11 Mar 13
Jim Lacey is not afraid to pull the beards of his bosses.
Jim Lacey is a professor of Strategic Studies at the United
States Marine Corps War College. In a
recently published article he demolishes point by point the campaign of the
Navy and Air Force chiefs of staff to grab a greater share of the defense
budget. Though he and I see eye to eye
on this issue, we reach diametrically opposite conclusions regarding Canada.
Interservice rivalry in the United States is more obvious and
bloody than here in nice, civilized Canada.
Entire political campaigns are launched from the Pentagon to gain the
favor of important Senators and congressmen for one service project or
another. Together, the pentagon and
congressional committees conspire against the unsuspecting taxpayer to put
spending programs into particular congressional districts that favor the
re-election of the congressman or Senator on the congressional committees. The pentagon, in turn, gets a bigger empire.
It’s called “bringing home the bacon.”
Nothing like this happens in Canada because, for one thing,
there is no bacon.
Jim Lacey is unconcerned with bringing home congressional
bacon. What he is concerned with an
adjective often associated with victory, namely “decisive.”
Decisiveness is our mutual point of departure.
The US Navy and Air Force have put together a military
doctrine which they call the Air-Sea Battle, appropriated from the now thirty
year old Air-Land Battle concept. The
Gulf Wars of 1991 and 2003 were applications of the Air-Land Battle
concept. The US Navy and Air Force
believe the growing military threat from China requires the development of an
air-sea battle concept for the United States to keep sea lanes open in the
western Pacific and Indian oceans. Of
course, this requires money.
The US defense budget absorbed a self-imposed whack of a 10
% reduction in expenditures over the next ten years. On top of this comes another 10 % reduction
through a budget constraint known as “the sequester.” While the US defense budget may see some
funds restored, the long term prospect is for lower spending levels, smaller
forces, less equipment, and lower readiness.
Some would say this is a good thing. Unless you rely upon US military force for
one’s protection.
Lacey attacks the new balance in lower spending among the
services being proposed by the Navy and Air Force. He argues forcefully that the true arm of
decision are land forces, and therefore land forces are deserving of having its
funding given preference over that of the other services.
He attacks the work of Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan, The Influence of Sea Power upon History,
saying that Mahan argued only half the story.
Reading Mahan, Lacey says, one would never get the idea that armies had
anything to do with the wars Mahan wrote about.
On account of British sea power, one would never get the impression from
reading Mahan’s work that the Brits lost the American Revolutionary war, and
that Napoleon hung around for another ten years after his fleet was destroyed
by Nelson at Trafalgar in 1805. The surface
fleets of both Britain and Germany were reduced to near worthlessness in World
War I, and neither were decisive in the outcome of the war. The battle of Midway, Lacey concedes, turned
the tide of the war in the Pacific, but three years of land battles lay ahead
to destroy Japanese power.
In the air, despite years of bombing round the clock, German
manufacturing escalated every year until reaching its peak in September, 1944,
when loss of terrain caused a loss of essential supplies such as petrol. The only truly decisive blow struck by air
power alone was the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan in August, 1945.
Air power and naval power are great ancillaries to land
power, Lacey says. To what purpose,
then, is enabling the opening of an air and sea corridor? To enable the employment of land forces –
whose power of rendering decision was deprived by diverting spending to air and
sea power!
Canada is in a different strategic situation, and Canadian
generals should take no comfort from Lacey’s case. The US Army is capable of being an arm of
decision; Canada’s army is not. A
Canadian expeditionary force will always be too small to achieve decisive
results.
Surveying our possible enemies, Canadian peacetime
expenditures preferentially belong on a navy that can strike a heavy blow at a
particular center of gravity.
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XXX –
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