The idea that QDR 01’s foundational strategy needed rewriting hinged on careful consider-ation of the original strategy’s focus and a comparison of that focus to the realities confronting U.S. forces in the field. We felt from the start that those who crafted QDR 01 over-militarized the landscape and its challenges, weighting their recommended strategic design heavily toward a transformed idea of traditional military superiority.
In QDR 01’s logic, the most significant challenges would continue to be nails and the solutions to them increasingly more capable, complex, and technically advanced hammers. In short, nothing would be novel about the sources of consequential competition—only the quality of that competi-tion and the physical address of the competitors. Aggressive states would remain the dominant sources of strategic hazard, and they would largely continue competing with the United States in ways that were novel technically and operationally but by no means unrecognizable from past periods of military rivalry.
QDR 01 was replete with references to anticipated “asymmetric” competition.18 However, the most important asymmetric threats by its definition would continue to manifest themselves in well-recognized forms of military rivalry—principally, rising great powers and rogue states em-ploying ballistic missiles and weapons of mass destruction (WMD) to limit American regional influence and, at times, hold the U.S. homeland at risk directly. 19 Further still, though ostensibly founded on the principal of “uncertainty” and, thus, trumpeting a “capabilities-” versus “threat-“
based approach to strategy, QDR 01 focused implicitly on the certainty of future military competi-tion with China. 20 It was classical realism redux.
In QDR 01’s vision, the grand strategic dynamics of the nation’s military future would look very much like its Cold War past. This view came from influential defense intellectuals who had declared meaningful military competition with the United States a decade or more off in the future.
Those holding this view sought to hinge future American military success on careful exploitation of what they thought was a “strategic pause” in meaningful competition. They believed that the United States should seize the opportunity afforded by the pause to undertake a transformational
“leap ahead” in military capability.21
In drafting NDS 05, we rejected this view and thus, also by implication questioned the valid-ity of DoD’s on-going transformation. Candidate Bush argued in 1999, “The best way to keep the peace is to define war on our terms.”22 We concluded that the defense establishment had redefined
war in QDR 01 (and likely since the end of the Cold War) as it would prefer to see it versus as it was or as it most likely would become.23
From our perspective, QDR 01 failed to acknowledge that real power and its effective employ-ment no longer adhered to 20th-century realist convention alone. Continued American primacy relied only in part on retention of dominant traditional military capacity—transformed or not. We concluded that traditional military superiority neither guaranteed broad spectrum primacy nor accounted for new forms of unconventional competition and resistance effectively. We also felt that the playing field DoD would have to fight through was itself both more complex and more level than QDR 01 acknowledged. The “leveling,” however, was less a function of our state-based opponents’ military advances (although that was important) and more a function of an expanded challenge set and the wide diversity of its individual threats.
Until DoD initiated work on NDS 05, it corporately continued to bind its relevance to the nar-row maintenance of traditional military dominance alone. This was true in spite of the fact that meaningful competition and resistance against the United States were straying further and further away from the traditional domain. It was clear that, despite recent experience, DoD continued to assess strategic risk only in the context of traditional conflict with great or lesser powers. In fact, it did so in ways not dissimilar to the net and risk assessments that dominated the Cold War. There-fore, though most concluded that years of demonstrated U.S. military superiority would continue to drive opponents toward new areas of competition, defense risk was nonetheless still pegged against DoD’s ability to conduct large-scale traditional campaigns. This view of risk assessment seemed to rely on the United States facing both the unlikeliest and the most favorable strategic circumstances at the same time—purposeful traditional conflict focused squarely at the jaws of U.S. advantage.
NDS 05 deliberately worked to deconstruct this perspective. The result was three new big de-fense ideas.
The First “Big Idea”: The New Normal—Persistent Conflict.
We concluded that the new strategic and operational state of nature would see the United States buffeted by persistent conflict, resistance, and friction.24 Those of us responsible for draft-ing NDS 05 saw competition with and resistance to the United States as endemic. The reality was that the United States had entered an era where conflict on some level was the norm and peace by most definitions the exception. In hindsight, NDS 05 served to artificially focus this “big idea” of
“persistent conflict” on the WoT. It was, however, meant to be more comprehensive than that. In our view, widespread, defense-relevant resistance to the United States was a natural by-product of primacy. By virtue of its power, the United States both drew more purposeful opposition and had a greater duty to act globally against threats to stability.
We concluded that defense-relevant competition with and resistance to the United States was neither exclusively confined to the conflict with extreme Islam (our immediate real world chal-lenge) nor was it driven solely by a future showdown with a rising near-peer like China (the im-plicit focus of QDR 01). We felt strategic circumstances were more complex and irreducible than either of these suggested. And, thus, by implication, a wider range of threats and challenges would be important to DoD over time.
Some discrete challenges to the United States would arise from purposeful resistance—predict-able antibodies to singular superpower. Others would originate in environmental discontinuities triggered by globalization and the dissolution of key aspects of effective sovereign control. Re-gardless of origin or purpose, however, most would be decidedly less traditional in their prevail-ing character, and all were certain to test U.S. primacy in unique ways.
In this construct, some opponents acted alone against the United States and its interests accord-ing to discrete designs. Some acted purposefully against the United States in concert with others, sharing active limitation of U.S. influence as a common goal. Few, however, enjoyed a common vi-sion for strategic outcomes. In other instances, the environment itself—un- and under-governance, weak or failing political order, and even natural or human disaster—would inhibit successful pur-suit of U.S. objectives and require defense intervention. Though uncoordinated and often compet-ing, the strategic effects of all of these competitors and competitive forces would likely combine.
Implicit in this recognition of persistent conflict was the need to reorient much of the depart-ment’s intellectual energy away from conceptual preparation for speculative future challenges and instead direct it against the near- to midterm threats about which we were more certain. After almost 9 years of constant war, the recent QDR (QDR 10) is credited with being the first to truly put the current wars at the forefront of defense strategy and planning. NDS 05, however, can take some credit for reorienting defense planning away from what amounted in QDR 01 to a more theo-retical focus on future challenges and toward a much more practical near-, mid-, and long-term look based both on recent experience and known trends. Frankly, from NDS 05 forward strategy and policy by necessity would have to be far less “capabilities-based” than many would prefer, as the United States fought real wars with real enemies in two-plus active theaters.
The Second “Big Idea”: The Rise Of Irregular, Catastrophic, Hybrid, and in the Future, Disruptive Challenges.25
Consistent with the above description, we concluded that the United States now operated in-side a band of constant, unrelenting resistance and friction where a range of discrete competitors tried to limit U.S. influence through a variety of unconventional, cost-imposing strategies. Our view was that, at present and well into the future, unconventional threats would challenge U.S.
interests more consequentially than any probable combination of traditional military challenges (legacy or transformational). The prominence and virulence of new unconventional threats was exacerbated by visible erosion of the authority and reach of some sovereign governments as well.
The range of consequential actors had expanded exponentially. While the United States consis-tently demonstrated its capacity to defeat traditional military competitors, it had not proven as suc-cessful against determined unconventional resistance. In light of this, we assumed that America’s most consequential competitors had already consciously ceded much of the traditional domain to the United States, opting instead to compete in alternative domains.26 They likely saw tradi-tional military competition with the United States as pointless, unnecessary, and self-defeating.
It engendered enormous—even existential—hazards. In short, the downsides far outpaced any possible advantages. Thus, going forward, while the United States could not ignore the traditional capabilities of hostile states, it also could not succeed without increasing its capacity to compete effectively against a broader range of less traditional threat capabilities and methods. We, there-fore, concluded that irregular, catastrophic, and hybrid challenges should rise to primacy in de-fense strategy and planning.
The Third and Final “Big Idea”: Defense “Transformation” Had To Be Remade and Retargeted.
As discussed above, mounting evidence suggested that traditional U.S. military superiority was necessary but not sufficient for success. The idea of the “lesser included case”—where the United States armed exclusively for high-intensity traditional warfare and handled everything by exception through ad hoc adjustment—was now dead. Indeed, we concluded that it was increas-ingly likely that the United States and its Armed Forces would confront an array of capable
non-state and non-state competitors under conditions of considerable strategic and operational ambiguity where success and failure are often very difficult to define. Therefore, reorientation of defense transformation away from a near-exclusive focus on high-end, traditional military capacity was an essential adjustment to 21st-century demands. Failure to do this would result in the United States accruing enormous risk precisely in those areas where recent history had proven it to be most vulnerable, leaving a great deal of the defense establishment irrelevant to combating what were becoming the likeliest and most important near- to midterm threats.
Further still, we concluded that the environment would never universally conform to the pre-conflict, war, and post-conflict model against which DoD had long pegged its relevance and readiness. DoD’s pre-9/11 worldview envisioned deliberately ramping up military capabilities to fight high-intensity combat engagements, fighting those engagements, and then ceding primary responsibility for final conflict resolution to other USG agencies. Now, however, DoD was elemen-tal to (and often responsible for leading) a constant whole-of-government effort to manage con-sequential competition and resistance perpetually. Thus, defense transformation—to the extent it occurred—would have to occur “in stride” as the United States actively defended its interests in perpetuity. “In stride” transformation too would have near-, mid-, and long-term components.
CONCLUSION
Starting with NDS 05, DoD began to assess and appreciate on-going environmental changes more realistically and judge the relative significance of those changes for future defense policy.
Unlike QDR 01, NDS 05’s strategy was not just a vehicle for articulating transformational policy and capability aspirations. Instead, it was a mechanism for adapting DoD’s culture to more effec-tively manage the defense-specific response to persistent and largely unconventional resistance to U.S. influence. To be sure, there is a great deal of truth to the argument advanced by some critics that—like most public policy pronouncements in the national security field—NDS 05 was heavy on concept and light on detail. However, there is very little question that the strategy did have a pronounced effect on the prevailing defense culture, particularly with respect to the aperture used to examine the environment and the lexicon employed to describe the environment’s principal challenges. While it was replaced by a new strategy in the summer of 2008, it did leave an indelible mark on DoD.