America Needs a New Way of War

(Bloomberg Opinion) -- “One of the serious problems in planning the fight against American doctrine,” one German officer is said to have said in World War II, “is that the Americans do not read their manuals, nor do they feel any obligation to follow their doctrine.” Even if that’s apocryphal, it’s accurate. Making things up on the fly is the finest trait of the American national character.

. If there is an “American way of war,” it’s very hard to pin down. So this week I talked to a couple of people who have tried. One is Susanna V. Blume, the deputy director of the defense program at the Center for a New American Security, who was previously the deputy chief of staff to the Pentagon’s resident futurist, former Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert O. Work. The other is Christopher M. Dougherty, a senior fellow in the CNAS defense program and former Pentagon defense strategist who helped develop the closest thing to a military doctrine the Pentagon has, the 2016 National Defense Strategy. Their new project is to develop what they call “A New American Way of War.” Here is a lightly edited transcript of our discussion:

. Tobin Harshaw: Let’s start with the big picture and then move into specifics. Chris, you’ve popularized this term “New American Way of War.” Can you briefly give the general outline of the theory/doctrine behind it?

. Christopher Dougherty: The idea grew out of the analysis and assessment work I did while at the Defense Department, which ended up shaping a lot of last year’s National Defense Strategy . When you look at possible future wars, particularly against great powers, the U.S. is taking a lot of risks. Moreover, these risks are systemic and spread out across different missions and organizations, meaning that the current piecemeal approach to dealing with them won’t work. What’s needed is a fundamental rethinking of how the U.S. armed forces fight.

. Susanna Blume: Chris often quotes a line from Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s novel “The Leopard”: “For things to stay the same, everything must change.” The U.S. is fundamentally a status quo power, but in order to ensure that we can maintain (and improve upon) the status quo into the future, we need to substantially rethink the way the U.S. military fights, given the strides our competitors have made in figuring out how to counter our advantages.

. TH: Today we break warfare down into five “domains”: air, land, sea, space and information/cyber. The U.S. can no longer expect to maintain dominance in all. But in terms of Russia and China, where is the U.S. most in danger? How, in terms of equipment and manpower, do we need to adapt to regain that dominance?

. CD: Information/cyber, followed closely by air and space. The other domains matter, but these are the linchpins. If you read Chinese and Russian military sources and look at their investments, they make clear their intention to attack us in these areas, because they (rightly) believe that this is how they can overcome our advantages and offset their weaknesses. The other part I’d mention is mobility/logistics/sustainment, because it’s so central to our ability to project power overseas.

. TH: The report by the commission that reviewed the National Defense Strategy grabbed a lot of headlines by saying the U.S. military “might struggle to win, or perhaps lose, a war against China or Russia.” Recent Pentagon war games have shown this as well. Do you think these assessments are overly alarming, or have things really reached that point?

. CD: Those assessments are generally accurate, although it’s very difficult to predict something as complex as a future war with a high degree of confidence - particularly when there is no track record of combat between adversaries using current weapons. Policymakers should be alarmed, but not panicked. These problems are solvable, provided we make some smart decisions.

. TH: Susanna last week put out a short post advising Congress on what its 2020 defense budget should look like . Looking at the White House’s proposed budget, what is one big thing the Trump team got right? And what are a couple of important things that need to be addressed?

. SB: There is goodness in this budget request. Highlights include the Navy’s substantial investment in unmanned surface and subsurface vehicles and substantial munitions purchases. However, a major shortcoming is that the services remain overly fixated on the size of the force, which results in inadequate attention to what the force is actually capable of doing in a highly contested environment.

. TH: Perhaps the most symbolic asset of the old American way of war is the aircraft carrier. But the Navy wants a whole new fleet of massive Ford-class ships at $13 billion a pop. Is that a mistake?

. CD: Answering this question requires answering three supporting questions. One, what is the Navy’s future vision for the aircraft carrier? If that vision is like the recent past, in which the carriers have served as platforms for relatively short-range air operations in permissive environments like Iraq or Afghanistan, then it could be a mistake. If, instead, the carrier serves as a long-range, sea-control, strike and anti-submarine asset for the Indian and Pacific Oceans, it could be quite useful.

. Two, what is the future of the carrier airwing? The airwing defines the mission capability of the carrier. If the Navy continues to buy short-range strike fighters like the F/A-18 and F-35, the carrier will be less useful. If it procures a more diverse airwing or multiple airwings that can be swapped based on mission demands, that would enable carriers to support the kind of long-range missions needed to confront China and Russia.

. Three, what are the opportunity costs? Carriers soak up a lot of resources, but they provide (presently) a lot of capabilities. Absent changes suggested above, trends suggest that the costs will go up as the capabilities against great-power competitors go down. In a world of quiet submarines and hypersonic anti-ship missiles, it may not make sense for the Navy to concentrate so much of its combat power in relatively scarce and expensive assets. The problem is that spreading combat power around — what the Navy calls distributed lethality — generally involves a loss of overall combat power to make the force more resilient to enemy attack. If the Navy can find ways to distribute combat power effectively without significant detriment to its overall combat power, there may be an argument for decreasing the size and salience of the carrier fleet.

. TH: When he was deputy secretary of defense – and Susanna’s boss - your CNAS colleague Bob Work was the driving force behind this sort of forward-looking reformation of the military. Did his work on the “third offset,” which centers on using new technology to rebuild America’s advantage, have a lasting effect on the Defense Department? Is there anybody or any team in the Trump Pentagon playing that role?

. SB: I do believe that the intellectual capital behind the third offset continues to have an impact on the department. Things like its continued investment in and prioritization of artificial intelligence and autonomy has its roots in the third offset. But I think the biggest impact we will continue to see well into the future is the cadre of mid-career officers and civil servants to whom the third offset gave a clear focus on the future, and on what the Pentagon needs to do to be ready for it.

. CD: The thinking and analysis behind the third offset didn’t go away - they’re woven into the fabric of the National Defense Strategy. As far as the people and teams go, there are a host of individuals and organizations that continue looking at the future through this lens. The services are doing some great work with the Futures Command in the Army , the Air Force’s Warfighting Integration Capability , the Marine Corps Warfighting Lab , and the Navy’s N3/N5 all being particularly forward-leaning.

. TH: There is a strong consensus in the national security community that Russia and especially China are the threats the military needs to be geared toward. But the terrorists aren’t going away; they are only going to multiply. How does the U.S. shift to major-power competition without losing the capabilities to counter non-state entities?

. SB: There are different ways to address the threat posed by non-state actors, which come with different resource requirements. One approach is to invade and occupy a country for years on end, attempting to remake it in our image. This approach is very resource-intensive, and often less than successful. Another approach is to focus on those individuals and groups that have the intention and capability to attack the United States, and to degrade their ability to do so. This approach requires money and manpower, but is much less resource-intensive than the former. Sticking to this latter approach, along with some sensible investments in inexpensive platforms designed to operate cost-effectively in permissive environments, will free up resources required to sustain the U.S. military’s technological advantage.

. TH: Let’s finish where we started. Given the invested interests in Congress, slowness of the Pentagon to make change (and number of flag officers who try to stop it all together), influence of the big contractors, etc., is there really any hope of moving to a force capable of the New American Way of War?

. SB: I remain optimistic. It is true that change in the Pentagon is generally slow, incremental and incomplete. However, we are already seeing progress, which has continued despite the change in administration. The service organizations focused on the future that Chris noted are great examples. On the other hand, if this administration were to invade Iran, for example, it could mean the effective end of the current National Defense Strategy.

. CD: I’m cautiously optimistic. There have been some positive shifts already. For example, our deterrent posture in Eastern Europe is much better than it was in 2014. Admittedly a low bar, but still progress. The other thing that gives me hope is that our competitors face many of the same (and some different) structural constraints and obstacles that we do.

. To contact the editor responsible for this story: Philip Gray at philipgray@bloomberg.net

. This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

. Tobin Harshaw is an editor and writer on national security and military affairs for Bloomberg Opinion. He was an editor with the op-ed page of the New York Times and the paper’s letters editor.

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America Needs a New Way of War