When the U.S. is Unrivaled Militarily,
What Happens to Our Alliances?
THE 1991 GULF WAR convinced the world that the United States had become stronger, faster and more capable than any other power on the globe. Although the United States fought the Gulf War in coalition with its allies, the supremacy of U.S. technology, coordinated by superior command and control, was one of the most noteworthy aspects of the war. The spectacular successes of U.S. weapons systems and forces in the Gulf War led many observers to argue that the U.S. was on the verge of a revolution in military affairs (RMA) - that is, a profound change in the overall capability and operating "style" of military forces. This revolution follows many others, such as the introduction of gunpowder, the creation of mechanized ground and air warfare (the "Blitzkrieg"), and the advent of nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles. The belief in a current-day RMA is usually associated with the explosion in information technology, advanced sensors, and instantaneous communications. Some advocates add such capabilities as stealth, space-based navigation and communications, directed energy, and even genetic manipulation.
Advances in U.S. war fighting will have both positive and negative consequences for U.S. diplomatic efforts. On the positive side, technological innovations associated with an information-based RMA will allow the United States to arrive at conflicts more quickly from farther away, a concept known as "just-in-time warfare." This will reduce the need to pre-position troops and material, a particularly attractive achievement for leaders sensitive to U.S. presence in their country. The RMA will also enable the U.S. to share with its allies a view of the battlefield otherwise unattainable, thereby helping tip the scales in favor of U.S. allies over their enemies. In some cases, technologies that support rapid mobility and improved battlefield awareness can also be used in conflict prevention and crisis management.
On the negative side, technological innovations may create a U.S. military that thinks and acts faster than its allies. U.S. and European military planners worry that future fighting forces will find it difficult to operate effectively on the same battlefield. Also of concern to U.S. friends and allies is the appropriateness of an RMA fighting force to many of the kinds of threats they face, such as ethnic and sectarian violence, disorder caused in failed states and terrorism. Furthermore, if allies become convinced that the United States is able to conduct certain kinds of operations unilaterally, they may become less likely to commit their own military support. The United States may still need the support of its allies (more for political than for military reasons), but it is less likely to be offered.
The RMA, if realized, may therefore serve as a mixed blessing. It may make it easier for the United States to augment an ally's war-fighting capability by providing valuable information. It may also help friends abroad rely on U.S. assistance without having to constantly defend the relationship to a skeptical domestic audience. On the other hand, revolutionary advances may strain relations with traditional allies. They may limit the U.S. ability to fight effectively alongside its allies. At the same time, they may decrease the forces that local allies will contribute to future conflicts.
Good news, bad news
Most advocates of the RMA focus on its implications for the conduct of military operations. Yet, its implications for diplomacy and the conduct of U.S. foreign policy are equally if not more profound. The RMA will bring opportunities to support both traditional and innovative diplomacy. However, like any other large-scale change in human affairs, it will also create new problems.
The centerpiece of most conceptions of today's military revolution is the ability to acquire and process rapidly vast amounts of information. The military refers to this as the field of command, control, communications, computers (intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance) or C4ISR. Superiority in C4ISR will allow the military to achieve dominant battlefield awareness, an understanding of the location, status and behavior of the forces on the battlefield and the ability to use that information in military operations. Gaining a superior position in the battle for information will involve both measures to gather information and efforts to deny information to an adversary. The advantages of knowing more than one's opponent in war are self-evident.
Superior knowledge is equally important to the conduct of foreign policy. The use of long-range, primarily space-based sensors, so-called "national technical means," has been central to verify strategic arms reduction agreements. Modern C4ISR have been used to great effect in the Sinai, helping to maintain a 20-year peace. At present, similar technologies are used in such widely varied areas as counter-narcotics, environmental monitoring, and the management of refugee flows.
What the RMA may bring to the conduct of diplomacy is an order-of-magnitude increase in both the quality and breadth of information available. The same capabilities which can support dominant battlefield awareness in the event of hostilities can support the conduct of diplomacy in peacetime. These capabilities can be used to monitor arms control agreements, support cease-fire arrangements, ensure the inviolability of disputed territories, and provide reassurance to states seeking to institute confidence-building measures. The ability to see with greater clarity across broader areas of the Earth and to translate data into understanding can support the expansion of diplomatic activities into new areas. In arms control, this may empower new arrangements intended to help build stability and security in regions long marked by suspicion and conflict. For the field of environmental monitoring, these new capabilities could support global arrangements on limiting greenhouse gases, waste dumping, and preservation of the rain forests. In support of humanitarian assistance operations, the new C4ISR technologies provide the basis for situation assessment and response in distant and difficult lands.
The ability to operate in new environments leads, perhaps inevitably, to combat in those arenas. Aerial combat followed close on the heels of our conquest of the air. The new medium is cyberspace; the new kind of combat is termed information warfare. While the field of information warfare involves more than attacking and defending computer networks and data bases, the subject of conflict in cyberspace poses one of the greatest challenges to U.S. security and military planning. At present, it is difficult even to detect attacks on U.S. computer networks. Identifying the originator of such attacks and motivation is even more complex. In addition, if the computer system attacked is in private hands, such as that belonging to a bank, and the source of the attack is not a nation but an individual, a hacker, the role for the U.S. military in responding to such an event is, at present, unclear. This creates enormous opportunities for hostile forces to attack critical nodes in the U.S. economy under a protective disguise which will make military responses extremely difficult.
The prospects for using computers and networks such as the Internet to pursue national security interests, and even military objectives, may present some interesting and positive opportunities in the future. Some advocates of information warfare talk about an era in which war by bayonet, bullet and bomb will be replaced by combat via computer virus, logic bomb and data corruption. They see a time when the U.S. military will be able to seize control of an adversary nation's computer networks from a distance, paralyzing communications, transportation, power systems, and industrial enterprises. They even foresee a time when we can move beyond simply paralyzing another country's electronic media by seizing control of them, and using them to undermine an adversary regime. The end result would be force without violence and wars without casualties.
But the new environment poses interesting new problems for the diplomats. What constitutes sovereignty on the Internet? What are the limits to the classic right of self-defense when the U.S. is attacked from a computer site in a third country that uses telephone lines passing through two other countries? Should there be limits to the use of cyberspace for military purposes in view of the fact that it is becoming the backbone of the modern global economy? What kind of arrangements, procedures or treaties need to be in place to simultaneously protect national security, promote electronic commerce and communications, and preserve personal privacy? The management of cyberspace, as was the case with outer space before it, will require new regimes and approaches.
Overall, the RMA will create opportunities for a new kind of war, one that is extraordinarily fast-paced, extremely intense, and probably wide-ranging, and without clearly defined front lines. Properly conducted, a second Gulf War employing RMA-type forces could be over in a fraction of the time with fewer casualties. Because of the capabilities provided by modern C4ISR, the forces deployed into the field in such a war would be much smaller. Many of the headquarters and supporting facilities which traditionally have been forward deployed would remain at locations far from the battlefield but possess near-instantaneous connectivity with forces at the front. In peacetime, this new connectivity would enable the U.S. to reduce the size of forward-deployed forces and installations, thereby reducing the potential risks from preemptive or terrorist attacks as well as the economic and socio-political burden on local populations.
The same characteristics which make this new type of warfare desirable from a military perspective raise a number of concerns regarding political and diplomatic consequences. Chief among them is the potential for such capabilities to create crisis instabilities. In most scenarios, but particularly those in which both sides have RMA-oriented forces, there is the potential for the side that strikes first to gain a significant, even overwhelming, advantage over its adversary by knocking out the opponent's C4ISR systems. Remember that the 1991 Gulf War began with strikes on Iraqi early warning radars, followed by attacks on military command posts, air defense headquarters, communications centers, and electric power. Iraq never recovered from the effects of these initial strikes.
Military history shows us how unstable such a situation can be. The classic case was the very beginning of World War I. Then, the danger of falling behind in a competitive process of military mobilization added to pressures for war. Today, the danger of being blinded and decapitated by an adversary's first strike could create pressures for nations to strike first or risk losing their critical RMA assets. An RMA intervention force might well look extremely imposing to potential adversaries in regions to which that force was deployed. Once such a force begins to deploy forward into a region in crisis, an adversary may seek resort to preemptive action to forestall being attacked.
Many of the technologies associated with the RMA are dual-use in nature. The revolution in military C4ISR is being driven by advances in commercial communications, computing and networking. The commercial use of space-based systems for remote sensing and communications is growing. It is therefore likely that others, including potential future adversaries, will be able to acquire some elements of an RMA force. This creates the potential of a series of local RMA arms races not dissimilar to the competition to develop ballistic missiles and weapons of mass destruction ongoing in the Middle East and South Asia. A 1995 Defense Science Board study warned that a future adversary, by investing no more than $2 billion dollars a year for a few years in selected RMA technologies, could seriously compromise the ability of the U.S. to intervene militarily in the adversary's home region.
The proliferation of RMA technologies raises serious problems for arms control and technology transfer. It is probably too late to control many of the relevant technologies. In some cases our concern should be about the ability of adversaries to gain access through commercial channels to technologies more advanced than those possessed by the U.S. military. Because of the dual-use character of many of these technologies, they may be readily and undetectably convertible to military uses. This creates the potential for serious arms race instabilities as well as the danger of excess spending by relatively poor countries on advanced technologies more suitable to military than commercial uses.
To date, the few analysts who have focused on the RMA and what it means for allied relations have tended to stress the positive aspects. Information and technology can be given and retracted at will, benefitting America's friends and depriving its enemies. With U.S. support, Joseph Nye and William Owen suggest, "Allies could achieve the same kind of military dominance as the United States." The United States will be able to ensure that "local allies retaining their own heavy forces can dominate on the battlefield, even if initially outmatched," comments Martin Libicki.
But along with increased opportunities, the RMA also presents challenges. The potential problems fall into two categories: operational and strategic. The operational problems are those that will affect U.S. forces' ability to operate with their allies. The strategic set of problems are those that affect the U.S. ability to develop efficient strategies to accomplish various goals. Both types of problems may make it less likely that other nations will be willing to fight alongside the United States-and more difficult for those allies to fight effectively, even when they are willing.
Recent conflicts in the Persian Gulf and Bosnia suggest that coalition operations will be an important war-fighting model for the future. Secretary of Defense William Cohen has said, "While the United States will retain the capability to act unilaterally, a strategy that emphasizes coalition operations is essential to protecting and promoting our national interests in a world in which we as a nation must often act in concert with others to create our preferred international conditions and secure our basic national goals."
But emphasis on close political relations with our allies does not necessarily reflect actual military trends. The RMA, despite its awesome possibilities, could in some cases actually dilute rather than solidify relations between the United States and its traditional European allies. This is true for several reasons. First, given its larger defense budget, the United States will be able to invest more than its allies in the experimental programs necessary to develop and integrate revolutionary technologies. Second, because the price tag associated with the RMA is so high and resources are scarce, the United States and its allies are assigning very different priorities to exploiting it. Third, and perhaps most important, the gap between the United States and its European allies could widen because technological innovations associated with the RMA are causing doctrinal and organizational changes within the U.S. that are not being reflected in allied forces.
Although the United States spends less on defense than it has in the past, it currently outspends Europe by a ratio of almost 3-1. Perhaps more troubling than the overall level of spending is the portion being devoted to R&D. The United Kingdom spends about six percent of its defense budget on R&D, down from 10 percent in 1990. This is half of the 12-14 percent the United States spends on R&D. U.S. expenditures on R&D surpass Germany's entire defense budget. If tomorrow's weaponry comes directly from today's laboratories, this disparity in R&D spending is a disturbing trend.
Not only is the U.S. spending significantly more on defense, its forces are becoming increasingly high tech: relying on electronics, computers, and information processing. That is, the United States is moving ahead of its allies in C4ISR capabilities. Such technologies will allow the United States to collect data, communicate it to its forces in the field, and efficiently eliminate specified targets. If the United States and its allies are unable to share such crucial information with each other, the golden ring of coalitional war fighting could prove illusory.
Bosnia provides an excellent example of potential C4ISR problems facing future coalitions. Initially, international forces in Bosnia were unable to communicate with each other, virtually paralyzing coalition operations. Over time, such limitations were overcome, albeit in an ad hoc manner which would not be readily transferable to future areas of conflict. In addition, improved coordination took time to implement, something future coalitions may not have. When asked what the biggest challenge was to closing the interoperability gap between the United States and its NATO allies, Adm. Harold Geham, NATO's supreme allied commander responded that "the biggest challenge, of course, is that technology is moving so fast and each nation is taking advantage of that technology differently."
Since its inception, NATO has struggled with problems of interoperability. However, the RMA adds a new component to this age-old problem. The RMA promises to increase the speed, scope and character of future battlefields, reducing the ability of RMA and non-RMA forces to fight together effectively. The question may thus be changing from "Can forces operate together effectively?" to "Can they operate together at all?" It is possible that because of the RMA, the alliance is developing along two separate axes - the United States providing the high-tech forces and the rest of Europe assuming classical war-fighting responsibilities (including assuming more casualties). It is quite difficult to imagine this two-tiered military relationship operating within a robust political framework.
The RMA has the potential to alter strategic relations between the United States and its allies as well. Revolutionary technology will increase the distance and speed at which American forces can operate. Not only are tanks and ships becoming faster, but because targeting is becoming more efficient, fewer sorties are needed, fewer troops are required, and therefore less materiel is needed on the battlefield. A lighter lift translates directly into a faster mobilization. This trend has important strategic consequences. Because of U.S. improvements, traditional allies may come to believe that their support is not decisive and may therefore be eliminated.
Consider the role that bases and military support play not only in military operations, but in determining political outcomes. For one state to allow another access to its bases, or to its airspace, is not only a military commitment but a very visible sign of political support. It is a way of conveying to the target, and to the international community, that there is a consensus behind a planned military engagement. Military necessity often forces such concessions. Nonetheless, they have important political ramifications. Most military planners fully understand the importance of winning not only the military battle, but the political one as well, because strategy, in its essence, is the military achievement of political ends. But the coming RMA is reducing the need for other states to commit militarily. This will make it increasingly difficult to prove victorious on the political battlefield.
Such problems were apparent in the February 1998 crisis in which the United States threatened military force against Iraq unless it allowed U.N. weapons inspectors back into the country. A contained Iraq is in the interest not only of the United States, but of all states in the region. Some were surprised that the U.S. State Department had difficulty achieving full Saudi Arabian support. It quickly became clear that while Saudi Arabia would allow the United States access to its airspace and bases for logistical support, it would not allow it to fly combat operations from Saudi soil. Arab leaders were in a difficult position: they did not want to appear to be pawns of the United States but they fully recognized the Iraqi threat. Saudi Arabia conveyed to the United States that given the kinds of missions that the United States intended to execute, Saudi military support was unnecessary. Washington could conduct its intended mission from afar: from bases in Diego Garcia, from the U.S. itself, from aircraft carriers located in the Persian Gulf and by using pre-positioned equipment located in the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain.
Just as this trend is becoming apparent in Europe and in the Middle East, Asia is also questioning some U.S. military requests. Japan, for example, is currently pressuring the United States to remove its forces from Okinawa. The U.S. military's astute response to this negative development is to explore new technologies and platforms such as mobile off-shore bases that decrease reliance on local allies. Unfortunately, this only re-enforces the trend toward military autarky and therefore exacerbates the problems discussed above.
As the United States is able to conduct more of the battle from farther away, it will become less reliant on local support. Also, as the United States develops the ability to arrive at the theater of operations with greater speed, allied partners will be able to withhold support until later in the crisis. The consequence of this could be that as the United States becomes increasingly powerful, it will become less adept at securing local support. Allies may increasingly perceive that their military support is no longer necessary. Militarily, the United States will still be able to accomplish its mission. Politically, its goals become harder to achieve.
The revolution in military affairs raises a number of questions, concerns and even problems for American diplomacy. The RMA force is information-intensive and will require a degree of surveillance and intelligence about potential adversaries that can impact - both for good and ill - diplomatic activities in the regions and nations in question. This force is also highly lethal, very fast-moving and offensively oriented, all of which can negatively impact foreign perceptions of U.S. intent and even the ability to manage crises where this force is present. Finally, the technologies and systems essential to this force - such as lasers, unmanned vehicles, and computer viruses - pose interesting, and in some cases extremely thorny, problems for arms control, technology transfer, and international commerce.
This discussion should not be construed as an argument against proceeding with an RMA. However, we need to recognize that improved capabilities could have both positive and negative consequences on U.S. international relations. The few analysts who have considered what the RMA means for the U.S. politically tend to stress only its opportunities. As the above discussion shows, however, there are pitfalls associated with the RMA as well. It will therefore become increasingly important for those conducting American foreign policy to understand allied concerns about the RMA and recognize its many political consequences. By working through the problems discussed above now it will be easier to avoid their negative repercussions in the future.
Rachel Bronson is a senior fellow for military affairs at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Dan Goure; is the deputy director of political-military studies at CSIS.
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