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.For some time it even seemed to behaving a good effect on Kim Jong Il, North Korea s quixotic leader.It really hasn t been tried on Iran.And if this power package fails,presidents can always draw and bloody their swords and attractmore wartime allies by having first taken the nonwar path.Admittedly, power packages, for all their punch, allow for imper-fect agreements.They entail compromises, which some people mis-takenly equate with capitulation.Compromises do sometimes leaveoutcomes fuzzy, and in their wake, arguments continue.These short-comings, however, have to be weighed against the alternative of war,where the costs are always very high and where our side doesn talways win, either.And good compromises, welded to America s con-siderable power advantages, give us the chance to resolve outstandingissues on favorable terms in subsequent bargaining rounds.The moral here is simple: American leaders need to think less164 Power Rulesabout imposing their will through military force and much moreabout shaping events through the application of military, economic,and diplomatic power.That cautionary note hits hard and true whenyou examine the very threats and scenarios that have propelledAmerica s leaders and military planners to make war instead.The threats that generate war scenarios inside the Pentagonalways start with ritualistic bows to big power menacing from Chinaand Russia.Traditionally, the military services feel most comfort-able with sizing their forces and developing capabilities to defeat thelargest conventional threats, whether or not those threats are at alllikely.To the Pentagon s credit, more and more planning time isnow directed at three interrelated new threats: terrorism, the  kingof threats in the post-9/11 period; rogue states led by dictators de-termined to acquire WMDs; and rogue or failed states transferringthose WMDs to terrorists.Defense Secretary Robert Gates in 2008 moved these new threatsto the center of U.S.military strategy.His new strategy requires themilitary services to focus their weapons purchases and training onirregular warfare, or what used to be called counterinsurgency.Inother words, the services will buy fewer heavy tank and artilleryunits and place more emphasis on weapons designed to ferret outterrorists and fight them in the streets.There will also be less em-phasis on short, all-out, and traditional combat, and more emphasison the  long war against terrorists, and on political and economicprograms to diminish public support for extremists.This involves amassive dose of programs to diminish the environment that fostersextremism.To Gates, these nonmilitary efforts to help our friendsgovern effectively and develop their economies have the primaryrole in the new strategy, over force.As for the big potential threatsfrom Russia and China, Gates calls for  collaborative and coopera-tive relationships rather than confrontations.In the next years,we ll see whether the military and the politicians will go along withthis new approach to buying military capability.Military Power 165But American leaders have to do this with their eyes wide open.Itmeans a commitment to defeating extremists and terrorists throughnation building, an enterprise that may well do the job.The newstrategy seems to shift the burden of responsibility for fighting theenemy onto the United States and away from the nations we aretrying to assist.Before committing to such a course, our leader mustbe very confident that the peoples of the nation we re trying to helpwill fight harder for their own freedom than our armed forces will.We can never win in Afghanistan if we have to fight harder thanthe Afghans to defeat the Taliban, or prevail in Iraq if our sacrificeto defeat al-Qaeda must exceed that of the Iraqis.Nation-buildingenterprises can succeed only if based more on the will and capabilityof our friends than on our own.Then there s also the question of whether our armed forces canmaintain their capability to fight major conventional battles and windecisively and at the same time train and equip for nation building,including counterinsurgency.It sounds like it might be easy but itisn t.Nor can advocates of this dual approach sidestep the problemby asserting that the State Department should now develop the req-uisite capabilities for nation building.This would involve a massivetransformation of a debilitated department and massive transfusionof personnel and training that wildly exceeds State Department at-titudes and management skills.Military capability is paid-for, acquired potential militaryforce.It is the sum total of personnel, training, weapons develop-ment, weapons, intelligence, information systems, mobility, andsustainability plus the X factors: operational and organizationalskills and leadership.What results is the ability to develop, deploy,and maintain firepower almost anywhere at the president s direc-tive, sometimes for minutes, sometimes for years, whatever it takesto defeat the enemy on the field of battle.The price tag for this in fiscal year 2009 was a requested defensebudget of $580 billion, including the costs of the Afghan and Iraq166 Power Ruleswars.That s about equal to the total military expenditures of therest of the world combined.Nothing like this disparity has occurredin modern times, and probably ever.Nor is U.S.spending likelyto recede after the fighting stops in Iraq and Afghanistan.Futurespending bills will stay at this level indefinitely because these warshave depleted stocks and have deferred investments, innovations,and further integration of operating systems; and because of newplans to expand the overall size of ground forces [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]