US Military's Third Offset Strategy: A Silver Bullet or Simply a Bad Idea?

Andrew Davies

Security,

Will it work? 

As a long term critic of the ‘silver bullet’ approach to military capability development, Gareth Robinson’s recent piece on the Third Offset Strategy got me thinking. Given the wealth of technical capability and capacity within American industry and academia, leveraging technology to stay ahead of the pack sounds a reasonable enough proposition. But I’m not at all convinced that it’s a winning approach.

Let’s look at the previous two offset strategies. Both were a product of different times and, for different reasons, neither looks particularly applicable today. The First Offset was the development of the New Look nuclear deterrence strategy (PDF) in the early Cold War days as a counter to the massive conventional forces of the Soviet Union. Despite qualitative superiority, US-led forces could only fight the numerically superior North Koreans and Chinese to a bitter draw in Korea. Soviet forces were an even more daunting prospect, so an asymmetric approach made sense.

The First Offset strategy was arguably successful (though one trial doesn’t produce statistics). But the asymmetric advantage was short lived as the Soviet Union built its own nuclear arsenal, blunting much of the desired deterrent capability in the conventional domain (PDF, p79). Looking at potential major US adversaries today, both China and (especially) Russia have credible second strike nuclear capability, so a similar dynamic applies.