The defense/national security world has been abuzz for the last few days with leaked information leading up to today's official release of the 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR). The report can be found and downloaded here.
So, what's the big deal? Let's start with the QDR itself. Published every four years, the QDR serves as an overarching framework for the Department of Defense. Think of it as a very broad Commander's Intent (for the five-paragraph OPORD-minded folks in the audience). My first run-in with the QDR was back in 2002 when I wrote a paper on the 2000 QDR for a college course (I think it was a class on public policy). Ever since 2002 (and probably earlier than that, even going back to pre-QDR days), the American military has focused on posturing itself so that it could fight two conventional wars on two separate fronts at the same time. This has driven force structure and force strength, as well as pursuits of various technologies (as technology increases in capability, you might see a down-sizing in ground troops -- all part of the delicate balance between capability and budget constraints).
So once again, the question begs: what's the big deal about 2010's QDR? From what I can glean from the web, it appears the the DoD is, for the first time in seemingly forever, abandoning the two-war construct, and shifting towards a full-spectrum operations capability.
Again, I haven't read the thing yet, but my guess is that this will come as no surprise to the Army or Marine Corps, who have bore the brunt of the human cost of the counterinsurgency fights in Iraq and Afghanistan for the past decade. Army doctrine has transformed from the conventional fight-the-Soviets mentality of AirLand Battle (ALB) of the 1980s to a full-spectrum operations mindset that we see today. Hell, ALB (or a close cousin of it at the very least) carried the Army through the Gulf War back in 1991. The humongous troop levels (500,000+) along with the very conventional maneuver warfare battles involving entire divisions and even corps were a perfect illustration of Army conventional warfighting doctrine in full motion.
Counterinsurgency, non-lethal effects, non-kinetic operations, stability and support operations, advise and assist: all of these buzzwords are the result of a transformation in Army doctrine that has been in effect ever since the middle 2000s (picking up steam with the publication of Field Manual 3-24, General Petraeus' meteoric rise in the ranks, and the Iraq surge). However, the very first seeds of the modern Army doctrinal transformation can probably be found in the aftermath of the 1993 Somalia debacle.
The Marine Corps has accustomed itself to adapting to new doctrine in modern history (20th century to the present). The smallest of the service branches, it has had to transform itself a number of times in order to maintain relevance. During the inter-war period between WWI and WWII, the USMC was at the forefront of developing counterinsurgency doctrine due to its involvement in the so-called Banana Wars in Latin America and the Caribbean. Out of this experience came the Marine Corps' Small Wars Manual, which prior to FM 3-24's publication in 2006, was the military's last actual doctrinal publication on counterinsurgency.
The USMC again reinvented itself as amphibious shock troops, illustrated by their storied Pacific island campaign of WWII. The USMC also showed some innovation during Vietnam with some small unit counterinsurgency tactics that are being examined again today, especially by those that are in or heading to Afghanistan (the Combined Action Program/Platoons in particular). In recent history, however, the Marine Corps (or at least their utilization in the Global War on Terror) has drifted away from the first-in/first-out shock troops employment, and more towards a role analogous to the Army's: a land force entrenched in full-spectrum operations mission.
This is probably the result of the operational tempo required to deploy and sustain the high numbers of American forces in both Iraq and Afghanistan, necessitating that the Marine Corps shoulder its share of the burden of fighting the "long war." Regardless, the 2010 QDR's policy shift should not be a surprise to leaders in the Marine Corps, as both the Corps and the Army have been going down this path for a number of years now.
So who will be surprised? Not surprisingly, the remaining services, in particular the Navy and Air Force. Strategic force projection is what the Navy and Air Force have always been about, and depending on how much the strategic outlook has been changed by this year's QDR, the USN and USAF may be severely impacted (budget-wise, and via other allocations across the board).
Will update with more thoughts once I've had a chance to read the QDR...
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