Here’s the Defining National Security Question of Our Time
July 7, 2015 By Peter W. Singer
We asked 20 experts whether great powers might ever go to war again.
“The world war is a form of war that the whole world should face up to.” This is what a professor at the PLA National Defense University argued in China’s regime newspaper, and it captures well the dilemma of our times. Such blunt discussions of great power war is either overheated rhetoric—or a harbinger of bad times to come.
Author
Peter W. Singer is a strategist and senior fellow at New America, consultant for the U.S. military and Defense Intelligence Agency, author of multiple bestselling books including Corporate Warriors, Children at War; Wired for War; Cybersecurity and Cyberwar: What Everyone Needs to Know and the ... Full Bio
U.S. and China leaders recently met in Washington for high-level talks and public displays of cooperation. And yet as the diplomats dined with smiles, the Pentagon boosted research on China’s military, launching an initiative that all but mirrors the Cold War effort against the Soviets. The Pentagon’s chief operating officer, Bob Work, explained that the military “cannot overlook the competitive aspects of our relationship, especially in the realm of military capabilities.”
The same kind of duality played out across the Atlantic. At their recent Brussels meeting, NATO leaders lobbed verbal threats at Russia and announced a new military rapid deployment force in response to Moscow’s moves in Ukraine. Meanwhile, the latest version of Russia’s defense doctrine calls NATO the “No. 1 threat” to national security. And yet alliance ministers also reported that their collective defense spending would shrink for a third year in a row, with just five of 28 member countries meeting the desired 2% of GDP. (Among the five is Greece, thanks only to its crashing economy.)
These issues strike to the heart of perhaps the biggest contemporary question of international relations and the future of war: Is the era of Big Wars over, or is it back?
One academic school of thought believes war between the great powers need no longer be worried about. Its proponents offer two primary lines of thinking. The first is that the world has fundamentally changed, thanks to normative and societal shifts that have rendered large-scale war a thing of the past—or as Steven Pinker put it, it has “gone out of style.” The second, less optimistic about humanity, argues that war has simply been reduced to insurgencies, terrorism, or low-level hybrids, leaving traditional warfare something of an “irrelevance.” A representative article in the Washington Quarterly argued that while the last decade has seen low-level conflicts from Afghanistan to the Philippines, we are seeing at a broader level “The End of War as We Know It”—or at least classical interstate conflict as we once knew it.
But there is another academic school of thought that questions this new orthodoxy, arguing against both the normative thinking and the data used to build these arguments. Its proponents assert that, as strategist Colin Gray puts it, war is not just “a permanent feature of the human condition,” but that “interstate war, including great power conflict, is very much alive and well.” Indeed, they argue that the statistics actually show that great power wars are cyclical—and that instead of living in a “long peace” in the first half of the 21st century, we’re just about due for another major dustup.
These back-and-forth claims are far from a purely academic debate. How you think about the risks of great power war shapes your policy preferences in everything from grand strategy to defense budgeting and planning. For example, Henry Kissinger has argued that U.S.-China relations “are heading for confrontation rather than cooperation”; as if in response, a Brookings Institution report cited Kissinger’s diplomatic legacy as a reason that America’s next president should not go “in search of enemies.” Similarly, in China, a leading strategic thinker has claimed that “Sino-American competition will be the defining game of the century” and its military has produced a film that argues “Conflict and struggle with the American hegemonic system is inevitable on the path of China’s national rejuvenation.” In turn, its Vice Premier Wang Yang recently insisted that “neither of us could afford the cost of noncooperation or even all-out confrontation.”
This question is shaping not just relations between states, but even between military services. In China, visions of the future of war are central to the debate between admirals and generals about whose service will be most important, a competition that will guide new doctrine, military spending, and even civil-military relations. In turn, the question of whether a war was possible with China was cast this week in a Politico expose as the reason why personal relations among the U.S. military’s Joint Chiefs have chilled. “There’s always tension between the service heads,” a currently serving JCS officer says, “but this was on an entirely different level. [Army Chief of Staff General Raymond] Odierno looked at his Navy and Air Force colleagues as plotting against him—and the Army.” Air Force and Navy leaders have embraced the notion of a great power war, in which they would play a larger role and lay claim to larger slices of the budget pie, while Odierno has argued back that the Pentagon “does not need to invent a scenario, or an adversary, or formulate a new problem than those being presented around the world today.”
There is as yet no definitive answer to this defining question of the future of war. But to gain further insight, we talked to 20 experts in fields ranging from defense policy and the military to law and communications. We asked: Will the future of war see a return to great power conflict? What would distinguish such a conflict from the wars of today?
The result was an interesting and atypical phenomenon: most of the people we talked to believed it to be a risk, but also hoped they were wrong. A world war is the one thing that experts don’t want to claim they predicted correctly.
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