choose among the alternatives under consideration or, in the case of historical battles or wars, judge the results. Marshall knew that while identifying the right MOEs was difficult under the best of circumstances, doing so was especially daunting during periods of disruptive changes in the character of war and the competitive environment. Later, after Marshall had tasked Andrew Krepinevich to assess the MTR, the work of Rosen, Roche, and Watts would become important sources of insights for his assessment.

  As with his light-handed supervision of ONA’s Cold War balances, Marshall suggested topics bearing on the MTR and encouraged members of St. Andrew’s Prep to look into them. But he certainly never told them what to think or what conclusions to reach. As Andrew May, another member of St. Andrew’s Prep who would become Marshall’s right-hand man at ONA in the early 2000s, aptly put it, Marshall “never, that I can remember, instructed me on what to write, or still less on what to think. He has never come out and said something I had written was wrong. He instead has offered only the most indirect of guidance.”8 Aaron Friedberg seconded May’s observation, recalling, “Like all the best teachers Andy never tells you what to think, but instead has a way of drawing your
attention to what he considers to be important questions and offering encouragement when he senses that you may be headed in a fruitful direction.”9 Marshall’s mentoring approach has been successful in no small part because, as his friend James March observed, “Very few smart people can tolerate anonymity, but Andy can.”10

  With the Cold War apparently winding down, Marshall decided his office would undertake an assessment as to whether the Defense Department should accept the Soviet view that a military-technical revolution was underway. He told Krepinevich that it would be done “in a very, very different way” from ONA’s previous Cold War assessments.11 Krepinevich, an Army officer, had joined Marshall’s staff in October 1989, having served on the defense secretary’s personal staff since 1986. A West Point graduate, Krepinevich had been sent to Harvard by the Army to earn his master’s degree prior to returning to teach at the US Military Academy at West Point. There he and Jeffrey McKritick, both of whom would later work for Marshall, served in the Social Sciences Department.

  Krepinevich had been brought onto Weinberger’s staff in 1986 partly at the behest of Graham Allison, who was then the dean of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and working part-time as a consultant to Weinberger on strategy. Allison had encountered Krepinevich when the young officer was a student at Harvard and felt that he could help the defense secretary in preparing his annual Department of Defense report to the Congress. Krepinevich was later given responsibility for preparing Weinberger’s other leading annual public document, Soviet Military Power, which summarized the ongoing buildup of the Soviet Union’s military capabilities. When Weinberger asked Krepinevich what he thought of the early Soviet Military Power publications, he responded by pointing out that because they focused exclusively on the Soviet side of the competition, they failed to provide the reader with a sense of where the United States stood relative to the USSR or where the NATO countries stood relative to the Warsaw Pact. A discerning reader could not gauge whether the United States and its allies were improving their position or not. What Soviet Military Power needed, Krepinevich said, was a net assessment. Weinberger agreed and Krepinevich then turned to ONA for help, the same office in which McKitrick was serving as Marshall’s lead analyst on the NATO–Warsaw Pact military balance. In briefing the European assessment to members of Congress, McKitrick had impressed then senator Daniel Quayle. After Quayle was elected vice president, he asked McKitrick to join his personal staff. McKitrick’s abrupt departure led to Krepinevich’s joining ONA as McKitrick’s replacement.

  Even before Krepinevich had finished the latest edition of Soviet Military Power for Weinberger and moved to ONA, Marshall recognized that his office would need to begin looking beyond the Soviet-oriented assessments that ONA had been producing since the 1970s. Thus when Marshall met with his new military assistant in September 1989, he emphasized that Krepinevich would not be doing a traditional assessment of the military balance in Central Europe. The next NATO–Warsaw Pact balance would require a new structure, he said, with greater emphasis on longer-term trends. The Soviets, Marshall told Krepinevich, were talking about a coming military-technical revolution. Your job, he said, will be “to look at the ten-to fifteen-year time horizon and ask yourself: Who will think through this period of change correctly?”12

  In the months that followed, in addition to his research on military revolutions, Krepinevich worked to come up with an outline or structure for the European Central Front assessment that would satisfy Marshall. As fate would have it, he was to gain access to considerable data and some insights into what the coming revolution might look like from the 1991 Persian Gulf War. On August 2, 1990, the Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein ordered his armed forces to launch a full-scale invasion of Kuwait. Only three years earlier Iraq had agreed to a ceasefire with Iran after eight years of brutal warfare. The fighting had left Iraq heavily in debt, primarily to Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. Saddam pressured both countries to forgive Iraq’s war debts, but was rebuffed. Faced with little to show for the costly war he had started, other than debt and growing internal instability, the Iraqi leader began accusing Kuwait of exceeding its production quota for the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), which he declared constituted a form of economic warfare. Tensions escalated during the spring and summer of 1990. After Saddam Hussein failed to receive what he considered sufficient concessions from Kuwait, Iraq invaded. Within two days nearly all Kuwaiti resistance had ceased and the small country was occupied by Iraqi forces.

  Condemnation of Iraq’s aggression was swift and widespread. Even Saddam’s traditional sponsor, the Soviet Union, supported UN Resolution 660, which demanded that Iraq withdraw its forces from Kuwait. Simultaneously, President Bush began assembling a coalition to forcibly evict the Iraqis if diplomacy failed. While Iraqi forces secured their hold on Kuwait and began preparing defenses along the Kuwaiti-Iraqi border with Saudi Arabia, the coalition began a massive military buildup in the region. Although diplomatically isolated and facing overwhelming military power, Saddam Hussein maintained his position that Kuwait was now a part of Iraq.

  On January 17, 1991, the US-led coalition, having exhausted all diplomatic options, launched Operation Desert Storm against Iraq. American forces led the way, with the Navy launching highly accurate Tomahawk cruise missiles while the Air Force struck with its new F-117A stealth fighters armed with precision-guided munitions (PGMs) to cripple the Iraqi air defense network and fracture its command and control systems. It was the first large-scale use of stealth aircraft against a significant military power,13 and the first intense application of PGMs to achieve the operational and strategic objectives of a campaign.14 Within days the coalition established clear air superiority over Iraq. By the war’s second week, Iraqi aircraft began abandoning the fight and flying to Iran for sanctuary. Over the next six weeks the air campaign continued in the skies over Iraq, followed on February 24 by a US-led coalition ground force offensive. The combined air-ground operation produced one of the most one-sided engagements in modern times, as coalition forces quickly drove the Iraqi Army from Kuwait in what became known as the “100-Hour War.” On February 28 President Bush declared a ceasefire and proclaimed the liberation of Kuwait.

  For many, Marshall included, the 1991 Gulf War provided strong evidence of the boost in military effectiveness made possible by the use of stealth aircraft, precision-guided munitions, advanced sensors, and the global positioning system (GPS) constellation of satellites the United States had deployed in the 1980s. Following the war Soviet military theorists, working in the shadow of the collapsing USSR, concluded that “the integration of control, communications, reconnaissance, electronic combat, and delivery of conventional fires into a single whole” had been realized for the first time,15 essentially crediting the US military with being the first to field a reconnaissance-strike complex. This was not quite true. Although the necessary components had been present in the theater they had not been integrated into a comprehensive battle network.16 Nonetheless, the evidence was growing ever harder to ignore that advances in military technology were starting to change in fundamental ways how future wars would be fought.

  The US military’s performance in Desert Storm confirmed for many senior US military leaders the wisdom of the changes they had made since Vietnam. Given their success, they saw little need to change their existing doctrines, operational concepts, organizations or military systems. To quote a well-known military aphorism: Why fix it if it ain’t broke?

  Marshall, who was looking much further ahead, had a different reaction. He was concerned that the changes the American military would need to make were unlikely to occur until the Pentagon’s leadership articulated “a convincing case for the declining utility of current approaches to war as well as the benefits of transformation.”17 Despite the progress Krepinevich was making on the MTR assessment, Marshall worried about the feasibility of trying to project how the competition in reconnaissance-strike operations would unfold over the next fifteen to twe
nty years. ONA’s Cold War balances had generally only looked five to eight years ahead. Marshall therefore began pressing Krepinevich on how he was structuring the assessment.

  Marshall also began soliciting opinions and advice from outside ONA, something he had not done in the past with the office’s Cold War balances. In August 1991 he convened a meeting of external experts to brainstorm how the MTR assessment might best be approached. Eliot Cohen and Barry Watts were in attendance, as was Chip Pickett. Frank Kendall,18 OSD’s director of tactical warfare programs participated, along with Air Force colonel John Warden, head of the Air Force’s Checkmate staff element, which had played a prominent role in planning the Desert Storm air campaign.19

  Marshall began the meeting by stressing the potential importance of this assessment for the United States’ long-term competitive position. The military that “gets the MTR right,” he said, would have a major advantage over its enemies in the next war, similar to the edge that the Germans’ development of blitzkrieg had given them over France and Great Britain in May 1940. Another point that emerged from the discussion was that the United States was at a very early stage in the emerging precision-strike regime. Using the analogy of blitzkrieg’s development during the interwar years, Marshall believed that US precision strike capabilities during Desert Storm were, at best, analogous to where the development of blitzkrieg was in the early 1920s. Krepinevich even speculated that Desert Storm might be closer to Great Britain’s first large-scale use of tanks in the November 1917 Battle of Cambrai. There was also discussion of the likelihood that the precision-strike regime would threaten a lot of service “rice bowls,” Pentagon jargon for the military’s preferred programs and forces. The group also agreed that different nations might follow different paths in pursuing the MTR, which meant that Krepinevich’s assessment had to take into account the divergent paths open to various US competitors. Finally, as with all ONA’s assessments, Marshall reminded everyone that his office was not in the business of telling the services what to do. The assessment would be purely diagnostic in character.20