Military restructuring.(FORUM)(Letter to the editor)

"Restructuring the Military," by Lawrence J. Korb and Max A. Bergmann (Issues, Fall 2008), makes many excellent points about the need to match our military forces to the current and potential future threat environments. There is, how ever, a critical issue of threat anticipation and tailoring of the forces that has yet to be faced. The article makes the valid point that forces built for modern conventional warfare are not well suited to the kinds of irregular warfare we face today, and quotes Lt. Col. Pail Yingling to the effect that our military "continued [after Desert Storm] to prepare for the last war while its future enemies prepared for a new kind of war." It goes on to argue that United States devotes too many resources to "dealing with threats from a bygone era [rather] than the threats the U.S. confronts today."

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This argument raises a logical paradox: Given the years that it takes to prepare the armed forces, in doctrine, equipment, and training, for any kind of war, if we start now to prepare them for the kinds of warfare we are facing now (usually referred to in the military lexicon as "asymmetric warfare"), by the time they are ready they will have been readied for the "last war."

Threats to our security will always move against perceived holes in our defenses. Insurgencies take place in local areas outside our borders that we and/or our allies occupy for reasons that reinforce our own and allied national security. Terrorist tactics used by transnational jihadists exploit openings in the civilian elements of our overall national security posture.

If we were to concentrate our military resources on meetings these current threats at the expense of our ability to meet threats by organized armed forces fielding modern weapons, as has been suggested, we could find ourselves again woefully unprepared for a possible resurgence of what is now labeled a bygone era of warfare, as we were in Korea in 1950. Such resurgent threats could include a modernizing Iran or North Korea, a suddenly hostile Pakistan, a China responding to an injudicious breakaway move by Tai-wan, a Russia confronting us in nations such as Ukraine or Georgia that we are considering as future members of the NATO Alliance, or others that arise with little warning, as happened on the breakup of Yugoslavia. Indeed, our effective conventional forces must serve to some degree as an "existential deterrent" to the kinds of actions that might involve those forces.

Given the decades-long development times for modern weapons, communications, and transportation systems, if we did not keep our conventional forces at peak capability, the time that it would take to respond to threats in these other directions would be much longer than the time it has taken us to respond to the ones that face us in the field today and have led to the current soul-searching about the orientation of our military forces.

Nor should we forget ...