opinionWar

War Is Extinct, and We Miss It! Part 3: What Is Our Military Future?

The future of war is bleak and uncertain, but the future of violence is assured. The worldwide growing gap between rich and poor and the unbearable despair of crossing it ensures desperation everywhere, including America.  It is mad to persist in our cycle of tactical victory preceding strategic failure, but it will be difficult to leave this treadmill.

We choose our enemies poorly. We demonize regimes when they are not absolutely “with us.” There is often no practical way to depose a regime and we leave no doorway to reconciliation. Instead, we might unilaterally declare an anti-American tin-pot dictator to be “our favorite Red” and thus co-opt his propaganda and acquired authority by our malevolently friendly diplomatic demeanor. American diplomacy, however, has rarely been clever.

Secretary of State Madeleine Albright once asked General Colin Powell “Whats the point of having this superb military that youre always talking about if we cant use it?”[i]  If our military cannot achieve strategic success, it should not be used. A de-centralized movement cannot be kinetically eliminated. We often mistake criminality for a political process and apply military tools to do a policeman’s job.  We have also learned that captured territory must be occupied for a long time. Hence, selective dove-ishness can be pragmatic.

Adapting to Modern Warfare

Our national military strategy (NMS) is only a programming guide. Our actual strategy is determined by the available resources and our funded structure is our only tool for every mission.[ii] We stubbornly maintain a military designed for linear war and are always surprised by the enemy’s chosen battlefield conditions. The Army’s Operating Concept is vague, even for a strategic document, about prioritizing capabilities. Forced to shrink specific capabilities to economize, our military is still trying to prepare to fight anyone, anywhere at any time. It is not the Army that is hollow; we have a hollow national strategy process. In the end, though, it is irrelevant that the Army is not ready to meet the requirements of the NMS because supplemental appropriations will fix everything when necessary. America has not lost any war because of unpreparedness. “Muddling through” is America’s tra