Back to 2-and-a-half wars?

An overarching tenet for decades in the American national security planning environment was the ability for the U.S. military to simultaneously conduct two-and-a-half major regional conflicts (MRCs).

Translated, this meant that the United States had the military size to generate and project military force for a major conflict in the European area, a major conflict in the Asian area, and a smaller “brushfire” conflict somewhere else. Going back 30 years, the 1993 “Bottom Up Review” was the seminal Department of Defense planning document that defined the beginning of the pivot away from this classic Cold War viewpoint to a new, post-Soviet era one.

The two-and-a-half MRC advocacy began to erode by the late 1990s with strong arguments that the Department of Defense budget was unsustainable in the face of requirements to re-capitalize Cold War era systems.

The budget process descended into decades of arguing that to pay for new systems, force structure had to be diminished. The flip side of the argument was that peacekeeping requirements (Bosnia, Rwanda, etc.), as well as the massive increase in deployment cycles brought on by the War on Terror, prevented the diminishment of the number of military units.

This led to an unsolvable impasse on the topic. New systems had a bill that could only be paid by cutting units and military personnel. Units and military personnel couldn’t be cut because of the demands of the deployment cycle.

And now the world seems to have descended into a real situation of two-and-a-half conflicts without seeking permission from the force structure planning community.

China Threat Re-awakening This National Security Imperative

The war in Ukraine drags on, but with some momentum perceptible as Ukrainian forces appear to have established a firm beachhead across the Dnipro River in a drive toward Crimea. After decades of relative peace, now the Middle East is inflamed as Israel strikes into the Gaza Strip to destroy Hamas terrorists while holding additional Iranian-backed proxies in southern Lebanon, Syria, the West Bank, and Houthi missile fire from Yemen in check. Meanwhile, there’s the specter of even greater conflict in the possibility of strategic strikes as Iran threatens Israel (and America).

In the two-and-a-half MRC calculus, it’s not clear whether these contagions are the “two-and-a-half,” or even possibly the “two-and-a-half-plus,” of the retro MRC worldview.

Hamas and the Houthis are proxies for Iran; Iran is a proxy for China. Russia, mired in the death and destruction it created, is a proxy for China. In December 2021, Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin met virtually, weeks before Russia invaded Ukraine, and agreed to a “no limits” partnership to topple American leadership of the world system.

Tensions in the Pacific have increased as China has greatly elevated its military exercises—demonstrations toward Taiwan and the Philippines. The Fiscal Year 2023 National Defense Authorization Act and related appropriations greatly increased American military spending while making numerous declarative statements of support for Taiwan, which has significantly displeased China.

Air Force and Navy in the Lead

With the upward trajectory of the American defense budget and the existence of an ongoing or building two-and-a-half-plus MRC world whether we like it or not, the question is, what force structure strategy and policy should be in effect?

The common outcome of the national security budget debate is what’s called “salami slicing,” where all military services and requirements take equal cuts or equal plus-ups. This is often the normalcy of the defense debate within and between the executive and legislative branches of the U.S. government.

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