We keep speaking of "whole of government" efforts to reach our objectives. Let's yoke all of our government to our strategic competition rather than insisting that the military weaken its core competencies to achieve the non-kinetic effects, too.
I think there is certainly a point in saying warfare is not limited to the kinetics of major combat operations:
The rapid evolution of war, or as Carl Von Clausewitz describes it, “politics by other means,” is reaching a point where “soldiers no longer have a monopoly on war,” as two People’s Liberation Army colonels wrote in the late 1990s. In their book Unrestricted Warfare, they predicted that the “boundaries lying between the two worlds of war and non-war, of military and non-military, will be totally destroyed” so that even the “rules of war may need to be rewritten.” Their notion of soldiers losing their monopoly on war emerged shortly after one of the US Army’s greatest triumphs, the defeat of Iraqi forces during Operation Desert Storm.
But this continuum between war and non-war isn't actually anything new to our era. People remain people so of course there has long been conflict that crosses the gap between full war and near-peace.
In addition, consider that Desert Storm forced the Chinese to change their underwear as they realized how far behind they were in military technology and art. A nice soothing story was needed to let them sleep at night and to protect the Chinese Communist Party whose wisdom surely would not allow America to get so far ahead.
And in the decades since that Unrestricted Warfare book the PLA has striven hard to match the American military in technology and military art. If the Chinese really believed that we were entering an era requiring us to redefine war away from soldiers, why would the PLA have advanced tanks and ships, more nukes, stealth aircraft, and even aircraft carriers?
Further, to compete in the non-kinetic regions that exist--despite not being new--the American military is the only part of the government that has large-scale combat operations as its core competency. Pushing the military to expand too much into grey areas ignores that we have many other foreign aid, intelligence, and diplomatic parts of the government that can take on these other means of struggling with enemies. With the military in a supporting role--indeed, in many ways both kinetic and non-kinetic, special operations assets are ideal for that.
And if we do dilute our military focus on large-scale combat operations to implement a "joint concept for competing" in all those other areas that our enemies decide is safer to compete in, won't our enemies be tempted to wage war because they see their chances higher in direct combat?
Let's not assume our military is so good that it can afford to divert attention to objectives not related to winning campaigns. I have serious doubts it is safe to assume that superiority.
NOTE: TDR Winter War of 2022 coverage continues here.
