America’s military has no preordained right to victory on the battlefield.
Stating that peer competitors are now the main threat rather than smaller rogue states makes it imperative to abandon the notion that victory is our birthright.
It's the Task Force Smith syndrome that assumes that the presence of Americans on a battlefield will cause our foes to run away.
So the only real task we have is getting forces to the battlefield as fast as we can to get that benefit.
One of my early publications pre-TDR addressed lessons for the Army that could be gained from examining the Iraqi invasion of Iran in 1980. The idea that victory is not preordained was the big picture lesson:
We must not underestimate our potential foes as the Iraqis did in 1980. They will be clever just as we are. They will believe in the cause for which they are fighting. And they, too, will fight to win. We cannot assume that the sight of an American soldier will panic our enemy and induce retreat and surrender in the same manner that Iraq thought the Iranians would collapse when confronted with Iraq's over1whelming invasion force. That Iran fought even when the experts said they should give up is a lesson that must not be overlooked. We will need to fight, bleed and struggle for victory. To assume that any lesser effort will suffice is courting disaster in our hubris.
The thinking gaining traction at the time was that we could lighten up or shrink our Army as much as we wanted as long as we could rapidly get Americans on the ground to collect the victory.
In 2005 I wrote (commenting on a pre-TDR publication):
Victory in battle is not our birthright. We cannot simply assume that whatever we send to war will trounce the enemy in a networked blur of killing and so all we need to do is make our military vehicles easier to transport long distances. Let's not get ahead of ourselves. We need tanks--or something an awful lot like them--to defeat our enemies.
In 2006 I wrote:
Transitioning cleanly from war to stability operations is a fine concept. But we must not fail to use fast and intense violence to destroy our enemies when the balloon goes up. We should never ever assume victory and look to the post-war phase four stabilization mission as if battlefield victory is our birthright.
During major combat operations, grab the enemy by the balls. Their hearts and minds will follow.
A bit later in 2006 I reproduced an essay I'd written for a contest on the 10th anniversary of the Persian Gulf War (sadly, the contest disappeared with a new editor):
Technologically superior heavy forces and air power decisively prevailed in Desert Storm after a laborious deployment to the Gulf. With lighter and fewer but technologically superior troops, we expect to deploy globally from CONUS and smash any enemy rapidly and with few casualties. Desert Storm, updated to Information Storm, will become a Global Storm. Our Information Storm cannot become global without tradeoffs. If we lighten the Army too much and optimize it for stability operations, our troops will be shocked if we must fight even a single MTW, let alone something worse. Training to beat the Soviet first team provided tremendous benefits when we faced a lesser opponent such as Iraq. Now we train for lesser threats and too many question whether that is overpreparing.
In 2008 I wrote:
Don't start believing that crud that nobody would dare to take on our conventional forces in a straight-up conventional war based on our prowess in past fights. We've been down that path before.
In 2009 I wrote:
I'm not saying we shouldn't take our enemies seriously. We need to treat them as actors intent on victory and work to beat them. Victory is not our birthright.
In 2012 I wrote:
I hope that we don't create a military able to move a small force fast right into the jaws of defeat, like British troops disembarking from their transport ships at Singapore in 1942 only to march straight into Japanese captivity.
In 2015 I wrote:
We can lose a war. Victory is not our birthright. Let's build our Army so it is capable of smashing a resolute and effective enemy.
Yet it got worse than even assuming our Army could smash any foe no matter how small and light if it had enough technology.
In 2009 we assumed that in the "medium term" we faced no peer threat and could afford to slight defense preparation:
We've just instituted the Medium Term Rule on our defense spending. The problems that will flow from this plan won't show themselves in the near term. We can coast on our past progress in building the best military in the world. But have no doubt that our military strength will erode, and this means we are accepting risks in case we have to fight a conventional war in the medium term despite our assumption that we can still win such a war.
We won't cancel the Medium Term Rule until it's too late to do any good.
In 2017, the effects were apparent:
We aren't even involved in high-intensity conventional warfare against a peer-ish military. Yet we are emptying warehouses earmarked for other potential theater of war to bomb one ragged group holding ground in Syria and Iraq?
Seriously?
And this is even worse because America maintains stocks of ammunition that serve as the reserve for our allies who as a rule do not maintain such stocks. We had to replenish allies in the Libya War in 2011 despite the weakness of Khadaffi's surviving military in that civil war.
And ammunition is just one measure of our lack of readiness that is finally catching up with our military. (Tip to Instapundti.)
But don't say we weren't warned. This poor readiness is just one effect of the modern ten year rule we launched in 2009[.]
So two fatal assumptions--that victory is our birthright but we don't need to worry about waging a war against a tough enemy--are at least in the rear view mirror with this new military strategy.
Now we need to correct the past actions that flowed from those decisions to give us the military we now have rather than the military we now wish to have.
Mind you, this kind of warning about taking an enemy seriously is no excuse to fixate on what an enemy might do to us. Mattis has that covered, too:
Mattis was speaking to reporters at the Pentagon in the afternoon when one of them asked what Mattis' top concern for the year would be. Mattis, however, turned the question around.
"I don't have concerns. I create them," Mattis said, according to multiple reports.
Our enemies need to have concerns. Let's get on with it.
