The Pentagon Must ‘Campaign’ Against China, Not Hope for a Goal-Line Stand
To dissuade aggression, the U.S. military must continuously persuade its adversaries to doubt their chances of success.
BRYAN CLARK and DAN PATT | APRIL 10, 2022
During the lead-up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the Biden administration released an unprecedented amount of classified intelligence regarding Russian plans, even revealing insider knowledge of Vladimir Putin’s intentions. This attempt at deterrence by detection failed; Putin invaded anyway. But the quality of allied intelligence-gathering and the new National Defense Strategy point toward a potentially better way to dissuade adversaries, through what the Pentagon calls “campaigning.”
Most discussion of the new NDS centers on its approach of Integrated Deterrence, in which all instruments of national power are orchestrated to prevent aggression. But the mixed results, at best, from the West’s combination of sanctions, intelligence revelations, and diplomacy suggests that capable, nuclear-armed adversaries like Russia and, more importantly, China may not be stopped by Integrated Deterrence’s threats of last-minute denial or punishment.
The new defense strategy’s inclusion of campaigning as one of its three main lines of effort provides a way for the Pentagon to break from simply trying to deny or punish aggression. Drawn from Marine Corps doctrine, campaigning refers to the orchestration of military activities alongside economic, diplomatic, and information actions to achieve specific goals. Through campaigning, U.S. forces would attempt to undermine adversary attempts at coercion, complicate enemy planning, and develop U.S. warfighting capabilities
https://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2022/04/pentagon-must-campaign-against-china-not-hope-goal-line-stand/365453/
