Against the backdrop of a major U.S. naval deployment to the South Atlantic and a dramatic name change from the Department of Defense to the Department of War; most Americans would think the technical documents and processes are largely irrelevant to U.S. power. Yet they matter a great deal, as the frameworks that channel strategy and policy. Wars are won and lost by choices made years, or decades, before the first shot is fired.
The Pentagon’s forthcoming National Defense Strategy and its reforms to procurement seem to be disconnected elements in a disjointed administration. In fact, they are part of the same process. Typically, budgetary constraints drive strategy, hamstringing American power. In today’s Pentagon, such procurement objectives as submarines and selected Air Force projects drive strategy. Weapons are essential to strategy but are not of themselves strategy. The consequence is that the United States has no strategy at all. The result will be a hard course correction in the face of threats from China and Russia later in the Trump administration, or worse, a major war that the United States loses.
The U.S. military is the most sophisticated force in human history. Across the five Services and Coast Guard 1.3 million men and women serve on active duty, with another 800,000 reservists behind them. The U.S. fields a fully mature triad of air, land, and sea-launched nuclear weapons. Each U.S. aircraft carrier has more combat power than most national air forces. American stealth bombers can evade all but the most sophisticated modern radars and deploy weapons that strike within feet, or even inches, of their intended targets. Alongside these uniformed personnel serve hundreds of thousands of civilian analysts, contractors, and bureaucrats, and tens of thousands more intelligence officers.
It is understandable that such a complex organization requires a careful procurement process. There is no silver bullet technology, no war-winning weapon that transforms war. Military organizations instead struggle to identify technological developments and coherently integrate them into future force structure, given there is so little hard data to predict how specific weapons will perform, and what data exists is contextual.
Historically, the U.S. military has sought to organize procurement across the Services through a coordinated process that identifies requirements, digests them into each Service, and then translates these into procurement plans. Initially, the Army, Navy, and Air Force did their own internal assessments, a sensible approach since the military services know their own capabilities best. This shifted after the 1986 Goldwater Nichols Act created a more powerful Joint Staff and Combatant Command system. In the early 2000s, the U.S. created the Joint Capabilities Integration and Development System (JCIDS) process to synthesize Service and Combatant Command insights. Although well-conceived, JCIDS degenerated into a paper-pushing bureaucracy substituting for coherent analysis.
Deputy Secretary of Defense Stephen Feinberg eliminated the JCIDS process in late August. Theoretically, this should devolve procurement back to the Services. But the Army, Navy, and Air Force staffs have not had force design responsibility and accountability concurrently since the 1990s. Instead, the Deputy Secretary is poised to lead force design and procurement for practical purposes. He has access to a pot of cash, the aptly named Joint Acceleration Reserve (JAR), to purchase high-impact technologies and defense articles.
Read the rest at RealClear Defense.
Seth Cropsey is the founder and president of Yorktown Institute.
