E-Notes

Defense Strategy in the Post-Saddam Era

by Michael O’Hanlon

May 12, 2006

Michael O’Hanlon is a senior fellow in foreign policy studies at the Brookings Institution. This essay is based on his book of the same title (Brookings, 2005) and on a presentation he made on December 5, 2005, as part of FPRI's W. W. Keen Butcher Lecture Series on Military Affairs.

One way of looking at defense strategy is by thinking about possible military scenarios for the future. Some of the ones I am going to propose may seem at first blush just as outlandish as Afghanistan would have seemed before September 2001 to most of us. While we certainly have to be prepared to deal with smaller, or “three-block war,” contingencies that are not the classic variety, some of the old-fashioned scenarios are still worrisome, involving potentially China or Iran, in particular.

Eurasian Littoral

These first couple of scenarios are ones we probably should not prepare for, even though they all are at some level not totally out of the realm of conjecture. We should not spend a lot of time or energy preparing to defend the Baltic States against a Russian invasion. True, we have a NATO Article 5 commitment to do so. But this threat is no longer very plausible in a classic military sense. Moreover, even if it did materialize, the geography is so unfavorable to us overall, we would prefer asymmetric military responses such as economic coercion against Russia. In any event, it doesn’t seem all that vivid as a concern in the next few years, although then-undersecretary for defense Paul Wolfowitz worried a lot about it back in 1992, when we were coming up with scenarios for the post-Cold War period.

Likewise, it is conceivable that some day Russia itself could be in NATO. Even if that happens, I would not want to spend American dollars or lives defending Russia, especially Siberia, against possible Chinese invasion. There are scenarios, some of them thought of by very bright people, such as the possibility of China’s saying to Russia some day, “You don’t really own Siberia. You have 6 million people there in one of the biggest land masses on the earth. We have already 1 million Chinese who are near or over the border on a given day. It will probably be 2-3 million within a decade or two.” You can imagine China making an argument that it has every right to control some of these resources.

If they did—and I’m not predicting this, all these scenarios are less than 10-20 percent probable in my opinion—I wouldn’t want to respond by sending 30 divisions of the U.S. Army to Siberia. Frankly, our historic commitment to that part of Russia would be of such limited significance that again, there would be better, economic ways to respond: a blockade or global economic sanctions of some kind.

A third scenario may be somewhat more controversial, but there have been some disputes in the last year or two between China and Korea over historical border issues going back a thousand years. This is not the kind of issue we hear a lot about today, because obviously, that border dispute involves the current North Korea. But you could imagine at some future date a debate between a reunified Korea and China over just where the border should be, and who historically has claim to what part of the peninsula. I favor a long-term U.S./ROK alliance, even after reunification, if we can someday achieve it. The U.S. presence in Korea shouldn’t be structured or sized primarily to deal with this kind of a hypothetical and extraordinarily unlikely scenario.

For one thing, Koreans have become too much a part of the history of that peninsula for this scenario to even become plausible. China is going to have a lot of other, more appealing places to apply military leverage, if it ever decides it wants to. And the idea of its taking part of the peninsula by force is not very credible. It’s much more likely that China would get into brouhahas with Korea, the same way it does now with Japan, over seabed resources. The U.S./ROK alliance should focus more on that kind of long-term concern, not on a land invasion from China.

Those are three scenarios I don’t want to plan on, but now for the eight or ten, depending on how you count, that I feel could cross over the threshold of sufficient plausibility and importance to the U.S. that we need to have military options for handling them.

Seabed

I just alluded to seabed disputes with China involving our two closest East Asian allies. I would include those on any list of long-term concern.

Taiwan

I also would certainly include Taiwan-related military options. I worry a good deal about these, despite the improvement in relations over the last six months. We have to take very seriously the notion not so much of a Chinese-attempted invasion, which would be too risky for China, but that China would consider various kinds of economic blockade and coercion against Taiwan should the latter push more ambitiously for independence. These kinds of options are entirely plausible, and some of them have the added feature that China could adjust the amount of pressure it applied almost like a rheostat as it watched the world’s reaction.

For example, it could declare any ship going into Taiwan to be at risk of attack, and it could attack one every three months. That would drive insurance rates inordinately high for shipping going into Taiwan, convincing a lot of companies not to trade with Taiwan at all, and drive down the Taiwanese stock market much more than the 1997 crisis ultimately did, allowing China to also back off if the U.S. Navy mobilizes forces into the region and to control the timing.

This range of scenarios is quite credible. In one sense, it’s less worrisome than all-out invasion-style war, but in another sense, for our Navy and Air Force, it’s quite challenging, because it means you may need to establish an air supremacy, naval-blockade-breaking capacity in the Western Pacific and be able to sustain it over many months, not knowing when China is next going to escalate or to try to sink a ship. And China could do this. It could even try to do this in a relatively humane way. It could say to the world that Taiwan caused the fight, pushing the independence question in a way they should not have, and that all it was doing was putting pressure on Taiwan’s economy in retaliation: “We’re not going to attack their cities. We’re not going to attack their civilian population. We are even going to try to save the crews of any ships we sink, and to deploy search-and-rescue capacity advance.” I’m not suggesting that China would succeed in conveying this message to the world, but it might convince itself that this kind of option is appealing.

Southeast Asia

We have had a lot of talk in recent years about the global Al Qaeda threat in Indonesia and the Philippines. We have to be ready at some future date to help stabilize a large part of one or another of these nations, as part of a broader multinational coalition. We would probably do it at the invitation of the government, if things got a lot worse than they are today, but there are scenarios under which we might do it without the permission of the government.

In any event, these are such huge land masses and populations that even trying to control a fraction of either of these main countries could be inordinately difficult, and would put a major demand on stabilization capacity of the same kind that we are seeing right now in Iraq, presumably not as dangerous of a mission in most cases, but potentially quite demanding on the force structure of U.S. ground forces.

Sometimes it is said that the worry would be that if a jihadist group took control of one island or another near the Indonesian or Malacca Straits, we would have to respond simply in order to keep global shipping lanes open. That may be true, but we would also have the option of simply sailing around the lanes. It would be less economically efficient, but not necessarily be out of the question.

We can’t see these two nation-states fail. The Philippines and Indonesia are too important to our global interests and to preventing the global spread of Al Qaeda. Ensuring the stability of those two nations could be a military mission important enough to carry out. That’s a judgment call.

South Asia

There isn’t a lot of room for judgment calls on two scenarios that would almost certainly necessitate American military intervention under certain circumstances. The most foreboding is a complete collapse of Pakistan, a nuclear-arms country. The U.S. couldn’t do much about that if it had already happened, but it possibly could if it were unfolding gradually, if it began in certain sectors of the country, if you saw a gradual erosion in the authority of the government, or if you saw the military gradually splintering.

Most of the military is fairly devoted to a secular pro-Western Pakistan, but there are pockets of it that may not be. Certainly, the Pakistani Intelligence Service is not as pro-Western as we would hope. You can certainly imagine Pakistan gradually beginning to fray at the seams, with some of its nuclear weapons related sites jeopardized by the fact that a major part of the country nearby was increasingly controlled or threatened by jihadists. If Pakistan began to collapse, that would be a more compelling threat to American national security in some ways than a Soviet invasion of part of Western Europe could have been in the Cold War. Because the collapse of Pakistan would give enemies of the U.S. who want to attack us the wherewithal to do so, in a way that a Soviet invasion of Western Europe would not have. It would be a greater threat to our core security than almost any attack on any overseas ally.

Kashmir

A somewhat more questionable case involves nuclear war between India and Pakistan over Kashmir. Unlikely as it might seem at the moment, we can never really rule it out until there has been a negotiated peace that has lasted for at least 5-20 years, and we are a long way from that right now. We still have to imagine another Indo-Pakistani war over Kashmir, with the possibility of nuclear escalation. If it has already happened, that’s too late. For these purposes, consider the scenario where each side has used one weapon against a military facility of the other side, doing old-fashioned Thomas Schelling nuclear signaling, both hoping that escalation to strikes against cities can be avoided, and at a very precarious moment when they are potentially open to an international diplomatic foray of some kind, looking for a third way to handle Kashmir, perhaps some kind of a trusteeship run by the international community for a certain period of time after which there would be political resolution.

Neither India nor Pakistan would like this very much. I’m talking about a world that has changed radically by the exchange of nuclear weapons with the fear of more coming. In that world, old assumptions could go pretty quickly.

Middle East

One state actor that is probably even more likely than China to be a thorn in our side is Iran. Here, the question is what Iran would ever think it could get away with doing against us, and no confrontation is likely to escalate to a direct use of force.

One can imagine a situation in which, especially if Iran’s support for terrorism increases, whether in Iraq or Lebanon or some other part of the greater Middle East, and if they continue to make blatant progress toward a nuclear weapon, one can imagine the U.S. taking preemptive action against Iran’s nuclear installations. But what would Iran do next? If it absorbs a blow against the Bushehr reactor or maybe a couple of its uranium enrichment sites, it would (1) continue its nuclear program, the same way Saddam did after the Osiraq reactor was destroyed by Israel in 1981, and (2) do it in a different way, probably slower. It may buy us ten years to do this, and that is why we might do it at some point.

Iran will certainly not give up its nuclear ambitions because of this sort of a strike. If anything, the strike would more likely unify more of the population around Iran’s nuclear ambitions. One can also be sure that Iran would do something else. Exactly what, we cannot know. But just as a matter of the natural way states behave in these circumstances, it would do something to show that it had not been totally intimidated by the American action, and to make us pay a price. Its options would include everything from trying to foment more trouble inside of Iraq, to supporting more anti-Israeli terror, to attacking U.S. interests in the Persian Gulf, and particularly, the oil economy through the Persian Gulf.

That last scenario is the one that makes this dynamic of greatest concern. One could easily see Iran trying to shut the Strait of Hormuz for a certain period, not by putting out navy ships of its own, except maybe some submarines, but putting out mines, the occasional submarine loitering in the shallow waters, building a lot of anti-ship cruise-missile launching batteries along its coasts, and potentially some sabotage operations as well.

How do we respond to this scenario, which gives Iran a lot of asymmetric advantages? We would have some advantages of our own, most notably the strength of our defense forces and the number of allies we would have on the other side of the Gulf that would be as threatened by this scenario as we would be. Iran would be able to make use of the sorts of asymmetric military capabilities that people like Andy Krepinevich have written about over the past ten years, which capabilities are really worrisome to the U.S. in this era of high technology.

With smart mines, the short- and medium-range anti-ship missiles that work very well in shallow water or near coasts, we certainly will continue to dominate in the blue waters against a country like Iran or even China indefinitely, but dominating closer to shore is more difficult. Doing so would require a more robust Navy presence in the Gulf for a longer period of time than many of us would consider likely at first blush, because we would have to have a lot of quick-response capacity to intercept ballistic missiles, to try to intercept anti-ship cruise missiles, and to be responsive against any submarines that would try to do a quick ambush and then retreat.

We could just try to attack some of the submarines in their ports, but there are things we could do in a more preemptive way. A lot of other things would be hard to do because the batteries and weaponry needed to execute these sort of attacks are also relatively small and easy to hide. We would have to compensate by constant presence, constant surveillance, and constant anti-missile deployments in the region.

Other

Without going into big peacekeeping missions in Congo or the likes, which also need to be at least in the back of our minds, there is the possibility of missions after a coup in Saudi Arabia or establishment of a trusteeship for Palestine. The latter mission was first proposed by my colleague Martin Indyk, who was assistant secretary of state for this region and also ambassador to Israel. What if the Israeli back-up notion of building the security barrier and essentially disengaging doesn’t work, and we decide it’s not a very good solution for our interests either because it antagonizes the broader Islamic world such that while Israel may be safer, we may not be?

What do you do if you can’t get these two sides to negotiate an acceptable peace? We have to imagine bad things happening that could make the currently unimaginable more imaginable. You may have to introduce some other notions, such as saying to Israel, “Let us-`we’ the world—run Palestine for a while, it’s better for you than doing it yourself.” It might seem better for Israel the day after an attack in which they have lost 1,000 people. To the Palestinians, saying to them, “Listen, it has now been 20 years since Oslo. Imagine us in 2013. No negotiated peace. It’s been ten years since the death of Arafat. You have no negotiated peace. The Israelis are giving you what little bits of the land they don’t want for themselves and hoping that’s enough. Let us try to get you a better deal in the sense that we are going to clamp down on your militias and terrorist groups, run this place for a while, and weed them out and put you in a much better position to negotiate with Israel in 5-20 years.”

Today, the Palestinians wouldn’t like this. They might never like it. Nonetheless, this is a credible option under certain circumstances where we have seen a complete breakdown in any and all processes. Our interest in this is pretty great, with 1.2 billion Muslims pretty angry at us over the peace process or lack thereof, and a certain small but real percentage of that 1.2 billion being more inclined to support jihadists than they would have been otherwise.

The U.S. has an interest in this that is different than it used to be. I’m not suggesting that we pursue this now, but as a force planner or a strategic prognosticator, one cannot rule it out.

As to a coup in Saudi Arabia, this is less than 10 percent likely. The Saudis are fairly good at internal security. But there is the real possibility that, just as we saw in Iran a quarter century ago, one could see jihadism + populism + anger at the regime coalesce into a movement that could create political instability, and the oil fields in the eastern part of Saudi Arabia could be put at risk.

How would we respond under these circumstances? I hope we would have gotten to a point where we had lessened our dependence on oil. Today, if those oil fields somehow could be all disrupted for an extended period of time, it would make Katrina look like nothing by comparison. The U.S. would very quickly consider unilateral military intervention.

I hope we would have developed enough capacity for our own energy conservation and alternative energy production that we would at least be able to buy some time and see if the coup could resolve itself internally, and if not, see if the international community would agree with us on what needed to be done, so that the military intervention would ultimately be multilateral, not unilateral. The concern is less about burden-sharing than about the legitimacy of putting Western forces on the holiest soil in Islam and hoping that would not be seen as a blatant act of American imperialism and oil lust. But the mission itself is entirely plausible if we get to a point where chaos in this part of the world had disrupted those oil facilities for an extended period of time with no alternative in sight for how to restore order and the functioning of those wells and pipelines. It’s not militarily an unfeasible mission: only a couple of million people live in this region, and the basic size and force-structure requirements of stabilization and occupation missions are usually determined by the land area and even more so by the size of the population.

COnclusion

After considering three not-to-worry-about scenarios and then ten scenarios we do have to worry about, one comes out at the status quo. While every single military decision we make needn’t continue the way it has, we should not be too radical in changing the status quo. We still have to worry about interstate conflict, about the Navy and the Air Force budgets, and at least almost as much about the Marine and Army budgets. Looking out over the future, I see all four of our Services as equally important for national security, and I see high-end combat almost as important as it has been historically. Low-end or complex combat contingencies will be more important than before, but not so much so that we can ignore the old-fashioned stuff.

Therefore, we are going to have to maintain robust forces across a wide range of capabilities, which means there are no easy choices in the defense budget today because we are going to have to essentially keep doing a lot with limited resources, not expect either a budgetary miracle or an easy strategic realignment of our concerns and our priorities to lead us down one path that makes all the decisions easy.

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