f, as expected, Congress approves the
Administration's proposed military budget for 2003, US military
spending will grow by $45 billion in the next fiscal year--a 13
percent increase over this year's allocation and the largest
increase since the early Reagan era. Some of the additional money
will be used to pay for the war in Afghanistan and to underwrite a
hefty increase in military pay, but much of it will be devoted to
the "transformation" of the military establishment. Even larger
amounts will be devoted to transformation in the coming years, as
the Defense Department begins to replace existing, cold war-era
weapons with new, super-sophisticated systems. The initiation of
this effort has produced great joy in the arms industry and sparked
a wide-ranging debate over the relative merits of various
technologies and weapons systems. But while much has been said about
the technical and financial aspects of transformation, very little
attention has been paid to its political and strategic
dimensions--the aspects that will have the greatest impact on US and
international security in the years ahead.
When pressed on the meaning of "transformation," Defense
Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and his associates speak of the need to
abandon longstanding strategic assumptions and to organize US forces
for combat against unfamiliar enemies in unexpected circumstances.
Much emphasis is also placed on the development of advanced
technologies to increase US prowess on future battlefields. But a
close examination of Pentagon statements indicates that a lot more
is going on than a mere desire to utilize new technologies or to
prepare for the unknown. It is possible to detect a fundamental
shift in strategic thinking--a shift with far-reaching implications
for the United States and the world.
When alluding to this shift, Pentagon officials speak of
replacing the "threat-based strategy" that long governed US military
planning with what they describe as a "capabilities-based approach."
This means that the Defense Department will no longer organize its
forces to counter specific military threats posed by clearly
identifiable enemies, but instead will acquire a capacity to defeat
any conceivable type of attack mounted by any
imaginable adversary at any point in time--from now to the
far-distant future. Put differently, this is a mandate for the
pursuit of permanent military supremacy.
The pursuit of permanent supremacy is not a new endeavor. Ever
since the end of the cold war, policy-makers have sought to convert
America's sole- superpower status into an immutable fact of life. In
the most explicit expression of this outlook, the Pentagon's draft
"Defense Planning Guidance" for fiscal years 1994-99, drawn up in
February 1992, called for a concerted US effort to preserve its
sole-superpower status into the foreseeable future. "Our first
objective," the highly classified document stated, "is to prevent
the re-emergence of a new rival, either on the territory of the
former Soviet Union or elsewhere, that poses a threat on the order
of that posed formerly by the Soviet Union."
This statement, attributed in part to Paul Wolfowitz (then the
Under Secretary of Defense for Policy and now the Deputy Secretary
of Defense), provoked a worldwide outcry when excerpts were
published in the New York Times and the Washington
Post. Critics, especially in Europe, charged that it assumed a
"world policeman" role for the United States and the subordination
of America's allies to second-class status in a US-dominated world
order. Faced with this criticism, the Defense Department adopted a
revised guidance document that called for greater collaboration
between the United States and its allies.
Although the idea of US military supremacy was too touchy to
discuss publicly during the 1990s, the concept never fully
disappeared. A number of prominent pundits and strategists continued
to circulate the ideas contained in the original draft of the 1992
guidance document. Then, during the 2000 presidential campaign,
proponents of this approach were given a new chance to advance their
views by George W. Bush. In his most important speech on military
policy, given at the Citadel in September 1999, Bush reiterated many
of the concepts first articulated in the 1992 document. Most
significant, he embraced the concept of permanent military
superiority. Pointing to America's huge advantage in military
technology, he promised "to take advantage of a tremendous
opportunity--given to few nations in history--to extend the current
peace into the far realm of the future. A chance to project
America's peaceful influence, not just across the world, but across
the years."
In this speech--reportedly prepared with the assistance of
Wolfowitz--Bush said the United States needed sufficient airlift and
sealift to move troops to any point in the world quickly, along with
sophisticated surveillance devices to locate enemy forces at any
time of day or night, and advanced munitions to destroy them with
minimum risk to American fighters. "Our forces in the next century
must be agile, lethal, readily deployable and require a minimum of
logistical support," Bush declared. "We must be able to project our
power over long distances, in days or weeks rather than months. Our
military must be able to identify targets by a variety of means" and
"be able to destroy those targets almost instantly, with an array of
weapons."