Our boy Greg Grant has a great piece on a pre­sen­ta­tion given by Steven Biddle and T.X. Hammes on the future of war­fare over at DoD Buzz.

I think it’s a good com­pan­ion piece to the inter­view we just did with Dakota Wood at CSBA and also dove­tails nicely with Greg’s pre­vi­ous piece on pro­pos­als from Mattis on how to bet­ter orga­nize the Marine Corps.

Gates is head­ing in the right direc­tion with a return to threat-​​based plan­ning ver­sus the capabilities-​​based port­fo­lio plan­ning of his pre­de­ces­sor that pro­duced unaf­ford­able pro­cure­ment plans, Hammes said at the Washington gath­er­ing. Trying to guess the exact type or nature of future war the U.S. is likely to fight is the wrong way to go as more often than not youre going to end up with the wrong force. Instead, develop a force that can fight well enough across the spec­trum of con­flict to buy time to work your way up the learn­ing curve. No mat­ter what type of war, youll be forced into a game of adap­ta­tion, as that is wars true nature, and the out­come usu­ally comes down to who can adapt the fastest. 

I agree 100 per­cent with this and am frus­trated when ana­lysts use China and Russia as exam­ples of “near-​​peer” com­peti­tors that we need to equip our­selves to fight. In fact, for all their excel­lent analy­sis, the CSBA tends to default to that con­tention — but I don’t think it’s out of some xeno­pho­bic reac­tion, just a way to com­pare apples to apples.

The chal­lenge is pre­vent­ing the ser­vices from default­ing to plan­ning for another Cold War by sub­sti­tut­ing China for the Soviet Union. Setting aside for a moment the absur­dity of going to war with your de-​​facto banker, Hammes said there is the lit­tle dis­cussed issue of Chinas nuclear arse­nal. A U.S. air and naval cam­paign against China would tar­get the coun­trys com­mand and con­trol. How do you do that with­out threat­en­ing their nukes and national com­mand author­ity? The Chinese lack a reli­able sec­ond strike capa­bil­ity, attacks on their com­mand and con­trol could be per­ceived as an effort to take out their nuclear capa­bil­ity, pos­si­bly trig­ger­ing a use-​​it or lose-​​it sce­nario. The Chinese know they cant stop indi­vid­ual air­craft attack­ing the main­land, instead, theyre build­ing bal­lis­tic mis­siles to tar­get airstrips and car­ri­ers to force the U.S. to fight at the extreme lim­its of range, tak­ing short range fight­ers out of the equa­tion. As for the Russians: in Georgia, the Russians drove a sin­gle divi­sion 60 miles after three months prepa­ra­tion. Not a threat. 

Thank good­ness there are at least some sober minds to help advance the debate in a more “mid­dle ground” approach. Rather than swing­ing all the way to the left and say China isn’t a threat because they’ve just adopted a dif­fer­ent polit­i­cal struc­ture, or to go all the way to the right and say they are a threat because of it, misses the point. It’s about capa­bil­i­ties. When more than 3/​4 of your pop­u­la­tion doesn’t have run­ning water, I’m sorry but that’s not “near peer.” By the same token, we get all freaked out about Russian bombers fly­ing close to Alaska or some such, but don’t real­ize that the pilots are so happy to just get the flight hours they don’t give a crap where they’re flying.

However, I do remem­ber an arti­cle in the Atlantic about a year ago pos­tu­lat­ing how we’d fight China (it was part of Robert Kaplan’s series) and it made me think about some­thing: How com­fort­able would I feel look­ing off the shore of my mother’s house in coastal North Carolina and see­ing a Chinese air­craft car­rier steam­ing nearby as apposed to a British or a French or a Japanese one? I’ll let you answer that one for yourselves.

Lethality in hybrid war­fare is cer­tainly increas­ing, as the vul­ner­a­bil­ity of even the most heav­ily armored vehi­cles will attest. Biddle ques­tions the notion that sit­u­a­tional aware­ness will prove ade­quate: In a hybrid form of war­fare, the ubiq­uity of cover and con­ceal­ment makes it pos­si­ble for rea­son­ably skilled oppo­nents to stay out of our infor­ma­tion grid. If we cant find them then we cant include them in a net­worked form of sit­u­a­tional aware­ness. Instead of adding armor to vehi­cles or look­ing to infor­ma­tion supe­ri­or­ity to pro­vide a bat­tle­field edge, Biddle said the U.S. will be forced to adopt more hybrid war like tac­tics: dis­per­sion, cover and con­ceal­ment, com­bined arms, fire and maneuver. 

A clear swipe at FCS…And this great line:

The U.S. mil­i­tary may be forced to under­take two trans­for­ma­tions. If win­ning today means the mil­i­tary must trans­form for low inten­sity con­flict, with larger ground forces and less empha­sis on high-​​tech mod­ern­iza­tion, and then trans­form once again, after these wars are con­cluded, for a dif­fer­ent kind of war, then thats prob­a­bly the right path to take, as incon­ve­nient and expen­sive as that may prove. 

It’s a bit­ter pill to swal­low, but I think Biddle’s right.

Be sure to check out the entire story on DoD Buzz.

– Christian