Review of “The Military We Have Vs. The Military We Need”

Introduction

In his 2020 paper “The Military We Have Vs. The Military We Need,” Gregory Foster[1] appears to make a reasonable suggestion: that our military should be geared to missions it will be likely to encounter in the next few years instead of fighting highly unlikely conventional conflicts with China or Russia. The missions he envisions do not fall into the military’s purview, however, and the overall future direction he proposes for the military would not pass muster either against contemporary National Defense Strategy documents.

The 1st Battalion, 12th Cavalry Regiment, 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 1st Cavalry Division, received 29 M1A2 Abrams tanks, Sept. 26, 2014, at Fort Hood, Texas. Photo by U.S. Army

Summary

Gregory Foster’s "The Military We Have Vs. The Military We Need" begins with his reading of the 2018 National Defense Strategy[2], claiming it represents the "intellectual stagnation that pervades the military." He summarizes it through four points:

1. The U.S. military has been emasculated and "rendered largely impotent by forcing it to focus on frivolous, tangential threats and missions such as countering violent extremism."[3]
2. The U.S. military is in danger of being replaced as the world's premiere fighting force.
3. Our current and future strategic situation is defined by great power competition (GPC).
4. To compete in this era of GPC, our organizational, doctrinal, and technological methods must emphasize lethality.

Foster derides all this as a rehashing of Cold War ideology and is "woefully and dangerously outmoded, outdated, self-serving, self-deluding, and self-perpetuating such received truths are."[4] Our true adversaries are “pandemic disease, cyberattacks, climate-induced natural disasters, and violent, rogue-actor extremism." These choices of "frivolous, tangential threats and missions" fit into a framework for military history that Foster proposes. He divides military history into four phases:

Hot war - practiced since antiquity, the use of force played a significant role in the conduct of statecraft.

Cold war - defining characteristic was detente, the avoidance of using force against a major power. Direct force was replaced by the use of proxies such as in the Korean and Vietnam Wars

New war - this is our current historical state, in which non-military power and non-traditional uses of the military offer the most promise for success but must struggle for legitimacy against the forces of tradition and stagnation. New war carries with it an imperative to redefine what militaries properly do.

The trajectory of all this is a future historical phase which Foster calls "No War" which he insists we should all be seeking. In this future state, militaries as currently conceived are made obsolete. We are prevented from getting this future state by a combination of tradition, the military-industrial complex, and the properties of a well-functioning (conventional) military - it is necessary to add that adjective because Foster imagines a different type of military as described below.

The primary problem we face, Foster insists, is that our military is not adapted to the real threats - the military we have is not the military we need. The wars we face are asymmetric and therefore, Foster asserts, are inherently unwinnable. In addition, "pandemics, natural disasters, cyberattacks, and random acts of violent extremism are very real, very serious, very deadly, and very demanding."

The issue then becomes: should we prepare for conventional wars with Russia or China, which are unlikely, or the "wars" (his quotes) we will face?

Fundamental to this is a question Foster asks: "what the military’s role properly ought to be: to serve itself (in the manner of a self-interested interest group); to serve the regime in power; to serve the state; or to serve society and even humanity (as grandiose as that might sound)?"

Foster concludes with (more) denigration of our current military and describes what the military should be: "The military we need would be quite the opposite: light, constructive, predominantly nonlethal, precise, noncombat-oriented, manpower-dominant, tailored, multilaterally-capable/-dependent, reassuring, de-escalatory, affordable, and sustainable. It would be a strategically effective force, designed to respond to a robust array of complex, most-frequently-occurring emergencies – peacekeeping, nation-building, humanitarian assistance, disaster response – that ultimately contribute most demonstrably to the overarching normative strategic aim of enduring global peace."

Analysis

First, we must address Foster's four criticisms of the 2018 National Defense Strategy (NDS):

1. That the military was emasculated and forced to focus on frivolous missions is true, and Foster goes on to propose more frivolous missions.
2. The U.S. can indeed be replaced as the world's premiere fighting force, but through two methods: spending by a near-peer power or by our own neglect.
3. The NDS is quite flexible in who our military competitors will be and allows for both great powers as well as non-state actors and other competitors acting asymmetrically. It also addresses cyber warfare and the threats posed by hackers.
4. Yes, the NDS focuses on lethality, which is what any good military should be.

While Foster is correct in stating that the military required by the NDS is enormously expensive; he proposes to replace this with an enormously expensive public works project addressing the problems of "pandemics, natural disasters, cyberattacks, and random acts of violent extremism."[5]

One of Foster's criticisms of the U.S. military is that "[u]nilateralism (and the attendant felt need for self-sufficiency) dominates multilateralism (with the attendant imperative for collective decision-making and action)." [6]This is blatantly false, as demonstrated by not only the body of doctrine involving partner nations, annual multinational training operations, and operations where we went out of our way to build coalitions, such as the 2003 Coalition of the Willing built in preparation of the Iraq war. Indeed, strengthening alliances and attracting new partners is one of the goals of the NDS.

Foster describes the wars we face today as "entirely wars of choice. No existing conflict, nor any reasonably to be anticipated, demands our involvement. And the wars we face are far removed from the total wars of the distant past and even farther removed from an idealized state of stable peace we have yet to seriously pursue, much less achieve."[7] How did we get to this condition where we only face wars of choice? Will the changes he proposes allow us to only fight wars of choice? Doesn't Foster know about this thing called "deterrence?" Foster also does not consider the time needed to rebuild the military should the U.S. need to pursue one of these older types of wars.

The idea that "pandemics, natural disasters, cyberattacks, and random acts of violent extremism" necessarily require military solutions is not proven. Further, does this cover pandemics released as biological weapons? What about pandemics or epidemics that seem to follow the election cycle?

Are asymmetric wars inherently unwinnable? Examination of the historical record shows that asymmetrical warfare has been practiced in some form since at least the time of Sun Tzu - his Art of War is applicable to both symmetric and asymmetric forms of warfare. Further, there are numerous examples of asymmetric wars being won by the defending nation. Finally, authors such as Mao Tse-Tung claim that asymmetric war can and should convert to symmetric war, as demonstrated by the Communist Revolution in China.

Is the "No War" historical state achievable? Is it even desirable? Or is it the case, as George Santayana wrote, that “only the dead have seen the end of war.” Foster does not answer these questions.

Foster’s Proposed Course of Action

Much like his analysis of military history pointing towards a "No War" end state, his conception of a future military is also pointing towards a course of action, but what? The answer is not in "The Military We Have Vs. The Military We Need" but rather in an earlier paper Foster authored and was published in CounterPunch[8]. During the "No War" phase, traditional militaries will become obsolete, and their main activity will be to "demilitarize the military."[9]

The paper in CounterPunch does not address why asymmetric wars are unwinnable, but Foster does write: "Douglas MacArthur famously said, “There is no substitute for victory.” Today there is no possibility of victory."[10] Another of his papers, published in Salon[11], also does not answer this assertion. The Salon article does explicitly state that demilitarizing would involve both nuclear disarmament as also general and complete non-nuclear disarmament.

Conclusion

Foster, in "The Military We Have Vs. The Military We Need," besides seriously mischaracterizing the NDS, also seems to be unaware of the concepts of deterrence and the doctrine of joint operations. His idea of non-military missions is covered in the March 2021 “Interim National Security Strategic Guidance.”[12] His plans for demilitarizing the military will not be possible even in the 2022 "National Defense Strategy,"[13] however.

Footnotes

[1] Foster, "The Military We Have Vs. The Military We Need."
[2] Department of Defense, "Summary of the 2018 National Defense Strategy of the United States of America."
[3] Foster, "The Military We Have Vs. The Military We Need."
[4] All quotes for the remainder of this section are from Foster, "The Military We Have Vs. The Military We Need."
[5] Foster, "The Military We Have Vs. The Military We Need."
[6] Ibid.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Foster, "Demilitarizing the Military."
[9] Ibid.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Foster, G. "Let's demilitarize the military.”
[12] The White House, “Interim National Security Strategic Guidance.”
[13] Department of Defense, "2022 National Defense Strategy."

Bibliography

Department of Defense. "Summary of the 2018 National Defense Strategy of the United States of America." 2018. Last retrieved 4 September 2024 from https://dod.defense.gov/Portals/1/Documents/pubs/2018-National-Defense-Strategy-Summary.pdf

Department of Defense. "2022 National Defense Strategy." 27 October 2022. Last retrieved 4 September 2024 from https://media.defense.gov/2022/Oct/27/2003103845/-1/-1/1/2022-NATIONAL-DEFENSE-STRATEGY-NPR-MDR.PDF

Foster, G. "Demilitarizing the Military." CounterPunch. 19 June 2015. Retrieved 4 September 2024 from https://www.counterpunch.org/2015/06/19/demilitarizing-the-military/

Foster, G. "Let's demilitarize the military: The Pentagon may pose the single greatest threat to our democracy." Salon. 16 March 2016. Retrieved 5 September 2024 from https://www.salon.com/2016/03/16/lets_demilitarize_the_military_partner/

Foster, G. "The Military We Have Vs. The Military We Need." Defense One. 28 June 2020. Retrieved 3 September 2024 from https://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2020/06/military-we-have-vs-military-we-need/166470/

Joint Chiefs of Staff. Joint Publication 5-0: Joint Planning. 16 June 2017. Retrieved 3 September 2024 from https://www.airforcespecialtactics.af.mil/Portals/80/prototype/assets/joint-pub-jpub-5-0-joint-planning.pdf

The White House. “Interim National Security Strategic Guidance.” March 2021. Last retrieved 3 September 2024 from https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/NSC-1v2.pdf