Great power focus underpins military failures (David Allan Adams) USofA

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Great Power Focus Underpins Military Failures Captain David Allan Adams, U.S. Navy (Retired) February 2018

Since the end of World War II, the U.S. armed forces have proved largely inept at exercising military power as an instrument of national policy. Retired Navy Admiral James Stavridis, in his review of Harlan Ullman’s book Anatomy of Failure: Why 1

America Loses Every War It Starts (Naval Institute Press, 2017), concedes that “we have become less successful over the past decades, beginning with the failures in Vietnam and continuing to the frustrations today in Iraq and Afghanistan.” 1 The cause of these military struggles, Ullman claims, is an inability of the nation’s political leaders to think in coherent strategic terms.

Putting on Their Masks of War The Pentagon has been applauded for the strategic clarity and the distinct shift in priorities provided in the unclassified summary of the “National Defense Strategy” (NDS). Secretary of Defense James Mattis lauded the strategy as “a good fit for our times” and summarized the shift by declaring that we will “continue to prosecute the campaign against terrorists that we are engaged in today, but Great Power competition, not terrorism, is now the primary focus of U.S. national security.” 2 The unfortunate consequence of this shift in priorities is that the new NDS unwittingly will allow the U.S. military services again to march to failure.

While Anatomy of Failure sheds light on many aspects of that path, it misses the mark on the key element underpinning our nation’s military misfortunes. The problem with Ullman’s thesis is not that it paints the post-World War II U.S. armed forces as a perennial loser, but rather that he gives U.S. military professionals a pass for our complicity in these defeats. In Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife , retired Army Lieutenant Colonel John Nagl reminds us how the U.S. military was recalcitrant in its 2

ability to learn from defeat in Vietnam and instead became enamored with preparing for high-technology conventional wars—the kinds of wars it knew how to and wanted to fight. 3 Rand Corporation’s Carl Builder called it in his highly praised 1989 study of The Masks of War . 4 He warned that because of their institutional preferences for great power war, the “military services would be unable meet the challenges the U.S. is likely to face by the turn of the century.” 5 The military’s reluctance to plan and train for the irregular fight precipitated its struggle to gain ground during almost two decades of unconventional wars following a 11 September 2001. In the past several years, the services—especially the Air Force and Navy—have been clamoring to prepare for a conventional fight with China and Russia. The Army and the Marine Corps are now jumping on board.

Not long ago, then-General James Mattis found it “intellectually embarrassing that people want to hug the Chinese [and exclaim], ‘Oh, thank God we have another peer competitor at last! Now we can go back to building the weapons that we always wanted to build.’” 6 At the same time, our current National Security Advisor, Army Lieutenant General H. R. McMaster, issued his clarion call against the “The Pipe Dream of Easy War,” stating that we can “afford least is to define the problem of future war as we would like it to be.” 7 His warning was widely perceived as an assault on the Navy’s and Air Force’s conventional biases epitomized by their China-focused air-sea battle dogma. 8 The new NDS demonstrates another victory for institutional bias over clear-eyed calculations of the threat. Prioritizing great power competition plays into the service’s deep cultural predispositions that empower influential defense contractors, admirals, and general officers to drive high-end missions and capabilities at the expense of cultivating innovative responses to defeat the more prevalent—and more difficult— unconventional threats facing our nation. The new NDS demonstrates how these attitudes are far more powerful—and far more entrenched—than the policymakers in the White House or on Capitol Hill. By donning their masks of war, the services become blind to preparing for combat threats that no longer fit their world.

A Slow-Learning Navy The U.S. Navy perhaps is the worst offender. Admiral Scott Swift, commander of the Pacific Fleet, is overjoyed with the NDS, giving it “huge head knots, I would say cheering.” 9 This is further confirmation that the U.S. Navy persistently has failed to heed General Mattis’s warning that we must “learn through others’ experiences . . . especially in our line of work where the consequences of incompetence are so final for young men.” 10 Since it has never suffered clear defeat in a war at sea, the Navy has been loath to learn the central lesson of the post-World War II era—epitomized so sharply by our experiences in Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Adversaries know that engaging the U.S. military in a conventional fight is a losing proposition, while the U.S. forces have proved largely incapable of long-term success in unconventional ones.

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After 11 September 2001, the Navy began to commit itself to irregular warfare. Even as late as 2010, then-Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Gary Roughead reinforced the Navy’s commitment to the irregular warfare and proclaimed that “every sailor is fully committed to the operations and the fights that are being undertaken in Iraq and Afghanistan.” 11 Yet, just as the SEALs, EODs, individual augmentees, and many others had begun to bring home the hard-learned lessons captured in the desert, in 2011 the Navy shed its nascent focus on irregular warfare. The term was almost completely exorcised from the Navy’s lexicon, stripped from its strategic documents, and omitted from senior leader speeches in favor of a warfighting-first strategy (translated to highend, conventional war at sea).

Just as hybrid, unconventional warfare began to break across the maritime horizon, the Navy turned away from it. China took advantage of the U.S. Navy’s lack of preparedness and conducted a series of well-thought-out, paramilitary maritime operations as it occupied and fortified the South China Sea. The Navy proved incapable of mustering a response and offered U.S. political leaders few options beyond the use of conventional gray-hull tactics and conservative freedom-of-navigation exercises. The greatest Navy in the world had its tail handed to it by a combination of a few moderately capable destroyers and a fleet of white-hulled “coast guard” vessels, fishermen, and dredges. The only reason China has not succeeded in fulfilling its ambitions in the East China Sea is that the Japanese were smart enough to overmatch their unconventional strategy— white hulls for white hull.

The Navy’s answer to Chinese assertiveness is to usher in a “high-end warfighting renaissance.” 12 It plans to deliver an even more lethal force that is perhaps even less suited for handling these irregular maritime challenges, much less contributing to a broader struggle against unconventional threats.

Rise to the Challenge Providing U.S. political leaders with a correct estimate of the overall threat is the foremost responsibility of U.S. military leaders. Military competition among great powers is severely constrained by the existence of nuclear arsenals. While the probability of a great power war with Russia or China remains extraordinarily small, the ongoing fight against a global Islamist insurgency is certain.

At the same time, a U.S. military that spends approximately eight times more than the Russians and three times more than Chinese on defense must do some serious soulsearching before it can justify larger defense budgets. 13 Why has Russia’s and China’s military performance eclipsed that of the United States? The People’s Liberation ArmyNavy is succeeding in fortifying the South China Sea and expanding China’s influence out to the second island chain. Russia has occupied the Crimea, waged a largely successful insurgent war in eastern Ukraine, and supplanted the United States as the most influential power in Syria. It goes to show that innovative thinking is much more important than innovative weapons.

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To honor their sacred obligation to defend the United States, the U.S. military first and foremost must learn the lessons of past wars—especially of those of the post-Hiroshima era—and be committed to mastering the unconventional. Containing the raging global Islamist insurgency is the United States’ most pressing priority and will require an adept combination of counterterrorism, counterproliferation, and counterinsurgency. In the larger sense, state and non-state powers—great and small—will continue to proliferate their employment of the unconventional and irregular tactics that give them the best chance for success against the U.S. military.

While the NDS does not ignore these irregular challenges, priorities matter. If the United States has learned anything from 11 September 2001, it is that relegating irregular challenges to a secondary priority is a colossal strategic mistake. 14 In a bestcase scenario, the NDS will embolden the U.S. military’s innate reluctance to master irregular warfare. In the current strategic landscape, however, it will impede the military’s ability to learn to live in, fight, and own the irregular conflicts into which it inevitably will be drawn because they pervade the world as it actually exists today.

Further defeats on warfare’s periphery will erode the nation’s influence and the U.S. ability to stand for the values cherished by peace- and freedom-loving people across the globe.

The most likely scenario, however, is that in the wake of the next major terrorist attack on a U.S. city—God forbid it should be one involving weapons of mass destruction—the nation will look back again in despair and wonder how it happened. Blame should not fall only on to political leaders, but on a military establishment unwilling to overcome its institutional biases for high-end warfare. To avoid this coming disaster, all military professionals must make it their first priority to learn, think innovatively, train intensely, and be primed for the inevitable irregular battles ahead.

Captain Adams is a contributing editor to Proceedings . He retired from the Navy in 2016 after 31 years of service. He commanded Provincial Reconstruction Team Khost, the USS Santa Fe (SSN-763), and the USS Georgia (SSGN-729B).

Endnotes: 1. Adm. James Stavridis, USN (Ret.), “‘Anatomy of Failure’: An Analysis of Why America Keeps Losing Wars,” Task & Purpose , 26 January 2018, https://taskandpurpose.com/anatomy-failure-analysis-america-keeps-losing... .

2. Secretary of Defense James N. Mattis, “Remarks by Secretary Mattis on the National Defense Strategy,” Department of Defense, 19 January 2018, https://www.defense.gov/News/Transcripts/Transcript-View/Article/1420042... .

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3. John A. Nagl, Learning to Eat Soup with a Knife (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 2005).

4. Carl H. Builder, The Masks of War: American Military Styles in Strategy and Analysis (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989).

5. James J. Wirtz, “Book Review: Carl H. Builder, The Masks of War: American Military Styles in Strategy and Analysis , Millennium”Journal of International Studies 19, no. 115 .

6. Thomas P. M. Barnett, “Think Again: The Pentagon,” Foreign Policy , 4 March 2013, http://foreignpolicy.com/2013/03/04/think-again-the-pentagon/ .

7. H. R. McMaster, “The Pipe Dream of Easy War,” New York Times, 20 July 2013, http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/21/opinion/sunday/the-pipe-dream-of-easy-... .

8. Bryan McGrath, “McMaster Sets His Sights on AirSea Battle,” Maritime Security, 22 July 2013, http://maritimesecurity.asia/free-2/maritime-security-asia/h-r-mcmaster-... .

9. Episode 16, The Proceedings Podcast , 1 February 2018, https://www.usni.org/magazines/proceedings/2018-02/proceedings-podcast .

10. Jean McGregor, “The Avid Reading Habits of Trump’s Secretary of Defense, James ‘Mad Dod’ Mattis,” Washington Post, 1 December 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/on-leadership/wp/2016/11/23/the-avid... .

11. Adm. Gary Roughead, USN, “Remarks at University of Chicago Conference on Terrorism & Strategy,” 12 October 2010, http://www.navy.mil/navydata/people/cno/ Roughead/Speech/101012-UofChicagoremarks%20FINAL.doc.

12. Syndey J. Freedberg Jr., “Navy in the Midst of High-End Renaissance:’ Vice Adm. Rowden,” Breaking Defense, 9 January 18, https://breakingdefense.com/2018/01/arenaissance-for-navy-warfighting-d... .

13. “U.S. Defense Spending Compared to Other Countries,” Peter G. Peterson Foundation, https://www.pgpf.org/chart-archive/0053_defense-comparison .

14. Capt. David A. Adams, USN, “Repeating Three Strategic Mistakes?” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 140, no. 9 (September 2014).

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