With Exercises in Asia, US Army Searches for Relevance
With Exercises in Asia, US Army Searches for Relevance by Anna Fifield, Washington Post
… It’s not war, or even a very close resemblance to war. But in a region of the world where there are enough territorial disputes on the islands surrounding Japan that battle sometimes feels possible, this is an exercise that reveals two military forces looking to redefine their mission. One is American, the other Japanese.
On a recent fall day, with fresh snow on the mountains here on the northern island of Hokkaido, American and Japanese soldiers were learning how to work together with different equipment, different capabilities and different languages.
The Orient Shield exercises, the latest iteration of which were held on this Japanese military base, ended Friday.
They are taking place at a time of immense change for both militaries: the Japanese Self-Defense Forces, as they are officially called, are gearing up to take on a bigger role in the region and expand their capabilities…
It’s worrisome that a reporter from a major newspaper uses such small minded rhetoric. Anna claims the Army is searching for relevance through engagement with our allies, yet the Army has always conducted exercises with its allies to improve interoperability and strengthen the alliance. The point is bigger than that, an Army in garrison, just as a Navy in port, maintain their relevance simply by their existence. An Army or Navy in being still deters, and gives our leaders options should the need for military capabilities be needed.
Anna’s implication is that the services must be employed and/or tied to a war plan to be relevant, and both concepts are outdated. Tying units to a war plan is a relic from the Cold War that probably needs to go away, we need a much more flexible approach for determining force structure that addresses a wider range of contingencies today, to include peacetime engagement. The point about being employed to show relevance was a mindset developed in the military after the collapse of the USSR. The U.S. appropriately downsized the military, so the reaction by the military was to show utility by deploying forces on a wide range of missions and exercises to show Congress how busy we were. To be fair, the military didn’t say hey let’s go to Bosnia, Kosovo, and Haiti, but upon return from those missions there was little rest before units deployed on off post training exercises, so the optempo was extremely high, and some units did everything they could to keep their optempo high to demonstrate relevance. Supposedly units that didn’t maintain a high optempo were at risk of being cut. Fortunately that belief didn’t apply to our nuclear forces or strategic bombers.
There are draw backs to this type of thinking. The first is a propensity for employing the military where it is not required. The second is the expenses associated with those employments. There is a Chinese proverb, “Train an Army for 1000 days to use it for one hour.” A success metric of our state craft could be how long we can keep the army in garrison, vice deployed; however, it is pretty clear that in today’s world we can’t keep the army in garrison even we wanted to, so Anna’s comment is even more bizarre.
Zosimus, 5th-century CE, historian:
“Thus to save money, Constantine abolished frontier security by removing the greater part of the soldiery from the frontiers to the cities — cities that needed no auxiliary forces. Thus, while he deprived of help the people who were harassed by the barbarians — and burdened tranquil cities with the pest of the military — such that several straightway were deserted.”
Likewise today President Obama’s “Pivot to the East” would seem to remove the greater part of the Army from where it is needed most on the frontier (the Greater Middle East) and placed it in areas of the world (the Asia-Pacific) where there is no need for such forces.
Thus, President Obama, much like Constitine, would seem to have:
a. Deprived of help the people on the frontier who needed significant help, while, simultaneously,
b. Burdened tranquial states, societies and populations with an influx of unneeded military forces.
In Constinine’s time, such a “grand strategy,” according to Zosimus, led to:
1. The frontier populations looking to the barberians (much as they are beginning to look to the radical Islamists today?) for protection.
2. Discord in the previously tranquil cities and regions. (A similar fate to those regions of the Asia-Pacific today who will, now, be burdended, unnecessarily and imprudently, with our forces?) And, ultimately,
3. To the demise of the Roman Empires.
Thus, a comparison — and for the reasons noted by Zosimus regarding Rome — worth considering re: our current grand strategy?
The future is always uncertain – but what an army does is crystal clear.
nations tend to fail strategically when they forget either of those two things.