Outgoing Defense Secretary Hagel announced the outlines of DOD’s new offset strategy initiative back on November 15th. Since then, Sydney Freedberg at Breaking Defense has carried some of the best analysis and commentary on the initiative that I’ve come across.
Freedberg’s initial
piece did a great job unpacking the various emerging technology areas the
SECDEF mentioned in his speech. On quicklook, these technologies are all
presently at relatively low Technology
Readiness Levels (TRL) with respect to their potential applications in next
generation military systems. Any conceptual systems that might be based around
these technologies are almost certainly at least a decade away from reaching Milestone B,
and that’s assuming laboratory-level research is successful enough for them to
support Milestone
A decisions and a transition to Technology
Maturation and Risk Reduction phase prototyping by the early 2020s. The
obvious implication is that the planning horizon for introducing such systems
is the U.S. military of the late 2020s/early 2030s. Hagel was therefore not
announcing some near-term tectonic shift in DOD force structure and acquisition
in favor of these kinds of systems, but rather that the underlying technologies
will be prioritized within the DOD budget’s basic and applied research funding
lines over the coming years. I accordingly recommend reading the Defense Science Board’s
October 2013 examination of several of the above technologies for context
on how research investments in them might be shaped.
Freedberg later
covered DEPSECDEF Work’s comments
regarding the prospective strategy’s technological durability. Work was quite right that
the U.S. likely does not possess dramatic or enduring advantages in any
particular defense emerging technologies over its main competitors. This
represents quite a contrast from how the sizable U.S. competitive advantages of
the 1970s-1980s in microelectronics technologies enabled introduction of
qualitatively superior conventional warfare systems that could partially offset
quantitatively superior Soviet conventional forces. Instead, contemporary
technological circumstances seem more similar to those that prevailed
throughout the 1950s. During that decade, the Eisenhower administration sought
to offset Soviet conventional mass by capitalizing on U.S. superiority in
nuclear weapons and delivery vehicle technologies at the expense of U.S.
conventional force structure. It certainly made strategic sense to prioritize
nuclear force development due to the sheer impossibility of economically sustaining
American conventional forces sized to match their Soviet counterparts. It also
made sense to threaten massive nuclear retaliation for any major acts of conventional
aggression against Western Europe or Japan while both were still politically,
economically, and militarily recovering from the Second World War’s traumas. No
technological or resource barriers existed to prevent the Soviets from
countering relatively quickly with their own symmetric nuclear buildup, however,
and by the end of Eisenhower’s second term this
and many other factors made it clear that a new and somewhat less
nuclear-centric strategic direction would be necessary.
If DEPSECDEF
Work’s assertion that the U.S. will not be able to enjoy any lasting
military-strategic advantages from investing in emerging technologies is
correct, then why make the exertion at all? The simple answer is that such
investments are America’s price for maintaining rough qualitative
military-technological parity with its competitors over the coming decades. I
would further argue, though, that technological advantages alone are never
enough to achieve military dominance. What really matters is doctrine, operating
concepts (including how forces are organized), and force-wide competence (from
the platform-level technician or console operator all the way up to the theater
commander) for employing advanced technology systems. These elements formed the
invisible core of the U.S. military's post-1970s microelectronics-based offset. If they end up
doing the same in the new offset initiative, they may very well end up being
the difference-maker.
