Foreign Policy
Spring 1998

Sidebar: America’s Achilles’ Heel?

By Lawrence Freedman

Anyone seeking insight into current mainstream thinking on military affairs could do worse than to read the report of the National Defense Panel, Transforming Defense: National Security in the 21st Century, published last December. The panel was chartered by the U.S. Congress to provide a degree of oversight to the Pentagon’s Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR). In contrast to the QDR, which was generally viewed as representing a conservative perspective, the panel argues that today’s relatively relaxed security environment provides a unique opportunity to divert resources away from sustaining the present force structure and toward developing one that can meet the challenges likely to emerge within the next two decades.

The panel suggests that the United States has little choice but to engage in the generality of international security problems and recommends that it deal with these issues—relying on diplomatic rather than military methods—before they reach a crisis point. Another sensible assumption is that opponents will have taken account of the Gulf War and will not accept American conflict on American terms. Future opponents are likely to rely on alternative methods of warfare, notably terrorism and weapons of mass destruction, and seek also to draw Western states into forms of urban combat where more advanced military capabilities would be less effective. Noting the growing American dependence on information systems, the panel concludes that this venue offers tempting new targets for would-be adversaries.

In fact, the panel goes so far as to assert that responding to “information warfare threats to the United States may present the greatest challenge in preparing for the security environment of 2010–20.” Having said that, they acknowledge that the “threat is diffuse and difficult to identify.” Indeed, the discussion of information warfare (and related topics such as “space control”) in this report reflects that current thinking has not advanced much beyond asserting rather obvious desiderata—we must deny to our enemies what we must protect for ourselves. The extent to which information systems are moving out of governmental control might have given the panel more pause in considering whether traditional military concepts of control have much relevance in the Information Age.

—L.F.