TOO FRAGILE TO FIGHT: COULD THE U.S. MILITARY WITHSTAND A WAR OF ATTRITION?
CONRAD CRANEMAY 9, 2022
At the turn of the 20th century, Polish Jewish banker Ivan Bloch compiled a detailed analysis of the potential effects of war between major powers. He saw a world of interconnected economies with vast industrial power and large armies. He thought future great-power war would be too costly to contemplate, as bloody wars of attrition would bankrupt participants without worthwhile results. For him, a clash of arms between major powers would “ruin both belligerents, financially and economically, long before the end would come in sight.” As we know now, he was right about the course future wars would take, and the inability of the participants to end them before suffering bankrupting costs. He was wrong, however, in predicting that war was impossible, and decision-makers rational enough to avoid it.
It has been a long time since the United States fought a high-intensity war of attrition, and the Pentagon, despite its renewed focus on large-scale combat operations, is not ready for it. Over the last half-century, the U.S. military has secured relatively bloodless conventional successes in Grenada, Panama, Operation Desert Storm, Operation Enduring Freedom, and Operation Iraqi Freedom. Then it fought two long-running but low-intensity wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. The National Defense Strategy remains concentrated on building a “more lethal” joint force, while the Interim National Security Strategic Guidance asserts that the United States will no longer engage in “forever wars.” As a result, current war plans still imagine relatively quick military actions with low casualties that remain within current capabilities. The resources for a longer and more brutal conflict have atrophied or been forgotten.
However, both history and the ongoing war in Ukraine suggest that such a possibility is more likely than we think. In a magisterial analysis of warfare from the Romans to World War II, Cathal Nolan argues that wars between peers or near-peers almost always become bloody contests of attrition, and these have gotten worse over time. In The Allure of Battle: A History of How Wars Have Been Won and Lost, he writes that “modern industrial and mobilization realities” have “helped bring about wars in which mass death and destruction, on scales hardly foreseen at their outset, become the ultimate means of reaching a lasting decision in quarrels among nations and empires.”
https://warontherocks.com/2022/05/too-fragile-to-fight-could-the-u-s-military-withstand-a-war-of-attrition/
