Rushing to Defeat: The Strategic Flaw in Contemporary U.S. Army Thinking

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Rushing to Defeat: The Strategic Flaw in Contemporary U.S. Army Thinking
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By Christopher Parker
July 06, 2020
 

“In the event of a conflict, the application of calibrated force posture positions the right mix of ready forces and capabilities so they can rapidly transition to combat operations, penetrate and disintegrate enemy anti-access and area denial systems within days, and exploit the resultant freedom of maneuver to defeat the enemy within weeks rather than months.”
—The U.S. Army in Multi-Domain Operations 2028[1]

The United States Army has a problem. As it extricates itself from protracted counterinsurgency and stability operations in Afghanistan and reorients towards large-scale combat operations, the Army has realized its adversaries, namely China and Russia, have adopted a security posture bent on undermining its preferred way of war. These adversaries have developed systems and doctrine that “achieve physical stand-off by employing layers of anti-access and area denial systems designed to rapidly inflict unacceptable losses on U.S. and partner military forces and achieve campaign objectives within days, faster than the U.S. can effectively respond.”[2] Through multiple wargames and exercises following the events in Crimea, the Army has concluded that Russia, for example, can achieve its military and political objectives in the Baltic in under three days, a fait accompli too costly to contest.[3] Such rapid aggression requires an equally rapid response.

…this obsession with speed and duration is a strategic miscalculation that…cedes the nation’s geostrategic advantages by embracing an operational concept foreign to its nature.

https://www.realcleardefense.com/articles/2020/07/06/rushing_to_defeat_the_strategic_flaw_in_contemporary_us_army_thinking_115443.html