WHITHER THE RMA:

TWO PERSPECTIVES ON TOMORROW'S ARMY

Paul Bracken

Raoul Henri Alcalá

July 22, 1994
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These papers were originally presented at the U.S. Army War

College Fifth Annual Strategy Conference held April 26-28, 1994, with

the assistance of the Office of Net Assessment. The Strategic Studies

Institute is pleased to publish the papers as part of its Conference

Series.
FOREWORD

In April 1994, the Army War College's Strategic Studies Institute

hosted its Fifth Annual Strategy Conference. The theme was "The

Revolution in Military Affairs: Defining an Army for the 21st Century."

 After fourteen of the nation's leading defense scholars presented

papers on the role of technology in warfare, Dr. Paul Bracken and

Colonel Raoul Alcala concluded the conference by offering their views of

the Army's future.

Professor Bracken contends that the Army of the 21st century will

be shaped by domestic concerns as much as by external threats to

American security. While economic power has increased in importance in

international relations, military power as traditionally conceived

remains a dominant factor in determining the status of nations.

Colonel Alcala holds that there is a connection between ideas and

principles. He argues that doctrines will provide the basis for force

structure, training, and weapons acquisition. Colonel Alcala maintains

that the Army's ability to stay intellectually ahead of the technology

will be, perhaps, its greatest challenge in the next century.

To contribute to an informed debate about the 21st century Army,

the Strategic Studies Institute presents the views of these respected

defense intellectuals for your consideration.

JOHN W. MOUNTCASTLE

Colonel, U.S. Army

Director, Strategic Studies Institute
BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCHES OF THE AUTHORS

PAUL BRACKEN is Professor of Political Science and Professor of

International Business at Yale University. He teaches in the areas of

comparative politics, international relations, and international

management, and is coordinator of international studies at the Yale

Management School. Before joining the Yale faculty in 1983 he was at the

Hudson Institute, New York, for 10 years where he led a broad range of

policy and economic studies. Dr. Bracken is the author of The Command

and Control of Nuclear Forces, and Reforging European Security and many

journal articles dealing with defense planning, Asian security, and

crisis management. He is working on a book, entitled High Command, on

the evolution of large military organizations and their effects on the

state system and international relations over the past 500 years. A

member of the Council on Foreign Relations, Dr. Bracken received his

B.S. in engineering from Columbia University and his Ph.D. in operations

research from Yale University.

RAOUL HENRI (ROY) ALCALA heads a consulting firm, Alcala Enterprises,

which specializes in national security and foreign policy issues. He

retired from the Army in 1991 after four years in charge of the Army

Chief of Staff's Assessment and Initiatives Group. As a White House

Fellow during the Ford and Carter administrations, he served as a

special assistant to the Federal Energy Administrator and to the

President's National Security Advisor. A graduate of the U.S. Military

Academy, he holds masters degrees from Yale University in international

relations and political science. His most recent publications include a

policy paper for The Atlantic Council of the United States: The United

States, NATO and Security Relations with Central and Eastern Europe;

studies for the RAND Corporation, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and

Science Applications International Corporation on military strategy,

technology, doctrine, training, and force structure, and on Persian Gulf

lessons learned. He is a Senior Fellow of Business Executives for

National Security.
FUTURE DIRECTIONS FOR THE ARMY

Paul Bracken

The best way to think about a Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA)

comes from a statement often heard in business strategic planning

circles: It is easier to design the future than it is to predict it. To

think about a revolution in military affairs as a predictive problem

misses many of the most important parts of such an exercise. The

responsibility of the national security community is to consider the

impact of such a development precisely because it is a national security

community. Other nations may move in this direction, and if ours does

not, some extremely serious imbalances could follow. Although the end of

the cold war is recognized by all, and although the unique conditions of

the Gulf War are understood not to characterize all future U.S.

conflicts, a considerable gap exists between saying these things and

actually absorbing them into our institutions. This conference is about

taking a step in this institutional redirection: making the change from

talking about revolutionary change to having it influence the Army's

day-to-day actions.

In an article published a few months ago I argued that current

thinking about national security was too constrained by immediate

issues. Downsizing of force structure, budget reductions, Bosnia, and

other issues were all very real problems requiring a great deal of

leadership and management to properly deal with them.1

 But there was a

subconscious tendency to use these immediate issues as signposts of the

future, even though little evidence existed to support such a use. From

many years of experience in long-range planning at the Hudson Institute

came some difficult lessons learned. The hardest single feature in

conducting long-range planning and brainstorming sessions for both

government and private sector clients was to divorce oneself from

current conditions. In the 1960s, for example, a great many planning

studies were built around a continuation of the `youth revolution' of

that decade, the introduction of new lifestyles, tastes, and social

norms. In the 1970s many planning studies were premised around various

solutions and outcomes to the energy crisis. By then the youth movement

had been forgotten, just as in the 1980s the energy crisis had been

forgotten.

With the end of the cold war it is understandable that immediate

issues would be analyzed as future signposts. In the absence of other

guidance there is not much else on which to base planning. But if

anything seems certain it is that in not too many years a new

equilibrium in U.S. military spending will be established, the situation

in Bosnia will be accepted, and that new dangers will loom on the

nation's horizon.

Yet another aspect of change needs to be emphasized: the inability

of people who have been involved in a field for most of their careers to

preserve their capacity to be intellectually surprised. A tendency

exists in large organizations for members to see the world in terms of

an unsurprising repetition of bureaucratic turf grabs, interdepartmental

feuds, and self-serving individual behavior. Economist A.O. Hirschman

has written that in the field of Latin American economic development too

many experts have been unable to see the dramatic changes that have

taken place. Instead, they see an out-of-date world defined by

government incompetence, civil-military tensions, and technological

backwardness. While these exist, important transformations have occurred
in political and economic structures, capital markets, and civil control

of the military. If the U.S. Army must maintain one attitude, it is the

capacity to accept new ideas and patterns of thinking.

Cycles.

The Army can partly construct its future, but it also must accept

certain features of its external environment. Quite often the confluence

and superposition of these features of the environment defines the

future which actually occurs. For example, in the 1930s the Army found

itself in a world where 1) technology in the form of the internal

combustion engine created new opportunities for fundamental changes in

military strategy and tactics; 2) international relations among states

were turning to a more predatory structure with the rise of the

communist and fascist dictatorships; and 3) the industrial structure of

the United States was changing to permit dramatically new and increased

kinds of mobilization, as well as a newly skilled type of soldier who

could read, drive a truck, and follow complicated orders.

It is unlikely that had not all three of these developments

materialized, the nation would have achieved the success it did in World

War II. There is a tendency to want to reduce complex institutional

behavior to simple one-dimensional characterizations: "revolutionary

technology holds the answer to the future of war," or "without any

external threats there is no need for advanced strategic thinking." In

fact, something much more complicated takes place involving the

interaction of unrelated cycles of trend development. The job of

leadership in any institution is to examine the internal and external

organizational environments and decide what are the most important

cycles affecting them. Strategies must then be formulated to manage the

relationship of these, one to the other. The Army leadership in the

1930s had to think not just about the revolutionary implications of the

tank, but also of ways to mass produce tanks, train people to repair

them, and leverage off other parts of the enormous (relative to Germany

and Japan) U.S. industrial base to produce a congruent force structure

with a tooth-to-tail ratio that made sense.

With this perspective it is useful to consider `cycles' in key

technical and environmental areas. Cycles do not imply predictable

periodicity, but rather significant changes in underlying structures

that are in most respects unpredictable.

Technology. This probably receives more attention than any other

part of the Army's environment. The cold war against the Soviet Union

was fought as a virtual war through technological innovation designed to

deter military expansion and risk taking. A large technical in-house

community has been created. There is a strong tendency for institutional

momentum to continue to operate in this manner.

This is not the place for a technical forecast in the dynamic

fields of computers, communications, or information technology. Army

thinking in this area emphasizes the importance of information, and

especially of information dominance over an opponent.2

 Whether this is

the right way to look at technology cycles is not clear, but experience

in the Gulf War and a perceived likelihood that the United States can

exploit such an advantage because of its capacities in computers and

telecommunications remains a powerful motivating force, one which, in

addition, looks to the future rather than the present.
A key question in this area is whether the current technological

defense community created to innovate during the cold war will remain

the best way to do so in the future. The Department of Defense is going

through the process of an `acquisition reform,' in which it is estimated

that somewhere between 35 - 40 percent overhead rates are attached to

the defense acquisition process. With declining defense budgets the

overhead costs which once were tolerable are no longer so.

Industrial Structure Changes. In the United States, the military

can only be as strong as the underlying economy. During World War II the

military gained leverage from the industrial economy. During the cold

war the Pentagon gained leverage from the strong technical base, both in

industry and academia. To the extent that a revolution in military

affairs is actually underway, the relationship between it and the rest

of the U.S. and world economies must be explored.

Here something of a paradox may be facing the United States.

Against a foe whose strategy and technology were well understood, the

Soviet Union, there could be clear objectives to optimize against. This

meant that a stable research and development infrastructure could be

supported and cultivated. This infrastructure contributed mightily to

containment of the Soviet Union. But in a different security environment

a new set of military-industry relationships must be forged.

Against a more nebulous set of objectives it is not at all clear

that the current R&D infrastructure is what is needed. With its large

in-house laboratory and arsenal system, and with a relationship to the

private sector that goes through specialized prime defense contractors,

the current system has an exorbitant set of overhead and transactions

costs associated with it. Thus, the present contracting budget climate

may present real opportunities to deconstruct and re-engineer the U.S.

defense industrial base.

Another way of putting it is that the budget environment may force

technological and industrial changes in the Army's relationship to the

larger civilian economy that would not otherwise be politically

feasible. Rather than decrying adverse impacts of reduced defense

expenditures, it may prove to be the case that the creative destruction

of these old relationships is a necessary precursor to full Army

participation in the revolution in military affairs. There is historical

precedent for this viewpoint. In the 1890s and early 1900s the United

States was a rising world power, and it took a supply and logistics

debacle in the Spanish American war to spur Congress to eliminate the

corrupt old bureau system of service supply.3

 But what followed was not

so much designed from scratch as superior, as one which intrinsically

relied on new capacities of the American economy in administration,

professional management, and scale economies. The result was a system

that was by no means perfect, but which possessed an ability to respond

to large crises, something demonstrated in World War II.

What are some of the new trends in the American economy that could

bear on the Army's participation in a revolution in military affairs? 

One of the most striking features is the increase in efficiency arising

from the appearance of tens of thousands of smaller firms, compared to

the Fortune 500, which are the incubators of technological innovation.

A tendency to think of the familiar giant corporate names as the engines

of the U.S. economy remains, but this view is a decade out of date. The
computer revolution has produced a wholesale restructuring of industrial

organization, whereby smaller firms have been able to capture economies

of scope as well as flexible economies of scale.4 This has produced a

move toward strong regional economies, places where these smaller firms

thrive for reasons of infrastructure availability, concentration of

technical personnel, and flexible relations among actors.5

In a related trend the main arena of technical innovation has

shifted to the commercial from the government sector. In the 1950s it

was the government, principally in DoD but also in other agencies like

NASA, that produced the early jet aircraft, computers, and materials

breakthroughs. It is now well appreciated that the U.S. Government is a

much smaller consumer of these than the private sector. However, it is

less well appreciated that the main source of innovation has shifted to

the private commercial sector. The U.S. Government, at least currently,

maintains a large collection of laboratories and research facilities

which it seeks to convert to other purposes. The existing defense

industrial base cannot keep up with the private market in producing

innovative solutions to problems. But the real question has less to do

with the proper disposal of the cold war defense industrial base and

everything to do with creating something new. Military planners are

confronted with the difficult issue of thinking about a new industrial

era, just as planners were in the early part of this century as they

confronted their industrial era. This is probably the area in which the

revolution in military affairs is in greatest need of thinking.

There are cycles in the relationship between public and private

sectors. At certain times government research leads the private sector,

and at other times it lags behind it. By all indications we are in a

period of private sector leadership, and this is the location of

innovation that all of the services must look to for the future. This

represents a cultural shift for the services which during the cold war

could rely on in-house research establishments to keep them supplied

with weapons, ideas, and innovations. A considerable change in outlook

will be needed for the Army and for the other services if they are to

relate to this different shape of the U.S. economy.

Associated with this trend is what in business schools is referred

to as true multinational companies, companies where national borders

represent little more than lines on a map. Companies like GE, Siemens,

Philips, and, increasingly, even Japanese firms, disperse their skills

and research around the globe. Old notions, such as the need to source

domestically, may be hard to change, but they are no longer meaningful

in today's global economy. As one example, the most advanced battery

research in the world doesn't take place in any one national facility.

Rather, it is dispersed in joint venture consortia with specialists from

many countries working together in Europe, Japan, and the United States,

sharing information among firms. For the U.S. government to try to beat

this with an in-house government laboratory, hampered by civil service

and acquisition rules, and not exposed to the competitive pressures of

the marketplace, is well nigh hopeless.

Organizing the mass of technical capability in today's world will

be very different than dealing with a handful of defense and industrial

giants as prime contractors. The services' entire approach to

acquisition will have to be changed, something which will include

standard notions of acquisition reform, but which will go far beyond

them. The essence of the problem is to open up the Army (and all of the
services) to these new industrial structures. Army people will have to

be expert on what is going on in the private sector in many different

areas, and can no longer become specialists in compliance to outdated

and inefficient congressionally mandated purchasing rules. There are

several different ways to go about this, and a great deal of

experimentation will have to occur to reach a comfort level acceptable

to the Army. No one has the answer to these new relationships. But it

seems clear that there will be far more outsourcing of research and

development and that a new cadre of industrial specialties will have to

be created.

The reason for outsourcing research and development will not be to

save scarce dollars per se, but rather to revitalize existing

organizations by introducing new sources of information and new ways of

looking at problems. The Army will need to develop "architectural

knowledge teams"--in-house specialists who are experts in the latest

technical developments, but who understand that to get something done

they do not have to do it themselves in a government controlled

laboratory. Rather, they can save money, time and get a better result by

using the private sector. In a few years, the idea of posting Army

officers to commercial establishments will be routine, even though these

establishments seemingly have nothing directly to do with military

research or production. Strategic sourcing will be elevated to a much

higher status than it currently has, and a thorough overhaul of training

and education in the methods of strategic alliances, outsourcing, fluid

contracting, and preservation of architectural knowledge will be

necessary.

It may be useful in this respect to suggest a long-term Army issue

related to these industrial trends, but one which requires immediate

decisions. At the present time the Army is actively participating in a

congressionally mandated base realignment and closure (BRAC) review. The

way this is conceived is similar in all of the services: what they can

dispose of with least pain. What is not considered is what structure the

Army should move toward, rather than what it should move away from. The

Army should think through one of the trends mentioned above, the

emergence of regional economies built on innovation and attainment of a

critical mass of technical personnel. These private sector "sticky

regions"6

 are very likely to be the "Ruhr Valleys" of the next century,

and the Army must consider ways to have some presence in them if they

are to harness the potential of the new industrial era to the revolution

in military affairs.

Strategic and International Trends. Whether classified as future

"threats" or as part of the emerging security environment, strategic and

international trends clearly have a profound impact on the Army as an

institution. Here an especially strong tendency exists to view current

problems as indicators of what the long-term future will hold. A tension

exists today between conceiving future conflicts as being variants of

the war against Iraq, or in terms of more likely contingencies which,

while quite different from one to the next, entail a more

politically-controlled use of force, emphasize special low-intensity

operations, and have as their goal the restoration of order in

disintegrating nations and states.

There can be little doubt that these latter contingencies,

exemplified by Somalia and Bosnia, are very likely to continue in other

parts of the world. The disintegration of the Soviet empire and the
extraordinary momentum of Third World population growth promise no

shortage of crises. Rather than predicting where crises might occur it

is better to stipulate that they will occur somewhere, and that it is

not possible to consider them as lesser included cases of larger

regional military contingencies.

Although different perspectives exist about whether the United

States should build its military planning on threats of a regional

character (North Korea, Iraq, Iran, etc.) or so-called peace keeping

operations (Bosnia, Somalia), another kind of competitor now receives

only scant attention, with little more than a dismissal of it as a

possibility. This is a peer competitor in the sense of a major power

which could threaten the security of the United States by challenging us

in important parts of the world. Over the past 100 years we have faced

five such competitors: Britain in the last century, and then Imperial

Germany, Imperial Japan, Nazi Germany, and Soviet Russia.

An issue that needs considerably more thought is how the collapse

of communism has created a situation where a replacement world ideology

of capitalism will change the structure of international relations.

While at first glance the triumph of capitalism seems like a victory for

the United States, a broader perspective is needed in thinking this

through. The question can be asked "Will a capitalist China, or India,

or Russia, or whatever, create more problems for the United States than

did their communist or socialists predecessors?" An unwarranted

assumption is that capitalism means democracy, and that because

democracies do not fight one another the United States will be a

long-term beneficiary of this trend. But the relationship between these

economic and political concepts is highly complex. The Soviet Union, in

fact, is the distinctive exception to the rule that America's previous

peer competitors had important aspects of capitalism associated with

their economic systems. Large private business enterprises dominated the

political landscape of Japan, Germany, and Britain when they were in

competition with the United States. This contributed to their dynamism.7

The issue could as easily be looked at another way: capitalism

means that once poor countries will become rich, and they will do so in

a way that uses modern technology supported by market allocations that

is likely to be more efficient than the Soviet Union was. Capitalism

does not equate with democracy, it only equates with private ownership

and use of markets. Indeed, the very gap between capitalism and

democracy has been the principal source of tension in modern Europe

since before World War II.

The world is now going through the greatest expansion of bringing

new people into the world marketplace than at any time in history.

Adding the populations of Russia, China, and India two billion people

once excluded from capitalism are now being thrust into it in a very

short time. When this transformation has occurred in other places it has

produced enormous upheavals. Consider the history of 19th and early 20th

century Europe when enormous class and national tensions were catalyzed

and manipulated for strategic ends and led to the disasters which took

place in Europe before 1945. There are no necessary reasons why this

should occur again, but there are reasons to take this trend as a good

one for constructing signposts about the character of America's

strategic future. The argument that the extension of capitalism to most

of Asia will produce comparable change to what its extension to Europe

did is at least as plausible as the argument that history is at an end
because of a consensus that liberal democracy is the best way to develop

in the future.

What are the signposts? Several different indicators might be

worth looking for. Change in the focus of Asian military institutions

from an inward to an outward orientation is one, a change that is

arguably taking place today.8

 Were this to occur there would also follow

an evolution of strategic thought of a kind very different than what we

in the United States now think about. In terms of doctrine for employing

new military technologies, the United States today considers it

inconceivable than anyone could match us. The lesson of the cold war is

thought to be that the Soviet Union proved this point, for even they

could not compete against us. But the extent to which their economic

deficiencies contributed to their defeat suggests that other more

flexible economic actors could mount a different kind of challenge to

America. We would do well to recall the effects of very different

operational strategies employed by nations such as Japan in the 1890s,

Vietnam in the 1960s, and Germany in the 1930s, which all pursued their

objectives with different approaches than anticipated.

Finally, another signpost comes from what have been referred to as

B+ countries, that is, countries which start out as relatively minor B

league military actors, but who gradually learn how to operate modern

military forces in a way that while it does not turn them into peer

competitors with the United States does create military potential for

quick wins in regional conflicts. We have become used to thinking about

B powers as being unable to manage modern forces, and for the wars they

fought to be long duration battles of attrition. The Iran-Iraq war has

come to symbolize for many people what their military capacities allow

them to do: get many people killed through high level strategic

incompetence, wherein each side proves incapable of decisive

breakthrough attacks--thus an absence of quick wins in Third World

conflicts.9

This has characterized such conflicts in the past two decades. But

it may not do so in the future. It would be dangerous indeed to assume

that all Third World countries are incapable of learning how to operate

modern forces. American industry once made the mistake of assuming that

Japanese, and later Korean, industry could not manage the modern

commercial enterprise. No one in American business believes this any

longer. The Korean economic miracle, and the current Chinese economic

miracle take place with an absence of democracy in Korea of a kind we

think of, and not at all in the case of contemporary China. If

industrialization can cross borders regardless of political systems, so

too can military modernization.

The first developing country which can master minimal 

improvements in national command and control of their armed forces will

obtain a tremendous military advantage over its neighbors. To the extent

this change is also accompanied by acquisition of weapons of mass

destruction--nuclear, biological, and chemical--an overnight change in

regional stability will take place. It is not that there will actually

be an overnight change in military capacities. Rather, it will appear

that way to the world, and especially to the countries in the affected

region because it is so unexpected. It will be extremely important for

the Army to monitor these changes and to develop signposts so that it is

not surprised as an institution.
The evolution of B to B+ countries is not something that is part

of the long distance future. It is a development with near and immediate

prospects. Many countries are studying the lessons of DESERT STORM, not

just the United States. Not all will be able to draw the appropriate

lessons, and not all will be able to execute needed changes even if they

are properly recognized. There will most likely be a differential

adaptation, as there is in any competitive situation, with great

benefits to the first mover. With the present distribution of world

power there will be great pressure on the United States to take the lead

in dealing with such a problem, and this pressure would be a reversal

from the one which sees a declining use for military power. For the Army

this means that for several years there may be little support for seeing

the world in terms of rising dangerous threats. But this could change to

a sharp reversal in national and international attitudes. The Army would

have to deal with these kinds of ups and downs in national policy, but

realistically this may be a part of the Army's environment.

Although it gets into immediate particulars, the case of North

Korea's nuclear weapons and her additional military power illustrates

one of the dynamics that shapes the Army external environment. For the

first years after the collapse of Soviet power it was widely argued that

economic power had become more important than military power. This is

still widely argued both in the United States and elsewhere. Yet North

Korea with less than 15 kilos of plutonium and a few reworked SCUD

missiles is now profoundly reshaping the security landscape of Northeast

Asia. North Korea has one of the weakest economies in the world. Yet she

is being treated with circumspection and caution, sending a message to

many other states that expansion of military capacities, far from being

obsolete, is one of the best ways to generate increased international

status.

Synopsis and Conclusion.

The viewpoint offered in this paper deals with issues badly in

need of greater attention. Current conceptions of national security in

the United States have placed far too much attention on immediate

problems, which although large and important, are not necessarily the

ones which will dominate the future. More importantly, current problems

are poor signposts for what to expect and prepare for.

Clearly, Army thinkers need to dwell on the immediate world of

base closings, peace keeping, and reduced force structure. The key is to

not think solely about these issues, but instead to create a forum for

attention to longer term issues. Two examples developed in this paper

illustrate that it would be quite incorrect to conclude that because an

issue is long term it does not require immediate attention. North Korea

was a B power which is quickly developing into a B+ regional military

force, one very likely armed with weapons of mass destruction. In the

United States itself, Army participation in the BRAC process is shaping

the long-term future of the Army relationship to the future U.S.

economy. Yet if experience is any guide, this issue is most likely being

conceived of in more narrow terms of compliance with procedures and as a

way to reduce short-term expenditures.

The Army has to become a learning organization, one which in

addition to its immediate national requirements must also seek new

frameworks and open a dialogue among its best officers with outside

sources of innovation and thinking. One avenue for increasing this type
of organizational learning is to encourage it in the formal parts of the

Army charged with this responsibility. New ideas need to be emphasized

at the U.S. Army War College, in the testing and simulation centers, and

in ways that Army senior leaders are comfortable with. Judged from a

distance the Army does not appear to be doing a bad job in these areas

already. If there is a need that an outsider can discern, it lies in

establishing an interlinkage between areas that are not usually thought

about as being related. Nothing is self-evident in the relationship of

cycles in technology, industrial structure, and strategic and

international relations. Yet in the confluence of events in these three

separate areas lie real dangers--as well as real opportunities-- for the

Army.

If one conclusion can be drawn from this discussion, it is the

need to become better at learning--not just learning about the process

of war, but also about the changes in the industrial structure of the

United States and about new dangers to American security emerging in the

international system. It is not too soon to start thinking about how to

do this.

Notes:

1. Paul Bracken, "The Military After Next," Washington Quarterly,

Vol. 16, Autumn 1993, pp. 157-174.

2. In particular, the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command has

held several seminars and meetings on this subject.

3. James L. Abrahamson, America Arms for a New Century, New York:

Free Press, 1981.

4. John Case, From the Ground Up: The Resurgence of American

Entrepreneurship, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992.

5. See Charles Sabel, "Flexible Specialization and the

Re-Emergence of Regional Economies," in P. Hirst and J. Zeitlan, eds.,

Reversing Industrial Decline, Oxford, U.K.: Berg, 1988.

6. This term is used to characterize regional economies like

Silicon Valley, Baden-Wurtenburg in Germany, and Kakamigahara in Japan.

See also the description of technological development in Utah as a

"sticky region," in "Software Valley," Economist, April 23, 1994, pp.

69-70.

7. See Clive A. Trebilcock, "British Armaments and European

Industrialization, 1890-1914," Economic History Review, Vol. 26, 1973,

pp. 254-272; Michael Mann, States, War and Capitalism, Oxford: Basil

Blackwell, 1988; and Anthony Giddens, The Nation-State and Violence,

Oxford: Polity Press, 1985, for different expressions of this argument.

8. Paul Bracken, "The Military Crisis of the Nation State: Will

Asia be Different From Europe?" British Political Studies, forthcoming

1995.

9. Anthony H. Cordesman and Abraham R. Wagner, The Lessons of

Modern War II: The Iran-Iraq War, Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1990.
GUIDING PRINCIPLES FOR REVOLUTION, EVOLUTION, AND

CONTINUITY IN MILITARY AFFAIRS

Raoul Henri Alcala

INTRODUCTION

Whither is the revolution in military affairs going?

This essay focuses on the nexus between ideas and actions. It

explores how concepts and doctrine shape three major areas of military

affairs that define military power: the design of forces including

organizations and materiel, the preparation of forces for war including

training and leader development, and the allocation of national

resources to provide for current and future forces. The author's basic

premise is that principles--acknowledged or tacit--guide action.

Moreover, widely held coherent collections of principles, that is,

doctrines, guide classes of actions in these three areas of military

affairs.

Today's actions and processes will have a significant effect on

the shape of the next generation of military forces, perhaps in the

second decade of the 21st century. This essay begins with a general

assessment of contemporary aspects of military affairs that have

particular significance for the future.

A prominent contemporary example of the primacy of doctrine is the

Army's AirLand Battle. Conceptualized in 1976,1

 it was a seminal element

of the renaissance--perhaps future historians will consider it a

revolution--experienced by the U.S. Army following the war in Vietnam.2

 It was formally promulgated in 1982. The principles embodied in the

doctrine have unambiguously guided the Army's preparation of forces to

deal with present and projected missions, roles, and functions. For

almost two decades, AirLand Battle has shaped the design of the Army's

forces; the preparation of Army forces for operations in peace and war;

and, to a significant extent, the allocation of scarce Army resources

among the various claimants. AirLand Battle doctrine has been the

bedrock upon which the Army built every aspect of its professional

being.

AirLand Battle doctrine evolved through the years that witnessed

the end of the cold war, and combat and peacetime operations from

Grenada and Panama to the Persian Gulf and Somalia. This evolution was

itself the product of a process that permitted maintaining continuity in

areas that were adequately addressed in the doctrine while changing it

to incorporate lessons learned from a variety of sources, domestic and

foreign. The 1993 publication of FM 100-5, Operations,3

 began the

projection of this doctrine from the rapidly changing post-cold war

environment into an uncertain and challenging future.

The example of FM 100-5 has relevance for what has been dubbed the

"revolution in military affairs" that today is shaping tomorrow's

American military capabilities. This is not to say that without change

the latest iteration of FM 100-5 is the answer to all--or any--of the

unforeseeable circumstances ahead. Rather, the primacy of ideas that is

the essential lesson of FM 100-5 is likely to continue to dominate

military affairs for the foreseeable future.
Following the Army's lead by 20 years, the other services have now

established their own doctrine commands. At the interservice level,

joint doctrine development is moving forward at an unprecedented pace.

As stated in the new Joint Pub 1:

Military leaders understand the nature and utility of

doctrine. Military doctrine presents fundamental principles

that guide the employment of forces.... Joint doctrine offers

a common perspective from which to plan and operate, and

fundamentally shapes the way we think about and train for

war.4

<pre> General Colin L. Powell, USA, CJCS, 1991

</pre>

Although it is premature to conclude that joint doctrine shapes

the way the services think about and prepare their forces for war, it is

indisputable that joint doctrine shapes the way the combatant commands

prepare for operations and train their assigned forces for those

operations.

While technology races ahead at a dizzying and apparently ever

increasing pace, and world events unfold in ways that challenge our

imaginations and shatter our preconceptions, it is organized ideas

including military doctrine that dominate and rationalize the processes

by which the U. S. military services conceive of and shape future

military capabilities. As the United States develops new ways of war,

moving into perhaps a new revolution in military affairs, doctrine will

surely be a key constituent.

Current doctrine and new concepts for developing future doctrine

(abbreviated as "futures concepts" in the remainder of this essay) play

a central role in the paradigms that provide the framework for analysis

of future force options. Two elements that define the paradigm are the

projections of the future circumstances in which military force will be

needed, and the manner of determining which military force capabilities

will be needed to assure success.

Contemporary Projections of Alternative Futures.

Conceptualizing the future entails the projection of trends and

the selection of a manageable number of circumstances-- scenarios--from

a larger set of possible alternatives. The cold war in the past

simplified this task. The increasing uncertainties and instabilities

evident in the international environment since the end of the cold war

are at least as challenging as those the United States experienced in

the last major revolution in military affairs, at the advent of the

nuclear age.5

 Selecting planning scenarios from the set of plausible

alternatives is now a relatively more difficult task. Nevertheless, to

continue to provide adequate guidance for the development of future

military capabilities, doctrine and futures concepts must accommodate an

appropriate set of alternative futures.

Today's perceptions are catalysts and at the same time present

obstacles in choosing alternative futures. For instance, the speed and

relative ease with which U. S. forces executed DESERT STORM have

produced claims of a new way of war6

 and expectations about similar

successes in future combat situations.7 To be sure, the focus on new

realities helps us shed irrelevant residues of the past. The Clinton
administration and its "Bottom-Up Review"8

 ushered in the latest

reassessment of strategy, forces, and resources. It emphasized the new

circumstances created by the collapse of the Soviet Union, substituting

a set of regional conflict scenarios for the East-West conflict

scenarios of the past.9 However, the planning horizon for the Bottom-Up

Review and the scenarios it employed are limited to the near term, not

projecting beyond the end of the decade. There is no new set of

longer-range scenarios that would be appropriate for the Defense

Department, the Joint Staff, and the services to use for future force

development.

In stressing the latest realities, the new conventional wisdom

also simultaneously makes it is increasingly difficult to see what has

not changed. Military organizations under continuous threat of

employment cannot afford the discontinuity that would result from taking

time out to reshape themselves as they experiment with and eventually

adopt new doctrines, organizations, and equipment. Armed forces in

today's circumstances must maintain continuity of capability while they

simultaneously prepare for the future.

The process of conceptual and doctrinal change, therefore, should

incorporate today's range of plausible futures, as the Bottom-Up Review

does, as well as other scenarios that provide insurance against futures

that today appear to be unlikely or possibly even implausible. The

process must be flexible, allow for reassessments and periodic

corrections, so that future forces may be capable and versatile enough

to cope with the unexpected.

Should Threats or Capabilities Guide Force Development?

Developing tomorrow's forces calls for a major change in the cold

war force development paradigm. The point estimates of future Soviet

developments and the accompanying threat-based analyses of the past are

no longer relevant. Rather, the new paradigm should focus on developing

needed capabilities for use in challenging but uncertain future

environments.10 Therefore, the new paradigm calls for new measures of

merit, not based entirely on the "force-on-force" algorithms of the

past. The new measures of merit that apply to the future should include

the efficiency, effectiveness, and interoperability of the new

capabilities contemplated.

Efficiency relates to the resources (funds, time, people) needed

to produce a particular capability. Effectiveness relates to the ability

(range, probability of kill, survivability of combatants and their

equipment) to produce the needed effect or end state. Interoperability

relates to the ability to exercise the capability, even

extemporaneously,11 in a joint and combined force. The baseline for

comparison becomes our own current capability rather than a presumed or

projected "threat" force's capability. Because these new measures are in

themselves valuable and can be quantified, in time they should be widely

accepted, even by the adherents of the obsolete threat-based force

development paradigm.

In a fundamental sense, a paradigm that focuses on making U. S.

forces as good as they can be, as survivable as they can be, evokes

values that are at the core of American culture. Such a calculus also

makes the future of the volunteer force more secure. Rather than

enlisting in a force whose capabilities and size are just good enough
theoretically to beat the current world villain, the high quality youth

needed for all our services would arguably be more attracted by a force

that is demonstrably superior and challenges them to be all that they

can be. There is substance for the future behind the time-honored Army

advertising slogan.12

The transition of the force development paradigm, from

threat-based to capabilities-based, will have major effects on the

development of doctrine and futures concepts. In the Army's case, the

basic assessments of the sufficiency of current doctrine and the force

capabilities it shapes will shift from defeat of the presumed threat to

meeting the new measures of merit. Rather than focusing on "battlefield

deficiencies," assessments and analyses will shift more to identifying

opportunities for more efficient, effective, and interoperable ways of

conducting operations.

Fielding Future Forces.

The end of the cold war and the dissolution of the Soviet Empire

have produced an understandable but dangerous trend. Stripped of their

principal former adversary, the armed forces have begun a rapid decline

in size and capability. Measured against the remaining contemporary bad

actors, even much smaller forces appear to be adequate. Nevertheless, it

takes much longer to reconstitute or create new forces than it does to

inactivate them. If there is a relevant lesson in our past on this

matter it is that we have uniformly appreciated new threats too late.

The processes we set in place to guide the transition to the future,

including developing new doctrine and futures concepts, should heed this

lesson.

Even small forces need the field laboratories in which to

experiment with alternative future capabilities. Moreover, innovations

that involve changes in doctrine, organization designs, and training

cannot be developed in theory and put on the shelf in the way that a

more efficient engine or longer-life battery possibly can be. Therefore,

the full spectrum of combat development activities, from thinkers

through the most sophisticated computer simulations to the ultimate

tests with units in the field, should remain in place regardless of the

reduction in the overall force size.

In planning today for fielding tomorrow's forces, it is therefore

vital to provide for the time needed to effect a transition to different

types of forces or larger force structures. It is similarly vital to be

certain of the capabilities the new forces will have before beginning

the process of replacing the old forces. In large, complex, and highly

interdependent organizations such as land combat units, high confidence

based on solid field testing is essential.

Assessing the Future.

In assessing the ongoing revolution in military affairs, this

essay will concentrate on the processes by which ideas guide actions,

against the background of the development paradigm and planning

considerations outlined in this introduction. It will examine how

concepts and doctrine can properly shape future U.S. military

capabilities in the three major areas of force design, training and

leader development, and resource allocation.
The point of departure is a review of the three services'

operating environments. These environments provide the context within

which service professionals (officers and noncommissioned officers)

develop their mindsets and learn to define their unique expertise.

Doctrine and futures concepts in each of the services respect the biases

that the operational environments produce.

The second element in the assessment is a review of the

characteristics of the three major areas and how concepts and doctrine

influence them. Of special importance is the inclusion of defense

agencies that provide capabilities for the entire defense establishment

and are controlled directly by the Defense Department, not by the

individual services or the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

The final section summarizes and offers thoughts on the process by

which the principles that guide action in military affairs are

developed. It offers a perspective on the limits of revolution,

evolution, and continuity in military affairs.

UNIQUE SERVICE ENVIRONMENTS

The environments within which the combat elements of each of the

services operate are the major socializing influences on their members,

particularly their career professionals. The dominant characteristics of

air, land, and sea combat environments are significantly different from

each other.

The environments described in this essay are based on the author's

assessment of how combat against regional adversaries would be conducted

in the period extending from the present to the 2020s. In the past,

during the height of the cold war, the risk levels for all services'

combat forces were admittedly higher. The descriptions of each

environment include, where applicable, the implications of these risk

differentials.

Air Combat Environment.

The air combat environment described in this section is for

fixed-wing aircraft. The operational environment in which combat

(attack, rescue, reconnaissance) helicopter units operate is essentially

the same as the land combat environment and is therefore included there.

Combat aircraft and their crews are in harm's way for relatively

short periods of time. Limitations of the aircraft themselves and the

nature of air-to-air and air-to-ground combat define this environment

and its short employment periods. Air combat units and their crews are

launched from and recover to relatively protected and comfortable areas.

The central process that directs air forces' employment in most

types of operations is the air tasking order (ATO). While the more

comprehensive joint campaign plan and force component plans and orders

establish the specific missions and desired end states over time, the

ATO is the central driving process that dominates air crews' lives. The

ATO ensures the sustainment over time of the principal air functions

which include: attack of point or area targets on land, control of

aerospace from aircraft, protection of the aircraft aloft with other

aircraft aloft, and reconnaissance over land areas.
This repetitive cycle of intense risk and relative comfort is

likely to be the dominant characteristic of air crew combat environments

for the foreseeable future. In addition, the limitations on air

functions imposed by periods of extreme weather and restricted

visibility on land--which limit further the periods of intense risk for

air crews--are also likely to continue to moderate the air crew combat

environment for some time.

During the cold war, the Soviet adversary possessed roughly

equivalent conventional air combat capabilities, significantly larger

air forces, formidable air defense forces, and a very high nuclear

capability. For American air combat crews, the risks during air

operations were significantly higher than they are against any current

or foreseeable regional foe. During the cold war, the nuclear threat was

high at main operating bases. Projecting ahead, the main threat against

operating bases is from weapons of mass destruction (chemical and

biological, primarily) that may be delivered by aircraft, ballistic

missiles, and cruise missiles. While these current risks are certainly

not negligible, they are significantly lower than the risk levels during

the cold war for air combat crews in operations and during periods of

rest and recovery.

Land Combat Environment.

In contrast to the air crew combat environment, armies must place

their combat soldiers continuously in harm's way, most often directly in

contact or in imminent probability of contact with a lethal adversary.

The operational environment of amphibious (or "marine" infantry) forces

is essentially identical to armies once the force is projected ashore.

In peacetime, the training environments of army and marine land combat

units are essentially identical.

Land combat forces engage in continuous operations to attack and

destroy forces and facilities, to control territory, and to protect

friendly areas and their populations; while ensuring their own survival

and freedom of action. Continuous and often high risk from enemy action

characterizes the daily existence of combat soldiers. Maintaining combat

capability during operations, and the versatility to adapt it to the

exigencies and opportunities of the situation without interruption,

comprise the central operational process for which the ATO is the

equivalent for air combat crews.

Once engaged, land combat units normally maintain contact to

assure battlefield dominance through control of information and

maneuver. They break contact only in extreme circumstances. Crew rest is

organized in a staggered fashion to permit continuous operations, day

and night, regardless of the weather. While risk is reduced during rest

periods, it remains continuously high in contrast to the relatively risk

free areas which air combat crews occupy between their periods of combat

engagement. For prolonged operations, land combat units are rotated to

secure areas for short periods of more comfortable and risk-free rest,

recuperation, and force reconstitution.

As in the case of air combat crews, the risks associated with the

cold war were higher for land combat forces. However, the relatively

high risk in combat against plausible foes does not significantly change

the combat operational environment for land combat. Moreover, the

vulnerability of land combat formations to weapons of mass destruction
even from relatively primitive adversaries is significantly higher than

that experienced by air or naval combat units.

Sea Combat Environment.

Naval forces operate in a combat environment that lies between the

operational environments of air and land combat forces. Sea combat units

are, typically, in harm's way for relatively short periods of time. The

naval force functions include destruction of targets at sea and on land,

control of selected sea areas, and facilitating and protecting force

deployments by sea and projection of those forces onto land for combat

or other operations.

Air combat units that operate from aircraft carriers experience

essentially the same operating environment as do air combat crews.

Submarine combat units, while more isolated for longer periods of time

than many surface combat units, are now operating in an environment of

low risk which is likely to continue well into the next century.

During the cold war, naval forces of all types experienced much

higher risk levels than they do now against plausible adversaries. Among

the services, sea combat units have experienced the most significant

reduction in the risks associated with their operational environments as

a result of the collapse of the Soviet Union.

The "Bureau" Environment.

Rather than being a facetious consideration, the operating

environment of the numerous "bureaus" in the defense establishment

merits consideration as a separate category. Much of the combat power of

the U.S. Armed Forces is based on organizations that never deploy to any

battlefield, never experience air or sea combat, and indeed are never

really at risk from the adversary. Excluded from this category are the

thousands of civilians who work directly for U.S. Government entities or

contractors and who routinely deploy with uniformed combat units to

operational theaters. This later set of individuals shares exactly the

risks of the forces they support.

The denizens of the bureaus have a "combat" environment that is

dominated by two types of "actions." One is the numerical analyses of

budgetary data. The other is the analysis of an item or program against

qualitative criteria, including such sources as presidential campaign

promises and local congressional interests. Literate, interpersonal, and

cerebral skills are most relevant in this environment. Quantifiable

dimensions of analysis are particularly prized.

The bureaus have essentially no characteristics in common with the

operating environments that shape the uniformed professionals. It is not

by accident that uniformed professionals so often shun service in the

bureaus. Neither is it by accident that bureau denizens often have a

difficult time appreciating the implications of essentially

unquantifiable aspects of combat operational environments. The author

recognizes that many bureaucrats have had substantial military service

in combat units; and that many combat veterans occupy at least temporary

positions in bureaus. It would be inaccurate to overstate the limiting

effects on the products of the bureaus--policies and budgets in the

main--as a consequence. Nevertheless, these different environments do

make a difference in the acculturation of civilian and military
professionals in the American defense establishment, and these

differences should be taken into account in assessing substantive

matters that bring civilians and the military together as they do in

every aspect of the revolution in military affairs that many assert is

underway.

Basic Implications of Unique Service Environments.

Understanding the operational environments is key to understanding

the service cultures, the military values of their professionals, and

therefore the ways in which they develop their doctrines and futures

concepts. It is important to acknowledge that there is no "joint"

operational environment. Deployed headquarters share, in the main, the

operational environments of air or sea combat units. Those headquarters

in the United States share the bureau environment.

The admirable initiatives to expand each service professional in

progressive and sequential joint education and operational experiences

have not changed service cultures. These joint episodes certainly serve

to expand mutual understanding but they in themselves cannot affect the

operational environments of each service's combat units and therefore

cannot change the dominant nature of their cultural influence.

ASSESSMENT OF MAJOR DEFENSE AREAS

In assessing the nexus of ideas and actions in the major areas of

military affairs, the author has implicitly based his judgments on the

principles outlined in the introduction to this essay in light of the

unique environments that shape professional attitudes across the

American defense establishment. The starting point is a brief review of

the status of joint and service doctrine and futures concepts efforts.

Service and Joint Doctrine.

In the seventh year following enactment of the Goldwater-Nichols

Act,13 there has been considerable progress in developing doctrine to

guide joint military action, although a substantial amount of work

remains. Authoritative joint publications have been promulgated for 51

of the 100 subject areas selected for joint doctrine development. Of the

remainder, in 43 areas a publication is under development. In only six

areas is there nothing under development.14

There are joint manuals to guide the armed forces at the highest

levels of all major functional areas except plans, for which a manual is

under development (Joint Pub 5-0, Plans).15 The areas in which doctrine

development has not begun include:

• Interagency Coordination (Joint Pub 1-06),

• Employment of Selected Weapon Systems (Joint Pub 1-09),

• Counterair Operations (Joint Pub 3-01),

• Joint Engagement Zone (Joint Pub 3-01.6),

• Humanitarian Assistance (Joint Pub 3-07.52), and

• Domestic Support Operations (Joint Pub 3-07.53).
In these six areas, progress has been frustrated by a combination

of insufficient agreement on fundamental principles, insufficient time,

and higher priority doctrine development projects for the Joint Staff,

services, and combatant commands concerned. In one area, previously set

aside16 as the domain of "basic national defense doctrine," early drafts

proved inadequate and there has been no further progress.

In all, in spite of obvious progress, there is no joint

publication that harmonizes all major functional areas in the way that

FM 100-5 and AFM 1-117 provide the doctrinal capstones for the Army and

Air Force, respectively. Each joint publication has had unique guidance

without the benefit of an overarching doctrinal concept. A variety of

entities, principally the services and combatant commands, have been

responsible for developing the initial drafts. As a consequence, even

after all 100 joint manuals now planned have been completed, they will

have to be harmonized within and between functional areas. Moreover,

whereas the Army's system specifically guides force development, the

joint system does not.

To illustrate the difference between the authority vested in Army

and joint doctrine, below are the operative statements from the Army's

latest version of FM 100-5 and the latest of the major functional area

manuals in the joint system.

FM 100-5 furnishes the authoritative foundation for

subordinate doctrine, force design, material acquisition,

professional education, and individual and unit training. 18

Joint Pub 2-0 is the keystone document of the joint

intelligence series. This publication sets forth doctrine to

govern the joint activities and performance of the Armed

Forces of the United States in joint operations as well as

the doctrinal basis for US military involvement in

multinational and interagency operations. It provides

military guidance for the exercise of authority by combatant

commanders and other joint force commanders and prescribes

doctrine for joint operations and training. It provides

military guidance for use by the Armed Forces in preparing

their appropriate plans.... In applying the doctrine set

forth in this publication, care must be taken to distinguish

between distinct but related responsibilities in the two

channels of authority to forces assigned to combatant

commands. The Military Departments and Services recruit,

organize, train, equip, and provide forces for assignment to

combatant commands....19

The Army's guidance is clear and direct. Joint doctrine, on the

other hand, neither directly nor through the combatant commanders has

the status to guide the fundamental activities reserved to the services

under Title 10, United States Code. The implications of this difference

will be outlined in the discussion of force development.

It is important to acknowledge the impact of lessons learned,

particularly from the Persian Gulf War, on doctrine. In the immediate

aftermath of the war, motivated by the desire to attenuate service

differences and to begin to provide top-down doctrinal guidance, General

Colin L. Powell commissioned (and to a significant extent personally
wrote) a wholly new publication, Joint Warfare of the U. S. Armed

Forces.20 Stressing the imperatives of joint action, it advertised on

its front cover that, "Joint Warfare is Team Warfare." This manual

sought to give impetus to a post-war spirit of interservice cooperation,

to energize all concerned to eliminate the large joint doctrine

development backlog, and to incorporate as rapidly as possible the

lessons of DESERT STORM.21 A formal Defense Department report on the

conduct of the Gulf War contained many useful findings and lessons.22

Not to be left without comment on this matter, the then Chairman of the

House Armed Services Committee commissioned and published his own report

on the war.23 Taken together, the Defense Department and congressional

reports contain findings and observations that are useful input for

joint and service doctrine and futures concepts development. Standing

alone, however, neither report adds anything significant to the existing

body of guiding principles that determine the military power of the

United States.

For its part, the Army incorporated lessons learned from DESERT

STORM with its ongoing futures concepts process to produce the 1993

edition of FM 100-5, Operations.24 This edition of the manual included

significant aspects of the previous Army futures concept, Airland

Operations.25 The Army also completed a one-volume assessment of

lessons learned in all areas, including doctrine, publishing the result

in 1993.26 The Army Chief of Staff promulgated a general vision

statement to guide the development of doctrine and other future-oriented

activities, also in 1993.27

The Air Force published a White Paper, Global Reach--Global

Power,28 and a new edition of its capstone manual, Air Force Manual

1-1, Basic Aerospace Doctrine of the United States Air Force.29 It also

commissioned an extensive "Gulf War Air Power Survey" that presented its

findings and recommendations in 1993.30 The Air Force sought to give

doctrine development additional emphasis by upgrading its activity to a

Doctrine Command, although its commander remains a colonel. The Navy

seized the opportunity presented in the aftermath of the Gulf War to

emphasize its role in projecting power (including armies and naval

infantry) ashore. The Navy's concept was published in a White Paper

entitled From the Sea.31 The Navy also established its own Doctrine

Command. In contrast to the Army's long established doctrine and futures

concepts development process, and its comprehensive Training and

Doctrine Command, the Air Force and Navy efforts in these directions are

embryonic. In due course, they will mature and acquire reputations based

on the value their respective services accord to their products.

Service and Joint Futures Concepts.

The Army has a well-established process for developing futures

concepts. These concepts provide for a disciplined exploration of

alternative futures to permit development of doctrine for the future.

This process resulted in the revisions to FM 100-5 promulgated in 198632

and 1993. At present, the Army's Training and Doctrine Command is

completing work on the latest such futures concept which will be

promulgated in a new TRADOC Pamphlet 525-5. When approved,33 this

pamphlet will become the authoritative basis for projecting ahead all

the Army shaping activities, including doctrine; operational concepts

for organizations and major weapon systems; the design of organizations;

materiel; and training and leader development programs. The new futures

concept will also influence the overall allocation of resources for
other future development activities.

Among the services, the Army's doctrine and futures concepts

development system is the most comprehensive and mature.34 Neither the

other services nor the joint doctrine system have concepts in place to

explore alternative futures. The joint doctrine system has no provision

for such developments. Moreover, there is no process or product in the

Defense Department to provide guidance or direction from the level of

the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) on futures concepts.

Two current initiatives within OSD and the Joint Staff could in

the future provide policy and doctrinal guidance for futures concepts

and future doctrine. One is sponsored by the Office of the

Undersecretary of Defense for Policy. It seeks to revitalize the

long-range planning system and provide general guidance to the uniformed

military establishment and the service secretariats for completing the

transition to capabilities-based force planning and for improving the

integration of defense-wide planning activities. This initiative could

provide policy direction for a joint process of futures concepts

development to include the selection of a relevant family of planning

scenarios that go beyond those contained in the Bottom-Up Review.35 The

most recent Defense Department Annual Report acknowledges that: "The

requirements process must be more closely integrated with the

operational concepts and objectives."36 This planning initiative could

be helpful in this regard.

The second initiative is being undertaken within the Joint Staff

under the auspices of the Vice Chairman. It entails revising the terms

of reference for the Joint Requirements Oversight Council (JROC) to

improve the way in which it can influence the definition of military

requirements for materiel systems as well as other dimensions of

military capability. Under the JROC's current mandate, it has the

responsibility for articulating military needs and validating

performance goals and program baselines for consideration by the Defense

Acquisition Board (DAB).37 In view of the JROC's position atop the

uniformed military requirements process and its role in advising the

DAB, if the OSD policy planning and JROC mandate revision processes are

synchronized, these combined initiatives could give impetus to a proper

joint futures concepts development process that could, in turn, shape

future joint force development. At present, however, because of the

absence of futures concepts development systems outside the Army, there

is no capstone vision statement for future development except in the

Army.

As an indicator of the emphasis given to doctrine and its

development, it is revealing that in the DOD Annual Report, only the

Army and Air Force commented at all on this subject. Neither the DOD nor

Navy sections of the report has any reference to doctrine. The Army

asserted the importance of the new FM 100-5:

The Army recently revised the intellectual foundation for its

operations. We published a new FM 100-5, Operations, both to

accommodate new strategic realities and to ensure

continuity.38

The Air Force asserted that:

Our doctrinal contribution to the ever-developing role of
aerospace power in recent joint operations is also important.

For example, in theater air defense, we are studying the

evolving aircraft, cruise missile, and ballistic missile

threats....39

These comments reveal, as well, the context in which these two

services typically view doctrine. The Army sees doctrine as a coherent

set of broad guidelines that reach out to all aspects of the its

operations. The Air Force at times views doctrine as an instrument for

achieving specific purposes in specific functional areas, as well as

asserting in the most general terms the role of "aerospace power" in

military affairs.40

Doctrine will have to be a central feature in any revolution in

military affairs. A significant obstacle to such a revolution is the

lack of any overarching OSD or joint vision statement or guidance for

futures concepts. The discussion of force development will highlight the

negative consequences that this creates for future force planning.

Service and Joint Force Development Processes.

Force development, as the term is used in this essay, comprises

the design of organizations and materiel to accomplish combat and

peacetime tasks. It is the function that creates the military potential

needed to carry out the tasks. By contrast, training and leader

development convert that potential into actual military capabilities.

Doctrine and futures concepts provide the sets of principles that

guide the force development process. They distill and interpret the

lessons of the past. They accommodate the central values and mores of

national culture and the unique aspects of the services' operating

environments. Futures concepts, in particular, posit alternatives for

the future that merit detailed analysis and experimentation.

In the process of force development, doctrine and technology

interact. Technology developed without the benefit of doctrine may serve

no useful military purpose. Doctrine established without understanding

the promise and limitations of technology cannot accomplish its

principal purpose. The issue is not which comes first, but how they

should relate to each other.

At this point in the post-cold war period, force development and

the absolute size of the armed forces are, so to speak, under siege. It

is difficult for the defense establishment to be persuasive about needed

new capabilities with the Soviet threat gone. Similarly, the defense

structure and its funding have become the principal source of resources

in Government-wide budget and deficit reduction initiatives and

"reinvestment" programs. Development of future forces under these

circumstances encounters obstacles that are the most severe that they

have been since the end of World War II.

It is, of course, entirely appropriate to insist that the

proponents of new capabilities make their case. It is also obviously

essential to assure the vitality of the American economy now and for the

future. Nevertheless, while reducing defense budgets and downsizing and

reshaping forces are essential, there is a lesson concerning the size

and composition of the armed forces that should be appreciated when

contemplating future force development. In this tumultuous period of
global instability and uncertainty, it is especially important for the

U.S. Armed Forces to have a robust capability to cope with unanticipated

but definable challenges in combat and noncombat situations.

Individual units must be versatile enough to adapt to a range of

potential types of employment against a wide variety of adversaries--

including a potential peer competitor at some point in the next century.

Forces developed for the challenging period ahead cannot be expected to

succeed if they are designed as lean organizations specialized to

perform a single task or a small set of tasks against a small and

defined set of potential adversaries. Forces in being today were

designed during the height of the cold war. Because their organizational

designs and materiel were inherently robust and versatile, they can with

little difficulty adapt to post-cold war challenges. Operation DESERT

STORM provides the most obvious evidence.

In assessing current force development efforts, two "lessons" from

the Persian Gulf War and more recent exercises have seminal importance.

These are the lessons of precision in the attack of distant targets on

land, and of simultaneous operations throughout the battle area.

In the area of precision, some of the lessons are almost too

obvious. If a target can be located, it can be destroyed at relatively

low risk to our own attack forces with a very high level of confidence.

Attack means include manned aircraft and stand-off missiles launched

from land, sea, or airborne platforms. The probabilities are very high

for penetrating enemy defenses, definitively locating a previously

identified target, delivering the lethal or nonlethal "warhead" where

and when it is needed, achieving the desired end state (destruction,

suppression, immobilization), and recovering the attacking force with

little or no damage or casualties.

Not as obvious in the lessons of precision attack are three major

unresolved issues. These are the nature and location of the real

intended target, the timing of the attack, and limiting unwanted

"collateral" damage.

Not all targets are what they appear. Some prime targets are not

obvious, not easy to distinguish from areas of little or no value. It

remains much easier to hit what can be seen than it is to be sure what

it is that is seen or actually has been hit.

Even if the target is indeed what it appears to be, it matters

when it is attacked. Some targets have values that vary over time.

Destroying an empty building may be useful but not as useful as

destroying it and the function it performs when that best assists our

forces to achieve important objectives. The destruction of some targets

will only have the desired effect within relatively narrow time limits.

At this point in service and joint force development, we have perfected

neither a method for determining the optimal time for attack nor the

mechanisms to utilize fully all available capabilities of all services

and allies at that time.

The issue of unwanted collateral damage continues to be serious in

spite of the significant increases in accuracy of many of our latest

warheads. As a consequence, the relative efficiency of long-range

stand-off attack may be inappropriate in important cases, possibly

necessitating foregoing the attack altogether. The cases of aircraft
placed next to archaeological monuments and difficulties of destroying

objects such as bridges located in populated areas are illustrative.

These three issues are likely to characterize the precision attack

task for the foreseeable future and, therefore, should be taken into

account by future force development initiatives.

In the area of simultaneous operations, it is now possible to

operate in depth to attack key combat functions and their control and

support means in a way that can achieve the end state without the need

for a prolonged sequence of close operations. When combined with the

effects of precision, simultaneity can substantially shorten the length

and costs associated with campaigns on land, facilitating an early and

favorable conclusion of hostilities.

The major issues concerning simultaneity appear to be controlling

information and intelligence, and synchronizing the operations of all

force providers. The major force development initiatives in the Army

center on the first of these issues. The Army is striving for near

perfect distributed situational awareness through the proliferation of

digital data processing capabilities in its principal combat platforms.

It is also seeking to ensure it has near perfect intelligence and

information provided to all who can use it in near real time, while

denying the same to the adversary and even actively deceiving the

adversary with false information. In both cases, the Army has in place

the basic doctrinal principles in the new FM 100-5 to begin to master

these two issues. It also is completing a new futures concept, as

mentioned above, to develop further these and other areas to achieve

"full-dimensional operations."41

These Army initiatives are typical of the force development

process. Each service has derived parochial lessons from combat against

Iraq. There is no joint mechanism to enforce a doctrinal basis for

moderating this normal but inefficient parochialism. Neither is there

joint future force development guidance that addresses these and other

basic questions of military affairs.

There is no guidance on the degree of robustness needed, much less

how to achieve it. Rather, there is ample guidance and forced budget

cuts on programs that originally were focused on the Soviet Union. The

exception to this rule is triggered when the civilian industrial base

appears in jeopardy, but not when combat functions could be at risk if

optimistic estimates of the future42 prove invalid. The operating

assumption is that "overlap" is unnecessary, except possibly in the case

of the nuclear triad.

Service operating environments are vital in developing guidance

for future force development. If future operations are assessed to be

essentially comprised of precise target attack and destruction or

neutralization (best rationalized in air and sea cultures), then the

other functions in war and peace will pay the bills. At the other

extreme, if future military operations are assessed as requiring largely

humanitarian and other assistance to civil authorities and peace keeping

operations, sophisticated air and sea precision attack forces become

irrelevant, as do forces that project combat power (rather than

noncombat assistance) from the sea.

Current processes and guidance provide no alternative to
independent and uncoordinated service force development activities

moderated at the last stage in the development process by the DAB, JROC,

and political budget pressures. In technical fields there is, on the

other hand, perhaps too much detailed near-term technical development

guidance. Even a cursory review of the DOD Annual Report, the latest

congressional authorization and appropriation bills, and the latest OSD

program and budget guidance will adequately illustrate this conclusion.

For longer-term science and technology developments, after casting aside

the previous Administration's strategy and technology thrusts, the

current Administration has not yet developed a replacement.43

A disciplined long-range planning process that included a range of

plausible (even if currently improbable) scenarios, and guidance for

developing futures concepts and future doctrine, would be the first step

in the establishment of a long overdue joint force development process.

Service and Joint Training and Leader Development.

Service training is continuous, intense, and expensive. Joint

training is episodic and expensive. Neither service nor joint peacetime

training adequately prepares forces for future contingencies. At the

nexus of ideas and actions in this major area of military affairs are

doctrine, which is adequate, and funding priorities, which are

inappropriate.

Services typically approach joint training as a necessity to be

addressed after the fundamental service core competencies at individual

and unit levels have been achieved. In the Army, the mission essential

tasks that guide each unit typically ignore or inadequately stipulate

the requirements for integrating the unit into a joint or combined

formation. The notable exceptions, of course, are Army airborne units

and their habitually associated Air Force airlift units. Even in the

most sophisticated and intense training environments, the National

Training Center and the Battle Command Training Program in the Army's

case, joint dimensions such as air-ground integration are underdeveloped

and underutilized.

The traditional Defense Department budget and program practices

have left largely to the individual services the establishment of

training priorities and funding. The standard auditing mechanism

consists of self-reported readiness indicators that remain

service-specific. Absent are indicators of the achievement of joint

training objectives which can be derived from joint doctrine.

To be sure, the provisions of the Goldwater-Nichols Act have

enabled joint commanders to establish readiness and capability

objectives for their assigned service forces. However, the services

control the allocation of the overwhelming majority of training funds

and determine training standards. There is no institutional, procedural

link between joint doctrine, joint command requirements, and allocation

of funds across and within services to support training.

Leader development is predominantly a service function, although

it also is affected by the Goldwater-Nichols Act. Services correctly

view leader development as the most important function for ensuring

near-term success in combat and for properly shaping the forces of the

future. Leaders are the services' most important legacies from

generation to generation.
In their programs of formal leader education and training,

development through successive operational assignments, and

encouragement of individual self-development, the services adopt

priorities that mirror their training priorities. The highest priority

is accorded to developing the basic service and specialty core

competencies. These basic leader development building blocks include

solid acculturation in the unique service operating environment. The

joint dimension of leader development becomes an added element, not an

inherent element, in leader development programs.

As a result of the Goldwater-Nichols Act, much more intrusive

joint requirements are placed on the formal education and promotion

systems. Nevertheless, as in the case of joint training, the

preponderance of guidance and funding for leader development programs

rests with the services without overarching joint guidance. There are no

institutional, procedural links between joint doctrine, the substance of

leader development programs, and the amount and priority of funding for

the preponderance of the functions that remain within the services.

The major point in this assessment of the joint dimensions of

training and leader development programs is not that they should be

taken from the services. It is, rather, that the services should be

given better guidance to make these joint dimensions integral to leader

development and training rather than the thin veneer that they are

today. As simulations assume a greater proportion of training and leader

development programs, it may become easier to integrate joint

dimensions. However, without adequate joint guidance for futures

concepts and force development, this major area of military affairs will

continue to be underdeveloped. It will not produce the maximum joint

combat capability from the potential of all the services' unit designs

and materiel.

Service, Joint, and OSD Programming and Budgeting.

By contrast to other major areas of military affairs, there is no

lack of guidance to the entire defense community for budget and program

formulation. In this area the guidance ranges from general priorities in

functional areas to specific directions for individual items.

The formal Defense Department Planning, Programming, and Budgeting

System (PPBS),44 and the day-to-day practices that give it life, have

two characteristics that inhibit a true revolution in military affairs.

The first is the lack of an institutional, procedural link to joint

doctrine. The second is the prevalence of threat-oriented marginal

analysis.

To be sure, the principal guidance documents and procedures relate

all elements of national military power to strategy and policy and

include all relevant participants. Because funds are never adequate to

provide for all needed military capabilities, PPBS does establish

priorities that transcend the services. Moreover, to a significant

degree, operational concepts and joint doctrine have a role in selected

functional areas, particularly within individual parts of the research

and development bureaucracy.

What is absent in PPBS is an overall joint doctrinal template by

which to rationalize current programs, including acquisition. Similarly,
there is no joint futures concept or force development vision by which

to rationalize research and development. No procedure is in existence

that would permit developing joint doctrinal measures of merit for

examining the sufficiency of funding within and across functional areas,

or within and across the services and defense agencies. Because there is

no joint futures concept, a number of attempts at overarching guidance

such as the "science and technology thrusts" have been developed.45

While these provide direction for selected areas considered of high

value by OSD, they are neither comprehensive nor helpful in establishing

priorities between current and future capabilities, between services, or

within services.

The second obstacle, threat-based marginal analysis, may be

removed if the changes in long-range planning under consideration by the

Undersecretary of Defense for Policy46 are put in place. The problems

that the old procedure creates are an inability to find a suitable

substitute for the Soviet threat to use in research and analysis, and an

inability to develop options that consider trade-offs between functional

areas and services. If PPBS indeed completes the transition to

capabilities-based force planning and a joint futures concept is

developed, analysis and decision making based on and rationalized by

joint doctrine and joint concepts would be possible.

CONCLUDING OBSERVATIONS

Returning to the opening refrain, whither goes the revolution

in military affairs? The short answer is that there is more

evolution than revolution in evidence.

The tables below provide an impressionistic summary of the

author's assessment of the current and potential future processes of

change in the three major areas of military affairs. The assessment

relates to the armed forces as a whole.

<PRE>

MAJOR AREA REVOLUTION EVOLUTION CONTINUITY

Force Design X

Training X

Resources X

Table 1. 1994 Assessment

------------------------------------------------------------------------

MAJOR AREA REVOLUTION EVOLUTION CONTINUITY

Force Design X

Training X

Resources X

Table 2. Future Potential

------------------------------------------------------------------------

</pre>

Clearly there are elements in all the services that will have
profiles that differ significantly from this overall assessment. For

instance, revolutionary change is possible within this decade in the

manner of conducting close operations in high-intensity warfare if the

Army experiments currently underway to "digitize" succeed. Similarly, if

current initiatives to improve the timeliness and precision of the

attack of distant high value targets on land succeed, the resulting

synergy between deep and close operations can significantly enhance the

effectiveness and speed of theater campaigns. In the main, for the armed

forces of the United States, there is no obvious revolution in military

affairs on the horizon of the sort that resulted from the introduction

of the internal combustion engine or nuclear weapons. What revolutions

there may be are more akin to the introduction of "stealth" which

resulted in a significant improvement in a few battlefield functions,

but hardly revolutionized warfare.

Focusing on the major defense areas, revolution in doctrine will

be possible only to the extent that significantly different futures

concepts or their equivalent drive the process. There are no such

revolutionary concepts, service-unique or joint, in existence or under

development. The revolution, if it occurs, will be in the processes for

developing futures concepts within the defense establishment. The

introduction of concepts- based planning with policy direction from OSD

and force development directly linked to doctrine and concepts could

produce a revolution within, perhaps, a decade.

In the area of force design, revolution is possible provided

current initiatives to use distributed simulations expand within and

across services and are stimulated by truly innovative futures concepts.

The slow part of the process will, of necessity, be the field testing

phase. For complex organizations and materiel systems, this phase will

remain unavoidable regardless of how revolutionary the design phase

becomes.

In the area of training and leader development, revolution is

clearly possible. This will require the correct mix of joint and

service-unique elements, distributed simulations and field exercises.

Taken together, the revolutionary potentials that exist in force design

and training and leader development open the possibility for much more

rapid improvements in the American way of war than at any time in the

past. Whereas it took a generation to reshape the forces following

Vietnam, it could take perhaps half that time in the future to effect a

comparable renaissance.

Turning to resources, there is no alternative to evolution as the

upper limit to change. It is simply impossible to terminate activities

overnight. Moreover, however revolutionary the process of change becomes

at the design end, it will be necessary to maintain current capabilities

in being until a transition can be effected. The armed forces are likely

to remain too small to permit rapid major transformations that

significantly decrease near-term readiness.

History alone will judge what it means to have a revolution in

military affairs. The uncertainties that have always surrounded warfare

have a profound effect on the military profession, inclining it to

conservatism, setting evolution as the normal upper limit of the rate of

change. That characteristic is likely to remain central to the

profession.
Notes:

1. AirLand Battle first appeared in its entirety in the 1982

edition of FM 100-5. See: Headquarters, Department of the Army, Field

Manual 100-5, Operations, Washington, DC: U. S. Government Printing

Office, August 20, 1982. This edition replaced the first post-Vietnam

edition published on July 1, 1976. The 1976 edition reflected the

beginning of a process of doctrine revitalization and embraced a concept

known widely as the Active Defense which stressed maximizing firepower

and tailoring forces for maneuver. By contrast, AirLand Battle stressed

the tenets of agility, initiative, depth, and synchronization--

emphasizing the employment of these interrelated aspects of combat to

maximize the ability of the force to win.

2. A central part of the Army's post-Vietnam reorganization and

renaissance was the creation of the Training and Doctrine Command. This

organization became the principal agent for developing the Army's combat

capabilities and preparing the Army for war, as well as being its

architect for the future. For a description of the organization and its

central role see: John L. Romjue, Susan Canedy, and Anne W. Chapman,

Prepare the Army for War: A Historical Overview of the Army Training and

Doctrine Command, 1973-1993, Fort Monroe, VA: Office of the Command

Historian, U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command, 1993.

3. Headquarters, Department of the Army, Field Manual 100-5,

Operations, Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, June 14,

1993.

4. Office of the Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff, Joint Pub 1,

Joint Warfare of the US Armed Forces, Washington, DC: National Defense

University Press, November 11, 1991, pp. 5, 6.

5. In thinking about changing military institutions under

conditions of uncertainty and instability, it is inspiring to recall the

Army's transition to the nuclear age. See: Maxwell D. Taylor, The

Uncertain Trumpet, New York: Harper & Brothers, 1960.

6. These are widely held perceptions among experts and attentive

publics.

7. While we should not overstate the case, especially in light of

the October 1993 combat losses in Somalia and the early 1994

appreciation of how difficult combat on the Korean Peninsula could be,

DESERT STORM is likely to remain a powerful model for shaping

expectations.

8. Les Aspin, Secretary of Defense, Report on the Bottom-Up

Review, Washington, DC: Department of Defense, October 1993.

9. It is important to acknowledge that the plans put in place at

the end of the Bush administration, including the Base Force, had

already made the transition to regional conflict scenarios. See: Lorna

S. Jaffe, The Development of the Base Force, 1989-1992, Washington, DC:

Joint History Office, Office of the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of

Staff, July 1993.

10. The shift within the military services from threat-based to

capabilities-based forces is well underway. While this is the reality,
it was not reflected in the rationales and scenarios of the Bottom-Up

Review. Many participants in national security decision making and

resource allocation processes hold to the obsolete threat-based

paradigm.

11. While habitual association and intensive training of joint and

combined forces should be the norm, the U. S. armed forces should be

flexible and versatile enough to permit effective integration of

unfamiliar units. It is prudent to plan for a range of potential

coalition warfare and peacetime operations in the future at least as

challenging as the wide array present in this early post-cold war

period.

12. "Be, ... all that you can be, ...."

13. The Goldwater-Nichols Department of Defense Reorganization Act

of 1986 (10 USC 161 et. seq. PL 99-433).

14. These data are excerpted from a graphic status report of the

Joint Publication System, dated March 31, 1994, Joint Staff J-7.

15. Ibid.

16. In 1992, a draft of a proposed manual on this subject

received extensive reviews by experts inside and outside the defense

establishment. No further work has been undertaken on this topic since

that time.

17. Office of the Chief of Staff, United States Air Force, Global

Power, Global Reach, Washington, DC: Headquarters, Department of the Air

Force, 1991.

18. FM 100-5, p. iv.

19. Office of the Chairman, The Joint Chiefs of Staff, Joint Pub

2-0, Joint Doctrine for Intelligence Support to Operations, Washington,

DC: Joint Staff, October 12, 1993, p. iii.

20. Joint Pub 1.

21. The "lessons" in this case relate to those the Chairman

himself believed to be clear. At that time, joint, combatant command,

and service lessons learned assessment teams were far from finished with

their work.

22. Department of Defense, The Conduct of the Persian Gulf War:

Final Report to Congress Pursuant to Title V of The Persian Gulf

Conflict Supplemental Authorization and Personnel Benefits Act of 1991

(Public Law 102-25), Washington, DC: Department of Defense, April 1992.

23. Representative Les Aspin, Chairman, and Representative William

Dickinson, Ranking Republican, House Armed Services Committee, Defense

for a New Era: Lessons of the Persian Gulf War, Washington, DC: U.S.

Government Printing Office, 1992.

24. FM 100-5.

25. United States Army Training and Doctrine Command, TRADOC
Pamphlet 525-5, Airland Operations, Fort Monroe, VA: U.S. Army Training

and Doctrine Command, August 1, 1991.

26. Brigadier General Robert H. Scales, Jr., DESERT STORM Study

Project Director, Certain Victory: The US Army in the Gulf War,

Washington, DC: Office of the Chief of Staff, United States Army, 1993.

27. General Gordon R. Sullivan and Lieutenant Colonel James M.

Dubik, Land Warfare in the 21st Century, Carlisle Barracks, PA:

Strategic Studies Institute, U.S. Army War College, February 1993. This

monograph was presented at the U.S. Army War College's Fourth Annual

Conference on Strategy in February 1993.

28. Office of the Chief of Staff, United States Air Force, Global

Reach- Global Power, Washington, DC: Headquarters, Department of the Air

Force, 1991.

29. Air Force Manual 1-1.

30. Thomas A. Keaney and Eliot A. Cohen, Gulf War Air Power

Summary Report, Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1993.

The full survey is a set of ten reports. See also: Eliot A. Cohen, "The

Mystique of U.S. Air Power," Foreign Affairs, Vol. 73, No. 1, January/

February 1994, pp. 109-124.

31. Office of the Secretary of the Navy, ... From the Sea,

Washington, DC: Headquarters, Department of the Navy, 1992.

32. For the period 1982-1990, the Army's futures concept was

termed AirLand Battle-Future, and produced a family of studies that were

helpful in refining FM 100-5, assisting in the production of the 1986

edition, and in shaping the subsequent futures concept, Airland

Operations, that was published in 1991. See relevant notes, above.

33. TRADOC developed preliminary drafts of the new Pamphlet 525-5

early in 1994. A final version may be available after mid-year. The

working title of this pamphlet is "Future Full-Dimensional Operations."

34. The Army disciplines and rationalizes its concepts and

doctrine with all other areas of force shaping by a combination of the

Training and Doctrine Command's Concept Based Requirements System and

the Department of the Army's long-range planning process. The definitive

documents for both processes are: U. S. Army Training and Doctrine

Command, TRADOC Regulation 11-15, Concept-Based Requirements System,

Fort Monroe, VA: U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command, June 11, 1989

(currently under revision with the new version likely to be completed by

mid-1994); and U.S. Department of the Army, AR 1-1, Planning,

Programming, Budgeting, and Execution System, Washington, DC: Department

of the Army, January 30, 1994.

35. This effort, which is being undertaken by the Undersecretary's

Policy Planning staff, is in its early stages and there are not yet any

definitive documents that outline it.

36. Les Aspin, Secretary of Defense, Annual Report to the

President and the Congress, Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing

Office, January 1994, p. 106.
37. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, CJCS Memorandum of

Policy No. 7 (CJCS MOP 7): Joint Strategic Planning System (JSPS), Washington, DC: Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, January 30, 1990;

including 1st Revision, March 17, 1993. This document is likely to be

revised in due course as a consequence of changes underway in the Joint

Requirements Oversight Council, inter alia.

38. Annual Report, p. 259.

39. Ibid., p. 281.

40. Air Force Manual 1-1 takes this broad view.

41. Forthcoming TRADOC Pamphlet 525-5.

42. Many critics, including this author, claim this is precisely

the case with the Bottom-Up Review.

43. According to the Defense Department's Office of the Director

of Research and Engineering, science and technology guidance for the

longer term will be completed by mid-1994 and will be based on the Joint

Staff's expression of essential future military capabilities.

44. Department of Defense, Department of Defense Directive

7045.14, Planning, Programming, and Budgeting System (PPBS), May 22,

1984; with Change 1, July 28, 1990; and Department of Defense

Instruction 7045.7, Implementation of the Planning, Programming, and

Budgeting System (PPBS), May 23, 1984; with Change 1, April 9, 1987,

Washington, DC: Office of the Secretary of Defense. Each of the services

maintains its own implementing directive. In the Army, it is AR 1-1.

45. As mentioned above, no new science and technology guidance

document has yet been developed by the Clinton Defense Department. The

section dealing with science and technology in the latest DOD Annual

Report focuses mainly on the reorganizations within OSD and the Advanced

Research Projects Agency. It leaves entirely unstated all but the basic

policy directions such as the emphasis on dual-use technologies (those

having both military and civilian applications). However, ample guidance

remains in place from the previous administration and has been reflected

in the services' research, development, and acquisition programs. The

most mature and comprehensive of these service efforts is the Army's

Science and Technology Master Plan. For FY 1994, see: Department of the

Army, Army Science and Technology Master Plan, Fiscal Year 1994,

Washington, DC: Office of the Assistant Secretary of the Army (RDA),

November 1993.

46. As noted earlier, this is a recent initiative for which there

are no public documents available. See: Aspin, Annual Report, p. 106.
U.S. ARMY WAR COLLEGE

Major General William A. Stofft

Commandant

*****

STRATEGIC STUDIES INSTITUTE

Director

Colonel John W. Mountcastle

Director of Research

and Conference Organizer

Dr. Earl H. Tilford, Jr.

Authors

Paul Bracken

Raoul Henri Alcala

Editor

Mrs. Marianne P. Cowling

Secretaries

Mrs. Shirley E. Martin

Ms. Rita A. Rummel

*****

Composition

Mr. Daniel B. Barnett

Cover Artist

Mr. James E. Kistler