Despite his periodic attempts to reassess ONA’s long-term research agenda, Marshall still had not settled on a way forward by late 2002. The following March, as another US-led coalition was preparing to invade Iraq, he held a one-day workshop on the role and focus of ONA over the next decade.6 At the workshop’s end he articulated several conclusions. First, ONA needed to increase its efforts on aspects of the future that others in the national security establishment were not considering, but which could profoundly influence US security. Meanwhile, the office would continue its analysis of issues relating to a mature precision-strike regime and a world in which the spread of nuclear weapons had not been contained. Second, he reaffirmed the need to pursue efforts to identify those areas of military competition that would dominate the future security environment and how the United States might best position itself to prevail in these competitions.7
Yet it was not until mid-2004 that Marshall formally committed ONA to a new long-term research agenda. He identified three main balances: a regional assessment focused on the military balance in Asia, emphasizing the need to hedge against the rise of China; a functional assessment of power projection in an anti-access/area-denial environment; and an assessment of the durability of the US advantage in realistic combat training that had emerged after the Vietnam war.8 To these balance areas he added a series of studies aimed at foreseeing how the security environment might be changed by advances in undersea warfare, the biological and human sciences, directed energy weapons, demographic decline in Russia, and possible calamities, such as an AIDS epidemic in Asia. He also mentioned the possibility of supporting studies in new areas such as policing and stability operations, understanding the kinship societies that dominate the Muslim world, and assessing the United States’ long-term economic prospects.9
The time Marshall had taken to decide on the direction that ONA should take in the post–Cold War security environment reflected several considerations. One, of course, was his own long-standing view that it was important to determine the right issues—the right “questions”—for ONA’s future work before beginning the effort to look for “answers” to these questions. A second issue concerned the extent to which the framework for net assessment that he had originally developed in 1972 could be adapted to the post-Cold War security environment. Instead of being able to focus on a single, large competitor, the United States was confronted with a much more complicated world, especially after al Qaeda terrorists succeeded in flying airliners into the Pentagon and both towers of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. The final factor was the frustrating outcome of the defense strategy review Marshall conducted in the months before 9/11.
In early 2001, soon after Donald Rumsfeld had returned to the Pentagon for a second tour as defense secretary under President George W. Bush, he asked Marshall to conduct a review of US defense strategy. Given the mutual respect that had emerged between the two men during Rumsfeld’s first tour at the Pentagon, it was natural for Rumsfeld to ask Marshall for such an assessment.
The circumstances in which the ONA director received this assignment reveals much about Rumsfeld and his view of Marshall’s value. Instead of asking Marshall to meet with him in the privacy of his office, Rumsfeld invited him to lunch in a Pentagon dining room where senior officials often ate. As Rumsfeld later wrote, he wanted to send a message to others in the Pentagon that he “valued Marshall’s thinking,” particularly on strategy.10 Rumsfeld also recalled that during the lunch Marshall had warned him that the Pentagon bureaucracy was as resistant as ever to change.
On Saturday morning, February 3, only two weeks after Bush’s inauguration, Marshall met with Jim Roche and Barry Watts to begin outlining a defense strategy based on the idea of maintaining US military dominance for as long as possible. Marshall’s senior military assistant, Navy captain Karl Hasslinger, soon joined the effort along with Jeffrey McKitrick and Andrew May, who were both then at the consulting firm Science Applications International Corporation doing work for ONA.
By late February the rapidly evolving outline for the review had identified four goals for an advantage-driven defense strategy based on the premise that the United States enjoyed a remarkably dominant and favorable geostrategic position:
1.Preserve and extend [key or vital] U.S. military advantages as long as possible;
2.Use the dominant U.S. position to secure a prolonged peace;
3.Keep future American wars small, limited in means, and far away by maintaining strategic buffers and overseas allies;
4.Discourage or delay the emergence of a major or “peer” competitor.11
As sensible and straightforward as these goals seemed at the time, it was not long before the strategy review started to lose focus. In a February meeting with Rumsfeld’s deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, to discuss the strategy review, Marshall was informed that Rumsfeld and others did not like such terms as dominance. Successive rounds of wordsmithing ensued, rapidly undermining the document’s clarity as more and more OSD political appointees began to make inputs. Along with responding to this guidance, Hasslinger and May were soon making slides to convert the strategy paper into a briefing for President Bush.
On March 21, 2001, Rumsfeld and Marshall met with the president to present the strategy review. Rumsfeld did the briefing. Afterward Hasslinger reported that the briefing had gone better than even the most optimistic among the Department of Defense staff could have hoped. The session had lasted about ninety minutes. The president had been interested, engaged, and had asked probing questions. And at the end Bush had said he was “very pleased” with the effort so far and told Rumsfeld and Marshall to continue developing the strategy.12
In response to some of Bush’s questions, Rumsfeld gave Marshall an opportunity to say what he thought needed to be done. The ONA director stressed the importance of experimentation and engaging bright young officers who could think creatively about the future. The president replied that he had talked to a lot of officers but had not found very many of them who thought innovatively about the future.13
The responses of the service chiefs to the strategy review were not nearly as supportive as Bush’s had been. They had received copies of the evolving draft the same week as the presidential briefing by Rumsfeld and Marshall. By then comments on earlier drafts had generated requests for examples of the key areas of advantage to be maintained going forward. The version of the review that went to the service chiefs listed five candidate areas: air superiority, undersea warfare, space, robotics, and realistic combat training. This list was intended to be illustrative—at most tentative examples of the sorts of areas of military competition in which the US military would want to remain well ahead. Marshall certainly did not intend for this list to be the final word. Nevertheless, the morning after this version of the strategy review was circulated to the service chiefs, Karl Hasslinger found himself in the office of the Army chief of staff, General Eric Shinseki, trying to explain why mechanized ground forces had not been included in the list of key areas of competitive advantage. In short order the other service chiefs began voicing similar objections, naming dozens of areas they considered vital and wanted to protect at all costs. Inexplicably Marshall, who should have known better, had been bushwhacked by the Pentagon bureaucracy.
At this juncture the easiest thing to have done bureaucratically would have been to let the services expand the portfolio of key military competitions. But there were compelling reasons to resist doing so. First there was the reality that resources are always limited in relation to perceived wants and needs—in this case to those of the Pentagon. The advantage-based strategy was designed in part to compel hard choices—to set priorities—regarding which military competitions would be most important over the next ten to fifteen years and therefore the ones to invest in preferentially. The other side of this coin was, of course, that over time the Defense Department would need to make the necessary divestitures and reductions in funding to military competitions of lessening value.14
Recognizing these realities, Marshall encouraged the services to embrace a portfolio of no more than nine or ten truly key military competitions. If such a consensus could be reached it would also resolve the problem of deciding what areas ONA should assess going forward. The portfolio of key military competitions would be the areas in which senior decision makers would want to know how the United States was doing relative to the competition: Were the competitors catching up, making no progress, or falling further behind? How could the United States improve its position in the key competitions? How might it hedge against the possibility it had chosen the wrong competitions to emphasize?
During the strategy review Marshall failed to get the services to agree on a short list of key competitions. Nevertheless, he persisted in his efforts. After 9/11 Marshall made further attempts to develop a consensus. In both 2002 and 2003 he had Chip Pickett head ONA summer studies on defense portfolios as a way of moving from a threat-driven to a capability-based planning paradigm. In 2005 Andrew May led another summer study that focused on the sources of US advantage rather than on the key military competitions themselves.
None of these efforts succeeded in pushing the services toward agreement on a short list of key military competitions. Preoccupied with the ongoing wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and determined to protect their preferred programs and budgets, the services resisted developing the defense strategy that the president had initially encouraged. The short list of candidate areas for preferential investment ONA had suggested became so controversial that it was deleted from the body of the final version of Marshall’s strategy review, appearing only in an annex.17
Other events, starting with 9/11, undoubtedly limited the time and energy Rumsfeld was able to devote to advancing an advantage-based defense strategy. The 9/11 attacks were quickly followed by Operation Enduring Freedom, the campaign against the Taliban in Afghanistan. In 2003 came the turn of Iraq. The previous year the UN Security Council had passed Resolution 1441, calling upon Iraq to cooperate with UN weapon inspectors to verify that it had completely eliminated any stocks of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) and was not engaged in trying to create any more. After months in which Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein failed to conform to the resolution despite repeated demands that he do so, a US-led coalition invaded Iraq, overthrowing Saddam’s regime in a mere three weeks of major combat operations.
The Second Gulf War—Operation Iraqi Freedom—drew the United States and its allies into what became a protracted counterinsurgency campaign in Iraq just as Operation Enduring Freedom did in Afghanistan. A key caution in Marshall’s late February 2001 strategy outline had been to “keep future American wars small, limited in means, and far away” from US shores.18 Operations Enduring Freedom and Iraqi Freedom were indeed fought far from American shores, but the Bush administration neither kept these conflicts small, nor the means required to wage them limited. Especially in the case of Iraq, prior to the initial three weeks of major US combat operations too little thought or planning were given in advance to dealing with the long-term consequences of overthrowing Saddam Hussein and occupying the country.
Only two days before Operation Iraqi Freedom began, Watts asked Marshall whether there was any evidence that senior Pentagon decision makers might embrace either the strategy of advantage or the specific areas of US competitive advantage that had been discussed since 2001. His response was, “No.”19 As Iraq began descending into lawlessness and insurgency, the war increasingly occupied the time and energies of senior Pentagon leaders. By the time Robert Gates replaced Rumsfeld as defense secretary in November 2006, the situation in Iraq had deteriorated into a civil war between the majority Shiites and the minority Sunnis, with al Qaeda and covert Iranian elements engaged as well. Marshall’s efforts on strategy formulation had been overtaken by the combination of deep-rooted resistance of the military services to change and external contingencies stemming from the protracted wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. In the final analysis, the 2001 strategy review serves primarily as a cautionary tale about just how difficult it can be to bring about fundamental changes in the thinking and priorities of large organizations.
Crafting good strategy in competitive situations is rarely, if ever, easy. One reason is that the adversary seeks very different outcomes, and the interaction between the two sides is never predictable.20 The post–Cold War efforts by a succession of administrations to develop national security and defense strategies have been no exception.
After the 2001 strategy review, two topics dominated ONA’s work: the rise of China and the maturation of the revolution in military affairs, particularly as they related to the challenges that would arise in a mature precision-strike regime. From a net assessment perspective, China’s rise and the spread of nonnuclear precision munitions were intimately entwined. Over time China’s development of long-range precision strike capabilities would provide it with the means to begin shifting the military balance in the western Pacific progressively in its favor, increasing the risks that the PRC would one day be tempted to undertake coercive or aggressive acts against US allies and partners in the region.
China’s pursuit of A2/AD counterintervention capabilities was part of a wholesale military modernization effort that the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) began in the mid-1990s. But even before China’s A2/AD capabilities and military modernization grew into major concerns in the Pentagon, the issue of how best to cope with China’s economic resurgence became a political lightning rod. The impetus behind this controversy went back to the New York Times’s publication in March 1992 of excerpts from a classified draft of the Pentagon’s Defense Planning Guidance (DPG).21 By then the 1991 Persian Gulf War and the abrupt collapse of the USSR had made it clear to senior US policy makers that the era of containing Soviet power was over and the United States was at a historical turning point. This was reflected in a speech President Bush delivered at the Aspen Institute on August 2, 1990, in which he announced that by 1995 US active forces could be safely reduced by 25 percent. Unfortunately Bush’s effort to articulate a post–Cold War security strategy was immediately lost in the noise of Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, which began that same day.
The national security strategy that the White House published the month after the end of the 1991 Gulf War only mentioned what became known as the military’s Base Force as an afterthought. A more comprehensive formulation of a national security policy and defense strategy for the post–Cold War world was clearly needed. To address this Defense Secretary Dick Cheney and Paul Wolfowitz, Cheney’s undersecretary for policy, directed Wolfowitz’s deputy, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, to begin developing a DPG that would go beyond what Bush had enunciated at Aspen and in the administration’s earlier, March 1991, National Security Strategy.
Libby and others involved in drafting the new strategy looked at the Truman administration’s crafting of the containment policy and the Eisenhower administration’s development of massive retaliation. Both Truman’s NSC 68 (containment) and the Sol
arium exercise that led to Eisenhower’s NSC 162/2 (the “New Look” and massive retaliation) had been major efforts to formulate grand strategy at a critical juncture in US history. The DPG Libby and others drafted in 1992 offers a third example of government officials “attempting to step back and think strategically about the nation’s future at a very dramatic turning point in US foreign policy.”22
The tempest that followed the New York Times’s publication on March 8, 1992, of excerpts from the February 18 version of the DPG draft lost sight of this broader purpose. The headline and opening sentence of Patrick Tyler’s New York Times article highlighted the primary objective of the DPG’s proposed defense strategy as being “to ensure that no rival superpower is allowed to emerge in Western Europe, Asia or the territories of the former Soviet Union.”23 Critics, even thoughtful ones, read this statement as “an unrealizable attempt at imposing global hegemony in the face of a rising China.”24 This reading of the DPG suggested that the administration’s intent was for the United States to arrogate to itself the role of the world policeman and eschew collective security with allies and friends.
Later versions of the DPG were not leaked, and subsequent drafts moved further and further away from this interpretation. For example, the version forwarded to Cheney later in March instead emphasized US and allied efforts to “shape” the future security environment to “preclude hostile, nondemocratic domination of a region critical to” US interests, “and also thereby to strengthen the barriers against the reemergence of a global threat to the interests of the US and its allies.”25 Nine years later, in the Pentagon’s September 2001 Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR), the idea of shaping the future security environment so it would be less threatening emerged as the US policy goal of dissuading “adversaries from undertaking programs or operations that could threaten US interests or those of our allies and friends.”26 (The QDR’s other three policy goals were to assure friends and allies, deter threats to and coercion against US interests, and decisively defeat any adversary should deterrence fail.)
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