PRESIDENT'S MESSAGE

War and Peace

The U.S./coalition combat successes in the first week of Operation Iraqi Freedom are encouraging. But, as President Bush, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, and other senior officials have pointed out, there still will be difficult times ahead, not only during the remainder of the fighting but also in the nation-rebuilding effort that follows.

Nonetheless, several useful lessons already have been learned, the first being that the wars of the 21st century will indeed be unlike any others in all history: faster-paced, more widely dispersed, and much more lethal. Mobility, flexibility, and versatility will be the keys to victory. Air, sea, and ground platforms and systems--and the naval/military professionals involved at every operational level--will have to work together as a netted, integrated, and closely coordinated total force.

From the U.S. point of view the single-service tunnel vision is a thing of the past. Future wars will be joint-service in nature. For political as well as military reasons they should be multinational efforts as well, and almost assuredly will be.

The first week of fighting in Iraq also validated: (a) the administration's decision to put current combat readiness first in the rebuilding of the U.S. military; (b) the allocation of significant additional defense funds for "transformational" technologies and systems that could be quickly fielded; and (c) the political and moral rationale behind the "preemptive war" policy enunciated last year by President Bush.

Far better than a preemptive-war policy, though, is a policy that prevents wars. To develop and carry out such a policy requires patience, persistence, and perseverance. It requires not just maintaining current U.S. naval and military superiority, but increasing it in both scope and depth as much as possible and as fast as possible. It also requires new ways of thinking--at the Pentagon, at the White House, and on Capitol Hill--that would be as conceptually transformational, over a much longer period of time, as the short-term transformation of the U.S. defense infrastructure has been over the past two years.

More specifically, the preemptive-war strategy should be continued, but with greater emphasis on long-term policies and programs designed to prevent the outbreak of future conflict. The administration can support this objective most effectively not by reallocating the funds earmarked for current readiness but by requesting the additional resources needed--particularly in procurement and RDT&E (research, development, test, and evaluation)--to ensure long-term readiness.

Congress, which has its own Constitutional responsibility to "provide for the common defense," can and should support the same goal by agreeing to, and appropriating the funds for, both multiyear and series-production programs that would: (a) replenish and rebuild the weapons and aircraft inventories of all of the nation's armed services; and (b) bring the Navy's active fleet to the level needed, a minimum of 375 ships, to meet that service's current and future commitments.

Significant additional funding also is needed for the Coast Guard, which has major homeland-defense as well as national-security responsibilities, and for the U.S.-flag Merchant Marine, which has played a key role in all previous U.S. overseas conflicts and will continue to do so for the foreseeable future.

Navy League members, both corporate and individual, can do their part both by supporting the men and women now serving in all of the nation's armed services, and their families, and by working with other civic and patriotic organizations to promote a greater understanding of the long-term need to maintain a strong national-defense program.

This would be a true "antiwar" program, and much more deserving of that name than the "peace in our time" policies espoused by Neville Chamberlain in 1938 and advocated, unwittingly perhaps, by today's protesters, both at home and overseas.

On 8 January 1790, in his first "State of the Union" address to Congress, George Washington said that, "To be prepared for war is one of the most effectual means of preserving peace." That common-sense precept still holds true, and is even more important today, because the wars of the 21st century--if we permit them to start--will be the bloodiest, most lethal, and most costly in all world history.

A prevention-through-preparedness policy would require the investment of additional billions of dollars. But it would be an investment in a better future for all mankind. The peace-loving peoples of Great Britain, France, and the United States were not prepared for war in the late 1930s, and paid a very heavy price for their previous apathy, complacency, indifference, and inertia. The result was a war that cost over 100 million lives and left entire nations devastated physically, politically, and emotionally.

The United States and its NATO allies kept that hard-earned lesson in mind during the four-plus decades of the Cold War, and spent hundreds of billions of dollars not for the waging of war against the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact, but for the deterrence of war. That was a true "policy for peace" that actually worked--and that should be emulated today.

Timothy O. Fanning, National President