By Seth Cropsey
Monday, January
10, 2022
The U.S. faces both the immediacy of
great-power competition and the prospect of great-power war. Both of these
require a military that is wholly prepared for combat. This preparation
includes all the standard aspects of military power — personnel, matériel, and
training. But most important and least measurable is intellectual readiness.
There is no sign that the armed services, or the defense establishment more
broadly, are intellectually prepared for a Sino–American clash.
A military organization’s first peacetime
task is preparing for combat. Americans could be forgiven for forgetting this
fact, given the state of our contemporary political debate, some of which has
drawn the military into the political fray. This political tension combines
with recent American combat experience to further conceal the military’s true
purpose. Since 2004, American counterterrorist policy has degenerated into
long-term “small wars” that any British Royal Marine, French Legionnaire, or
pre-1940 American Marine would recognize, but that sit poorly alongside
post–Cold War public perceptions. None of these conflicts were clear-cut wars
ending in the enemy’s destruction; they were open-ended commitments, difficult
for the public to understand because they did not resemble traditional warfare
and asked no sacrifice of most Americans.
These conflicts demand officers who take
the initiative, operate without extensive support, and are extremely proficient
in small-unit tactics and comfortable working with local political actors. Some
of these skills translate to great-power warfare, but most are practiced at the
lower levels of command. This is especially true of naval and air officers. At
no point since Vietnam have they been asked to wage a long-term air-control
campaign, and at no point since 1945 have they been required to secure sea
control against a capable adversary.
The most recent approximation of
conventional warfare came in 2003 against an outdated and ill-led Iraqi army.
The U.S. Navy has not faced a conventional competitor since 1991, and has not
fought in conventional naval combat since 1945. It is not, however, the lack of
major-power combat experience that should cause unease.
The United States’ entire national style
is defined by the application of overwhelming matériel superiority against an
adversary. Exceptions exist — for example, Grant and Sherman’s operational
brilliance late in the Civil War — but in general, major American wars follow
an identical pattern: an initial defensive period, during which the U.S.
mobilizes resources, followed by a punishing counterattack that overwhelms the
adversary.
The key, again, is matériel superiority,
which in today’s U.S. military amounts to a bootless faith that technology and
industrial capacity can prevail against foes with greater initial military
competence. But there is no end in sight to China’s arms buildup. The U.S.
ought to consider the possibility that China will possess larger forces than
ours, and we should look upon the exceptional military competence of Israel as
a model. Underscoring this is the U.S.’s vastly diminished ability to equal
American industry’s extraordinary World War II output. The U.S. may not have
its former ability to overcome a powerful enemy with matériel in time to
prevail.
Moreover, the notion that sheer mass
enabled past American victories stems from a warped reading of strategic
history. In each conflict, the U.S. did have supremely
talented commanders at the highest levels — again, Grant and Sherman in the
Civil War, Dewey in the Spanish–American War, Pershing and Sims in World War I,
and Eisenhower, Patton, Nimitz, Halsey, and others in World War II. Yet in most
cases, it took U.S. statesmen time to identify their generals.
Lincoln burned through three commanders before settling on Grant in 1864.
Roosevelt took several months to choose Eisenhower, while Nimitz assumed
command of the U.S. Pacific Fleet only after the war began. Pershing was
promoted in part for his well-timed recent Mexican service.
However, the issue is that the U.S.
military has so deeply imbibed the matériel element of
strategic history that its ability to identify command talent
is a troubling question. The post–Goldwater-Nichols Defense Reorganization Act
(of 1986) promotion system rewards bureaucratic aptitude over military skill, a
natural consequence of the same legislation’s radically dilated Joint Chiefs of
Staff and combatant command (COCOM) staffs. The expanded control that
Goldwater-Nichols gave to the central command drained the military services’
ability to shape strategy.
Hence the secretary of defense and the
Joint Chiefs move at a glacial pace and increasingly overmanage, with the
former most recently conducting an independent naval-force-structure study
rather than devolving to the services the responsibilities that ought to result
from their operational knowledge. And the services are now encouraged to
compromise current combat capabilities for future advances, most notably in the
Navy’s “Divest to Invest” scheme, which relies on small surface combatants that
are years away from deployment in numbers and on unmanned systems without
public prototypes.
The U.S. military today is focused on
budget battles, procurement issues, social engineering, and the permanent quest
of large central military staffs to increase their hold on everything from
strategy to force architecture. As important as these are, they distract from
warfighting. The understanding that the U.S. is in an interwar period does not
exist. The notion that the military’s first task is to defeat our increasingly
powerful adversaries is a relic from the unexamined past. If it animated the
U.S. high command, there would be unrelenting emphasis on selecting officers
more like Grant than McClellan for promotion at all ranks. Rather than end the
careers of exceptionally promising naval officers for mistakes made during
exercises or mishandled paperwork, the Navy should end its witless confusion
between “loss of confidence” and the insistence for perfection as reasons to
relieve excellent commanders. This would be followed by similar attention to
training, planning, and equipping for wars with a major adversary — or two. This
would include realistic war-gaming (i.e., where the U.S. side can lose),
organizational structures that allow unitary command of such geographically
separate regions as Ukraine and the East China Sea, and serious strategic and
historical education to parallel and complement what the greatest generation —
that means Nimitz, Halsey, Marshall, and Patton — learned about strategy from
combat in World War I.
The results of our military’s inability to
imagine, plan, and exercise accordingly to deter or defeat China are more
readily apparent. A People’s Liberation Army victory in the western Pacific
that crippled U.S. forces almost certainly would prompt negotiations and the
emergence of a Chinese-shaped world — that is, a world led by the genocidal
regime that harvests dissidents’ organs. Too much rides on the question of the
U.S. military’s first task, warfighting, to be swallowed by intellectual
laxity, to disappear into Byzantine central staffs, or to continue to be
distracted by social desiderata.
Note: Harry Halem, a research assistant at
Hudson Institute, aided with research for this article; he is a graduate
student at the London School of Economics.
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