REBALANCING THE ARMY FOR MILITARY COMPETITION
Justin Magula | 04.05.22
Rebalancing the Army for Military Competition
This article is part of the contribution made by the US Army War College to the series “Compete and Win: Envisioning a Competitive Strategy for the Twenty-First Century.” The series endeavors to present expert commentary on diverse issues surrounding US competitive strategy and irregular warfare with peer and near-peer competitors in the physical, cyber, and information spaces. The series is part of the Competition in Cyberspace Project (C2P), a joint initiative by the Army Cyber Institute and the Modern War Institute. Read all articles in the series here.
Special thanks to series editors Capt. Maggie Smith, PhD, C2P director, and Dr. Barnett S. Koven.
Americans don’t like losing wars and especially not small wars with unclear objectives. Since World War II, the United States has spent over $9 trillion and incurred over one hundred thousand casualties during wars in Korea, Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, only to walk away without achieving strategic success in any of them. After twenty years of operations in Afghanistan, the chaotic American withdrawal highlighted America’s difficulty in winning its recent wars. General Mark Milley even referred to the evacuation as a “strategic failure.” This track record might lead observors to wonder if there are ways for the US military, and particularly for the Army, to improve its performance in wars that fall short of large-scale combat operations.
Following most wars, the US Army faces difficult decisions about how to reorganize its doctrine and force structure to meet budgetary constraints and address current and future threats. After undesirable results in the Korean and Vietnam Wars, the Army refocused on fighting a conventional, large-scale conflict against the Soviet Union in Europe and neglected many of its hard-earned combat lessons from those wars. The United States most often deploys the Army in operations below the threshold of large-scale combat. However, whether due to mission biases, interservice budgetary battles, or other reasons, the Army usually refocuses on preparing for the “big one” after fighting wars that fall short of that construct.
https://mwi.usma.edu/rebalancing-the-army-for-military-competition/
