Bad Idea: Assuming the Small Wars Era is Over
Bad Idea: Assuming the Small Wars Era is Over by Alexander Evans and Alexandra Evans - CSIS’s Defense360
To see where the foreign policy winds in Washington are blowing, look to D.C.’s graduate schools, where aspiring civil servants and future defense strategists compete for national security jobs. In 2010, entering students studied counter-insurgency strategies and terrorist networks, polishing language skills in Arabic, Pashto, and Dari. In 2015, their successors enrolled in classes on grey-zone warfare and limited interventions in order to get to the field’s cutting edge. Security studies students matriculating in 2020, however, know the market demands have shifted. What Washington wants now is expertise in strategic competition.
“After being dismissed as a phenomenon of an earlier century, great power competition [has] returned,†the 2017 National Security Strategy declared. Concerned by Russian revanchism in Eastern Europe and growing tensions with China in Asia, U.S. scholars, commentators, and policymakers alike have convened conferences, tested historical metaphors, and probed the origins of the term itself. “For all the acrimony in Washington today, the city’s foreign policy establishment is settling on a rare bipartisan consensus: that the world has entered a new era of great-power competition,†Center for a New American Security CEO Richard Fontaine recently wrote in Foreign Affairs.
https://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/bad-idea-assuming-small-wars-era-over
