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US Defence Policy in an Age of Austerity Evolution and Key Tenets

in

Europa Regional Surveys 20124 – The USA and Canada

The USA

Essays (Public Affairs)

Alexandra Homolar

University of Warwick

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The US Founding Fathers were highly sceptical about the benefits of maintaining a

standing military, and they did not entertain the idea of establishing armed forces in

peacetime. In the early days of the USA, powerful domestic interests in the country also

opposed the establishment of a permanent, large military apparatus. Today, however, the USA

is the predominant military power in the world, maintaining a permanent, large defence sector

with a budget of over US $682,000m. (almost US $670,000m in constant 2011 prices). The

Pentagon is the largest employer in the world, and the USA operates hundreds of military

facilities across the globe in close to 150 countries, ranging from 10 sq m rooms with fewer

than 10 active duty personnel to large military bases with well over 1,000 active duty

personnel. Since its founding, the USA has undergone 11 `periods of war’ with other countries

and engaged in many further military operations, including small preventive military strikes,

hostage rescue attempts, peace-keeping missions and humanitarian interventions. Thus, US

defence policy has enormous societal and economic implications in both the US domestic

sphere and beyond its borders. Unsurprisingly, US defence policy tends to attract considerable

attention from domestic and international policy-makers and news media, and it is frequently

at the heart of debates on the USA’s power and the way in which it seeks to shape the

international environment.

Since the end of the Cold War, US defence policy has faced many challenges. After the fall

of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the American people expected a `peace dividend’, the Warsaw Pact

disintegrated and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) collapsed. A wave of violent

ethnic conflicts subsequently erupted across Europe and Africa, and nuclear weapons

proliferated horizontally to India, Pakistan and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea

(North Korea). At the beginning of the new millennium, the USA was attacked on its own soil

by al-Qa`ida militants in the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 (`9/11’), and has since been

engaged in fighting two major long-running armed conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. In turn,

contemporary US defence policy has undergone a number of significant changes. This includes

a transition from focusing on the security threats posed by other states towards broadening the

spectrum of concerns to encompass environmental, economic and humanitarian incidents as

well as a wide range of non-state actors such as transnational criminal organizations, terrorist

networks, and religious or political extremists. Today, with a decade of war and counter-

insurgencies coming to a close and faced with severe budgetary pressures fuelled by the

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effects of the global economic crisis, many national and international observers as well as

members of the US policy-making community see America’s defence establishment as being at

a historic turning point that is similar to the critical juncture presented by the end of the Cold

War in terms of the prospects for lowering the US defence burden.

This essay puts these broad trends in contemporary US defence policy into perspective.

The first section provides an overview of what the term `US defence policy’ refers to and how

it can be understood as a political process. The second section introduces an integral part of US

defence policy, the political economy of US defence planning, and examines it from a historical

perspective. This serves to highlight the intensity of public-private-military co-operation in the

USA’s war preparation and the effect that outsourcing US security has for US defence

planning in the 21st century. The third section investigates the Cold War origins of

contemporary US defence strategy and examines how planning for multiple wars has

remained a cornerstone of the country’s defence policy throughout the post-Cold War

interregnum and during the global `war on terror’. The final section explores the key

challenges and tenets of defending America in the age of austerity, with a specific focus on

new threats and capabilities. The conclusion relates the different aspects of US defence policy

back to the question of whether in the 21st century the USA has reached a point where a

departure from existing strategic models is likely, and argues that, if looked at in its broader

historical context, US defence policy is unlikely to change radically in the near future.

I. What Is US Defence Policy?

US defence policy is the military component of the wider national security agenda to

protect the USA, its citizenry and its interests. In essence, it is America’s approach to the

recruitment, training, organizing, equipping and deployment of the armed forces as well as

when, where and how to commit them. As such, US defence policy also includes the nuclear

posture of the USA—i.e. all dimensions of nuclear weapons including military capabilities,

arms control initiatives and non-proliferation strategies—and courses of action regarding

specific regions, countries and organizations.

The common sense understanding of US defence policy tends to imply a logical, almost

objective, causal relationship between America’s security objectives, threat scenarios and

defence strategy, and defence planning documents reinforce this view. Yet US defence policy

is not only a strategy to underwrite American national security interests with military force, it

is also a political process that was designed as such by the Founding Fathers in the US

Constitution through granting decision-making power in defence policy to both the executive

and the legislative branches. For instance, while the President holds the title of Commander-

in-Chief of the US Armed Forces and—with the approval of the Senate—appoints the civilian

and military leadership of the US defence establishment, including the Secretary of Defense

and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Congress was given the power to declare war and to provide for a

common defence. Moreover, while the executive branch is officially responsible for the

formulation and implementation of defence policy and proposes the defence budget, Congress

has oversight and investigative powers as well as the power of the purse as its most effective

means to shape US defence policy. Through Congress’s control over budgetary matters, it can

directly influence everyday defence policy decisions, and this division of authority over

military appraisal and resource allocation also has an impact on the formulation of defence

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strategy. Fiscal constraints on resource availability more generally place additional limits on

the ways in which the USA can militarily secure strategic objectives. The practice of US

defence planning is not simply an objective process of deploying resources to counter strategic

threats: the allocation of limited resources to the US defence establishment involves countless

policy compromises, including trade-offs between force structure, readiness and

modernization. Contrary to the perception that politics stops when it comes to the national

interest, defence policy is, like all areas of public policy in the USA, riddled with political

battles and the pursuit of self-interested agendas.

Taken as a whole, defence planning today is an intricate process that involves a wide range

of actors from within and outside the public sector in complex decision-making procedures

and intertwined structures. Academic observers often locate the historical sources of both the

flaws and qualities of US defence planning processes in the country’s mobilization for the

Second World War and defence policies during the Cold War. However, to fully account for

the complexity, size and inflexibility of the US defence policy apparatus, it is necessary to

examine its development through the country’s war-preparation efforts since the American

Revolution.

II. The Political Economy of US Defence Planning: A Historical Sketch

The organizational methods employed to mobilize a country’s economic resources to

prepare and engage in armed conflict are generally referred to as the political economy of war

preparation. The political economy of US war preparation and mobilization since the

American Revolution has gradually extended and institutionalized public-private military

collaboration, as well as contributing significantly to the growth of the US federal

Government.

From the American Revolution to the End of the Second World War

The origins of the US defence sector can be found in the latter stages of the American

colonial period in the second half of the 18th century. The war effort to fight the British Empire

during the American Revolution and the lessons learned from the political economy of war

preparation in the USA during the Civil War in the middle of the 19th century laid the

foundations for both a modern military apparatus and the institutionalization of government-

industry-military collaboration in the production of military equipment. In addition, attempts

to reform systems for the production and supply of military equipment during this period

gave rise to larger corporate enterprises such as the Remington Arms Company and Colt

Defense Weapon Systems (now Colt Defense)—with growing commercial interests in defence

contracts—and fostered greater collaboration and convergence of interests between the

military and private industry. By the start of the USA’s mobilization for the First World War,

more than a century of US preparation for armed conflict had led to the gradual

institutionalization of public-private-military collaboration to prepare for potential

engagement in armed conflict. It had also significantly increased both the size and scope of the

federal Government, including the establishment of a military apparatus that proved

increasingly resistant to attempts to dismantle it despite the traditional scepticism in American

society towards a standing army and a permanent military apparatus. Between the American

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Revolution and the end of the First World War, the US conception of what `defence’ entails

had also begun to move away from the narrow focus on protecting the territorial integrity of

the USA towards the conception that US national security involved global responsibilities and

thus international engagement.

By the start of the Second World War, the federal Government, business community and

military services had all developed complex, modern and professional structures, significantly

distinguishing the US mobilization effort for the Second World War from earlier campaigns

(Koistinen, 1980). For example, the revenue legislation enacted during the First World War

changed the nature of US taxation, because it established the basis for a permanent national

income tax system that affected increasing numbers of Americans more directly. Moreover, in

order to manufacture large quantities of technologically advanced and specialized military

hardware, the civilian economy was converted for defence purposes instead of merely

increasing its production capacity and diversifying its output. This required extensive

economic planning and regulation under the control of the federal Government, but because

existing government structures were insufficient to meet this task, new centralized

mobilization bodies were created. This increased the role of US business in the defence

planning process because not only did the Government lack the necessary personnel, expertise

and information, but US politicians were keen to ensure the co-operation of large sectors of

private industry.

During the Second World War, which represents America’s last major economic

mobilization effort for large-scale hostilities to date, the USA modified the model employed in

the First World War to increase effectiveness and to allow for more planning time prior to

major deployments of military manpower. It incorporated lessons learned through President

Franklin D. Roosevelt’s (1933–45) `New Deal’ (a series of economic-stimulus measures

implemented to combat the severe economic depression of the early 1930s) and adapted to

changes in the domestic and international environment, including the increased pace of

change in the technology of military hardware and aircraft. The Second World War

mobil­ization effort had a lasting legacy. For example, it settled previous areas of contention

between the military, private industry and the federal Government on how to prepare the

economy for war. It also led to the reorganization and expansion of the War Department,

laying the foundations for both a system of dual civilian-military responsibility that remains a

feature of the US weapons procurement system and the creation of an independent air force as

a cornerstone of US post-Second World War defence strategy. Perhaps most importantly, the

Second World War also entrenched the gradual shift in US defence policy away from a focus

on defending the country’s borders and shores (defensive capabilities) to that of a global

military mission and international engagement (offensive capabilities).

The Cold War and the End of the `American Century’

With the beginning of the Cold War, the approach of US defence planning to rely upon the

`arsenal of democracy’—the conversion of the civilian economy should America engage in

armed conflict, which could then be re-converted at the end of hostilities—was abolished in

favour of a dedicated defence industrial base to keep pace with technological advancement

and complexity in modern warfare. As a result, the ever-growing demands of modern warfare

during the Cold War superpower hostilities with the USSR created a permanent split in

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America’s industrial base between a civilian economy and a segmented military sector. This

gave rise to highly specialized defence contractors operating in a protected industry, with a

guaranteed market for their goods and sheltered from foreign competition. Their main source

of generating profits was contracts with the US federal Government, while the Government, in

turn, had to rely on private industry to supply military equipment for national defence. This

cemented the conditions of mutual dependency between the Government and private industry

that had gradually evolved since the American Revolution.

When the Berlin Wall came down in 1989 after 40 years of superpower hostilities with the

USSR, the USA’s defence industrial base consisted of prime contractors and sub-contractors

that were too specialized to move back into commercial markets. Thus, when economic

experts predicted major cuts in defence contracts at the end of the Cold War, nearly 7m.

employees of the US defence industrial base faced an uncertain future. Defence analysts

expected these contractors to minimize the impact of the changes by using their profits, skilled

workforce and technologies to develop their product lines and market orientation beyond the

defence sector, and to scale down both in size and dependency on the US Government, while

fostering the dual use of military technology. Yet despite the demise of the USSR as the USA’s

sole peer competitor in military power, US defence planning during the 1990s continued to be

based on the maintenance of a `hot’ production capacity and the development of next-

generation systems in all major weapons categories simultaneously and under tight budget

constraints. Although entering a `procurement holiday’ by skipping one generation of

weapons systems, unit acquisition costs still needed to decrease in order to achieve this goal in

the new post-Cold War fiscal reality.

The path chosen by the Administration of Bill Clinton (1993–2001) during the 1990s sought

to reform the weapons acquisitions process to make it more economically efficient. Since the

Second World War the US procurement system had been operated according to a contracting

framework that essentially rewarded cost overruns, and this was to be modified to mirror the

competitive, price-sensitive practices used in commercial industry, in order to achieve greater

economies of scale and innovation in the defence industrial base. Paradoxically, this was

achieved through fostering industry consolidation by subsidizing mergers and acquisitions.

However, the consequences of this process were exactly the opposite of those intended by the

Clinton Administration. Despite reducing their overhead costs and laying off millions of

employees, what had formerly been partially defence-dependent firms that did not enter the

commercial sector were now merged into a smaller number of highly defence-dependent

companies that aggressively entered the global arms market in order to soften the impact of

reduced budgets and demand from the US Government, effectively decreasing competition

between contractors. As these industrial giants tended to operate on plant efficiency levels of

less than 35% (compared with 85% in commercial-sector companies), this led to an immense

build-up of excess capacity and, paradoxically, increased the price tag for their products.

Overall, the measures taken to reform the US defence industry during the 1990s increased

rather than reduced the conditions of mutual dependence between the US Government,

defence corporations and the armed forces. Forged through two centuries of public-private-

military collaboration in the political economy of US war preparation, this interdependence

outlasted the end of the Cold War and has continued to be a defining feature of contemporary

US defence policy.

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Outsourcing US Security in the 21st Century

At the turn of the century, the US defence industrial base—like America’s commercial

sector—entered an era of rapid technological change and an increased pace of

internationalization, with smaller but more diverse production runs. The emergence of new

warfare concepts based on technological advances—such as Network Centric Warfare, Cyber

Warfare and Effects-Based Operations—which were integral to the Department of Defense’s

so-called Revolution in Military Affairs in the 1990s, and the subsequent battleground

experience of US troops in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, have altered the system demands

by the US armed forces. Contemporary US military strategy demands defence industrial

capabilities for the production not only of precision weaponry, but also of advanced

communication systems, unmanned systems and force protection systems that need to be

integrative across the services and their diverse war-fighting systems. Among other things,

this is essential to manage complex ground combat environments in which the differentiation

between civilians and combatants may not be obvious.

The US defence industrial base has continued to remain a central pillar of US military

power. Yet the companies that continued with the `defence business’ after the post-Cold War

consolidation process were both fewer in number and larger than ever before. The

contemporary US defence industrial base is a world-wide complex that consists of a handful of

large prime contractors (Boeing, Raytheon, Northrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin and

General Dynamics) that operate a network of countless subsidiaries and sub-contractors. Thus,

while the US Department of Homeland Security states that more that 100,000 companies and

sub-contractors perform under contracts with the Pentagon in addition to its government-

owned or -operated facilities, the number of firms that can act as prime contractors for a

particular weapons system is now often limited to two or three candidates, and in many cases

only one company has the required capabilities. This, of course, has further increased the

mutual dependence between the Department of Defense and supplier monopolies or

oligopolies, as well as the lobbying influence of individual defence corporations. Indeed,

industry consolidation and the concentration of market power in the defence sector has

continued to be a key factor contributing to cost overruns, quality deficiencies and significant

delays of weapons systems on which the US Government relies.

A further significant trend in the political economy of US war preparation has been the

increasing reliance on private military corporations (PMCs). Throughout the history of US war

preparation, the US armed services, and in particular the army, have relied on the support of

civilian contractors for supplies and services, including logistics. In the mid-1990s, however,

when the US defence industrial base consolidated and the US military drastically reduced its

active duty personnel, the USA’s private security industry boomed and was able to take

advantage of a large recruiting pool to satisfy its greater need for skilled security personnel.

Since the early 1990s the number and range of contracts awarded by the US Government to

PMCs has also increased dramatically. Today, PMCs under contract with the US Government

provide training for peace-keepers, safeguard post-conflict reconstruction projects, construct

and run military bases, guard government employees, support disaster relief operations,

gather intelligence, escort military supply convoys, and have engaged in peace and stability

operations across the globe from Somalia and Kosovo to Haiti and Darfur, Iraq and

Afghanistan. PMCs such as Blackwater Worldwide also carried out many clandestine

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unmanned vehicle operations in Iraq between 2004 and 2006, and are now involved in the

controversial deployment by the Administration of President Barack Obama (2009–) of

remotely piloted aircraft and unmanned aerial vehicles (commonly referred to as `drones’)

against terrorist networks. The outsourcing of US security to PMCs can have potential benefits

such as minimizing US casualties while increasing political and military flexibility through the

ability to sub-contract specialist expertise. At the same time, the performance of military duties

by PMCs in conflict zones has continuously raised financial, ethical, legal, transparency and

accountability concerns. Until 2007, for example, PMCs were not subject to the US Uniform

Code of Military Justice (UCMJ), the consequences of which were brought to public attention

most prominently through the torture scandal in Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison. While the UCMJ

has now been altered to include private security companies and their personnel, this has been

done in such a broad fashion that it remains highly problematic since the Code now applies to

all persons accompanying the US military during a contingency or military operation.

In addition to both national and international legal concerns, PMCs face limited public and

intergovernmental accountability. For instance, congressional oversight over PMC contracts is

restricted, as the executive has no formal legal obligation to inform US lawmakers about

contracts below US $50m. In addition, while PMC contracts with the US Central Intelligence

Agency do not generally fall under the State Department’s licensing system for the use of

PMCs outside US territory, loopholes in the system are frequently used by the Pentagon to

circumvent the licensing process. This may help the US Government to shift defence

expenditures, risks and culpability for mistakes `off the books’ by hiding it from Congress and,

by extension, the news media and broader public. However, PMCs are commercial companies

that do not fall under the control of the US Government, and this raises significant issues

concerning civilian control of military operations and civil-military relations more generally.

Since the large-scale military operations carried out by PMCs are generally in the hands of a

select group of large contractors including Engility (formerly MPRI), Vinnell, DynCorp

International and KBR, the private security sector entails minimal competition. In this respect,

the private security sector mirrors the USA’s post-Cold War defence industrial base, and thus

shares many of the same problems in terms of accountability, political influence, cost-

effectiveness and democratic responsiveness. In short, despite its attractions for many policy-

makers, the increasing tendency to outsource security in contemporary US defence policy does

not necessarily represent a cheaper alternative in terms of either financial or political costs.

III. The Evolution of US Post-Cold War Defence Strategy

A key challenge in US defence policy-making is the development of a defence strategy that

translates the broad sketch of perceived threats to national security objectives (generally

provided by the USA’s civilian leadership) into specific military requirements through a

detailed force-planning framework. Such frameworks tend to clarify the strategic context of US

defence policy through outlining military requirements based on identifying who the potential

future adversaries might be, what they could do, in which regions aggression could occur, and

how the military would have to be structured and equipped to carry out an appropriate

military response. As the following discussion shows, since the end of the Second World War

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US defence strategy has remained remarkably constant, despite significant changes in the

international environment.

The Cold War Origins of Contemporary Defence Strategy

Throughout the Cold War the principal threat to US national security objectives was

located in Soviet expansionism and aggression combined with communist ideology. The core

strategic context for US defence policy was thus fairly clear-cut. Despite changes in US

political leadership, due to the Soviet threat US defence policy-making was marked by a high

degree of stability and continuity, which allowed the USA to rely on incremental modifications

of its strategy of containment. In particular, US defence policy-making emphasized two main

pillars to achieve national security objectives that remain central elements of defence policy

today: (i) a credible strategic and tactical nuclear deterrent; and (ii) large conventional war

capabilities.

As John L. Gaddis (2005) has prominently suggested, soon after the beginning of the Cold

War, US containment strategy generally shifted between approaches that concentrated on

defending either: (a) `vital regions’; or (b) `vital regions’ plus the `periphery’. An example of

the geographically more limited approach was the political scientist George F. Kennan’s idea

of a `strongpoint’ defence, which advocated defence of the centres of industrial and military

capacity that had not fallen under Soviet control rather than defending areas that would not

pose an immediate threat to US national security objectives if lost. In contrast, President John

F. Kennedy’s defence strategy (1961–63) emphasized the concept of `perimeter defence’, which

meant that the USA would `deter all wars, general or limited, nuclear or conventional, large or

small—to convince all potential aggressors that any attack would be futile’. To contain the

USSR effectively, US Cold War defence planning also shifted between symmetrical and

asymmetrical responses to Soviet aggression. Examples of an asymmetrical approach to

defence planning to contain Soviet expansionism include Kennan’s idea of economic aid to

rebuild Western Europe, as well as President Eisenhower’s focus on nuclear deterrence based

on massive retaliation rather than conventional war capabilities.

Detailed force-planning frameworks during the Cold War centred on selecting strategic

imperatives and defence priorities based on identifying conflict scenarios that envisioned the

USSR as the aggressor—or one of its communist allies. Especially following President

Kennedy’s idea of `flexible response’ to reduce the likelihood of a nuclear war, which

underwrote the second pillar of US defence policy (large conventional war capabilities), US

Cold War force planning centred on scenarios that envisaged concurrent US conventional war

commitments in more than one contingency. Kennedy’s Secretary of Defense, Robert

McNamara, for example, advocated a conservative and cost-intensive `two-and-one-half-war’

framework to determine the size and structure of the US armed forces. After the collapse of the

Sino-Soviet Alliance in 1963, the Administrations of Presidents Richard Nixon (1969–74),

Gerald Ford (1974–77) and Jimmy Carter (1977–81) settled for conventional war capabilities to

deal with only one major and one minor regional contingency. While they also gradually

moved US force planning away from restrictive geographical localization of the potential

regional contingencies, the requirement to be able to defend Western Europe against the USSR

and to fight a global war against the `evil empire’ remained at the heart of US force planning

throughout the Cold War.

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Planning for Multiple Wars

The end of the Cold War replaced nearly half a century of conflict between two

ideologically opposed superpowers with the emergence of a unipolar international order

centred on US hegemony. The major consequence of this rupture in the international system

for the making of US defence policy was that defence strategy—and therefore military

missions, means and capabilities—could no longer be derived from the threat posed to

national security by the USSR and international communism. In short, the threat scenarios that

had underpinned US force planning based on multiple regional contingencies for 40 years

were now obsolete. Defence analysts described this loss of the key rationale guiding US

defence planning as a `peace shock’.

In the early 1990s many US policy-makers and members of the defence establishment

highlighted the fundamental nature of the changes in the international system brought about

by the end of the Cold War. Yet they soon began to express uncertainty and scepticism about

the idea that this would lead to a more peaceful international system. Instead, they argued that

the end of the Cold War created new and more complex threats to US national security, while

the threat that the confrontation with the USSR had posed to national security was declared

`familiar’ and `predictable’. However, despite redefining the post-Cold War landscape in

terms of uncertainty and threats, the US defence establishment’s process of developing a post-

Cold War strategy in the early 1990s that could guide the development of a new force planning

framework was riddled with politics, with its future orientation pulled in different directions

by groups of actors that each pursued contrasting sets of interests.

The medium through which these competing agendas were gradually reconciled was a

series of formal defence policy reviews during the decade after the end of the Cold War under

both the Administrations of President George H. W. Bush (1989–93) and of Bill Clinton. Key

policy reviews included the Base Force, which was devised between 1989 and 1992 by Gen.

Colin Powell in his capacity as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; the 1993 Bottom-Up

Review, developed by President Clinton’s first Secretary of Defense and former Congressman,

Les Aspin, Jr; and the first Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) in 1996, developed by

Clinton’s third Secretary of Defense, William S. Cohen. However, rather than heralding a

radical departure from the main pillars of US Cold War defence policy, these reviews initiated

a process of redefining national security objectives and repackaging existing defence priorities

that left many of the core elements of that defence strategy intact.

This continuity became possible through the emergence of a new strategic consensus to

base the structure, size and equipment of the US armed forces on two overarching

requirements that still underpin US defence policy today: (i) the preservation of overwhelming

US military power to guard against the emergence of a future peer competitor; and (ii) the

maintenance of adequate conventional war capabilities to fight at least two major regional

contingencies simultaneously. Threat scenarios that envisioned a resurgent USSR initially

underwrote the first requirement, but after the USSR’s collapse at the end of 1991 their focus

was reoriented towards a regional great power rival, implicitly treating the People’s Republic

of China as a future peer competitor. Since its reintroduction to US defence policy after the

Cold War, the second requirement has been underwritten by threat scenarios that centre on

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those non-democratic `Third World’ regimes that refuse to abide by existing international

norms of state behaviour—most prominently these have been labelled as `rogue states’.

US defence policy could potentially have taken a number of directions after the fall of the

Berlin Wall in 1989. Although most US military operations during the 1990s involved small-

scale contingencies and peace-keeping interventions, these were not at the forefront of the

country’s revamped defence strategy. Instead, by centring US defence strategy from the early

1990s on the same force planning requirements translated into a post-Cold War security

environment, existing strategic models were realigned with new threat scenarios, which

preserved much of the status quo and largely allowed the continuation of business as usual.

Defence Strategy during the Global `War on Terror’

Given the immobility and resistance of the US defence apparatus with respect to efforts to

move away from Cold War force-planning frameworks, strategic models and war-fighting

capabilities despite such a fundamental change in the international system, it is perhaps

unsurprising that defence planning in the 21st century did not entail a radical change. The first

revision of US defence policy in the new millennium under President George W. Bush (2001–

09) was published less than three weeks after the `9/11’ terrorist attacks, and most of it had

been drawn up well before. The 2001 QDR was a top-down report with decisions on strategy,

forces, capabilities and risks based on months of deliberations among senior members of the

Department of Defense. While the 2001 QDR continued to base force planning on the need to

guard against a peer competitor and the ability to fight two major regional

contingencies/theatre wars, it made four significant changes.

First, the new strategy devoted more attention to the future possibility of a peer military

competitor, and while the previous QDR referred to an unnamed regional great power rival,

the 2001 QDR specifically entertained the idea of emerging large-scale military competition in

East Asia. Second, the multiple regional contingencies approach at the start of the Bush

Administration shifted US defence planning away from a focus on who the potential

adversaries might be and where aggression could occur towards how they might fight. It

identified the need for a portfolio of US defence capabilities that was robust across the

spectrum of possible force requirements, both functional and geographical, which could deter

and defeat adversaries who relied on surprise, deception and asymmetric warfare to achieve

their objectives. Third, the 2001 QDR enhanced the objectives for a potential engagement in

multiple theatre wars. In addition to seeking a decisive victory, the Administration of George

W. Bush aimed for the decisive defeat of adversaries in one theatre while planning for military

regime change and long-term US occupation of foreign territory in the second theatre. Finally,

like the defence strategies of the Reagan and George H. W. Bush Administrations and in

contrast to that of the Clinton Administration, the 2001 QDR placed a distinct emphasis on

traditional war-fighting capabilities, and did not contain any reference to peace-keeping, peace

enforcement, enforcement of sanctions, preventative deployments, disaster relief or

humanitarian operations. Instead, US military strength was seen as the quintessential tool to

achieving the goals of promoting peace, sustaining freedom and encouraging prosperity.

The latter Bush Administration expanded these defence strategy changes in the 2002

National Security Strategy. In addition to the promotion of democratic values, the expansion

of free markets and the increase of global economic wealth as the principal means to maintain

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and enhance US security, the document laid out what later became known as the `Bush

Doctrine’, which based US defence policy on two main pillars. The first was the principle of

preventive self-defence (which was referred to as pre-emption in order to reflect compliance

with international law) to counter the danger posed by terrorists and rogue states potentially

armed with weapons of mass destruction. The second involved spreading democracy across

the globe, if necessary through the use of military force to foster regime change. The first

National Security Strategy of the new millennium also emphasized the USA’s willingness to

act unilaterally and enshrined a `with us or against us’ logic in the Bush Administration’s `war

on terror’. In order to underwrite the new strategy militarily, US defence planning was

extended to encompass conventional war-fighting capabilities for more than two major theatre

wars while maintaining military superiority to prevent the rise of a peer competitor.

The Bush Administration’s second QDR, issued in 2006, was written at a time when the

USA had put the multiple major theatre planning approach into practice. After using military

force in October 2001 to remove the Taliban regime from power in Afghanistan as a first

response to the `9/11’ terrorist attacks, the USA launched the controversial war in Iraq in

March 2003 ostensibly to pre-empt Saddam Hussain from attacking the USA with weapons of

mass destruction at some future point and to address an exigent humanitarian emergency.

However, contrary to post-Cold War defence planning expectations, neither wars required the

large conventional war-fighting capabilities the USA had anticipated, and the country has

instead been engaged in a decade-long asymmetric conflict, conducting counter-insurgency

operations with troops that were originally insufficiently trained and ill-equipped for such

operations. The 2006 QDR sought to address these deficiencies, which were to a significant

extent rooted in a mismatch between US defence strategy and force planning and the missions

in which the US military had actually engaged during the 1990s, including peace-keeping

operations and counter-insurgency campaigns in Eastern Europe and Central and East Africa.

In line with the 2005 National Defense Strategy, the 2006 QDR thus sought to reorient US

defence capabilities to address non-traditional, asymmetric challenges such as irregular

warfare, including terrorism that utilizes weapons of mass destruction, and other `disruptive’

threats to the ability of the USA to project power abroad—in addition to maintaining

predominance in traditional inter-state warfare. In order to fight what policy-makers in the

Bush Administration referred to as the `Long War’, defence planning was now stated to be

centred on four strategic priories: the defeat of terrorist networks, including but not limited to

al-Qa`ida; defending the American homeland in depth; shaping the choices of emerging and

major countries at strategic crossroads (implying China); and preventing hostile states and

non-state actors from acquiring or using weapons of mass destruction. In practice, this

reorientation entailed little change in the force planning framework, because the two key

requirements that were carried over from the Cold War into the 1990s and beyond have

remained at its core.

While maintaining the capabilities to prevent the rise of a peer competitor, the 2006 QDR

set out the need for capabilities and forces to wage multiple campaigns simultaneously with

little or no prior warning. In order to address the deficiencies encountered through the

military engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan, this now included the ability to conduct a

large-scale and long irregular warfare campaign, including counter-insurgency as well as

security, stability, transition and reconstruction operations rather than a quick `shock and awe’

12

conventional military campaign. It also entailed building more defence capacities oriented

towards a greater emphasis on highly mobile expeditionary operations utilizing more austere

bases abroad, a shift from focusing primarily on traditional combat operations towards a

greater capability to deal with asymmetric challenges, and moving towards an integrated joint

force capable of carrying out interdependent operations. These transformational changes have

continued after President Obama took office in January 2009.

IV. Defending America in the Age of Austerity

US defence policy under President George W. Bush spurred debates about a new form of

US imperialism. Obama’s `mandate for change’, in turn, was connected to the expectation that

with his election the USA would reinterpret its national security interests as well as the means

to achieve them. In particular, Obama’s presidency hoped to reverse the Bush

Administration’s ingrained preference for a unilateralist approach, and its reliance on military

force and ad hoc alliances to defend the USA’s interests at home and abroad through a

restoration of US multilateralism and engagement in international institutions. The early

award of the Nobel Peace Prize to President Obama in 2009 is probably the clearest expression

of these widespread hopes for a more diplomatic and multilateral character of US international

engagement. Yet Obama’s first term in office has led to a change in US defence policy in

nuance rather than in scale, despite the severe budgetary restraints in the aftermath of the

global economic crisis. Towards the end of Obama’s first term in office and at the end of a

more than a decade of war and asymmetric conflict, many observers saw the US defence

establishment as being at a historic turning point not too dissimilar from the end of the Cold

War. The following overview on contemporary and emerging defence trends as well as the

impact of the austerity measures under the 2011 Budget Control Act on defence planning

suggests that this is unlikely.

Counter-Proliferation and Counter-Terrorism

Despite a high degree of continuity in central force planning requirements, US post-Cold

War defence policy has also undergone significant changes, including in the area of non-

proliferation strategies. For example, while the main non-proliferation concern until the end of

the Cold War centred on preventing the proliferation of nuclear weapons, with the emergence

of the rogue states threat scenario the focus shifted towards the broader concept of weapons of

mass destruction. In addition, `counter-proliferation’ gradually replaced non-proliferation as

the principal US strategy to prevent the spread of chemical, biological, radiological and

nuclear weapons. In contrast to Cold War efforts to halt the vertical and horizontal

proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, contemporary US counter-proliferation efforts

are aimed at preventing the horizontal proliferation of such weapons, and they stress the

importance of proactive, preventative and unilateral military approaches, rather than

collective approaches, to arms control and disarmament or multilateral non-proliferation

regimes.

Compared with his predecessor, however, President Obama has again put significant

emphasis on a multilateral `style’ in finding co-operative solutions to the problems that

nuclear weapons pose to governing international security. He expressed a strong preference to

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move gradually towards the end goal of `global zero’, a nuclear weapons-free world. Yet,

apart from successfully negotiating a new Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty with Russia,

which was signed in April 2010, this has not resulted in concrete policy outcomes, such as the

reform of existing international institutions, the creation of new ones, or achieving the passage

of legislation (such as the ratification of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty). Obama

did, however, reorientate the official role of nuclear weapons in US security policy: the 2010

Nuclear Posture Review redefines US nuclear policy in comparison to the Bush

Administration by renouncing the development of new nuclear weapons and shoring up the

importance of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (the Non-Proliferation

Treaty—NPT) by explicitly ruling out a US nuclear attack against states without nuclear

weapons that are compliant with their NPT obligations. At the same time, the Obama

Administration has continued to maintain a missile defence system at the heart of the USA’s

counter-proliferation portfolio.

In his first presidential campaign, Obama raised expectations that he would reverse many

unpopular features of his predecessor’s approach to counter-terrorism and to base it firmly

within US legal and moral traditions. In contemporary US defence policy, however, counter-

terrorism remains as a central feature of strategic planning as the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq

are winding down, with much of the essence of the Bush Administration’s counter-terrorism

strategy still intact. Of particular importance here is that, while the Obama Administration has

carried forward many of the policies initiated under Bush, Obama’s approach has begun to

transform and reorient US counter-terrorism strategy. For example, Obama has sought to

depart from the costly and unpopular large-scale and long-term `counter-insurgency

operations’ (or COIN) of his predecessor and included a much stronger focus on the needs of

the troops on the ground, in particular in conflict environments with no clear battlefield and

where the differentiation between combatants and non-combatants is not clear-cut. In

addition, the Obama Administration has given the idea of resilience through protecting

critical, cyber and national infrastructure a prominent place in US defence policy, mostly

under the direction of the Department of Homeland Security.

At the same time, the Obama Administration has continued the controversial `kill or

capture’ counter-terrorism campaign that the Bush Administration had initiated after the `9/11’

attacks through the use of drones. Indeed, especially after the al-Qa`ida leader, Osama bin

Laden, was killed in a US raid in Pakistan in May 2011, and another high-ranking member of

the militant organization was killed during a drone strike in Mir Ali, North Waziristan in June

2012, the Obama Administration has further escalated the number of drone strikes and is now

increasingly targeting `foot soldiers’ rather than the leadership of terrorist networks. Such

drone-based targeted killing has been central to Obama’s focus on `counter-terrorism after

counter-insurgency’, and it may also be a relatively quick and cost-effective alternative to

engaging in counter-insurgencies in order to neutralize al-Qa`ida (see Boyle, 2010, for an

overview on why counter-terrorism might be incompatible with counter-insurgencies).

Yet despite little public attention in the USA on the negative side-effects, drone killings

have a number of unintended consequences that may harm US security in the future. For

example, in addition to the legality, accountability, oversight and ethical concerns that are

raised by the use of drones to kill alleged militants, a 2012 study on `The Civilian Impact of

Drones’ by the Human Rights Clinic at Columbia Law School and the Center for Civilians in

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Conflict found that the number of civilian casualties is high and that the drone strikes also

adversely affect the functioning of whole communities, both of which fuels anger towards the

USA in the aggregate. In addition, while the USA currently enjoys technological superiority in

the area of drone warfare, the ongoing extensive use of such weapons as a cornerstone of the

USA’s contemporary counter-terrorism strategy, without appropriate domestic or

international legal frameworks, may spur an arms race in the development of drone

technology to counter the US strategic advantage or to inflict terror among civilian

populations.

Refocusing Threats - Rebalancing Regions?

During the 1990s President Clinton’s defence policy emphasized the major regional

contingencies approach and preventing the rise of a future peer competitor as the primary

determinants of the structure, size and capabilities of US conventional and nuclear forces. At

the same, the Clinton Administration stressed the need to be prepared to use the US military

in a wide-range of other missions. In addition to combating terrorism through prevention,

deterrence and punishment, fighting drugs-trafficking was given a prominent place in

Clinton’s 1996 National Security Strategy of Engagement and Enlargement. While an

important aspect of US defence policy prior to the end of the Cold War, in particular under the

Reagan Administration, this shifted the strategy from an emphasis on transit interdiction to a

broader and co-operative approach that included building institutional and political

infrastructure in source countries. Other key elements of President Clinton’s approach to

defence were a focus on fostering sustainable development, energy security, democracy

promotion and economic security at home and abroad, as well as addressing the dangers of

climate change. The acknowledgment of a wide spectrum of potential threats to US national

security mirrored the way in which the study of international security moved away from

focusing primarily on interstate military conflict.

In contemporary US defence policy, a new prominent threat included in key strategy

documents is humanitarian emergencies, in particular mass atrocities. Spurred by prominent

cases of ethnic cleansing and genocide during the 1990s, such as Somalia, Haiti, Rwanda, East

Timor, Bosnia, Kosovo, and most recently Darfur and Syria (in some of which President

Clinton resorted to the use of military force), questions about how best to respond to

humanitarian emergencies generated by severe government repression and intrastate conflict

have been a matter of intense debate especially since the end of the Cold War. The idea that

the international community has a moral obligation to intervene—including through the use of

military force—to halt severe human rights violations, and thus to violate a core principle of

the Westphalian order, state sovereignty, gained added momentum at the beginning of the

21st century. The idea of a `responsibility to protect’ gained increasing international legitimacy

through the Bush Administration’s attempt to legitimize the 2003 invasion of Iraq as a

response to an exigent humanitarian emergency, and when the USA began to embed the

drawing of a causal link between the prosecution of the `war on terror’ and the problem of

`failed states’ into US defence policy.

The US role in the 2011 multilateral military intervention in Libya—prompted by the

violent response of the regime of Col Muammar al-Qaddafi to domestic anti-Government

protests during the so-called `Arab Spring’—was a limited one: Obama authorized the

15

deployment of US military resources to enforce a UN-mandated `no-fly zone’ in Libya, but the

President encouraged other nations (notably France and the United Kingdom) to take the

operational lead. While the Obama administration characterized this approach as `leading

from behind’ and justified it with references to the high levels of opposition to US military

action that the Bush administration had faced, critics saw weakness and indecision on the part

of the President. However, the Obama Administration has yet to take a clear and

unambiguous position on when to intervene militarily in distant conflicts where US security

interests may not be directly at stake, and where US inaction to prevent severe human rights

violations has the potential to embolden criticism of America’s global leadership.This has been

made painstrikingly prominent in the US reaction and international debate over a military

intervention in Syria after the confirmed use of Sarin gas in the fight betwenn rebels and

government forces. At the same time, President Obama has frequently articulated a strong

belief that the use of military force can be justified on humanitarian grounds, and the 2010

QDR emphasized that the US Department of Defense must be prepared to support and

stabilize fragile states facing serious internal threats, and preventing human suffering due to

mass atrocities or large-scale natural disasters abroad. Similarly, the 2009 Capstone Concept

for Joint Operations (CCJO) also outlined an important role for the US armed forces in

responding to crisis and disaster to alleviate human suffering and promote peace.

Like his predecessor, President Obama has incorporated the idea of `failing states’ and the

potential need to intervene (militarily) as a key aspect of US defence policy. The 2009 CCJO

locates the importance of capabilities to address the problem of state failure in the context of

domestic consequences (specifically, that populations could become more susceptible to social

movements based on ethnic or religious loyalties) and the spillover effects this may have in

terms of humanitarian crises and internal or cross-border armed conflict. This illustrates how

the Obama Administration has begun to incorporate key aspects of the principle of the

`responsibility to protect’ in the case of humanitarian emergencies into major policy

documents. At the same time, through the concept of `co-operative security’, the Obama

Administration has acknowledged the limitations that any one country faces in responding to

such humanitarian emergencies, and has accepted the need to establish arrangements that

enable the USA to share the burden of maintaining security and stability world-wide. As the

2009 CCJO explains, co-operative security aims at maintaining or strengthening the global

security framework of the USA and its partners, and involves a comprehensive set of actions

among a broad spectrum of co-operative actors that maintains or enhances stability, prevents

or mitigates crises, and facilitates other operations when crises occur. However, for the US

concept of `co-operative security’ to lead to the development of a new form of multilateral

governance with respect to humanitarian crises will require a longer-term process of

deliberately decoupling humanitarian interventions from military actions pursued under the

rubric of global norms for strategic national interests.

The US government under President Obama has not only sought to promote the

refocusing of US defence policy towards a wider spectrum of threats but also pursued the

rebalancing of America’s regional focus. In 2010, the Obama administration had announced a

‘pivot’ to Asia in order to reverse decades of neglecting this region. The Asia pivot has entailed

a shift in America’s strategic focus towards renewing military ties with traditional partners in

the region, such as Thailand, the Philippines, Singapore, and Burma as well as to work more

16

closely with the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) countries – of which China

is not a part – and expanding US naval presence in the Asia Pacific region. In late October

2011, then Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta confirmed this strategic shift during a visit of

Yokota Air Base in Tokyo that ‘the United States is going to remain a presence in the Pacific for

a long time’ and, in June the following year in Singapore that the USA would bring ‘enhanced

capabilities to this vital region.’ One month later, then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton

argued in a Foreign Policy article entitled ‘America’s Pacific Century’ that the time had now

come for the USA to make commitments as a ‘Pacific power’ to the region similar to the

transatlantic relationships and networks after World War II, which she expected will yield

‘dividends for continued American leadership’.

Soon after Barack Obama was re-elected to serve a second term as US President, he

renewed his commitment to the region by commencing on his first post-election trip in

Southeast Asia. Yet, as Lisa Aronsson pointed out in a RUSI Newsbrief following Obama’s

election victory in November 2012, during his administration’s first term the Asia pivot

consisted largely of rhetorical pledges, taking only ‘a few small steps towards implementing

its Asia Strategy’. Nevertheless, many commentators have seen the increased attention paid in

particular to Southeast Asia as an attempt to countering China’s growing influence in the

region, both militarily and economically. Many traditional US allies have perceived the

geographical shift towards the Asia Pacific region as a refocusing of US security policy away

from Europe and the Middle East – partially welcoming this move, partially criticizing the

USA’s rebalancing of American defence strategy.

Joint Force 2020 and the Sequester

In mid-2000, while the presidential election campaign between President Clinton’s Vice-

President, Al Gore, and the Governor of Texas, George W. Bush, began to intensify, the

Department of Defense released its vision for how the USA could address future threats

through `full spectrum dominance’. This Joint Vision 2010 centred on the `cumulative effect of

dominance in the air, land, maritime and space domains’ as well as in the information

environment `that permits the conduct of joint operations without effective opposition or

prohibitive interference’. In particular through President Bush’s unilateral and militarized

approach to foreign policy the concept of full spectrum dominance received considerable

criticism.

On 2 October 2012 the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Martin E. Dempsey,

supported by President Obama, released the 2012 Capstone Concept for Joint Operations

(CCJO) as an updated vision for the roles, missions and capabilities of US armed forces as a

whole. The 2012 CCJO integrates the Obama Administration’s approach to counter-terrorism,

counter-insurgencies and counter-proliferation, as well as the widened spectrum of threats

that were outlined in previous planning documents, including the 2010 QDR and the 2009

CCJO, for example; it also incorporates Obama’s vision for a Joint Force 2020. The CCJO thus

supports and underwrites the new defence strategic guidance published by the Obama

Administration in January 2012, entitled Sustaining US Global Leadership Priorities for 21st

Century Defense, which had identified 20 principal missions through which the Joint Force

would protect US national security interests. These include key elements of US post-Cold War

and post-9/11 defence policy such as to counter terrorism and irregular warfare, deter and

17

defeat aggression, project power despite anti-access/area denial challenges, counter weapons

of mass destruction, and maintain a safe, secure and effective nuclear deterrent, as well as to

conduct stability and counter-insurgency operations. In addition, the missions of the Joint

Force 2020 now explicitly encompass addressing new threats and vulnerabilities such as to

operate effectively in cyberspace and space, defend the homeland and provide support to civil

authorities, provide a stabilizing presence across the globe, and conduct humanitarian,

disaster relief and other operations.

At the core of the new Joint Force 2020 lies an agile, flexible and globally postured US joint

force that conducts operations with integrated capabilities from all elements of the US armed

forces and allied nations—across what Corps Lt-Gen. George J. Flynn, the Director of Joint

Force Development on the Joint Staff, referred to as domains, echelons, geographic boundaries

and organizational affiliations. The vision for a Joint Force 2020 continues the focus on

technological superiority on the battlefield. However, the document emphasizes that the

`conduct of military operations remains a fundamentally human enterprise’, that the use of

military force is only one of many aspects of US national power, and that co-operation with

non-defence US governmental agencies, international allies and non-governmental

organizations will often be the key to strategic success. Joint Force 2020 will be smaller, taking

into account that a decade of US engagement in asymmetric warfare with significant US

casualties is now drawing to a close. It also seeks to share the financial burden and human

costs of US defence policy domestically and internationally . While it therefore already

represents a response to the new fiscal realities more limited defence budgets, the austerity

measures put in place by US Congress to manage the US government deficit will necessitate

further efforts to ground 21st century US force planning to 21st century fiscal realities

In the early days of August 2011, the United States was close to going into sovereign

default over on-going debates within and between different branches of US government over

government spending, the debt ceiling, and national debt more broadly. This means that

during this ‘debt-ceiling crisis’ the USA nearly failed to pay in the interest on its debt or

principal of US treasury securities on time. Such sovereign default could have had severe

consequences through the resulting damage in reputation, including higher interest rates and

increased difficulty to obtain new credit. It is thus not surprising that the President and

Congressional leadership sought to avoid this situation. On 2 August 2011, President Obama

signed into law the Budget Control Act of 2011, which both Houses of Congress had passed on

1 and 2 August respectively, and which authorized the much needed increase in the debt

ceiling to avoid sovereign default in exchange for a significant reduction of at least $2.4 trillion

in the US deficit over the following ten years: through over $900 billion in spending cuts

directly specified in the Act as well as cuts of to $1.2 trillion to be determined by a bipartisan

joint House-Senate ‘Super Committee’. One day later, US national debt rose drastically to

$14.58 trillion, and for the first time since the end of the Second World it exceeded the US

Gross Domestic Product (GDP) – thus putting the USA in line with other countries whose

national debt has been in excess of 100 per cent of GDP in the aftermath of the 2008 financial

crisis such as Italy, Greece, Ireland, and Iceland. For the first time in American history, on 5

August 2011, the credit-rating agency Standard & Poor's downgraded the credit rating of US

government bonds from AAA to AA.

18

Yet after the Budget Control Act of 2011 came into effect the heated debates and bitter

divisions between the Democratic and Republican Parties continued. In the end, the Super

Committee failed to reach agreement over how to achieve the cuts proscribed under the new

legislation, triggering automatic, arbitrary, and across the board budget cuts of about $1

trillion from 1 March 2013. This ‘sequestration’ contained in the Act was envisioned as

providing strong incentive to Congress to work together on the spending cuts. As Obama

notes on his sequester webpages:

“The whole design of these arbitrary cuts was to make them so unattractive and

unappealing that Democrats and Republicans would actually get together and find a good

compromise of sensible cuts as well as closing tax loopholes and so forth."

The sequestration has an on-going significant effect on debates on America’s future

defensive capabilities as it entails a decade-long series of US military spending cuts of $470

billion on top of the incisions in projected defence expenditures that was planned under the

Budget Control Act before it triggered the process of automatic reductions. Expressed in 2013

dollars, the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated in July 2012 that the average annual

reduction from the sequestration caps on US defence spending would be about $49 billion over

the whole period from 2013 - 2021 beginning with $52 billion in 2013 and ending with $45

billion in 2021.

In light of these austerity measures, the Overview Fiscal Year (FY) 2014 Budget Request

document published at the end of March 2013 after the sequester came into effect sought to

make clear that the DoD will continue to proceed with the force structure reductions made

under the previous budget request and to achieve additional savings for the American

taxpayer through a more disciplined use of resources, ‘better buying power’, and an overall

reduction in the costs of how the Pentagon ‘does business’. Yet the Overview warns that even

the more cost-effective ‘modern, ready, and balanced force to meet the full range of potential

military requirements’ envisioned here cannot be achieved should the sequester continue.

The individual branches of the Armed Forces have argued in a similar fashion that under

the new spending regime they would not be able to fulfil their roles and requirements set out

in the 2012 defense strategic guidance and the Joint Force 2020. In a House Armed Services

Committee Hearing that took place on 18 September 2013, America’s service chiefs warned

that the reductions in military expenditures required by law for the fiscal year 2014 on top of

savings already achieved would increase security risks to US national security and the

American people. Army Chief of Staff Gen. Ray Odierno, for instance, argued that the

cutbacks in manpower, active and reserve, alongside the ending, restructuring, or delaying of

over 100 acquisition programs as well as reduced training opportunities would severely

impact on the Army’s readiness, training, capabilities, and capacity. Odierno pointed out that

in his view ‘these reductions will put at substantial risk our ability to conduct even one

sustained major combat operation’ and that sequestration would threaten the Army’s ability to

deter and compel US adversaries. In their statements, Chief of Naval Operations Adm.

Jonathan W. Greenert, Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Mark A. Welsh III, and Marine Corps

Commandant Gen. James F. Amos mirrored Odierno’s assessment.

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It is important to note here that the FY 2013 budget request proposed the first reduction in

military ‘base spending’ in more than a decade and would keep levels well above Cold War

averages (this also excludes Overseas Combat Operations (OCO) which are not part of the

Budget Control Act). At the same time, the proposed amount was still 0.9 per cent above the

level originally available under the Act, and the reductions triggered by the sequester appear

more alarming because they tend to be related to high projected military spending levels.

Despite the end of military operations in Iraq and their winding down in Afghanistan, the FY

2014 budget request suggests new projected top lines for the base budget under the Budget

Control Act (but without a continued sequester) that result in a negative average real growth

of only 0.2 per cent for FY 2014 – FY 2018. Likewise, despite the reductions in military

manpower that are planned to be achieved largely in the active Army (13 per cent) and Marine

Corps (10 per cent) would still leave both services larger than before 11 September 2001 and

the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Cybersecurity as US Operational Domain

The issue of cybersecurity has been on the Pentagon’s map for well over a decade. Yet

while the sophistication and frequency of attacks on US military and civilian networks and

infrastructure had picked up significant speed under the Bush administration, the US

military’s effort to defend against those attacks took place under a loose partnership of joint

task forces that lacked a formal geographical or institutional home. The Obama administration

recognized the increased importance of the cyberdomain for US military operations early on,

and in order to consolidate and formalize the US cyberdefence effort then Secretary of Defense

Robert Gates was able to integrate the dispersed structures within a new single four-star

command in mid-2009, the US Cyber Command (as part of the US Strategic Command), which

became operational 18 months later. The US Cyber Command has since been responsible for

the day-to-day protection of defence networks (or "dot mil" (.mil) networks), supports military

missions and counterterrorism operations in cyberspace, has been responsible for conducting

offensive US cyberspace operations, handles US cyberwarfare resources, and liaises with other

US government departments, the intelligence community, private industry and allied

governments. It also coordinates with the Department of Homeland Security in order to

defend US critical infrastructure, which tends to be privately owned.

Following the establishment of US Cyber Command’s, the DoD released a strategy report

on cyberspace in July 2011, which is the third formal cyberstragey under the Obama

administration but only the first such document in which the Pentagon outlines its take on US

cybersecurity policy. The report focuses on five strategic initiatives, which are reflective of the

US Cyber Command’s key responsiblities: First, to treat cyberspace as an operational domain

in its own right; second, to employ new defence operating concepts to increase the resilience of

DoD networks and systems; third, to continue to partner with other US government

departments and agencies and the private sector to enable a whole-of-government

cybersecurity strategy; fourth, to continue building strategic robust relationships with US allies

and international partners to strengthen collective cybersecurity; and, finally, to leverage the

nation’s ingenuity through an exceptional cyber workforce and rapid technological

innovation.

20

The increased focus of the Obama administration and US military leaders on cybersecurity

should not come as a surprise, in particular in light of recent breaches such as Wikileaks’

releasing of Afghan War Diary and the Iraq War Logs in 2010 and Edward Snowden’s

disclosing of top-secret US and UK surveillance programs to the press in 2013. Likewise

pointing to the increasing importance of this security domain, the US service chiefs ensured

that US cyber warfare capabilities would be protected even in light of increased defence

budget cuts. At the same time, despite Congressional efforts to enact cybersecurity legislation

and Obama’s push for the creation of the framework and the promotion of cyberthreat

information sharing, the cyberdomain still lacks a sufficient legislative framework that can

strike a widely accepted balance between demands for information sharing and monitoring of

communications in the name of defence and national security and privacy, civil liberties, and

internet ecology. The Obama administration, the Pentagon, and Congress have also yet to

provide a clear definition of what exactly constitutes a cyberthreat that necessitates these

measures.

Conclusion: A Peace Dividend after 10 years of `Hot War’?

In the USA, the end of the Cold War spurred an expectation that the time had come

significantly to reduce military spending in order to free up resources to generate a `peace

dividend’ that would allow the Government to pay off public debt, expand social programmes

or stimulate the economy via investments in civil goods, services and technologies. Yet when

the reductions in the US defence budget between 1989 and the nadir of US military

expenditures in 1998 are calculated in a way that does not greatly exaggerate the size of the

`peace dividend’ by selecting biased datasets, this amounted to a mere five months of average

annual Cold War defense expenditures (or US 142,700m. in 2004 constant prices), while the US

defence architecture did not undergo the radical downsizing and restructuring process that

had been expected. As the discussion of contemporary US defence policy in a historical context

suggests, building a US defence strategy that can transform Cold War planning scenarios and

strategic models has proven to be a complex and difficult process across the Bush, Sr, Clinton

and Bush, Jr, Administrations. Moreover, while President Obama has been able partially to

refocus US defence policy towards a more co-operative approach in order to achieve national

security objectives, core elements have either been left in place or changes have been a matter

of degree rather than scale in order to align US defence policy with domestic requirements and

changes in the international security landscape.

With the winding down of US military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, and in the

context of the global economic crisis, similar expectations have begun to surface in terms of

limiting the scope of US defence policy, scaling down the size of the country’s armed forces

and reducing the Administration’s financial defence burden. Contrary to the popular criticism

of President Obama’s stark reduction in military expenditures, the initially proclaimed

decrease in the US defence budget was in fact only a lessening of projected increases, with no

actual decrease in year-on-year defence budgets (in either nominal or real terms) after 2013.

The sequester triggered under the Budget Control Act that came into effect in March 2013 has

corrected these figures downwards. Yet as the discussion of the actual defence budgetary

effects has shown, these will maintain rather than significantly decrease contemporary US

21

military spending levels. This is even more puzzling when considered in the context of

declining military spending for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. At the same time, the on-

going discussions over the extent to which potential actual reductions in force structure and

defense expeditures may threaten US national security are reminiscent of the debates that

followed US defence cuts in the early post-Cold War period.. Similarly, the new strategic

vision for the USA does not represent a radical departure from existing strategic models.

Overall, this essay has shown that, when viewed in a historical context, it is clear that US

defence policy in the 21st century is the result of an evolutionary rather than revolutionary

process, and that a sudden about-turn in the direction of policy is unlikely. Analysing current

US defence dynamics and the core challenges at the heart of contemporary defence policy and

architecture, the essay suggests that expectations of a radical restructuring of the US defence

sector and a drastic change of course in defence strategy in the aftermath of US-led wars in

Iraq and Afghanistan are unlikely to be fulfilled.

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Kennan, George F. `The Sources of Soviet Conduct’ (aka the `X Article’), Foreign Affairs 25 (4),

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Koistinen, Paul A. C. The Military-Industrial Complex: A Historical Perspective. New York,

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