Competing Theories of War in the 21st Century
How the Lines are Blurring Between Multiple Theoretical Perspectives in an Interconnected Algorithmic Age
A great article from the Irregular Warfare Center written by Dr. James Derleth titled, “Great Power Competition, Irregular Warfare, and the Gray Zone,” got me to thinking about the multiplicity of theoretical perspectives advanced in our attempts to conceptualize and understand war. While I have neither the time nor space necessary to cover such a dense, rich, and voluminous topic in this Substack post, it nevertheless conjured an image for me from my high school physics class where I was first introduced to ripple pools and wave interference.
Like the ripple pool, whenever a new theory on war makes a “splash” in academic and foreign policy circles, it creates a wave pattern which begins to interfere with other wave patterns begun by previous “splashes” in this realm. If there are only two proffered choices, then the amplitudes and frequencies are fairly distinct, well-defined, and calculable. The analogy is perhaps a bit stretched, but between two competing ideas, practitioners can choose which best suits their analytical perspectives through which they can develop foreign policy and military approaches. But what if, as we find today, there are multiple competing ideas colliding together which make analysis, definition, and prescription much more difficult? It might look something like this:
While discernible patterns may emerge over time, the constant interaction between the waves makes predicting those patterns and emergent behaviors much more difficult to ascertain. I feel we may currently find ourselves in this situation due to numerous factors, including: globalization; mass communication and social media; algorithmic speed and social engineering; cognitive capture due to psychological and educational biases; etc.
Dr. Derleth does a nice job in his article describing this challenge, and I would like to expand on his excellent piece by attempting to take another conceptual framework — Mosaic Warfare — to see if it might offer a useful heuristic through which to bind together these disparate theoretical frameworks.
But First, the Extant Theories
Irregular Warfare:
Dr. Derleth does a nice job of describing what irregular warfare looks like in the 21st Century. He acknowledges irregular warfare has existed for centuries (after all, assassins, spies, propaganda, military deception, guerrilla warfare, insurgencies, etc., have all existed as long as humankind has battled). That said, he argues irregular warfare in this century is somewhat different:
Irregular warfare is not new. Formidable armies such as Napoleon’s Grand Armée and Hitler’s Wehrmacht struggled to control irregular forces which exploited their knowledge of the local environment to disrupt communication and supply lines. During the Cold War, the U.S. engaged in “political warfare” and the Soviet Union used “active measures” to lessen the likelihood that their rivalry would lead to war.
Nevertheless, contemporary irregular warfare differs significantly from irregular warfare of the past. First, the type of actors and the way in which they are employed is different: Private military companies, cyber hackers, and criminal organizations are increasingly being used as state proxies. Second, as was seen in the Donbass region of the Ukraine in 2014, conventional forces supported irregular forces, instead of what was traditionally the reverse relationship.
Third, non-lethal activities, such as influence and cyber operations, are used with greater frequency. As the result of globalization, a 24/7 news cycle, the weaponization of information technology, and new information sources—especially social media—the effectiveness of non-lethal tactics has drastically increased. Combined with other multi-domain, non-lethal actions such as cyber-attacks, sponsored demonstrations, economic coercion, and the sabotage of infrastructure, Russia’s disinformation campaign in Ukraine successfully exploited societal vulnerabilities, weakened government institutions, and undermined the legitimacy of the Ukrainian state. Revisionist powers have also employed influence operations to exacerbate and exploit societal divisions in other democracies. It can be argued that information has become the strategic center of gravity in contemporary conflict, and irregular warfare has become at least as important as conventional warfare.
He then goes on to describe how our primary competitors, China and Russia, focus on political, or cognitive/information, warfare, while NATO and the west continues to focus on the more traditional forms of warfare centered around military strategy, tactics, and equipment. Based on this insight, while the west prepares for possible war against our potential adversaries, our primary competitors are already at war with us through murky, less attributable means alternatively described as hybrid war, gray zone operations, operations below the level of armed conflict, or any of a number of terms deployed to understand the nature of their approaches. The question then becomes, what is it exactly the Russians and Chinese are doing in this sphere?
New Generation Warfare:
Russian Chief of the General Staff Valery Gerasimov is the man who developed the concept of New Generation Warfare. To be fair, it is a characterization of warfare he felt the US had developed and deployed in the Balkans, Afghanistan, Iraq, the Caucasus, and Ukraine. In his analysis, it was the US who developed social and political pressure within these nations (Serbia, Kosovo, Afghanistan, Iraq, the Arab Spring, Color revolutions in Lebanon, Georgia and Ukraine), leading to political and social instability which then created the “necessity” for political and economic sanctions. Those in turn led to regime pressure and measures to exert control over their populations, which then ultimately led to the justification of US military intervention to protect civilians and establish stability. As Charles Bartles notes in a 2016 Military Review article titled, “Getting Gerasimov Right,”:
However, Russia believes that the pattern of forced U.S.-sponsored regime change has been largely supplanted by a new method. Instead of an overt military invasion, the first volleys of a U.S. attack come from the installment of a political opposition through state propaganda (e.g., CNN, BBC), the Internet and social media, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs). After successfully instilling political dissent, separatism, and/or social strife, the legitimate government has increasing difficulty maintaining order.
As the security situation deteriorates, separatist movements can be stoked and strengthened, and undeclared special operations, conventional, and private military forces (defense contractors) can be introduced to battle the government and cause further havoc. Once the legitimate government is forced to use increasingly aggressive methods to maintain order, the United States gains a pretext for the imposition of economic and political sanctions, and sometimes even military sanctions such as no-fly zones, to tie the hands of the besieged governments and promote further dissent. Eventually, as the government collapses and anarchy results, military forces under the guise of peacekeepers can then be employed to pacify the area, if desired, and a new government that is friendly to the United States and the West can be installed.
Whether one agrees or not with Gerasimov’s assertions from a US/western perspective, it is important to understand that this is exactly how Russia sees the state of Russian-US geopolitics now. It also happens to provide a fresh perspective on Russia’s eventual invasion of Ukraine and the motives which led them to that decision.
Dr. Philip Karber wrote an article in 2015 on the National Geospatial Agency website describing the factors involved in New Generation Warfare:
5 Elements of Russia’s New Generation Warfare
POLITICAL SUBVERSION: Insertion of agents; classic “agit-prop” information operations employing modern mass media to exploit ethnic-linguistic-class differences; corruption, compromise and intimidation of local officials; backed up with kidnapping, assassination and terrorism; recruiting discontented elements into a cellular cadre enforced with murderous discipline.
PROXY SANCTUARY: Seizing local governmental centers, police stations, airports and military depots; arming and training insurgents; creating checkpoints and destroying ingress transportation infrastructure; cyberattacks compromising victim communications; phony referendum with single party representation; establishment of a “People’s Republic” under Russian tutelage.
INTERVENTION: Deploying of the Russian forces to the border with sudden large-scale exercises involving ground, naval, air and airborne troops; surreptitious introduction of heavy weapons to insurgents; creation of training and logistics camps adjacent to the border; commitment of so-called “volunteer” combined-arms Battalion Tactical Groups; integrating proxy troops into Russian equipped, supported and led higher-level formations.
COERCIVE DETERRENCE: Secret strategic force alerts and snap checks — forward deployment of tactical nuclear delivery systems; theater and intercontinental “in your face” maneuvers; aggressive air patrolling of neighboring areas to inhibit their involvement.
NEGOTIATED MANIPULATION: The use and abuse of Western negotiated ceasefires to rearm their proxies; using violations to bleed the opponent’s Army while inhibiting other states from helping under the fear of escalation — divide the Western alliance by playing economic incentives, selective and repetitive phone negotiations infatuating a favorite security partner.
Sound familiar today based on what is happening in Ukraine?
If there’s one important lesson to be drawn from Russia’s apparent use of New Generation Warfare in the Caucasus and Ukraine, it is that overreliance on non-military or para-military approaches to the exclusion of effective front line maneuver capabilities — to this point, at least — have proven less than advantageous in achieving their aims.
Unrestricted Warfare, “Intelligentized” Warfare, and System Destruction Warfare:
Unrestricted Warfare
On the heels of America’s stunning defeat of Iraq’s army in Operation DESERT STORM in 1999, two colonels from the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) witnessed the impressive US victory over what was at the time considered one of the more capable and well-equipped forces in the world. In response, they penned an article called, “Unrestricted Warfare” which described what China would need to do in order to compete against the US. As the graphic above describes, the authors believed warfare needed to expand beyond the traditional military definitions and into a more comprehensive, whole-of-society approach where boundaries, rules, battlefields, and methods were all blurred in service to a nation’s pursuits and interests. As they state:
In its eyes, everything that can benefit mankind can also harm him. This is to say that there is nothing in the world today that cannot become a weapon, and this requires that our understanding of weapons must have an awareness that breaks through all boundaries. With technological developments being in the process of striving to increase the types of weapons, a breakthrough in our thinking can open up the domain of the weapons kingdom at one stroke. As we see it, a single man-made stock-market crash, a single computer virus invasion, or a single rumor or scandal that results in a fluctuation in the enemy country's exchange rates or exposes the leaders of an enemy country on the Internet, all can be included in the ranks of new-concept weapons.
In their treatise, they too recognized how the US engaged in “supra-national” efforts to garner support for its invasion of Iraq during Desert Storm. Using diplomatic, economic, informational, and military means to develop support, resources, narrative shaping, and military buildup, the US paved the way toward how the Chinese authors envision a wider scope of warfare moving forward. As demonstrated through Gerasimov and Qiao Liang, US actions served as the predicate for their strategic vision, an unintended consequence which has pitted our own “way of war” against us in different and altered permutations based upon the cultural and historical perspectives of Russia and China. But whereas the US and the west continue to focus primarily upon military power in its conceptualization of war, our chief competitors have flipped the script and are considering the military as a supporting element to their overarching war aims.
But, beyond the US’s traditional definition of a nation’s instruments of national power residing within its diplomatic, informational, military, and economic realms, the Chinese have taken it further. As Derleth describes:
In 2003, China issued the “Political Work Guidelines of the People’s Liberation Army,” describing “three warfares” which are to be executed during peace and war. The first, psychological warfare, is the application of military, diplomatic, and economic pressure to weaken an adversary’s will. The second, public opinion warfare, is focused on the overt and covert manipulation of information to influence international and domestic decisions and policies. The third, legal warfare, refers to the exploitation of international norms to support Chinese strategic objectives.
Additionally, beyond its PLA focus on the “three warfares,” under Xi the state is also employing less visible means of influence operations.
Far beyond public diplomacy which has guided international relations and involves government-led efforts to communicate with foreign publics to build support for their objectives, Chinese efforts have been characterized as “covert, coercive, or corrupting.” Though the article capturing this dynamic specifically analyzes China’s role within Australian politics, it is clear Chinese influence operations are taking place on a global scale and are designed to intimidate diaspora Chinese populations, coerce or otherwise corrupt national elites and politicians, and do so “under the radar” as a means to inject disruptive wave function potentiality into the individual minds of influential citizens to then actuate those potentials into local realities which then initiate divergent attitudes and perspectives within the body politic worldwide. Much of this work is conducted by a little-known department within the CCP called the United Front Work Department (UFWD) which Xi Jinping has called a “magic weapon” for the aggrandizement and rejuvenation of the Chinese people. The UFWD:
. . . guides and controls an elaborate network of proxies and front organizations which are used to reward, intimidate, surveil, and coopt the overseas Chinese community – its civic and business associations, student groups, and Chinese language media – as well as academic institutions, politicians, and others with influence. The goal is to ‘win hearts and minds’ of overseas Chinese and other influential targets and unite them in support of the CCP and its goals while neutralizing critics.[2]
Stretching the ripple pool analogy above, the UFWD might more properly be called the United Wave Front Work Department, inserting another dipper into the geopolitical ripple tank to create diffractive wave fronts.
Certainly, within the U.S. these Chinese influence operations have been going on for some time. Whether through the targeting of political leaders such as Senator Dianne Feinstein who employed a Chinese staff member and driver who served with the senator for nearly twenty years and who was later identified by U.S. intelligence in 2018 as a Chinese spy, or Representative Eric Swalwell who was targeted by a Chinese spy during his time serving on the Dublin, California City Council and who continued to fund raise for Representative Swalwell as he rose to national prominence as a member on the House Intelligence Committee and later as a Democratic contender for President, Chinese operations in the political realm have been ongoing and apparently pervasive for many years. FBI Director Christopher Wray is quoted in an Axios article stating, “Beijing is engaged in a highly sophisticated malign foreign influence campaign . . . These efforts involve subversive, undeclared, criminal, or coercive attempts to sway our government’s policies, distort our country’s public discourse, and undermine confidence in our democratic processes and values.” This, too, is an effort at reality shaping but on a much grander, global scale.
In addition to political influence, China is also involved in shaping academic, corporate, and other national institutional entities in order to shape reality congruent with Chinese objectives and desires. These efforts include the establishment of Confucian Institutes across the university systems throughout the world, with nearly fifty-five institutes operating across most states in the U.S. In the corporate realm, Chinese influence on corporate decision-making in exchange for access to the lucrative Chinese market is well-documented, as is the requirement for U.S. corporations to share proprietary product and process information to the Chinese government before being allowed access to the vast Chinese market or to Chinese territory for corporate operations. In return for these corporate concessions, China is able to shape corporate decision-making through expunging media which runs counter to Chinese objectives or narratives, or which might place China in a negative light. This has been most recently witnessed regarding news and information about the origins and responses to the COVID-19 pandemic which swept throughout the world in 2020.
“Intelligentized” Warfare
While Unrestricted Warfare is a broad, pervasive, holistic, and patient approach toward shaping the environment congruent with Chinese aims, they have also embarked on an aggressive military modernization effort in concert with these less visible influence operations.
Since the 1980’s, China has embarked upon three distinct military modernization programs:
Mechanization: China sought to equip PLA units with modern platforms, including electronic warfare systems, as well as motorized, armored personnel carriers and infantry fighting vehicles. Mechanization emphasized fixed boundaries and armor operations, primarily for troops stationed along China’s land borders, at the expense of naval and air operations. In 2020, the PLA announced it had “basically achieved” mechanization.
Informatization: Since the 1990s, the PLA’s dominant push has been informatization, in which wars are won through information dominance, and the space and cyber domains are the “commanding heights of strategic competition.” PLA operational concepts today emphasize the need to win “informatized local wars” by using long-range, precision, smart, and unmanned weapons and equipment. In 2020, the PLA announced its goal to become a “fully mechanized and informatized” force by its centenary, the year 2027.
Intelligentization: First mentioned in China’s 2015 Defense White Paper, intelligentization represents “a new round of military revolution” characterized by networked, intelligent, and autonomous systems and equipment. It endeavors to build on mechanized and informatized systems, creating “ubiquitous networks” in which “‘human-on-human’ warfare will be replaced by ‘machine-on-human’ or ‘machine-on-machine warfare.’” In particular, AI forms the basis of the PLA’s push toward intelligentization and tops the list of emerging technologies prioritized in recent Chinese strategy documents and development plans.
Specifically, as part of their 14th Five Year Plan, the Chinese under Xi seek to:
In concert with national modernization and development, we will do a good job in strategic-level planning, deepen sharing of resource factors of production, strengthen policy regime coordination, improve organizational management, work operation, policy systems, talent teams, and risk prevention and control systems, and build an integrated national strategic system and capability.
We will promote the coordinated development of key regions, key sectors, and emerging fields and concentrate our efforts on implementing major projects in defense fields. We will promote the organic combination of the military construction layout and the regional economic development layout and better serve the needs of the national security development strategy.
We will deepen military-civilian S&T collaboration and innovation, strengthen military-civilian overall development planning for maritime, aerospace, cyberspace, biotech, new energy, AI, quantum technology, and other fields, promote resource sharing between military and civilian S&T facilities, and promote the two-way transformation and application of military and civilian scientific research results and the development of key industries.
We will strengthen the co-construction and common use of infrastructure, strengthen the overall planning and construction of new infrastructure, and increase the intensity of economic construction projects to implement national defense requirements.
We will speed up the construction of a modernized military logistics system and asset management system.
We will strengthen the joint training of military and local talents and improve military and civilian talent exchange and use, qualification certification, and other systems.
We will optimize the layout of the defense S&T industry and accelerate progress in standardization and generalization.
We will promote reform in weapons and equipment market access and air traffic management.
We will refine the national defense mobilization system, strengthen emergency response collaboration, improve mechanisms for strengthening border defense, enhance national defense education, and reinforce military-government and military-civilian solidarity.
We will safeguard the legal rights and interests of military personnel and make military service into a profession respected by the whole society.
In simple terms, China wishes to become the world leader in emerging and advanced technologies and will integrate those aspirations through both the public and private sector in a whole-of-nation approach toward this vision.
System Destruction Warfare
While system of systems analysis and effects-based approaches to operations are terms which have fallen out of vogue in US military strategy and planning, it is important to note the ideas behind these concepts are still found within joint military doctrine. That said, according to a 2018 RAND report, systemic confrontation and warfare are very much enshrined in Chinese military thinking and is the basic operational principle for Chinese military planning and theories of victory.
Similar to all-domain warfare now embraced and codified in US military strategic documents, the Chinese approach of system destruction warfare envisions an operational environment devoid of classic battlefield geometries and instead as a more comprehensive, global mosaic of systems across all domains, to include the cognitive and population domains, as described above. As the report puts it:
Not only are the modes of war fighting (i.e., systems confrontation) and methods of joint operations (i.e., nonlinear) unique to modern-day warfare, so are the battlefields on which conflict is waged. Systems confrontation is waged in the traditional physical domains of land, sea, and air but also in outer space and the nonphysical cyber-space and electromagnetic domains. As a result, specific geographical boundaries or specific strategic directions no longer fully characterize the modern battlefield. Winning wars—or at the very least, not losing wars—requires the ability to “wage comprehensive competition in all domains.”
It is my opinion that whereas the US views the Indo-Pacific region as the focused operational environment with global domains such as space, cyberspace, logistics and defense industrial base and supply chain nodes and routes as supportive to that main effort, China takes a more holistic approach and — in combination with the Unrestricted Warfare and Intelligentized Warfare discussions above — plans to develop “baskets” of capabilities necessary for each domain across not only the operational environment, but the strategic environment as well. This means that, in a paraphrase of Sun Tzu’s treatise, On War, their intent is to subdue the enemy’s systems before battle even begins. What the US used to call prepping the operational environment, or shaping activities, the Chinese view as systemic warfare where everything up to and including human cognition through population influence operations are on the table.
Whether it is Russian bots supposedly influential in the surprising results of the 2016 presidential election (though this hypothesis is losing salience as more Twitter files are released), or Chinese investors exerting control over content on social media, traditional news media organizations, or Hollywood studios which depend heavily upon Chinese investment, it is clear the Chinese are already actively engaged in “shaping activities,” or prepping the operational environment. How effective those lines of effort are, or will be, post-COVID and the resulting decline in Chinese productivity and its shrinking economy and demographic health is left to be seen.
So, if our primary competitors are utilizing systems warfare and mosaic approaches of systems against systems in all domains, how might the Mosaic Warfare concept play a role?
Mosaic Warfare
The image above is a picture of a Roman mosaic depicting the Trojan War found in Syria in October 2022. Archeologists are still in the process of excavating the site but have tentatively dated the mosaic to 1,600 years ago. So, why the image?
As is well known, mosaics take hundreds or thousands of small, different sized tiles which are laid in a manner that reveals a desired image. Taken individually or in small groups, the tiles represent nothing other than themselves. But when taken holistically as a larger group, the tiles reveal the intended vision of the artist.
Unlike jigsaw puzzles which are engineered specifically so that each piece is meant to fit exactly with the corresponding pieces needed to complete an image, mosaics utilize tiles which are cut in such a manner that if one tile is lost, the image remains. Or, if a tile isn’t an exact fit with the tiles next to it, the image nonetheless also remains intact. Mosaics have inherent flexibility in the application of their constituent parts, relying less on precise engineering parameters and more on adaptability in the placement of its individual units.
Conceptually, Mosaic Warfare seeks to operate off of this same principle.
In a 2018 presentation, then DARPA Director for the Strategic Technology Office, Dr. Tim Grayson, stated that rather than focusing on dominance — where current sensors and weapons are tightly bound together and integrated on monolithic platforms — we instead need to focus on lethality which means the ability to distribute and disaggregate those sensors and weapons. In a world where our competitors are producing similar, if not better, capabilities and platforms than the US, our old concepts of operation can no longer be taken for granted.
Transforming from dominance to lethality, and from a maneuver-centric to a decision-centric mind set will be the key to enhancing surprise and confounding our enemies’ force design and development strategies, thus adding to our lethality in the face of peer or near peer adversaries.
To go back to the tile picture and jigsaw puzzle analogy above, our exquisitely engineered systems currently in place on those monolithic platforms he mentions (think carrier strike groups, aviation strike platforms, maneuver brigades, or Marine Expeditionary Forces/Units) are like those tightly prescriptive and specifically engineered pieces of a jigsaw that, if removed, fail to achieve the complete image. Similarly, those disaggregated capabilities will be able to disaggregate and reaggregate at will because they are designed more like mosaic tiles which can loosely fit together or, if missing, will nevertheless achieve the intended image.
But in order to actualize a mosaic approach toward warfare, the US first needs to develop a vision for what the final image will be. In military terms this should look something akin to a governing strategy, or at the very least a theory of victory such that the arrangement of the tiles (capabilities) ultimately achieves the desired image (strategic ends).
There is a tremendous amount of literature which argues this has been — in keeping with the Trojan War analogy — the US’s Achilles heel for some time. Our involvement in WWII and development of the Marshall Plan while US victory was far from certain, or the adoption of the Truman Doctrine and later strategy of containment and mutually assured destruction (MAD) during the Cold War militate against this notion.
That said, in the examples above or the decades since the collapse of the Soviet Union, it is fairly safe to say our nation’s “strategies” have been reactionary and responsive to events rather than proactive and designed to shape events before they become crises.
But a counterargument could be made that the US approach of engagement and enlargement during the Clinton 1990’s was a forward-thinking and proactive approach toward advancing neoliberalism across the globe. Yet again, a counter-counterargument could assert our western-centric view of the world failed to account for other perspectives which did not accord with our approach and in fact created the unintended consequences which were contributory to our shift to the global war on terrorism as our next organizing principle. Hubris, hegemony, empire, greed. All of these epithets have been weaponized against US actions over the last 30 years with some veracity behind those claims.
So, how might Mosaic Warfare help to mitigate this shortfall?
Ends, Ways, and Means? Strategic, Operational, and Tactical Levels of War?
Ends, Ways, Means
The semiotics of military lingo are designed to provide shared meaning across the joint force but can also serve as mental prisons within which new meaning and sense making becomes difficult, if not impossible, after a lifetime of enculturation within the military and service-specific organizational cultures. While I recognize this sounds like gobbledygook, I’ll let a George Bernard Shaw quote from his 1906 play, The Doctor’s Dilemma, hopefully clarify what I seek to convey:
Professions are a conspiracy against the laity.
Anyone who has had to parse legal documents, physician diagnoses, tax codes, or military documents/doctrine immediately understand the dilemma! When a servicemember is indoctrinated into the “priesthood” of the military profession, they become keepers of the faith and acolytes who will only advance within the clerisy if they adhere to the dogma and language of the military faith. The terms captured above in the header are all too familiar to those in the military and become second nature heuristics through which understanding of the world and the military’s role within it can be perceived and shared. But what if this is a mistake?
(As an aside, I’d like to mention here that Useful Fiction, the entity and business created by August Cole and Peter Singer, co-authors of the fictional works, Ghost Fleet and Burn In, is a fantastic enterprise aimed at generating and fostering greater imagination, creativity, and innovation. As I always told my students, if you find yourself lost in the doctrine and arguing about how many angels dance on the head of a pin, abandon it all and Just. Tell. A. Story! Because at the end of the day, all military strategies or operations are stories we tell in real time. Strategies are stories. Plans are stories. Operations are the play where those stories unfold. If the professional lexicon obfuscates more than it clarifies, ditch it and go back to the human basics of storytelling)
For example, in the race to outcompete our adversaries and modernize the force, the US has embraced the quest for robotics, autonomy, AI/ML, hypersonics, space capabilities, quantum communications and computing, etc., etc., etc. These are all perceived as the means necessary to operationalize the ways in which the military will achieve its ends.
The ways currently in play include Dynamic Force Employment (DFE), distributed operations, all-domain warfare, Joint All-Domain Command and Control, and the service-specific contributions to those concepts such as: Multi-Domain Warfare (Army); Distributed Maritime Operations (Navy); Expeditionary Advance Base Operations (Marine Corps); and Advanced Battle Management System (Air Force). These warfighting concepts — or ways — in turn are supposed to achieve the ends, which are . . . what? The 2022 National Defense Strategy (NDS) puts it this way in their unclassified fact sheet:
The Defense priorities are:
1. Defending the homeland, paced to the growing multi-domain threat posed by the PRC
2. Deterring strategic attacks against the United States, Allies, and partners
3. Deterring aggression, while being prepared to prevail in conflict when necessary, prioritizing the PRC challenge in the Indo-Pacific, then the Russia challenge in Europe
4. Building a resilient Joint Force and defense ecosystem.
The Department will act urgently to sustain and strengthen deterrence, with the People’s Republic of China (PRC) as our most consequential strategic competitor and the pacing challenge for the Department.
Russia poses acute threats, as illustrated by its brutal and unprovoked invasion of Ukraine. We will collaborate with our NATO Allies and partners to reinforce robust deterrence in the face of Russian aggression.
The Department will remain capable of managing other persistent threats, including those from North Korea, Iran, and violent extremist organizations.
Changes in global climate and other dangerous transboundary threats, including pandemics, are transforming the context in which the Department operates. We will adapt to these challenges, which increasingly place pressure on the Joint Force and the systems that support it.
Recognizing growing kinetic and non-kinetic threats to the United States’ homeland from our strategic competitors, the Department will take necessary actions to increase resilience – our ability to withstand, fight through, and recover quickly from disruption.
Mutually-beneficial Alliances and partnerships are an enduring strength for the United States, and are critical to achieving our objectives, as the unified response to Russia’s further invasion of Ukraine has demonstrated. Answering this “call to action,” the Department will incorporate ally and partner perspectives, competencies, and advantages at every stage of defense planning.
The Department will advance our goals through three primary ways: integrated deterrence, campaigning, and actions that build enduring advantages.
• Integrated deterrence entails developing and combining our strengths to maximum effect, by working seamlessly across warfighting domains, theaters, the spectrum of conflict, other instruments of U.S. national power, and our unmatched network of Alliances and partnerships. Integrated deterrence is enabled by combat-credible forces, backstopped by a safe, secure, and effective nuclear deterrent.
• Campaigning will strengthen deterrence and enable us to gain advantages against the full range of competitors’ coercive actions. The United States will operate forces, synchronize broader Department efforts, and align Department activities with other instruments of national power, to undermine acute forms of competitor coercion, complicate competitors’ military preparations, and develop our own warfighting capabilities together with Allies and partners.
• Building enduring advantages for the future Joint Force involves undertaking reforms to accelerate force development, getting the technology we need more quickly, and making investments in the extraordinary people of the Department, who remain our most valuable resource.
The Department will develop, design, and manage our forces – linking our operational concepts and capabilities to achieve strategic objectives. This requires a Joint Force that is lethal, resilient, sustainable, survivable, agile, and responsive.
Once characterized as a return to great power competition (then amended to strategic competition) with a focus on the 2+3 actors — China, Russia + North Korea, Iran, and violent extremist organizations — the defense strategy above articulates the Department’s priorities and goals, but nowhere is there a clear vision for what the ends — or the final image of our mosaic analogy — is supposed to look like.
This makes it especially difficult for military strategists and planners when the active verbs listed in the priorities — Defend, Deter Strategic Attack, Deter Aggression, and Build — are nearly impossible to codify, measure, or assess in terms of a positive vision for the future. The only proactive priority listed is in building a resilient Joint Force, while all the rest are passive and rather reactive to competitor actions.
Yes, I know deterrence and deterrence theories can be viewed and defined as active measures, but only if the assumptions made, and variables selected for analysis of how deterrence measures impact adversary decision-making, are adequate. When the Department conflates the means of deterrence with the thing itself — a process which takes place within the cognitive architecture of those whom we seek to influence through our deterrence measures — then the very idea of levels of war/analysis and units of analysis become blurred.
Levels of War
Figure 1. Levels of Warfare: This graphic shows the levels of war as a distinct hierarchy with marginally overlapping areas between the strategic and the operational and between the tactical and the operational. In this hierarchical structure, there is no overlap between the tactical and the strategic as suggested by the description in Joint Publication 3-0, Joint Operations. (Figure from Joint Publication 1, Doctrine for the Armed Forces of the United States)
An excellent article titled, “The Levels of War as Levels of Analysis” by Dr. Andrew Harvey does a nice job of explaining the analytical importance of differentiation between the strategic, operational, and tactical levels of war. He highlights the levels of analysis popularized by Kenneth Waltz in his structural theses for neo-classical realism used by social scientists to this day. As Harvey describes:
Kenneth N. Waltz, in Man, the State, and War and in Theory of International Politics, proposes three levels of analysis that are now most commonly used: the individual, the state, and the international system. These three levels allow a scholar to investigate phenomena from very different perspectives. For example, if the individual level of analysis is selected, then the research would focus on what the individual decision-maker does in terms of policy and why he or she made that decision. If the state level of analysis is chosen, then the focus would be on the internal workings of the state and how bureaucracies and groups make decisions (e.g., Graham Allison’s work on the Cuban Missile Crisis12). If the international system is chosen, then the research would focus on the structure of the system and the interactions between actors in the system (e.g., looking at the structure of alliances and treaties prior to World War I).
This is an excellent paradigm for focusing researchers’ questions, but in terms of joint force actions Harvey proposes such levels of analysis would also assist planners and practitioners with determining the impacts of those actions on the strategic, operational, and/or tactical levels of war. In other words, tactical actions could have strategic effects, or strategic actions could have tactical effects. Conceptually, I have no issue with this distinction per se since it is prudent to evaluate discreet tactical actions across the range of possible ramifications and vice versa. That said, the delineation of the levels of war in the 21st Century seem to have less salience than in the past and are in fact ripe for a reevaluation. What do I mean?
In the highly connected world in which we live where adversaries are currently engaged in warfare-like activities on a daily basis, these levels of analysis become distinctions without a difference. From social engineering through social media and traditional media influence, cyber attacks and espionage occurring every day, to political warfare waged against elections, economic warfare waged against institutions, and other non-traditional means of warfare, our adversaries make no distinctions between strategic, operational, and tactical levels of war. For them, the globe is the operational environment and everything is strategic, operational, tactical and important.
Whether it is Chinese Belt and Road Initiative investments utilizing what is colloquially termed debt-trap diplomacy, or Confucius Institutes and other influence investments applied across polities worldwide, or currency manipulation to ensure favorable trade balances, cyber espionage and attack, Wolf Warrior Diplomacy, or creating and building island military bases from whole cloth, the Chinese are focused globally, operationalizing globally, and acting globally. There is no delineation between “levels” of war; it is all war, everywhere, all at once. Unrestricted Warfare in action!
For the Russians, the reach may exceed their grasp, but that has not deterred them from trying a similar approach. From political warfare involvement in national elections, petro and economic warfare, or actual warfare in Syria, the Caucasus, and Ukraine, cyber intrusion and attack, social media manipulation, or other forms of warfare — both traditional and non-traditional — Russia seeks to operate globally, operationalize regionally, and act locally. That said, due to historical and cultural imperatives, it is the regional which most animates Russia’s actions. And if Ukraine is any indicator, Russian focus on New Generation Warfare may have come to the detriment of old-fashioned, classic warfare. Again, time will tell.
Of course, despite protestations to the contrary, America has been playing its own global role for well over a century, and certainly with vigor since the end of WWII. I am not so naive to think we haven’t engaged in many of the similar methods described above, though I do happen to believe we do so with a modicum of restraint — at least until US forces are deployed to conduct combat operations. And this might be the problem.
The Global War on Terror is a great case in point. The US government continuously evaluates and assesses the global environment through diplomatic, economic, stability, social, informational, political, and other lenses. Corporations, too, have their own intelligence units designed to ascertain environments for market volatility and determine which are conducive to business interests.
The military itself keeps vigilance on a global scale through its various geographic and global combatant commands (European Command, Central Command, North America Command, South America Command, Indo-Pacific Command, Africa Command, Strategic Command, Transportation Command, Cyber Command, Special Operations Command, and Space Command), but when the organizing principle and focus of the national security establishment hones in on a global war on terror, then that singular focus tends to drown out the broader perspectives associated with global vigilance.
In a world where finite resources dictate winners and losers in the resource battle (“Initiative without funding is delusion!”) and where combat forces are fighting major campaigns in the Middle East and Central Asia run through CENTCOM, the other combatant commands found themselves struggling to obtain the resources necessary for managing their respective regions. Insidiously, too, in order to maintain relevance during the twenty years of our fight against violent extremist groups, the focus for those “sidelined” combatant commands necessarily shifted from one of major combat operations against peer rivals to one of counterinsurgency against loosely formed groups of militants operating within their areas of responsibility. Consequently, while the bell was being rung about our declining position vis-a-vis China and Russia, it was nowhere near strident enough a warning to shift our national priorities until around 2016.
In other words, you design, develop, and employ your forces based upon the paradigm du jour versus analyses based upon a strategic vision against which a long-term design and development program can be sustained.
During the Cold War, the US developed strategic forces and strategic weapons to deter Soviet aggression while we fought proxy wars on the margins around the globe. After the fall of the Soviet Union, the US embarked on engagement and enlargement operations, exercising its role as the sole superpower in the world to expand free market economies and democracy, oftentimes through military means (Haiti, Somalia, the Balkans, etc.). It was the “end of history” after all, and we were just facilitating the move toward liberal democratic ideals and governance. Then we were attacked, and the pendulum swung once again, this time merging the ideals of engagement, enlargement, and democratization with the lofty goal of democratic realism to alter the environment and “drain the swamp” from which violent ideologies sprung.
While the military-industrial-congressional complex receives a lot of flak, the truth is defense industries have to operate off of extensive time horizons for the research, development, test, evaluation, and procurement of weapons systems. Similarly, congressional politicians have to remain responsive to constituent desires, so when an attack like 9/11 occurs the political pressure placed on our representatives to DO SOMETHING! so such an attack never occurs again is very real. In the face of such a shocking event, it is hard to sell to the American public that while the attack was horrific, it is necessary to maintain our strategic purpose against China and Russia over the long-term, versus going after al Qaeda and other jihadist groups in the short term. In the process, the military, the defense industry, and congress all have to adapt to the realities of today versus maintaining course on a strategy 10, 20, or 30 years down the road.
This is where Mosaic Warfare can come into play.
The Cold War: Past as Prologue
Arguably, the Cold War could be viewed as the predicate for how Mosaic Warfare can work. While the “battlefield” can be considered similar — both the Cold War and our current competition/possible conflict in the future are global in their nature — the time and geographic compression due to communication and AI technology presents some differences as well. So, how might a Cold War paradigm fit the emerging technology of today?
First, both then and now, the US was and is engaged in an ideological, economic, political, and narrative battle against challenges to the post-Bretton Woods international order from Russia, China, Iran, and non-state actors. Then, as now, it is imperative the US keeps Russia and China from forging closer ties, though rather than opening China against the Soviet threat we should now be opening Russia against the Chinese threat. That has been made infinitely more difficult given our meddling in Ukrainian sovereignty since at least 2012 and our bellicose and dangerous rhetoric aimed against a nuclear armed Russia since their invasion of Ukraine in 2021.
I know, I know . . . this is not a popular take. But if we consider the Russian view as articulated through the tenets of New Generation Warfare rather than caricaturing Putin as a two-dimensional, blinded-by-evil villain, then true offramps toward peace might have been taken. Now, we wait and see.
All of this said, our response to the Ukrainian invasion since has been in my opinion about right. Rather than mobilizing large maneuver unit formations to directly confront Russia, we have instead mobilized all of the instruments of national power — diplomatic, informational, military, and economic — through sanctions regimes, NATO talks and engagement, shipping of weapons and trainers to assist in Ukraine’s fight, and a decidedly anti-Putin information campaign across the globe.
While it can be argued the US is depleting its strategic stock of munitions, and the sanctions have failed to achieve the desired results and have in fact threatened global economic stability, and further NATO expansion could quite possibly exacerbate tensions on the continent, and the negative narrative campaign may be boxing Putin into a corner, the US has nevertheless maintained its military capability intact to hedge against broader war while activating alliances and partnerships in order to fight a proxy war against Russia.
From a more enduring and far-reaching perspective, a US and Ukrainian-led ability to grind down Russian capability and forces in Ukraine may serve as effective a wedge between China and Russia as any opening to Russia prior to their invasion might have. Again, time will tell, but this is a similar approach to the one the US took during the Cold War through the strategy of containment.
From Korea to the Suez Crisis, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Angola, Iran, Guatemala, Israel, Lebanon, Nicaragua and El Salvador, the US fought military engagements both large and small — but mostly small and often shadowy — to prevent the spread of communist ideology across the globe. It was an ideological/narrative battle fought through proxies rather than against our main protagonist, the USSR. That said, should open war between the US and USSR have broken out, the US had strategic air, naval, and ballistic missile capabilities ready if necessary while simultaneously developing new technologies such as stealth and cyber capabilities to further our advantage as the Cold War waned.
From a Mosaic Warfare view, our large, monolithic forces stayed largely untouched and in the ready, while our smaller, disaggregated units fought globally to contain Soviet and communist advances. As mentioned earlier, while the global battlefield geometry has greatly compressed time and space, a mosaic approach to future warfare concepts remains largely similar to that which has already been successfully employed.
Handle Analogy with Care!
As one of my favorite professors was wont to say during my PhD program, “Handle analogy with care.” He then went on to add, “In fact, handle your facts with care.” Of course, what he was arguing was that each instance across history had its own unique set of circumstances, personalities, and driving forces which dictated the course of events. Nevertheless, he would argue, historical analogy can be a useful heuristic through which one can gain a better shorthand understanding of current trends and events. So long as one understands the benefits and the pitfalls, analogy can be helpful in many ways.
Taking that to heart, what is similar today from our Cold War experience, and what is different? Perhaps the most notable difference is the complex global interconnection most humans now share due to advances in digital, internet, and satellite communications. Where every person with a smart phone is a sensor/reporter, and where the global economy has rendered us far more interdependent upon other nations’ fiscal stability, this is one obvious difference. Arguably, Ukraine has done a brilliant job recognizing and exploiting both for maximum effect in defense of their country. Similarly, during the Cold War that level of interconnection and interdependence simply didn’t exist. The world essentially had a binary choice between free market capitalism and liberal democratic ideals, or centrally planned and controlled economies and more centralized, totalitarian Marxist ideals.
Now, systemic, macro-level forces of greater centralizing impulses (supranational entities such as NATO, the UN and EU, or large free trade blocs such as USMCA, T-TIP or RCEP) versus decentralizing impulses (BREXIT, challenges to the dollar as the global reserve currency, blockchain enabled digital currencies, etc.) compete with micro-level forces of individual freedom, association, and cross-cutting interest and issue areas which transcend national geographic boundaries. In other words, those levels of analysis mentioned above — much like the notion of nation states and sovereignty — are increasingly becoming blurred and perhaps less salient than ever before post-Treaty of Westphalia, or certainly since the post-colonial national movements following WWII and the collapse of the Soviet Union.
What is similar? We are in a global conflict against governmental, ideological, and economic systems which are antithetical to American and liberal democratic ideals. Rather than viewing the Indo-Pacific as the future battlefield, the US needs to view the world as its operating environment. Mosaic Warfare can help us build the capabilities to fight both disaggregated proxy skirmishes on the margins while simultaneously enabling larger maneuver forces to remain in a high state of readiness and aggregative stance should a war in the Indo-Pacific break out. Or not. Perhaps diffusion for both movement and maneuver will be the order of the day in any major war, where a mosaic approach to both warfighting principles confounds our enemies’ ability to target mass formations as they make their way to the fight, or the maneuver units of engagement once they enter the fight.
What is Old is New Again
Regardless, this long exegesis began with the title, Competing Theories of War in the 21st Century. While it is true many have argued over the “trees” regarding strategy, tactics, concepts of war, etc., it is my belief the forest has remained largely intact and underappreciated for its longevity. Put another way, while the character of war may change over time, the immutable nature of war as a violent competition between human wills remains unchanged. As with most human nature, we constantly struggle over the battle between change and continuity; what was, what is, and what might be. The art and horror of war is no different because it has always been, and will always be, a human endeavor.
Mosaic Warfare may be one way to reconceptualize what was tried and successful in the past with modifications allowing for how things have changed now and will change into the future. But instead of focusing on the things which represent this changing character — the change side of the continuity and change dichotomy — we should instead focus on the continuity of our past global conflicts, determine what the final image should be to govern US success, and then develop concepts to actualize the vision, requirements needed to actualize the concepts, and then turn to the things which will actualize the concepts and the vision.
In this, the mosaic image in its totality represents the Ends.
The concepts behind Mosaic Warfare, all-domain operations, JADC2, unit composition, training, organization, and fielding of forces, force development, force design, force employment and the requirements needed for the same represent the Ways.
Finally, and only after the first two steps, should we begin discussing the things — robotics, autonomous systems, AI/ML, data and digital architecture, hypersonics, quantum encryption, communication, and computing, bio- and nanotechnology, etc. — as the Means.
Then, and only then, will the disparate tiles be stitched into a cohesive and coherent vision for future warfare.
If you managed to plow through this somewhat meandering argument, congratulations! You’re a better and more resilient reader than most. Not sure what I’ll post on next, but I’m leaning toward the language and lexicon of the military machine as a hinderance to strategic foresight, or I may simply wax philosophic on esoterica of interest to me. Given my frail readership numbers, I don’t think anyone will mind either way ;>) Until then . . .