2
hypothetical conficts against the nation’s most capable adversar-
ies, programmed U.S. forces repeatedly have failed to achieve their
primary operational objectives and sufer heavy losses in doing so.
Assessments conducted by RAND and published in recent years,
for example, show that
U.S. and allied forces today could not defeat a concerted,
short-notice Russian invasion of the Baltic states.3
China’s growing military capabilities, combined with unfavor-
able geographic asymmetries, raise questions about the future
credibility of U.S. security guarantees to Taiwan.4
U.S. and allied forces lack satisfactory answers to the growing
threat of North Korean nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles.5
Te U.S. armed forces today are, at once, larger than needed to
fght a single major war, failing to keep pace with the modernizing
capabilities of great power adversaries, poorly postured to meet
key challenges in Europe and East Asia, and insufciently ready
and trained to get the most operational utility from many of their
active-component units.6 Te
National Defense Strategy
, published
in early 2018, recognizes that trends have been unfavorable, noting
that today, for U.S. forces, “every domain is contested—air, land,
sea, space, and cyberspace.”7
Tis did not happen overnight. DoD’s failure to adapt to a
deteriorating security environment goes back more than a decade.
Multiple reasons can be cited for this failure, including a sense of
complacency resulting from the success that U.S. forces experi-
enced in Operations Desert Storm (Iraq) and Allied Force (former
Yugoslavia); the resources and attention that have been devoted
to counterinsurgency, stability, and counterterrorist operations in
Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere; and, of course, the constraints
placed on discretionary spending by the Budget Control Act of
2011. Whatever the causes, there is an urgent need to modernize
U.S. military capabilities and operational concepts, lest we and our
allies lose further ground to China and Russia. Tis Perspective
examines how things got to this point and what can be done about
it.
Diagnosis: A Case Study
DoD’s inadequate response to increasingly clear signals that U.S.
forces were facing or were about to face serious new challenges
from China, North Korea, and Russia provides a case study in
the state of its force development process. In the cases of China
and North Korea, this failure dates back to the early years of this
century, when analyses were beginning to reveal the consequences
of China’s rapid military modernization eforts and the likelihood
that North Korea would develop and feld deliverable nuclear weap-
ons.8 What was the response to these developments, and what does
it tell us about the capabilities, motivations, and limitations of key
players in the force development process Te following observa-
tions are meant to shed light on these questions.
DoD’s poor performance was not due to an “intelligence
failure.” Intelligence projections, of course, are rarely perfect. But
the intelligence community (IC) did a credible job of tracking
China’s progress toward a modern military force and its develop-
ment of a “counterintervention strategy” aimed at keeping U.S.
military power at bay during a confict in the Western Pacifc. Te
IC’s estimates of the growth of China’s forces of ballistic and cruise
missiles, space and counterspace systems, air and naval forces, sur-
face-to-air missiles, and other sinews of military power were widelyavailable and sufciently accurate to support force assessment and
development. Te same is true for North Korea: Unavoidably, given
the secretive nature of the regime, there were sizable error bars
around estimates of how much fssile material the DPRK was gen-
erating and how soon the Kim dynasty might have an operational
nuclear weapon, but the intelligence community provided clear
warnings that these were coming—again, with sufcient fdelity to
support gaming, analysis, and force development.9
Te defense analytic community was tracking these
developments. Wargaming and analysis by RAND’s Project AIR
FORCE since the early 2000s pointed both to the growth of Chi-
na’s anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) capabilities and to their poten-
tial consequences for future U.S. power projection operations.10 Te
Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments likewise sounded
the alarm with unclassifed publications beginning around 2003.11
Since at least 2008, DoD has had a serviceable set of defense
planning scenarios that provide a basis for evaluating joint force
capabilities and concepts against reasonable depictions of the
relevant threats from China. Tose scenarios fueled campaign-level
modeling inside DoD that was, by 2010 or so, identifying the same
challenges as RAND and others. And gaming done by RAND
from 2006 to 2008 suggested that deterring a nuclear-armed North
Korea could be highly problematic and that new capabilities would
be called for.12
Policy direction was clear. In 2012, the White House
announced that it would “rebalance” U.S. strategy and resources
toward the Asia-Pacifc region. Te strategy document accompany-
ing the rebalance stated that the United States would “make the
necessary investments to ensure that we maintain regional access
and the ability to operate freely in keeping with our treaty obliga-
tions. . . .”13 At the same time, however, the administration agreed
to accept the caps on spending imposed by the Budget Control
Act, and there is little evidence of a signifcant shift in emphasis or
resources within DoD to reverse the decline in U.S. power projec-
tion capabilities vis-à-vis China. Tis is a textbook example of DoD
failing to respond to national strategy.
Te military services have only partially responded to the
rising challenge. Te Navy and the Air Force have been atten-
tive to the need to modernize major platforms, such as attack
submarines, surface combatants, and fghter and bomber aircraft.
However, while such modernization is necessary and appropriate, it
is not sufcient. China’s A2/AD capabilities create uncomfortable
problems for our Air Force and Navy, for which they have had no
ready answers. For the Air Force, these include serious threats to
the survivability of land-based air forces in the Western Pacifc and
to military satellites, and difculties in suppressing China’s increas-
ingly dense and sophisticated integrated air defenses. Likewise, the
Navy faces growing questions about the survivability of its surface
combatants, including carrier strike groups, in a confict with
China in the Western Pacifc. And neither U.S. air nor land forces
Wargaming and analysis by RAND’s Project
AIR FORCE since the early 2000s pointed
both to the growth of China’s anti-access/
area denial (A2/AD) capabilities and to their
potential consequences for future U.S. power
projection operations.fare well in wargames depicting confict with Russian forces on the
eastern fank of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)
treaty area. Even as analysis began to identify investment options
and operational concepts that had the potential to counter the
threat, the services have largely failed to embrace these, as resources
have been constrained, and new investments could often be made
only at the expense of other priorities in their planned programs.14
It appears that DoD’s leaders often did not make good
use of available information about emerging threats. Although
U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld was an advocate for
modernizing U.S. forces, he rejected what he called “threat based
planning,” pressing instead