http://www.brookings.edu/blogs/order-from-chaos/posts/2015/08/31-future-of-land-warfare-ohanlon Michael E. O'Hanlon | August 31, 2015 8:00am
'The Future of Land Warfare'
1st Sgt Buddy Hartlaub with the US Army's 1-320 Field Artillery Regiment, 101st Airborne Division stands before a memorial to Spc 1st Class Brandon King at Combat Outpost Terra Nova in the Arghandab Valley north of Kandahar, July 20, 2010. King was shot and killed by a suspected Taliban militant while on guard duty at Combat Outpost Nolen on July 14. REUTERS/Bob Strong
In my new book, "The Future of Land Warfare" (Brookings Institution Press, 2015), I attempt to debunk the new conventional wisdom (which began with the Obama administration but also permeates thinking beyond): Messy ground operations can be relegated to the dustbin of history. That is a paraphrase and dramatization, to be sure—but only a modest one, since the administration’s 2012 and 2014 defense plans both state that the U.S. Army will no longer size its main combat forces with large-scale counterinsurgency and stabilization missions in mind.
This is, I believe, a major conceptual mistake, even if not yet one that has decimated the Army. But it will cause increasing harm with time if we buy into the idea. The active-duty Army is already below its Clinton-era size and only slightly more than half its Reagan-era size. Reductions to the Army Reserve and Army National Guard have been almost as steep. None need grow at this juncture, but the cuts should stop.
Army Annual Budget as Portion of All Department of Defense Spending
I recognize that we need to maintain counterinsurgency and stabilization capacity, as well as a robust deterrent against possible threats to NATO by Russian President Vladimir Putin and to South Korea by North Korean Supreme Leader Kim Jong Un, among other concerns.
But we also need to think about nontraditional scenarios. While unlikely—and unpalatable—on an individual basis, they may be hard to avoid. To paraphrase the old Bolshevik saying: We may not have an interest in ugly stabilization missions, but they may have an interest in us. In some cases, the needed response may entail not just trainers and drones, but brigades and divisions.
Escalation in South Asia
The scenario that I’ll focus on here—though I develop more in the book— concerns India and Pakistan and how the two countries might come to the threshold of all-out nuclear war. It is, I fear, all too plausible—and there are ways it could unfold that could make American ground forces nearly unavoidable. A nuclear confrontation would be devastating in South Asia, enormously disruptive to the world economy, and highly dangerous to the whole planet (particularly with the prospect of loose nukes afterwards).
An Indo-Pakistani war remains a real possibility today. There have already been three or four, depending on whether one counts the Kargil crisis of 1999, and it is remarkable that there have not been more. If the nuclear weapons threshold were crossed in the future, a foreign military role could become much more plausible, particularly to reinforce a ceasefire. To date, Delhi in particular has eschewed any foreign role in diplomacy over Kashmir or related matters. But in the aftermath of the near or actual use of nuclear weapons, calculations could change dramatically—such a world could be characterized by a far different political psychology than today’s.
