— by Odysseus
It has been said that America always prepares to fight its last war, and this observation has much merit. However, America has not always been a superpower. Now, every country/power on the planet spends its time creating strategies to fight the United States. In this environment, preparing for the last war is sometimes more perilous to the globe than others. Right now, our defense posture is leading the world into cataclysm. By restructuring our forces to fight small wars, we are undermining our ability to fight the big ones.
Prior to World War I, the United States fought in several “brushfire” wars against forces that were not sponsored by industrialized nation states. The United States fought an Islamic uprising in the Philippines, a savage guerrilla war, and then chased Pancho Villa’s bandits along the United States and Mexico border areas. Neither war taxed the industrial economy of the growing United States nor risked an outcome that was an existential threat to the country.
When World War I began, the United States military was not equipped to be a major participant and only entered the war late, as a dilettante, to assist the British with manpower after the British suffered catastrophic human losses in the world’s first truly industrial war. Even during the lead up to World War II, the United States had a relatively small military and required a significant buildup period to get ready to actually fight industrialized powers in a conventional war.
The United States spent much of the last century preparing for a World War II-style global conflict, where massive industrial armies faced each other in pitched battles for global domination. Our war fighting capabilities focused on heavy strategic units, including armored battalions, technological air dominance, nuclear weapons of varying survivability, speed of strike, and counterstrike. This overall strategy dictated the types of weapon systems we purchased, the overall size of our forces, the training of our troops, and even the trained mindset of our individual military members. We created a force that was unquestionably the most dominant on the planet in conventional warfare.
In so doing, we caused a re-alignment of other countries and power structures around the globe to devise war fighting strategies that would bypass our field of dominance. In Vietnam we encountered asymmetric warfare, where technologically inferior forces would use guerrilla tactics to slowly bleed the United States forces into a political, rather than military, defeat. In warfare, a victory is still a victory, regardless of the means of success. The United States found itself weakened, with significantly less global clout, in the 1970s not only because of demoralization after Vietnam, but also because our military had significantly restructured itself to fighting a guerrilla war, and in so doing had undermined its ability to fight “conventional war”. (For the purposes of this discussion, we will call conflict between massive industrial armies “conventional” warfare).
This lapse in conventional warfare capability was not complete because though there was a temporary focus on the necessities of fighting a guerrilla war and the existence of the Soviet Union continued to pose an existential threat to the United States. Therefore, resources could not, and were not, completely redirected to guerrilla warfare/counter insurgency warfare programs. However, the lapse did require the Reagan administration to re-direct, re-motivate, and re-supply the conventional military structure into something that was a significant deterrent to Soviet conventional power during the 1980s. It was at this time the United States became a “Hyper-Power”, and all other countries on the planet were forced to the conclusion that open warfare against the United States would be unthinkable, a certain loss. Even the Soviet Union, the other superpower, eventually dropped any real thought of challenge to United States “Hyper-Power”.
Although many were not aware of it during the period, it is likely that history will record the post World War II period not as the “Cold War”, but more likely the “Pax Americana”, and will date this period up through the 1990s and into the beginning of the current millennium. This will be so not because there were zero military conflicts in this period, but, rather, because there were zero military conflicts that had the capability to truly restructure the dominant global paradigm.
The Global War on Terror (which is really a global war on Islamist anarchists akin to the British efforts against piracy in the age of sail) has the potential to be the end of “Pax Americana”. Without a significant conventional threat looming, the United States seems to be utterly set upon re-aligning its force structure to focus once again on guerrilla warfare and “brushfire” wars. The focus on defense expenditure is dropping the strategic systems that focus on conventional warfare. Air dominance has been abandoned, dropping the F22 air superiority fighter to token level status. The Joint Strike Fighter, supposedly chosen in preference to the F22, is now also being dramatically scaled back. The navy is being reduced and advanced artillery systems were dropped from development , including the Paladin system. Now the Obama administration is talking about making significant cuts to our nuclear arsenal. Yet, some in our leadership talk about taking on yet another military mission in Syria.
Emblematic of the change is the training of our infantry and infantry support units. The long time spent in Afghanistan and Iraq have transitioned the infantry from war fighting to “occupation”. “Occupation”, put simply, ruins armies. The mindset of an occupying force is radically different from the mindset and protocols of a war-fighting army. The occupying force, as part of counter insurgency warfare, has to develop a more “police” like mentality than a war-fighting mentality. An aggressive war fighter would create far too many civilian casualties in a counter insurgency environment, turning the populace even more against the occupiers than the situation inevitably generates, defeating the very purpose of counter insurgency warfare. The opposite also holds true. Soldiers trained and experienced in counter insurgency warfare are ill-equipped to fight a conventional war. They, as well as their command and control structures, hesitate too often to maintain the speed and violence of action that is necessary to prevail on a conventional battlefield. Between the wars of occupation and the re-tasked dedication of dwindling resources, we are creating a “shell military”. While they are becoming very good at fighting small brushfire wars, occupation, and counter insurgency warfare, they are losing their deterrent effect. The world is watching and waiting.
Just as the opportunistic global powers recognized that conventional warfare was no longer a viable option against the United States during “Pax Americana” and adjusted their strategy, they can now re-adjust it once again. If the United States becomes a specialist at fighting small, disperse, lightly armed guerrillas, our opponents will move to using large, heavily armed, conventional formations. They will begin to challenge us in a large strategic sense, pursuing air superiority, naval power projection, and overwhelming force. Unlike guerrilla, or brushfire wars, this strategy will pose an existential threat.
While it may be hard to explain the importance and cost of the heavy systems needed to fight a conventional war, their maintenance is essential to prevent other countries from developing these capabilities. If the United States continues on its present course and loses focus on what is really required to protect the United States itself from existential threat, we may actually cause another global arms race that will end in another cataclysmic, industrialized, global conflict. Fighting brushfire wars is a necessary part of warcraft and a fine skill for our forces to have. However, we must not be lulled into believing that it is their primary focus. We dare not be prepared for the last little war when we find a big war upon us.
The obvious solution to this dilemma is to develop an element of the United States armed forces that is specifically devoted to fighting brushfire wars and leave the bulk of the military structured to fight conventional war, as a deterrence to existential threats that could develop. The mainline military is still useful for the initial “kinetic” stages of any action where speed and violence of action are both necessary for victory and desirable. However, it is the follow on phase sometimes called stabilization, or other times called occupation, that blunt the desirable attributes of a mainline fighting force. So, we should designate at least one entire division, to stabilization capabilities. That division and its support structures would be more heavily trained and equipped with miltary police units, engineering or sapper, units, and psychological warfare specialists. Their equipment would be more tailored to urban operations, maximizing city mobility, and long term protection of United States assets. Their logistics training would also be geared to longer term, lower intensity duties.
A parallel salutory effect of making this duty the responsibility of a designated division or divisions would be in reducing our inclination to make too many global commitments. If our units designated for stabilization are already being utilized somewhere on the planet, we have both a disincentive to become engaged in yet another stabilization action elsewhere because we lack the specialized units and an incentive to re-assess our need to continue engagement where those units are already occupied. Prioritization and an incentive to wrap up occupation operations would both be healthy concerns to inject into the military foreign policy considerations of our leadership.
By making such stabilization and occupation a designated task for a limited number of our armed forces, we improve our capabilities in that area, as well as preserve our armed forces for use in their primary role, which is the protection of the United States from existential threats, present and future.
