Two-Theater War Strategy

April 13, 2004

The continuing quagmire in Iraq, especially the recent calls for more troops, got me thinking. Since the conclusion of the Cold War, American military planning has relied on the Two Major Theater War strategy, or 2MTW. This strategy, essentially, holds that the US should be capable of simultaneously fighting two major conflicts in different parts of the world. Is it possible for the US to maintain this strategy?

According to the Council for the Liveable World, an admittedly anti-military organization, the US military requires a considerable force to fight a war successfully.

The Pentagon's minimum group of forces it believes will be necessary to win one theater war is 4-5 Army divisions (60,000-100,000 troops), 4-5 Marine brigades (12,000-25,000), 10 Air Force fighter wings (720 planes), 100 Air Force bombers, and 4-5 Navy carrier groups.

As it is, that's well over one quarter of our entire active military force. And thanks to the Iraq occupation, our forces are stretched to the limits. Deploying an additional 100,000 military personnel would be nearly impossible.

Interestingly, some of the strongest supporters of the 2MTW strategy are members of the Bush administration. Before the 2000 election, the Pentagon held hearings on the future of 2MTW. Several Bush supporters were outspoken in maintaining the ability of the US military to fight two simultaneous wars.

Interestingly, some of the biggest concerns about 2MTW that were voiced by supporters of Bush were spot on.

Dick Cheney:

I think about the whole need for homeland defense. If there is an area where we have not done nearly enough in terms of thinking about our vulnerability as a society--thinking about how an adversary might want to come at us and attack us--it's in the whole area of vulnerability that we find here inside our continental borders. That's really a new thing for us to think about, especially within the context of the Defense Department. The military historically has not had a significant role in terms of homeland defense. We've always been concerned, because of posse comitatus and other concerns, that we not allow the military any domestic role. We're very careful about how we use even the National Guard. The National Guard, when it's operating domestically, is under the control of the state governors, not the Defense Department.

But think about the possibility of somebody bringing a weapon of mass destruction into the United States, or detonating a nuclear weapon inside the United States, or releasing biological or chemical agents. It's not a traditional kind of attack from an adversary from enemy territory, but it's something that is internally generated. Or think about attacks on our intelligence or energy infrastructure. It is important for us to begin to think about how do we defend against that.

Others had the right idea, but their advice was apparently not heeded.

John Hillen, advisor to the Bush 2000 campaign:

When you're looking at American military strategy for the future, the question of first principles asks, "What will the very serious conflicts of the future look like?" There are a lot of things we don't know about the future. But one of the things that we do know is that a diminishing rogue power--North Korea--and an emasculated dictator--Iraq--are not going to be the big threats of the future. They're serious enough. When you stand on the DMZ in Korea or when you're in Kuwait, as I recently was, they look very serious. But they are not the alpha and the omega of the big security challenges for the next 50 years. . . .

The real point is that those are not the wars that will really matter in the future. The Korean scenario and the Iraq scenario diminish in their threat and importance with each passing day. Even considering the potential weapons of mass destruction factor, they diminish in their important to the real security challenges of the future. Rogue states of the 1990s are a challenge of the past. We need to attend to them. It's important, and we spend a lot of resources on making sure they don't blow up. But they're not the challenge of the future. And so if you ask the military to only be prepared and spend 95 percent of its resources on Korea and Iraq--conflicts of the past--that's precisely what it will do.

If you follow Hillen's logic, Iraq was never a significant threat. But, by focusing on Iraq, the Bush administration has undermined the military's ability to modernize and fight new assymetric threats such as terrorism, an issue Cheney warned we'd have to address. It seems that the only courses of action are to significantly increase military spending in order to maintain more troops and purchase better, more efficient technology, or acknowledge this country's inability to fight two simultaneous wars. Given the instability in North Korea, Afghanistan, Iran, and other parts of the Middle East, as well as peacekeeping concerns in Africa and the Balkans, I fear we have no choice but to accept a bigger military budget for some time.

Posted by Jason Pront at April 13, 2004 10:52 PM