How America found itself fighting the last war — again
Even as political Washington points fingers over Afghanistan, many in the defence establishment are fretting about China
Peter Spiegel in New York
It is the oldest and most persistent plague to infect Washington’s national security bureaucracy.
Faced with a fresh threat, strategic planners and weapons buyers nonetheless “fight the last war” — that is, build intelligence and military capabilities to combat a threat that has already faded in its potential to do America harm.
Twenty years after the September 11 terrorist attacks, it remains the most potent lesson of that horrific morning.
The Pentagon and CIA were still acquiring high-end fighters for air-to-air combat against a non-existent Soviet Union and prioritising cold-war-era intelligence targets — and failed to see the “next war” coming against Islamist terrorism.
With all eyes in the capital focused on the ignominious end of America’s presence in Afghanistan, it seems an appropriate time to ask if two decades of retooling the US Army for irregular warfare and hiring scores of Arabic-language specialists in Langley has become another case of fighting the last war — and whether the US is overlooking the next threat.
If the defence establishment — military officers, civilian leaders and defence contractors — is any indication, the answer is an unequivocal yes.
Even as Kabul falls, Washington is full of hand-wringing that China, which has spent years investing in precision long-range missiles that can target US installations in the Pacific and intelligence satellites that can track American troop movements, has stolen the march on the US in the next battlefield.
“China is very different from the threat of the past 20 years,” one senior military officer involved in weapons development told me.
“Either we change, or we become unprepared for China.”
But over the past 18 months, there have been signs that the national security bureaucracy is beginning to move, however belatedly, to counter the rising Chinese challenge, with a handful of bets on technologies and strategic plans aimed at gaining ground back from Beijing.
US Marine Corps commandant General David Berger has proposed ridding his storied service of all its tanks and most of its artillery batteries, as well as several large amphibious assault units — which allow Marines to “storm the beaches” but provide big targets for Chinese missiles — in exchange for the long-range missiles, unmanned reconnaissance drones and smaller-scale amphibious groups that would be needed for a geographically sprawling fight in the Pacific.
He will also redeploy assets away from the Middle East, where Marines have essentially been a second US Army, towards the Japan-based III Marine Expeditionary Force.
Perhaps it’s no surprise that Berger commanded all Marine forces in the Pacific before becoming commandant.
The other service chief who has come to Washington after a tour in the Pacific is Air Force General Charles Brown, whose weapons acquisition team recently decided against replacing its fleet of traditional reconnaissance aircraft, called J-Stars, and to invest instead in a new command and control system intended to adapt commercial advances in technology, particularly artificial intelligence, to help commanders make quicker decisions — also with an eye on China.
“The side that wins is the side that decides the fastest,” said Brigadier General Jeffery Valenzia, the US Air Force’s most senior officer on the project.
“It’s no longer the side who has the biggest bombs or the most bullets.”
Two decades of investment in drones, satellites and advanced radars have left the US military with an endless number of sensors to track enemies, but no way to pull together that information into a single view of a battlespace in real time, one that can include weapons at the ready to quickly attack a threat.
What is needed is a “militarised internet of things”, in the words of one former Pentagon official.
Elements of the new command and control system are being rolled out every four months in a way that mimics Silicon Valley software patches.
A few months ago, an upgrade allowed a cold-war-era tank to network with a satellite-based radar to shoot down a cruise missile, a highly evasive weapon that normally can only be stopped by specialised missile defence.
But the Pentagon bureaucracy and overseers on Capitol Hill have been resistant to both Berger and Brown’s initiatives.
Some of Berger’s missile batteries were cut by Congress, which ordered more helicopters instead.
And the Air Force’s new advanced battle management system has struggled for backing because it does not fit into the procurement world’s traditional performance checklists.
Earlier this month, the US Navy’s top officer, Admiral Michael Gilday, lit into defence contractors at a major industry conference for lobbying Congress to “build the ships that you want to build” and “buy aircraft we don’t need” rather than adapt to systems needed to counter China.
“It’s not the ’90s any more,” Gilday railed, saying he needed the rest of the military-industrial complex to understand “the sense of urgency that we feel every day against China . . . in a bureaucracy that is really not designed to move very fast”.
Will Roper, a former top Air Force official who championed the new command and control system, said the Pentagon seems addicted to “innovation tourism”, where officials order up a demonstration of an advanced capability — and then let it sit on a shelf.
“You do the demonstration and no one calls you back,” said Roper, now the chief executive of a tech start-up that suffered that exact fate.
“The Pentagon pukes on agility,” added Roper, who worries that innovations aimed at countering China will continue to struggle against financial and bureaucratic interests wedded to “last war” deployments and programmes.
“It is a heroic departure from the acquisition system that is losing against China.
It is more in jeopardy because of us than because of our enemy.”
Peter Spiegel is the FT’s US managing editor
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