Dempsey Wants to ‘Rebalance the Use of Military Power’

At the top of the United States mil­it­ary’s vast, glob­al bur­eau­cracy sits the chair­man of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the highest-rank­ing mil­it­ary of­ficer in the land and the pres­id­ent’s seni­or mil­it­ary ad­visor. The chair­man sits between the four-star ser­vice chiefs on one side, and the four-star com­batant com­mand­ers on the oth­er. The chiefs are re­spons­ible for de­vel­op­ing, train­ing and equip­ping the armed forces for the fu­ture. The com­mand­ers are re­spons­ible for de­ploy­ing those forces, and their fo­cus is on the ap­plic­a­tion of mil­it­ary power to mit­ig­ate crises of the day. Between them in that “sup­ply and de­mand” equa­tion sits Gen. Mar­tin De­mp­sey mit­ig­at­ing dis­putes and fash­ion­ing tradeoffs.

As U.S. com­bat forces with­draw from Afgh­anistan this year, the ser­vice chiefs are try­ing to man­age a force draw­down across the mil­it­ary as com­batant com­mand­ers cope with myri­ad crises and an un­stable world. That has made De­mp­sey’s job one of the most dif­fi­cult of any chair­man of the Joint Chiefs in mod­ern times. De­fense One con­trib­ut­or James Kit­field re­cently dis­cussed those chal­lenges with De­mp­sey. Ed­ited ex­cerpts from their in­ter­view fol­low:

De­mp­sey: Well, I’m go­ing to get a little philo­soph­ic with you here, but when you look at what the mil­it­ary in­stru­ment of power can ac­com­plish, it is ac­tu­ally more ef­fect­ive in deal­ing with strength-on-strength situ­ations than it is in deal­ing with strength-on-weak­ness scen­ari­os. And we’re find­ing that a weak­en­ing of struc­tures and cent­ral au­thor­ity is per­vas­ive in today’s world. The Middle East is a poster child for that dy­nam­ic. But if you look at al­most any sec­tor of civil­iz­a­tion — from in­ter­na­tion­al or­gan­iz­a­tions, to big cor­por­a­tions to places of wor­ship — their au­thor­ity has di­min­ished over the past dec­ade. That has to do with the spread of tech­no­logy that has made in­form­a­tion so ubi­quit­ous in today’s world. But the res­ult has been a weakened in­ter­na­tion­al or­der. And frankly, it’s harder to ar­tic­u­late the prop­er use of mil­it­ary power in that en­vir­on­ment as op­posed to a world with stronger cen­ters of au­thor­ity.De­fense One: Even be­fore the U.S. has pulled its last com­bat troops out of Afgh­anistan, the ad­min­is­tra­tion is be­ing widely cri­ti­cized for its re­luct­ance to use mil­it­ary force in re­sponse to nu­mer­ous oth­er crises. How do you bal­ance the fre­quent de­mands for a U.S. mil­it­ary re­sponse with a stressed force and war-weary Amer­ic­an pub­lic?

De­fense One: How does a weak­en­ing in­ter­na­tion­al or­der im­pact your think­ing on the best uses of mil­it­ary power?

De­mp­sey: Well, it means you have to re­bal­ance the in­stru­ment of mil­it­ary power. I would sug­gest to you that there are ba­sic­ally three ways we can in­flu­ence the se­cur­ity en­vir­on­ment around the world: dir­ect mil­it­ary ac­tion, build­ing part­ner­ship ca­pa­city and en­abling oth­er act­ors. Hon­estly, this is not ma­gic, and there’s not much more to it than that.

Over the past 10 years we’ve done most of our heavy-lift­ing on the dir­ect ac­tion side. In­creas­ingly, we are do­ing more, however, to build part­ners so that they can counter threats in their own re­gions. We are also en­abling oth­er na­tions to act. A good ex­ample is the way we’re part­ner­ing with the French in Mali [to counter al-Qaeda-linked ter­ror­ists] in West Africa.

As I look for­ward and think about the need to re­bal­ance the use of mil­it­ary power, I think we will need less dir­ect ac­tion be­cause it is the most costly, dis­rupt­ive and con­tro­ver­sial use of Amer­ic­an power. By con­trast, we need to do more in terms of build­ing part­ners. I’m a huge ad­voc­ate of doub­ling or even trip­ling our ef­fort to build cred­ible part­ners around the globe. And I’m also a huge ad­voc­ate of en­abling oth­ers who have the will, but per­haps not the cap­ab­il­ity to act.

De­fense One: When talk­ing about the many chal­lenges and threats the U.S. mil­it­ary must re­spond to, you break them down in­to a “Two, Two, Two and One” con­struct. Can you walk us through your think­ing?

De­mp­sey: Well, there are the two heavy­weights in Rus­sia and China. There are two mid­dle­weights in Ir­an and North Korea. There are two net­works, in terms of al-Qaeda and its af­fil­i­ates. And then there’s the one new do­main, which is cy­ber. All of them re­quire a some­what dif­fer­ent ap­proach. In terms of the two heavy­weights, for in­stance, I’m not pre­dis­posed to the idea that our re­la­tion­ship with either Rus­sia or China will in­ev­it­ably lead to con­flict. In fact, there’s every reas­on to be­lieve that we should be able to chart a path that won’t lead to con­front­a­tion. But Rus­sia’s ac­tions in Ukraine are troub­ling pre­cisely be­cause they are dis­rupt­ing the in­ter­na­tion­al or­der we ascribe to, which holds that na­tion­al bound­ar­ies and bor­ders are de­cided through an in­tern­al elect­or­al pro­cess, and not from the out­side.

De­fense One: And your pre­ferred re­sponse?

De­mp­sey: My per­son­al view is that this is a mo­ment for NATOto de­cide what it in­tends to be in the fu­ture. You know, the NATOal­li­ance has done a great job in part­ner­ing with us in Afgh­anistan. That showed the al­li­ance was will­ing to look bey­ond its own bor­ders and be­come a re­gion­al force for good and sta­bil­ity. Now I think the crisis in Ukraine is caus­ing NATOto look back to its own back­yard, and for­cing it to de­cide wheth­er it still has the cap­ab­il­ity and ca­pa­city to re­as­sure its mem­ber states — es­pe­cially those East­ern coun­tries that em­braced NATO as it en­larged in the 1990s — that the al­li­ance re­mains cred­ible. So the Ukraine crisis is a chal­lenge to the in­ter­na­tion­al or­der, and we should re­spond to it as part of ourNATO al­li­ance.

De­fense One: Doesn’t NATO need to re­dis­cov­er its old Cold War mis­sion of de­terrence?

De­mp­sey: That’s ex­actly right. But back to my “Two, Two, Two and One,” con­struct, de­terrence has a some­what dif­fer­ent mean­ing in each case. With the two heavy­weights Rus­sia and China, that’s clear state-on-state de­terrence. With the mid­dle­weights like Ir­an and North Korea, de­terrence takes on a dif­fer­ent role, be­cause they can be less pre­dict­able and more roguish. And when you’re talk­ing about net­works like al-Qaeda and its af­fil­i­ates, I’m not sure you can de­ter a net­work — I think you just have to de­feat it. But to your point about NATO and Rus­sia, when you’re talk­ing about an al­li­ance of na­tions and state act­ors, in that case I think we do need to re­vis­it what it means to “de­ter.”

De­fense One: Some ex­perts be­lieve China’s dis­pute with Ja­pan and oth­er neigh­bors over con­tested is­lands has pro­duced the most volat­ile situ­ation in Asia in many years. Are you wor­ried that a mis­cal­cu­la­tion could draw U.S. forces in­to a con­front­a­tion with China on be­half of our treaty ally Ja­pan?

De­mp­sey: Well, cer­tainly the po­ten­tial for mis­cal­cu­la­tion con­cerns me. I don’t think China or any of our Asia-Pa­cific part­ners seek con­front­a­tion, but the more they feel a need to as­sert their ter­rit­ori­al claims, the great­er the risk of mis­cal­cu­la­tion. So we spend a lot of time try­ing to put in place codes of con­duct and ac­cep­ted rules of be­ha­vi­or so that when our forces do in­ter­act the pos­sib­il­ity for mis­cal­cu­la­tion is lim­ited. The chal­lenge is this patch­work quilt of is­sues that ex­ist in the Asia-Pa­cific re­gion, and the his­tor­ic an­im­os­it­ies that un­der­pin them.

For in­stance, we just re­cently saw China con­fis­cate a Ja­pan­ese ves­sel as com­pens­a­tion for a World War II debt. In the United States, we may not think that any­one in the 21st cen­tury still thinks in those terms, but in Asia some of these an­im­os­it­ies are as real today as they were many dec­ades ago. Secondly, you also have the dy­nam­ic of a China that’s rising in the in­ter­na­tion­al or­der, and Chinese lead­ers may not feel that they’ve had a suf­fi­cient voice in es­tab­lish­ing that or­der.

De­fense One: Is the re­la­tion­ship you de­scribe with a rising China as tricky as it sounds?

De­mp­sey: I’ll give you an ex­ample of how we deal with it on a mil­it­ary-to-mil­it­ary basis. When I vis­ited China last year it was in the af­ter­glow of the meet­ing between Pres­id­ent Xi [Jin­ping] and Pres­id­ent Obama, when both lead­ers ex­pressed a fun­da­ment­al de­sire to es­tab­lish a new re­la­tion­ship. When I met with my Chinese mil­it­ary coun­ter­parts they said, ‘This is great, we’re go­ing to take a blank sheet of pa­per and build a new re­la­tion­ship.’ And I replied, ‘Well, not so fast.’ It just so hap­pens we’ve already got some writ­ing on our pa­per, so it’s not blank. For starters, we’ve got his­tor­ic re­la­tion­ships with the Re­pub­lic of Korea, the Phil­ip­pines, Ja­pan and Aus­tralia. And I said, ‘Surely you wouldn’t ask us to ig­nore those re­la­tion­ships?’ Well, of course they’d love for us to ig­nore them! [laughter] But the point is the United States doesn’t have a blank sheet of pa­per in the Asia-Pa­cific re­gion, and that means we have to stay en­gaged and keep man­aging all of these com­plic­ated re­la­tion­ships and this patch­work of is­sues.

De­fense One: Are you con­cerned that the pro­longed civil war in Syr­ia, which con­tin­ues to at­tract thou­sands of Is­lam­ist ji­hadi fight­ers from around the world, be­gins to re­semble the civil war in Afgh­anistan in the 1990s that gave rise to al-Qaeda and the Taliban?

De­mp­sey: As you know there is a his­tor­ic, sec­tari­an fault-line that runs from Beirut, Le­ban­on all the way to Bagh­dad, Ir­aq, and that is a fun­da­ment­al prob­lem. And Syr­ia has be­come a mag­net for mil­it­ants who want to wage ji­had against the West or in­tern­ally against oth­er Muslims and that is also very dan­ger­ous. But I don’t be­lieve the mil­it­ary in­stru­ment of power, by it­self, is go­ing to change the fun­da­ment­al dy­nam­ics there. So our ap­proach across the re­gion is to con­tin­ue to work with re­gion­al part­ners, and to en­able those part­ners by build­ing ca­pa­city.

De­fense One: Left to burn, might not the Syr­i­an civil war destabil­ize the en­tire Middle East along that sec­tari­an fault-line between Sun­nis and Shiites, em­power­ing ex­trem­ists on both sides?

De­mp­sey: We’re try­ing to un­der­stand and gauge the ele­ment of time in the Syr­i­an crisis. Again, not to sound too philo­soph­ic­al, but there are dif­fer­ent Greek words for chro­no­lo­gic­al time, and the no­tion of the “right time.” There are oth­er very prom­in­ent re­gion­al ini­ti­at­ives go­ing on, for in­stance, such as the re­mov­al of chem­ic­al weapons from Syr­ia. So as mil­it­ary lead­ers, we’re try­ing to provide our best ad­vice on the cap­ab­il­it­ies we can bring to bear in terms of build­ing part­ners in the re­gion, en­abling them, and tak­ing dir­ect ac­tion, and when is the right time to em­ploy those cap­ab­il­it­ies. And by the way, there’s a lot of dis­agree­ment in this city on those is­sues among well-mean­ing people.

De­fense One: You and the oth­er mem­bers of the Joint Chiefs have is­sued dire warn­ings about the im­pact of budget cuts as­so­ci­ated with the “se­quester” spend­ing caps. Are you frus­trated that no one seems to be listen­ing?

De­mp­sey: I’ve dis­covered that the two hard­est words to ad­equately ar­tic­u­late in my line of work are “risk” and “read­i­ness.”

Risk is hard be­cause the mean­ing is so dy­nam­ic. It’s a com­bin­a­tion of cap­ab­il­ity and in­tent on the part of those people who would do us ill, and frankly, you can meas­ure cap­ab­il­ity but it’s hard to meas­ure in­tent. So risk is ex­traordin­ar­ily dif­fi­cult to ar­tic­u­late in a way that people un­der­stand.

Read­i­ness is also very dy­nam­ic, and it means something dif­fer­ent for each ser­vice. The Air Force, the Navy and the Army all meas­ure read­i­ness slightly dif­fer­ently. So when you tie the words “risk” and “read­i­ness’ in­to doc­u­ments like the Quad­ren­ni­al De­fense Re­view or the De­fense Stra­tegic Guid­ance, of­ten times people will hear what they want to hear.

De­fense One: Do you stand by your state­ment that U.S. mil­it­ary forces are on a path of de­cline that, un­less re­versed, will reach a point where “it would be im­mor­al to use that force”?

De­mp­sey: The prob­lem is we’re kind of the vic­tims of our own suc­cess. Whenev­er a crisis comes up — wheth­er it’s a hu­man­it­ari­an crisis, dis­aster re­lief, or par­tic­u­larly a se­cur­ity threat — we tend to just deal with them. Frankly, that is dis­guising the suf­fer­ing our men and wo­men in uni­form are en­dur­ing from all this un­cer­tainty. How big a force will we be? How ready will we be? Will we have the money ne­ces­sary to equip and train ourselves prop­erly?

Whenev­er I travel to learn what’s on the minds of the young men and wo­men who serve, and their fam­il­ies, the clear­er it be­comes to me that the greatest risk we run right now as an armed force is un­cer­tainty. That’s not to say I would em­brace se­quest­ra­tion spend­ing levels, be­cause I ac­tu­ally be­lieve they will take us to a level that puts the na­tion at risk. But I do think there is a level of spend­ing between where we are and [se­quest­ra­tion spend­ing caps], where we could do the na­tion’s bid­ding. I’ve said to our elec­ted lead­ers, both in the ex­ec­ut­ive branch and in Con­gress, that we need budget cer­tainty, flex­ib­il­ity and more time.

De­fense One: Flex­ib­il­ity to do what?

De­mp­sey: To close the ex­cess in­fra­struc­ture we don’t need, kill the weapons sys­tems we no longer need in fa­vor of the ones we do need, and make mod­est ad­just­ments to paid com­pens­a­tion and health care to slow the growth in our per­son­nel costs. If giv­en that flex­ib­il­ity we could find the re­sources ne­ces­sary to get the job done for the coun­try.

De­fense One: How much more time do you need to downs­ize and re­shape U.S. mil­it­ary forces?

De­mp­sey: First of all, we can’t do this one year at a time, or even in 5-year in­cre­ments. If you let us spread this chal­lenge over 10 years, however, with more flex­ib­il­ity and budget cer­tainty, then we can fig­ure it out, and do the things that make us the world’s greatest mil­it­ary. We can re­shape the force, re­cap­it­al­ize and mod­ern­ize its equip­ment, train it to our former high stand­ards, and also treat the young people who are go­ing to leave the ser­vice with dig­nity and re­spect. But if we con­tin­ue down this path of one-year-at-a-time, death-by-a-thou­sand cuts budgets, without cer­tainty, flex­ib­il­ity or ad­equate time, then I worry that we could break this force. Lack­ing those things, and driv­en to se­quest­ra­tion spend­ing levels, we will end up with aU.S. mil­it­ary that is both too small and not ready. That is a dan­ger­ous mix for this coun­try.

De­fense One: Do you think that mes­sage is re­gis­ter­ing in Wash­ing­ton?

De­mp­sey: Well, it’s my job to ar­tic­u­late and ex­plain it, and I’m not shirk­ing that job. I have been work­ing at this now for 2-and-a-half years. But wheth­er it’s be­cause of my in­ab­il­ity to be per­suas­ive, or be­cause no one is listen­ing, we’re still on the path of se­quest­ra­tion. And that is a very dan­ger­ous path.

De­fense One: What’s your as­sess­ment of the per­form­ance of the all-vo­lun­teer mil­it­ary in its first peri­od of ex­ten­ded war, and the im­pact of a dec­ade of con­flict on its over­all health?

De­mp­sey: Well, first of all, I re­mem­ber com­ing in­to a con­script army as a young sol­dier, and then it was re-en­gin­eered in­to an all-vo­lun­teer force. As you know, it was nev­er ori­gin­ally in­ten­ded to fight a pro­trac­ted con­flict of the sort that we’ve been in­volved in for the past dec­ade. The in­tent was to have the all-vo­lun­teer force at the start of a con­flict, and then to re­in­force it either with a re­turn to the draft or a full mo­bil­iz­a­tion [of the re­serves]. So the all-vo­lun­teer force was nev­er sized, frankly, to bear the bur­den of a pro­trac­ted con­flict and con­stant de­ploy­ments and re­deploy­ments. And yet that’s what we asked it to do, and I would say the all-vo­lun­teer force per­formed mag­ni­fi­cently.

De­fense One: Do you feel the stress of so many war­time de­ploy­ments has taken a toll?

De­mp­sey: When you vis­ited me in Ir­aq in 2003-2004, in the middle of what turned in­to a 14-month de­ploy­ment, if you had asked me then what would hap­pen if these troops have to do three or four more de­ploy­ments over the next dec­ade, I would have told you that it would break the force. For­get the costs and even the hu­man di­men­sion of those who wear the uni­form, I just didn’t be­lieve that the fam­il­ies could bear up un­der that kind of pres­sure and strain. And yet they did. Even today, in some cases sol­diers are more wor­ried about not de­ploy­ing than about hav­ing to de­ploy again, though their fam­il­ies may feel dif­fer­ently. So when you ask me about the health of the all-vo­lun­teer force, I can’t an­swer in any oth­er way than to say they’re mag­ni­fi­cent.

De­fense One: Giv­en that the cost of field­ing an in­di­vidu­al sol­dier has more than doubled dur­ing these wars, isn’t the all-vo­lun­teer force also very ex­pens­ive?

De­mp­sey: Well, an all-vo­lun­teer force is more ex­pens­ive, that’s just the way it is. And we cer­tainly can­not af­ford to take those vo­lun­teers for gran­ted. We can’t take for gran­ted the fact that we’ve been able to at­tract the best of Amer­ic­an youth in­to the mil­it­ary, or that they have stayed with us and been will­ing to de­ploy and re­deploy at such fre­quent in­ter­vals.

Look­ing for­ward, I cer­tainly hope the na­tion con­tin­ues to com­mit to hav­ing an all-vo­lun­teer force, as op­posed to go­ing back to some sort of con­scrip­tion. In fact my strongest ad­vice to our elec­ted lead­ers is that we as a na­tion con­tin­ue to in­vest in an all-vo­lun­teer force