Armchair Generals Wanted: Army Outsources Criticism of New Defense Strategy

Ever felt like you could fix U.S. national security strategy, if only the military would listen to you? The Army is ready to listen. Especially if your arguments mean a bigger role for the Army.

This is a tough time for the Army. Its reward for fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan for 12 years is to have its soldiers downsized and its budget slashed. Worse, from the ground forces' perspective, its future relevance is in question: The defense strategy that the Obama administration unveiled in 2012 is big on robots, commandos, and air and sea power in places like Asia. Ponderous ground warfare is out.

What's a ground warfare organization to do? If you're the Army, commission a study on why the strategy is a looming disaster.

Last week, the Army put out feelers to small businesses for a review of the strategy's weak points. The idea is to identify, over the next 10 months, 'strategic shock' ' that is, 'the likelihood of failure and/or prohibitive cost in securing one or more of [the Defense Department's] new strategic objectives.'

The strategy has a direct relationship on the size and shape of the force that the Defense Department seeks. And an assessment of the strategy failing in certain ways could help the Army argue for its enduring primacy in an era of lean budgets and unclear conflicts. That isn't a case that even the Army's best friends currently find compelling.

'With the Iraq War over, the Afghan War ending, and a limited number of obvious conventional combined arms opponents on the horizon,' the Army announcement reads, 'the department has begun the process of consciously assuming increased risk in large-scale ground operations, especially those operations that might entail widespread hybrid combat action and extended opposed stabilization.' Such increased risk 'will certainly manifest downstream with respect to ground force performance against 'future challenges.''

So the Army wants to get detailed. 'The objective is for the contractor to extrapolate a set of specific at-risk interests from the enduring national interests outlined in the President's National Security Strategy and identify the likeliest and most dangerous ground-centric threats to those at-risk interests,' according to the announcement. This being the Army, the announcement recommends war-gaming out the prospects for failure.

The Army's certainly seizing an opportunity. Numerous defense officials have said over the past several months that the automatic budget cuts now in effect, known as sequestration, jeopardize the Pentagon's ability to implement the new defense strategy. On Friday, new Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said that he still believes the strategy is 'the correct policy,' and he intends to continue implementing it.

That's the Army's fear. And maybe it can change Hagel's mind if it can itemize for him exactly how much 'strategic shock' to 'large-scale ground operations' it represents.