Failed States and Casualty Phobia: Implications for Force Structure and Technology Choices

: The emergence of failed states as the principal source of international political instability and the appearance of mounting casualty phobia among U.S. political and military elites have significant force structure and technology implications. Overseas, intra-state and often irregular warfare is displacing large-scale inter-state conventional combat. At home, there has arisen a new generation of political and military leadership that displays an unprecedented timidity in using force. Yet the Pentagon continues to prepare to refight the Korean and Gulf Wars simultaneously, no less and to invest heavily in force structures whose commitment to combat would invite politically unacceptable casualties. The air war over Serbia should be a warning to U.S. force planners: In contingencies not involving direct threats to manifestly vital U.S. interests the post-Cold War norm, elevation of force protection to equal or greater importance than mission accomplishment mandates primary, even exclusive reliance on air power. It further mandates expanded investment in stand-off precision-strike munitions and other technologies providing greater range and accuracy. The Army's combat arms were more or less irrelevant to the war against Serbia because of that service's comparative strategic immobility, and because a casualty-phobic White House and Pentagon leadership had already decided to withhold U.S. ground combat forces from exposure to combat. Yet the war against a tiny, isolated, third-rate military power consumed almost one half the Air Force's deployable combat assets. The defense budget debate of recent years has predictably focused on the scope and wisdom of the post-Cold War cuts in overall defense spending.