Fighting Over the Next Fight
CNAS Authors: Michael J Zubrow, Alice E. Hunt
Type: opedOp-Ed
October 13, 2008 — As the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan continue, a debate has been simmering in side the Department of Defense over what America’s next war will look like and how to spend the Pentagon’s billions of dollars to prepare for it. On one side are those who foresee American forces largely involved in irregular wars. On the other are those who believe the future will look more like the past, marked by great power rivalries and the race for high-tech lethality unique to state-based warfare. Each side believes that its vision of the future should determine the future shape of the force. Dominated by these two extremes, the debate suggests a false choice — the wars of tomorrow will likely not look like those of yesterday or today. America must be ready for future combat that will require the full range of military activities.
Analysts across the political spectrum have cited Russia’s tank heavy incursion into Georgia as evidence that history has returned, and with it the inevitable threat of conventional war between Great Powers. Some military thinkers are already using the Russia-Georgia war as evidence that our future wars will not look like our present engagements. But did Russia’s war on Georgia really tell us much about the type of wars the United States will fight in the coming decades? The answer is yes, but not for the reasons that conventional enthusiasts provide.
The engagement between Russia and its substantially weaker former republic tells us very little about the battles the United States could fight in the future. But it tells us quite a bit about Russia, and the fact that rivals like it will combine both regular and irregular methods. Conventional warfare is not “back” because it never went away. In the case where one country’s military has a clear advantage over another(see Russia’s conventional military versus Georgia’s), the superior military can be expected to use its own strengths to attack the weaknesses of its opponent. Aspiring regional hegemons will continue to develop conventional capabilities as tools to use against weaker opponents and as symbols of their growing power. But they will also develop unconventional capabilities to threaten closer competitors.
No adversary in the world can survive a symmetrical engagement with the U.S. military. America’s supremacy on land, in the air and at sea is unprecedented. As long as the American military remains the overwhelming favorite in any conventional conflict, its enemies will seek to challenge it in unconventional ,asymmetrical ways. This, then, is the paradox of America’s military power: the clearer its conventional advantage, the less likely it will be central to the types of wars it will fight. While future wars will still be fought between states, adversaries will not come exclusively in state based packages. States will continue to advance and defend their interests, but the conduct of war will not be the exclusive domain of insurgents or tank divisions. It likely will involve both. Indeed, a growing consensus is emerging, sketched out in national defense documents such as the National Military Strategy, the Maritime Strategy and the Marine Corps Strategy, that future wars will be fought in that hazy realm between conventional and unconventional war called “hybrid war.”
Preparing for such conflicts will prove challenging because of the range of capabilities required for victory. Equally problematic, no two enemies would attack the United States in the same way. One need only survey the range of potential adversaries facing the United States today to perceive the range of threats. Iran, while relentlessly developing its nuclear capabilities, also backs proxies throughout the Middle East and the world to hold current and potential enemies at risk. Russia’s advance on Georgia this past month involved both tanks and computer network attacks. Chinese defense industries work feverishly to develop a fifth-generation fighter as well as anti-satellite capabilities, while the government casts a global net of economic influence and waves of hackers attack America’s sensitive networks. In a fight against America each of these states would take a different approach somewhere on the continuum between conventional and unconventional war. The future will not demand a single answer, but a balanced and flexible mix of responses. Challenges to America will often be state-based but may be proxy-executed. They will involve both major weaponry and cyber attacks. Responding to these challenges will require a mix of conventional and unconventional capabilities. America cannot choose to fight only certain kinds of threats; it must be prepared for the full-spectrum of war.
Topic(s): Terrorism, Irregular Warfare and Crime
Project(s): U.S. Military Forces and Operations, Iraq
