US Military's Third Offset Dilemma: How Soon is Too Soon for New Weapons?

James Hasik

Security,

Historical perspective should inform the aims of the Pentagon’s Third Offset strategy. 

RAND has just released a public version of its study War with China: Thinking Through the Unthinkable (hat-tip to Council member Byron Callan for bringing that to my attention). For the Army, which sponsored and took in the report last year, authors David Gompert, Astrid Cevallos, and Cristina Garafola recommend sending mobile land-based missiles and more for air defenses to the western Pacific. Having argued for much the same, I am sympathetic. More broadly, they recommend “a purposeful long-term program to substitute more-survivable systems, at least for this region.” [p. 70] Specifically, from the Navy and Air Force, they want more missiles, submarines, drones, cyber-things, and anti-satellite weapons. But theirs is a highly conceptual and even breezy argument. Do they mean survivable, or just expendable? And as Andrew Davies and Malcolm Davis of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute recently asked about future fighting drones, are these three researchers advocating technological concepts altogether too soon?

RAND’s call for more missiles for more stand-off warfare seems uncontestable today, but the history hasn’t been uniform. After the Second World War, the US Strategic Bombing Survey found that “strategic” bombing hadn’t been all that strategic, simply because it wasn’t nearly as effective as advertised. From that vantage point, the enthusiasm of industrial-bombing advocates in the RAF and the USAAF in the 1930s was all too early. At the time, nuclear weapons were already getting past the lack of precision, as long as one was willing to blow up whole cities at once. By the late 1950s, as RAND’s Bernard Brodie would tell us, we’d have a strategy for the missile age. Air-breathing aircraft then started looking obsolete to cost-cutters. In Canada, Avro's Arrow fighter project was cancelled partly on the promise of Boeing’s Bomarc anti-aircraft missiles. But even these long-range weapons would be useless against Soviet ballistic missiles.