Military forces consist not just of the services, but also special operations forces, civilians, contractors, and non-DOD agencies. In his final white paper in a series on U.S. forces, CSIS’s Mark Cancian analyzes recent changes to these other national security elements.
The Army struggles to grow its force structure as it takes steps towards modernization for great power conflict. In the fourth white paper in his series on U.S. forces, CSIS’s Mark Cancian analyzes the Army’s plans and challenges for growth and modernization.
The Marine Corps is developing capabilities for great power conflict after decades of counterinsurgency. In the third white paper in a series on U.S. forces, CSIS’s Mark Cancian analyzes the Marine Corps’ force structure, strategic reorientation, and long-term challenges.
This first white paper in Mark Cancian’s military forces series analyzes the strategy and budget context for building forces in FY 2020, criticisms of the strategy, budget and resulting force plans, and risks for sustaining force levels in the future.
The overall theme of this year’s military forces report is the struggle to align forces and strategy, unrelenting operational demands, and legacy programs whose smooth operations and strong constituencies inhibit rapid change.
The future poses two risks to the administration’s plans: (1) the lack of real growth in future budgets will hamper the launching of further initiatives; and (2) a softening of public, and then political, support could undermine both budgets and an engagement strategy.
When the United States invaded Afghanistan after the attacks on September 11, 2001, and
overthrew the Taliban regime, senior military officers were not predicting that the United
States would remain militarily involved 18 years later.
Recent reports of unsafe conditions and unresponsive repair services require immediate action by the Defense Department to fix the problems—but not kill the program.
The budget deal’s large defense increase in FY 2019 allows the Department of Defense (DOD) to do a lot more than it was doing before, but not everything. A major trade-off is with force structure. The forces proposed are more than what Secretary of Defense James Mattis had originally signaled but less than what President Donald Trump’s rhetoric had implied.
The Department of Defense (DOD) faces a strategic choice: whether to focus on modernization for high-tech conflicts with China and Russia or expand forces and improve readiness to meet a superpower’s commitments for ongoing conflicts and crisis response. In their FY 2018 budgets, the services all complain that they are too small for the demands being put on them and hedge toward expanding forces and readiness. In the new DOD strategy being developed for 2019 and beyond, the services hope to pursue all three goals—expand forces, improve readiness, and increase modernization—but the fiscal future is highly uncertain, and they will likely have to make difficult trade-offs.