Strategy in the 21st Century

[Bill Moore]

http://www.nationaldefensemagazine.o...d-rules-of-war

Disruptive Technologies to Upend Rules of War

New technologies promise an alternative. Robotics, cyber and space weapons can reduce the size of ground forces needed to wage war. They can withdraw human soldiers from the battlefield while making attacks more precise and deadly. They can allow nations to coerce each other without inflicting the same level of casualties and destruction as in the past. They can reach far beyond borders to pick out terrorists or selectively destroy WMD sites. They can reduce the costs that discourage western nations from stopping humanitarian disasters or civil wars. While armed conflict will continue as a feature of the human condition, it might now come at lower cost, for a shorter time, and with less violence.

Maybe, but I suspect Colin Gray's argument about "Another Bloody Century" is more accurate. As the character of warfare changes based on automation and robotics, which arguably results in smaller military forces, do we really think these weapons will simply be directed against so-called legitimate military targets? It makes little sense, since destroying an adversary's robotic military would do little to compel a state or its population to bend to our will, or vice versa. For an opponent to impose one's will on another through this form of warfare would most likely require applying it against the opposing government and civilian population to force compliance.

There seems to be a line of thinking in the high tech world that if my robot can beat our robot we win. I don't see how this form of warfare would result in achieving political ends with military power. It may serve as a deterrent, but most understand winning wars requires more than winning battles.

[Bill Moore]

https://nationalinterest.org/feature...rregular-29672

The Future of Warfare is Irregular
These realities suggest that competition between the United States and its main adversaries will likely be irregular—not conventional.
by Seth Jones

America’s adversaries are unlikely to compete with the United States directly in a series of set-piece battles. Instead, they will likely continue to engage in cyber, proxy and information campaigns. Thus far, the United States has failed to compete effectively in this field, except for some efforts by U.S. special operations forces. Washington has been far too reactive, defensive, and cautious—not to mention discordant among multiple U.S. government agencies. Russia, China, Iran and North Korea have embraced irregular warfare. But the United States has not. It isn’t too late to adjust course.

It has been awhile since I provided an update to this, and Seth Jones’ recent article provides an opportunity to reopen the discussion. Jones argues our adversaries / competitors will likely continue to resort to irregular or more accurately non-conventional strategies to pursue their strategic aims, while our current focus on building a superior conventional and nuclear capability fails to address the gaps in our ability to protect our interests in competition short of traditional armed conflict, also known as the gray zone. He is not opposed to a conventional force build up and modernizing our nuclear forces, but correctly points out our adversaries can still defeat us (undermine our strategic interests) if we fail to address their use of what we call irregular warfare.

While Jones did a good job of advocating for the U.S. to enhance its irregular warfare (IW) capabilities throughout the military (especially SOF), the CIA, and other government agencies, he fails to identify how these capabilities would be used to achieve desired ends. He clearly is talking about a much more comprehensive form of IW, than the narrow view of conceived in response to our protracted conflicts in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. He is focused on the full range of irregular or unconventional activities (what Kenan calls political warfare) that can be executed unilaterally and through proxies. Unfortunately, he fails to describe how these capabilities and ways would be employed to achieve strategic ends. While old time SOF operators would say it is obvious, the articles is focused on convincing conventional military leadership on the need to ramp up our IW capabilities, not downsize them.

He recommendations include the need to educate our public on how our adversaries use irregular warfare. Presumably this will enhance our resilience and generate the political will to counter it once it is recognized as a strategic threat. Second, professional education at military schools need to add more irregular warfare topics to the curriculum. In my view, most military education in this area is tied to faulty strategic approaches for counterterrorism and counterinsurgency. One is focused on the non-strategic tactical approach of find, fix, finish to defeat terrorism, where we have 17 plus years of tactical success and strategic failure, and the other naively assumes the center of gravity is always the local populace to defeat an insurgency. That view was questionable during Cold War, and even more so now when various external actors can continue to leverage proxies strategically regardless of the populace’s leanings. For great power competition, the educational curriculum needs to address unconventional warfare, foreign internal defense, cyber, and other topics at the strategic level, which was actually his third recommendation (reduce the focus on counterterrorism).

It is a good article, but one that I hope he follows up on with an article on how the U.S. government and military would employ irregular warfare to achieve strategic ends in the 21st Century. We can’t repeat the Cold War, the strategic environment has changed too much. We’re now in a multipolar world that is increasingly interdependent economically, which results in more limitations, but perhaps also more opportunities.

[Bill Moore]

https://www.defenseone.com/ideas/201...seone_today_nl

This short article is the most concise, yet comprehensive description of the gray zone or competition short of armed conflict that I have seen.

augmenting their substantial political, economic, military, and commercial capabilities, Beijing and Moscow are mastering the “weaponization of everything” to achieve exploitable hypercompetitive advantages vis-à-vis the United States. Their “hammers” range from political coercion, predatory economics and strategic extortion, to information warfare and subversion, covert action, and overt disregard for international norms.

We need to expand our view of multi-domain warfare to address other domains beyond the doctrinal ones and compete in those domains short of armed conflict. These strategies are hardly new in the historical sense, but the U.S. has become an astrategic nation. As the article states, we have failed to adapt to a post U.S. primacy world. I would add we subconsciously cling to the "End of History" myth and over emphasize the value of soft power as a means and way to an end.

Our adversaries decisively and deliberately maneuver and compete in domains beyond maritime, land, space, air, and cyber to achieve their policy aims over time (extended battles that require strategic patience). In contrast, the U.S. military national defense strategy narrowly focuses on improving lethality in the doctrinal domains, while our adversaries execute sophisticated whole of society campaigns to achieve their ends that largely neutralize our conventional military power.

The article accurately points out we are not even on the defense, much less the offense. However, once we wake up to the growing threat presented by these competitors to our way of life and internal stability, I believe we have the ability to prevail in this competition, yet time is not on our side.

As warlike behavior migrates into new competitive spaces – strategic influence, commerce, culture, domestic politics, cyberspace, space, and the electromagnetic spectrum — the U.S. government and private sector must recognize the far-reaching and growing hazards of hypercompetition and rival gray-zone strategies. The boundaries between war and peace, battlefield and market, and adversary and competitor are dissolving. If the United States is to effectively compete for position and influence in this turbulent and dangerous environment, it requires an urgent meeting of the minds to bring a more collaborative stance to hypercompetitive great-power rivalry.

[davidbfpo]

This is an article by Professor Anatol Lieven, Kings War Studies, which appeared in my electronic reading list today, but was published pre-Xmas in The National Interest, so some may have read this before.
The sub-title says:

In their enthusiasm for a new cold war against China and Russia, the western establishments of today are making a mistake comparable to that of their forbears of 1914.

He opens with:

This year saw the 100th anniversary of the end of the First World War, in which some 16 million Europeans died, two great European countries were destroyed, and others crippled. This year may also be seen by future historians as the last year of the period between the cold wars, when after 29 years of relative quiet, the world's major powers once again moved into positions of deep and structural mutual hostility.

Link:https://www.opendemocracy.net/can-europe-make-it/anatol-lieven/can-we-please-learn-from-history? or The National Interest:https://nationalinterest.org/feature...522?page=0%2C1

[Bill Moore]

This is an article by Professor Anatol Lieven, Kings War Studies, which appeared in my electronic reading list today, but was published pre-Xmas in The National Interest, so some may have read this before.
The sub-title says:
He opens with:
Link:https://www.opendemocracy.net/can-europe-make-it/anatol-lieven/can-we-please-learn-from-history? or The National Interest:https://nationalinterest.org/feature...522?page=0%2C1

David,

I read this guy's bio and it is impressive, but his article is a bunch of hyperbole that suggests we bury our heads in the sand. The U.S. has no enthusiasm for a new Cold War, and I suspect Western Europe would prefer to avoid one also. In fact, both the U.S. and Western Europe went out of their way to accommodate China. The Russia situation is more complex, but the U.S. extended multiple olive branches. Based on Xi's increasing aggression, and Russia's military aggression and increasing gray zone interference in the internal affairs of western nations, we had to respond. To do otherwise would be to repeat the same mistake Chamberlain made prior to WWII.

We are waging a competition as a distraction from our internal troubles, and the one thing Anatol got right is we have a lot of internal troubles that have resulted in significant economic, social, and cultural insecurity leading to a higher death rate and addictions. This is exactly the reason we don't desire a new Cold War, they're expensive and distract from the work we need to do at home. If it was a distraction it certainly failed, because both Americans pay little attention to this competition. Many American college kids can't identify where the U.S. is on a globe, but they'll tell you white males destroyed the world, yet be unable to defend their position in a debate.

Here are some of his hyperbole comments:

Murderous Filipino populists? I suspect many Filipinos would take issue with this broad characterization. The Philippines has had insurgencies and high crime for the past 150 years, but they have also made significant progress and the vast majority of the population are good people.

Apparently according to the author, India is ruled by Hindu Fascists. I'm amazed that India exists as a country at all with 13 official languages and its various ethnic groups, insurgencies, separatists groups, economic disparity, etc., the fact that it does is admirable.

Millions of people from Central America fleeing to the U.S., millions? Really?

Unfortunate, but not surprising that another academic is polluting our youth's minds with with anti-Western, anti-democratic, and the West is always wrong diatribe.

[Bill Moore]

From the SWJ Journal: THE NATIONAL DEFENSE STRATEGY A YEAR LATER: A SWJ DISCUSSION WITH ELBRIDGE COLBY

https://smallwarsjournal.com/jrnl/ar...elbridge-colby

Principled realism focuses through a realist lens on building a free, open, and dignified political order within the international system. The logic is that America needs to play power politics so that we don’t live in a power politics world. Principled realism accepts that power and especially the agglomeration of power determines international outcomes. But it seeks to adapt that reality in service of positive ends.

Throughout the interview, he limits his view of power to brute military force, both conventional and nuclear. While these elements will remain relevant for a nation-state vying for power on the world stage, other actors, including non-state actors that Colby largely dismisses, have demonstrated they have considerable power to influence states and their populations.

What’s wrong with the “international rules-based order” language is that rules per se do not define international order. “Rules based order” sounds like conceiving of or attempting to turn the international environment into a domestic environment. But a domestic environment requires the preponderance of power by a sovereign, which is incompatible with the preservation of meaningful state sovereignty. The other problem with the “rules-based order” phrase is that it tends to focus people on violations of the “rules” rather than the real issue, which is power. My favorite example is the South China Sea. If the Chinese could create artificial features, militarize them, and achieve military dominance in the South China Sea – and do this all legally – we would still have a problem with it.

I don't see how you can have a free and open international system that isn't based on rule and norms. Those that adhere to the rules and norms develop a shared trust in these rules and processes, that equates to a higher degree of stability in the international system. Those who violate the rules and norms destabilize the system, and it is the violation of these rules that give us some degree of legitimacy to act.

Generally, the NDS emphasizes that we need to have a theory of victory that is able to beat their theory of victory. Their theory of victory is the rapid seizure of allied territory that presents the perception through nuclear or conventional coercion that the costs and risks of ejecting the them from their seizure would be too great and too daunting to be contemplated because such action could split the alliance or at the minimum tame our response sufficiently to negate its effectiveness.

Colby is viewing the world through one soda straw instead of a more holistic kaleidoscope. He fails to adequate address competition short of armed conflict, or gray zone competition when he refers to China and Russia seeking to expand their territory and shift the preponderance of power through small, limited wars. This implies that China and Russia must conduct strategic preparation of the environment to set conditions for quick, decisive wars to achieve limited objectives. A recent example is Russia's aggression against Crimea. After seizing the territory, Russia and China will then attempt to normalize it politically in hopes that others, especially the U.S., will not seek to dislodge their military and paramilitary forces. In many ways, while Russia still controls Crimea, it was a loss for Russia strategically. In the far east, the Chinese using a strategy of incrementalism have achieved a degree of success in the South China Sea. Their activites change the facts on the ground, or blue soil, without triggering a military response. However, it now viewed as naked aggression and coercion by many countries, so this strategy is gradually backfiring.

This is largely about deterrence, not assurance. The point is to develop combat-credible forces forward (whether American or allied) that can blunt the adversary’s aggression so that they cannot consummate the fait accompli, so that they cannot seize territory or hold on to it. Ideally the alliance will deny the adversary their attempt at localized aggression so the adversary cannot achieve the fait accompli.

People tend to bifurcate political influence and military force. Of course, the real objective of having a military advantage is to develop political influence without having to use military force or using it in a very efficient way. Influence comes from the understanding that if you challenge the other side you will lose. If the states of the East are under the shadow of Russian power, including their A2/AD capability, and they perceive that the U.S. and the rest of the Alliance don’t have a credible and plausible way of defending them, then they will face strong pressure to defer to or even bandwagon with the Russians.

Deterrence hinges on a favorable balance of power, and for us that requires allies and partners who are assured we will honor our commitments before they commit to theirs. To do otherwise could prove suicidal.

This interview sidesteps the reality of gray zone competition, although it is addressed in the National Defense Strategy. Simply relying on an improved conventional and nuclear force posture will not deter these sophisticated political warfare tactics. It is not a lesser threat either, assuming a national interest is worth fighting for based on our expensive forward posture, then it is a logical assumption if that interest is threatened short of traditional armed conflict and we do not have a strategy to counter it, then we have a significant gap in our strategy. A significant gap that the Chinese have effectively exploited much more effectively than the Russians.

[AdamG]

Ongoing Conflicts as of 2019 (source unknown)