|
|
 |
|
Home page  About CSIS Programs Burke Chair in Strategy Burke Chair on Middle East Energy and Security Western Military Balance
|
|
|
Western Military Balance
|
The attached papers provide a broad statistical "net assessment" of Western military efforts and forces. They combines data on the trends in defense efforts, spending, procurement and RDT&E, manpower, and land, air, naval and nuclear forces. They also compare the individual national trends in defense efforts in key nations, including the US.  The following documents are in the PDF format and can be accessed using Adobe.
Analysts familiar with past net assessments will notice several basic changes in this approach to measuring the balance: - The "West" now includes nearly 10 more countries that now reach east to the Caspian. · There is no military balance in the classic Cold War sense, although there are comparisons divided the West into central, northern, and southern areas.
- Force numbers are still useful, but total manpower and holdings reflect a far more diverse mix of technology, readiness, and capability than in the past. Any understanding of the numbers requires the reader to look at the force numbers, total spending, and procurement and RDT&E data and then make personnel judgements as to how capable a given force is likely to be.
- The issue of readiness is so critical, and the modernization of C4I/BM/SR systems is so critical to modern war fighting, that the WEI/WUV and other methods of scoring military effectiveness the Department of Defense developed during the Cold War produce little more than statistical nonsense.
- This document, and the supporting document on Western military efforts, indicates that US efforts to measure burdening sharing are now of little value, and that many of the measures used in documents like Forces for the Common Defense have little value.
- Compliance and non-compliance with the CFE remains broadly important, but the details have little military meaning. Excesses are historical accidents in countries that cannot man or fight the equipment involved. Most countries are far under the CFE limit.
- For all the discussion of the European Defense Initiative, NATO Force Improvement Plan, and other strategic concepts, there is no coherence in actual downsizing. Nations are clearly driven more by internal political factors, or external pressures from outside the West, than any effort to bring strategic coherence.
- This lack of coherence inevitably affects the arms trade and efforts to restructure defense industry and RDT&E.
- The nuclear numbers are no longer coupled to any clear strategic concept, regardless of the nation shown.
- The SALT/START derived concepts of parity leave major imbalances in the triads of the US and Russia that would have been a source of major concern during the Cold War, but are now virtually meaningless.
If there is any single lesson that can be drawn these figures pose, it is that broad discussions of strategy, institutions, and force concepts tend to have little substantive value in today's post-Cold War world. The issue, again and again, is whether there is any real military capability and how current trends will affect that capability. In almost every case, the devil also lies in the substantive details. The gap between Western strategic rhetoric and institution building and the military realities summarized in these tables is often so great that it raises basic questions about the value of theory that is so divorced from actual practice. |
|
|