The National Defense Strategy is Not

[flagg]

The younger folks who are fighting the current fight are not concerned with dogma and Clausewitz, they have real problems they need to solve and they're tested almost daily in combat. Tactical innovation as you pointed out is not strategic innovation. I was going to make the excuse that we haven't been forced by reality to force innovation in strategy, but frankly, that isn't accurate. Whatever we call the war on terror now, it has been a tragic failure at the strategic level. There has been limited innovation at the strategic level, we clung to a failed strategy for way too long. Instead of innovating we're more likely to quit. Furthermore, China and Russia have made impressive gains with their gray zone strategies, and our response is to develop a more lethal force? A more "effective" force is certainly required to deter an adversary from pursuing nuclear and conventional options that threaten our interests, but it does nothing to reverse the setbacks in the gray zone. Since I'm on a roll, our innovation has largely been innovated to technology, seeking that third off-set technical advantage, but little innovation in the realm of strategic and operational approaches.





First, we need an overall strategy that describes where we want to be in the future as a nation, and that includes some internal issues such as our education system, infrastructure, economically, environmentally, internationally, and so forth. Once we have an idea of where we are steering, the threats and opportunities become clearer and more rational.

China, Russia, and Violent Extremism are critical threats to our interests, but as you pointed out each requires a deep understanding of all the strategic factors including the culture of each country (and its subcultures), political, economic, military, paramilitary and other factors to determine how to gain advantage. We have a habit of driving blind and focus on so called decisive combat operations as the answer to everything when more often than not the decisive work is done before the fight if there is even a need to fight. Increasing lethality as the author of the article above notes is not a strategy. The reason we haven't seen innovation to challenge these threats short of conventional armed conflict is largely due to our bureaucratic structure which has shaped our strategic culture. It's the hammer-nail thing. While we have other tools, each tool is in a separate toolbox with it owns authorities and associated funding, and that tool will seek to protect its turf. The hammer can only envision a conventional war paradigm, even against VEOs.

China seeks to change the international order that we and many other countries depend upon for our security and prosperity. They have a multiprong sophisticated strategy for achieving this. Help me connect your idea to protecting the international order? You'll need to explain the global geodigital operating systems to me because I think we already have those in spades.

Thanks for the response Bill.

Last week I submitted an article for the US Army Mad Scientist 2030 writing competition that covers “geodigital strategy” in a fictional scenario against “Donovia” used as a proxy for China.

I’m happy to send thru a copy(although about 4500 words) if you’re interested.

But in short:

GeoDigital Strategy: A fictional subfield of geopolitics. Foreign policy guided by factors that are unique or significantly magnified in the digital environment. The geopolitical application of Metcalfe’s, Moore’s and Zipf’s Laws.

Superplatform: A digital platform of global geodigital significance.

One Platform, One Network(OP/ON): One Belt One Road applied to geodigital networks. A fictional development strategy extension of OB/OR to expand the integrated China/BATH superplatform into the ubiquitous global operating system.

FAANG+(Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix, Google, Microsoft, Cisco/Juniper)

BATH(Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent, Huawei)

The entire fictional exercise actually rose from a post I made here in response to one of yours where I mentioned the disturbing rise and total dominance of WeChat in China.

http://council.smallwarsjournal.com/...l=1#post212826

I view China/BATH as an integrated “operating system” akin to government developing and directing strategy executed in combined arms operations by an interoperable Army, Navy, and Air Force.

I view the US/FAANG+ “operating system” as the “geodigital” equivalent of a government in open conflict with each and every one of its superplatform “armed services” who are also concurrently in open conflict with each other.

Having grown up during the 90’s gen1 Internet boom and the silly valuations put on scaling user bases(first common use of Metcalfe’s Law in tech media lexicon). Then again in the last decade long boom.

It has me thinking Metcalfe’s Law and Zipf’s Law may apply to government/commercial hybrid networks that are globally and geopolitically significant.

Hope that helps clarify it?