| 摘要 | June 4, 2019
It is all too easy to talk about strategy in broad conceptual terms, but strategy does not consist of what people say, it consists of what they actually do. The is not a minor issue as the United States shifts back from the period in which the Cold War ended and it had no serious peer competitors, and ideas like "the end of history" and "Globalism" seemed to promise a steady march towards development, peace, and democracy.
It is all too clear that the U.S. must now a focus on major competitors like China and Russia, deal with more limited regional threats like Iran and North Korea, and deal with broad areas of global instability due to threats from extremists and terrorists. These challenges are further compounded by ongoing U.S. wars in Afghanistan and the Middle East, and the challenge of meeting defense costs that total $750 billion in the President's defense budget request for FY2020.
So far, however, the U.S. government has done far more by way of talk and stating broad goals than providing practical analysis and net assessments that shape and justify a given course of action. It has failed to develop well-defined strategic goals and effective plans, programs, and budgets to implement them. U.S. strategy documents lack a clear focus on specific key issues, regions, threat countries, and strategic partners.
This analysis does not challenge the focus on existing national strategy documents on very real threats. It does review the major weakness in current U.S. national security strategy, the failures in the FY2020 budget request, and broader failures in the ways the U.S now shapes and justifies its strategy, and its planning, programming, and budgeting activities.
It suggests that major changes are required in each of these areas, that the U.S. needs a far more functional mix of strategies that address the key challenges to each of the major U.S. combat commands, and that these need to be justified by detailed net assessments. It also calls for reforms that would tie such strategies to a well-defined mix of plans, programs and budgets to implement them, and a focus on a functional Future Year Defense Plan that would consider their future year implications, rather than focus on the coming fiscal year.
It stresses the need to look beyond deterrence and war fighting, and to develop strategies that place at least an equal emphasis on hybrid form of civil-military competition. It focuses on the grand strategic need to consider how to achieve stability, conflict, termination, and lasting forms of peace as part of a broader focus on civil-military and hybrid operations. It also stresses the need to see strategic partners as partners, rather than sources of resources and burden sharing, and to avoid seeing competitors and potential threats as opponents in zero-sum games.
Strategic Regression Instead of ProgressThe new strategy documents and budgets issued by the Trump Administration reflect long standing failures in U.S. efforts to form and implement effective strategies. If anything, they are better focuses than the previous national strategy documents and Quadrennial Defense Reviews, and seek more adequate levels of defense budgets and resources. There has been a decades long period of regression in U.S. efforts to create functional links between strategy, the assessments and analysis that shape it, and its actual implementation through planning, programing, and budgeting.
The Slow Collapse of Functional Planning, Programing, and Budget ReformsThe efforts to shape an effective PPB process that grew out of the work of Hitch and McKean during the Eisenhower Administration, and which was then institutionalized by Secretary McNamara, gradually collapsed after the Johnson Administration because of Congressional and military service resistance to reshaping service oriented-input budgets, the failure to define meaningful program categories in the PPB system, and the politics of the Vietnam War. The last truly serious effort to justify U.S. strategy, and link it to major program categories and a future year defense plan, occurred when Harold Brown was Secretary of Defense in 1981 – nearly four decades ago.
The basic structure of the U.S. defense budget retained a largely 19th Century character, shaped by a focus on each military service. The budget was not linked to strategy and key mission areas, but rather to line item input categories. It was divided into service-wide mixes of personnel, O&M, and procurement/RDT&E efforts that were not tied to any clear strategic objectives.
Moreover, efforts to serious plan beyond the coming fiscal year steadily deteriorated over time, and effectively collapsed after the passage of the Budget Control Act. What initially was a serious annual effort to create a five year, and then Future Year Defense Plan (FYDP) became a largely pro forma extension of the annual budget request with no clear links to strategy.
The Failure to Properly Integrate Net Assessment and Develop a Meaningful Whole of Government ApproachPioneering work by Andrew Marshall to tie strategy to net assessment did continue to make progress but largely in the form of a separate studies and analysis that shaped policy, rather than national strategy and plans, programs, and budgets. Strong internal resistance within the NSC and the Pentagon prevented efforts to tie net assessment to strategic planning and the PPB process. Efforts by Senator John McCain to legislate an annual net assessment by the Joint Staff in the late 1980s were resisted to the point where they were never meaningfully implemented.
More broadly, the U.S. talked about a "whole of government" civil-military approach to strategy but never really implemented one. It also never linked a growing focus on joint warfare, and the creation of major combat commands, to a clear and major role in the planning, programing, and budgeting process.
The Loss of America's Strategic FocusThe U.S. also lost strategic focus as a result of the end of the Cold War, the rundown in U.S. forces after 1991, its narrow reaction to terrorism and 9/11, its miscalculations in invading Iraq, the impact of the "great recession" in 2008, and the broader impact of the need to deal with the fiscal ceilings and restrictions in the Budget Control Act. The seeming lack of lack of a serous peer competitor sharply reduced the pressure to develop clear strategic priorities, which is compounded the failure to reshape U.S. strategy to focus on joint warfare, net assessment, and functional planning, programming, and budgeting systems.
Strategy documents like the Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR), and the State Department's Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review (QDDR) because vague and often unfocused looks at the future. The QDRs in particular produced little more than broad policy goals, many of which were so badly defined – or so focused on the future – that they little practical operational meaning. In many cases, it was unclear what actions they called for, what levels of activity were needed, and what resources were involved.
It is now all too clear that this approach to strategy, planning, programming, and budgeting does not meet America's current needs. The Russian invasion of Georgia and the Ukraine, its seizure of the Crimea, its nuclear programs, and its other actions in Europe and the Middle East have revived U.S. concerns about both Russia and NATO. While Russia is scarcely kind of global peer competitor that it was as the Soviet Union, it has taken on much of the character of such a competitor in Europe and the near abroad.
The rise of China is an even more serious challenge. China's growing military pressure on Taiwan and in the Pacific, and its rise as a major global economic power, have all have shown the U.S. that it now faces an emerging peer competitor – although it will still remain a largely regional military power for some years to come. It must now be a central focus of U.S. strategic planning, although there are many options for cooperation as well as competition and conflict.
The U.S. also faces serious lesser challenges that it cannot ignore, and its strategy and national security efforts must address. These include threats from Proliferation and aggression by nations like Iran and North Korea. They also include the broad rise of extremism and instability in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia which are shaped in part by failed states and serious demographic pressures that will last for at least the next three decades. Critical as Russia and China are, the U.S. must continue to deal with lesser threats and military actions in every major regional command.
Failed U.S. National Security DocumentsSo far, however, the U.S. has produced more strategic rhetoric than real changes in strategy. U.S. military budget requests still focus largely on line-item input budgets for given military services and defense agencies for one coming fiscal year. Key aspects of the actual formulation and implementation of key aspects of U.S. strategy vary from day-to-day, tweet-to-tweet, and sanction-to-sanction. The U.S. continues to fail to effectively integrate civil and military strategy and operation, and is deeply involved in long wars for which it seems to have no clear strategy or end game.
National and Defense Strategy Documents that Do Not Meet a Meaningful Definition of StrategyThe latest public strategy documents issued by the NSC, Department of Defense, and Department of State do raise valid concerns about the changes in the threat. They set many valid broad priorities for U.S. policy, and they broadly recognize the importance of America's strategic partners. These are real strengths and they need to be recognized as such. At the same time, they still show that the U.S. "strategy" has lost much of its practical focus and meaning at even the most basic definitional level.
There are many dictionary definitions of "strategy, but Webster's main definition of strategy is a functional one and is the definition the U.S. should be using. Webster defines strategy as "the science and art of employing the political, economic, psychological, and military forces of a nation or group of nations to afford the maximum support to adopted policies in peace or war." In practice, such a definition means the U.S government should develop a mix of civil-military strategies that are fully justified by analysis and net assessment. They should be strategies that involve specific actions, and whose implementation is supported by plans, programs, and budget that can actually implement them.
A Failed Mix of National Strategy Documents and Budget RequestsKey U.S. strategy documents are still filled with broad statements of goals and vague desired end states. And, this is as close to a real strategy as the open source versions of the three main White House and Department of Defense strategy documents – and a FY2020 budget submission that supposedly reflected the new U.S. national security strategy – actually come to presenting the kind of analysis, functional strategy, and PPB efforts that are actually needed
The first such document is the National, Security Strategy of the United States issued in December 2017. It provided a long list of civil and military goals focused on four general areas: Protect the homeland, the American people, and the American way of life, Promote American prosperity, Preserve peace through strength, and Advance American influence. It sets out a long series of sub-goals in each category – some well-defined and many that are so vague as to be nearly meaningless. It only makes a marginal effort to justify them. It makes no serious effort to show how they can be achieved. Its wording is relatively conservative – and makes an awkward use of the term "America first." but it does recognize the importance of America's strategic partners, and few Americans would challenge its broad goals and objectives.
The second document is the 2018 National Defense Strategy of the United States; Sharpening America's Competitive Edge, which was issued in early 2018. It sets out eleven major goals for improving U.S. capabilities, but again provides only minimal indications of how to achieve them. It does call for three distinct lines of effort: "First, rebuilding military readiness as we build a more lethal Joint Force; Second, strengthening alliances as we attract new partners; and Third, reforming the Department’s business practices for greater performance." However, much of its content consists of little more than slogans, and it describes many implementation goals in terms that so broad that there are no practical priorities or plans.Its most practical priorities address the need to focus U.S. defense planning around the threat post by Russia and China: "The central challenge to U.S. prosperity and security is the reemergence of long-term, strategic competition by what the National Security Strategy classifies as revisionist powers. It is increasingly clear that China and Russia want to shape a world consistent with their authoritarian model—gaining veto authority over other nations’ economic, diplomatic, and security decisions.
At the same time, it focuses vaguely on "Rogue regimes such as North Korea and Iran (that) are destabilizing regions through their pursuit of nuclear weapons or sponsorship of terrorism," and "non-state actors (that) also threaten the security environment with increasingly sophisticated capabilities. Terrorists, trans-national criminal organizations, cyber hackers and other malicious non-state actors have transformed global affairs with increased capabilities of mass disruption."
It provides remarkably little guidance as what the U.S. should actually do, and where it should actually do it.
The third document is the Secretary of Defense's rather strange version of Providing for the Common Defense, A Promise Kept to the American Taxpayer, which was issued in September 2018. This short document claims to be based on the report of a Congressionally-mandated, bi-partisan National Defense Strategy Commission. In practice, it does little more that provide a summary set of priorities for added defense spending. It has little strategic content and provides no real details as to actual plans, programs, and budgets. It is essentially a wish list, rather than a well-defined shopping list, for the FY2020 The fourth document is the group of FY2020 budget defense budget request documents presented by OSD and the military services in early 2019, and that are now available on the OSD Comptroller web page. These documents should implement the previous new national strategies. In fact, the summary Budget Overview document issued by OSD does call the FY2020 budget request a "strategy-driven budget." However, almost all of the content of the FY2020 budget request consists of requests for more spending on the line item inputs to the budgets of the Army, Navy, Marine Corps, and Air Force.Some 1,100 pages of input budget data lay out line-item costs for individual military services or defense agencies broken down in to major categories like personnel, O&M, procurement, and RDT&E. These requests cannot be clearly tied to any key element of strategy or mission capability and are totally disconnected from efforts to describe and shape the role of America's strategic partners. There are little or no actual regional strategy data. The future year budget data seem to be place-holder figures rather than real efforts at shaping a future year program. There are little or no actual plan, program, or budget (PPB) data that actually reflect major changes resulting from the National Security Strategy or National Defense Strategy as distinguished from increasing the funding of existing efforts.
Even allowing for the fact that the classified versions of these documents may have considerably more detail, there is little evidence that these classified versions present a clearer picture of what the strategy is or how it can be implemented in any detail. It is brutally clear from the details of the FY2020 budget submission that the classified versions had little or no additional broad impact on actual plans, programs, and budgets.
As for NSC and State Department strategy documents, there are no meaningful NSC civil-military strategy documents. The State Department budget justification does little more that set broad strategic goals in near-cliché terms, while issuing what may well be the most strategically incoherent single U.S. government budget document.
Critical Failures in Addressing Key Grand Strategic Issues and Aspects of U.S. StrategyBoth the three strategy documents, and the FY2020 budget request also have critical failure lures in shaping U.S. strategy, and the need to develop adequate forms of strategic competition:
The Failure to Address U.S. Resources Constraints and Impacts on Federal Spending. Any real-world U.S. strategy must address the issue of how much the U.S. can and should spend on national security, and how to use those resources most effectively. The current set of strategy and budget request documents totally ignore these issues.They also ignore a long-standing crisis in the trends in federal spending that is creating steadily greater federal budget deficits, and that has deeply divided the U.S. politically over federal efforts to create entitlement programs like Social Security, national medical care, welfare, and education. This crisis helped to cut the percentage of total federal spending on defense from 52% in 1960 to 15%, and it was compounded in 2018 by a major set of tax cuts that increase projected debt in 2029 FY to levels that the Congressional Budget Office projected ibn May 2019 as reaching $11 trillion dollars.
The CBO states that in its projections, "the federal budget deficit reaches $896 billion in 2019 and exceeds $1 trillion each year beginning in 2022. Relative to the size of the economy, the deficits that CBO projects would average 4.3 percent of gross domestic product over the 2020–2029 period, well above the 2.9 percent average over the past 50 years. CBO’s estimate of the deficit for 2019 is about the same as it was in January 2019, and projected deficits over the 2020–2029 period are about 2 percent less than CBO projected in January....Federal debt held by the public is projected to grow from 78 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product in 2019 to 92 percent in 2029—the largest share since 1947 and more than twice the 50-year average." The key cause has been a rise in Social Security, medical and other mandatory budget spending from 5.5% of the GDP in FY1969, to 12.7% in FY1919, and one the CBO projects will lead to a further projected rise to 14.9% in FY2029.
Figure One shows that these May 2019 budget projections not only project a major increase in the deficit and national debt, but a rise in the annual cost of interest on the debt from 1.8% of the GDP in 2019 to 3.0% in FY2029. They do so in spite of assumptions that FY2020-FY2029 budgets require no future major contingency spending, that the total impact of defense spending can drop from 3.1% of the GDP in FY2019 to only 2.5% in 2029, and that the debate over education entitlements will be resolved in ways that allow major cuts in other discretionary spending.
The real defense burden imposed by the new National Strategy is far more likely to be at least 3.5% to 4% of the GDP, new military contingency spending seems a near certainty, and the real deficit and debt would then be far higher.
The strategy documents and budget request are not linked to any well-defined supporting analyses and net assessments, or to meaningful planning, programing and budgeting (PPB) efforts. As is described in detail later in this analysis, the new national strategy and FY20202 budget request lack clear analytic justification, do not provide meaningful guidance to the combat commands, and are not linked to meaningful implementation plans and resource requirements. The assumption that global instability, terrorism, extremism, and the threat from other powers and non-state actors will not impose the same costs and burden on defense as the burden from a lesser superpower like Russia. The national strategy assumes that the direct challenge from superpowers can dominate U.S. defense efforts. It seems to have done without analyzing the impact of the overall trends in global instability caused by failed states, extremist challenges, internal divisions and conflicts, local and regional challenges like those posed by Iran and North Korea, and conflicts, acute population pressures and migration issues, and the more speculative effects of factors like climate change and the impact of automation and artificial intelligence.These events are occurring at a time when global demographics are creating a massive projected increase in the number of young men and women entering the labor force in developing nations, and pressures for population migration as well as internal conflicts. These issues are documented in detail by U.S intelligence, the World Bank, the International Monetary Funded, and UN development reports.
Moreover, they create a high probability that Russia and China will seek to exploit these trends in competition with the U.S. The end result is that every U.S. regional combatant command is likely to have to commit forces and resources to deal with these challenges for at least the next decade at force and cost levels equivalent to competing directly with a superpower.
A failure to properly address the nature of Russian strategic competition, and the scale of Russia’s potential success in exploiting tensions and divisions within Europe and NATO, and elsewhere in the world. As is noted later in this commentary, Russia is a relatively minor economic power compared to the former Soviet Union, and is estimated to only be spending around $62 billion annually on military forces. This is only a little over 25% of the total military spending by of European NATO, excluding Canada and the U.S.At present, however, Russia is able to exploit key fault lines in the alliance and a divided Europe, take advantage of U.S. posturing over burden sharing and threat to cut its role in NATO, and exploit the lack of any coherent European approach to deterrence and force planning. Russia has also developed some elements of a strategic partnership with China, and shown it can use hybrid mixes of diplomacy and low-level military action to exert pressure against the U.S. in areas as different as Croatia, the Ukraine, the Baltic states, Kaliningrad, Turkey, Syria, and Venezuela.
As is the case with China, the U.S. cannot ignore the need to deter worst case military options like a major conventional conflict or nuclear exchange with Russia. The fact remains, however, that these are contingencies where it is unclear that either power can "win" in any grand strategic sense, while Russia has many far safer and more productive options for hybrid forms of competition.
A tacit focus on Chinese military challenges rather than a complex mix of challenges dominated by economics, politics, and diplomatic forms of hybrid competition and l w-level military action. China too gains most from exploiting competing at lower levels, and particularly at the level of economics and business and through its "road and belt" initiatives. China can also gain from successful low-level military efforts, using other states and non-state actors, and from showing that it can achieve parity with US., and neither China nor the U.S. can "win" a major conventional conflict or nuclear exchange.So far, however, the U.S. has focused more on China's future warfighting options than it civil, diplomatic, economic, and hybrid options. It also has tended to deal separately with China's efforts to achieve parity/superiority in its military technology and industrial base from its equally massive efforts to restructure its civil base, and every aspect of its education, labor force, and levels of automation. While the authors of the new strategy documents may not have intended this, there has been little practical U.S. response to the National Security Strategy’s emphasis on the need to ensure America’s overall lead in both civil and military technology and manufacturing. Instead, some major federal R&D programs have been cut.
At a civil level, the U.S. has also effectively transferred leadership of the Trans Pacific Partnership to China, engaged in unilateral trade wars, cut its conventional efforts in Korea to focus on an uncertain effort to cut North Korea’s potential nuclear threat to the U.S., and made no clear effort to analyze and deal with the strategic impact of the growth in China’s civil economy and technology and industrial base.
At a military level, the U.S. has tended to focus on reshaping U.S. forces to fight major conventional wars and focused on modernizing nuclear forces to deal largely with Russia. It has failed to address the fact that Chinese strategy focuses as much on civil and hybrid options as warfighting, Chinese competition in technology an industry is driven as much by state-sponsored civil programs as military ones. They also seem to have led U.S. national strategy –as distinguished from combatant command strategy – to undervalue critical opportunities at a regional level like America's strategic partners – particularly Australia, Japan, and South Korea, China’s dependence on the flow of maritime exports of petroleum from the Gulf, and China's tensions with India.
At the same time, the U.S. has not attempted to tie its public strategy to some estimate of clear China’s future nuclear forces and nuclear weapons holdings, has not publicly integrated China into its nuclear arms control efforts, and has not publicly addressed how the U.S. could successfully “win” a high level of conventional conflict with China or some form of nuclear exchange, or why China would engage in competition of this kind given the advantages offered by its civil, hybrid, and other options.
This is not a casual issue at a point where the afford ability of any serious strategic defense remains so uncertain, where China is projected to be deploying SLBMs and MIRVed ICBMs, and when China is estimated to only have some 280 nuclear warheads compared to 1,350 deployed and 4,000 stockpiled nuclear weapons for the U.S. and 1,444 deployed and 4,350 stockpiled nuclear weapons for Russia.
Mixed Signals: The Full National Defense Strategy Commission Report on Providing for the Common DefenseAll of these factors – and weaknesses in the strategy documents and budget request issued by the Executive Branch –also need to be considered in the light of a fifth national strategy document. This document is entitled Providing for the Common Defense: The Assessment and Recommendations of the National Defense Strategy Commission. It is the full 111-page report that provides the actual assessments and recommendations of the National Defense Strategy Commission.
It lacks the official White House and Department of Defense status of strategy documents cited earlier, but it has far more in-depth than the hollow shell laid out in the Secretary of Defense’s odd non-summary of the same report in Providing for the Common Defense: A Promise Kept to the American Taxpayer. It is also far more constructive in addressing the need for an effective strategy based on serious analysis. It is also one that addresses the key planning, programming, and budgeting aspects of actually implementing such a strategy.
Limits as Well as StrengthsThis praise does need qualification. The full report does have serious limits. It only makes a limited attempt to assess how the strategy and force developments in China and Russia, and the impact of regional and extremist threats, should reshape U.S. strategy and forces. It is not clearly linked to the planning, programming, and budgeting process.
It focuses on hybrid warfare and understates the importance of political and economic competition. It does not really address the roles of America's key strategic partners, and it does not tie its strategic recommendations to clearly defined changes in the roles and capabilities of most major U.S. commands. It also does not address the strategic issues raised by America's wars in Afghanistan and Syria-Iraq, or the threats and U.S. military actions in a wide range of smaller extremist and local conflicts.
The report's focus on raising the defense budget also sometimes has a strange “Oliver Twist” character. It comes close to dealing with every strategic challenge by asking for more resources in every possible area. It also does not attempt address how U.S. defense efforts compare with those of potential threats. This is not minor issue when the U.S. defense budget request for FY2020 is for $750 billion, and DIA estimates that China only spent some $200 billion-plus in 2018 (the IISS estimates $168 billion), and the IISS estimate that Russia only spending some $62.4 billion.
This failure to compare relative defense spending efforts illustrates the dangers in shaping strategy without valid net assessments. It is particularly striking, considering that China and Russia have no major strategic partners while just two key U.S. partners in Asia like Japan ($47.3B) and South Korea ($39.2B) spent another $86.5 billion, and NATO reports that NATO European countries spent $249.7 billion (four times the Russian total). If nothing else, such figures show why U.S. strategy should explicitly consider the role of strategic partners, and not focus exclusively on U.S. forces.
But, a Valid Focus on the Problems in Formulating and Executing an Effective U.S. StrategyAt the same time, the full report does provide far more by way of assessments, funding rationales, and analytic detail than the Secretary's summary of the report, or any of the so-called "strategy" documents issued by the Executive Branch. It provides a clear definition and analysis of why China and Russia are emerging as serious competitors and potential threats, and discusses illustrative contingencies. It discusses Iran, North Korea, and extremist threats in some detail, sets out some clear priorities in given regions and key areas technology and global operations, and does create a credible case for spending in some key areas.
Most importantly, the full report flags the lack of depth and strategic details that characterize the previous strategy documents, the FY2020 budget request, and the overall character of American strategic planning. It addresses the need to improve U.S. planning, programming, and budgeting; and key problems in civil-military relations and the ability to carry out a real world "whole of government" approach. Further, the report makes it clear that these problems exist at the classified as well as the unclassified level.
These reservations are made in a number of key portions of the report, but they are scattered among its broader focus on key strategic issues – and arguments for more spending – in ways that can distract from their importance. If ne examines it closely, its key points include the following quotations:
The NDS rightly stresses competition with China and Russia as the central dynamic in sizing, shaping, and employing U.S. forces, but it does not articulate clear approaches to succeeding in peacetime competition or wartime conflict against those rivals...As America confronts five major security challengers across at least three important geographic regions, and as unforeseen challenges are also likely to arise, this is a serious weakness...
Proposed fixes to existing vulnerabilities—concepts such as “expanding the competitive space,” “accepting risk” in lower-priority theaters, increasing the salience of nuclear weapons, or relying on “Dynamic Force Employment”—are imprecise and unpersuasive. Furthermore, America’s rivals are mounting comprehensive challenges using military means and consequential economic, diplomatic, political, and informational tools. Absent a more integrated, whole-of-government strategy than has been evident to date, the United States is unlikely to reverse its rivals’ momentum across an evolving, complex spectrum of competition. (pp. vi-viii)
The United States needs more than just new capabilities; it urgently requires new operational concepts that expand U.S. options and constrain those of China, Russia, and other actors. Operational concepts constitute an essential link between strategic objectives and the capability and budgetary priorities needed to advance them. The unconventional approaches on which others rely, such as hybrid warfa |
