Al-Qaida chief Ayman al-Zawahiri The Coordinator 2017 Part 19-122-Russia-10-90-NATO

CdW Intelligence to Rent; Strategic Intelligence Adviser [email protected]

Al-Qaida chief Ayman al-Zawahiri The Coordinator 2017 Part 19-122-Russia-10-90-NATO

"That means, as a soldier, you say ‘Bang, Bang!’ This is obviously disastrous for the morale of the military. You do not want to do this to a professional."

Su offers a Chinese perspective on the Northern Sea Route [северный морской путь]: “… the majority of this sea route traverses Russia’s near seas. While this could generate some fees, the overall safety/security is assured.” Moreover, such cooperative efforts to develop the Arctic fit easily into the “Belt and Road Initiative,” (BRI) according to this analysis, as BRI aims to create infrastructure linkages that span Asia’s vastness, to include apparently its northern vastness.

The sending of thousands of US troops to Eastern Europe in January is aimed at showing how Nato means business when it says it wants to tackle a perceived Moscow military menace. In turn, it is a move that Russia says is a threat to its own security. Russia's defence minister, Sergei Shoigu, said in January that Moscow might switch its focus on nuclear weapons to precision bombs, and would rely on warships and submarines with cruise missiles to carry its precision-guided weapons.He said: "By 2021, we plan to more than quadruple the combat capabilities of our strategic conventional forces, which will fully meet the demands of conventional deterrence." He said Russia will also need to prioritise reorganising and professionalising its personnel, which by some estimates number 798,000. Military service is compulsory for Russian men aged between 18 and 27, but many of Russia's forces are conscripts with only limited training.

Russia is in the midst of undertaking a 10-year military modernisation project until 2020 called the State Armaments Programme. This will see the Kremlin spend an estimated $647bn (£525bn) across the Armed Forces at the 2011 exchange rate, although continuing sanctions and the falling ruble may affect this.One of Nato's most senior retired generals warned of the risk of a nuclear war with Russia if the West did not boost its defences in the Baltic States and called on a commitment to the alliance from the incoming president Donald Trump.

Former deputy supreme allied commander for Europe, Sir Richard Shirreff told IBTimes UK in December: "I think Putin's aim is to neutralise Nato, and one of the ways he does that is by decoupling America from European security. That is what he is going to be looking for by cosying up to Trump." In February 2016, the American military think tank the Rand Corporation estimated that it would be impossible for Nato to defend the Baltic states, which form the alliance's most exposed territory, calculating that Russian forces could reach the outskirts of Tallinn and Riga within 60 hours. Director of editorial at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, Nicholas Redman said Russia's business and community links in the Baltics are just as key as its military capability in exerting influencing Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.

"I think there is a high value placed on the Baltic States on the part of the Kremlin but it is a way of showing Nato, which is making the Kremlin feeling vulnerable, that Nato itself has vulnerabilities," he said.

Russia will maintain a military stronghold in Syria for at least the next 49 years, after the two nations signed an agreement allowing Russian ships to port in Tartus. This is

“Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war first and then seek to win”― Sun Tzu, The Art of War

CdW Intelligence to Rent Page 1 of 30 01/05/2023

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Russia’s foothold in the Middle East, and yet another example of how the country is expanding its military power globally.

Russia's Secret Weapon to Invade the Baltics and Crush NATO: Soldiers Falling from the Sky. In February 2016, the influential RAND Corporation — a think tank closely aligned with the U.S. Air Force — published a paper in which it warned that a Russian invasion of the Baltic States could reach the capitals of Latvia and Estonia in less than three days even with a week of warning. But that might underestimate how quickly Russia could overrun the region, were the Kremlin to send the bulk of its airborne forces and seize the element of surprise. It’s possible a Russian victory could come within hours, not days.

How would such an invasion unfold? A missile barrage and air strikes at dawn, crippling the Baltic States’ defenses, would precede a large-scale airborne operation supported by a small-scale land intrusion into Lithuania from Russia’s enclave in Kaliningrad.Before the alliance could understand — let alone react to — what was happening, it’d be over.

Impossible? Let’s have a look at the figures.

Estonia has 5,300 active duty land troops as of 2016, according to the International Institute for Strategic Studies. Latvia has 4,450 active ground troops and Lithuania has 6,000, which gives the Baltic States a combined 15,750 soldiers. To be sure, these numbers don’t include naval and air force personnel, which are relatively small in size. It also doesn’t count reservists, paramilitary forces and allied NATO troops who regularly rotate through the region. Estonia can call on 12,000 paramilitary members of the Estonian Defense League, and Lithuania has 11,300 militia fighters, according to the IISS.However, it’s unlikely all of these troops will be available at once, and the same goes for reservists. We also can’t assume the Baltic States’ entire active land forces will be available during a surprise attack — given likely disruption to the Baltic governments’ ability to communicate during a conflict’s opening hours.The Russian Airborne Troops alone consist of four divisions and six brigades/regiments, totaling more than 45,000 men. These soldiers are better equipped and trained than their potential opponents and will be able to count on overwhelming Russian air superiority for at least several days.However, Russia is not able to deploy that entire force at once, even if it wanted to. The bottleneck is transport aviation. A study by the author of Russia’s active transport aircraft, their transport capacities and availability rates reveals that, in theory, the Russian military — when working at maximum capacity — could move half of its paratroopers … at best.Russia typically relies on four-engine Ilyushin Il-76 transport planes for dropping its blue-beret paratroopers during training exercises. However, we cannot exclude the possibility of Russian airborne troops flying into battle aboard other types of aircraft — at least toward captured airfields.Which doesn’t mean Russia will conduct an airborne operation in this manner were it to go to war. But it’s within the realm of possibility that Russia could, at the least, strike with an airborne force of around 10,000 men were it to deploy almost its entire fleet of 91 Il-76s.

Would the Russian Army be operationally capable of conducting such a large airborne operation? Well, its airborne forces certainly train to do exactly that.





In one October 2015 exercise, Russia brought 10,000 paratroopers in the Central Military District to a state of combat readiness within 24 hours before moving them by air. In 2016, Russia carried out no fewer than 18 large exercises which either included or were solely conducted by the airborne forces. The largest 2016 airborne exercise involved more than 30,000 soldiers from Russia’s Western Military District between March 22-24. The exercise included 3,800 military vehicles and more than 100 attack helicopters and warplanes. However, not all of the soldiers in this exercise were air-dropped.

Additionally, the Kaliningrad enclave holds a formidable military presence consisting of two motorized rifle brigades and a single marine infantry brigade — a total of around 14,000 soldiers supported by an artillery brigade. Were the Kremlin to further bolster its forces, it could call on at least 14 more battalions from the Russian Western Military District — including four tank battalions.Even if we don’t include casualties caused by the preliminary strikes, the Russian Army would begin the conflict with an enormous numerical advantage in terms of soldiers and the quality of equipment, while at the same time operating with air superiority.Russian air superiority is crucial to a successful surprise attack — but the Kremlin’s advantage here is practically guaranteed in the short term. Were Sweden and Finland to stay neutral, and neither are members of NATO, the Western alliance’s access to the air space over the Baltics would be severely limited within the first few hours, if not days, after the start of an invasion.Regardless, the decisive factor would be surprise and the effectiveness of the preliminary strikes, which if successful could throw the Baltic States’ regular forces into disarray.To give one example, the garrison of the Estonian Kuperjanov Infantry Battalion located in Võru is just 50 miles away from the Russian base in Pskov. The range of 9M528 rockets fired from the BM-30 Smerch is 55 miles.

RAND’s study also assumed Sweden would allow NATO to use its territory as a base for the alliance’s combat aircraft. Such a move would instantly place Sweden under the threat of retaliation, including the nuclear option. The alliance should not take Swedish cooperation as a given. Russia seizing the element of surprise would also be critical to prevent the Baltic States from mobilizing their paramilitaries and reserves. And with defenses shattered, communication lanes and key infrastructure either knocked out or under Russian control, the region’s governments would be under tremendous pressure to surrender — potentially within mere hours of the first missiles and paratroopers landing on Baltic soil.

And what about Poland? If during the early hours of an operation, Russia were not to attack Polish territory, should Warsaw fulfill its responsibilities under the NATO charter? Should it launch a counterattack on its own?Should Poland attack Kaliningrad and face the possibility of a Russian stand-off attack on its infrastructure? Or maybe even a nuclear strike? Such moves would also lead to a halt of Russian oil and gas, of which Poland is very dependent. A day, or three, of hesitation would be all that Russia needs to bring its regular army units into the Baltic capitals and solidify its presence.Could NATO avoid such a disaster? Yes — through deterrence. The alliance’s ability to retaliate, and having the political will to do so, is key to forcing Russia to weigh any aggressive action very carefully.

Is the presented scenario a purely fictional one? Hopefully.It’s unlikely Russia will undertake direct, aggressive military action against a





NATO member state. However, as events of the recent years prove, even the most unlikely scenarios can come true.

How NATO grew fat and Russia took advantage. Why are we so panicked about Russia? Not long after Mitt Romney was dismissed as a Cold War nostalgist for calling Russia the top geostrategic foe of the United States, elite paranoia about the Kremlin is back.Some of it is just the Vladimir Putin scare-stories that Americans are telling themselves. Much of the respectable American news media has fallen for embarrassing rumors of Russian interference and hacking in recent weeks. A story spread that Russia had hacked C-Span, replacing it with Kremlin-funded Russia Today. It was false. A week earlier thousands of outlets repeated the claim that Russian hackers had penetrated the American electrical grid. The hacked computer wasn't even tied to the electrical grid. Last year an email marketing system was confused with some imagined digital leash that Putin had around the neck of Donald Trump's campaign.Some of the unease is inspired by the real dread of watching the Russian military thwart American ambitions. A protest movement in Kiev that was cheered and funded by the West inspired a Russian reaction. The Russian Army crossed the border into Crimea, as Ukrainian nationalists watched a portion of their country lopped off in horror.We saw how easily Russia escalated its involvement in Syria, effectively saving the Assad regime from years of U.S.-backed rebellion. Russia even parodied the American playbook, claiming to intervene to stop ISIS, while in fact taking firm sides in the main theater of the Syrian civil war.And some of the Russia panic is the fear that the post-Cold War unipolar moment is ending, that we've somehow passed "Peak America." But that may just be a more prosaic way of saying that the actual ideological and psychological costs of NATO expansion over the last 17 years are finally coming home, likely to be followed by real financial costs.NATO expansion in 1999, 2004, and beyond meant issuing nearly a dozen new permanent war guarantees throughout the part of Europe that was the charnel house of the 20th century.Western policymakers buck themselves up by saying Russia's military mostly went into scrapyards at the end of the Cold War. The Russian economy is primitive. It's a "gas station" that generates as much wealth for its 140 million citizens as the Italian economy generates for 60 million. That's all true. But what might be a remote threat becomes more urgent if you are overexposed to it.The problem is, America's NATO war guarantee is wrapped up in a larger ideological status quo across the West. Trade liberalization, political liberalization, increased migration, sexual and cultural liberation from Christian traditionalism, the further political integration of the E.U., and the expansion of the Western alliance to the borders of Russia are all wrapped together in the minds of policymakers. And so, every reversal for any part of that project is seen by the guardians of the policy consensus as a demoralizing reversal for the Western alliance and, consequently, a gain for revisionist Putinism.Knowing this, all political discontent in the West becomes of interest to Putin. And so he extends loans to parties like France's Front Nationale that question the post-Cold War consensus. The Kremlin-funded news network highlights all dissident political movements in the United States.And consequently, the West frets about every party that comes to power that is wobbly on any one of the planks of the status quo. Hence the small panic about Poland's Law and Justice. As if questions about the size of a majority needed on Poland's constitutional court





were of grave importance to the whole project of liberal governance.Beyond that, the position of U.S. military assets and potential war materiel is still largely the way it was at the end of the Cold War, much of it in Germany and Italy. And the promise of mutual protection amounts to little more than the extension of a promise to fire nuclear missiles at Russia in the event of a challenge to NATO. That makes it trivially easy for Russia to put America's premise to the test. Would Americans really want to respond to a conventional military threat in the Baltic countries that separate Russia from its exclave in Kaliningrad with an ICBM?The NATO alliance is the basis of America's post-war global strategy. But it's undergone significant revision since the end of the Cold War. These expansions were carried on with little debate because there was no cost.But the price is starting to come in. Americans have to worry about what, say, a collapse of the government in Belarus could mean if Russia and Poland both respond to it militarily. Preserving this larger, baggier NATO may require huge new financial and military investments. And it may require decoupling some of the total package of ideological values from each other so that the project doesn't flounder on Poland's Catholicism or France's desire to protect its remaining industry.Is that really so crazy?

Russia's Crazy Plan to Win World War III: Invade Iceland? Tom Clancy’s 1986 novel Red Storm Rising depicts a conventional war between NATO and the Warsaw Pact. It’s one of Clancy’s best books and, interesting for a story about a Third World War, doesn’t involve a nuclear apocalypse.It does describe a ground war in Germany, naval and air battles in the North Atlantic and — central to the plot — an invasion of Iceland by a regiment of Soviet troops. Clancy, who died in 2013, was known for his realism and extreme attention to technical detail.In Red Storm Rising, the Soviet troops overwhelm a U.S. Marine company in the Nordic island country after sneaking to shore inside the MV Yulius Fuchik, a civilian barge carrier loaded with hovercraft. Before the amphibious assault, Soviet missile target and destroy NATO’s F-15 fighters based at Naval Air Station Keflavik.

Iceland was an overlooked by highly strategic location in the Cold War. Were the Soviet Union’s attack submarines to break out into the Atlantic and threaten NATO shipping, neutralizing Iceland and penetrating the “GIUK gap” would be of vital importance.But that doesn’t mean the Soviets really could’ve invaded Iceland … right? For a possible answer, let’s consult The Northwestern TVD in Soviet Operational-Strategic Planning, a 2014 report by Phillip Petersen — an expert on the Soviet and now Russian militaries for the Potomac Foundation.In December, the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment made the report public and available on its website.Petersen’s analysis is a revealing blueprint for how to defend Scandinavia from a Russian attack. Much of the report is comprised of military-oriented descriptions of remote rivers and sparsely-inhabited valleys — pictures included — which the word “obscure” can barely describe. Obscure, except in case of World War III.“Faced with a predominantly sea-oriented NATO coalition dependent on control of the [sea lines of communication], there can be no question but that the Soviets would have liked to capture or at least neutralize Iceland,” Petersen wrote.“Soviet operations against Iceland could have theoretically covered a wide spectrum of means, ranging from air and missile attacks to troop assaults.”





Supporting the theory that the USSR could have pulled off a Clancy-style surprise attack, the Soviet Union possessed the exact equipment in Red Storm Rising — reflecting Clancy’s attention to all-things hardware — suitable for landing troops in Iceland without the need for a major port.In fact, the Soviets trained to use such repurposed “roll-on/roll-off” vessels like Yulius Fuchik for precisely those kinds of missions. Meanwhile, NATO kept its military presence in Iceland minimal because of the country’s heated political divisions over its participation in the alliance.

Iceland has not had a military since 1869.Thus, in the event of a war breaking out, NATO would have to rush troops to the island and shore up its defenses to raise the costs of, and hopefully deter, a Soviet attack.Iceland’s remote location and ruggedness — and the Soviet Navy’s comparative weakness — meant that a surprise attack by a small and relatively light force before the Western alliance could respond was Moscow’s only feasible strategy.The Soviet military had experience with similar operations in World War II, including deploying small teams to Norway to spy on German troops. In 2014, Russia carried out an almost-bloodless surprise attack on Crimea which occurred too quickly for Ukraine to respond.Iceland would’ve been a far more difficult target. For one, there was the problem of distance. The country is also windy and rough, making an airborne drop an exceedingly hazardous proposition. Paratroopers might have been swept away by winds and dashed into rocks, or broken their legs upon landing.And any Soviet operation would have faced challenges at sea. The Kremlin would have to bet on basically perfect weather and skilled navigators to make it through Iceland’s narrow fjords and around its numerous reefs.However, “even if the Soviets had attempted a lower-risk effort such as inserting a naval infantry company by submarine,” Petersen wrote, “such a force might have been sufficient to attack the Kevlavik airbase, while special-purpose (spetsnaz) forces, in teams of five to twelve men each, attacked outlying facilities like that at Hofn.”Hofn was the site of a Cold War-era NATO radar station which tracked Soviet bombers heading south.So the Soviets could’ve taken Iceland. Or at least caused a lot of chaos and disruption if the United States did not bolster the defenses beforehand.But that would just be the beginning. A Soviet occupation force would probably face a NATO counter-attack, likely supported by at least one U.S. carrier battle group, without having Soviet warplanes backing them in comparable numbers — and little cover from NATO aircraft flying overhead. Which is pretty much what happened in the fictional battle for Iceland in Red Storm Rising. NATO won.

Little over a year ago, on a pleasant late fall evening, I was sitting on my front porch with a friend best described as a Ukrainian freedom fighter. He was smoking a cigarette while we watched Southeast DC hipsters bustle by and talked about ‘the war’ — the big war, being waged by Russia against all of us, which from this porch felt very far away. I can’t remember what prompted it — some discussion of whether the government in Kyiv was doing something that would piss off the EU — but he took a long drag off his cigarette and said, offhand: “Russia. The EU. It's all just more Molotov-Ribbentrop shit.”His casual reference to the Hitler-Stalin pact dividing Eastern Europe before WWII was meant as a reminder that Ukraine must decide its future for itself, rather than let it be





negotiated between great powers. But it haunted me, this idea that modern revolutionaries no longer felt some special affinity with the West. Was it the belief in collective defense that was weakening, or the underlying certitude that Western values would prevail?

Months later, on a different porch thousands of miles away, an Estonian filmmaker casually explained to me that he was buying a boat to get his family out when the Russians came, so he could focus on the resistance. In between were a hundred other exchanges — with Balts and Ukrainians, Georgians and Moldovans — that answered my question and exposed the new reality on the Russian frontier: the belief that, ultimately, everyone would be left to fend for themselves. Increasingly, people in Russia’s sphere of influence were deciding that the values that were supposed to bind the West together could no longer hold. That the world order Americans depend on had already come apart.

From Moscow, Vladimir Putin has seized the momentum of this unraveling, exacting critical damage to the underpinnings of the liberal world order in a shockingly short time. As he builds a new system to replace the one we know, attempts by America and its allies to repair the damage have been limited and slow. Even this week, as Barack Obama tries to confront Russia’s open and unprecedented interference in our political process, the outgoing White House is so far responding to 21st century hybrid information warfare with last century’s diplomatic toolkit: the expulsion of spies, targeted sanctions, potential asset seizure. The incoming administration, while promising a new approach, has betrayed a similar lack of vision. Their promised attempt at another “reset” with Russia is a rehash of a policy that has utterly failed the past two American administrations.What both administrations fail to realize is that the West is already at war, whether it wants to be or not. It may not be a war we recognize, but it is a war. This war seeks, at home and abroad, to erode our values, our democracy, and our institutional strength; to dilute our ability to sort fact from fiction, or moral right from wrong; and to convince us to make decisions against our own best interests.Those on the Russian frontier, like my friends from Ukraine and Estonia, have already seen the Kremlin’s new toolkit at work. The most visible example may be “green men,” the unlabeled Russian-backed forces that suddenly popped up to seize the Crimean peninsula and occupy eastern Ukraine. But the wider battle is more subtle, a war of subversion rather than domination. The recent interference in the American elections means that these shadow tactics have now been deployed – with surprising effectiveness – not just against American allies, but against America itself. And the only way forward for America and the West is to embrace the spirit of the age that Putin has created, plow through the chaos, and focus on building what comes next.President-elect Trump has characteristics that can aid him in defining what comes next. He is, first and foremost, a rule-breaker, not quantifiable by metrics we know. In a time of inconceivable change, that can be an incredible asset. He comes across as a straight talker, and he can be blunt with the American people about the threats we face. He is a man of many narratives, and can find a way to sell these decisions to the American people. He believes in strength, and knows hard power is necessary.

So far, Trump seems far more likely than any of his predecessors to accelerate, rather than resist, the unwinding of the postwar order. And that could be a very bad — or an unexpectedly good — thing. So far, he has chosen to act as if the West no longer matters, seemingly blind to the danger that Putin’s Russia presents to American security and American society. The question ahead of us is whether Trump will aid the Kremlin’s goals with his anti-globalist, anti-NATO rhetoric– or whether he’ll clearly see the end of the old





order, grasp the nature of the war we are in, and have the vision and the confrontational spirit to win it.***To understand the shift underway in the world, and to stop being outmaneuvered, we first need to see the Russian state for what it really is. Twenty-five years ago, the Soviet Union collapsed. This freed the Russian security state from its last constraints. In 1991, there were around 800,000 official KGB agents in Russia. They spent a decade reorganizing themselves into the newly-minted FSB, expanding and absorbing other instruments of power, including criminal networks, other security services, economic interests, and parts of the political elite. They rejected the liberal, democratic Russia that President Boris Yeltsin was trying to build.Following the 1999 Moscow apartment bombings that the FSB almost certainly planned, former FSB director Vladimir Putin was installed as President. We should not ignore the significance of these events. An internal operation planned by the security services killed hundreds of Russian citizens. It was used as the pretext to re-launch a bloody, devastating internal war led by emergent strongman Putin. Tens of thousands of Chechen civilians and fighters and Russian conscripts died. The narrative was controlled to make the enemy clear and Putin victorious. This information environment forced a specific political objective: Yeltsin resigned and handed power to Putin on New Year’s Eve 1999.From beginning to end, the operation took three months. This is how the Russian security state shook off the controls of political councils or representative democracy. This is how it thinks and how it acts — then, and now. Blood or war might be required, but controlling information and the national response to that information is what matters. Many Russians, scarred by the unrelenting economic, social, and security hardship of the 1990s, welcomed the rise of the security state, and still widely support it, even as it has hollowed out the Russian economy and civic institutions. Today, as a result, Russia is little more than a ghastly hybrid of an overblown police state and a criminal network with an economy the size of Italy — and the world’s largest nuclear arsenal.Even Russian policy hands, raised on the Western understanding of traditional power dynamics, find the implications of this hard to understand. This Russia does not aspire to be like us, or to make itself stronger than we are. Rather, its leaders want the West—and specifically NATO and America — to become weaker and more fractured until we are as broken as they perceive themselves to be. No reset can be successful, regardless the personality driving it, because Putin’s Russia requires the United States of America as its enemy.We can only confront this by fully understanding how the Kremlin sees the world. Its worldview and objectives are made abundantly clear in speeches, op-eds, official policy and national strategy documents, journal articles, interviews, and, in some cases, fiction writing of Russian officials and ideologues. We should understand several things from this material.

First, it is a war. A thing to be won, decisively — not a thing to be negotiated or bargained. It’s all one war: Ukraine, Turkey, Syria, the Baltics, Georgia. It’s what Vladislav Surkov, Putin’s ‘grey cardinal’ and lead propagandist, dubbed ”non-linear war” in his science fiction story “Without Sky,” in 2014.

Second, it’s all one war machine. Military, technological, information, diplomatic, economic, cultural, criminal, and other tools are all controlled by the state and deployed toward one set of strategic objectives.

This is the Gerasimov doctrine, penned by Valery Gerasimov, the Russian Chief “Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war

first and then seek to win”― Sun Tzu, The Art of WarCdW Intelligence to Rent Page 8 of 30 01/05/2023



of the General Staff, in 2013. Political warfare is meant to achieve specific political outcomes favorable to the Kremlin: it is preferred to physical conflict because it is cheap and easy. The Kremlin has many notches in its belt in this category, some of which have been attributed, many likely not. It’s a mistake to see this campaign in the traditional terms of political alliances: rarely has the goal been to install overtly pro-Russian governments. Far more often, the goal is simply to replace Western-style democratic regimes with illiberal, populist, or nationalist ones.

Third, information warfare is not about creating an alternate truth, but eroding our basic ability to distinguish truth at all. It is not “propaganda” as we’ve come to think of it, but the less obvious techniques known in Russia as “active measures” and “reflexive control”. Both are designed to make us, the targets, act against our own best interests.

Fourth, the diplomatic side of this non-linear war isn’t a foreign policy aimed at building a new pro-Russian bloc, Instead, it’s what the Kremlin calls a “multi-vector” foreign policy, undermining the strength of Western institutions by coalescing alternate — ideally temporary and limited — centers of power. Rather than a stable world order undergirded by the U.S. and its allies, the goal is an unstable new world order of “all against all.” The Kremlin has tried to accelerate this process by both inflaming crises that overwhelm the Western response (for example, the migration crisis in Europe, and the war in eastern Ukraine) and by showing superiority in ‘solving’ crises the West could not (for example, bombing Syria into submission, regardless of the cost, to show Russia can impose stability in the Middle East when the West cannot).

This leads to the final point: hard power matters. Russia maintains the second most powerful military in the world, and spends more than 5 percent of its weakened GDP on defense. Russia used military force to invade and occupy Georgian territory in 2008 to disrupt the expansion of NATO, and in 2013 in Ukraine to disrupt the expansion of the EU. They have invested heavily in military reform, new generations of hardware and weapons, and expansive special operations training, much of which debuted in the wars in Ukraine and Syria. There is no denying that Russia is willing to back up its rhetoric and policy with deployed force, and that the rest of the world notices.The West must accept that Putin has transformed what we see as tremendous weakness into considerable strength. If Russia were a strong economy closely linked to the global system, it would have vulnerabilities to more traditional diplomacy. But in the emerging world order, it is a significant actor – and in the current Russian political landscape, no new sanctions can overcome the defensive, insular war-economy mentality that the Kremlin has built.***How did we reach this point? After the collapse of the Soviet Union, Western security and political alliances expanded to fill the zone of instability left behind. The emerging Russian security state could only define this as the strategic advance of an enemy. The 9/11 attacks shattered Western concepts of security and conflict and expanded NATO’s new mission of projecting security. When Putin offered his assistance, we effectively responded “no thanks,” thinking in particular of his bloody, ongoing, scorched-earth war against the Chechens. We did it for the right reasons. Nonetheless, it infuriated Putin. This was the last moment when any real rapprochement with Putin’s Russia was possible.Since that time, physical warfare has changed in ways that create a new kind of space for Putin to intervene globally. The Obama administration has a deep distaste for official overseas deployments of US troops and the associated political costs. ‘No new wars’ was





the oft-repeated mantra — which altered America’s toolbox for, if not the frequency of, foreign interventions. Drone warfare was greatly expanded, as was the reliance on special forces— a politically easy choice due to their diverse capabilities and voluntary career commitment to service. But the actual number of special forces operators is exceedingly small and increasingly exhausted; soldiers deployed in shadow wars and shadow missions have far less protection than troops in traditional ground combat.As the definitions of war and peace have blurred, creating impossibly vast front lines and impossibly vague boundaries of conflict, Putin has launched a kind of global imperialist insurgency. The Kremlin aggressively promotes an alternate ideological base to expand an illiberal world order in which the rights and freedoms that most Americans feel are essential to democracy don’t necessarily exist. It backs this up with military, economic, cultural and diplomatic resources. Through a combination of leveraging hard power and embracing the role of permanent disruptor — hacker, mercenary, rule-breaker, liar, thief — Putin works to ensure that Russia cannot be excluded from global power.Putin tries to define recent history as an anomaly — where the world built with American sweat and ingenuity and blood and sacrifice, by the society founded on American exceptionalism, is a thing to be erased and corrected. The Russian version of exceptionalism is not a reflection of aspirational character, but a requirement that Russia remain distinct and apart from the world. Until we understand this, and that America is defined as the glavny protivnik (the ‘main enemy’) of Russia, we will never speak to Putin’s Russia in a language it can understand.

There is less and less to stand against Putin’s campaign of destabilization. It’s been 99 years since America began investing in European security with blood, and sweat, and gold. Two world wars and a long, cold conflict later, we felt secure with the institutional framework of NATO and the EU — secure in the idea that these institutions projected our security and our interests far beyond our shores. The post-WWII liberal world order and its accompanying security architecture ushered in an unparalleled period of growth and peace and prosperity for the US and other transatlantic countries.I spend most of my time near the Russian frontier, and today that architecture seems like a Kodachrome snapshot from yesteryear. We joke that we yearn for a fight we can win with a gun, because the idea of a physical invasion is actually preferable to the constant uncertainty of economic, information, and political shadow warfare from the Kremlin.Combatants in these shadow wars bear no designations, and protections against these methods are few. From the front lines, in the absence of the fabric of reassurance woven from our values and principles and shared sacrifice — and in the absence of the moral clarity of purpose derived from “us and them” — civil society is left naked, unarmored. Putin has dictated the mood of the unfolding era — an era of upheaval. This past year marks the arrival of this mood in American politics, whether Americans deny it or not. The example of Eastern Europe suggests that without renewed vision and purpose, and without strong alliances to amplify our defense and preserve our legacy, America too will find itself unanchored, adrift in currents stirred and guided by the Kremlin.President-elect Trump harnessed this energy of upheaval to win the American presidency — a victory that itself was a symptom of the breakdown of the post-WWII order, in which institutional trust has eroded and unexpected outcomes have become the order of the day. Now it is his responsibility to define what comes next — or else explain to Americans, who want to be great again, why everything they’ve invested in and sacrificed for over the past century was ultimately for nothing.As Obama did, Trump has already made the first mistake in negotiating with the Russians:





telling them that there is anything to negotiate. Trump likes to discuss Putin’s strengths. He should also understand that much of it is smoke and mirrors. A renewed approach to dealing with Putin’s Russia should begin by addressing the tactics of Russia’s new warfare from the perspective of strength.We have to accept we’re in a war and that we have a lot to lose. We need to look at this war differently, both geographically and strategically. For example, it’s hard to understand Ukraine and Syria as two fronts in the same conflict when we never evaluate them together with Moscow in the center of the map, as Russia does. We also need a new national security concept that adds a new strategic framework, connects all our resources, and allows us to better evaluate and respond to Gerasimov-style warfare: we have to learn to fight their one war machine with a unified machine of our own. This will also strengthen and quicken decisionmaking on critical issues in the US — something we will also need to replicate within NATO.Exposing how the Kremlin’s political and information warfare works is a critical component of this strategy, as is acting to constrain it. We must (re)accept the notion that hard power is the guarantor of any international system: security is a precondition for anything (everything) else. That the projection of our values has tracked with and been amplified by force projection is no accident. Human freedom requires security. NATO has been the force projection of our values. It hasn’t just moved the theoretical line of conflict further forward: the force multiplication and value transference has enhanced our security. This is far cheaper, and far stronger, than trying to do this ourselves.It’s also important to acknowledge that a more isolated, more nationalist America helps Putin in his objectives even while it compromises our own. We need to accept that America was part of, and needs to be part of, a global system — and that this system is better, cheaper, and more powerful than any imagined alternatives. For many years, the United States has been the steel in the framework that holds everything together; this is what we mean by ‘world order’ and ‘security architecture,’ two concepts that few politicians try to discuss seriously with the electorate.Taken together, these steps would be a critical realignment to our strategic thinking and internal operations, and would allow us to plow through this era of upheaval with greater certainty and for greater benefit to the American people.***In an era increasingly cynical about American ideals, and skeptical about intervention abroad, how can the US build support for a new, more muscular global resistance to what Russia is trying to do?

We already have one model: the Cold War. Putin and his minions have spent the past 15 years ranting about how the West (specifically NATO) wants a new Cold War. By doing so, they have been conditioning us to deny it, and made us do it so continually that we have convinced ourselves it is true.

This is classic reflexive control.

The truth is that fighting a new Cold War would be in America’s interest. Russia teaches us a very important lesson: losing an ideological war without a fight will ruin you as a nation. The fight is the American way. When we stop fighting for our ideals abroad, we stop fighting for them at home. We won the last Cold War. We will win the next one too. When it’s us against them, they were, and are, never going to be the winner. But when it's “all against all” — a “multipolar” world with “multi-vector” policy, a state of shifting





alliances and permanent instability — Russia, with a centrally controlled, tiny command structure unaccountable for its actions in any way, still has a chance for a seat at the table. They pursue the multipolar world not because it is right or just, but because it is the only world in which they can continue to matter without pushing a nuclear launch sequence.We must understand this, and focus now, as Putin does, on shaping the world that comes next and defining what our place is in it. Trump has shown willingness to reevaluate his positions and change course — except on issues relating to Russia, and strengthening alliances with the Kremlin’s global illiberal allies. By doing so, he is making himself a footnote to Putin’s chapter of history — little more than another of Putin’s hollow men.Trump should understand, regardless of what the Russians did in our elections, he already won the prize. It won’t be taken away just because he admits the Russians intervened. Taking away the secrecy of Russian actions — exposing whatever it was they did, to everyone — is the only way to take away their power over the US political system and to free himself from their strings, as well. Whatever Putin’s gambit was, Trump is the one who can make sure that Putin doesn’t win.Trump should set the unpredictable course and become the champion against the most toxic, ambitious regime of the modern world. Rebuilding American power — based on the values of liberal democracy — is the only escape from Putin’s corrosive vision of a world at permanent war. We need a new united front. But we must be the center of it. It matters deeply that the current generation of global revolutionaries and reformers, like my Ukrainian friend, no longer see themselves as fighting for us or our ideals.In a strange way, Trump could be just crazy enough — enough of a outlier and a rogue — to expose what Putin’s Russia is and end the current cycle of upheaval and decline. This requires non-standard thinking and leadership — but also purpose, and commitment, and values. It requires faith — for and from the American people and American institutions. And it requires the existence of truth.The alternative is accepting that our history and our nation were, in fact, not the beginning of a better — greater — world, but the long anomaly in a tyrannous and dark one.Molly K. McKew (@MollyMcKew) advises governments and political parties on foreign policy and strategic communications. She was an adviser to Georgian President Saakashvili’s government from 2009-2013, and to former Moldovan Prime Minister Filat in 2014-2015.

The Real Russia-China Connection That Should Worry Americain the Arctic.Lyle J. GoldsteinJanuary 22, 2017 Great power relations seem to be in flux during the uncertain days since the U.S. election surprise. Some Washington strategists are examining the possibility that a “Kissinger move in reverse” that energetically breaks the ice with Moscow could throw a major wrench into Beijing’s calculations, causing it to adopt a more restrained and cautious outlook. The logic of reengaging the Kissingerian strategic triangle once again is not entirely without merit. However, the obstacles, not least U.S. domestic disgust with the Kremlin, are so apparent as to seemingly limit the chances of success.





Another significant obstacle to such a strategy is that Russia-China relations have been continuously strengthened over three decades, so that they no longer constitute the brittle “marriage of convenience” so often perceived from Washington. One need only point to the recent arrival of the long-sought after Russian-made Su-35 fighter aircraft into China’s air combat arsenal, not to mention the increasing scope and pace of Russian-Chinese naval exercises to realize this is the case. Yet, China-Russia cooperation often operates “below the radar” and this edition of Dragon Eye will examine one aspect of the partnership that is somehow usually missed: the Arctic. That is especially odd because, looking at a map, one immediately sees that between China and the Arctic lies the vast terrain of Russian Siberia, so that bilateral partnership may form the only viable path to actually develop these regions effectively. A 30-plus-page spread with eight serious research articles in one of China’s leading naval magazines Naval & Merchant Ships [舰船知识] at the end of 2016 suggests a new level of impetus in China’s focus on the North.The first article by Su Han [苏涵], possibly (but not confirmed to be) a senior researcher in the international department of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, is quite breathtaking in its candor. He opens his discussion with the bold claim that the Arctic is “not simply a geographic concept, but … is inseparable from our country’s future building and development …” He makes clear, however, that this line of thinking runs directly through Moscow: “…whether concerning use of the navigation route … or opening the development of resources, these [projects] are all closely connected with Russia. China-Russia ties form our country’s key link to participation in Arctic activities.”So far, so good, but then the author steers into a rather scathing critique of U.S. foreign policy and its impact on Russia. Su explains that “In the 25 years since the collapse of the USSR, the U.S. has never retreated from its strategic containment of Russia.” For good measure, he additionally explains that all of Europe’s contemporary problems, from the refugees to terrorism to the Ukraine issue are all “… closely connected to the US.” […与美国密切相关] In so far as the U.S. has sought to wield influence across the “Eurasian landmass” [欧亚大陆], “efforts by either China or by Russia to energetically develop the Arctic have in certain respects the significance of dispersing U.S. strategic pressures in other areas… It opens up a resistance space [对抗的空间] in the Arctic.”Addressing skepticism about China’s role in the Arctic, Su argues: “All voices are slowly coalescing around the idea that the Arctic is becoming our new strategic breakthrough point” [我们新的战略突破口] Su notes that the USSR never took China seriously as a player on Arctic issues, but he observes now that the situation has vastly changed, as illustrated by the fact that China has begun work on its second large-scale icebreaker. In addition, two mid-size military icebreakers recently joined the PLA Navy’s North Sea Fleet. Su’s analysis does highlight the potentially pivotal role of the North Korean port of Rajin [朝鲜罗津港] in both Russia-China relations and also China’s Arctic strategy more broadly. He points out numerous challenges, including the shallow depth of the Tyumen River, and the different rail gauges for North Korea and Russia, but ultimately points out





that the project could be critically important to further development of China’s northeastern provinces and their international trading relationships.However, the Yamal natural gas project gets top billing in this analysis as the “pearl” of the Arctic treasures. Grabbing the attention of the Chinese shipbuilding industry, moreover, this analysis relates a market projection that at least 20 Liquefied Natural Gas (LNG) tankers will ply the route from Yamal through Arctic waters and down to East Asia, providing China with a stable supply of 3 million tons of LNG each year. Other articles in this series detail aspects of contemporary Russian ice-breaker development and discuss other key shipping imperatives, such as state-of-the-art port logistics that will interest Chinese companies. Su offers a Chinese perspective on the Northern Sea Route [северный морской путь]: “… the majority of this sea route traverses Russia’s near seas. While this could generate some fees, the overall safety/security is assured.” Moreover, such cooperative efforts to develop the Arctic fit easily into the “Belt and Road Initiative,” (BRI) according to this analysis, as BRI aims to create infrastructure linkages that span Asia’s vastness, to include apparently its northern vastness.

Regards Cees ***

23 Jan The British Army's only remaining fighting unit could be wiped out "in an afternoon" in conflict with an enemy such as Russia as "years of budget cuts" have left it with just one war-fighting brigade, the army's in-house think tank has claimed.A "hollowing out or depletion of the army's capabilities" has "effectively removed" Britain's ability to deploy a fighting force, according to a paper published by the Centre for Historical Analysis and Conflict Research (CHACR), which is made up of current and former "soldier-scholars". 'This raises an important question: is the British Army ready for such a possibility?" CHACHR ask."If one merely sees preparedness through net manpower and kinetic force capacity, the answer might be a simple ‘no’: the British Army is at its smallest and has faced years of budget cuts. "The prospect of 'losing the division in an afternoon' will weigh heavily on the chain of command, with strategic-to-tactical command compression almost inevitable as politicians appreciate the stakes involved in committing the division to battle."

The Army would only be able to muster a brigade 5000 to 10,000 war-fighting troops if war broke out tomorrow, though this division will be expanded from a total manpower of 30,000 to 50,000 in coming years. The RAF is not able to move large numbers of heavy vehicles such as tanks, while only a third of the war-fighting brigade would be able to fit onto its naval fleet.

Who would win in a war between Russia and Germany? I've answered a number of hypothetical questions that stretch the limits of imagination, but this one stands out by its unrealism :) Politics aside, who would attack whom and where? Germany has a modest military and even more modest means to project force beyond immediate borders. IMHO, Germany could not realistically mount an effective attack on Greece today, let alone on Russia. Russia has a strong military, but is also limited in force projection. The two countries share no border, and the only country that shares borders with both - Poland - would not allow Russian troops through without a fight. Not to mention that Poland's border with Russia is at the Kaliningrad oblast - a small enclave surrounded by NATO members, which can't realistically be used as the main springboard for an attack on Germany from





land (it also houses the Russian Baltic Navy, short-range missiles and a few landing strips).If we don't ignore NATO Article 5, then Russia cannot win and would not even start a fight (NATO has a larger and more capable force that would be bound by Article 5 to help Germany). But the question mentions only Germany, without allies. So, Russia won't be able to get through the Polish territory.Shipping an expeditionary force through the Baltic sea to Germany seems unrealistic too - Russia's Baltic fleet is not large and is getting old, while Germany has decent coastal defenses and a Navy that would put up resistance. The Baltic sea is relatively shallow, which is why Russia bases only four diesel subs there. More could be sent from the Northern fleet, but Germany could hunt them down from the air, if they get any close. Any surface ships would be seen from afar and made vulnerable to coastal torpedoes and missiles.No one would win as it's difficult to start such a war. Of course, in a fantasy world you can imagine various things, but they will make the answer unrealistic.

One way to make sense of this question is to focus on cyber-wars, where physical distances do not matter. But I have yet to see how a cyber-war can be won. In the worst case, a country would have to shut down its external connections. - 1 Sep 2015 · Upvoted by Marc Bodnick, Former Stanford PhD student in Politics and Luiz Giaconi, Foreing Relations and Politics post graduate

January 27, 2016 Yet the German military is not fit for purpose, according to Hans-Peter Bartels, the German parliamentary ombudsman charged with overseeing the country's armed forces, known as the Bundeswehr.

"The military forces are tired," Bartels remarked in an interview with the German newspaper Handelsblatt a day after he released a report that depicted Germany's military as small, demoralized, and struggling to fulfill missions with malfunctioning equipment. "There are too many things missing." Bartels found that only 38 of Germany's 114 high-tech Eurofighter jets are operational, Deutsche Welles reported. It also has 93 Tornado fighter jets, but only 29 of them work. The number of German soldiers was around 600,000 at the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s. Today the country has just 177,000. Last year, a report from the German broadcaster ARD set off a wave of press coverage saying that German troops used broomsticks that had been painted black to stand in for a lack of machine guns during a NATO training exercise. In 2014, Der Spiegel magazine called the Bundeswehr "ramshackle." In 2011, Bild published an exposéciting internal government reports in which commanders complained that German troops in Afghanistan didn't know how to use their weapons. "We are short of almost everything," he told German lawmakers on Tuesday. "The army is at the turning point."

"Bang Bang" - Dutch Army Reduced To Yelling Gun SoundsInstead of shooting, the Dutch Army have been shouting. 03 Aug 2015 In what is an embarrassing state of affairs, the military has been saving on munitions by imitating the sound of rifle fire with shouting. According to local media reports the NATO member has had to cancel a number of compulsory shooting drills due to a lack of bullets.According to a confidential e-mail from the Defence Ministry, seen by Dutch broadcaster RTL, severe shortages of ammunition have been a persistent problem for the military. The feeling of frustration has been growing among Army personnel. "There is not always sufficient ammunition available for exercises and training. The Defence Ministry understands that troops are not always happy with this. Once additional funding is





available, the stockpiles will be replenished in 2015."The Dutch government has raised its defence budget to €8 billion for this fiscal year, up from €7.6 billion in 2014. From 2015, the government has also pledged an annual increase in defence spending in real terms of €100 million. According to a report commissioned by the European Leadership Network (ELN), this is a "significant break" from their long-term budgetary policy."In fact, it is the first time for over a decade that Europe’s fifth-largest economy will spend more rather than less on defence," the report said.According to Defence Ministry figures cited by Newsweek, defence spending now accounts for 1.15 percent of GDP.

2016, A merica is a global power with global interests. Its military is meant first and foremost to defend America from attack. Beyond that, it is meant to protect Americans abroad, allies, and the freedom to use international sea, air, and space while retaining the ability to engage in more than one major contingency at a time. America must be able not only to defend itself and its interests, but also to deter enemies and opportunists from taking action that would challenge U.S. interests, a capability that includes preventing the destabilization of a region and guarding against threats to the peace and security of America’s friends.As noted in the 2015 Index, however, the U.S. does not have the right force to meet a two–major regional contingency (MRC) requirement and is not ready to carry out its duties effectively. Consequently, the U.S. risks seeing its interests increasingly challenged and the world order it has led since World War II undone.

How to Think About Sizing Military PowerMilitary power begins with the people and equipment used to conduct war: the weapons, tanks, ships, airplanes, and supporting tools such as communications systems that make it possible either for one group to impose its will on another or to prevent such an outcome from happening.However, simply counting the number of people, tanks, or combat aircraft that the U.S. possesses would be irrelevant because it would lack context. For example, the U.S. Army might have 100 tanks, but to accomplish a specific military task, 1,000 or more tanks might be needed or none at all. It might be that the terrain on which a battle is fought is especially ill-suited to tanks or that the tanks one has are inferior to the enemy’s. The enemy could be quite adept at using tanks, or his tank operations might be integrated into a larger employment concept that leverages the supporting fires of infantry and airpower, whereas one’s own tanks are poorly maintained, the crews are ill-prepared, or one’s doctrine is irrelevant.Success in war is partly a function of matching the tools of warfare to a specific task and employing those tools effectively in the conditions of the battle. Get these wrong—tools, objective, competency, or context—and you lose.Another key element is the military’s capacity for conducting operations: how many of the right tools—people, tanks, planes, or ships—it has. One might have the right tools and know how to use them effectively but not have enough to win. Given that one cannot know with certainty beforehand just when, where, against whom, and for what reason a battle might be fought, determining how much capability is needed is an exercise of informed, but not certain, judgment.Further, two different combatants can use the same set of tools in radically different ways to quite different effects. The concept of employment matters. Concepts are developed to account for numbers, capabilities, material readiness, and all sorts of other factors that





enable or constrain one’s actions, such as whether one fights alone or alongside allies, on familiar or strange terrain, or with a large, well-equipped force or a small, poorly equipped force.All of these factors and a multitude of others bear upon the outcome of any military contest. Military planners attempt to account for them when devising requirements, developing training and exercise plans, formulating war plans, and providing advice to the President in his role as Commander in Chief of U.S. military forces.

Measuring hard combat power in terms of its adequacy in capability, capacity, and readiness to defend U.S. vital interests is hard, especially in such a limited space as this Index, but it is not impossible. Regardless of the difficulty of determining the adequacy of one’s military forces, the Secretary of Defense and the military services have to make decisions every year when the annual defense budget request is submitted to Congress.The adequacy of hard power is affected most directly by the resources the nation is willing to invest. While that investment decision is informed to a significant degree by an appreciation of threats to U.S. interests and the ability of a given defense portfolio to protect U.S. interests against such threats, it is not informed solely by such considerations; hence the importance of clarity and honesty in determining just what is needed in hard power and the status of such hard power from year to year.Administrations take various approaches to determine the type and amount of military power needed and, by extension, the amount of money and other resources to commit to it. After defining the national interests to be protected, the Department of Defense can use worst-case scenarios to determine the maximum challenges the U.S. military might have to overcome. Another way is to redefine what constitutes a threat. By taking a different view of major actors as to whether they pose a meaningful threat and of the extent to which friends and allies have an ability to assist the U.S. in meeting security objectives, one can arrive at different conclusions about necessary military strength.For example, one Administration might view China as a rising, belligerent power bent on dominating the Asia–Pacific. Another Administration might view China as an inherently peaceful, rising economic power, with the expansion of its military capabilities a natural occurrence commensurate with its strengthening status. The difference between these views can have a dramatic impact on how one thinks about U.S. defense requirements. So, too, can policymakers amplify or downplay risk to justify defense budget decisions.There can also be strongly differing views on requirements for operational capacity. Does the country need enough for two major combat operations (MCOs) at roughly the same time or just enough for a single major operation plus some number of lesser cases? To what extent should “presence” tasks—the use of forces for routine engagement with partner countries or simply to be on hand in a region for crisis response—be additive to or a subset of a military force sized to handle two major regional conflicts? How much value should be assigned to advanced technologies as they are incorporated into the force?

Where to StartThere are references that one can use to help sort through the variables and arrive at a starting point for assessing the adequacy of today’s military posture: government studies and historical experience. The government occasionally conducts formal reviews meant to inform decisions on capabilities and capacities across the Joint Force relative to the threat environment (current and projected) and evolutions in operating conditions, the advancement of technologies, and aspects of U.S. interests that may call for one type of military response over another.The 1993 Bottom-Up Review (BUR), conducted by then-Secretary of Defense Les Aspin,





is one such frequently cited example. Secretary Aspin recognized “the dramatic changes that [had] occurred in the world as a result of the end of the Cold War and the dissolution of the Soviet Union…[altering] America’s security needs” and driving an imperative “to reassess all of our defense concepts, plans, and programs from the ground up.”1The BUR formally established the requirement that U.S. forces should be able “to achieve decisive victory in two nearly simultaneous major regional conflicts [MRCs] and to conduct combat operations characterized by rapid response and a high probability of success, while minimizing the risk of significant American casualties.”2 Thus was formalized the two-MRC standard.

Dr. Daniel Gouré, in his 2015 Index essay “Building the Right Military for a New Era: The Need for an Enduring Analytic Framework,” noted that various Administrations have redefined force requirements based on their perceptions of what was necessary to protect U.S. interests.3 In an attempt to formalize the process, and perhaps to have a mechanism by which to exert influence on the executive branch in such matters,4 Congress mandated that each incoming Administration must conduct a comprehensive strategic review of the global security environment, articulate a relevant strategy suited to protecting and promoting U.S. security interests, and recommend an associated military force posture.

The Quadrennial Defense Reviews (QDR) have been conducted since 1997, accompanied in 1997, 2010, and 2014 by independent National Defense Panel (NDP) reports that have reviewed and commented on them. Both sets of documents purport to serve as key assessments, but analysts have come to minimize their value, regarding them as justifications for executive branch policy preferences (the QDR reports) or overly broad, generalized commentaries (the NDP reports) that lack substantive discussion about threats to U.S. interests, a credible strategy for dealing with them, and the actual ability of the U.S. military to meet national security requirements.

Correlation of Forces as a Factor in Force SizingDuring the Cold War, the U.S. used the Soviet threat as its primary reference for

what it needed in hard power. At that time, the correlation of forces—a comparison of one force against another to determine strengths and weaknesses—was highly symmetrical. U.S. planners compared tanks, aircraft, and ships against their direct counterparts in the opposing force. These comparison assessments drove the sizing, characteristics, and capabilities of fleets, armies, and air forces.The evolution of guided, precision munitions and the rapid technological advancements in surveillance and targeting systems, however, have made comparing combat power more difficult. What was largely a platform v. platform model has shifted somewhat to a munitions v. target model.The proliferation of precise weaponry increasingly means that each round, bomb, rocket, missile, and even individual bullet (in some instances) can hit its intended target, thus decreasing the number of munitions needed to prosecute an operation. It also means that the lethality of an operating environment increases significantly for the people and platforms involved. We are now at the point where one must consider how many “smart munitions” the enemy has when thinking about how many platforms and people are needed to win a combat engagement instead of focusing primarily on how many ships or airplanes the enemy can bring to bear against one’s own force.5In one sense, increased precision and the technological advances now being incorporated into U.S. weapons, platforms, and operating concepts make it possible to do far more with





fewer assets than ever before. Platform signature reduction (stealth) makes it harder for the enemy to find and target them, while the increased precision of weapons makes it possible for fewer platforms to hit many more targets. Additionally, the ability of the U.S. Joint Force to harness computers, modern telecommunications, space-based platforms—such as for surveillance, communications, positioning-navigation-timing (PNT) support from GPS satellites—and networked operations potentially means that smaller forces can have far greater effect in battle than at any other time in history. But these same advances also enable enemy forces. And certain military functions—such as seizing, holding, and occupying territory—may require a certain number of soldiers no matter how state-of-the-art their equipment may be.With smaller forces, each individual element of the force represents a greater percentage of its combat power. Each casualty or equipment loss takes a larger toll on the ability of the force to sustain high-tempo, high-intensity combat operations over time, especially if the force is dispersed across a wide theater or across multiple theaters of operation.As advanced technology has become more affordable, it has become more accessible for nearly any actor, state or non-state. Consequently, it may be that the outcomes of future wars will pivot to a much greater degree on the skill of the forces and their capacity to sustain operations over time than they will on some great disparity in technology. If so, readiness and capacity will take on greater importance than absolute advances in capability.All of this illustrates the difficulties of and need for exercising judgment in assessing the adequacy of America’s military power. Yet without such an assessment, all that we are left with are the quadrennial strategic reviews (which are subject to filtering and manipulation to suit policy interests); annual budget submissions (which typically favor desired military programs at presumed levels of affordability and are therefore necessarily budget-constrained); and leadership posture statements that often simply align with executive branch policy priorities.

The U.S. Joint Force and the Art of WarThis section of the Index, on military capabilities, assesses the adequacy of the United States’ defense posture as it pertains to a conventional understanding of “hard power,” defined as the ability of American military forces to engage and defeat an enemy’s forces in battle at a scale commensurate with the vital national interests of the U.S. While some hard truths in military affairs are appropriately addressed by math and science, others are not. Speed, range, probability of detection, and radar cross-section are examples of quantifiable characteristics that can be measured. Specific future instances in which U.S. military power will be needed, the competency of the enemy, the political will to sustain operations in the face of mounting deaths and destruction, and the absolute amount of strength needed to win are matters of judgment and experience, but they nevertheless affect how large and capable a force one might need.In conducting the assessment, we accounted for both quantitative and qualitative aspects of military forces, informed by an experience-based understanding of military operations and the expertise of external reviewers.Military effectiveness is as much an art as it is a science. Specific military capabilities represented in weapons, platforms, and military units can be used individually to some effect. Practitioners of war, however, have learned that combining the tools of war in various ways and orchestrating their tactical employment in series or simultaneously can dramatically amplify the effectiveness of the force committed to battle.Employment concepts are exceedingly hard to measure in any quantitative way, but their





value as critical contributors in the conduct of war is undeniable. How they are utilized is very much an art-of-war matter, learned through experience over time.

What Is Not Being AssessedIn assessing the current status of the military forces, this Index uses the primary references used by the military services themselves when they discuss their ability to employ hard combat power. The Army’s unit of measure is the brigade combat team (BCT), while the Marine Corps structures itself by battalions. For the Navy, it is the number of ships in its combat fleet, and the Air Force’s most consistent reference is total number of aircraft, sometimes broken down into the two primary sub-types of fighters and bombers.

Obviously, this is not the totality of service capabilities, and it certainly is not everything needed for war, but these measures can be viewed as surrogate measures that subsume or represent the vast number of other things that make these “units of measure” possible and effective in battle. There is an element of proportionality or ratio related to these measures that drives other aspects of force sizing. For example:

When planning air operations, the Air Force looks at the targets to be serviced and the nature of the general operation to be supported and then accounts for aircraft and munitions needed (type and quantity) and the availability and characteristics of airfields relevant to the operation. From this, they calculate sorties, distances, flight hours, fuel consumption, number of aircraft in a given piece of airspace, and a host of other pieces of information to determine how many aerial refueling tankers will be needed.

Joint Force detailed planning for operations determines how much equipment, manpower, and supplies need to be moved from one point to another and how much more will be needed to sustain operations: Logistics is a very quantitative business.U.S. Transportation Command (TRANSCOM) calculates the amount of lift required in cargo planes, sealift shipping, long-haul road movements, and trains.

The Marine Corps operationally thinks in terms of Marine Air-Ground Task Forces (MAGTFs) that are composed of command, ground, air, and logistics elements. The size of a MAGTF varies depending on the mission to be accomplished, but the nucleus is normally (though not always) the ground combat element that typically ranges from a battalion to a division. The amount of airpower, logistics support, and transportation (amphibious, sealift, and airlift) required to execute the operation extends from there.

The Navy thinks in terms of the number of surface combatants, the nature of operations, and proximity to ports to drive planning for all of the combat logistics force vessels that are needed to make it happen.

The Army provides a host of “common user support” capabilities to the overall force that can include operating ports, theater-wide trucking and rail operations, large-scale fuel and ammunition storage and distribution, engineering and construction services, and general supply support.Institutional elements like recruiting are necessary to generate the force in the first place, the multitude of installations at which units are based, training facilities, acquisition workforce, and the military’s medical infrastructure.The point here is that the military spear has a great deal of shaft that makes it possible for the tip to locate, close with, and destroy its target, and there is a rough proportionality between shaft and spear tip. Thus, in assessing the basic units of measure for combat power, one can get a sense of what is likely needed in the combat support, combat service support, and supporting establishment echelons. The scope of this Index does not extend to analysis of everything that makes hard power possible; it focuses on the status of the hard power itself.





This assessment also does not account for the Reserve and Guard components of the services; it focuses only on the Active component. Again, the element of proportion or ratio figures prominently. Each service determines the balance among its Active, Reserve, and National Guard elements (only the Army and Air Force have Guard elements; the Navy and Marine Corps do not) based on factors that include cost of the respective elements, availability for operational employment, time needed to respond to an emergent crisis, the allocation of roles between the elements, and political considerations.6 This assessment looks at the baseline requirement for a given amount of combat power that is readily available for use in a major combat operation—something that is usually associated with the Active components of each service.

The Defense Budget and Strategic GuidanceAs for the defense budget, ample discussion of budget issues is scattered throughout (mainly as they pertain to acquisition programs), but the budget itself—whether for the military services individually, the Joint Force as a whole, or the totality of the defense establishment—is actually a reflection of the importance that the U.S. places on the modernity, capacity, and readiness of the force rather than a measure of the capability of the force itself. In other words, the budget itself does not tell us much about the posture of the U.S. military.The baseline budget for defense in FY 2015 was $522 billion, which paid for the forces (manpower, equipment, training); enabling capabilities (things like transportation, satellites, defense intelligence, and research and development); and institutional support (bases and stations, facilities, recruiting, and the like). The baseline budget does not pay for the cost of ongoing operations, which is captured in supplemental funding known as OCO (overseas contingency operations).It is true that absent a significant threat to the survival of the country, the U.S. will always balance expenditures on defense with spending in all of the other areas of government activity that it thinks are necessary or desirable. Some have argued that a defense budget indexed to a percent of gross domestic product (GDP) is a reasonable reference, but a fixed percentage of GDP does not accurately reflect national security requirements per se any more than the size of the budget alone correlates to levels of capability. It is possible that a larger defense budget could be associated with less military capability if the money were allocated inappropriately or spent wastefully, and the fact that the economy changes over time does not necessarily mean that defense spending should increase or decrease in lockstep by default.Ideally, defense requirements are determined by identifying national interests that might need to be protected with military power; assessing the nature of threats to those interests and what would be needed to defeat those threats (and how much that would cost); and then determining what the country can afford (or is willing) to spend. Any difference between assessed requirements and affordable levels of spending on defense would constitute risk to U.S. security interests.This Index enthusiastically adopts this latter approach: interests, threats, requirements, resulting force, and associated budget. Spending less than the amount needed to maintain a two-MRC force results in policy debates over where to accept risk: force modernization, the capacity to conduct large-scale or multiple simultaneous operations, or force readiness.





The decision to fund national defense commensurate with interests and prevailing threats is a policy decision reflecting national priorities and acceptance of risk. This Index assesses the ability of the nation’s military forces to protect vital national security interests within the world as it is so that the debate over funding hard power is better informed.In fiscal year (FY) 2015, debate about how much funding to allocate to defense was affected by a larger political debate that pitted those who wanted to see an overall reduction in federal spending against those who pushed for higher levels of spending for defense and those who wanted to see any increase in defense spending matched by commensurate increases in domestic spending. Efforts to repeal or substantially modify the Budget Control Act (BCA) were stymied by those who feared losing a mechanism that disciplines federal spending. Yet there appears to be a consensus that more money is needed for defense, given the BCA requests for FY 2016 funding from the White House

and both chambers of Congress.The FY 2015 defense budget was only $1 billion more than the FY 2014 budget. Adjusted for inflation, this is actually a 1 percent cut. The President’s budget request for FY 2016 was $561 billion, which would represent an almost 6 percent real increase over FY 2015. For comparison, President Obama’s 2012 defense budget, the last under former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, proposed spending $624 billion on defense in FY 2015. A bipartisan consensus, as seen in the National Defense Panel report in 2014, has identified the so-called Gates budget as the minimum the United States should be spending on national defense.7 As seen in Chart 3, the FY 2015 enacted budget and the FY 2016 budget proposal are well below this minimum.The restrictions placed on defense spending by the BCA continue to be a major concern of the military service chiefs, who have consistently testified about the damage these restrictions are causing to readiness, modernization, and capacity for operations. As FY





2015 ended, the budget debates about FY 2016 had not been resolved, but it appears unlikely that any resolution will bring the national defense budget close to even the minimum levels proposed by the Gates budget.

“Purpose” as a Driver in Force SizingThe Joint Force is used for a wide range of purposes, only one of which is major combat operations. Fortunately, such events have been rare, averaging roughly 15–20 years between occurrences.8 In between (and even during) such occurrences, the military is used in support of regional engagement, crisis response, strategic deterrence, and humanitarian assistance, as well as providing support to civil authorities and U.S. diplomacy.

The U.S. Unified Combatant Commands, or COCOMS (EUCOM, CENTCOM, PACOM, SOUTHCOM, and AFRICOM), all have annual and long-term plans through which they engage with countries in their assigned regions. These engagements range from very small unit training events with the forces of a single partner country to larger bilateral and sometimes multilateral military exercises. In 2015, these engagements included training and assisting Iraqi military forces and participating in joint training exercises with NATO members. Such events help to establish working relationships with other countries, acquire a more detailed understanding of regional political–military dynamics and on-the-ground conditions in areas of interest, and signal U.S. security interests to friends and competitors.To support such COCOM efforts, the services provide forces that are based permanently in respective regions or that operate in them temporarily on a rotational basis. To make these regional rotations possible, the services must maintain a base force sufficiently large to train, deploy, support, receive back, and make ready again a stream of units ideally numerous enough to meet validated COCOM demand.The ratio between time spent at home and time spent away on deployment for any given unit is known as OPTEMPO (operational tempo), and each service attempts to maintain a ratio that both gives units enough time to educate, train, and prepare their forces and allows the individuals in a unit to maintain some semblance of a healthy home and family life. This ensures that units are fully prepared for the next deployment cycle and that servicemembers do not become “burned out” or suffer adverse consequences in their personal lives because of excessive deployment time.Experience has shown that a ratio of at least 3:1 is sustainable, meaning three periods of time at home for every period deployed. (If a unit is to be out for six months, it will be home for 18 months before deploying again.) Obviously, a service needs a sufficient number of people, units, ships, and planes to support such a ratio. If peacetime engagement were the primary focus for the Joint Force, the services could size their forces to support these forward-based and forward-deployed demands.Thus, the size of the total force must necessarily be much larger than any sampling of its use at any point in time.In contrast, sizing a force for major combat operations is an exercise informed by history—how much force was needed in previous wars—and then shaped and refined by analysis of current threats, a range of plausible scenarios, and expectations about what the U.S. can do given training, equipment, employment concept, and other factors. The defense establishment must then balance “force sizing” between COCOM requirements for presence and engagement with the amount thought necessary to win in likely war scenarios.Inevitably, compromises are made that account for how much military the country is willing to buy. Generally speaking:





The Army sizes to major warfighting requirements.The Marine Corps focuses on crisis response demands and the ability to contribute to one major war.The Air Force attempts to strike a balance that accounts for historically based demand across the spectrum since air assets are shifted fairly easily from one theater of operations to another (“easily” being a relative term when compared to the challenge of shifting large land forces), and any peacetime engagement typically requires some level of air support.The Navy is driven by global presence requirements. To meet COCOM requirements for a continuous fleet presence at sea, the Navy must have three to four ships in order to have one on station. To illustrate with a simplistic example, a commander who wants one U.S. warship stationed off the coast of a hostile country needs the use of four ships from the fleet: one on station, one that left station and is traveling home, one that just left home and is traveling to station, and one that fills in for one of the other ships when it needs maintenance or training time.

This report focuses on the forces required to win two major wars as the baseline force-sizing metric. The military’s effectiveness as a deterrent against opportunistic competitor states, and a valued training partner in the eyes of other countries, derives from its effectiveness (proven or presumed) in winning wars.Our ApproachWith this in mind, we assessed the state of military affairs for U.S. forces as it pertains to their ability to deliver hard power against an enemy in three areas:• Capability,• Capacity, and• Readiness.

Capability. Examining the capability of a military force requires consideration of:• The proper tools (material and conceptual) of sufficient design,

performance characteristics, technological advancement, and suitability for it to perform its function against an enemy force successfully.

• The sufficiency of armored vehicles, ships, airplanes, and other equipment and weapons to win against the enemy.

• The appropriate variety of options to preclude strategic vulnerabilities in the force and give flexibilities to battlefield commanders.

• The degree to which elements of the force reinforce each other in covering potential vulnerabilities, maximizing strengths, and gaining greater effectiveness through synergies that are not possible in narrowly stovepiped, linear approaches to war.

The capability of the U.S. Joint Force was on ample display in its decisive conventional war victory over Iraq in liberating Kuwait in 1991 and later in the conventional military operation to liberate Iraq in 2003. Aspects of its capability have also been seen in numerous other operations undertaken since the end of the Cold War. While the conventional combat aspect at the “pointy end of the spear” of power projection has been more moderate in places like Yugoslavia, Somalia, Bosnia and Serbia, and Kosovo, and even against the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2001, the fact that the U.S. military was able to conduct highly complex operations thousands of miles away in austere, hostile environments and sustain those operations as long as required is testament to the ability of U.S. forces to do things that few if any other countries can do.

A modern-day “major combat operation”9 along the lines of those upon which “Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war




Pentagon planners base their requirements would feature a major opponent possessing modern integrated air defenses; naval power (surface and subsurface); advanced combat aircraft (to include bombers); a substantial inventory of short-range, medium-range, and long-range missiles; current-generation ground forces (tanks, armored vehicles, artillery, rockets, and anti-armor weaponry); cruise missiles; and (in some cases) nuclear weapons. Such a situation involving an actor capable of threatening vital national interests would present a challenge that is comprehensively different from the challenges that the U.S. Joint Force has faced in past decades.In fact, 2015 saw a shift in debate within military circles about the extent to which the U.S. military is ready for major conventional warfare, given its focus on counterinsurgency, stability, and advise-and-assist operations over the past decade. The Army in particular has noted the need to reengage in training and exercises that feature larger-scale combined arms maneuver operations, especially to ensure that its higher headquarters elements are up to the task.This Index ascertains the relevance and health of military service capabilities by looking at such factors as average age of equipment, generation of equipment relative to the current state of competitor efforts as reported by the services, and the status of replacement programs meant to introduce more updated systems as older equipment reaches the end of its programmed service life. While some of the information is quite quantitative, other factors could be considered judgment calls made by acknowledged experts in the relevant areas of interest or as addressed by senior service officials when providing testimony to Congress or addressing specific areas in other official statements.It must be determined whether the services possess capabilities that are relevant to the modern combat environment.

Capacity. The U.S. military must have a sufficient quantity of the right capability or capabilities. There is a troubling but fairly consistent trend that characterizes the path from requirement to fielded capability within U.S. military acquisition. Along the way to acquiring the capability, several linked things happen that result in far less of a presumed “critical capability” than supposedly was required.• The manufacturing sector attempts to satisfy the requirements articulated

by the military.• “Unexpected” technological hurdles arise that take longer and much more

money to solve than anyone envisioned.• Programs are lengthened, and cost overruns are addressed (usually with

more money).• Then the realization sets in that the country either cannot afford or is

unwilling to pay the cost of acquiring the total number of platforms originally advocated. The acquisition goal is adjusted downward (if not canceled), and the military finally fields fewer platforms (at higher unit cost) than it originally said it needed to be successful in combat.

As deliberations proceed toward a decision on whether to reduce planned procurement, they rarely focus on and quantify the increase in risk that accompanies the decrease in procurement.

Something similar happens with force structure size: the number of units and total number of personnel the services say they need to meet the objectives established by the Commander in Chief and the Secretary of Defense in their strategic guidance. The Marine Corps has stated that it needs 27 infantry battalions to fully satisfy the validated requirements of the regional Combatant Commanders, yet current funding for defense has





the Corps at 23 on a path to 21. The Army was on a build toward 48 brigade combat teams, but funding reductions now have it at 35 on its way to 24 BCTs by 2019—half the number that the Army originally thought necessary—if sequestration remains law.Older equipment can be updated with new components to keep it relevant, and commanders can employ fewer units more expertly for longer periods of time in an operational theater to accomplish an objective. At some point, however, sheer numbers of updated, modern equipment and trained, fully manned units are likely necessary to win in battle against a credible opponent when the crisis is profound enough to threaten a vital interest.

Capacity (numbers) can be viewed in at least three ways: compared to a stated objective for each category by each service, compared to amounts required to complete various types of operations across a wide range of potential missions as measured against a potential adversary, and as measured against a set benchmark for total national capability. This Index employs as a benchmark the two-MRC metric.The two-MRC benchmark for force sizing is the minimum standard for U.S. hard-power capacity because one will never be able to employ 100 percent of the force at the same time. Some percentage of the force will always be unavailable because of long-term maintenance overhaul (for Navy ships in particular); unit training cycles; employment in myriad engagement and small-crisis response tasks that continue even during major conflicts; and the need to keep some portion of the force uncommitted to serve as a strategic reserve.The historical record shows that the U.S. Army commits 21 BCTs on average to a major conflict; thus, a two-MRC standard would require 42 BCTs available for actual use. But an Army built to field only 42 BCTs would also be an Army that could find itself entirely committed to war, leaving nothing back as a strategic reserve, to replace combat losses, or to handle other U.S. security interests. Again, this Index assesses only the Active component of the services, though with full awareness that the Army also has Reserve and National Guard components that together account for half of the total Army. The additional capacity needed to meet these “above two-MRC requirements” could be handled by these other components or mobilized to supplement Active-component commitments. In fact, this is how the Army thinks about meeting operational demands and is at the heart of the current debate within the total Army about the roles and contributions of the various Army components. A similar situation exists with the Air Force and Marine Corps.10The balance among Active, Reserve, and Guard elements is beyond the scope of this study. Our focus here is on establishing a minimum benchmark for the capacity needed to handle a two-MRC requirement.We conducted a review of the major defense studies (1993 BUR, QDR reports, and independent panel critiques) that are publicly available,11 as well as modern historical instances of major wars (Korea, Vietnam, Gulf War, Operation Iraqi Freedom), to see whether there was any consistent trend in U.S. force allocation. The results of our review are presented in Table 6. To this we added 20 percent, both to account for forces and platforms likely to be unavailable and to provide a strategic reserve to guard against unforeseen demands. Summarizing the totals, this Index concluded that a two-MRC capable Joint Force would consist of:6 Army: 50 BCTs.7 Navy: 346 ships, 624 strike aircraft.8 Air Force: 1,200 fighter/attack aircraft.





9 Marine Corps: 36 battalions.America’s security interests require the services to have the capacity to handle two major regional conflicts successfully.

Readiness. The consequences of the current sharp reductions in funding mandated by sequestration have caused military service officials, senior DOD officials, and even Members of Congress to warn of the dangers of recreating the “hollow force” of the 1970s when units existed on paper but were staffed at reduced levels, minimally trained, and woefully equipped. To avoid this, the services have traded quantity/capacity and modernization to ensure that what they do have is “ready” for employment.

As was the case in 2014, the service chiefs have stated that current and projected levels of funding continue to take a toll on the ability of units to maintain sufficient levels of readiness across the force. Some units have reduced manning. Though progress has been made in some areas due to supplemental funding provided by Congress in 2014, the return of full sequestration threatens to undo these gains. For example:5 General Raymond T. Odierno, former Chief of Staff of the Army, has

stated that the Army can maintain only one-third of its force at acceptable levels of readiness. Each shuttering of a BCT incurs a lengthy restart cost. Specifically, “it takes approximately 30 months to generate a fully manned and trained Regular Army BCT,” and “senior command and control headquarters…take even longer.”12

6 General Mark A. Welsh, Chief of Staff of the Air Force, has noted that if the Air Force shut off all utilities at all major installations for 12 years or quit flying for nearly two years, it would save $12 billion—enough to buy back just one year of sequestered funds.13

7 The Navy is accepting risk in its ability to meet defense strategy “Victorious warriors win first and then go to war, while defeated warriors go to war




requirements according to Admiral Jonathan Greenert, Chief of Naval Operations. He has testified that under current spending limitations, “ships will arrive late to a combat zone, engage in conflict without the benefit of markedly superior combat systems, sensors and networks, or desired levels of munitions inventories.”14

8 Also, the Navy can now surge only one-third of the force required by Combatant Commanders to meet contingency requirements.15

It is one thing to have the right capabilities to defeat the enemy in battle. It is another thing to have a sufficient amount of those capabilities to sustain operations over time and many battles against an enemy, especially when attrition or dispersed operations are significant factors. But sufficient numbers of the right capabilities are rather meaningless if the force is unready to engage in the task.

Scoring. In our final assessments, we tried very hard not to convey a higher level of precision than we think is achievable using unclassified, open-source, publicly available documents; not to reach conclusions that could be viewed as based solely on assertions or opinion; and not to rely solely on data and information that can be highly quantified, since simple numbers do not tell the whole story.

We believe the logic underlying our methodology is sound. This Index drew from a wealth of public testimony from senior government officials, from the work of recognized experts in the defense and national security analytic community, and from historical instances of conflict that seemed most appropriate to this project. This Index considered several questions, including:4 How does one place a value on the combat effectiveness of such concepts

as Air-Sea Battle, Network-centric Operations, Global Strike, or Joint Operational Access?

5 Is it entirely possible to assess accurately (1) how well a small number of newest-generation ships or aircraft will fare against a much larger number of currently modern counterparts when (2) U.S. forces are operating thousands of miles from home, (3) orchestrated with a particular operational concept, and (4) the enemy is leveraging a “home field advantage” that includes strategic depth and much shorter and perhaps better protected lines of communication and (5) might be pursuing much dearer national objectives than the U.S. such that the political will to conduct sustained operations in the face of mounting losses might differ dramatically?

6 How does one neatly quantify the element of combat experience, the health of a supporting workforce, the value of “presence and engagement operations,” and the related force structures and deployment/employment patterns that presumably deter war or mitigate its effects if it does occur?

This Index focused on the primary purpose of military power—to defeat an enemy in combat—and the historical record of major U.S. engagements for evidence of what the U.S. defense establishment has thought was necessary to execute a major conventional war successfully. To this we added the two-MRC benchmark, on-the-record assessments of what the services themselves are saying about their status relative to validated requirements, and the analysis and opinions of various experts in and out of government who have covered these issues for many years.Taking it all together, we rejected scales that would imply extraordinary precision and settled on a scale that conveys broader characterizations of status that range from very weak to very strong. Ultimately, any such assessment is a judgment call informed by quantifiable data, qualitative assessments, thoughtful deliberation, and experience. We





trust that our approach makes sense, is defensible, and is repeatable.








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