Welcome back to the September edition of Military Journals: Military Thought & Future Battlespace!
Several articles caught my eye this month that revolve around one of Sun Tzu’s best-known dictums: “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.”
At the strategic level, studying an adversary’s tactical and operational performance offers two valuable insights.
First, it provides empirical evidence of the adversary’s actual strengths and weaknesses, including its capabilities, readiness, and effectiveness in applying its way of war.
Second, it provides a means to “grade” your own capabilities against the adversary and the operating environment, revealing strengths, vulnerabilities, and capability gaps. Together, these assessments create opportunities to adapt capabilities and operational concepts while exploiting an adversary’s weaknesses. This kind of honest appraisal is critical to gaining and maintaining a competitive edge.
Over the past several decades, U.S. forces have sustained military operations across a wide range of missions and geographic areas, from counterterrorism and counterinsurgency campaigns in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, and Africa to maritime and air-defense combat in the Red Sea and ongoing strikes and naval operations against Iran. These missions have provided hard-earned experience, tested joint readiness, and exposed the strengths and limitations of American military power for all to study.
The U.S., its allies, and its adversaries each have a compelling interest in determining what works and what does not. A clear and honest assessment of military capability, linked to real decisions about how to build a force in support of a viable strategy, is one of the best hedges against losing the next war.
We have seen this pattern before. Germany after World War I, Israel after the Yom Kippur War, and the U.S. after Vietnam each examined its military experience and undertook consequential reforms. Similarly, the overwhelming U.S.-led coalition victory in Desert Storm drew headlines celebrating American operational effectiveness and the dawn of precision warfare. It also attracted the close attention of friends and adversaries, particularly China and Russia.
I still have my marked-up, dog-eared copy of Unrestricted Warfare, written by PLA Senior Colonels Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui and published in 1999. Its message was plainly apparent: China was awed by American combat power, recognized how far it lagged behind, and would seek asymmetric means to confront the U.S. Beijing was signaling that it intended to adapt and exploit asymmetric advantages, while the U.S. largely reinforced what had already worked.
It is this theme of assessment, net assessment, and adaptation that emerges from the articles and books highlighted here.
