Colin Powell: “U.S. Forces: Challenges Ahead”

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America is a remarkable nation. We are, as Abraham Lincoln told Congress in December 1862, a nation that “cannot escape history” because we are “the last best hope of earth.” The president said that his administration and Congress held the “power and … responsibility” to ensure that the hope America promised would be fulfilled. Today, 130 years later, Lincoln’s America is the sole superpower left on earth.…

In 1989, because of dramatic changes looming over the horizon, we began looking at how to restructure these high-quality armed forces without doing harm to their excellence; in fact, we wanted to improve them even further. Only a fortune-teller could have predicted the specific changes that occurred—the fall of the Berlin Wall, the demise of the Warsaw Pact, the failed coup in the Soviet Union and the eventual disappearance of that empire. But in the Pentagon we did recognize the unmistakable signs of change—the kind that leaves in history’s dust those who cling to the past.

President Bush saw this historic change. Working together with his advisers, the president and the secretary of defense outlined a new national security strategy. In the Pentagon we took the new national security strategy and built a military strategy to support it. Then, in August 1990, as President Bush made the first public announcement of America’s new approach to national security, Saddam Hussein attacked Kuwait. His brutal aggression caused us to implement our new strategy even as we began publicizing it. Every American was able to see our strategy validated in war.

Today there are other Saddam Husseins in the world. There is one in North Korea, and there is the original still in the Middle East—and no reason to believe his successor would be any different. Moreover, the instability and uncertainty that always accompany the fall of empires are growing rather than diminishing. In the Pentagon we believe our military strategy fits the world we see developing like a tight leather glove.

In the fall of 1992 we are fine-tuning that strategy, restructuring our armed forces so that they are ideally suited to executing it, and proposing a much-reduced multiyear defense budget to pay for it all.…

The new national military strategy is an unclassified document. Anyone can read it. It is short, to the point and unambiguous. The central idea in the strategy is the change from a focus on global war-fighting to a focus on regional contingencies. No communist hordes threaten western Europe today and, by extension, the rest of the free world. So our new strategy emphasizes being able to deal with individual crises without their escalating to global or thermonuclear war.

Two and a half years ago, as we developed the new strategy, we saw the possibility of a major regional conflict in the Persian Gulf—and it turned out we were right—and a major regional conflict in the Pacific, perhaps on the Korean peninsula, where the Cold War lingers on. We knew then, and we know now, that prudent planning requires that we be able to deal simultaneously with two major crises of this type, however unlikely that might be. In our judgment, the best way to make sure their coincidence remained unlikely was to be ready to react to both, so that if we were involved in one, no one would tempt us into the other.

Moreover we can see more clearly today that danger has not disappeared from the world. All along the southeastern and southern borders of the old Soviet empire, from Moldova to Tajikistan, smoldering disputes and ethnic hatreds disrupt our post–Cold War reverie. In the Balkans such hatreds and centuries-old antagonisms have burst forth into a heart-wrenching civil war. The scenes from Sarajevo defy our idea of justice and human rights and give new meaning to the word “senseless.” In Somalia, relief operations are underway amid the chaos and anarchy of another civil war that wracks our idea of justice, human rights and the rule of law. Ruthless warlords make money from donated food and medical supplies. Relief workers are threatened if they do not comply with a local dictator’s whims.…

To help with the complex issue of the use of “violent” force, some have turned to a set of principles or a when-to-go-to-war doctrine. “Follow these directions and you can’t go wrong.” There is, however, no fixed set of rules for the use of military force. To set one up is dangerous. First, it destroys the ambiguity we might want to exist in our enemy’s mind regarding our intentions. Unless part of our strategy is to destroy that ambiguity, it is usually helpful to keep it intact.…

When a “fire” starts that might require committing armed forces, we need to evaluate the circumstances. Relevant questions include: Is the political objective we seek to achieve important, clearly defined and understood? Have all other nonviolent policy means failed? Will military force achieve the objective? At what cost? Have the gains and risks been analyzed? How might the situation that we seek to alter, once it is altered by force, develop further and what might be the consequences?

As an example of this logical process, we can examine the assertions of those who have asked why President Bush did not order our forces on to Baghdad after we had driven the Iraqi army out of Kuwait. We must assume that the political objective of such an order would have been capturing Saddam Hussein. Even if Hussein had waited for us to enter Baghdad, and even if we had been able to capture him, what purpose would it have served? And would serving that purpose have been worth the many more casualties that would have occurred? Would it have been worth the inevitable follow-up: major occupation forces in Iraq for years to come and a very expensive and complex American proconsulship in Baghdad? Fortunately for America, reasonable people at the time thought not. They still do.

When the political objective is important, clearly defined and understood, when the risks are acceptable, and when the use of force can be effectively combined with diplomatic and economic policies, then clear and unambiguous objectives must be given to the armed forces. These objectives must be firmly linked with the political objectives. We must not, for example, send military forces into a crisis with an unclear mission they cannot accomplish—such as we did when we sent the U.S. Marines into Lebanon in 1983. We inserted those proud warriors into the middle of a five-faction civil war complete with terrorists, hostage-takers and a dozen spies in every camp, and said, “Gentlemen, be a buffer.” The results were 241 dead Marines and Navy personnel and a U.S. withdrawal from the troubled area.

When force is used deftly—in smooth coordination with diplomatic and economic policy—bullets may never have to fly. Pulling triggers should always be toward the end of the plan, and when those triggers are pulled all of the sound analysis I have just described should back them up.

Over the past three years the U.S. armed forces have been used repeatedly to defend our interests and to achieve our political objectives.…

The reason for our success is that in every instance we have carefully matched the use of military force to our political objectives. We owe it to the men and women who go in harm’s way to make sure that this is always the case and that their lives are not squandered for unclear purposes.

Military men and women recognize more than most people that not every situation will be crystal clear. We can and do operate in murky, unpredictable circumstances. But we also recognize that military force is not always the right answer. If force is used imprecisely or out of frustration rather than clear analysis, the situation can be made worse.

Decisive means and results are always to be preferred, even if they are not always possible. We should always be skeptical when so-called experts suggest that all a particular crisis calls for is a little surgical bombing or a limited attack. When the “surgery” is over and the desired result is not obtained, a new set of experts then comes forward with talk of just a little escalation—more bombs, more men and women, more force. History has not been kind to this approach to war-making.…

Because of the need to accomplish a wide range of missions, our new armed forces will be capabilities oriented as well as threat oriented. When we were confronted by an all-defining, single, overwhelming threat—the Soviet Union—we could focus on that threat as the yardstick of our strategy, tactics, weapons and budget. The Soviet Union is gone. Replacing it is a world of promise and hope—exemplified by the former Soviets themselves as they struggle mightily to make a transformation that the world has never witnessed before. But the U.S.-Soviet standoff imposed a sort of bipolar lock on the world and, in many ways, held the world together. That lock has been removed. Now tectonic plates shift beneath us, causing instability in a dozen different places.

In a few cases, such as Korea and southwest Asia, we can point to particular threats with some degree of certainty; otherwise, we cannot be exact. Most of us anticipated very few of the more than a dozen crises our armed forces have confronted in the past three years. That will not change. We must be ready to meet whatever threats to our interests may arise. We must concentrate on the capabilities of our armed forces to meet a host of threats and not on a single threat. This is a very different orientation. It is so different that some of us have trouble adapting to it; we are so accustomed to the past. Indeed most of our lives were dedicated to the old way of thinking. But in the Department of Defense I believe we have made great progress in changing to this new emphasis on capabilities as well as threats.

Conceptually we refer to our new capabilities-oriented armed forces as “the Base Force.” This concept provides for military forces focused on the Atlantic region, the Pacific region, contingencies in other regions and on continued nuclear deterrence.

Across the Atlantic—in Europe, the Mediterranean and the Middle East—America continues to have vital interests. We belong to the most effective alliance in history, NATO. In light of the changes that have taken place in Europe, NATO has revamped its strategic outlook and restructured its forces as dramatically as we have our own.…

In 1990 we deployed massive U.S. forces to the Persian Gulf. Using those forces in 1991 we fought an overwhelmingly decisive war. We did this to liberate Kuwait and to strip a regional tyrant of his capacity to wage offensive war and thus destabilize the region. With two-thirds of the world’s oil reserves in the region, this action was certainly in our vital interest.

Nothing has changed about the importance of the Middle East. What has changed is that Kuwait is free, oil is flowing and Saddam Hussein threatens no one outside his own borders. A U.S. military presence is crucial to ensuring that this stability continues.

American forces in the Atlantic region—on land and at sea—are part of our conceptual package of Atlantic forces. Also part of that package are forces based in the United States whose orientation is toward the Atlantic; should a crisis in the region demand more forces than we have forward-deployed, these forces would reinforce then as rapidly as possible.

In our Base Force we have provided for the same sort of conceptual force package focused on the Pacific region. There too America continues to have vital interests, our security relationships with Japan and the Republic of Korea being at the top of the list.

We have also provided for what we call a “contingency force package.” Troops and units in this conceptual package will be located in the United States and be ready to go at a moment’s notice. The time from their alert to their movement will be measured in hours and minutes, not in days.

Finally, we provided for a conceptual package of strategic nuclear forces. Notwithstanding the historic reductions proposed for the world’s strategic nuclear stockpile, when and if these reductions are complete, we will still have nuclear weapons in the world. We must continue to deter the use of these weapons against America or its friends and allies. This can only be done with a modern, capable and ready nuclear force. We will rely heavily on the most secure leg of our nuclear triad, the ballistic missile submarines. But we will maintain a resilient and capable triad with forces in the other two legs as well, manned bombers and land-based ballistic missiles.…

Today, unlike that December day in 1862 when President Lincoln spoke to Congress, the prospects for America are anything but bleak. It is true we have substantial economic challenges facing us, as well as a burning need to reaffirm some of our basic values and beliefs. But if Lincoln were alive today, I do not believe he would trade December 1992 for December 1862.

I believe Mr. Lincoln would be especially excited by the prospects that now lie before his nation. Only three times in our history have we had a “rendezvous with destiny,” as President Franklin D. Roosevelt called our challenge in World War II. The American Revolution was one such historical moment because it gave birth to America. The Civil War was another because it made our revolution complete; it made America what it is today. World War II, as Roosevelt so clearly recognized, and the Cold War that followed—which he could not see—combined to provide us the third such occasion. These two wars cleansed the world of tyrannies bent on hegemony and began the spread of democracy and free markets and, as the Soviet Union finally disappeared, accelerated their spread at a dizzying rate.

The summons to leadership that we face at present is our fourth rendezvous with destiny. Answering this summons does not mean peace, prosperity, justice for all and no more wars in the world—any more than the American Revolution meant all people were free, the Civil War meant an end to racial inequality, or World War II and our great victory in the Cold War meant the triumph of democracy and free markets. What our leadership in the world does mean is that these things have a chance. We can have peace. We can continue moving toward greater prosperity for all. We can strive for justice in the world. We can seek to limit the destruction and the casualties of war. We can help enslaved people find their freedom. This is our fourth rendezvous with destiny: to lead the world at a time of immense opportunity—an opportunity never seen in the world before. As Lincoln said in 1862, America could not escape history. In 1992, we must not let history escape us.

 

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Source: Reprinted by permission of Foreign Affairs 71, no. 5, Winter 1992/93. Copyright 1993 by the Council on Foreign Relations, Inc. www.ForeignAffairs.org.