A former partner in a top-10 global management consulting firm, Joe Buff is a seasoned risk analyst and professional writer on national security and defense preparedness. Two of his non-fiction articles received annual literary awards from the Naval Submarine League. He is also a national bestselling author of tales of near-future warfare featuring nuclear submariners and special operations forces in action at their bravest and best. Joe holds a master's degree in math from MIT, earned under a National Science Foundation Fellowship. He worked as an intern at the Argonne National Laboratory. Previously a qualified actuary for twenty years, with extensive experience at interpreting policy implications of dire "what if" scenarios, he is now a member of the Society for Risk Analysis, a non-partisan international scholarly body headquartered in McLean, VA.
Joe's father was an enlisted man in the Navy (Seabees in the Pacific Theater) from 1946 through 1951, and his uncle was a merchant mariner on the North Atlantic convoys late in World War II, before being drafted into the U.S. Army to serve in the Occupation of Nazi Germany. Joe is a Life Member of the following Navy-related organizations: U.S. Naval Institute, the Navy League of the United States, the Fellows of the Naval War College, CEC/Seabees Historical Foundation, and the Naval Submarine League. During 2004, after having been a guest luncheon speaker at their Annual National Convention, Joe became a sponsored Life Associate Member of the U.S. Submarine Veterans, Inc. He was recently made an Honorary Life Associate Member of the Navy Seabee Veterans of America, partly in recognition of his pro bono work for Operation Seabees Knowledge.
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May 17, 2005
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A trend I find very disturbing is an increasingly widespread perception or belief within our country that the United States will never again be forced to fight a major war. One sees more and more statements even from people I used to think of as hawks, to the effect that the 21st century will be an era only of counter-terror and counter-insurgency conflicts. The possibility that we could in the foreseeable future get stuck in a big, stand-up shooting war is being dismissed with blithe glibness as old fashioned and out of step.
There's a dangerous disconnect here, between this simplistic belief in "no more big war," and harsh reality. And the disconnect is widening, to the point that dreadful military planning mistakes might occur and become irreversible. Perhaps worst of all is that despite the recent condemnation of similar behavior by more than one independent investigational body, groupthink and doublespeak about crucial defense decisions appear to be as rampant as ever both inside and outside the Beltway. A simple illustration of the problem is the way in which the following two ideas are often written in the same paragraph, or spoken in the same breath:
1. America's military might is so overwhelmingly great that no nation would ever dare take us on in a head-to-head war.
2. Because our present military strength is such an effective deterrent, we can pare it away toward impotence -- through cuts whose main purpose is shrinking the national budget deficit.
While maybe sounding seductive at first, these two ideas are mutually contradictory, and put together the package undermines and negates itself.
The daily newspaper headlines scream about various threats to world order and safety which ought to suggest that the current downsized, over-stretched U.S. military is already losing some of its vaunted conventional deterrent power:
1. China is taking an increasingly hard line toward absorbing Taiwan. Ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and other weapon systems and troops are being clustered near the strait separating the continent from the island, to the extent that American carrier strike groups and U.S. Air Force platforms could suffer serious losses if they tried to create a barrier to Chinese aggression. It's too easy to dismiss China's rising militarism as bluff. They have the intention and the means to field a world-class blue water navy themselves within a decade or two. The last time we ignored their warnings not to interfere in their "internal" matters, the result was a bloodbath when Chinese troops poured across the Yalu into North Korea.
2. Speaking of which, North Korea continues to show impressive skill at playing other countries against each other while remaining opaque to outside intelligence gathering. What we do know should be deeply troubling: The North has countless hardened artillery emplacements that could pulverize South Korea's capitol, Seoul, within a few hours -- another bloodbath. The withdrawal of American troops from within range of this massive artillery barrage amounts -- certainly in North Korean eyes -- to a concession that if fighting did break out, things would be very grim for the good guys. And after talking and talking, and yet more talking, North Korea is continuing to take steps to develop a nuclear arsenal. To think diplomacy and sanctions will somehow, suddenly make a breakthrough against this relentless opponent seems overly optimistic indeed.
3. Iran appears to be no more of an encouraging situation than North Korea. A different group of countries, mostly from Old Europe, have tried carrot-and-stick tactics to try to convince Tehran to dismantle their nuclear program. These tactics have not succeeded. Iran seems bent on starting up their uranium centrifuges again, regardless of all the blather and threats from the West. Claims that their desire for domestic supplies of uranium are solely for peaceful purposes defy credibility: Fuel rods for research and power reactors are available on the open market, at much less cost that duplicating the refining technology from scratch. With their substantial proven petroleum reserves, Iran ought to be one of the last countries worried about energy independence right now. Their bellicose message to Israel, "Don't try to pre-emptively attack us the way you did Iraq's reactor back in the early 1980s or you'll regret it," comes across to me like the voice of a guilty conscience, not an innocent, law-abiding global citizen.
4. Russia remains fixated on regaining superpower status. Vladimir Putin is not a nice man. His boasting about the Kremlin's next-generation ICBMs, some dozens of which are already operational, supposedly able to penetrate any conceivable missile shield, doesn't read like a message of peace. Continued meddling in the politics of now-sovereign nations on the Russian Federation's borders isn't very reassuring either. Even the recent war of words at the sixtieth anniversary of V-E day about the Soviet role (rule?) in the Baltic States should serve as a reminder that what happened once could still happen again. Some military commentators (including me) have stated that a Second Cold War with Russia may already be emerging.
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We the People of the United States constantly forget how poorly we understand the cultures of other countries. Those countries know it, and they play to our wishful thinking by manipulating us, spending large sums on lobbying and advertising to reinforce our cherished but false myths. Is Japan really a democracy in the American mold, or is it a deeply racist and class-conscious command economy with a thin veneer left over from MacArthur's day? In a major op-ed piece in the NY Times recently, Nobel laureate Guenter Grass, a native German, seriously questioned whether re-united Germany was a true democracy -- he actually warned of the "risk of a new totalitarianism" in Germany! From regular correspondence with military-oriented e-pals in Canada, the UK, and the Republic of Ireland, I'm not sure how much the average American even "gets it" about values, perceptions, and politics in those countries.
History shows that tyrants will often begin wars of aggression that rational analysis would suggest they couldn't win. Either they were irrational people drunk on unquestioned authority, or their strategic goals had logic at the time to them (if not to us), or they thought they could gain more than they'd lose by rolling the dice of premeditated state violence and then trusting to luck. This peculiar behavior-set remains vividly active today. And remember, what should have been a fully effective non-nuclear deterrent force, America's latent industrial strength and huge manpower pool in the 1930s, failed to prevent World War II. Perhaps the deterrence was undermined by the enemy's shrewd reading of American propensities for pacifism and isolationism -- propensities which do not appear to have dwindled by much today. That the shrewd reading wasn't so shrewd in the end is beside the point: The war started, and we had to fight it to win.
History also shows that every major war, in its own way, was limited and asymmetrical: The enemy fights viciously, but refrains from certain types of fighting in certain places for what might be inscrutable reasons, muddling an accurate grasp of their objectives and motivations. Each combatant always plays to their strengths and attacks the opponent's weaknesses. Asymmetries can be psychological and emotional, too -- these are frequently the most telling differences of all, which lead to war after war breaking out that "didn't make any sense."
Even when the U.S. does achieve victory in a major war, the cost in money and lives is severe. Often, tens or hundreds of thousands of combat troops are killed, and many more are wounded in body and mind. The financial cost of fighting any big war, translated into 2005 dollars, can easily run into countless billions. The victory parade at the end of such a mess has to be the most expensive type of celebration known to humanity. Frankly, I don't look forward to getting an invitation to such a party in my old age. The answer is simple, but also extremely challenging -- and we sweep it under the rug at our collective peril: Threat assessment, intell gathering, warfighting doctrine, force structure, acquisition plans, ongoing training, and military "right-sizing" must all be premised on the genuine possibility that our next serious enemy will be a big one who won't flinch from slugging it out.
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