Accelerating into the Next Fight: The Imperative of the Offense on the Future Battlefield
Bill Hix and Robert Simpson | February 26, 2020
The modern slaughters of World Wars I and II are modern demonstrations that when great powers fight symmetrically, the result is costly, even globally catastrophic. While America avoided catastrophe during the Cold War, the potential for great-power conflict and its consequences have returned.
Today, America deters its great-power rivals, Russia and China, from a strategically prudent forward-defensive posture, centered in other nations’ sovereign territory. However, that deterrence and America’s strategic position depend on its ability to respond to attack by near instantaneously accelerating into a relentless offensive war of maneuver and firepower. In that regard, the US Army’s multi-domain operations concept correctly emphasizes offensive action. Still, much work remains if the Army is to assume the offensive at the speed and scale demanded by the intersection of great-power conflict and the twenty-first-century equivalent of the Industrial Revolution that powered those slaughters in last century’s world wars. Absent that, America could face a Hobbesian choice, either yielding to aggression or reversing it through carnage.
https://mwi.usma.edu/accelerating-next-fight-imperative-offense-future-battlefield/
