AFA Policy Forum

Leon S. Fuerth
National Security Advisor to Vice President Al Gore
AFA Convention
Washington, DC
September 11, 2000 

I know that you are interested in a lot of very specific issues relating to the Defense posture of the United States and the future of the Air Force in particular. It seems to me that I ought to concentrate my remarks on what I think are four issues that embrace all that.

First of all, I happen to believe very firmly that as far as our military power is concerned, we’re in a good place. There is nobody else like the United States on the surface of the planet. All of you as people with professional interests in military power understand perfectly well that at any given time some damn thing is going to be out of whack with the system. The question is whether or not the system is picking up on it. The question is whether or not it is being eliminated. And the question is whether or not the resources are there at the level of the national budget to take care of these things as they appear. The other question is whether the underlying plan is sound. The answers to all those things are yes. We pick up on what is going on. We address it. We have the resources to do so.

That leaves us free to address what I described before as the core question. What is the purpose of this excellent military force? Under what circumstances should it be used? What is the relationship between military force and the purposes of the United States? Not only does that affect how you design the force, but it affects the lives of everybody in this room and anybody else who has any connection with the military.

The first premise is that the United States can’t be a universal policeman and is not obliged to think that it ought to be. That is sort of the left hand bracket. The right hand bracket, on the other hand, is a sentence as follows: we are obliged to do nothing with our military force except defense the United States against direct attack or respond to an attack on a formal U.S. military ally. That is a no brainer. We all know this. That is what military force is for and will continue to be for.

But for eight years we have confronted another set of issues, issues that have acquired great prominence given the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact and the collapse of the global power structures that reflected a bi-polar conflict between us and that system. All of a sudden we were no longer dealing with attacks across borders. We were dealing with the collapse of states. And attendant upon that collapse, we were dealing with forms of chaos and human rights abuses on a scale that none of us hoped ever to see again after World War II. At the extreme end of the range, we are also seeing ways that could affect regional stability, could affect countries which are military allies of the United States and therefore at their farthest range, could affect the security of the United States. These things don’t present themselves as conflicts inside of states, rather than cross border aggression.

If you happen to be living in a country emerging into independence from the former Yugoslavia and are attacked by troops across the border, you had a different view as to whether or not there was international aggression going on and that was part of the complexity of the situation.

There is also another factor here and that is, we are all taught to address the materiel defense of the United States. Every administration goes through a period, usually in the first 10 months or so, when there is a big interagency review of what is in the national interest, especially, what is it in the vital national interest that is the level of threat sufficient to bring the use of military force. That is a very important exercise to go through. The trouble is, or the truth is, not necessarily the trouble, at the other end of that process, when the people who comprise the system at its most senior levels sit down to address what is happening in the real world. All of these precise and quasi-scientific formulations only give you limited help.

What you get in the situation room with the Secretaries of State and Defense and head of the CIA and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and the National Security Advisor assembled are a bunch of Americans who are asking themselves, in the face of an on-going crisis – what do we expect of ourselves? What do we expect of the country? What does the country expect of itself? What is right as well as what is necessary for us to do with this case? Is a military response in any event?

At that point, you are leaving behind a sort of executive summary of the latest national security document and you are entering a realm where it is very intelligent, very well informed human beings at the edge of what can really be understood, struggling to predict consequences, consequences if we act, consequences if we don’t. In the course of all those discussions something else comes out and that is that the foreign policy of the United States. The part that begins to lead to the use of military force, is not just the calculation based on the material requirements of the country, let alone the moral requirements as well. Anybody who is in business knows that goodwill is an intangible, but it is a business asset.

The same is true of our country. The goodwill of others and our good reputation is intangible, but it is a strategic asset. It is what helps us convince others to steer destinies of their countries along the same paths that we are trying to travel ourselves. This is tremendously important. There are situations where, if the United States chooses not to act, nothing effective really will be done. We are in effect the court of last resort. Decisions as to when we will respond, when we will not respond, how we will respond needs counting just physical implications, but implications about the kind of country that we are and they speak loudly about the kind of role we are prepared to make a real effort to construct. Once you get into that domain where these issues can’t be mechanically separated into yes or no piles, you do need some kind of system for helping you think through what you are going to do.

I am not going to tell you we sit there rigidly applying the system, but I will tell you that there are simple rules of thumb that are applied in the course of these deliberations. First is, have we used every other possibility other than military force? Will military force work? What kind of military force? Do we happen to have enough of it that is usable for this purpose? Is there anybody out there by way of ally or a coalition of the willing who is competent and prepared to join us in this matter? How much is it going to cost? What are the opportunity costs involved with that expenditure? Are we going to be able to persuade the people in the Congress to go along with this investment of the blood and treasure of the United States?

Believe me, those issues are discussed each and every time the question of the possible use of military force comes up. And of course there is a question, do we have a theory on the case, namely once we get in, how are we getting out? We have learned to go through this and to answer those questions as best we are able to before going to the president and saying we want to talk to you Mr. President because we have recommendations in this matter. That is what has happened in the case of Haiti and it is what has happened in the case of Bosnia and the case of Kosovo. It also leads us into discussions in which we search out ways to lend a hand to other countries that are willing to do this in other parts of the world in peacekeeping missions where it may not be in our interest to be front and center, but where it may be in our interest to provide airlift or intelligence or material support or money or even moral support or some small contingent of people for training.

There are mix and match techniques and a repertoire of responses that go beyond simply yes or no to military force. As all of you know, because many of you have been involved in planning or executing these kinds of options.

That is a snap shot in a few minutes of what is involved in a decision to use force. But then there is something else that the vice president has been talking about and that is a way of looking at both old and new security agenda and something he’s termed forward engagement. The old classic security agenda is what we are all familiar with – that is aggression across the border, an attack on us, an attack on an ally. And it is still with us, even thought we are the dominant military power on the face of the globe and destined to remain that way for almost the foreseeable future.

It is still there and has to be provided for. But there is a new security agenda which is taking its place alongside the old one. The new one consists of forces in the world that are powerful enough to create the kinds of instabilities that can have a strong impact on the safety and well being of the United States, even if they are not military. You already know these – automatically you can name them yourselves – trans border crime, internationally organized crime, internationally organized terrorism, the spread of weapons of mass destruction and delivery systems for those, the spread of pandemics, like HIV/AIDS at a rate that threatens to burn up entire continents within a generation. And you could add HIV/AIDS, malaria, which is also running out of control, in large parts of sub-Saharan Africa. You could add to that tuberculosis resistant to normal therapies which is a real problem within the Russian federation and a problem in the Russian federation nowadays can get on an airplane and get off in New York or Los Angeles or anywhere else in the world. So, these things are important.

There are questions about the stability of our food supply if you happen to note that fisheries all around the world are being depleted at the same time, I think it is legitimate to ask, what happens if the availability of protein from fish is declining simultaneously from all major forces. What are the impacts of that going to be on the stability of the international system or doesn’t food matter as a cause of war between states? Of course, it matters, especially if there is a combined pressure on a major source of it. What happens if there is climatic change and the food growing cycles of countries are changed in very significant ways and change simultaneously so there is region-wide disruption. These deserve to be dealt with in the same way that we used to deal with military threats.