How Will We Fight?

In considering the question “How will we fight?”, this article begins by examining the threats we face from conventional, insurgent, and hybrid enemies as well as terrorists and super-empowered individuals. It then outlines how America can fight effectively against each threat—as well as identifying the deficiencies in our current force structure that will hinder that response. The analysis argues that America needs a well-balanced, medium-weight joint force. It then provides recommendations for each of the services, as well as special operations forces, to achieve that goal. It concludes by describing what is needed to insure our force is capable of the rapid innovation in wartime required of successful nations.     

First Priorities in Military Professionalism

This article contends that it is time for the armed forces to revisit their schools, day rooms, wardrooms, squadron meeting places, headquarters, bases and posts to increase the level of awareness and the teaching of professional norms.     

A Requiem for American Counterinsurgency

Counterinsurgency as an operational method employed by the American military to achieve policy aims at a reasonable cost in blood and treasure has failed miserably. The idea that it has worked should be buried in the ground with a requiem stating that counterinsurgency is dead. Unfortunately, a large group of writers over many years have constructed a deeply flawed narrative that suggests that it is alive and well and continues to shape and influence American foreign policy toward and activist use of American military force in the world's troubled spots.     

U.S.-Russian Strategic Arms Reductions: Nonlinear Challenges,Practical Opportunities

The Obama Administration's desire to push forward with strategic nuclear arms reductions during the President's second term requires the navigation of numerous shoals and reefs. U.S. and Russian negotiators will have to overcome both political and military obstacles to accomplish post-New START reductions in long-range nuclear weapons. For example, efforts to reduce offensive nuclear weapons are complicated by U.S. and NATO plans for missile defenses deployed in Europe and by exigencies in U.S. and Russian domestic politics. In addition, the military-technical aspects of cyber war and nuclear deterrence can no longer be treated, analytically or practically, as isolated compartments. This article considers several aspects of the relationships among possible post-START offensive force reductions, advanced conventional weapons including missile defenses, and emerging cyber capabilities.     

Innovation or Inertia: The U.S. Military and the Learning of Counterinsurgency

Following its encounter with insurgent violence in Iraq, the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) has sought to improve the U.S. military's ability to conduct counterinsurgency. This effort suggests a potential turning-point in the history of the U.S. military, which has traditionally devoted its attention and resources to “high-intensity” or “conventional” combat. Given this institutional culture, what are now the prospects of the U.S. military ‘learning counterinsurgency’? In many ways, the ongoing reorientation is promising and targeted, informed directly by the U.S. campaign in Iraq. At the same time, Pentagon priorities still reveal a remarkable resistance to change, and this in spite of the radically altered strategic environment of the War on Terror. Given this intransigence - and the eventual fall-out from the troubled Iraq campaign - the ongoing learning of counterinsurgency might very well fail to produce the type of deep-rooted change needed to truly transform the U.S. military.     

Air and Space Power, Lead Turning, the Future

To optimize security investment for the future, the Department of Defense (DoD) should adopt an approach that rewards the services for developing innovative methods to attain national security objectives with the least risk in both blood and treasure. To accomplish this, the DoD may have to re-visit its former practice of providing each service with relatively equal slices of the military budget. Under such an approach, the services are motivated to make incremental changes to the concepts and weapons of the previous war and have little reason to take risks to increase productivity of man and machine alike. What is needed—particularly in these times of increasingly complex national security challenges, rising costs, and shrinking budgets—is a plan for going forward that is centered on a shared vision of the variety of threat conditions we are likely to face, an honest evaluation of their significance, and a mature appraisal of what will be required to deal with them. We should dedicate ourselves to crafting an overall defense strategy that will allow us to shape the environment and act flexibly across the entire range of operations, and that will also provide a framework upon which to base our jointly focused resource and investment decisions.¹     

Can Europe Fill the Void in U.S. Military Leadership?

This article lays out the case for why Washington's European allies are incapable, both now and in the foreseeable future, of replacing American military leadership. Despite recent substantial force contributions in Iraq and Afghanistan and small-scale interventions in Africa, European military capabilities are limited, declining, and unlikely to rebound, regardless of whether the United States is in strategic retreat. As a result, the United States faces a bleak choice: not whether to trade American global leadership for an equally benevolent European world order, but whether to give up its mantle of leadership and thereby create a void that may be filled by unfriendly, if not overtly hostile, actors.