Defeat Is Possible/Edward Geist/June 17, 2021
If the United States is to have a reasonable hope of winning a war, it needs to think very seriously about what it would be like to lose. For several years, analysts have been sounding the alarm that the United States and its allies might not prevail in a high-level conflict with a near-peer adversary. While Russia and China fall short of the United States in overall military power, they enjoy local overmatch in key theaters that might allow them to defeat U.S. forces. In 2019, analyst David Ochmanek of the RAND Corporation remarked that “In our games, when we fight Russia and China, blue gets its ass handed to it.” In November 2018, the National Defense Strategy Commission found that “If the United States had to fight Russia in a Baltic contingency or China in a war over Taiwan … Americans could face a decisive military defeat … Put bluntly, the U.S. military could lose the next state-versus-state war it fights.” These findings suggest that, in a pitched battle with a near-peer adversary such as China, American forces may be defeated even if its commanders don’t make any mistakes. Unfortunately, there exists a longstanding taboo in American strategic culture against the contemplation of defeat. To the extent that the possibility U.S. forces might lose on the battlefield is acknowledged at all, prescriptions for dealing with it fail to account for all the ways in which this defeat might transpire. If defeat is to be prevented, U.S. strategy and planning may need to think about all the different forms defeat might take so as to be ready for alternative kinds of conflicts and concepts of operations.
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Well if defeat is possible, obviously so is victory. No brain needed.
Anyone advancing such serious notions, needs to dispense w/the
journo mask and don the mantle of Karl Von Clausewitz; or at least
attempt to, in order to be taken seriously.
