Cold War Transition, Part IV (Conclusion)

Part I (Army), here

Part II (Air Force) here

The services remain largely stuck in their efforts to transform for the 21st century. The Army, though moving closer towards developing an institutional knowledge of counterinsurgency, remains wedded to purchasing high technology equipment and weapons more suited for large conventional war. The Air Force has attached itself to the F-22 air superiority fighter and now, rather than regrouping, spends much of its time desperately seeking an enemy or a mission for that fighter. The Navy has made a few, intermittent steps towards revamping itself, but without any overarching strategic vision.

This slow transition has made the United States vulnerable. Most particularly, in Iraq, the inability of the Army to handle—at least at first—an insurgency meant that the United States was bogged down in that country for several years. Only as the Army developed counterinsurgency tactics on the fly did the situation improve. But the slowness meant that one of the original goals of the Iraq invasion—to serve as an object lesson to states that might oppose the U.S.—was utterly undercut. Iran and North Korea—for example—knew that there was and is no realistic chance that the U.S. will invade them in the near future and risk the same sort of protracted war as in Iraq.

The slow transition also has the potential to make the United States vulnerable in the future. War often sees revolutions in tactics and strategy that catch militaries unaware. The machine gun in WWI, blitzkrieg and the aircraft carrier in WWII were all game-changing weapons that left the old ways of war in the dust and mud (quite literally in the case of the battleships of the American Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor). Should another such revolution happen while the U.S. military continues at least to glance back to the Cold War, America could find the military superiority it takes so for granted to have disappeared.

There are hints that such a revolution is in the offing. The rise of unmanned vehicles, particularly unmanned aerial vehicles, could potentially alter the balance of power in the air. UAVs have numerous advantages over manned vehicles, most importantly range and maneuverability. They have developed quickly in capability over the last decade and have the potential to displace manned planes within the next 10-20 years. Should they do so, and the United States falls behind in their development, we face the possibility of regional powers such as India or China being able to rival American forces. Military revolutions are unforgiving in their effect, with little credit for past performance or current position.

The challenge that the Obama administration thus faces is not only to deal with external military issues, like Iraq or Afghanistan, but to figure out how to redirect and refigure <I>internal</i> military issues as well. The services do not have the same immediate hostility to a Democratic President that they did in 1992 when Bill Clinton came into office. Eight years of George W. Bush’s disasters have put paid to Republican superiority on military matters, at least temporarily. But the military remains skeptical of a Democratic administration, and that skepticism will likely deepen if Obama pushes them to reconsider their attachment to conventional Cold War verities. The senior officers would ratherbe “preparing –and procuring — for the big, conventional Russia-China scenario the U.S. military institutionally prefers,” as one anonymous Pentagon official put it (Hat tip to <a href=”http://washingtonindependent.com/18335/productive-obama-military-relationship-possible”>The Washington Independent</a>).

Obama does have potential allies within the services, none more so than the Army, where a growing cadre of officers, head by General David Petraeus, are trying to remake the force from one exclusively focused on conventional warfare to one focused on a range of different military scenarios, from peacekeeping to counterinsurgency to conventional. Obama’s visit with Petraeus in July of this past year gave both men a chance to size each other up. Getting Petraeus on his side would go a long way towards assuring that Obama has a successful relationship with the military, perhaps the most important institutional relationship a President has. President Obama is faced by an institution still at least partly caught in the paradigm of the Cold War. He, the first genuinely post-Cold War President, has to pull that institution forward into this century. The kaleidoscope of threats that face the United States demands nothing less.

Bluer Than Blue, Redder Than Red

One of the most critical underlying stories of last night’s election is the continuation of a regional electoral realignment that started in the 1960s and reached partial fruition yesterday night. In 1976, Jimmy Carter won election to the Presidency by winning every southern state, a spine of states running up the Appalachians to New York, several Midwestern industrial states, and only one state west of the Mississippi (Texas). This was the last gasp of the old Democratic coalition, built on the “Solid South” and the Rust Belt.

That coalition was decisively fractured by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the subsequent Republican exploitation of disaffected white southerners. Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” effectively started to split the Solid South away from the Democrats. Slowly, over the next several decades, the southern realignment meant the disappearance of southern Democrats at all levels. Southern Democratic Senators and Representatives lost elections, left for the GOP, or retired. By the late 1980s, the south was consistently voting Republican at a national level (with several exceptions). Pushed out of their traditional base, the Democratic Party faced an enormous challenge to establish a new base from which to fight elections. Without such a base, the Democrats would go into each Presidential cycle at a built-in deficit to the Republicans, as both Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis discovered.

The Democrats did have one advantage. The two bookend states of the electoral college, California and New York, were trending Democratic, and they brought with them nearly 100 electoral votes. Add to that midwestern states like Illinois, Wisconsin, and Michigan, and the Democrats had the start of a new coalition, one centered in the northeast, the middle west, and the west coast. But it took time to build it, and the GOP had a headstart with the South. In a preview of this new coalition, a Democratic candidate like Bill Clinton in 1992 could manage to win by taking the northeast, the midwest, and the far west, while still pulling a few southern states into the blue side (Georgia and Kentucky, for example). But eight years later, Al Gore could not even win his home state of Tennessee and the entire south went for George Bush (albeit Florida with some shadiness). The south (especially the Deep South) was redder than red. The northeast, west, and midwest were trending Democratic but there were still states that waffled. Thus New Hampshire in 2000 went for Bush. Thus Iowa in 2004 went for Bush. The Democrats had the bones of a coalition in place, but the body remained to be filled out.

The election of 2004 confirmed the delicate balance. George W. Bush won by holding the states of the South, Great Plains, and Mountain West, and defeating John Kerry in Ohio, Florida, and Iowa. He won no states on the west coast. He won no states in the Northeast. Most ominously, he lost Pennsylvania, which suggested that the Democratic coalition was beginning to expand ever so slightly southward. In addition, the races in several mountain west states, like New Mexico were close enough to suggest Republican vulnerability. The realignment continued in 2006, albeit at the Congressional level. Republicans in Northeastern states at both the House and Senate were clobbered. The northeastern states were becoming bluer than blue. Most critically and surprisingly, the Democrats managed a strong showing in some border states of the Old Confederacy, most notably Virginia, where Jim Webb eked out a Senatorial victory. Combine that with Howard Dean’s 50-state strategy, which pushed the Democratic Party to compete in all the states of the union, 2006 presaged a Presidential election in which, for the first time in a generation, the Democrats would have an advantage.

Barack Obama played that advantage masterfully. What is particularly notable about the campaign is the fact that Obama had several pathways to victory, instead of the essentially constrained choices of John Kerry. Spared the expense of defending much of the northeast and west coast (as the Republicans were spared the cost of defending the South), Obama could pour money, time, and effort into Florida and Ohio and Indiana and New Mexico and Colorado and Virginia. In all of those places, the Democrats dominated the airwaves and built massive ground operations. In addition, the new Democratic electoral base consisted of states which are among the wealthiest and most populated in the United States, and Obama’s fundraising reflected that wealth and population.

The realignment helped create a Presidential race in which the Republicans were on the defensive from the start, and reduced to a narrow set of possible victory scenarios. By the end of the campaign, McCain had to sweep the table of toss-up states to have any chance to win. Last night, McCain did not only not sweep the table, but he lost states that a Republican had not lost in a generation, including Virginia and (seemingly) North Carolina. Pennsylvania went convincingly for Obama, as did Florida and Ohio and a bevy of western states. If Jimmy Carter was the last gasp of the old Solid South coalition and Bill Clinton was the candidate of a transitional coalition, Barack Obama is the president-elect of the new alliance of east and west and middle, a Democratic coalition decades in the building.