Abstract
Preparing for war is a near impossible mission that defence planners are required to accomplish. Despite the numerous frameworks and methodologies that can be used for defence planning, preparing for future contingencies will always be a complicated process due to the prevalence of strategic risks: high-level uncertainty and future threats emanating from defined and undefined adversaries. Given these circumstances, strategists, such as Colin Gray, argue that the objective of defence planning should be to develop strategies that can cope with, rather than diminish, the strategic risks that are part of international politics. Since predicting the ‘foreseeable future’ is not possible, developing a strategy based on over-preparation is more prudent and much better than a gamble on under-preparation.
In Defense Planning and Uncertainty, Stephan Frühling contributes to the debate on defence planning by offering a comprehensive analysis of how defence planning can be used as a tool by states to manage strategic risks. The book’s main argument is straightforward: using defence planning as an instrument to manage strategic risk requires clarity and coherence in its framework. This argument is based upon Frühling’s evaluation of four defence planning frameworks, which he argues are benchmarks that emphasize consistency and provide a general framework for coherent defence planning.
Frühling begins the substantive section of the book by introducing concepts that relate to defence planning as risk management (Chapter 2). The concept of risk, author explains, ultimately arises from uncertainty generated from the probability of an event happening and the consequences if it actually does. In this regard, managing strategic risks implies reducing them from what they would otherwise have been, which necessarily involves the development of a strategy. A defence strategy, which links the use of force and political ends, should justify how the maintenance and the use of the military will reduce strategic risks overall.
Since the assessment of strategic risks and the development of a strategy are based on judgements, the author discusses the logic behind defence planning by examining the methods of logical inference: deduction, induction and abduction. While these methods proceed on different assumptions, they are used as frameworks to come up with conjectures that are necessary to identify and characterize strategic risks. Once risks are understood, the strategy to manage them is developed in terms of key requirements of a military force, such as, capabilities and level of readiness, that should eventually translate into a clearly defined force structure and posture. In this context, the author briefly reviews four main approaches that are used to translate military requirements into a force structure: hedging, options, portfolios and flexibility (pp. 34–36).
Following this conceptual discussion on defence planning, Frühling dedicates the next four chapters to examining several defence planning frameworks, which he considers as ideal examples of focused and coherent frameworks (Chapters 3 to 6). The first framework, Net-Based Planning, is appropriate in situations where the pattern of strategic risks is in the present and near future, caused by a known and obvious adversary. As Frühling points out, this type of planning was applied during the Cold War since the source of conflict was clear and the threat was imminent. Mobilization Planning, on the other hand, is used to address the risk of future conflict and from a potential adversary that has not been identified to be a threat. The author identifies the ‘color war plans’ of the US after World War I as an example of Mobilization Planning because War Plans Orange and Red, for example, were focused on managing the risk of a conflict that would arise in the future.
Defence planners rely on Portfolio Planning in situations where a military force is confronted with several known potential adversaries, operating in a reasonably well-understood manner. This type of framework develops a defence force that is able to generate forces appropriate to deal with several known risk that might materialize. The author elaborates on this framework by using the US military’s bottom-up review as an example since this strategy was developed to determine the overall composition and size of military forces in the event of two major wars. The fourth framework discussed by the author is Tasked-Based Planning which is focused on a situation where there is insufficient information to determine military requirements deductively. Tasked-Based Planning is further examined through the discussion of the US 2001 Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR). The QDR revealed an operating environment characterized by multiple risks and significant uncertainty; therefore, the US military focused on strengthening its basic tactical and operational tasks as a strategy to reduce risks.
After reviewing the ideal defence planning frameworks, Frühling then addresses what seems to be the main contribution of the book: US defence planning in the context of China’s rise (Chapter 7). In this chapter, the author traces how the risk of conflict with China has influenced how the US has framed its force structure and force posture decisions since the end of the Cold War. The chapter emphasizes that while China gradually rose to prominence after the 1995 Taiwan Strait Crisis, conflict over Taiwan was just one of several strategic risks the US decided to address during the time. Therefore, despite the attention and resources that were dedicated to moderate China’s aggressive behaviour, the US still remained concentrated on being able to manage multiple risks that existed in different regions around the globe.
Frühling then expands upon the difficulty of characterizing and managing strategic risks in the twenty-first century by looking into the implications of the concepts in the book on the US and other states in the Asia-Pacific (Chapter 8). The author contends that since 2010, US defence planning has reassumed increasing elements of portfolio-based planning given its refocus on specific adversaries, rather than on the ability to perform basic tasks against generic types of strategic risks. In sum, Defense Planning and Uncertainty raises important questions on how the US perceives strategic risk in the Asia-Pacific; its strategy to reduce it, and what type of forces it requires to do so remain unanswered.