With breaking news of a U.S. Navy SEAL team successfully rescuing two hostages from pirates in Somalia, military pundits are quick to note how the deployment of small, elite units will fit in with President Barack Obama’s vision for modernizing the U.S. military. Yet, while small, elite units are indeed crucial to the modern military, so too is a balance of force structures, doctrines, and technologies appropriate to a variety of challenges. At the strategic level, preparing for 21st-century threats means thinking holistically on a global scale.
First, we must define the threats. China and Russia present the greatest long-range threat to U.S. national security interests. More immediately, the threat issues from a nuclear-armed Iran, especially if Tehran’s alliances extend beyond Syria to North Korea, Venezuela and—not unthinkably at some point—a drug-cartel dominated Mexico. At another level, insurgencies and civil wars in Africa and South America are likely to continue. Additionally, threats from international terrorism, in some cases allied with the four rogue states cited above and, possibly, criminal cartels, enlarges the threat profile.
With the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq and the current winding down of our presence in Afghanistan, . While the Navy and Air Force have formulated an air-sea concept for meeting future threats from major powers or would-be regional hegemons like Iran, the Army struggles with how to recapture the conventional war-fighting concepts and skills lost or, at the least, degraded during the last decade.
In a way, the present harkens back to the immediate aftermath of the Vietnam conflict when the predominant attitude was, “We ain’t doing that again.” Attention turned to more conventional forms of warfare attendant to stopping a Soviet attack at the Fulda Gap during the era of Air-Land Battle. The reality is, counterinsurgency, irregular warfare, and terrorism are not going away. U.S. national security strategy must, therefore, indulge in a delicate balance of priorities to meet a full range of threats, or we face total defeat at the high end of the spectrum on the one hand, or death by a thousand cuts through inappropriate organization, doctrine, and training at the lower end.
Earl Tilford
Dr. Earl Tilford is a military historian and fellow for the Middle East & terrorism with
The Center for Vision & Values at Grove City College. He currently lives in Tuscaloosa, Alabama where he is writing a history of the University of Alabama in the 1960s. A retired Air Force intelligence officer, Dr. Tilford earned his PhD in American and European military history at George Washington University. From 1993 to 2001, he served as Director of Research at the U.S. Army’s Strategic Studies Institute. In 2001, he left Government service for a professorship at Grove City College, where he taught courses in military history, national security, and international and domestic terrorism and counter-terrorism.