DEPSECDEF Work on the Increasingly Severe Tradeoffs Between Forward Presence and Forcewide Readiness

Back on 30 September, Deputy Secretary of Defense Bob Work gave a speech at the Council on Foreign Relations. His discussion of the way-forward for the U.S. military’s Asia-Pacific rebalance and the status of operations against ISIL is what garnered the most press attention. I wasn’t even aware of the speech until late last week when a colleague cued me to the fact that Work's main topic was actually about how the present U.S. global force posture model is no longer sustainable given the country’s fiscal policies. Suffice to say that this issue is well known to Information Dissemination’s readers. What makes the DEPSECDEF’s speech so noteworthy, however, is that it represents some of the most detailed disclosures I’ve seen thus far regarding the strategic policy changes being explored at the Defense Department’s highest levels.

Below are excerpts from some of the speech's key passages.

On the difficult balance between maintaining sizable forward presence forces (e.g., those that are either permanently forward-stationed in a host country or rotationally forward deployed from the U.S.) and the combat readiness (with particular emphasis on training and material condition) of the between-deployment forces that would be surged forward from the U.S. in the event of a war:

“And the important goal that we're trying to wrestle with right now under intense budget pressure is to get the proper mix between the forces that are forward presence forces and those based in the United States and our U.S. territories, which are our surge forces. That's what we're trying to do…

…So simply put, something has to give. Maintaining our military at such high tempo in this resource-constrained environment is simply no longer sustainable. Period. End of story. It prevents us from properly preparing for future contingencies across the full spectrum of conflict. Now, that is what wakes me up at night, because ultimately preparing the joint force to win wars is what the department does. It is what we are charged to do.

And as we come out more than a decade of fighting irregular warfare campaigns and our potential adversaries across the world continue to advance their inventories of advanced weapons and capabilities, our commanders are saying, hey, I need to have more fight tonight forces, so I need to have more forces forward in theater.

But that just can't happen without us balancing the readiness of the surge forces. It really, really is a tough problem, because we have to take time and money to reset, repair worn-out war equipment, upgrade our weaponry, and train for some very demanding scenarios.

So as we adopt our post-Afghanistan and post-sequestration global posture, we now have to keep an eye focused much more on the surge forces. We've always kept an eye focused on the forward-deployed, ready -- high-ready forces, but now we have to really take a look at it the other way…

…Now, let me be very clear here. We are still going to maintain a robust forward-deployed forces where the strategic rationale is compelling and where our priorities tell us we must do, but our forces won't be large enough to give our combatant commanders all the forces they would want to have in theater at every single moment to be prepared for any regional contingency, because for far too long, as I've said, we've chosen to sacrifice readiness of the surge force or of the base force, instead of reallocating forces that were already out in theaters across combatant commander areas of responsibility.

Now, in the past, we've had sufficient slack in funding and force structure and flexibility to do this. But I have to tell you, based on the fiscal turbulence we face today, our forces are shrinking without question and our flexibility is under pressure, so we can't continue the way we've been doing things for the last twenty years.

So one of the key principles moving forward is that we're going to reprioritize our limited assets and develop innovative ways of maintaining forward presence as we rebuild our readiness. We think we're in a readiness crisis, a readiness trough for two or three or four years, as we try to build out. All of our program says we try to get back to full spectrum readiness at the end of the five-year defense plan. In the meantime, we have to think creatively of how and when to utilize our precious force availability to maximize our strategic imbalance.”

Work then lists several deployment policies such as increasing the forward basing of key presence-maintaining units as practicable, as well as rotational forward deployments of tailored, disaggregated force packages. However, he follows this by indicating a potentially major shift in how U.S. forces will be globally deployed and how conventional deterrence postures in critical regions will be maintained:

“Another way of innovating is what Chairman Dempsey calls dynamic presence. Now, what would happen is normally what we'd do is we'd push all of our forces forward, every single bit of ready forces that we'd have, we'd push forward. And once they got into a COCOM's -- a combatant commander's area of responsibility, you could shift them across borders -- excuse me, the lines of responsibility -- but it was difficult. It took time. We had to go through laborious discussion processes.

What we're trying to do is to try to figure out what is the minimum deterrent force that you might need in a theater and then have the rest of the force being more dynamically used across the world. This is a tough, tough problem, because it's a different way of doing.

If I could say it this way, we are going from a demand side model, where the COCOMs demand forces and we provide them everything that we possibly can, to a supply side model in which we are setting forces out that keeps the balance between readiness and the surge and forward presence and then dynamically tasking it across the world.”

This is remarkable in that it suggests a completely different paradigm for how the COCOMs will be apportioned deployable forces, with the implication that fewer forces on the margins will be deployed at any one time. This touches directly upon the issues regarding sizing and positioning of a conventional deterrent I recently wrote about. There is no way to do what the DEPSECDEF is outlining without taking on greater deterrence risk. The challenge will be in developing new force architectures (e.g capabilities, quantities, positioning, and posture) as well as doctrine for employing such forces that are sufficiently credible to maintain deterrence effectiveness. I will be exploring this in more detail with respect to East Asia in a few weeks.

For now, I urge you to read and think about his prepared remarks in their entirety.