Strategic Reform: A Battle of Assumptions.

摘要

Everyone has a worldview that shapes how he or she interprets the environment and interacts with others, and every worldview is based on assumptions. Similarly, those individuals responsible for the unenviable task of creating, defining, and implementing national security strategy are forced to begin with assumptions. Worldviews underwritten by inaccurate or incomplete assumptions will struggle to produce predictable outcomes, regardless of the resources applied. This article submits that the current national defense strategy includes three fundamental assumptions that should be questioned in order to provide a more reliable, affordable, and enduring security strategy for our nation. The first assumption is that uncertainty has become the dominant characteristic of our security environment, requiring America to spend ever more money to sustain general readiness for unpredictable contingencies. The second is that our only reliable guide star is a need to pace China with high-end forces optimized for a force-on-force clash waged close to the Chinese coast for decisive control of the Pacific. The third is that all other potential applications of military power constitute lesser included cases requiring merely diminished application of high-end US strength. These assumptions drive the Department of Defense (DOD) to demand an overage of unaffordable forces while neglecting the innovations and long-term investments which could ensure that the twenty-first century will be an American century. Some people see reduced defense spending as the end of America as a superpower, but this is not the beginning of the end. Rather, it is the passing of a phase. Defense strategy should set conditions that allow America to remain a (if not the) global superpower, but the DOD owes the nation a feasible strategy and an affordable military.