American Military Power: Future Needs,

Future Choices

October 1991

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Recommended Citation: ‘

U.S. Congress, Office of Technology Assessment, American Military Power: Future Needs,

Future Choices-Background Paper, OTA-BP-ISC-80 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government

Printing Office, October 1991).

For sale by the U.S. Government Printing Office

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Foreword

America’s global security environment is changing profoundly, pushing the country

toward a fundamental reevaluation of its military requirements and those of the supporting

defense technology and industrial base. If U.S.-Soviet relations do not deteriorate, defense

procurement could accelerate its present decline through the end of the decade. The Office of

Technology Assessment has been asked to conduct an assessment of what form the future

defense technology and industrial base might take. An essential first step in any evaluation of

the defense base is understanding what military forces it will support and what those forces

may be called upon to accomplish. Many of the characteristics of the U.S. military forces and

the defense industry that supports them arose because of the unique security requirements of

the last 40 years. Given the extraordinary new environment, the assumptions that led to today’s

military and industrial structure requires careful and continuing review. What threats the

Nation faces, the role of force, the context of regional conflict, even the definition of

‘‘security,’ must be reevaluated.

This background paper, part of OTA’s ongoing assessment of the future defense

technology and industrial base, outlines some of the issues of importance for making choices

about the future nature and role of U.S. armed forces, and suggests how these choices will

affect defense base requirements. The final report of the assessment, to be delivered in the

spring of 1992, will address specific policy options arising from the strategic choices and

tactical decisions discussed here.

In preparing this background paper, OTA sought information and advice from a broad

spectrum of knowledgeable individuals and organizations whose contributions are gratefully

acknowledged. As with all OTA studies, the content of the background paper is the sole

responsibility of the Office of Technology Assessment and does not necessarily represent the

views of our advisers and reviewers.

 JOHN H. GIBBONS

Director

.,.
Managing the Nation’s Defense Industrial Strength

in a Changing Security Environment

Advisory Panel

Walter B. Slocombe, Chair

Caplin & Drysdale Chartered

Richard Bohlen

Senior Vice President, Operations

Rockwell International Corp.

Robert Calaway

President

Resource Management International, Inc.

Gordon Corlew

Vice President, Production

AIL Systems Inc.

Jacques S. Gansler

Senior Vice President

The Analytic Sciences Corp.

Julius Harwood

Consultant

William W. Kaufmann

Professor

John F. Kennedy School of Government

Harvard University

Gen. P.X. Kelley

USMC (Ret.)

James L. Koontz

President & CEO

Kingsbury Machine Tool Corp.

Thomas L. McNaugher

Senior Fellow

The Brookings Institution

William McNeill

Professor Emeritus

Department of History

University of Chicago

John Mearsheimer

Chairman

Department of Political Science

University of Chicago

Joseph Nye

Director

Center for International Affairs

Harvard University

William J. Perry

Chairman & CEO

Technology, Strategies and Alliances

Donald W. Putnam

Corporate Director

Contracts and Technical Analysis

General Dynamics Corp.

Jack Ruina

Professor of Electrical Engineering

Center for International Studies

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Howard D. Samuel

President

Industrial Union Department AFL-CIO

Wickham Skinner

Professor Emeritus

Business Administration

Harvard University

Gen. William Y. Smith

USAF (Ret.)

James Solberg

Professor

Engineering Research Center

Purdue University

Leonard Sullivan

Consultant

System Planning Corp.

Adm. Harry Train USN (Ret.)

Division Manager

Strategic Research and Management

Services Division

Science Application International Corp.

Gen. John W. Vessey, Jr. USA (Ret.)

Albert Wheelon

Consultant

NOTE: OTA appreciates and is grateful for the valuable assistance and thoughtful critiques provided by the advisory panel members. The panel does

not, however, necessarily approve, disapprove, or endorse this report. OTA assumes full responsibility for the report and the accuracy of its

contents.

iv
OTA Project Staff-American Military Power:

Future Needs, Future Choices

Lionel S. Johns, Assistant Director, OTA

Energy, Materials, and International Security Division

Alan Shaw, International Security and Commerce Program Manager

Jack H. Nunn, Project Director

Ivan Oelrich

Jonathan B. Tucker

Christopher Waychoff

Administrative Staff

Jacqueline Boykin

Louise Staley

Contractor

Madeline Gross
Richard Barnet

Senior Fellow

Institute of Policy Studies

Conventional Forces Workshop, Aug. 7, 1990

Ivan Oelrich, Chair

Office of Technology Assessment

Richard Betts

Senior Fellow

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Stephen Biddle

Research Staff Member

Institute for Defense Analyses

Seymour Deitchman

Senior Research Associate

Institute for Defense Analyses

Col. Marvin Floom, USMC

Warfighting Center

Randall Forsberg

Executive Director

Institute for Defense and Disarmament Studies

Robert Johnson

Senior Fellow

National Planning Association

Gen. Frederick Kroesen

USA (ret.)

Barry Pavel

Consultant

Princeton University

Barry Posen

Associate Professor

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Col. John Warden

Headquarters, USAF

The Pentagon

NOTE: OTA appreciates and is grateful for the valuable assistance and thoughtful critiques provided by the workshop participants. The workshop

participants do not, however, necessarily approve, disapprove, or endorse this background paper. OTA assumes full responsibility for the

background paper and the accuracy of its contents.

vi
Contents

Page

Overview . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix

Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

. . . . . . . 1

The Post-War Security Environment and Evolution of U.S. Military Doctrine . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

U.S. National Security Objectives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

Policies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

The Future Security Environment . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

Europe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4

Outside Europe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

The Continuing Nuclear Threat . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8

Four Choices About How To Reach Objectives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

Size of Contingency . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10

Readiness of U.S. Forces . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11

Interdependence With Allies . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12

Performance of Weapons . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13

summary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15

Figures

Figure Page

I. Major National Military Budgets, 1988 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11

2. Active Armed Forces Personnel, 1988 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11

3. Gross Domestic Products, 1988 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11

Tables

Table Page

l. Countries Producing Weapons—Now Through 2000 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7

2. Force-Structure Choices Affecting the Defense Technology and Industrial Base . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

vii
OVERVIEW

America’s international security environment is

undergoing profound changes. The Office of Technology Assessment has been asked to evaluate the

effects of these changes on the future requirements

of the defense technology and industrial base,

possible changes in management required by a

smaller base with new missions, and options for

moving from the current cold-war configuration of

the base to a streamlined but still robust future base.

An essential first step in any evaluation of the

defense industrial base is understanding what military forces it will support and what those forces may

be called on to accomplish. This background paper

outlines the major issues in the ongoing debate about

the future nature and role of U.S. armed forces. The

paper starts with a review of post-World War II

developments and then summarizes U.S. national

security objectives, possible future policies, and

current trends in world security. The paper ends with

a discussion of the choices to be made about the

nature of future U.S. forces and how these choices

will affect the defense technology and industrial

base.

During the First and Second World Wars, the

United States mobilized its industrial potential to

meet the material challenge of war and, when the

fighting stopped, quickly demobilized. In 1950,

following the North Korean invasion of the South

and the Berlin crisis, the United States entered a

period of tense peace or “cold war’ with the Soviet

Union that required a state of continuous partial

military mobilization. Today the cold war is over

and a substantial part of the associated defenseindustrial mobilization can be reversed. At the same

time, however, the United States remains a military

super-power with global responsibilities that must

now be reexamined in a broader context than the

U.S.-Soviet competition.

Fundamental U.S. national security objectives

will probably change very little. These objectives

include guaranteeing the physical security of the

United States, maintainingg a wide range of foreignpolicy options, improving the country’s prosperity,

ensuring a stable international environment, and

promoting democracy throughout the world. But the

policies that the Nation pursues to meet these

objectives may change significantly with the end of

the cold war. In particular, the use of military force

to meet U.S. objectives must be reexamined. In some

cases, such as Europe, deterrence through the

potential use of force will become less important. In

other cases, such as the recent Gulf War, the political

context for the use of force has changed radically.

The security of Europe is as vital to the United

States as it has always been, but the military

challenge is now much reduced. Soviet forces are

being pulled back to the Soviet Union, some beyond

the Ural Mountains, and their overall number

reduced. The Warsaw Pact has been dissolved and

former Soviet allies now provide an important buffer

between the Soviet Union and the North Atlantic

Treaty Organization (NATO). However, ethnic conflict in Eastern Europe (e.g., Yugoslavia) is on the

rise and the ultimate nature of the Soviet Union is

unclear.

The security situation outside of Europe is more

complex and ambiguous. Although there is much

conflict throughout the “Third World,” in only a

few cases do regional hostilities threaten U.S.

security interests, now that they have been removed

from the context of the superpower competition. The

United States can therefore concentrate its military

planning efforts on the few countries of the world

that have significant military resources and directly

threaten some U.S. interest or ally, rather than

planning for a “generic” Third World threat.

Fortunately, current U.S. military capabilities dwarf

those of nations other than the Soviet Union and a

very few others. Moreover, most of the military

powers in the second tier are close U.S. allies.

Although the Soviet nuclear arsenal is still capable

of destroying the United States, the diminished

threat of escalation from conventional war in Europe

has made any intention by the Soviets to use nuclear

weapons even more remote than in the past.

There are four primary policy decisions about

future U.S. military forces that will affect the

defense technology and industrial base. They are:

1. the expected size and type of the threat or

contingency that available U.S. and allied

forces are expected to meet,

2. the desired rate at which forces would be

committed and the length of time they need to

be sustained,

3. the degree of autonomy desired for U.S. forces,

and

ix
4. the expected performance of U.S. weapons

compared to those of potential adversaries.

Each of these choices will affect the requirements

placed on the defense technology and industrial

base. The size of the force will determine the overall

size of the base. The readiness of forces should be

roughly matched with the responsiveness of the

base. The desired autonomy of U.S. defense technology will determine the extent of dependence on and

cooperation with allies and, in an era of increasing

globalization of technology, the degree of integration between civil and defense industry. Finally, the

performance of U.S. weapons will determine the size

and intensity of the Nation’s defense research and

development effort.

Whatever choices the Nation makes about its

future force requirements, the defense technology

and industrial base that served so well during the

cold war is no longer appropriate. Careful attention

must be given to the restructuring of the base to

assure its ability to support the Nation’s defense

needs well into the next century.
American Military Power: Future Needs, Future Choices

INTRODUCTION

America’s international security environment has

changed profoundly and the change continues. The

primary engine of change is the political revolution

in the Soviet Union and the consequent revolutions

allowed in its former satellite nations. The Office of

Technology Assessment has been asked to evaluate

the effect of these changes on the future requirements for the defense technology and industrial

base, possible changes in management required by

the smaller size of the base and its changing mission,

and means of evolving from the current cold-war

configuration of the base to the future streamlined

but still robust base.

An essential first step in any evaluation of the

defense industrial base is understanding what military forces it will support and what those forces may

be called on to accomplish. This background paper

outlines a cluster of issues of importance to the

ongoing debate about the future nature and role of

U.S. armed forces. It takes a traditional approach to

force planning by discussing near-term (10 year)

options against more traditional threats. OTA is also

conducting a separate assessment of longer term (25

year) options and a broader array of potential threats.

Designing a military structure is a complex

process. An idealized approach would start from

scratch with a statement of national military objectives. These objectives could be based on consensus,

or tradition, or they could be considered axiomatic.

Policies would then be developed to promote the

chosen objectives, and military forces would then be

designed to serve those policies. In fact, however,

practice is well removed in many ways from this

idealized approach. Even in a rapidly changing

world, the Nation must consider existing force

structures and inventories of weapons, organizations’ traditional approaches, and domestic and

international precedent. Nevertheless, many of the

characteristics of the U.S. military forces and their

supporting defense industry arose in response to the

special security requirements of the last 40 years.

Given the profound security changes that have

occurred, the assumptions that led to today’s military and industrial structure warrant review.

The next section briefly covers the post-war

developments that led to the current U.S. military

force structure and the supporting industrial base.

The following sections review the Nation’s security

objectives and the military policies designed to

achieve those objectives. There follows a description of the new security environment and the

foreseeable trends. Finally, the paper concludes with

a discussion of how force-structure decisions will

affect the defense technology and industrial base.

THE POST-WAR SECURITY

ENVIRONMENT AND

EVOLUTION OF U.S.

MILITARY DOCTRINE

Immediately after the victory of the Allied Powers

in the Second World War, the United States perceived few security threats. The Allies had defeated

the Germans and Japanese and the United States was

still hopeful that the wary wartime alliance with the

Soviet Union would continue. While the U.S. public

had seen the military and industrial mobilization for

the war as necessary, it was never popular, and full

demobilization was expected immediately after the

war. U.S. strategy at the end of the war appeared as

simplistic as “bringing the boys home’ and returning quickly to business as usual. But the emergence

of the United States as the world’s preeminent

economic and military power opened new opportunities, as well as new peacetime responsibilities.

Soon after the end of the Second World War,

events combined to create new security challenges

for the United States and the world. The Soviet

Union, by its coercive actions in Eastern Europe,

quickly came to be seen as a military threat. The

sharp and apparently irreconcilable ideological differences between the communist countries and the

liberal democracies tended to force nations into one

of the two camps, forming a ‘‘bipolar’ world. The

United States tended to define conflicts large and

small around the world in a context of this ideological superpower rivalry. Finally, nuclear weapons, by

their very existence, hung over every calculation of

war and gave Americans an unprecedented sense of

national vulnerability.

– l –
2 ● American Military Power: Future Needs, Future Choices

The North Korean invasion of the South decisively reversed the post-War dismantling of the U.S.

military and its supporting industry. Defense spending between 1950 and 1953 shot up from $78 to

$331 billion (in FY90 dollars). The United States

saw a Soviet Union intent on expansion, believed a

world war was imminent, and feared that such a war

might be nuclear and devastating. The United States

hoped that the strategy of “containment” would

attain the objective of preventing Soviet domination

of Europe by conquest or intimidation while avoiding nuclear war.l

This state of continual tense, alert peace came to

be called the “cold war,” and it required something

new of the United States. Because Soviet conventional capabilities in Europe were so formidable, and

the destruction from a nuclear surprise attack would

be so devastating, the Nation would not be able to

recover from a sudden blow and mobilize over a year

or more, as it had in World War II. Thus, highly

ready forces were deployed both at home and far

from the United States to counter similarly ready

Soviet forces. This task in turn required a level of

military operations that was unprecedented for the

United States in peacetime, and the Nation settled

into a state of continuous military alert and partial

industrial mobilization.

The military threat from the Soviet Union, in

particular the threat from Soviet nuclear weapons,

has dominated U.S. strategic thinking for the past 40

years. 2 Although some argued that atomic weapons

made war too horrible to consider as a policy option,

even a U.S. monopoly on atomic weapons did not

deter the Soviets in the 1948 Berlin crisis nor, later,

the North Korean invasion of the South. In part

because of the frustrating failure of nuclear deterrence in Korea, the United States explicitly presented, in a 1954 speech by Secretary of State

Dunes, a policy that became known as “massive

retaliation.” In its most extreme form, this policy

threatened a U.S. nuclear attack against the Soviet

homeland in response to conventional attack by

communists anywhere.

Finances were a prime motivation for the policy

of massive retaliation. The United States, and even

more its European allies, were convinced that they

could never match the Soviets man-for-man and

gun-for-gun. (This judgment was based on the size

of a standing army thought to be politically acceptable in a democracy; a comparison of economies and

populations reveals no inherent inferiority.) Nuclear

weapons seemed to offer a cheap way to counter the

huge communist land armies. Western conventional

forces, and specifically U.S. forces in Europe,

needed to be only large enough to demonstrate U.S.

commitment and serve as a “tripwire’ to trigger

nuclear war.

Massive retaliation was a plausible strategy only

as long as the Soviets did not have an atomic bomb

with which to retaliate or to deter a Western nuclear

attack in the first place. Since Dunes’ speech

occurred after the Soviet’s first test of a hydrogen

bomb, massive retaliation was recognized at the time

to be an interim policy. The next year Maxwell

Taylor introduced the strategy of “flexible response,’ which envisioned using only the amount of

force necessary and appropriate to counter an

aggression. The capability to respond proportionately to any of a wide spectrum of possible attacks

required more powerful and versatile conventional

forces.

Once the Soviets had acquired a substantial

arsenal of nuclear weapons, the United States’

objective was to minimize the chance of all-out

nuclear war, which would most likely start from a

conventional conflict. Initially, nuclear weapons had

been intended to deter conventional attack, relegating U.S. conventional forces to the almost token

role. By the early 1960s, however, Secretary of

Defense McNarmara was urging European allies to

increase spending on conventional forces to forestall, or at least delay, the resort to nuclear weapons

should war break out. Thus deterrence relied less on

the nuclear threat, and the relation of nuclear and

conventional weapons almost reversed itself. Toward the end of the cold war, NATO forces were

meant to provide a credible conventional defense or,

at the very least, a coherent defense lasting weeks to

allow a deliberate decision to use nuclear weapons.

Conventional forces in Europe have received

various amounts of attention since McNamara’s

tenure. The war in Vietnam was a purely conventional conflict in which the threat of nuclear use

played no real part, yet the United States has never

allowed nuclear weapons to lose their critical role in

Europe as the fina1 recourse if attacked. Indeed,

l,tx~ J (~rge Kennan), “The Sources of Soviet Conduc4° Foreign Aflairs, vol. 25, No. 4, July 1947, pp. 566-582.

~or a good history of nuclear strategy, see Lawrence Frexxhm@ The Evolution of NucZear Strategy (New Yorlq NY: St. Martin’s Press, 1981).
American Military Power: Future Needs, Future Choices ● 3

along with continued improvements in conventional

force capability, a great deal of effort during the cold

war went toward developing procedures and weapons that would “couple” the conventional defenses

in Europe to increasingly powerful nuclear forces,

culminating with the intercontinental nuclear forces

of the United States.

Throughout the cold war, the United States

viewed most regional conflicts outside of Europe as

being at least partially in the context of a global

struggle between the United States and Soviet-aided

communist aggression. This perception gave some

local conflicts in small countries, such as Angola

and Nicaragua, an importance out of proportion to

that they would have received if viewed in isolation.

Even when local animosities were adequate to

produce conflict, for example in the Middle East, the

Soviets often tried to exploit such conflicts to the

disadvantage of the United States. The United States

played the same game, supporting groups whose

main qualification was opposition to whatever group

the Soviets were supporting. In only a few cases such

as Panama, because of the importance of the Canal

to U.S. commerce, did the United States perceive

security interests wholly independent of the superpower competition.

The cold war affected every aspect of U.S. force

structure to some extent: forward deployment of

forces; reliance on allies; maintenance of large,

highly ready forces; and emphasis on highperformance weapons. The continuing changes in

the Soviet Union and east-central Europe are of the

same magnitude as those that brought on the cold

war, only in the direction of diminished threat.

Before discussing changed policies, however, the

next section reviews U.S. objectives.

U.S. NATIONAL SECURITY

OBJECTIVES

The stated national security objectives of the

United States are simple, although not consistently

observed in real-world politics. According to recent

statements by the President, the United States has

four basic objectives:

1. ensuring the survival of the Nation as a

politically independent entity;

2. promoting economic prosperity for Americans

and the world;

3. maintaining a stable world order conducive to

liberty; and

4. forging strong ties to allies and like-minded

nations throughout the world.3

For the foreseeable future, pursuing these objectives will require military forces to supplement

economic and diplomatic tools.

Maintaining a political identity and the ability to

act as a political entity is the foremost objective of

any state. Indeed, pursuing this objective could be

used to define the purpose of a “nation-state.”

Beyond this fundamental goal, the United States has

the power and resources to pursue other objectives.

First, the U.S. Government maintains the objective of promoting its own and the world’s prosperity

by pursuing policies it believes will contribute to a

stable international environment. Other countries

may share this view but the United States is foremost

in being able to effect it on a global scale, and the

only nation with the required force even to attempt

it militarily.

Second, stated U.S. foreign-policy objectives

have an ideological content. The United States is a

liberal democracy and officially supports liberal

democratic governments around the world, as well

as movement toward democracy among those governments that have not yet achieved it. The historical

record here is mixed, however, and the United States

has not always lived up to its rhetoric. During the

cold war, for example, the United States supported

autocratic regimes in Iran, Iraq, South Korea, and

throughout Central and South America simply

because they were anticommunist or were perceived

to promote regional stability. Nevertheless, no

country, except the Soviet Union, has even attempted on a global scale such support based on

ideology.

POLICIES

Planning for future military force structure requires some vision of the mission of the military

forces. The country needs very different forces to

intervene in other countries than it does just to keep

hostile military forces off its own shores. And no

military force alone will be able to guarantee that a

future government, for example in Iraq, is stable,

democratic, and friendly to the United States.

3National Security Strategy of the United States (Washington DC: The White House, March 1990), PP. 2-3.
4 ● American Military Power: Future Needs, Future Choices

There was never much question of whether the

United States should defend vital interests challenged by the Soviet Union. Instead, the debate

concerned how to do it best, how much military

force was needed, and how that force ought to be

deployed.

U.S. policymakers have recognized that in the

modern era, economic and industrial power create

military potential. Thus, during the cold war, the

United States considered the potential Soviet domination of Europe’s industrial power-and hence its

military potential-to be a long-term threat to

American security. The security of Europe remains

vital to the United States. The difference now is that

the Soviet challenge is much reduced and the new

security equation much more complex. The threat of

overwhelming surprise attack is gone. Estimates of

warning time have increased from 2 weeks to as

much as 2 years, and the Soviet Union is much

weakened. This change is now believed irreversible,

in the strict sense that the Soviets will not be able to

return to the situation they once enjoyed and an

important buffer of Eastern and Central European

states now exists between the Soviets and NATO

Europe.

Military security cannot be measured on an

absolute scale, but comparing the situation today to

the past suggests that the relative likelihood of a

major war in Europe involving the United States has

fallen to its lowest level since the 1920s. Yet, even

without a threat of short-term surprise attack, Europe

may still need the American long-term potential for

reinforcement and mobilization to counter the comparable Soviet potential, and some European nations

may still want the U.S. nuclear guarantee against

Soviet nuclear coercion.

Instability in Eastern Europe, or in the Soviet

Union itself, while not a “threat” in the normal

sense, could pose a potential danger to U.S. and

NATO security. Since wars can expand in unpredictable and seemingly irrational ways, President Bush

can say with some reason that the enemy is

‘‘instability.’ Having intervened in two World

Wars in Europe, the United States clearly has an

interest in maintainingg stability on the continent.

Aside from the Soviet threat, the United States,

thanks to its size, power, and geography, faces

exceedingly few threats to its survival. Nevertheless,

the United States has been willing to fight for

interests that cannot in the strictest sense be called

“vital” in that they affect national survival. The

intervention in Grenada is a recent example. These

interventions were officially justified in part by the

U.S. objective of promoting international stability.

Of course, great care must be exercised in the use of

military force because it is a blunt instrument with

many unpredictable consequences and often leads to

less rather than more stability.

In the future, the United States must continue to

balance costs and benefits when calculating whether

and when to involve itself militarily around the

world. Furthermore, if military planning is not

dominated by the need to meet the Soviet threat, the

United States must make difficult tradeoffs when

deciding on the military forces (and supporting

industrial base) needed to maintain the capability to

intervene around the world.

THE FUTURE SECURITY

ENVIRONMENT

If the United States chooses to remain a great

power, even if not a “superpower,” then it must

have military resources that make it a serious player

along with other large nations on the world stage.

Comparisons of military power between any two

countries should not imply that the potential for

conflict exists. Indeed, part of the ongoing debate

about the appropriate size of U.S. forces in Europe

involves the perceived need to have forces comparable in size to the those of allies so the United States

can remain a major player in NATO policymaking.

Europe

Europe continues to hold the greatest concentration of conventional military power on Earth. For

U.S. military force planning, it also holds the

greatest number of ironies. Since the end of the

Second World War, the Soviet Union and the

Soviet-dominated Warsaw Pact have been the dominant threats to security in Europe. The Warsaw Pact

is now defunct, but Soviet military power, while

reduced, is still formidable. NATO has done well at

deterring the military threat to the security of

Western Europe but is now uncertain of its future

role. The future role of U.S. forces in particular is

unclear.

American forces have been integral to the defense

of Europe. They represented both significant military power in their own right and the commitment of

the balance of American power should war break
American Military Power: Future Needs, Future Choices ● 5

out. The United States could judge the size of its

military requirements by the force needed to bring

NATO’s overall strength up to the challenge presented by the Soviet threat.

This NATO military shortfall is much reduced

with the reduction of Soviet forces and their

withdrawal from Eastern Europe. The dissolution of

the Warsaw Pact, and the loss of East Germany to

NATO, represent a greater loss of military power by

the Soviet side than the withdrawal from Europe of

U.S. forces would be for NATO. If trends in

reduction of the Soviet conventional threat to

Europe continue then very little of the military

justification for U.S. forces in Europe will remain.

European NATO countries ought to be more than

capable of providing for their own security, especially if backed by the potential for U.S. reinforcement.

Without an immediate Soviet threat, the military

mission of U.S. forces in Europe has become less

clear, and the lack of a clear mission means that no

simple yardstick is available to judge the appropriateness of any particular level of U.S. military force.

The European countries have significant armed

forces of their own, and almost any U.S. military

action in Europe would require the cooperation of

allies. This fact requires estimating U.S. military

needs within the context of a total allied force.

Even though the military mission of U.S. forces in

Europe has become less clear, few Europeans are

clamoring for a complete withdrawal of U.S. forces.

One reason is that the U.S. military presence has a

political function to perform by demonstrating the

United States’ continuing commitment to the security and stability of Europe. Ultimately, this mission

might require little more than a military liaison and

logistics support on the ground. If warning time of

a resurgent Soviet threat really is 2 years or more,

then U.S. military potential plays as great a part as

immediate capability in the deterrence calculation.

U.S. forces may be useful for a variety of possible

nonmilitary NATO missions. They could serve to

enhance stability, as a sign of U.S. political commitment to European affairs, as insurance or reassurance, or in a future European arms control regime.

None of these missions alone would justify a U.S.

presence, however, and each has limitations. For

example, although instability could spill over into

NATO areas, it is most likely to arise in southeast

Europe-Bulgaria, Romania, or Yugoslavia-or in

the realigned republics of the Soviet Union itself,

where U.S. forces could not realistically be deployed. Alternatively, U.S. forces may reassure the

Poles and the Russians about German intentions, but

explaining this mission to the Germans would be

very delicate indeed. Finally, U.S. forces might find

a role in a future European arms control regime if

non-European forces are needed to serve as more

disinterested observers or referees. They could help

monitor military movements and count treatylimited weapons, and act as inspectors or adjudicators.

Outside Europe

Until recently, the Warsaw Pact threat to Europe

was so challenging that it alone could provide most

of the context for planning U.S. military forces. If

the United States could meet the threat in Europe,

then other, lesser contingencies would be covered

more or less automatically. This will not be the case

in the future.

The importance to U.S. security of areas outside

of Europe and Japan, often lumped together as the

“Third World,” has been much debated. There are

two basic schools of thought.4 One school argues

that the United States should concentrate almost

exclusively on the security of the world’s industrial

centers and the oil-rich areas that fuel them, because

they are the source of military power. Since the

Third World’s economic power is very limited and

diffuse, the Third World is of limited security

interest to the United States except for such special

cases as Panama, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia.5

Members of the opposing school contend that

straightforward calculations of industrial power are

too simplistic. They argue that much of the importance of the Third World depends on geography and

that, while no single country maybe vital, aggregate

loss of access to resources and bases could affect the

global balance of power. Moreover, some observers,

seeing the Third World’s growing populations,

rising religious fundamentalism, and expanding

dFor a good comparison Of the main arguments on both sides, see Michael C. DesclL ‘‘The Keys That Lock Up the World: Identifying American

Interests in the Periphery,’ International Security, vol. 14, No. 1, summer 1989, pp. 89-121.

SFor a ~sc~ct exwsition of fis view, see stephenv~Ever% ‘ ‘American strategic ~terests:J$@rEuN)pe Matters, why the Thkd World DOem’t”

hearings before the Panel on Defense Burdensharing, Committee on Armed Services, U.S. House of Representatives, Mar. 2, 1988.
6 ● American Military Power: Future Needs, Future Choices

arsenals, argue that it is becoming increasingly

unstable, and that threats to U.S. interests in the

Third World are increasing in number and degree. In

such a view, even if conflict in Europe would be

more damaging, Third World conflict is so much

more likely that it should receive greater attention. GIn contrast, a longer term view suggests reasons why

Third World stability may increase: the long postwar decolonization and its destabilizing effects are

behind us, Third World nation-building is well

along, and the Soviet’s ideologically driven intervention has ended. Thus, whether the world outside

Europe and North America will become less stable

in the future is uncertain. Whatever the future of

level of instability, where Third World conflict

persists today, it is most often due to long-standing

local animosities and does not automatically imply

threats to Western security.

Much of the past argument about the importance

of the Third World concerned its effect on the global

balance of power between the Soviet Union and the

United States. Since the Soviets have essentially

withdrawn from that competition, however, balanceof-power arguments supporting involvement in the

Third World are no longer relevant and the postulated military threats to U.S. interests are substantially reduced. Other considerations supporting Third

World involvement will survive the end of the cold

war, but they also may be weakened. Geography will

remain the same: the United States will inevitably be

concerned about what goes on in Mexico and other

nearby states. Although threats to straits and other

transportation choke-points are possible because of

Third World geography, they were most significant

within the context of potential global conflict with

the Soviet Union. Moreover, it is easy to exaggerate

the significance of these threats, since there are

always alternatives.8 For example, anyone with a

map can point out the “vital” importance of the

Suez Canal, yet it was closed for years after the 1967

Arab-Israeli War without disastrous effects.

Regardless of the extent of U.S. interests, the large

majority of nations of the world have such limited

military capability that even a small force by U.S.

standards would be adequate to handle most contingencies. Moreover, the majority of the world’s

nations are poor and thus have a limited military

potential. This is not to say that the poorest parts of

the world, such as Africa, are or will be peaceful.

Precisely because they are poor, they may experience civil and interstate conflict, but they are

unlikely to pose a traditional overt military threat to

U.S. security interests.

The types of potential U.S. military intervention

in the poor Third World could require more tailored

forces. One would have to postulate some type of

extended guerrilla war involving the United States

before the military requirements would be taxing.

But forces used for intervention may need special

equipment and training, and may be only part of a

coordinated program of economic development,

police training, education, and so on.

Other than the Soviet Union, only a handful of

nations have substantial military capability and also

control a vital resource (in practice, this means oil)

or threaten a U.S. ally or important U.S. interests.

The number of potentially serious threats is small

enough that instead of planning for a “generic”

Third World threat, specific cases can be considered.

North Korea and a few countries in the Middle East

are the challenging potential threats, providing a

yardstick for future U.S. force requirements.

Only a handful of Third World nations have any

significant domestic weapons production and none

has a broad, comprehensive military industrial base.

Still, Third World weapon production capability is

increasing, often with Western help.9 (See table 1.)

A few countries have tried to leapfrog their defense

industry into production of weapons such as ballistic

missiles, although those available so far are better

suited for terrorizing civilians than for achieving

military objectives.

The problem is not just the proliferation of

military technologies but the widespread availability

of weapons on the open market. Other than nuclear

weapons, there is very little that any country with the

money cannot buy. Thus, some Third World nations,

especially those with oil reserves, have been able to

acquire substantial arsenals. Several nations have

GSee Steven R. David, “why the Third World Mtters, ” International Security, vol. 14, No. 1, summer 1989, pp. 50-850.

%Liot CoheU “Distant Battles: Modem War in the Tbird World,” International Security, vol. 10, No. 4, spring 1986, pp. 143-171.

gRob~ H. Jo~on, ‘‘Exaggerating America’s Sties in ~d World CO~C@” International Security, vol. 10, No. 3, winter 1985-86, pp. 32-68.

%J.S. Congress, OffIce of Technology AssessrnenL GlobalArms Trade: Commerce in AdvancedMilitary Technology and Weapons, OTA-ISC-460

(Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Oftlee, June 1991).
American Military Power: Future Needs, Future Choices ● 7

Table l-Countries Producing Weapons—Now Through 2000

Major independent Indigenous production of Limited production of Limited production of Minimal weapon

weapon production a wide range of weapons many types of weapons a few types of weapons production capability

United States Brazil Chile Argentina Algeria

Soviet Union India Greece Egypt Iraq

France Israel Indonesia North Korea Libya

Germany South Korea Iran Taiwan Morocco

United Kingdom Yugoslavia Malaysia Canada* Syria

China South Africa Singapore

Poland Spain* Pakistan

Czechoslovakia Thailand

Italy Turkey

Sweden

Japan*

‘Additional estimates by OTA.

SOURCE: Briefing by David Louscher, “Patterns of Demand and Supply of Weapons.”

bought sophisticated types of weapons that, even if

not possessed in large numbers, can severely complicate U.S. defense plans. Antiship cruise missiles

are an example. Although some defense contractors

have suggested promoting arms sales to support the

U.S. defense base, this policy makes little sense if it

encourages sales of weapons to countries that may

become America’s enemies.

The Continuing Nuclear Threat

Soviet intercontinental-range nuclear weapons

continue to pose a direct threat to the United States.

Although the threat from Soviet conventional forces

is much reduced and the Warsaw Pact threat has

disappeared, there has been no comparable reduction in the capability for destruction from Soviet

central nuclear systems. But even though Soviet

nuclear capabilities are practically undiminished,

there is still a reduced risk to the United States, for

several reasons.

First, although military planners often say that

one should disregard intentions and concentrate only

on capabilities, that is too simplistic. Both the

British and the French have nuclear arsenals that

could destroy the United States as a modern society,

yet Americans do not worry about those capabilities

because of their confidence in the intentions of these

two allies. The Soviet Union clearly has become less

belligerent over the last several years and any

intention to use nuclear weapons is certainly even

more remote than in the past.

Second, nuclear war would be so horrendous that

no one could easily imagine incentives strong

enough to start one. Most military planners have

judged that the most probable route to nuclear war

has been escalation from conventional war. With the

diminished probability of conventional war between

the United States and the Soviet Union, the risk

posed by the Soviet nuclear arsenal has been

indirectly reduced.

Finally, the recently completed START arms

control negotiations offer hope that the future threat

to the United States from Soviet nuclear weapons

will be reduced through further cuts in numbers and

types of weapons (particularly heavy ICBMs). Each

side’s modernization drives the other’s to some

extent and requires costly countermeasures, for

example, to maintain survivability. Even if the two

superpowers remain wary of each other, changes in

the Soviet Union are such that it is now at least

conceivable that retaliatory security can be assured

by cooperatively refraining from deploying counterforce weapons.

Perhaps the greatest potential for an increase in

the threat from Soviet nuclear weapons would

follow from instability in, or a breakup of, the Soviet

Union. In that case, nuclear command-and-control

could pass to untested, perhaps unstable governments. The Soviet coup and its aftermath forcefully

demonstrated the potential dangers. However, the

breakup of the Soviet Union could also lead to the

rapid dismantling of its nuclear forces particularly

with encouragement from the United States, such as

the recent unilateral reductions in the number and

readiness of its nuclear weapons. The events unfolding in the Soviet Union at this time carry both risks

and opportunities.

U.S. policy of extended deterrence has assigned to

strategic nuclear systems in the United States some

role in defending Europe. Nuclear weapons were

meant to weigh in the final balance as a deterrent to

conventional aggression. As the conventional threat
8 ● American Military Power: Future Needs, Future Choices

to Europe is reduced, nuclear weapons need to keep

only their purer deterrent function of deterring the

other side’s use of its own nuclear weapons, and the

further deterrent provided by nuclear weapons

would become redundant. As a result, the nuclear

force intended to deter conventional attack could be

proportionately reduced.

Although the Soviet nuclear threat may be diminishing, there is the continuing worry about the

second tier of nuclear powers, particularly China,

and the additional concern about the spread of

nuclear weapons to other nations. In the past, the

Soviet nuclear arsenal has been so huge that China’s

weapons seemed insignificant. If large Soviet reductions occur, then more attention must be given to

China and other nuclear states.

The nuclear club has grown very little over the

past 10 years but other nations are trying to develop

nuclear weapons or are on the verge of having them.

Nuclear weapons are so destructive that possession

by even one hostile nation could be a significant

threat to the Nation’s physical security. This makes

defense difficult; for example, a weapon could be

carried in a single ship into any of dozens of harbors.

Moreover, deterrence by the threat of retaliation,

which seems to have worked in the past, may not be

effective against irrational leaders who may acquire

nuclear weapons.

Another strategy is to prevent the spread of

nuclear weapons. Here there is some room for hope

since the existing nuclear powers cooperate fairly

well to discourage further proliferation and most

non-nuclear states with a nuclear weapon potential

have chosen to forego the option.10 The problem,

then, is not a general worldwide rush to go nuclear

by every country that is technologically capable of

it, but rather a few nations, such as, Pakistan, Libya,

and Iraq, that appear intent on acquiring nuclear

weapons. Although these cases present a challenge,

isolation, persuasion, coercion, and sanctions work

better against a few renegades than against a general

trend and they are far less costly than deploying a

strategic defense system.

Summary

The global security environment has become

more favorable to the United States over the last few

years and the trends point toward continuing improvement. The Soviet threat is reduced, while the

military threat from Third World conflicts has

diminished now that these continuing conflicts have

been removed from the superpower context. U.S.

force planners must not assume that military forces

or conflict around the world are necessarily a threat

to U.S. interests.

Those Third World crises that do flare up will be

much easier to handle in the absence of the threat of

Soviet intervention hanging over every move. Imagine the recent war against Iraq if it were still a Soviet

client state. Each U.S. action would have been

judged against the risk of Soviet involvement, and

the Syrians and several other Arab states most likely

would have withheld support from the United States

or even sided with Iraq. The Europeans, worried

about antagonizing the Soviets on their own front,

would have been much less forthcoming. What was

already a formidable task might have become

paralyzingly complex.

The change in the nature of the military threat will

result in changes in the required military force

structure, creating new needs for the supporting

technology and industrial base. But competing

requirements for military forces create conundrums

for defense base planning. With the sharp decline in

the Soviet threat, the large increase in warning time

available before it could launch a credible conventional attack, and anew buffer of independent states

between NATO and the Soviet Union or its successor states, the challenge of meeting a future major

threat involves reconstituting a huge U.S. military

capability at least as quickly as the new threat

emerges. That period of competitive rearmament

could take years. On the one hand, no one proposes

that the United States should maintain a standing

army sized to meet a reconstituted Soviet military

capability or some other great-power threat. On the

other hand, there are many lesser contingencies that

require forces-in-being, and the defense base requirements of those forces will be very different

from those needed to reconstitute forces to meet a

new superpower threat. How to allocate limited

resources between these two requirements will be

one of the important policy questions concerning the

defense industrial base in the coning decade.

1OJoseph Nye, “Nonproliferation: A Long-Term Strategy,” Foreign Affairs, vol. 56, No. 3, April 1978, pp. 601-623.
American Military Power: Future Needs, Future Choices ● 9

FOUR CHOICES ABOUT HOW TO

REACH OBJECTIVES

Desired characteristics of the Nation’s future

military forces will result primarily from political

choices, assumptions, and judgments; few decisions

will fall out from objective calculation. Nevertheless, these decisions should be based on a few

important policy choices.

There are four primary policy decisions that will

affect the defense technology and industrial base.

They are:

1.

2.

3.

4.

the expected size and type of the threat or

contingency that available forces will be expected to meet,

the desired rate at which forces should be

committed and the length of time the forces

need to be sustained,

the autonomous capability for unilateral action

desired for those forces, and

the expected performance of U.S. weapons

compared to those of potential adversaries.

These choices are summarized in table 2.

These force-structure choices should not be

thought of as independent parameters in an equation

but as different perspectives from which to examine

a very complex problem. The options are closely

interrelated. For example, the size of the Navy, and

specifically the number of aircraft carriers, is determined in part by the total force capability required

and in part by the desired reaction time of the

carriers.

The United States still has to decide which

contingencies it wants to handle with forces-inbeing. There will always be hypothetical contingencies that would require a national mobilization and

general expansion of the military, for example,

against countries the size of the Soviet Union, India,

or China. On the other hand, operations smaller than

defending against an all-out Soviet attack on Europe,

such as the ones in Grenada, Panama, and the Persian

Gulf, could be handled with plausible levels of

active forces. Since none of these lesser cases

present immediate threats to the fundamental security of the country, U.S. defense planners must use

somewhat subjective judgment in choosing which

contingencies to handle with available forces.

Whatever the size of any particular military force,

the Nation must decide on the readiness of that force.

Very different readiness levels are required if the

President wants U.S. forces to occupy Panama

within 24 hours as compared with taking 6 to 12

months to do the same thing. Readiness is reflected

most explicitly in the ratio of standing to reserve

forces but also in the training time of standing

personnel, the stock of spare parts, and the level of

maintenance of weapons.

Since the beginning of the Second World War, the

United States has relied on allies to help protect even

its most vital interests. Although the Nation has

maintained an autonomous nuclear retaliatory force,

the United States has chosen to forego the ability to

conduct major military operations without allied or

host-nation cooperation. Interdependence with allies

affects industrial-base needs in two ways: first,

directly by influencing the size and composition of

Table 2—Force-Structure Choices Affecting the Defense Technology and

Industrial Base

National security policy choice Military force implications DTIB implications

Size and nature of contingency Size and capability of overall

planned for force

Urgency of dealing with Readiness of force, active/

contingency reserve ratios, training tempo,

war reserves

Autonomy of action Degree of integration with allied

forces, size and readiness of

forces, composition of force

Qualitative or quantitative Performance and number of

emphasis in weapons weapons

Size of sustaining base, surge

and mobilization capacity

Responsiveness, lead times

Use of foreign technology, use of

foreign production, cooperative logistics planning

Sophistication of supporting technology base, allowed dependence on global commercial

technology

SOURCE: Office of Technology Assessment, 1991.
10 ● American Military Power: Future Needs, Future Choices

the forces needed for various contingencies and,

second, by determining the extent to which the

United States allows itself to rely on foreign supply

of weapons and components.

The fourth force structure decision that will affect

strongly the requirements of the industrial base is the

desired performance of U.S. weapons. The United

States has made a policy of having weapons of

superior performance to those of potential adversaries, even if that has required sacrificing quantitative

superiority. Producing weapons with high performance at acceptable cost has required maintaining

technological superiority over potential enemies.

This policy is not written in stone. Indeed, during the

Second World War, the United States was renowned

not just for the quality of its weapons but for their

overwhelming numbers. Even if the Nation continues to pursue a policy of maintaining qualitative

superiority, the question of trades between quality

and quantity will remain.

Each of these policy choices is expanded below.

Size of Contingency

The size of the threat that U.S. forces must be

capable of handling, that is, the overall capability

and power of the Nation’s military force, is the most

important single choice to be made about them. This

section discusses some of the considerations that

will go into making that choice.

Measuring military power is extremely difficult,

and several units of measure are commonly used.

Perhaps the best overaIl comparison of capability in

modern conventional war is total resources expended for military forces, as measured by dollars

spent. Total resources corresponds to the investment

in modern weaponry and the sidled manpower to

run it. Measures of capability used by military

planners include total number and quality of people

under arms, and the firepower, mobility, and vulnerability of major weapons (tanks, planes, and ships).

Total resources invested is another rough, aggregate

measure of overall capability.

Using any measure for a relative comparison of

two military forces can be even more problematic.

Furthermore, static comparisons of today’s forces

may tell us little about the military potential of a

nation. For example, the existing military power of

Japan measured by its deployed tanks and planes is

much less than the military potential that Japan

could achieve after a few years’ mobilization. In

contrast, some oil-rich countries may have huge

inventories of modern weapons but may lack the

industrial infrastructure to support them, a profound

weakness in any long-term conflict. Simple comparisons of industrial capability alone are also inadequate. Again using Japan as an example, because it

is an island-nation short of natural resources, Japan’s

military potential is vulnerable to disruption by

naval blockade. Clearly, measuring military requirements will always be difficult and neither completely quantitative nor precise.

The size of future U.S. forces will be determined

by judgments about the size of contingencies to be

handled, the likelihood of those contingencies, and

the risks of not being able to handle them. Figures 1

and 2 provide some global perspective on the

military challenges confronting the United States.

Figure 1 shows military spending of those nations

with the largest military budgets. What stands out

starkly from the figure is that the United States and

the Soviet Union do not just outspend other countries but overwhelm every other nation’s military

spending.

In fact, other than the Soviet Union, no other

nation spends on its military as much as one-eighth

as much as the United States does. This distant

second tier of nations with significant military

spending is made up overwhelmingly of America’s

closest allies: the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Japan, Italy, and Saudi Arabia. As measured

by spending, there is little competition other than the

Soviet Union; if the United States were to halve its

defense budget, it would still outspend the nearest

competitors by a factor of 4. (The ratio of spending

will hold steady with many of the European countries even after U.S. budget reductions because they,

too, will be reducing their spending after the CFE

Treaty goes into force.)

Again with the exception of the Soviet Union, no

large nation spends as great a fraction of its gross

domestic product (GDP) on its military as does the

United States, even though it has the largest GDP in

the world. The other countries that spend a greater

fraction of GDP on the military than the United

States are a few oil-producing states with valuable,

easy-to-seize assets and small populations to defend

them (e.g., Oman), face perceived immediate threats

(e.g., Israel), are involved in hostilities or insurrection (e.g., Angola), or are militarized societies (e.g.,

North Korea).
American Military Power: Future Needs, Future Choices ● 11

Figure l—Major National Military Budgets, 1988

United States /////////m//////e////////H//// A

Soviet Union

France

West Germany

United Kingdom

Japan

China

Italy

Poland

Saudi Arabia

Iraq

Iran

Canada

Czechoslovakia

India

Romania

South Korea

Spain

Bulgaria 1

0 100 200 300

Billions of 1988 dollars

SOURCE: U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency.

Figure 2 shows another measure of a nation’s

military power, total personnel in the armed forces.

By this measure, the United States does not standout

so clearly, nor is there a sharp cut-off that divides the

great from the small. Yet even if the United States

halved its total number of personnel, it would still

count among the largest forces in the world. (Note

that by halving the force the United States would

only lose relative rank with India and Vietnam.) If

the United States halved its current personnel

strength and maintained its current quality of troops,

training, and equipment, it would still have both one

of the largest and best militaries in the world.

Although not a perfect measure, total national

resources are a good frost cut at military potential.

Figure 3 shows GDP for the largest economies of the

world. Again, the United States stands out from the

rest of the world and the nearest competitors are

counted among America’s military allies. Thus, by

any measure—spending, major weapons, total men

under arms-only a few nations are in the same

league as the United States. This suggests that an

analysis of future military force requirements could

profitably concentrate on comparison to a few

specific nations—for example, Syria, Iran, and

North Korea.

Readiness of U.S. Forces

After deciding the size of U.S. forces, the next

most important policy decision to be made concerning them is their state of readiness. According to the

Figure 2—Active Armed Forces Personnel, 1988

Soviet Union

China

United States

India — Vietnam

Iraq

Turkey

North Korea

Iran

South Korea

France

West Germany

Pakistan

Egypt/Italy

o 1 2 3 4

Millions of persons

SOURCE: U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency.

Figure 3-Gross Domestic Products, 1988

United States

Japan

Soviet Union

Germany France:

United Kingdom

Italy

China

Canada

Brazil

Spain

Iran

India

Australia

Netherlands

Switzerland/Sweden

Mexico

South Korea

Belgium 1 I 1 I

o 1 2 3 4 5

Trillions of 1988 dollars

SOURCE: U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency.

Department of Defense definitions, readiness as a

military term refers to the fraction of a force that can

be committed to a fight without unacceptable delays

and acquit itself well. Factors determining readiness

include: the quality, training, and reaming levels of

military personnel; the condition and maintenance

of equipment; the state of collective training of units

and crews; the quality of command, control, communications, and intelligence (C3I) support; the location and mobility of forces; and logistics support.ll

When a force is “ready” is, of course, partly a

judgment. On the one hand, any force can be thrown

into combat without training, but disaster may await

them. On the other hand, any force would probably

llFrank Carlucci, Secretary of Defense, Annual Report to the Congress, Fiscal Year 1990, P. 7.
12 ● American Military Power: Future Needs, Future Choices

benefit from additional training and attention to

weapons. Overall readiness of the total military

forces is affected primarily by the ratio of active to

reserve forces, but any particular reserve unit can be

at varying levels of readiness (where ‘readiness’ is

defined by how long it would take to get prepared to

fight). Readiness is also affected by the deployment,

the training tempo, and the support of active forces,

particularly the transport planes and ships required

to get them where they are needed.

Decisions about maintainingg readiness will include calculations about both the costs of staying

ready and the costs of not being ready. The costs of

readiness are clear.

requires high levels

personnel, which in

equipment, fuel for

people. Maintaining

full of spare parts

To maintain ready personnel

of realistic training for active

turn means wear and tear on

vehicles, and salaries for the

ready equipment means bins

and aggressive maintenance

schedules, all of which costs money.

Estimating the costs of not being ready is more

difficult. The greatest danger would arise if a hostile

power could attack so quickly and so severely that

the victimized state could not recover to defend itself

further. This situation characterizes the vulnerability

of many small nations, and that of the United States

to intercontinental nuclear weapons. Fortunately,

the United States is large, militarily powerful, and

separated from potential enemies by great oceans, so

that its homeland and military industrial potential

could not be overrun in a conventional (i.e., nonnuclear) surprise attack. The United States may pay

a price for not being ready, but its survival will not

be in jeopardy.

Nevertheless, wars and threats can flare up

quickly in places where the United States has

interests, and sometimes costs can be incurred by

delaying a military response. The North Korean

attack on the South in 1950 provides an example.

Had the United States completely lost its foothold on

the peninsula, then the cost—both in materiel and

lives-of later having to make a “forcible entry”

could have been much higher.

Against a giant adversary like the Soviet Union

with its huge mobilization potential, the best allocation of resources will result almost certainly in a

“total force” made up of a combination of highly

ready active forces and reserve forces at various

lesser levels of readiness. The best ratio of active to

reserve forces for secondary contingencies is controversial, and will be determined by a judgment

comparing recurring costs to potential risks. Because of the United States’ power and distance from

enemies, however, it will always have some time to

prepare for a major non-nuclear war. Thus, U.S.

military forces can be composed of a limited number

of active troops to deal with quick flare-ups or to

‘‘hold the fort’ until successively less ready categories of forces are brought up to combat strength.

Others argue that any U.S. intervention must be

quick and decisive, as much for domestic political as

military reasons, and thus must be carried out with

forces-in-being. This view implies that reserve

forces will not be used to their full potential except

in cases of total war.

Like force size, future force readiness decisions

are still unresolved. Given the choice between size

and readiness, most military planners today seem to

prefer a smaller, highly ready force to a larger, less

ready force. There are a variety of reasons for this

preference but one is the perception cited above that

only ready forces are usable. Others counter that

highly ready forces make military involvement too

easy. Indeed, several recent Presidents have argued

that, as Commander-in-Chief, they can commit

active forces as they see fit, even to the extent of

engaging in combat. Once active forces have been

raised, congressional control becomes more difficult, but Congress could put a ceiling on the extent

of future U.S. involvements by limiting the size of

the ready forces.

Interdependence With Allies

Since the beginning of the Second World War, the

United States has often operated militarily in cooperation with allies, but it has also sought to preserve

the option for independent military action. Alliances

obviously can bring to bear greater military power

than any one nation alone could produce. But the

United States has sought to act within a group as

often for political as for military reasons. The crisis

with Iraq is a good example of how the United States

has sought to forge an international consensus for

the use of military power. Operating within an

alliance can be frustrating, but it can be a moderating

influence as well.

The United States is allied with Japan, South

Korea, Australia, and New Zealand, but the NATO

alliance has dominated. With the collapse of the

Warsaw Pact and the continuing diminution of the

Soviet threat against Europe, the NATO alliance will
American Military Power: Future Needs, Future Choices ● 13

certainly change. NATO could be weakened by the

lack of a clear, unifying threat. However NATO

evolves, the United States cannot avoid reexamining

its most important alliance relationship and its

attitude to alliances in general. The allowed degree

of interdependence with allies is the third important

policy decision affecting the nature of the future

defense technical and industrial base, and will affect

the required size of U.S. forces, their level of

readiness, and their composition. Moreover, a consistent policy would match the degree of military

and industrial interdependence.

The size and capability required of U.S. forces is

related to their autonomy. The U.S. forces stationed

in Germany or South Korea would have no hope of

defending those countries alone and were never

intended to. Clearly, if allies are fighting alongside,

the requirement for U.S. forces is reduced. The

logistical burden on U.S. forces is also reduced by

host-nation support and the existence of secure lines

of resupply. Required readiness levels are also

affected by the degree to which the United States is

willing to depend on allies to defend common

interests. A rational division of responsibilities

could leave quick response to those allies nearer the

threat, while the United States maintains its huge

reserve potential.

The composition of U.S. forces will depend on the

degree of allied cooperation. In many cases, efficiency calls for specialization. NATO is an example

of how individual nations in a group have-to a

limited extent-divided up military responsibilities

so that each can become more expert at their tasks or

geographic areas. For example, Denmark has special

responsibilities to maintain control of its straits,

which are important to all of NATO; the United

States has a disproportionate responsibility in air

power because it can be reinforced across the

Atlantic quickly; and Belgium and the Netherlands

have special logistical responsibilities in their harbors. The division of these tasks maybe obvious and

straightforward, but no nation’s forces could do its

job smoothly without the other nations’ doing theirs.

The disadvantage of such a division of labor is that

without the cooperation of the other members of the

alliance, any single member may become vulnerable. As a simple illustration, if one navy were good

at protection against submarines and the other at

protection against missiles, then the two may be able

to work together but each would face major problems working alone.

To the extent that the United States pursues a

policy of military autonomy, it will require a

complete and diverse military force. If the United

States is willing to forego some autonomy, in some

cases giving up the option of acting without allied

support, it could specialize to a greater degree. For

example, some military analysts have suggested that

ground forces in South Korea could be supplied by

the host nation while the United States invests its

resources in tactical air power capable of rapid

reinforcement. This opton would result, however, in

a U.S. force that might not have adequate ground

power to act independently elsewhere.

The capability, readiness, and composition of

U.S. forces will have indirect effects on the defense

industrial base, but decisions about allied dependence will affect the base directly. The United States

has depended on allies to help defend Europe from

the Soviets. It also buys from these allies critical

components of U.S. weapons. While these two types

of dependence are different, they should be roughly

consistent. Depending on a nation for a computer

chip should not cause excess alarm about military

(as opposed to commercial) vulnerability if that

same nation is being depended on to provide combat

forces when the need arises. Finally, the chosen

extent of interdependence with allies will affect the

degree to which some allies may depend on the U.S.

defense base to supply them with weapons and

logistical support.

Performance of Weapons

Throughout the cold war, the United States sought

to match greater Soviet numbers with fewer but

higher performance weapons. This approach has

been followed for so long that today it has become

nearly axiomatic. One should not forget, however,

that this approach is a policy choice and not an

inevitable result of circumstances. A comparison of

populations and productive capacity reveals that the

Western allies certainly have had the option of

matching the Warsaw Pact man-for-man and tankfor-tank if they had so desired.

The future choices about the performance of U.S.

weapons relative to that of potential enemies will

have significant long-term effects on the defense

technology and production base supporting U.S.

military forces. These choices will determine how

much effort is devoted to research for new technology, what the sources of that technology will be, and

how it will be paid for.
14 ● American Military Power: Future Needs, Future Choices

The United States has, in general, sought weapons

of higher performance than those of potential

adversaries, even if the higher costs have required

smaller numbers of weapons and smaller forces

overall. The debate about the optimal allocation of

resources between numbers and performance is

perennial. Often the debate seems to be between two

distinct camps, but in fact the positions are not as

extreme as may frost appear. Everyone agrees that

performance is important. Would the Royal Air

Force have had an easier time in the Battle of Britain

if they had been flying F-15s armed with missiles?

Of course. But wouldn’t they have had nearly as

much of an advantage with Korean War vintage

F-86s armed with guns? The question is not whether

performance is important but the proper tradeoff

between performance and numbers (e.g., the choice

is between hundreds of Spitfires or just one F-15),

and where one should stop when pursuing performance (against propeller-driven airplanes, an F-86 is

probably good enough and an F-15 is overkill).

The reduced intensity of the U.S.-Soviet military

competition will have an important effect on the

development of U.S. weapons. Since the end of the

Second World War, the Soviet Union has been the

yardstick against which U.S. weapon performance

has been measured. The United States will continue

to develop new weapons. But if the pace of Soviet

weapons development slows down dramatically,

then the development of countering U.S. weapons

can follow suit.

In the future, improvement in weapon performance may be harder to achieve because the total

number of each type of weapon will probably be

smaller, and smaller production runs do not justify

as large investment in development (and, in the long

run, research). Greater time between procurement

cycles will increase the problem of holding design

teams together or, in the extreme, maintaining the

design ‘‘culture’ of a particular type of weapon.

Nevertheless, the weapons of the United States, its

allies, and the Soviet Union far outclass those of any

other producers. Indeed, most nations of the world

have armed themselves with sophisticated weapons

by buying them from members of NATO or the

Warsaw Pact. Although a few countries view arms

exports as economically important, the original

motivation for most of the weapon development was

the NATO-Warsaw Pact confrontation. Thus, with

the fading of the cold war, the rate of all weapon 

development could be reduced.

In fact, the engine of U.S. weapons development

of the future may be the performance not of Soviet

weapons but those of our allies, or at least those

weapons they are willing to sell abroad. Nations

outside of NATO and the Soviet Union are generally

not capable of broad-based defense production and

will continue to purchase most of their weapon

systems from U.S. and European producers. The

trend today is a widening military technical gap

between the United States and most nations of the

Third World, although a few oil-rich countries can

afford to buy some of the world’s best performing

weapons.

In sum, the international arms market may change

the benchmark by which the United States measures

the performance of its weapons. Foreign markets

may help support the U.S. defense industrial base,

but selling weapons to nations that may later use

them to fight against the seller is clearly counterproductive in the long term. The solution, a sellers’

cartel, seems obvious in principle but may be

difficult to arrange in practice. In any case, a very

careful cost/benefit analysis must precede any decision to support the U.S. defense industrial base by

encouraging arms exports.12

Choices about the performance of future weapons

will affect, and be affected by, the other policy

choices outlined here about size, readiness, and

independence of U.S. forces. On the one hand, if the

Nation decides to reduce military personnel to levels

much smaller than today’s, then high-performance

weapons may be needed to maintain military capability. On the other hand, depending on smaller

numbers of high-performance weapons would exacerbate the problems and costs caused by very limited

production runs.

Future weapon-performance goals will affect the

requirements for the underlying defense technologies. At any given level of technology, better

performance is available by paying more, although

some performance levels are not possible at any

price. If the policy decision is made to continue to

press weapon performance to ever-increasing levels,

then new technical capabilities will be required, in

12U.S. Congress, Office of Technology Assessment, Arming Our Allies: Cooperation and Competition in Defense Technology, OTA-ISC-449

(Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, May 1990).
American Military Power: Future Needs, Future Choices ● 15

turn requiring a continuing robust research and

development effort.

Moreover, defense technologies must be protected to prevent other nations from using them for

weapon production. Some analysts have suggested

greater use of civilian, or ‘dual use,’ technology for

military purposes at the same time that civilian

technology is becoming evermore internationalized.

But the objective of superior weapons performance

places limits on the degree to which the United

States can pursue a policy of depending on civilian

technology for military purposes. To maintain an

unmatched performance lead will require the United

States to protect and nurture some specifically

military technologies.

SUMMARY

The cold war, which lasted 40 years, provided a

whole generation of military planners with a basic

paradigm that now must be reexamined. The cold

war is over, the Warsaw Pact has disbanded, and the

Soviet threat has been substantially reduced. While

many places in the world, especially among the least

developed nations, continue to be racked by armed

conflict, only a very few of these trouble spots pose

security threats to the United States in the absence of

the U.S.-Soviet competition.

The immediate threat of a short-warning Soviet

attack against NATO has been transformed into a

long-warning threat of a reconstituted Soviet force.

The goal of the United States is to be able to

reconstitute military power at least as fast as the

Soviets (or any other emerging great power). The

potentially short-warning threats are from lesser

contingencies, none of which present immediate

challenges to the core power of the United States nor

are capable of irretrievably damaging the U.S.

capability to respond. Meeting the materiel requirements of the large immediate threat from the Soviet

Union was difficult, but at least the threat was clear.

Meeting the materiel needs of lesser threats will be

much easier, but the Nation is faced with difficult

tradeoffs between the costs of maintaining a ready

military force and risks of not being able to meet a

regional military threat in a timely manner.

Whatever choices the Nation makes about its

future force requirements, those choices will have

implications for the defense technology and industrial base. The base that served so well during the

cold war is no longer appropriate. Careful attention

must be given to the currently evolving base to

assure its ability to support U.S. national-security

needs well into the next century.
Other Related OTA Reports

● Arming Our Allies: Cooperation and Competition in Defense Technology

OTA-1SC-449, May 1990; 124p.

GPO stock #052-003-01189-1 $5.00 per copy

NTIS order #PB90-254 160

● Adjusting to a New Security Environment: The Defense Technology and Industrial Base

OTA-BP-ISC-79, February 1991; 24p.

GPO stock #052-003-01225-l; $1.50 per copy

NTIS order #PB91-163 261

● Global Arms Trade: Commerce in Advanced Military Technology and Weapons

Free summary available from OTA

OTA-ISC-460, June 1991; 192p.

GPO stock #052-003-01244-8; $9.00 per copy

NTIS order #PB91-212 175

. Redesigning Defense: Planning the Transition to the Future U.S. Defense Industrial Base.

OTA-lSC-500, July 1991; 128p.

GPO stock #052-003-01249-9; $5.50 per copy

NTIS order #PB91-220 012

NOTE: Reports are available from the U.S. Government Printing Office, Superintendent of Documents, Dept. 33, Washington

DC 20402-9325, (202)783-3238; and/or the National Technical Information Service, 5285 Port Royal Road, Springfield,

VA 22161-0001, (703) 487-4650.

u. s. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE : 1991 0 - 297-948