OSCE High-Level Seminar on Military Doctrine Session 3 – Impact of Doctrinal and Technological Changes

Initial Comments As Prepared for Delivery by Dr. Anatoli Rozanov (Foreign Policy and Security Research Center, Minsk, Belarus) at FSC.MDS on 25 May 2011 (ENGLISH only).

First of all, I would like to thank the organizers of this important event (and especially the Italian FSC Chairmanship) for inviting me as a panelist. It is, of course, an honor for me to have a chance to talk to such a distinguished audience and to share with you some of my reflections.

I’d like to stress that I am not only a Professor of International Relations of the Belarusian State University but also a Research Director of the Foreign Policy and Security Research Center in Minsk. The Center is an independent “think-tank” dealing with international security and arms control issues. In recent years, we organized a couple of seminars in Minsk in cooperation with the NATO Public Diplomacy Division on such topics as NATO’s new strategic guidelines and NATO’s role in the evolving international security environment.
Let me start my comments on the two keynote addresses by noting that in 1999 I was a student of the George C. Marshall European Center for Security Studies and I spent four months in Garmisch-Partenkirchen.  It is well known that the establishment of the Marshall Center was a joint initiative of the United States and Germany. And when I was there, I was really impressed by the fact that the American and German professors, scholars, and generals put a special emphasis on doctrinal issues and tried to develop innovative, nontraditional approaches to military doctrine and strategy.

And I am happy to say that, in my view, Lt. Gen. Mark Hertling and Lt. Gen. Marcus Bentler  have clearly demonstrated in their presentations that we need to elaborate far-sighted and, in a way, alternative visions of doctrinal and technological changes and their impact on arms control and security. Obviously, we should not stay in conventional matrix in this field.

I have to confess that I am more familiar with the United States military doctrine and posture than with the German attitude. That is simply because I teach courses on U.S. foreign and defense policies at the State University in Belarus and two of my books (one on U.S. defense policy and the other one on US foreign policy) are being used as textbooks by my students.

The American military rejoiced in its smashingly fast and near cost-free defeat of Iraqi forces in Kuwait and at the beginning of 1990s started to implement further improvements in its conventional war-fighting capabilities. These improvements, often referred to as the Precision Revolution, were based on advances in sensor, radar masking, robotic, and targeting technologies and were intended to allow American forces to detect, classify, and destroy targets precisely with low risk and at expanding distances.
The rapid and seemingly decisive victories in the initial phases of American operations in Afghanistan and Iraq featured such advances, the product of a decade long effort by the military to implement the operational lessons of the Gulf War while trimming force structure to adjust to the Soviet Union’s demise.

But many American analysts (I mean first of all professor Harvey M. Sapolsky of the MIT and his MIT SSP colleagues) predicted that the Afghanistan and Iraq victories in the final analysis would be anything but decisive. The U.S. forces soon become entangled in difficult counter-insurgency (COIN) operations in both countries.

The resulting “hard slog”, as Secretary Donald Rumsfeld once described the COIN operations, is blamed on many factors, but mostly on a supposed blind spot in the U.S. Army’s doctrinal vision. The U.S. Army, it is said, is culturally resistant to creating effective doctrine for COIN operations, preferring to focus on large-scale conventional operations.

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates critisized the entire U.S. military for being absorbed in the so called “Next-war-itis” even as it still fights the current difficult war in Afghanistan. The U.S. Army, he noted, had designed its Future Combat System, a network of manned and unmanned vehicles, to defeat up-dated versions of Soviet motorized rifle regiments while the Air Force keeps promoting its extremely expensive F-22 (Raptor) fighter which is optimized for air-to-air combat, a non-existent set these days. By the way, Mr. Gates killed the air force’s beloved F-22 project as too fancy for today’s wars.

Surely, it is relatively easy for the U.S. forces to defeat the enemy’s conventional forces arrayed against it because they are basically targets that can be identified and destroyed at safe ranges. Coping with insurgents is a much more difficult task because the insurgents hide among civilians and often attack from great advantage. So, as Dr. Harvey Sapolsky of the MIT noted with evident sarcasm, the American military’s doctrine is to avoid fighting counter-insurgencies.

On April 11 this year, Secretary Gates welcomed at the Pentagon a new Chief of Staff of the U.S. Army, General Marty Dempsey. And he said that as leader of the Army’s Training and Doctrine Command, General Dempsey spread the gospel of adaptation in a world, where, as he is fond of saying: “Uncertainty is the only certainty in life in this century.”  In view of the Secretary of Defense, the U.S. Army is to become more versatile and decentralized, it should change its approach to war-fighting and develop new concepts that elevate adaptation to an institutional imperative.

As to the military technology aspect of our discussion, I can’t say that I am totally unfamiliar with some of the U.S. weapons and military technologies.

When I was a student of the George C. Marshall Center, we had a wonderful study trip to the States. At the Pentagon, for example, we talked to Defense Secretary Cohen for about an hour.

We travelled from Washington, D.C., to the New York City. Later we went by bus to New London County and arrived to Groton, Connecticut. As you may know, some people refer to Groton as a “Submarine Capital of the World”. We spent a couple of hours inside the United States submarine USS Dallas – a Los Angeles-class nuclear-powered attack submarine with four torpedo tubes.  And when you suddenly are inside such kind of a ship, you automatically start to better understand the complexities of modern weapon systems and their huge destructive capabilities.

My basic conclusion from that trip was that it is necessary to use military power wisely and it is better to use any power in a smart way.
The concept of smart power was developed, of course, by the Harvard University Distinguished Service Professor Dr. Joseph S. Nye. Many of his ideas, by the way, were incorporated into the State Department’s Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review presented by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton on December 15, 2010.   

In the words of Joseph S. Nye, “smart power is the ability to combine the hard power of coercion or payment with the soft power of attraction into a successful strategy”.

In recent years, United States foreign policy has evidently tended to over-rely on hard power because actually it is the most direct and visible source of American strength. The Pentagon surely is the best-trained and best-resourced arm of the U.S. government, but there are limits to what hard power can achieve on its own.