It's Time to Rethink U.S. Defense Strategy

Deanna Lee

You're listening to Policy Minded, a podcast by RAND. I'm Deanna Lee. Today, we're joined by David Ochmanek. He's here to discuss the decades-long erosion of U.S. military power and influence and what might be done to restore it. David is a senior international defense researcher at RAND, he previously served as the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Strategy from 1993 to 1995, and more recently as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Force Development from 2009 to 2014. David, thanks for being here.

David Ochmanek

Thanks for having me.

Deanna Lee

All right, let's jump right in. You wrote in a highly influential RAND report published two years ago that U.S. national security was at a pivotal inflection point. What did you mean by that?

David Ochmanek

So for those who aren't mathematically-inclined, an inflection point is where a curve stops going down and goes up, or vice versa, stops going up and turns down. And as we looked at the situation the United States found itself in, we found three trend lines that were pointing us to the need for some very fundamental rethinking of our strategy and our military forces. First, at the end of the Cold War, we had a fairly benign international environment. Our most consequential adversaries were what were known as regional adversaries, the Irans, the Iraqs, the North Koreas of the world, with really second or third class military capabilities. That's fundamentally changed now, particularly with China emerging as a adversary state, well equipped with world-class military systems, Russia turning overtly hostile, and these other regional states acquiring new military capabilities. So we're in a much more challenging international environment than we were before. At the same time, military technologies are changing, really eliminating our near-monopoly on modern military capabilities, such as near real-time sensing, precision strike. And finally, we were well aware of trends within our own society that are undermining the consensus we've had as a nation about the need for the United States to remain globally-engaged as a leading country and as a security guarantor. So the confluence of those three trends to us created a situation where we've really got to, as a nation, take stock of where we are and decide what role we want to play in the world, and if we want continue to play an activist role, to remake our military capabilities in some fairly fundamental ways.

Deanna Lee

Maybe we can dive a little bit deeper into what's changed over the years. You mentioned this shift from sort of regional adversaries to facing adversaries that are more capable militarily like China and Russia. And you write in the report that, quote, the U.S. defense strategy has been predicated on U.S. Military forces that were superior in all domains to those of any adversary. But this superiority is gone. What are some of the key factors within this larger shift of adversaries that contributed to this?

David Ochmanek

So Desert Storm was a watershed in military operations. The performance of U.S. forces in that war surprised a lot of people, including in the United States. We showed that a truly modern force could operate with near impunity over the airspace and land of hostile countries, and doing that could fairly methodically dismantle their military capabilities. Well, China, Russia, and other states took note of that. And they began long-term efforts to create capabilities that would prevent us from doing to them what we did to Iraq. And, they've been successful in that. So, I mentioned the loss of our monopoly on these advanced military capabilities, people have even talked about the so-called democratization of precision strike. With miniaturization, autonomy, software dispersion, countries without huge defense budgets, without a tremendously deep technical base have shown themselves able to do the kinds of things on the modern battlefield that only our forces could do 30 years ago. And that's confronting us obviously with a much more stressing combat environment when we think about military operations.

Deanna Lee

I'm curious, how much are commercial drones a part of that equation?

David Ochmanek

They are probably the most extreme example of cheap precision. China's at the high end. They've built literally thousands of ballistic and cruise missiles that are highly accurate, highly dangerous, that really transform the combat environment that we would have to operate in if we went to war with them. But in recent years, as we've seen in Ukraine, very inexpensive small unmanned aerial vehicles and indeed, unmanned seagoing vehicles, can inflict serious damage on major military platforms: tanks, ships, aircraft, and so forth. So that's, at this point, the ultimate expression of this democratization of precision strike that we've seen.

Deanna Lee

Can you provide some more examples? You mentioned the war in Iraq as being kind of a watershed moment; you know, our adversaries took that experience and learned from it. Are there any other specific examples that sort of demonstrate why the typical or legacy U.S. approach simply isn't going to work anymore?

David Ochmanek

Yes, so let me describe that legacy approach. Again, Desert Storm is the model. When President George H.W. Bush announced that Saddam Hussein's aggression against Kuwait would not stand, he initiated Operation Desert Shield. Over the next five months, the United States and its coalition partners deployed what became known as an "iron mountain" of military forces and materiel to the Arabian Peninsula. So our approach to defeating aggression by those regional adversaries was expeditionary in nature. The bulk of the force we needed to conduct the operation had to be deployed from elsewhere before the operation could begin. The second feature of Desert Storm that is characteristic of this legacy approach I call sequential. The opening days and nights of that war were devoted primarily to breaking the enemy's air defense, shattering his military command and control systems. So that we could then create this more permissive environment over the battle space and then go after the military forces that were the objective of the operation. Those two features, the expeditionary approach, the sequential approach, are exactly the vulnerabilities that China's strategy is designed to exploit. They will not give us five months or even five weeks to position a force to counter aggression by them. Their force is large enough, capable enough, and ready enough that they can decide when to initiate hostilities, and it could be a matter of five days that we have to position ourselves to cope with that. And if we try to use the opening days and weeks of the war to create this more benign environment by breaking their air defense and command and control, we'll find ourselves disappointed in that. Their air defenses are too sophisticated, too dense, too numerous, their command and control is hardened and dispersed. We'll end up expending our forces on those objectives while China achieves its objectives of, for example, invading Taiwan. So we have to find ways to break into this highly contested military environment they've created with their air defense and other things to get after what military strategists call the operational center of gravity, the invasion force, from the very outset of hostilities.

Deanna Lee

Okay, and you mentioned Taiwan. I think that tends to be the sort of top of mind when thinking about the potential for a conflict with China in the future. Is that the primary scenario you looked at in trying to understand how the U.S. might perform in such a conflict?

David Ochmanek

Short answer is yes. The National Defense Strategy published by the Pentagon in 2018 identifies China unambiguously as the principal threat to our security going forward. And the Taiwan scenario is the most stressful, plausible case in which China could forcibly challenge a U.S. partner. So we think that's a very good scenario for planning. We also focus on the challenges that Russia could pose to NATO, particularly on the eastern flank of NATO. That was in the years before 2022 when they invaded Ukraine. But we still regard defense of the Baltic States, defense of Poland, for example, as being an important scenario as well, because eventually when the fighting stops in Ukraine, we expect that Russia will reconstitute its conventional forces and again pose a significant threat to NATO. So those two scenarios in combination are our principal planning cases.

Deanna Lee

I'm curious when you contrast potential conflict with China, with potential conflict between the U.S. and Russia, how differently do those play out? Does the U.S. need to do the same things to prepare for both of those scenarios or is there different priorities for both contingencies.

David Ochmanek

So yes and no, in broad strokes, the approach that the U.S. and its allies need to take to defeating aggression by both of those adversaries is essentially the same. Reject the expeditionary approach, reject the sequential approach, put sufficient combat power in place so that you can prepare to defeat aggression within a matter of days of a decision to intervene, not weeks or months. And be prepared to engage the invasion force from the outset of hostilities. Now the details of the capabilities you would need to do that vary somewhat between the two in part because the geography is very different. So a fight over Taiwan is going to be waged principally in the air, in the maritime environment, as well as in space and the information environment. Obviously, defense of NATO against a Russian invasion would be more waged in the land and the air environment, rather than the maritime. But again, the basic approach, the need to revise the way we think about projecting power to defeat aggression has to change fundamentally in both cases.

Deanna Lee

Let's talk a little bit more about some of those solutions. You know, we need to fundamentally change the way we think about projection of power? So it's not just about new and better weapons or technology. What does it look like for the U.S. to fight differently? Sort of specific actions that might be taken or specific recommendations that you put forth in your research.

David Ochmanek

Right, so here we can learn a lot from what's going on in Ukraine. And what we see there every day is that forces that present what military operators call large signatures are quite vulnerable. By signature, we mean something that can be observed readily by sensors. Do you have a large number of people concentrated in one place? Are you dependent on a fixed facility or infrastructure that the enemy can find? Are you reliant on things that can be readily observed? Fuel storage, for example, electrical power generation, things of that nature. Increasingly on the modern battlefield, you have to be agile, you have to be mobile, you have be hidden, or difficult to see and find, and/or able to base your force at significant range away from the enemy so that you can operate from a relative degree sanctuary. Those are the attributes of a force that are going to be needed to successfully challenge aggression by these highly-capable adversaries.

Deanna Lee

Okay, and this report, as I mentioned, was published two years ago in 2023. And you said a lot has been learned over the last couple of years with the conflict between Russia and Ukraine. Of course, Russia and China are also learning from that conflict, I presume. So how well can we track what our adversaries are doing while we're also in real time trying to adjust to what the future of a potential conflict might look like?

David Ochmanek

Right, so we get pretty good data every day from Europe about how both Russia and Ukraine are adapting to the conflict. And really the pace of adaptation has been pretty stunning. We see a technical innovation, for example, that would make a Ukrainian drone more robust, and within a very short time the Russians have come up with a new electronic jamming means to counter that innovation. So, this back and forth is continuous. And again, we get pretty good data about that, less so with China because their adaptations, the lessons they're learning are less visible. But this is one of the roles that we rely upon wargaming to help us with. When we think about how U.S. forces need to adapt to defeat aggression by China, it's important that those adaptations be tested against a representative, adaptive adversary. Now we can't get Xi Jinping and his generals into the gaming room with us, but we have some world-class experts on Chinese military doctrine and operations here at RAND and elsewhere in the intelligence community. They play the red team. So as we invoke new capabilities, new operational approaches for Blue, for the United States and its partners, we try those out in wargames, and then we have the Red teams say, "This is how we believe the People's Liberation Army—which is the name the Chinese give to their military forces—might adapt to this innovation, and let's play it out on the game board and see what the outcome is."

Deanna Lee

I want to talk a little bit about wargaming in a moment because I think that's definitely of interest to our listeners. But before we do, has the U.S. made any notable progress in some of the areas you talked about since you've published the report?

David Ochmanek

The short answer is yes. About two years ago, the Department of Defense announced an initiative called Replicator. Replicator was a very ambitious initiative that sought in many ways to reverse some long-standing trends in the development and procurement of U.S. weapons systems. My friend Chris Brose has observed that for decades, United States Armed Forces have been on a trajectory of buying ever more exquisite, ever more expensive weapons systems in ever smaller numbers: world-class fighter aircraft, ships, submarines, etc. That approach looks increasingly fragile in the face of these highly-capable adversaries like China because you have so few of these platforms that you can commit to the battle. Replicator, it aims to buy thousands of inexpensive but smart, mostly unmanned systems That can do some of these functions on a modern battlefield, A, without exposing large numbers of human beings to the risk of loss, and B, en masse. So we're gaining in numbers what each individual platform might lack in capability and sophistication. So that's a very important step on our part. We've also seen the Marine Corps with their Marine Littoral Regiment, the Army with their multi-domain task force, getting into this action with small teams that are highly mobile, that have sensors and precision strike weapons associated with them. That looks like it's going to be very viable on this battlefield. So we do see innovation happening, we see capabilities reaching the field that are going to consistent with this new approach to power projection that I talked about. I would say many of us in the analytical community want to see a continued acceleration of these trends. And moving into domains other than counter-maritime, which has been, I think, the focus of Replicator thus far.

Deanna Lee

Would you say the most important factor is innovation or is it just the strategic mindset that has to shift as sort of being the key first step here?

David Ochmanek

Yeah, great question. I like to remind people that in the 1980s, the United States and its allies in NATO came up with a new way to fight, to defend NATO against a possible Russian Warsaw Pact attack. That was called Air-Land Battle. In Air-Land Battle, they defined in a few short pages a new way to defeat aggression. And that concept lent a lot of coherence to the services' programs to develop and field weapon systems. And of course, it's an iterative process, right? As you define the concept, you begin to learn more about what's possible technically. That helps you refine the concept. The concept then helps you focus your resources on developing the appropriate capabilities. So I would say the concept is the fundamental thing. We don't have a consensus on that. We haven't codified it, but the elements of it are emerging through our wargaming and analysis.

Deanna Lee

We've mostly talked about China and Russia here, unsurprisingly, top two threats for the U.S. Are there any other major threats that the U.S. is focused on that required this new approach that we've been talking about?

David Ochmanek

Short answer is yes. So again, after Desert Storm, it wasn't just Russia and China that took away the lesson that they needed to develop some new capabilities to hold our military forces at arm's length. North Korea, Iran are moving in similar directions. Obviously, they don't have the resources that those larger countries have, but nevertheless, they're fielding their own versions of this anti-access/area denial suite of capabilities. And indeed, you know, non-nation actors, terrorist groups, insurgent groups, also as we learned to our detriment in Iraq and Afghanistan, are fielding some capabilities as well that can be quite threatening. So the threat environment, if you will, is dynamic. It isn't limited to just those two top-tier states. Thanks for the opportunity to mention that.

Deanna Lee

Sure. And these states also have a burgeoning relationship, right? They're sharing information, they're becoming friendlier, for lack of a better word. I imagine that plays into it as well.

David Ochmanek

Absolutely right. The prospect of continued cooperation among the four obviously hostile states magnifies the threat by creating synergies among them.

Deanna Lee

Let's get back to wargaming. The findings from the research we've talked about today came out of numerous wargames, as you described a little bit. You've participated in probably more wargames than you can count in your career. Can you talk more broadly about how valuable they are and the kind of insights you can get from those experiences that maybe you can't get from just studying an issue and writing a policy paper on it or debating a topic in a room?

David Ochmanek

Sure. Wargames are valuable in multiple ways. In the first instance, when you approach a new scenario, such as Russia invades the Baltic States, a scenario which really didn't exist prior to 2014 when the Russians went into the Donbas, you don't really know how that war might go, which means it's impossible to create a computer simulation of the warfight. We use the wargame to understand the basic dynamics of what both sides might do. It's almost like creating a sketch before you pull out your oil paints and create the portrait. Secondly, the wargames, as I mentioned before, enable you to test hypotheses about different ways to equip your force, different ways to employ and posture the force to improve the prospects of success. A certain idea, so for example, early on, we thought, "Well, it would be good if we had more Patriot missiles in the Baltic states to defend our air bases." So we tried that out in the wargame. What we found out was that deploying those missiles within range of Russian ballistic missiles wasn't very effective. So having the opportunity to test these things in the wargaming environment against an adaptive adversary, enables you to evaluate whether certain initiatives are likely to bear fruit or not before you spend a lot of money actually creating them in the real world. Finally, and this is really important, let's say you're the Chief of Staff of the Air Force. It's one thing to get a briefing from one of your analysts, whether he or she is at RAND or inside the Air Force, to say, "Boss, we ran some computer simulations and this what we found." It is quite another thing for you as the Chief of Staff to have personally engaged in a wargame, in which you lost to Red, right? You're invested in this, you bring your expertise to bear, you do the best job you can, and what you find out is that the tools you had at your disposal were inadequate. There's a visceral learning that takes place for teams when they're involved in a wargame, particularly if it doesn't go well from their perspective. So shaking people out of their sense of complacency is something that wargames do better than than any briefing or report that I've ever seen. And believe me, there was a lot of that consciousness-raising that had to happen early on when we started exposing people to the challenges posed by China and Russia.

Deanna Lee

Certainly, I'm sure it was something to be in the room during a moment like that. What's one of the most surprising things that you've learned from a wargame in recent years?

David Ochmanek

I'll offer two. In the fall of 1990, after Operation Desert Shield had begun, the Air Force and the Pentagon began developing what became its war plan for kicking Iraq out of Kuwait. The Vice Chief of Staff wanted RAND to wargame that plan. I came back here from Santa Monica with a colleague, they briefed us on the plan and we were like, "This is cool. This is going to be great." We spent a week wargaming in against a Red team. We were astonished that even though the plan would work at the technical and operational level, it would not achieve the outcome that the Air Force and the Blue team, frankly, expected. So we thought after a week, two weeks of intensive bombardment, Saddam Hussein would understand, "The jig is up. I've got nothing. I've gotta surrender." The Red team said no, that's not the way Saddam sees the world. Saddam sees his trump card as being his army in the field. And until you can dislodge it, until you can convince him that it can't fight anymore, he won't understand that he's been defeated. So we said to the Air Force, you've got a great opening gambit here, but attacking these so-called strategic targets is not enough. You've got to do the sort of meat-and-potatoes, wearing down the will to fight of that army of hundreds of thousands of soldiers in the desert, which they did. And it laid the basis for a very successful. So one more short story. I talked about our wargaming of the Russian attack on NATO. We began this in the summer of 2014. We went into it with the expectation that it wouldn't be a very interesting set of wargames. On paper, NATO in 2014, indeed NATO today is much more powerful than Russia. We've got an economy that's 10 times the size. We've five times as many people under arms. We've better weapon systems, et cetera. Doesn't matter. You don't fight wars on paper, you fight them on the battlefield. And what matters is what lethality you can bring to bear at the point of contact. And what we learned was it was not actually postured to effectively defend its Eastern flank against a determined Russian attack. So we took that message to the policy community and very soon we began to see things like the European Deterrence Initiative, we started flowing resources into NATO to enhance our posture there. So two very surprising outcomes of wargames that had some significant implications for how we actually fight and equip our force.

Deanna Lee

Before we wrap it up, David, I'd like to, I think the answer to this question is pretty obvious at this point, but I'd just like to hear it from you in your own words. Why is it so important for the U.S. to rethink its approach to warfare right now?

David Ochmanek

So it's important at the military level because we fight wars for important reasons. If we stick with business as usual, in terms of how we equip the force, how the force plans to fight, we run a real risk of losing the next war and/or failing to deter that war, which of course is the objective. No one wants that to happen. But it goes deeper than that. And to an extent, I think most people don't appreciate today in America, our whole national security strategy is predicated on our ability as a nation to organize, to foster, to lead a coalition of like-minded states, mostly democratically governed, in the pursuit of common objectives, whether those objectives are strengthening the international legal order, deterring aggression, enjoying free trade and prosperity, getting after environmental problems, etc., etc. In a complex, interdependent world, you can only make progress on these problems by acting in concert with other powerful nations. Well, the glue that holds that coalition together is, first of all, our common interests and values, but secondly, the U.S. role as a credible security guarantor. If our partners begin to doubt our will and/or our capacity to defend common interests, their motivation for cooperating with us in this whole range of international problems that face us as a nation is going to be undermined and called into question. So it's very important that we get this right on a lot of levels.

Deanna Lee

I'm glad you kind of took a step back and looked at the bigger picture there and you mentioned deterrence and maybe that's a point that we haven't hit on yet is that your findings and your recommendations from this research, you know, focused on improving defense strategy and posture. But that's not just about preparing for a war that might happen, right? It's also about preventing war and deterring escalation should a conflict erupt. And I just sort of want to emphasize the fact that the point of it all is not to go to war, it's to prevent something like that from happening, correct?

David Ochmanek

Exactly right. George Washington said it best. He said, the best way to prevent war from happening is to be prepared to prevail if it does happen. And that's what we're about.

Deanna Lee

That's a perfect note to end on, David. Thanks for being on the show.

David Ochmanek

Thanks for the opportunity to share some of the things we've learned.

Deanna Lee

And thank you to our listeners. The research that we discussed today will be available in our show notes at rand.org/policyminded. Thanks again to our guest today, David Ochmanek. This episode was produced by me, Deanna Lee. It was recorded by me and Evan Banks, who also edited today's episode. RAND's director of digital outreach is Pete Wilmoth. We'll see you next time on Policy Minded. RAND is a nonprofit institution that helps improve policy and decisionmaking through research and analysis.