University Times

While the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have dominated the U.S. armed forces’ attention for several years, the military continues to plan for other possible conflicts, according to one of the nation’s leading national security strategy experts.

“I will not give you the solution to what’s going on in Iraq and Afghanistan. I don’t have it. I’m not an expert on Iraq,” acknowledged Maj. Gen. Paul J. Selva, director of Air Force strategic planning, deputy chief of staff for strategic plans and programs and director of the Air Force quadrennial defense review at the U.S. Air Force headquarters in Washington, D.C.

Selva spoke at Pitt Jan. 17 on “The Conflict After Iraq — What Will It Look Like? Are We Prepared?” The lecture was sponsored by the Matthew B. Ridgway Center for International Security Studies, part of the Graduate School of Public and International Affairs.

“As the Air Force strategic planners, my team has spent a lot of time looking at the world as we think it might emerge 15-30 years from now,” Selva said.

Although military conflict planning is a decidedly inexact science, Selva said, history offers several examples of where it has been done successfully on the world stage.

“We’ve been pretty good at this in our past,” Selva said. “Those of you who have studied the strategies that were laid out prior to World War II [know] there were very few surprises in the war in the Pacific.”

Plan Orange, the U.S. Navy plan developed after World War I, was a near-perfect model for military operations in the event Japan went from being a trading partner to an enemy, Selva said. That plan had only two surprises, he said: Pearl Harbor and the atomic bomb.

“We didn’t know how the war was going to start and weren’t quite sure how it was going to end, but we got the middle almost exactly right,” Selva said. “We knew that the process of beating back that threat would require an island-hopping campaign, that we would have to build air bases on islands in the western Pacific and that ultimately we would use those as sending-off points in what we believed would be an invasion [of Japan] and the ultimate defeat of the Japanese army.”

Cold War strategists, particularly George F. Kennan, an American ambassador and state department adviser who became known as “the father of containment,” also succeeded in sound military planning.

“At the end of World War II the world as we knew it changed,” Selva said. “The implicit things [we knew] from the interactions of Churchill, Roosevelt and Stalin during the war … allowed us to predict that the world would fracture into a bipolar world at the end of that war; that the allies, which included the Russians, would very quickly become enemies; that, as Winston Churchill described, an Iron Curtain would fall across Europe.”

In response, Kennan developed the strategy of containment: “Surround the Communists, hopefully limit their expansion and allow the rest of the free world to become a capitalistic functioning economy with natural interaction as trading partners with free nations,” Selva said.

The Cold War was like a game of chess, he said. “It was a very fair game: The board was 8×8 [squares], there were black pieces and white pieces. We fought in surrogate wars, but we never faced the Russians head on. And we did engage in competitive strategies: How can we influence what the Russians do?”

Containment strategy today has been modified with the advent of nuclear weapons and the fall of the Soviet Union, Selva said. “The question is: How do we look at what might be the natural interactions of free nations in a global market economy that is growing increasingly complex, and what does that mean for national security policy over the next 15 to 30 years?”

Selva cited three broad trends that represent potential military threats over the next two decades. “If we look at the broad trends that exist in our world today and attempt to understand those trends, then we can place ourselves in a situation as a nation to continue our position of global reach. That is a profound challenge for all of us,” he maintained.

“One is the existence and the pervasive nature of radical extremist movements,” he said.

While the global economy has been described as a rising tide that lifts all boats, Selva said, “some of the boats are small, and some people riding on those boats consider themselves the most disenfranchised population in the world. And that can breed some really interesting ideologies, like, ‘I hate George Bush, I hate your government, but I love Americans.’ Something about the way they think about the United States is to separate the people of the country from the country itself, from the leadership of the country. That is very unhealthy. It is those kinds of radical movements that are likely to come in conflict with us, because of [their penchant for violent] deliberate acts.”

A second potential threat comes from strong states that want to dominant their weaker neighbors.

“These are regional powers that want to influence the people around them. They’re not interested in banging into us. But because of a miscalculation or a deliberate act, we could find ourselves in a military confrontation,” Selva noted.

He said a classic example of this kind of confrontation occurred earlier this month in the face-off between U.S. Navy ships and Iranian speedboats in the Strait of Hormuz.

“Was that act deliberate? Was it an accident? Was it an action by someone not following the military commanders? All questions that need to be answered,” Selva said. “But that kind of miscalculation can result in an act of war.”

The third volatile trend is the potential for the rise of a “peer competitor.” “That is a military euphemism for a country that can defeat us and destroy our way of life,” he said. “We do have the most capable military on the face of the planet, and that’s not likely to change in the next decade. But there are several countries that have a strategy they call anti-access and area denial.”

That strategy manifests itself in building navies strong enough to neutralize the U.S. Navy, and narrowly targeting U.S. high-tech systems to block their effectiveness within a country’s territory.

From a national security strategist’s perspective, he said, the biggest danger signal is the rapidly deteriorating military materiel.

“The Army, Navy and Air Force that we have today is the same as when I joined [the service] 27 years ago. The lion’s share of our equipment is old. The planes we have are as old as I am,” Selva said. “We designed this military to react to the worst possible set of threats we could imagine at that time, like oppression in Europe from the Soviet Union. We have to be able to adapt to a much more rapidly changing national security environment.”

Over the last 50 years the power of the U.S. military and the country’s influence on the global political environment have allowed economic growth, free trade and discourse between nations that is unprecedented in human history, he said.

“How much are you willing to invest to sustain that position? Because in the end, national security strategy, looking at broad trends, understanding how nations interact, is about sustaining our position as a nation,” Selva said.

“I will tell you today we are ready for whatever happens in Iraq and what comes after Iraq. The Air Force is ready; the nation is ready. What is less clear is will we be prepared a decade from now or two decades from now for those threats that are very real. The choice is ours: We can choose to sustain our position and global influence or we can fade and simply go along for the ride.”

In a polite but occasionally argumentative question-and-answer session following Selva’s Jan. 17 lecture, audience members probed some of the major general’s opinions.

One member asked Selva how military strategists in their planning can inoculate themselves against bad intelligence, such as the lack of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Selva said he believes in the “principle of relentless skepticism” within the community of planners. “Take nothing at face value. Ask the hard questions first,” he said. That guiding principle will not prevent all tactical errors, but will help reduce their costliness, he said.

Another audience member questioned Selva’s description of a sample radical ideology as one that hates the U.S. government but loves the American people, because, she said, she herself feels that way in the current climate. Military actions are politically and economically motivated and are started by rich politicians, not military strategists, she asserted. “Perhaps the chain of command is not a particularly good idea,” she said.

Selva responded, “I subscribe to civilian control of the military, which prevents the military from becoming too belligerent. I don’t swear allegiance to the government. I swear allegiance to support the Constitution against all enemies, foreign and domestic. My obligation is to provide the best military advice to the policy makers, and I won’t regret what they do with it. If I do disagree, it’s my obligation to say so, and if I profoundly disagree on philosophical grounds, it’s my obligation to take off my uniform [and resign].”

A third questioner asked Selva to address the difference between global influence and interference.

“You use influence when you’re a player in a community of nations,” Selva said. “The use of power or influence and the projection of force are two different things. Force is sometimes necessary, and sometimes it just won’t work.”

Selva gave as an example the Middle East where there is inter-Muslim turmoil as well as disputes between the Israelis and the Palestinians. “All these parties don’t see eye to eye,” he said. “Projections of force are not going to work, but projections of influence could work — leaning on the Israelis, leaning on the Saudis, leaning on Hammas.”

Using influence also can have residual positive effects, Selva said.

When the U.S. military responded to a request from the Pakistani government to aid earthquake victims, the humanitarian aid was swift and gained the support of the Pakistani people. An underlying message of that mission, Selva said, was “if we could use humanitarian force, we can just as easily bring an iron fist, and they respect us for that.”

Regarding a question on the threat of so-called peer competitors, Selva said that maintaining superior military capability was one part of deterrence. “But it’s not just a matter of hardware and training,” he said. “It’s a matter of how do they see us? During the Cold War, we still talked to the Russians. We need to knock off the silliness of not talking [to our enemies] in order to avoid an accident. We’re not there yet with Iran or North Korea.”

—Peter Hart