Dropping DIMEs: Leveraging All Elements of National Power on the Multi-Domain Battlefield
Brandon Morgan | September 18, 2019
While the US Army continues to shift its focus from the stability operations that characterized America’s post-9/11 wars toward preparing for large-scale combat operations, our adversaries are working feverishly to ensure that the US military and those of our allies and partners will never be afforded the time or political capital to mass the combat power such operations would require. The Army’s emphasis on large-scale combat operations is built on an assumption that ground combat at scale remains a viable medium to achieve unconditional surrender against peer adversaries in the twenty-first century. However, since the unconditional surrenders of Germany and Japan in 1945, the world has iteratively progressed to an era where US competitors and peer adversaries have been able to establish a complex of integrated air defenses, cyber, rocket, drone, informational, proxy forces, and nuclear fires. This makes unconditional surrender increasingly difficult to coerce and massive, land-based thrusts deep into the enemy’s political capital extremely risky—and thus irrelevant as a military planning factor to achieve success in great-power conflict.
Today, ongoing operations in Ukraine, Syria, and Afghanistan, and disputes of varying but real significance between the United States and China, North Korea, Iran, and even Turkey, reveal that military strength alone is becoming less and less determinant of achieving national objectives. The notion that through overwhelming military force a nation or alliance can force total capitulation on an adversary is all but dead. Welcome to the era of highly contested negotiations in multi-domain operations.
https://mwi.usma.edu/dropping-dimes-leveraging-elements-national-power-multi-domain-battlefield/
