The Army's $200 Billion Makeover

Alec Klein at the Washington Post has a fascinating article on the modernization of the US Army, the most far-reaching effort in over half a century, The Army's $200 Billion Makeover:

The project originated in part in 1995 when Maj. Gen. Robert H. Scales Jr., now retired, launched a series of war games. As director of the Army After Next project, his job was to divine the nature of war a quarter century hence. So Scales assembled a team of about 700, including members of the Army, Air Force, Marines, the CIA and civilian scientists, who warred over the next two years in a huge simulation center at the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle, Pa. "The Army had never done it -- they thought I was off my rocker," he said.

The blue team represented the Americans. The red were the Iranians, who in one scenario captured Riyadh and began executing the royal Saudi family on live television. That drew the blue team into the streets of Riyadh, which, choked with heavy armor, became a bloody mess. Scales, building on earlier military research, realized that the United States needed a lighter, highly mobile force.

He called it the "Aha moment."

Then a fiasco hastened the Army's commitment to modernize. In 1999, the Army was bogged down in muddy logistics as it sought to move Apache helicopters into Albania so they could be used in the Kosovo war. They didn't make it before the fight ended, an embarrassment that prompted Army Chief of Staff Eric K. Shinseki to declare that the service needed to get lighter and faster -- quickly.

In 2000, the Project for the New American Century (our current crop of neo-cons) delivered the gem, "Rebuilding America's Defenses":

...V. CREATING TOMORROW’S DOMINANT FORCE


To preserve American military preeminence in the coming decades, the
Department of Defense must move more aggressively to experiment with new
technologies and operational concepts, and seek to exploit the emerging
revolution in military affairs.... the Pentagon, constrained by limited budgets
and pressing current missions, has seen funding for experimentation and
transformation crowded out in recent years.

Any serious effort at transformation must occur within the larger framework
of U.S. national security strategy, military missions and defense budgets. The
United States cannot simply declare a “strategic pause” while experimenting
with new technologies and operational concepts. Nor can it choose to
pursue a transformation strategy that would decouple American and allied
interests. A transformation strategy that solely pursued capabilities for
projecting force from the United States, for example, and sacrificed
forward basing and presence, would be at odds with larger American policy
goals and would trouble American allies.

Further, the process of transformation, even if it brings revolutionary
change, is likely to be a long one, absent some catastrophic and catalyzing
event – like a new Pearl Harbor....

-- REBUILDING AMERICA’S DEFENSES
Strategy, Forces and Resources For a New Century
A Report of The Project for the New American Century
September 2000


... And within the year, the miracle happened.