Readiness for What?
DRAFT
Defense Horizons
Readiness for the
Interwar Period
by D. Robert Worley
Center for Technology and National Security Policy
National Defense University
Draft
1
DRAFT
Table of Contents
Overview
Transformations of the First Order
Transformation and Modernization: Order Matters
The British Army and the Interwar Era
General Characteristics of First Order Transformation
Readiness for What and When?
Organizational Responses to the Cold War
Changes in the Environment
A Transformation of the First Order Is Needed
Adapting to Conflict in the Interwar Period
A Change in Readiness Model
A Change in Command Model
A Change in Training
A Change in Combat Development
A National Readiness Capability
Conclusion
1
DRAFT
Abstract
Two distinct transformations of today’s force are required.Both begin with a force designed for great power war in the 1980s.One produces a force designed for the small wars characteristic of an interwar period, and the other produces a force designed for the next great power war for 2020 and beyond.Direct conflict between great powers exhibits far more symmetry than does great power interventions in the affairs of lesser powers.Eras of great power conflict provide a great many knowns and allows for a strong reliance on long-term planning.Interwar periods are characterized by unknowns and crisis action planning.This paper recommends two distinct transformation processes and includes recommendations for changes in readiness model, command model, training, and combat development.It presents the requirements of a national readiness capability to underwrite the transformations.
1
DRAFT
Readiness for the
Interwar Period
by D. Robert Worley
Overview
Only a few years ago, a small but well-credentialed and vocal minority posited the end of war.Another group announced that war had not gone away, but would never be fought the same way.A major premise of this paper is that another clash of great powers is inevitable and, therefore, it is appropriate and productive to view the foreseeable future as an interwar period.Interwar periods of the past have been far from peaceful.Indeed, such periods can be characterized by frequent and costly conflict between lesser powers and by great power interventions, but not by direct conflict between fully mobilized great powers.Readiness, defined within this framework, requires a transformation of the force from one designed for an era of great power conflict to one designed for an interwar period and beyond.
What does it mean to transform the force?Senator Sam Nunn, then Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said in 1989 that, “we must go forward, not with a smaller Cold War force, but with a different force.”He was calling for a significant departure from the past, a transformation in today’s parlance.The senator clearly meant more than the continual change that characterizes US military history.Modernization, too, is continuous, and given the inventory of aging equipment, certainly there is a need for modernization, but that cannot be what Senator Nunn meant either.Since then, some spoke of a revolution in military affairs, and more recently, Congress advocated experimentation as the way ahead.We spoke of transformation long before September 2001, so we cannot be talking about change driven by a few hostile zealots, most of whom constitute no threat to US national security.Transformation must be something more than what already takes place continuously.
The impetus for transformation can range from technological opportunity to changes in the strategic landscape.This paper focuses on transformation driven by a shift in the geo-strategic environment from an era of great power conflict to one characterized as an interwar period.A known enemy, extensive planning, optimized force structure, standing forces, and a high degree of symmetry between the adversarial powers characterize great power conflict.Interwar periods are better characterized by great power interventions in the affairs of lesser powers, an inherent asymmetry between adversaries, and expeditionary operations.Many of the organizations and processes in place are the result of decades of adapting to the Cold War and great power conflict.Those same organizations and processes are inappropriate to the current interwar period.
Two transformations are required.One transformation is from the force for great power conflict to a force for the small wars of an interwar period and the other transformation is from the force for the old great power conflict to the force for the next great power conflict.They are fundamentally different transformations each requiring separate management, processes, and schedules.The changes necessary for the transformation to the interwar period include DoD-wide adoption of a rotational model of readiness, adoption of adaptive command, and a shift in emphasis from training to doctrine to learning to adapt.The changes necessary for the transformation to the next great power war include the procurement of a wider array of weapon systems, each in fewer numbers, and threat-driven experimentation.A common infrastructure enables both, and learning events take precedence over today’s training and experimental events.
Two illustrative examples from history are used to set the stage for examination of transformation driven by significant change in the strategic environment.Relevant changes in the US geo-strategic environment are then reviewed, and the assumptions underlying the current force design are challenged.Finally, examples of strategic transformation are offered.
Transformations of the First Order
Two cases serve to illustrate transformation driven by significant changes in the strategic environment.One is a story of transforming a navy designed for global commerce protection into a navy designed for concentrated fleet engagements in local waters.The other is a story of transforming a continental army designed for great power war into an army designed for policing the empire.General characteristics of strategic transformation are derived from these illustrative cases.
Transformation and Modernization: Order Matters
Chancellor Otto von Bismarck maintained a strong army and a modest navy in accordance with Germany’s status as a major continental power.Kaiser Wilhelm’s ascendancy brought about a significant change.He envied Britain’s fleet, and by 1897 Germany had eight new battleships compared to Great Britain’s 62.But to fully implement the Kaiser’s naval fantasies, he needed a building plan and an operational plan to justify his High Seas Fleet.Rear Admiral Alfred Tirpitz was appointed to State Secretary for the Navy to provide both plans.His operational concept, called risk theory, was not to confront the Royal Navy on an equal footing, but to threaten a part of it so as to alter the balance between Great Britain and its principal competitors.His building plan was to slowly increase the rate of ship production and to incrementally increase the size of each ship laid down—a “brick by brick” building of the fleet so as to maintain the support of his parliament and to not provoke the British into a competition.
The early 1900s found the British Empire and the Royal Navy in decline.The recently appointed First Sea Lord, Admiral Jackie Fisher, inherited a large navy of battleships, gunboats, and small men-of-war distributed to the four corners of the globe deployed mostly for commerce protection and gunboat diplomacy.Fisher sensed the need for a transformation.The new British operational concept was to impose a distant blockade on the nascent German High Seas Fleet.A close blockade would have put British ships at risk from submarines and minefields in Germany’s home waters.His first step was to consolidate many of the smaller remote squadrons, to disestablish some, and call as many ships home as possible to form the Grand Fleet stationed in the superb ports along the eastern seaboard of England and Scotland.It had long been easy to deny Germany access to the Atlantic through the Dover Strait.With the Grand Fleet on Britain’s eastern seaboard, it could also deny Germany access to the Atlantic through the Scotland-Norway gap.Atlantic commercial flows would thus be assured.
Old ships and small were discarded; 154 left service early in Fisher’s tenure.From the savings in ships and crews, he was able to pursue his second step.There was a growing sense amongst naval architects that technological improvements in propulsion, armor, armament, and gunnery had been made piecemeal and that a dramatically new ship architecture could better exploit the individual improvements.The all-big-gun battleship, the dreadnought, was the result.A new building program began in October 1905 based on the new design, and the first ship of the class delivered in February 1906 immediately rendered all Tirpitz’s new battleships obsolete.Fisher next pursued the battle cruiser, a more controversial idea trading armor for speed.
Parliament had added an additional ten percent to appropriations in response to Germany’s growth and proximity.Fisher could have called for expansion—a larger navy to handle all the old missions plus containment of the Germans, who traditionally had not figured prominently in the equation.But he did not.He could have argued for preservation of the force he inherited in the face of declining political support for an increasingly irrelevant force posture.He did not.Or, he could have called for modernization, replacing all the old ships with more modern ships.But he did not.
Instead, Fisher first recognized that the new geo-strategic environment required a change.Second, he devised a new operational concept appropriate to the new environment.Third, he reorganizedandredeployed the navy, within the fiscal means available, to support the concept.The transformation freed resources, and from the savings, he began a modernization program to strengthen his new organization and operational concept.Had Fisher modernized first, he would have modernized a global commerce protection navy.To the contrary, he transformed the navy into one organized and trained for decisive fleet engagements, and then he modernized it with the right equipment.Order matters.
The British Army and the Interwar Era
In the days following the First World War, Great Britain had to make hard strategic choices.Knowing that its true source of strength was its economy and that it would not face another great power competitor for at least ten years, Britain chose to focus on rebuilding the economy and deferring investment in its military, both devastated by the war.
Because priority was given to the economy, the primary military and naval mission was policing the empire.For the army, this meant garrisons around the world to show presence and keep the peace.Air forces were employed in an attempt to provide a cheaper alternative to manpower.An additional expeditionary force was built to bolster the garrisons should contingencies arise beyond the local force’s capacity.The Royal Navy began a shipbuilding competition with the US but quickly shifted to maritime commerce and reliance on treaty limitations placed on major combatant ships.None of the great continental powers were modernizing their armies and, therefore, Great Britain, separated by water from the continent, had little incentive to modernize its army even if funds had been available.
That the advantage had shifted to the defense had surprised many, and it resulted in a bloody stalemate on land and at sea during the War to End All Wars.JFC Fuller and BH Liddell Hart were busy prescribing fast moving mechanized warfare as necessary to break the stalemate in the next great power war on the continent.[1]The British were thinking about the next great power war but neither investing in nor experimenting with the forces to fight it.The Germans benefited from British thinking, added their own rigorous thinking, and began experimenting and investing earlier for the next war.The British Army was unprepared for WWII, the next war between great powers, as were the armies of France and the United States.The cost of that unpreparedness was high.
General Characteristics of First Order Transformation
Both Fisher and Tirpitz were responsible for significant transformations in the years preceding the First World War.Both formulated a new operational concept.Tirpitz developed risk theory—the idea of threatening only a part of the enemy navy; Fisher settled on a distant blockade of the enemy navy.Tirpitz built a navy to underwrite his country’s desired new role in the world; Fisher built a navy appropriate to the changed threat environment.Both wanted a large fleet of big ships.Both were constrained by resources.After the war, Great Britain’s army was even more severely constrained by resources.The fine continental army that began the World War had to be transformed to an army for expeditionary and police operations in distant lands.That’s what strategic choice is about—means must be subordinated to ends, and risks must be assumed.
If one accepts these as exemplars of strategic transformation, then we might define this level of transformation by these characteristics: recognition of a changed geo-strategic environment, a new or changed operational concept appropriate to the environment, redeployment of the force, and finally, a change in the way the force organizes, trains, and equips to underwrite the new operational concept.
Readiness for What and When?
A tradition of unpreparedness for war has characterized much of US history.The periods preceding the two world wars were multi-polar eras of several great powers and of shifting alliances and balances.In both world wars, America’s allies bore the brunt of the war while the US mobilized, itself buffered from the conflict by great oceans.During the Cold War, two great powers rose above the others and were dubbed “super powers.”Two stable alliances formed around them and, as the North Korean invasion of the South demonstrated, the new bi-polar super power era demanded standing forces.The post-Cold War period is sometimes referred to as unipolar, with the US the only super power.Great societies and great economies exist, but they no longer behave like the great powers of the previous multi-polar era.There is no evidence to suggest that we are returning to the multi-polar great power era that preceded the Cold War.
In the multi-polar great power era, readiness for the United States meant ready to mobilize—mobilize the people and mobilize the industrial base, to raise the force.In the Cold War era, readiness primarily meant ready to fight a super power in Europe and secondarily meant ready to skirmish elsewhere.These indirect contests between super powers were variously called lesser-included cases, half wars, small wars, and proxy wars.In the present interwar era, the Cold War’s lesser-included cases are the main effort.Clearly, any transformation should produce greater readiness for present and near-future needs, but the country’s needs are complex and changing, and we must answer more specifically when asked, readiness for what and when?
At least four distinct transformations are discernable from the literature.Two are toward the uncertain future beyond 2020.The year 2020 is somewhat arbitrary, but is based on the widely held assumption that the US will face no peer or near-peer competitor for the next twenty years.
- From a big war force for the 1980s to a big war force for 2020 and beyond.
- From the industrial-age force of the 1980s to an information-age force for 2020 and beyond—a dominant interpretation of the revolution in military affairs, the RMA.
- From the garrison force built for the big war of the 1980s to an expeditionary force for the small wars of 2000 to 2020.
- From warfare practiced independently by the services to joint warfare.
Some may consider transformations A and B to be the same and, indeed, they may turn out to be.Both make the assumption that the big wars of the future will be fought in a fundamentally different way, only the latter makes the assumption that future war will be enabled predominantly by information technology.The other two transformations are of a more immediate nature.And, indeed, transformation C may also be partially underwritten by information technology, but most are inclined to see this transformation as requiring a shift from the equipment centric to the man centric.Each of the four transformations potentially impels force development in different directions.
Unless one believes that the United States will never again face a peer competitor, then it is useful to view the present unipolar era as an interwar period.Viewing it as such leads to a clear conclusion: we must transform our force to be relevant to the many small wars typical of an interwar period without losing sight of the fact that a force that is ready for small wars is not necessarily a force ready for great power war.Great power war brings focus to a specific threat and requires full mobilization of the nation’s resources, including personnel and industry.The largest of “small wars” in an interwar period can be assumed to be those fought with a half million troops, about that required for Korea, Vietnam, and the Gulf War.