Curbing Innovation / 7 / 7.1

7.1 REPLACING SCENARIO WITH A NEW PLANNING PARADIGM

The first inkling of trouble was the sudden collapse of the Soviet Union which rendered the Cold War planning scenario unpredictive. Under the circumstances, as recognized in the latest Quadrennial Defense Review conducted by the Pentagon in 2001, we can no longer predict with any confidence the next war our nation will be called upon to fight. To quote the QDR [1]:

The new defense strategy is built around the concept of shifting to a capabilities-based approach to defense. That concept reflects the fact that the United States can not know with confidence what nation, combination of nations, or non-state actor will pose threats to vital U.S. interests or those of U.S. allies and friends decades from now.

We must, therefore reconsider the acquisition process used during the heydays of systems analysis and seek for alternative ways of slaving command technology to the security needs of the nation, ways that would avoid reliance upon an unpredictive planning scenario.

We begin by making a fundamental distinction, one that unfortunately is too often left unmade, namely the distinction between what kind of systems one ought to buy and how much of the capability provided by those systems one ought to acquire. In the past, both these questions could be addressed within the planning scenario representing World War III; today, we submit, the two questions must be dealt with separately. The reason is that scenarios, no matter how unpredictive, must remain an option for deciding how much capability to buy, but, as we shall argue below, they must be eliminated altogether from the process of deciding what kind of systems to buy.

Indeed, the question of how much to acquire of the appropriate type of military capability is fundamentally a political question, best dealt with in our democracy by open debate between the Department, Congress, and industry; in this debate, analysis of specific campaigns are no more than dramatic statements of the political positions embedded in the many assumptions underlying the campaign, and should therefore be fair game. If the military capability under consideration is the right kind of capability, acquiring more or less of it as the will of the nation decides, will not fundamentally affect the nation’s ability to fight successfully. In what follows we will therefore restrict ourselves to a discussion of that side of the acquisition process that deals with the question of what systems the nation should buy and leave the “how much” question essentially untouched.

There are only three different ways in which the matter of the unpredictive planning scenarios can be addressed: replace the single Cold War scenario with a finite set of planning scenarios representative of whatever degree of certainty the nation has in the nature of its next confrontation; dispense with the set of scenarios and plan to the most stressful scenario instead; or, finally, do away with planning scenarios altogether. Let us consider these three alternatives separately.

Clearly the set of all possible scenarios representing confrontations likely to involve the U.S. is infinite. If we select a finite set from them to use as planning scenarios, chances are the next confrontation would not be among them. Moreover, even if we were satisfied with the coverage of the representative scenarios, there remains the unsolvable question of how one is to slave command technology to a set of scenarios rather than to a single one. Are we to acquire the sum total of the systems required to prevail in each planning scenario, no matter how much that may cost, or are we to weigh each scenario in some manner reflecting our more or less arbitrary views concerning their likelihood? Either way, planning to a set of scenarios remains every bit as unsatisfactory as the process of planning to a single, unpredictive scenario.

Alternatively, one might try to dispense with the set of scenarios altogether by planning to the most stressful scenario instead, on the argument that any other, less stressful scenario ought to be automatically included. The validity of this “lesser included case” argument depends upon the kind of war one expects to fight. If that war is envisioned to resemble two caribou, horns locked in combat, pushing against each other at mating time, the argument should be valid; otherwise it is not. Indeed, in this caribou-like model of warfare, the side that has more strength manifestly wins and, therefore, all scenarios that require less strength than the one that requires the most, are won, if the latter is won. However, if outfoxing an enemy is far more important than confronting him head on, the stronger force does not necessarily win over the weaker one.

Now, since our current enemies are substantially less able to fight a war against us than the Warsaw Pact might have been during the Cold War, the type of war likely to involve the United States in the foreseeable future is of the latter kind. Indeed, just because the United States is a superpower, that does not mean that enemies will stop interfering with our security interests; it only means that they will adopt a new model of war focused on avoiding direct confrontation with our overwhelmingly more powerful forces by exploiting singular vulnerabilities in our military capability. This “asymmetric” type of war, long reduced to a secondary place in the theory of war, appears now to be coming back to the fore.

Consequently, the “lesser included case” philosophy is not an adequate answer to the problem of unpredictive planning scenarios, either. That leaves us only with the option of doing without a planning scenario. At first sight, this conclusion is puzzling indeed: if, as we argued all along, scenarios are essential for planning, how are we to plan future capabilities without the benefit of a scenario? This puzzlement is particularly troublesome now because, after so many years of practice, we have come to believe that scenarios fulfill some irreducible human need for mental context. Remember, however, that scenarios were originally introduced, not to serve as a visualizing technique, but rather to control the creative energies of command technology. Therefore, there is nothing impossible about dispensing with them, provided, of course, that we can find an alternative way of slaving command technology to the security interests of our nation.

To see how that might be accomplished, consider, that when confronted with asymmetric warfare, a nation must be prepared to have its vulnerabilities thoroughly probed by the enemy. To avoid losing the advantage, the nation must therefore seek to reduce, if not directly eliminate, the singular vulnerabilities in its military capability. In the context of singular vulnerabilities, the word “vulnerability” is not used to mean, as it usually does, inability to fully defend oneself against being wounded; rather, it is used to describe the possibility that an enemy could, by virtue of his actions, render one’s capability impotent by severing that capability from its expected military effects. Clearly, vulnerability so construed is a characterization of one’s capability, not of the enemy one confronts. Consequently, we might be able to identify and then deal with the seams in our capability without reference either to a specific enemy or to a specific location in which to fight that enemy. Command technology could thus be slaved to the scenario-independent goal of reducing the singular vulnerabilities in our warfare capability.

It is important at this point to clearly distinguish between scenario independence and enemy-independence. While our line of thought has brought us to the realization that no scenario will adequately deal with the circumstances prevailing in the world today, it did not say that we should ignore the general character of the enemy. On the contrary, it was the explicit characterization of that enemy that directed our argument. However, once the asymmetric character of our likely enemies has thus been recognized, one need say no more about the specific enemy; for, no matter who he may be, whether Iraq or Korea, he will, by virtue of his being an asymmetric foe, test our singular vulnerabilities in exactly the same way that we ourselves might if we decided to play “red cell” to our own military capability.

We suggest, therefore, that the most reasonable first step in the process of recapturing control over command technology is to move away from the current scenario-based acquisition process, aimed at increasing the magnitude of our military capability, towards a largely scenario-independent acquisition process, aimed at reducing singular vulnerabilities in our military capability. The ultimate goal of an acquisition process designed to reduce singular vulnerabilities is to generate a war machine whose capabilities display no seams for an enemy to exploit. This sharply contrasts with the ultimate goal of the current acquisition process, which is to generate systems that perform more effectively than current systems. Since, under the circumstances, the emphasis of the acquisition process shifts from specific threats and systems to generic capabilities, we might call this new focus “capabilities-based acquisition”.

However, for the time being at least, both acquisition processes might be needed to attend to the nation’s military needs. The introduction of the capabilities-based process mentioned above is therefore not intended to be a sudden and complete switch from the scenario-based process we still use today, but rather a deliberate movement away from it.

There are three distinct reasons for thus temporarily mixing the two acquisition processes. First, no institution can transform itself on a dime. Second, our military capability is not nearly as good as we would like to think. Acquired, as it was, in a race to the finish with the Soviet Union, there was no time to develop most of our systems to the point of maximum effectiveness and, consequently, we must maintain some measure of the old acquisition process to consolidate the capability we have acquired to date. Finally, our current military capabilities will service the nation for quite a number of years yet to come and, therefore, the acquisition system must see to it that those capabilities do not become obsolescent before it is time to retire the corresponding weapons. To do all this, the acquisition system can not completely abandon the current drive to improve capability even as it pursues a vulnerability-reduction program.