Third Offset Reservations....Some Thoughts on Deputy Secretary of Defense Work's Speech

Over at War on the Rocks, they've posted DEPSECDEF Work's talk at CNAS from the other day.  You can watch it here:





I posted a comment to the War on the Rocks piece, which I reproduce here:



"Bob Work is a great American and the essential man in the Pentagon. I look forward to seeing what he and Dr. Carter can do together. But I have great reservations about “Third Offset” that spring from two main areas….technology and mass.

Secretary Work rightly makes the distinction between the circumstances underpinning technology today and the situation in the previous “Offsets”, the most important of which is the degree to which the technological drivers have shifted to the commercial sector. But what he fails to follow that up with is the second big shift from the past, and that is that these commercial technological advances are increasingly not made by American firms. Technology has internationalized, and the erosion in our technological leadership that the Secretary speaks of is unlikely to be reversed as long as innovation is occurring throughout the world, and especially with potential allies. Yes, China is stealing a lot of technology. I get it. But they aren’t stealing all of it. Their own R and D efforts are churning out successes at a noticeable clip.

The second reservation I have is the degree to which we whistle past the graveyard on the concept of mass-or capacity. We have become enamored with the “one bomb one target” mentality that grew out of the combination of the precision guided munition revolution and the fall of the Soviet Union, and we have fought wars in the past twenty years against second and third rate opponents who could not protect their valued assets. This will NOT be the case in high end war against a peer competitor. There will have to be a combination of precision and mass, yet we only seem to talk about/fund the former, while our Service Secretaries and Service Chiefs wistfully talk about favoring capability over capacity. The bottom line is that great power dynamics are back in fashion, and we need to begin to think about how such wars would be waged. Russia in Crimea and China in the South China Sea are NOT STRATEGIC ISSUES. The strategic issues all come from great power dynamics and the potential for great power war. We need to think less about how to deter China from its adventurism in SCS and more about how to conduct and win a global war with against them. We need to worry less about what Putin’s next land grab will be and more about how to convince Europe that Russia — at least this Russia — is a candidate for a new brand of containment.

But these big questions are inconvenient to talk about, and certainly inconvenient to plan for. Why? Because they are expensive. Because in order to actually resource to prepare for such wars, we cannot continue to spend what we currently do on defense. When Eisenhower initiated the “First offset”, defense was getting over 60% of the Federal budget. When Carter initiated the second, defense was getting 30% of the budget. Defense currently comprises significantly under 20%. Which brings me to my final objection to “Third Offset”.

Third Offset has the stench of decline about it. Although Secretary Work speaks of no silver bullets, what he’s actually looking for are SEVERAL silver bullets. This is because we as a nation have not thought seriously enough about what a long war with a peer competitor would take, and so we salve our consciences with references to our great past and our ability to harness technology and innovation to our own purposes. We’ll do that because we aren’t prepared to spend what is necessary to back up that technology with mass, or capacity. We have resigned ourselves to flat or declining budgets, to budgets which increasingly are less of both the national budget and our nation’s GDP, while we worship at the altar of technology to save us from our own strategic blindness.

There is a lot to like in Third Offset-I certainly want to double down on WHATEVER capability and technology advantages we have. But we cannot pin our hopes solely on what might be considered a true “wasting asset”, and that is our leadership in technology. If we want to remain the world’s dominant power, if we want to continue to enjoy the benefits of our current position in the world, we’re going to have to consider spending more than 3.5% of our national wealth each year to maintain and extend those positions."

Bryan McGrath