Deep cuts to the defense budget continue to pose ongoing problems for the Pentagon as it seeks to rebuild and recuperate a force that is battle weary, Deputy Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter told military leaders on Wednesday.
"Grueling combat, long times away from home, [and] missed birthdays" have greatly impacted the U.S. military, Carter said at the Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis’ (IFPA) annual conference, a gathering that attracts top military brass and defense insiders.
"All this has taken a toll. The force is weary. Families are weary," Carter said, admitting that billions of dollars in cuts known as sequestration have impacted troop readiness and recuperation.
"We are ready for whatever happens to our budget, but the choices are unprecedented and will require congressional support to get them right," Carter said, asking that lawmakers leave the Pentagon "leeway" to make necessary adjustments.
With more than 9,000 special operations officers working in 92 countries across the globe, speakers at the IFPA confab grappled with the need to boost forces in tumultuous regions as sequestration bears down upon them.
Former officials such as former Ambassador Thomas Pickering advocated in favor of relying on small special operations teams over large-scale military might.
"I have the greatest respect of the military, but it is important to say here today the conventional military has been relied on too often, too much, and perhaps too certainly as the resolution of trenchant diplomatic problems," Pickering said.
"There is a new opportunity for a military role of a small footprint, of discretion and careful understanding," he said, adding that U.S. policy should not be "four years in one country" once diplomacy fails.
Budgetary constraints should not foster an isolationist mentality, said Michele Flournoy, the Obama administration’s former undersecretary of defense for policy.
While past military drawdowns have come in times of peace, "we’re not so lucky this time," Flournoy said.
Political gridlock and debates about America’s role in the world have given "rise to a very erroneous and pernicious narrative of the West’s decline," Flournoy said. "This is something we have to put a stop to."
"Now is not the time to entrench," she added. "We are the indispensible partner in the world. … No other power I see can play that role and when we don’t play it very negative things happen."
Syria and the Middle East also topped the agenda as top military brass and defense insiders expressed concern about America’s role in the region in the years to come.
U.S. special operations forces are "going to have to face a … Salafist Sunni jihadist swath of terrain from the Mediterranean, across Syria, including parts of Lebanon, across Anbar province [in Iraq] up to the gates of Iraq," warned Robert Kaplan, chief geopolitical analyst for the intelligence group Stratfor.
Kaplan warned that the Arab Spring "is not about the rise of democracy but the collapse of a central authority" in the Arab world. "Democratic systems have not replaced them."
As these countries, including Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, and others, break down their borders are becoming more porous and less state-like, Kaplan said.
"The only real states may be Israel and Iran," he said. "We’re going from a world of borders to a world of frontiers."
In Syria, Strafor has identified scores of disparate rebel fighter groups, "and almost none of them can be described as moderate or secular," Kaplan said.
State Department official Frederick Barton additionally cautioned against trusting any one Syrian rebel group due to a lack of knowledge about their composition.
"The revolution started with a group of people we were not that intimate with, that we didn’t know at any real level," said Barton, who serves as assistant secretary of state for the State Department’s Bureau of Conflict and Stabilization Operations and the Coordinator for Reconstruction and Stabilization.
"Here we were working out of neighbor states, some of them more reluctant to have us working there, and we didn’t have a base knowledge" about the rebels, Barton
"For the last year what we’ve been trying to do is just broaden our base of Syrians we need to know," he said, noting that the United States has provided rebels with FM radio stations, satellite ability, and has even explored helping them utilize Facebook as a means to disseminate information.