A central tenet of U.S. national strategy since the beginning of the Cold War has been the maintenance of technological military superiority over our adversaries. Indeed, since our extensive use of precision strike capabilities, stealth aircraft and other innovations during Operation Desert Storm in 1991, there has been a broad consensus that the United States has an overwhelming dominance in conventional warfare, causing our adversaries to resort to asymmetric and irregular warfare.

Since 2014, however, the Obama administration has signaled, through public statements and the Department of Defense’s initiation of the Defense Innovation Initiative (DII), that the United States’ “overmatch” is threatened, and the long-standing U.S. military supremacy in high-intensity conventional warfare is eroding. Therefore, the objective of the DII is to identify and develop what has been called a “Third Offset,” a set of game-changing technologies that will restore or sustain our military dominance for the future.

Since DII’s inauguration, DoD has elaborated on the the “Third Offset” and announced a wide range of activities to support its goal of sustaining and advancing the American military’s “unfair competitive advantage.” After months of effort, DoD’s leaders recently identified autonomy and artificial intelligence technologies as the core elements of what they believe our new overmatch will be.

The Third Offset thus is off and flying in the defense world; signals from senior DoD leaders have been received throughout the Pentagon and in the defense industry. The Third Offset, somewhat like “defense transformation” and the “revolution in military affairs” before it, is now central to the defense ecosystem—in the policy community, from government to think tanks to academia, the armed services, the research and development and acquisition communities, industry, and Congress. And, to a fair degree, the Third Offset has been accepted at face value without much debate.

But before the Third Offset flies too far, we need to ask the critical question: whether we are soaring in the right direction. Or, are we, like Icarus, on the wrong flight path, flying too close to the sun, apparently out of hubris?

Undoubtedly, the “Third Offset” is a useful tool to focus on the need for innovation to ensure future national security. It has encouraged critical thinking and experimentation with not only new technologies, but a combination of new operational and organizational concepts for applying them. As DoD has rightly recognized, successful innovation is not merely about technology, but the ability to effectively utilize that technology in modern warfare, from doctrine to organization to operations to tactics and training. The administration should be applauded for this effort and the change process it has generated; the Defense Department is a large, conservative and sometimes risk-averse organization to which change often comes slowly.

However, a series of fundamental questions needs to be addressed by the next administration as it seeks to shape future military forces so as to sustain our qualitative edge and the deterrence it fosters:

• First, is the United States’ qualitative military edge over its adversaries really eroding?

• Second, is the notion of an offset, or disruptive game changer, that conveys a sustained qualitative edge a realistic construct given the nature of warfare and innovation?

• Third, is Russia really an actual or near “great power,” that warrants serious consideration in shaping our force of the future?

• Fourth, are autonomy and artificial intelligence, the technologies on which the identified future offset is founded, what we should build around and what will afford the United States a sustained advantage?

• Finally, is the direction in which the “offset strategy” is shifting the Pentagon’s focus—away from irregular wars and toward “big power” conflict—the right one in light of the likely threats we will face in the future?

The next administration needs to consider these issues as it decides whether to terminate, change the trajectory of or keep on course the flight of the Third Offset. Under the offset rubric or another approach, the United States needs to develop a properly balanced strategy and supporting defense investments that examines future threats and determines the proper mix of capabilities for the future force.

I. Is the Core Assumption Correct: Is U.S. Military Dominance Eroding?

In a 2014 kickoff speech at National Defense University, Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert Work identified the “First Offset” as the development of a large and robust U.S. nuclear arsenal during the 1950s. This U.S. nuclear advantage then receded, as the Soviet Union developed a full panoply of nuclear weapons (and chose not to compete in nuclear weapons by adopting a strategy of mutually assured destruction).

The so-called “Second Offset,” based on advanced microelectronics and information technology developed during the 1970s and 1980s, resulted in a generation of smart weapons linked to networked sensors targeting systems and command-and-control systems. The U.S. advantage in conventional forces derived from the Second Offset, and the deterrence it generates, has been sustained for a generation.

Thus, the threshold question is whether the core underlying assumption of the DII is correct—namely, that the United States’ military superiority, based on our dominance in precision weaponry and related capabilities, is now eroding.

While senior defense leaders did not explicitly claim this when unveiling the initiative in 2014, their statements over time increasingly stressed this point. While the formulations have varied somewhat, from claiming that our margin of technological superiority “is eroding” to saying it is “at near-term risk” to, as Deputy Secretary Work recently put it, “slowly eroding,” the underlying message is the same. Whether the United States’ military superiority in fact has eroded or is eroding is a question that can only be evaluated carefully across the broad spectrum of capability areas and realistic threat scenarios.

The DoD conclusion appears to be based largely on concerns that Russia and China have made significant investments in select areas, apparently enhancing their capabilities to challenge U.S. dominance in these areas. Both seem to be focusing in particular on a range of “anti-access” and “area denial” capabilities to prevent the United States from intervening in specific parts of the world, or at least, to make such intervention prohibitively expensive. Recent provocations by both Russia and China undoubtedly reinforce this view.

As Deputy Secretary Work observed, other nations have studied U.S. technological superiority and “set about devising ways to compete. Today, many of these earlier innovations. . . have proliferated widely” and have become available to our adversaries. Russia and China, he recently stated, have invested considerably to achieve “rough guided munitions parity with the United States.”

Other areas of investment by potential adversaries have included cyber and electronic warfare, including jamming or disruption of the Global Positioning System (GPS), on which the United States relies for navigation, precision weapons guidance and even communications.

But many of the anti-access capabilities being fielded by our potential adversaries that are now attracting attention are not new, but were developed in the Cold War. The Soviet Union deployed antiship ballistic missiles, cruise missiles and antisatellite systems in much larger numbers in the 1980s, and the United States developed countermeasures for each. But, with the end of the Cold War, the United States retired many of our very capable Cold War systems designed to address these anti-access threats (e.g., the F-14 Tomcat, the S-3 Viking carrier-based antisubmarine warfare aircraft, and Aegis cruisers) and, in effect, let those capabilities atrophy as the threat receded. Addressing these challenges is less about greater technological innovation and more about restoring capabilities that the United States once had, either through the development of new systems, or, potentially, by returning older systems to service (e.g., with line restarts where it is cost-effective).

Overall, while there may be select areas where our margin has been reduced, it is difficult to find a strong basis to assume an across the board erosion of U.S. military superiority. In core conventional capabilities—from fighter aircraft and unmanned aerial vehicles, to naval power projection, to ground systems, to our major intelligence, reconnaissance and reconnaissance systems—the United States still holds a considerable lead in technology, quantity and the ability to effectively integrate these capabilities into our forces. While there has been talk of new advanced development programs in these areas by our adversaries, there has been little demonstrable action in terms of new fielded systems. Beyond prototypes displayed at air shows, there is no evidence that either Russia or China have really built and deployed a fifth-generation fighter jet on par with the F-22 or F-35.

U.S. dominance in electronic capabilities and net-centric warfare, including precision strike (the so-called second offset) also remains significant due to the complexity of the enabling technologies to field these capabilities and the cost of acquiring and maintaining them in sufficient numbers to make a difference in sustained conflict. It is one thing for an adversary to copy a laser-guided bomb or JDAM, but another thing entirely to produce them in large quantities and integrate them with advanced C4ISR systems (command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance) to create an effective precision strike system. Not surprisingly, there is little evidence that other countries have developed such seamless capabilities in any quantities to date.

Thus, in any direct, broad-scope, conventional confrontation, it is difficult to believe that the United States’ unique and large combination of lethal, networked systems and platforms, with a panoply of strike and defensive systems, would not be dominant. Moreover, U.S. economic power should not be dismissed from the equation. Building a large, robust conventional-warfare capability is prohibitively expensive, which is why so few countries even try.

It may be, as several of our military leaders have stated, that the United States has reduced its force structure and readiness to the point where it is stretched thin. There also may be discrete contingencies, as there always have been, where our offset is less significant than in others. But on balance, against even a near-peer competitor, the United States still has an overwhelming advantage, qualitatively and numerically. And, as Stalin said, “quantity has a quality of its own.”

In sum, assessing the degree of U.S. military dominance is more art than science. The next administration undoubtedly will shape its own approach to defense planning, with its own assumptions about what threats are reasonably foreseeable, what capabilities our budgets can bear and, ultimately, how to define dominance. Nevertheless, whatever approach is selected, there is no reasonable basis to assume U.S. military superiority is substantially eroding.

II. The Role of “Game-Changing” Offsets in Modern Warfare and Innovation

Both the nature of warfare and the innovative process suggest that the quest for an offset—central game changers that can sustain our military leadership for a generation—is more myth than reality.

A. Game Changers are Few Between and Fleeting in Warfare

Historically, true technological revolutions in military affairs are few and far between. The use of the horse, the development of the composite bow, and the introduction of iron weapons, firearms and nuclear weapons: all these represent true step discontinuities that changed the face of warfare in profound ways. Almost all other military innovations have been largely incremental in nature.

In essence, warfare tends to follow a “punctuated equilibrium” model: long periods of stasis or gradual change, followed by short bursts of radical innovation. And, technological superiority only conveys transient advantages; a new technology rapidly proliferates, negating the initial advantage it conveyed.

The United States’ conventional dominance in the last quarter century is largely an historical aberration rather than a pattern likely to be repeated. The combination of the Reagan buildup, the collapse of the USSR, internal pressures on China and the unwillingness of most other countries to invest in military forces at a time of relative peace meant that the United States was, effectively, unchallenged. It is extraordinary that the United States has reduced its force structure to less than half of what it was at the end of the Cold War, and yet remains more powerful than the next largest military by an order of magnitude.

But history is unlikely to repeat itself, given the dynamics of the global security environment today. Viewed in historical context, the quest for a Third Offset “strategy” focused on one or several technologies or capabilities seems unrealistic.

The Multiplicity of Future Threats. In contrast to the Cold War, where we faced one central threat—to deter and, if necessary, blunt a Soviet thrust into West Germany—today we face a wide range of symmetric and asymmetric threats from a many potential adversaries possessing diverse technologies, organizational constructs and operational methods.

Thus, we certainly can and should drive for innovations that afford us comparative advantages in some key areas, but it is unreasonable to expect that we can develop one or even a handful of breakthroughs that apply across the board against all emerging threats, let alone afford us a sustained overmatch.

The Ephemeral Nature of Offsets. Moreover, any overmatch achieved will likely prove fleeting. Ironically, the very reasons that DoD cites for our apparent loss of an overmatch in the first place—notably, the proliferation of advanced technologies—make it unlikely we can obtain another sustainable broad spectrum overmatch in the future.

B. Directed Offsets as the Antithesis of the Messy Innovative Process

Meaningful defense innovation is not easy or necessarily quick; it’s not like squeezing toothpaste out of a tube. Unfortunately, there is no direct correlation between innovation “inputs” and “outputs.” There is a range of factors that may lead to innovation, including a proper legal enabling environment, a strong talent pool of innovators, financing, collaboration and other variables. But even if all the right inputs are in place, innovation is hard to achieve, unpredictable and may take considerable time, with trials and errors along the way.

The difficulty is compounded when the goal is to produce “game-changing” innovation or offsets. The notion that the United States can, in advance, identify and target a developmental area as an “offset” and then proceed to implement it runs contrary to the nature of the innovative process; it implies that innovation is top-down rather than bottom-up. While top-level decisions played a role in the development of the second offset, for the most part the process was more bottom-up in nature, disjointed and organic, with fractured programs and failures, and tended to originate with technical solutions to local operational requirements.

Technology Investments Are Risky, and Few Prove Out. To borrow an analogy from the investment world, there is a substantial difference between a diversified portfolio of potential investments and a large “bet” on a single stock. Perhaps Warren Buffet has the investment acumen to make one or even several bets and succeed, but history shows most people cannot. Indeed, venture capitalists know that for every bet they make on an early stage high tech start up, most will fail.

The Need for a Diversified Portfolio of R & D Investments. Thus, given the broad spectrum of threats we face and the range of technologies that could make a difference when used in various operational concepts, DoD ought to act like a prudent financial portfolio manager in making R & D investments in the future force.

Investment (security) risks should be spread or mitigated and overall returns (security benefits) maximized by maintaining a diversified portfolio of “equities” (R & D investments) that allocates funds among different elements of the portfolio. Of course, the allocation probably should not be equal; capabilities should be prioritized based on risk assessment, probability of return on investment, time horizons, applicability to a sensible operational concept and other relevant considerations.

III. Russia as a “Great-Power Threat”: Really?

The “Third Offset” is framed as a needed response to “a resurgent, revanchist Russia and a rising China,” countries Deputy Secretary Work views as emerging “great powers” with sufficient military assets to challenge the United States in an all-out conventional war and nuclear deterrents that could survive a first strike.

There is little doubt that China, a peer or near-peer competitor, is a long-term threat. Making significant, but selective investments in defense, China has focused on its naval, air, space and cyberspace capabilities, including a new generation of ballistic missiles, new attack and ballistic-missile submarines, a fifth-generation fighter, antisatellite weapons, hypersonic strike weapons, and a host of anti-carrier weapons.

The real debate centers on Russia, and whether its capabilities should be viewed as a threat relevant to shaping future U.S. forces and the Third Offset.

Certainly, Russia’s recent aggressive actions in Ukraine and Syria mark a sea change in approach. President Vladimir Putin is now far more willing to take a more assertive role in global affairs, using Russia’s military capabilities to support its perceived interests, even if it risks violating international norms and facing international sanctions or international condemnation.

There are any number of reasons for Russia’s new posture, including a desire to reclaim a leadership role on the world stage; opportunism (exploiting situations that have arisen to further its interests, as in Ukraine); the vacuum left by limited U.S. and Western engagement (especially in Syria); and the building of domestic support for the regime, in light of difficult economic difficulties resulting from the collapse of oil prices.

To be sure, there likely are boundaries on future Russian actions, which to date have been limited to traditional areas of Russian influence. Nevertheless, it is fair to conclude that the Russian threat has grown, and that the United States and its allies should be better prepared for a range of hybrid contingencies. NATO is taking steps to fortify its eastern flank, including a U.S. armored brigade deployed on a rotating basis in Eastern European member states.

Yet it is important to distinguish between steps to address the Russian threat by: (1) enhancing the deployment, operations, readiness and training of our current and modernizing force (to ensure that we retain the skills and capability for high intensity warfare) and (2) creating a force of the future with an “overmatch.” Notwithstanding Russia’s aggressive actions in Ukraine and Syria, it is difficult to view Russia, in the long term, as a resurgent great power that warrants significant consideration in shaping the future force and the Third Offset.

Russia’s Limited Resources and Declining Population. While it has some seven thousand nuclear weapons, Russia has an economy smaller than that of Italy and a rapidly aging and shrinking population. Moreover, with a heavily petrodollar-based economy, plummeting oil prices have resulted in significant reductions in Russian GDP over the last several years (negative 3 percent in 2015), with further contractions likely.

After years of allowing its military forces to atrophy (with the exception, perhaps, of its Strategic Rocket Forces), Russia has had ambitions to grow its defense budget and modernize its forces, announcing an increase to $75 billion as recently as 2014. However, these plans have largely been put on hold, with the devaluation of the ruble reducing Russian purchasing power roughly in half (i.e., to the equivalent of $35 billion annually). Subsequently, Russia announced it would be cutting its 2016 defense budget by 5 percent while it faces additional expenses due to its higher tempo of operations (in Syria and along the border with Ukraine). International sanctions are also likely to have an effect on Russia’s defense production as many high-tech items needed must be procured from international vendors.

Thus, fiscal reality doesn’t leave the resources for force modernization let alone the development of new advanced weaponry that DoD has raised concerns over. And, comparatively speaking, the entire Russian defense budget is a small fraction (7 to 8 percent) of U.S. defense spending.

Russia’s Limited Military Modernization. Most of Russia’s military equipment was produced in the Soviet era. Most of its twelve-thousand-plus tanks are in poor repair, and only roughly 2,800 are operational (mostly 1970s-vintage T-72s). Even the vaunted Russian air defense systems were developed under the Soviet Union and only been subject to incremental improvements. The Russian air force presently relies on combat aircraft designed (and mostly built) during the Cold War, and the Russian navy similarly relies on aging ships and submarines in a poor state of repair, manned by poorly trained crews.

While Russia has made some limited use of modern equipment in Syria and Ukraine, including UAVs, laser-guided bombs and missiles as well as electro-optical weapons, most of the Russian capabilities deployed in these operations are older systems from a prior era.

By all accounts, Russia’s efforts to modernize its defense capabilities to date have been limited at best. Despite the appearance of new products in the pipeline, Russia has been unable to develop a new main battle tank or infantry fighting vehicle, and still relies on Soviet designs inferior to those of the United States. Its future fighter program, PAK-FA, has stalled over cost and technical issues, and its promise of new carriers and heavy bombers have not been realized.

Russia has successfully modernized is its strategic nuclear force, which is seen as politically useful, both for intimidating its neighbors and maintaining Russia’s image as a great power. There has been some talk of Russia redeploying low-yield tactical nuclear weapons as a potential counter to U.S superiority in precision weapons, but whether this is a credible threat is debatable. Russia well knows that crossing the nuclear firebreak would bring the risk of uncontrolled escalation, something Russia would probably not be willing to do in pursuit of limited regional objectives.

The Russian military also has repeatedly attempted and failed to professionalize its military forces. Unable to attract volunteers, it still relies on unpopular conscription; draft evasion is endemic. As a result, Russia today has, in effect, two militaries: a small, professionalized force of perhaps one hundred thousand men, and a much larger force of poorly trained, poorly motivated conscripts with obsolete, poorly maintained equipment. The former is capable of maintaining internal security, conducting small-scale expeditionary operations, and perhaps seizing and occupying portions of neighboring countries in the face of light or disorganized opposition. The latter has very limited military utility.

There are serious questions whether Russia will be able, for the foreseeable future, to mount a sustained challenge to U.S. military power. Russia is most likely to be a regional power with aging forces and selectively modernized capabilities in discrete areas where cost-effective investments can be made (like the cyber domain). Thus, Russia has some capability to create havoc along its periphery and pose challenges in select other areas. But the notion of Russia as a “resurgent” great power and Russian capabilities as a frame of reference for an “offset strategy”—i.e., the development of our force of the future—is debatable at best.

IV. Autonomy as the Centerpiece of the Third Offset: Is This a Good Bet?

“The third offset strategy is based on the premise that advances in artificial intelligence and autonomy will allow the joint force to develop and operate advanced joint, collaborative human-machine battle networks that synchronize simultaneous operations in space, air, sea, undersea, ground, and cyber domains.”—Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert Work

The assertion that autonomy and artificial intelligence will be central to the Third Offset also bears considerable scrutiny.

Legitimate Areas for Investment, But Should We Bet the “Work(s)”? There is no doubt that these specific technology areas, in which the United States has invested for years, are advancing. Anyone who test-drives a Tesla, with its driverless autopilot feature, can attest to the fact that autonomous capabilities are arriving in the commercial sector. Certainly, as ideas go, these continue to be worthwhile ones for R & D investment—they are future technologies that are rapidly accelerating and warrant our focus, as one focus among others.

But the question is whether there is a basis for betting the house, or the “Work(s),” so to speak, on these particular ideas at this juncture? Where is the evidence that leads us to believe, with any degree of confidence, that these will be the enabling framework for the Third Offset, if there in fact is one.

A number of factors give one pause when considering this question:

• Are We Wise Enough to Know? At a conceptual level, who can identify today the centerpiece of an “offset” for a future force that will not be fielded for many years. Given the messy, unpredictable nature of innovation, is it bordering on hubris or chutzpah to take this view? On balance, developing a DoD, and service-centric autonomy plans—efforts now underway—appear premature.

• A Range of Capabilities Will Likely Sustain U.S. Military Leadership. In the future, we are likely to face a wide range of threats rather than a singular “Cold War” challenge, and will likely need a range of capabilities in different domains to address those threats. Thus, it is hard to believe that any single technology, including autonomy, will convey an overriding “overmatch” across the board. It is far more likely that any U.S. military dominance would be achieved in the future through a combination of different operational constructs and technologies that span a range of capability areas, from virtual reality to cyber technology to biotech.

• Why Will Autonomy Necessarily Yield a Sustained Overmatch? Even if these technologies become sufficiently mature to use on the battlefield, will they provide a competitive advantage, let alone one that can be sustained, given the proliferation of relevant commercial technologies and investments made by other countries?

• A Disconnect Between the Russian Threat and Autonomy Solution. While autonomy is a prudent long-term bet with China in mind, do we really need this capability to address Russia, given its inherent economic and demographic constraints, and its limited military capability and ability to invest for the future? There are other strategic approaches for dealing with what is essentially a regional power with the ability to conduct expeditionary warfare in certain limited situations.

• The Machine Interface: Ethics and Value-Added. A central ethical issue, which conjures up the Skynet program from the Terminator movies, is whether we would cede all control to the machines, removing the human interface especially over potentially lethal decision-making functions. Deputy Secretary Work has suggested we will always retain the option to keep human beings in the loop (Iron Man, rather than Skynet) and has highlighted the importance of man-machine interfaces. But will these innovations will in fact yield benefits to the war fighter if we leave humans in the loop and, by definition, automatically slow down the engagement cycle?

• Technical Challenges. Finally, there is a host of technical challenges in this area as well, including latency (the time for data to go from the unmanned platform to control and back again), situational awareness, unprogrammed situations that machine intelligence may not be equipped to handle, and the like, as well as cost.

In sum, many issues, including “unknown unknowns,” may derail autonomy as a Third Offset—we just lack the foresight to know if it will succeed. Whether this technology makes the difficult, long-term transition from the laboratory to the war fighter remains to be seen. In truth, an offset, if there is one, is something that only lends itself to description after the fact, when it is there for us to behold.

Put another way, if autonomy becomes the centerpiece of our overmatch going forward, it is likely not because of top down guidance from DoD, but because years of defense investments, trials and errors, including some failures, come to fruition. At best, DoD may be putting a punctuation mark on something that has been happening for years, perhaps giving it a little push toward the goal line.

Thus, some investment in autonomy certainly is warranted but there is no basis to bet the “Work(s).” Rather, we need a portfolio of sustained investments in different technologies, constructs and organizational structures—and considerable experimentation—to address the reality that we just don’t know what the future “offset” might be until it happens.

V. The Implications of the Third Offset and the Renewed Focus on Threat-Based Planning: Should We Tilt Away from Irregular Warfare?

The Third Offset reflects a broader realignment of defense planning now underway that moves the needle back to a more central focus on “great-power” conflicts and high-intensity warfare, to the clear detriment of irregular warfare capabilities.

The broad question faced by the next administration will be whether the Third Offset and shift in defense-planning constructs risks creating an imprudent over-shift away from irregular and low intensity warfare.

A Shift to Threat-Based Planning. In rolling out the 2017 budget, Secretary Carter clearly signaled the reorientation away from a capabilities-based defense planning that has dominated in the last fifteen years, and to a more threat-based approach. Due to changes in the international environment, he observed, the United States needs to focus on developing the capabilities to defeat five specific threats: Russia, China, North Korea, Iran and terrorism (with a particular focus on defeating ISIL).

With Russia and China as our “most stressing competitors,” Secretary Carter highlighted the need to focus more on developing “full-spectrum” capabilities that can deter and defend against “high-end” threats. As a corollary, Deputy Secretary Work has gone even further and stated in clear language that we need to “shift away from irregular warfare and toward high-end adversaries”—namely, Russia and China.

The Pack May Be Back: The Prospects of Reverse Pull

Thus, as noted at the outset, the “Third Offset” is now off and flying. Top level signals have been rippling through the Pentagon, and DoD components are shifting their priorities accordingly: from the policy community, to the R & D and acquisition ecosystem, to the armed services. The effect of such signals cannot be underestimated, and have a serious impact in the large Pentagon bureaucracy, where military officials are trained to follow orders.

Thus, officials at all levels are now marching forward; speeches, PowerPoints and actions at all levels now reflect the Third Offset, autonomy and the like. In the broader defense arena, think tanks have held one symposium after another on the subject, and numerous articles and studies has been written. One can barely attend a conference today on defense without these issues being central. Congress also has gotten into the act, with hearings and legislation reflecting the new concepts. In short, a new “pack mentality” is emerging, in which nearly every program in the Pentagon now will try to associate itself with the Third Offset and “autonomy” to draw off whatever new funding exists for this initiative. The Army is busily rolling out its autonomy strategy for the future.

The Third Offset as the New “Defense Transformation”: An Empty Vessel?

The “pack mentality” has a number of consequences. First, there is a very real risk that the “Third Offset” becomes an amorphous concept bereft of operational or technological meaning. Indeed, the broad language of “autonomy” and “man-machine interface” being used could describe virtually half the DoD acquisition and development programs of record.

This is precisely what happened with the “defense transformation” and “revolution in military affairs” initiatives in the 1990s: they became all things to all people, and eventually were reduced to buzzwords with little or no strategic, operational or acquisition-related meaning. The Army’s assertion at the time that the Cold War–era Crusader program was “transformational” was the ultimate proof the term lacked substance. Indeed, at one point, Bush administration officials began to refer to transformation as a “state of mind” and “a journey, not an end state.”[4]

There is evidence this phenomenon is already at work. Deputy Secretary Work has expanded his original definition of the Third Offset, focused on autonomy and AI, to include hypersonic propulsion for rapid, precision strike weapons, as well as space capabilities. He now speaks of “offset strategies” in the plural, and focuses more broadly on offsets as an approach to maintain conventional deterrence across the board.

In sum, to the extent that Third Offset construct broadens and is not bounded, it potentially will no longer have significance as a technology-based military strategy or future force structure; it would be an empty vehicle without tangible content. Thus, DoD leadership would be wise to bound it, and make clear that it has limited application—lest it become all things to all people.

The Implications for Defense Investments: What is the Proper Balance?       

Finally, there is a real risk that the “pack mentality” will result in a repeat of the post-Vietnam reversion of defense strategy, away from counterinsurgency and other forms of low-intensity warfare that we are more likely to face, in favor of “full-spectrum” capabilities for the “big wars” that we are less likely to fight. This risks short-changing the development of inexpensive, but potentially important soldier systems and other low-intensity and tactical capabilities.

The debate over the future priority of irregular warfare is most significant for the Army, which faces continued questions over its future roles and missions. Even after 9/11, the Air Force and Navy, by the nature of their capabilities, necessarily focused more on high-intensity warfare and the deterrence these capabilities generate. The Army has been the predominant service focused on irregular war in all of its dimensions.

However, there have long been elements in the Army encouraging the drift away from irregular warfare. They view the decade plus of counterinsurgency as a diversion from the Army’s historic mission—its DNA, if you will—which is more along the lines of defending the Fulda Gap. Thus, they welcome the refocus on great power competition, and would prefer to renew the Army’s focus on developing new, and potentially expensive, future fighting vehicles as part of a “full-spectrum” Army: code language for returning to a high-intensity focus.

The risk of over-shift should not be discounted. In recent years, the pendulum had already shifted significantly away from irregular warfare as our operations in Iraq and Afghanistan wound down, low-intensity conflict became politically less desirable, and sequestration created significant budgetary pressures. There is clear evidence that our capability for low-intensity warfare is beginning to attenuate in all of its dimensions, from organizational structure, to training, to defense investment, to the interagency and civil-military component.

To this day, the Army’s organizational embrace of low-intensity warfare remains tenuous—without a true bureaucratic home, clear career paths and the like. The Army’s Irregular Warfare Fusion Cell, created to assess, integrate and coordinate irregular warfare activities and capabilities across the U.S. Army and joint services, was closed its in 2014. The Army’s capabilities for large-scale irregular warfare contingencies have certainly been scaled back, and a review of the Army’s investment accounts indicates a clear focus on high-intensity capabilities such as combat and related vehicles.

The next administration must carefully assess the merits of this shift away from irregular warfare. First, what is the realistic probability that the United States is likely to fight high-intensity wars in the near-to-medium term—do Russia’s limited actions to date and China’s investments and minor provocations really mean we face significant risks in this arena in the foreseeable future?

Second, what changes in U.S. capabilities and investments are needed to address these threats? Even during the last fifteen years, as we focused on irregular warfare operationally, we have continued to sustain sizable investments in the air and naval capabilities needed for these contingencies, and have expanded our efforts in space, cyber and other domains. Thus, while further investments may be warranted at the margin in these areas, do we really need to significantly enhance our capabilities in these domains?

The rubber hits the road with ground combat capabilities for high-intensity conflict. Are there really scenarios in which the United States will need capabilities beyond those provided by the current Bradley and Abrams vehicles? With technology evolving rapidly in many areas, a cogent argument can be made that the most sensible approach for the Army is continued development of prototype vehicles and experimentation, but without committing to any type of expensive new vehicle development programs for the foreseeable future. Modernized versions of existing systems, with lateral technology insertion from experimental programs, could potentially suffice until it is apparent these capabilities no longer address the threat.

Finally, why believe that the next decade or more will be different than the last decade? A reasonable case can be made that irregular and other low-intensity warfare (from counterinsurgency to humanitarian missions to stabilization and reconstruction), with limited high-intensity engagements mixed in, is more likely to be the norm than the exception. One only has to survey the areas of the world in Africa and Asia with open spaces or weak governance to identify situations where radical terrorism may take root and pose a threat to Western interests.

While the United States may not desire to participate in low intensity or irregular warfare scenarios—the bloom is clearly off the rose after years of U.S. engagement with mixed success—nevertheless we may have interests that require our direct engagement in some cases. From Yemen to Syria to Iraq and Afghanistan, we continue to be engaged in these types of operations.

Viewed through this lens, the DoD’s proposed new threat based planning construct, by its nature, tends to shortchange the need to maintain a robust, broad scale irregular warfare capability for counterinsurgency, stability operations, and other low intensity operations. Under the planned approach, we will likely maintain a limited capability in our Special Operations Forces but our main ground forces will have largely reverted away from these missions.

The Need for a Top-Down Review of Irregular Warfare Capabilities. The next administration should seek to “balance” its portfolio by directing a top-down, across-the-board review of our commitment to irregular and low-intensity warfare—doctrine, organization, training, equipage and investment—to ensure the right mix of capabilities, organization and investments to fight small- and large-scale irregular conflicts in which the United States is more more likely to engage. The administration should also carefully consider which defense-planning construct to utilize, and whether to adopt a possible mixed threat-capabilities approach to ensure we do not over-shift in one direction or the other.

Conclusion

Ultimately, it will be up to the next administration to decide whether to continue, with some possible tweaks of its own, the flight path of the Third Offset, or head off in another direction. While the offset construct can be a useful tool to catalyze innovation and produce game changers where possible, as an operational or acquisition approach it seems more akin to Greek mythology than a twenty-first-century war-fighting strategy.

Given the nature of innovation, the notion that DoD (or anyone) is prescient and wise enough to identify and direct, from the top down, a Third Offset that provides an overmatch across the broad range of threats we face is dubious. Constructing a strategy around an unproven cluster of technologies like autonomy, artificial intelligence and hypersonics long in advance of fielding seems more like Icarus’s use of wax wings near the sun (the catastrophic failure of a single technology) than prudent portfolio management.

Rather, the United States needs a balanced strategy and supporting portfolio of defense capabilities and investments that keeps our eye focused on the ball in play—the low-intensity conflicts we are more likely to encounter in the near-to-medium terms—while maintaining sufficient conventional capabilities to sustain deterrence against our traditional high-end adversaries and investing in “game-changer” or offset technologies relevant to such high-intensity capabilities. Under this approach, autonomy and artificial intelligence could be one targeted area among others, rather than a central focus of attention.

Jeffrey P. Bialos is a Partner in the law firm of Sutherland Asbill & Brennan LLP and an adjunct Senior Fellow at the Center for Transatlantic Relations at John Hopkins University’s Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies. He served as Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Industrial Affairs in in other senior positions during the Clinton administration. Stuart L. Koehl is a military historian and defense analyst with forty years of experience, who has worked on the assessment of foreign military forces for the Defense Department’s Office of Net Assessment and assisted on a wide range of programs for DoD and the aerospace industry. He serves as an Adjunct Fellow at the Center for Transatlantic Relations, has authored and coauthored a number of books and articles on national security and defense, and is a regular contributor to the Weekly Standard.

Image: Lt. Col. Thomas Wolfe performs preflight checks on F-16 Fighting Falcon at Bagram Air Field, Afghanistan. Flickr/DVIDSHUB.