What Questions Are Underrated in National Security Policy?
Welcome to the third edition of “Mind Scourge,” and hello to everyone who is just joining us today for the first time! If you’ve liked what you’ve seen over the past few days: there is much, much, more to come, and please consider subscribing so that you don’t miss any updates. As always, let your friends know as well; unless you haven’t liked it, in which case: inform your enemies.
Today’s theme is inspired by the “War on the Rocks” podcast on July 29, 2019, “Ask Me No Questions, and I’ll Tell You No Lies.” If you haven’t heard of “War on the Rocks,” you should: it’s exactly what it says on the tin, “By Insiders, For Insiders,” and it provides a window into the national security community that isn’t typically reflected in more mainstream sources. Its content is less varnished, more raw; it’s also a venue to air possibly less popular ideas. Believe me, everyone you’ve heard of is reading it, and goodly number of those you haven’t, either, but will be, in the future.
In any case, the podcast, which focused on the questions that are not but should be asked in national security, got me thinking about the mindset reflected in the question-and-answer session. Great power competition (especially China, but also Russia) is back, in a big way. This assumption has many downstream implications, not least for the types of research-and-development programs that are funded, the weapons systems that are eventually purchased, the force structure the United States desires, even in some instances the kinds of personnel the Defense Department selects for.
Incidentally, while I do not so much question the reality or even the importance of great power competition at the present moment, especially with China (although this specific case is considerably more complicated, as “Mind Scourge” plans to explore in the future) I do find that the willingness of the American people to bear the costs of such a prolonged struggle is - strikingly - under-examined. American politicians have avoided clarifying where redlines in our relationship with China might exist, or the extent of the sacrifices the U.S. might be willing to accept in order to “contain” or “balance” China. This likely reflects less a studied strategic circumspection than it does an implicit acknowledgement that there is asymmetry between the consensus figure supported by the national security set and the one embraced by the American populace as whole. I do not sense at present any great appetite amongst the American electorate to gear up for a multi-decades’ struggle (and with what end state as a goal?) with China or its flying buttress, Russia. Nor, I suspect, is the risk threshold acceptable to the American people for any putative great power competition particularly high, either. Beijing certainly understands this, and would leverage its advantage accordingly. It is a capital error for great powers, like the U.S., to run risks at points where the enemy’s commitment outweighs their own. In the final analysis, Taiwan is close to China, and far from the United States. Little else really matters, absent new facts on the ground that offset this differential.
Will is qualitative, and usually decisive. If the United States government does desire to scale-up for Cold War 2.0, if it does wish for a “whole-of-government” or “whole-of-society” approach, then it first needs to focus on the sustaining factor here, the strategic center-of-gravity, namely public opinion. U.S. political leaders, from both parties, need to make - and win - this case to the American people. The resuscitated Committee on the Present Danger is potentially an organic, nonpartisan, step in this direction.
Speaking of questions which are not asked: why has the productivity of military technologies been declining since 1945? We can usefully define productivity in a military context as the “return” on battlefield expenditure; the marginal rate at which expended technologies deliver tactical or strategic effects. Using this as a working definition, I hypothesize that the unit gain is at present negative. Further, the rate has been underwater for some decades.
Put differently, why does technology appear to be negatively implicated in regards to predicting victory or defeat, in a strategic sense, on the modern battlefield? To a first approximation, the gap, or delta, between U.S. technological capacity and that deployed by its enemies has never been greater. Yet translating that technological advantage into sustainable real-world gains off the battlefield remains elusive. Do not overlook the fact that the most significant military innovation of the postwar period is not the nuclear-tipped ballistic missile, or the guided munition, but the suicide bomber, and while we have evolved robust mechanisms to deter the use of the former, for the latter we lack any global solution. “High” technologies, of which the nuclear bomb is perhaps the chief example (artificial intelligence in military affairs will be a coming close second), are brittle, hugely expensive to maintain, require extensive training and specialized knowledge to utilize to potential, and typically can be negated by an equivalent technology, leading to either deterrent (for nuclear weapons) or attritional (for great power war) strategies. “Low” technologies on the other hand, are quasi-organic: cheap, replaceable, usually intuitive to use, return multiples on the initial investment, and can be sourced through “living off the land” strategies. Counter-intuitively (at least to the default Western mindset), low usually beats high, and this has been the dominant trend of the postwar period. This heterodoxy remains unacknowledged, however, and is perhaps unrecognized.
An immediate objection arises in that conventional force structures are typically confounded in asymmetric contexts where irregular forces operate orthogonally to a conventionally-organized military’s structures and trainings, the implication being that the empiric finding of military ineffectiveness in non-conventional contexts should be disallowed. This is a peculiar logic, as in military matters the only desideratum is victory or defeat. An army that loses, loses, no matter the reasons, and it is no explanation that the enemy in some sense fought unfairly, or that one’s own military was not right-sized for its foe.
This connects back with the “War on the Rocks” podcast in that great power competition appears to be sidelining - at least in terms of mindshare and top-of-the-mind awareness - the conflicts that are actually being fought. This puts me in mind of Donald Rumsfeld’s “revolution in military affairs,” which emphasized increased operations tempos, rapid decision making, and precision fires, all enabled by a networked, lightweight force on the ground that relied for its protection on speed and battlefield transparency. The war Rumsfeld actually fought in Iraq was very different, however; and the U.S. military bulked up accordingly, deploying a vastly heavier up-armored force at the end of the war than at its start. As General and former Defense Secretary James Mattis was fond of recounting, in war, the enemy also gets a vote, and you are forced to adjust correspondingly.
To this end, it is troubling that the equilibrium for the United States appears to be the pursuit of technological revolution without limit: hypersonics, directed energy, artificial intelligence, a Space Force, all funded out of a military budget approaching one trillion dollars per annum. In Afghanistan, for eighteen years the U.S. has failed to evolve a winning methodology against an opponent expending perhaps five hundred million dollars per annum and deploying a light infantry force almost exclusively. Although in Iraq and Syria, the United States, partnered with local and coalition forces, destroyed the nascent Islamic State, from the perspective of mid-2019 it appears that the Islamic State’s defeat owed as much or more to its own classic error in accelerating its transition to Maoist-style “phase 3” or “conventional” warfare, and note that it took half-a-decade, longer than the First World War, to do so. It was the Islamic State’s state-building which enabled the U.S. force structure to so effectively and efficiently target the Islamic State’s sources of military and political power. Conventional state-building on the part of the Islamic State aligned its “attack surface” sufficiently with U.S. capabilities and capacities such that its destruction was more or less assured once the U.S. took the decision to intervene militarily. But the Islamic State as a movement is no more defeated strategically than Chiang Kai Shek’s driving the Chinese Communists deep into the interior of China meant the end of Communism in China. It is the ability of low technology forces to “live off the land” and regenerate military power almost endlessly and at very low cost that is the real asymmetric advantage they possess against conventional powers.
The pursuit of great power war can be seen as a promissory note against the chance of its occurrence. To this extent, it is not per se money wasted. But we should not lose sight of the simultaneous opportunity cost that it represents: by pushing out indefinitely into the future a force structure sized for defeating one specific kind of enemy, we may find that in the meantime, a very different kind of military revolution was occurring in parallel, outside of our recognition, one evolving organically, and that by the time it rises to our attention, the world we believed we understood will be unrecognizable.
Book Recommendation: Walter Kempowski’s “All For Nothing,” translated by Anthea Bell. World War II from the German side, set in a bleak and blasted Prussia, with the gotterdammerung of the Red Army just over the horizon.