The absence of a direct and immediate threat to U.S. national interests affords a unique opportunity to shape and prepare for the future. For example, continued economic primacy will be an essential prerequisite to maintaining America's global influence. The United States must exploit the opportunities arising from economic globalization and interdependence. Given the prevailing trends in commercialization, the Armed Forces will have to leverage technology, equipment, and logistics from the private sector. By incorporating still more modern business practices, the DoD can become more responsive, flexible, and efficient. In particular, the military will need to adapt business innovations such as the greater use of
e-commerce and other on-line capabilities to speed and streamline its acquisition practices. The Department of Defense will have to expand its purchase of technologies and equipment from the commercial sector if it is to benefit as fully as possible from the information revolution.

Given the major advances in technology, the capabilities of potential adversaries will increase in both sophistication and lethality. New asymmetric threats and the growing ability of states and actors other than states to threaten the American homeland and U.S. forces abroad must be integrated into U.S. strategic thinking. Indeed, the United States has already suffered terrorist attacks at home and abroad. Moreover, our adversaries will be increasingly able to strike our allies with WMD as weapons of first, rather than last, resort. We must increase drastically our efforts to deter and defeat the use of WMD in all its forms.

Despite the relative lack of public focus on security issues, military force will remain a critical instrument of statecraft. The essence of war will remain unaltered. Soldiers will have to engage in combat on the ground and casualties will undoubtedly mount. The threat or actual use of force must always be an extension of the national will, with clearly defined military and political objectives. Developing cutting edge military capabilities will be of continuing and sustained importance to maintaining current readiness and preparing for future operations.

The United States may be able militarily to act unilaterally in the future but the political costs of such action may often be prohibitive. Alliances and coalition operations will continue to characterize American engagement in major overseas crises and conflicts. However, coalitions may exert major limitations on our ability to achieve political and military goals. As in the case of NATO's intervention in Kosovo, democracies and alliances comprised of democracies will use force only as a last resort. The requirement for consensus within an alliance reduces the likelihood of a timely response. In spite of the compelling need for greater interoperability in combined operations, the technological gap is widening between the United States and its allies. Top-heavy command structures and logistical redundancies have impeded alliance operations. Unless both sides take timely action to remedy such shortcomings, our combined military effectiveness will continue to suffer.

In addition to the transatlantic gap in advanced military technologies symbolized by the RMA, differing acquisition practices and timetables for procuring new systems, together with falling defense budgets, have been major obstacles to alliance interoperability. National restrictions on technology transfers; political barriers to purchasing foreign equipment; the inability to halt the downward spiraling of defense budgets in Europe; and technology gaps among European countries themselves, taken together, impede efforts to redress technology disparities. At the same time an even larger challenge is to gain a consensus on how the forces will be organized around common objectives. While technological interoperability among allies is critical, in the end it is people who determine how well coalition partners cooperate. At the present time, there is virtually no single piece of equipment that is shared by all NATO members. The perpetuation of debates on burden sharing could lead to a dangerously counterproductive bean counting exercise intended to demonstrate how much each side has contributed to a common cause. It should be kept in mind that the vast preponderance of ground forces both in Bosnia and Kosovo is provided by countries other than the United States.

page created 31 October 2000

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