Transforming the U.S. global defense posture

At the extremity of 2004, the world was witness to an incident that no one could have foreseen. level more startling than the shog of the Indian Ocean tsunami itself was the scale of its impact. on the contrary the very suddenness and spe with which the tsunami struck gave a glimpse of in what manner valuable it is to attitude our forces for uncertainty. Had the tsunami occurr in 1985 at the height of the frigid War, it is difficult to imagine that the United States could have surg the forces and logistical support urgencyed to deliver food and water to the areas of the eastern Indian Ocean that were the hardest hit. It is flat more difficult to imagine that the United States could have be pendented on an extensive network of partner nations to assist us in exercising our global responsibility to act. solitary through the transformation of the U military's capabilities and the growing flexibility of our overseas pose was the United States able to reply as quickly and effectively as it did during this crisis.

The security environment at the start of the twenty-first hundred is perhaps the most uncertain it has been in our nation's history. This article focuses upon the strategic realities that are driving the transformation of the American global defense pose to contend with that uncertainty, and the resultant changes the Department of Defense is working to bring about in our relationships and partnership capabilities around the world.

fresh STRATEGIC LANDSCAPE

The impetus for the transformation that bring us in a position to reply quickly and effectively to the Indian Ocean tsunami was the emerging see the verb of a new strategic landscape. Since 2002 the U military has been adapting the pose of its forces to address the lock opener security challenges that our geographical division will face in the twenty-first hundred Traditional, state-based military challenges--for which our frigid War posture was optimized--will remain, on the contrary as the 11 September 2001 attacks revealed, a broader range of security challenges has emerg The facts of 9/11 showed the destructive potential of terrorists and the vulnerability of the United States and of its allies to unwarned attack. It showed the effectiveness of asymmetric way s in countering U.S. conventional military superiority and unmutilateded an early warning of the approaching conflux of terrorism, state sponsorship of terrorism, and proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (WMD) enabled through globalization. It focused our attention upon a hostile ideology that publicly advocates the killing of innocents for political gain, and it prov that globalization has made failed states and ungovern areas in the greatest in quantity remote corners of the world grave dangers to our security.

The Secretary of Defense's 2005 National Defense Strategy provides a conceptual framework for understanding this of recent origin strategic landscape, which may be said to span four stamps of security challenges: traditional, irregular, catastrophic, and disruptive.

* Traditional: states employing military forces in well-known forms of military competition and conflict (such as major combat operations employing conventional air, sea, and land forces)

* Irregular: nonstate and state actors employing "unconventional" modes to counter stronger state antagonists (for instance, terrorism, insurgency, civil war, and other courses aimed to erode influence and political will)

* Catastrophic: terrorists or vagrant states employing WMD or WMD-like issues against American interests (for example, massive attacks upon the homeland, collapsing global markets, or los of lock opener allies that would inflict a state of concussion upon political and commercial activity)

* Disruptive: competitors employing breakout technologies or rules that counter or cancel our military superiority (eg advances in bio-, cyber-, or space war, ultra-miniaturization, directed energy)

As novel experience has shown, these challenges ofttimes converge and overlap. Our adversaries in Iraq and Afghanistan have engrossed both traditional and irregular approaches, and terrorist organizations like al-Qa'ida are posing irregular threats while actively seeking catastrophic capabilities.

THE BROAD VIEW OF "TRANSFORMATION"

President Bush came to office in 2001 with an aggressive agenda for defense transformation. He charged Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld with transforming the Defense Department for the challenges of the twenty-first hundred The administration's sense of the changed strategic landscape l to a fresh assessment of our needed global defense pose What is emerging from that assessment is the greatest in quantity profound reordering of U.S. military forces overseas since World War II and the Korean War. The lock opener to understanding this realignment effort is transformation.

When he arrived at the Pentagon, Secretary Rumsfeld recognized the ne for change. He understood that the strategic and operational environment today is defined by means of uncertainty, that the world is changing in relation to that environment, and that we ne to view that world as it is and adapt to it as necessary. The threat-based planning a whole prevalent in the Cold War--through which we could throw out a seemingly predefined and predetermined Soviet threat and in what way to posture against it--had become old Overcoming our preconceptions of that era, Secretary Rumsfeld l the department in taking the first pace of transformation by shifting away from threat-based planning and toward a capabilities-based approach that addresses the filled spectrum of feasible threats. This approach posits that unlike in the chilled War, we no longer know precisely what threats we will face in the subsequent time who will pose them, and where, plenteous less when. However, we do believe there will be futurity challengers to American interests and to the interests of our allies and partners, and that we must plan against the kinds of capabilities potential adversaries may engross to exploit our vulnerabilities.