When Robert Gates began his service as U.S. secretary of defense, his priorities were clear: "Iraq, Iraq and Iraq," as he said at his Senate confirmation hearing.
The priority was not misplaced; the situation in Iraq was dire in late 2006. But a new counterinsurgency strategy implemented by a new commander given increased resources led to a dramatically different situation by the end of 2008.
Under President Obama, Gates switched his focus from Iraq to Afghanistan, overseeing a dramatic increase in resources devoted to that conflict. And over the past two years, he focused on implementing a culture of accountability and on reforming the defense budget to prepare the Pentagon for the leaner years ahead.
Yet the business of defending the United States never stops, and much remains to be done by whoever replaces Gates later this year. His successor's overarching objective will be to maximize U.S. national security in an era of increased budget constraints and decreased certainty about the shape of future conflict. In other words, he or she will need to spend less money to prepare for a wider range of threats.
The most serious of these threats will be asymmetric in nature - that is, they will target American weaknesses to circumvent its conventional superiority. Asymmetric threats come in two basic forms. The low-end version, which the U.S. military has spent the past decade combating, is terrorism and insurgency.
The asymmetric attacks of Sept. 11, followed in short order by virulent insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan, demonstrated that conventional military force was insufficient to protect the interests of the nation. Gates led a remarkable rebalancing of American military power that improved U.S. irregular warfare capability.
He was particularly insistent on the procurement of armored vehicles that resisted improvised explosive devices and the development of UAVs to provide intelli-gence on and strikes against insurgent cells.
Unfortunately, these changes have not yet become part of the DNA of America's fighting forces, which still struggle to build the capacity of foreign military forces - a task that Gates has said is "arguably the most important military component in the war on terror." Building our allies' capacity to fight is an effective, affordable but often overlooked way to ensure the future security of the United States. Despite its rhetorical emphasis on building partner capacity, the Pentagon has not yet demonstrated an effective approach to execute this mission.
The next secretary of defense will have to fight hard to institutionalize advising foreign forces and ensure that the many lessons learned about countering insurgencies and terrorists are not once again forgotten.
High-Tech Challenge The second, equally troubling variant of asymmetric warfare involves the use of high-technology capabilities to negate traditional American military strengths. The most prominent looming asymmetric challenge is in the Asia-Pacific region. China has the potential to present a significant military threat but not in a strictly conventional sense.
Although China is rapidly developing its conventional military capabilities, including an aircraft carrier and a fifth-generation fighter plane, more worrisome is its improving ability to threaten America's allies and interests in this region with missile, cyber and other asymmetric capabilities. As a result, the world's greatest Navy is at increasing risk of being checkmated by very precise and relatively cheap guided munitions.
China's growing anti-access and area-denial capabilities are likely not only to prevent ships and manned aircraft from approaching its shores but to prevent current-generation UAVs and ISR platforms from providing intelligence or filling a strike role.
Adapting to the development and proliferation of high-end asymmetric capabilities will require embracing a more rapid evolution of our own traditional capabilities and operating concepts. This will be a major task for the next secretary. Gates had to take extraordinary measures to procure sufficient numbers of UAVs to meet the demands of commanders in Iraq and Afghanistan, but those systems faced almost no air-to-air threat. The next secretary of defense should oversee major investments in unmanned vehicles - aerial, ground, water and underwater - that can survive and succeed in contested spaces against a capable enemy. With costs that compare favorably to manned platforms, these unmanned systems present affordable long-range strike options that impose defensive costs on China or other adversaries using Chinese weapons.
Deterring the use of military power in the western Pacific will depend in no small part on how wisely those investments are made, and how soon.
Gates faced the huge challenge of turning around a war that was rapidly being lost when he assumed leadership of the Department of Defense. Gates' successor will also face challenges: institutionalizing progress in irregular warfare and deterring high-end asymmetric challengers, while continuing to whittle down defense expenditures.
"Asymmetry, advisers and UAVs" doesn't roll off the tongue any more trippingly than did "Iraq, Iraq and Iraq," but it will be just as important for the next secretary of defense to get his or her priorities straight.
John Nagl is president of the Center for a New American Security and the author of "Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife: Counterinsurgency Lessons from Malaya and Vietnam."
