Versione Italiana – Translation by Paul Rosenberg
The global scenario raises questions for the West’s leading country, the USA, about its political/strategic approach in the face of the emerging “new world”, without too much of a pursuit of the ghost of radical solutions of continuity between Republican and Democratic Administrations. Continuity is often spotty, but it is there. The following reflections focus on a political analysis, but with the particular attention specifically to military aspects of that analysis.
History ends… but also not
Lenin’s Red Empire finally crumbled in 1992. Japanese American political scientist Fukuyama interpreted the triumph of the West at the end of the twentieth century by writing, in the footsteps of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit,a philosophical epiphany that saw in the ruins of the “Wall” the zenith of the evolution of political concepts in victorious liberal democracy. The scholar stated that political philosophy touched the horizon in this way.
However, what attracted attention to Fukuyama’s work, more than its philosophy, were the “geo-philosophical” consequences of his reflections, which saw the system of international relations as a Ptolemaic system with the USA at its center. This imaginary unipolarism had similarities with the neocon Project for the New American Century and shared the idea of redefining the role of the United States in the 21st century.
Thus, by crossing the permanent liberal revolution with the Wilsonian ideology of international law, Washington would guarantee the legality of the liberal order’s passage to the international arena in the name of a political universalism blocked by the Cold War and tied to the collaborative/competitive Washington/Moscow duopoly imposed by the doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction (MAD).
Hence the ideology of war as an “international police operation” and the political/strategic concept of asymmetric war. Thus, in the immediate post-USSR period there was the belief that the era of great clashes that characterized the wars of the twentieth century could be considered overcome. What remains of this supposedly definitively surpassed era, being necessary for the new approach, is the American will for clear superiority by sea, sky and land.
Another enduring legacy of the Cold War consists of giving (at least in theory) Washington’s armed forces – therefore the West’s – the ability to sustain multiple conflicts simultaneously in different areas such as the European Continental Shelf and the Pacific Ocean. This is the clear legacy of the experience of the war with Germany (Europe) and Japan (Pacific). The difference is that back then Tokyo and Berlin were weaker than the US both in terms of control of raw materials and industrial capacity. Today with Moscow and Beijing this is different.
The Air-Land Battle was the American military’s last conceptual innovation conceived or for a conventional conflict during the Cold War. It dominated the Euro-American war doctrine from 1982 until the 1990s, when the Russian Soviet Republic fell.
When the USSR existed
This doctrine was conceived as the answer to the possibility of a Soviet Blitzkrieg centered on large, armored units, which was considered possible at the time due to Moscow’s supposed and probable conventional superiority on the Old Continent. The political significance of the Air-Land Battle doctrine was to extend the credibility of Washington’s guarantee to Europe by remedying the overly defensive approach of the previous doctrine, called Active Defense.
In fact, unlike its predecessor, the Air-Land Battle doctrine was inspired by a more aggressive philosophy of action, that is, to counterattack the enemy’s war rearguard to destroy its infrastructure, logistics and command/control centers. The experience of Israel between the “Six-Day War” (1967) and the “Yom Kippur” war (1972) contributed to its birth. It is worth noting that it implied a new approach to “military technology policy” which translated into innovations in vehicles such as the Abrams tanks and the well-known F16.
It is a historical paradox that the first experimentation with Air-Land Battle took place against Iraq in the very last months of the USSR. In short, with Operation Desert Storm on January 18, 1991, it was Saddam Hussein who experienced a military vision conceived against Moscow deployed against himself. It was a managerial/war success, favored by having been tested against the Iraqi army, one that was inferior to the Soviet army.
Of course, its application in Europe would have been more complex, and after the fall of the Berlin Wall, this doctrine was replaced by the concept of asymmetric warfare.
The Brief Ptolemaic Illusion of Unipolarity
The perception of the decline of post-Soviet Russia’s military capacity, made official by the “Obama doctrine”, favored the ideology of a system of international relations with the USA at the center and with the Russian Federation relegated to a regional role. This consequently created a political terrain even more favorable to the idea that classical warfare – that is, a clash on the ground of enormous masses of tanks, artillery and aviation – was in decline because it had been replaced by asymmetric warfare.
This new political philosophy of the employment of the armed forces was careful to minimize the use of “boots on the ground”. This was possible based on the premise of US technological supremacy. It was the Western military utopia after the USSR: that is, the absence of adversaries of equal level. The awakening of the Russian Bear and the People’s Republic of China will later change the picture.
It is worth repeating that full domination of the skies remains a constant in war thought in the USA and the West. In democracy it is used to annihilate the enemy (shock and awe in doctrine; Desert Storm in practice) in order to reduce the loss of citizens/voters and therefore of consensus.
The Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA in the English acronym)
It was born between the end of the twentieth century and the dawn of the new millennium to adapt the US armed forces to technological discontinuity. It is “the information war” both for the control of the enemy and to strike him with maximum precision. It has a utopian side: it is the “CNN war”, a war with zero deaths (of its own).
The logic is systemic. Its concept is the application of information technology developments to the battlefield. So, in principle the armed forces should progressively combine network organizational models with the traditional hierarchical one.
Instead, the original political reading of the RMA was given by the then head of the Pentagon, Donald Rumsfeld (President G.W. Bush), linking it to the concept of “light war”: small and rapid units in action; more agile logistics; powerful air fire. It is the theorization of the use of force “after the end of history”.
“Back to the Future”
The new protagonism of the great powers led to a rethinking of the Rumsfeld style “political RMA” (another thing was the research on the effect of technology on the armed forces both in terms of organizational and doctrinal advantages and stress). An emblematic date for this was Russia’s intervention in Georgia in 2008, which revealed Moscow’s desire to regain an imperial status that projects from the Caucasus to the Far East. Just add the challenge of China to see how the logic of conflict, whether it be a war or not, changes scale.
Of course, the presence of asymmetries in the context of war will always be possible. We saw it in the Falklands War of 1982 where the technological capacity of the Argentine Air Force caused serious losses to the English, while it was the technical/organizational superiority of Her Majesty’s troops on the ground that brought down the Videla government. Beware of overestimating them, however. The counterproof can be found in Afghanistan, where the asymmetry of the West’s war power has proven to be insufficient, because it is only one element of the overall military capacity, which counts on other political/strategic aspects.
This is especially true now that the post-unipolar historical phase is ending and the new one, which is beyond analogies, is emerging as even more complex than the Cold War. It is less calculable; that is, more dangerous.
The Evolution of Washington’s Reading of the World
It was the then US President G W. Bush who provided the direction of US foreign and military policy in the unipolar world, even symbolically. He did so in his National Security Strategy of the United States of September 17, 2002 (after the Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986 more or less one per presidential term).
These are the guiding ideas that opened the post-USSR phase for the USA. In fact, it is stated:
In the Cold War, especially after the Cuban Missile Crisis, we faced a generally static and risk-averse adversary. Deterrence was an effective defense. But deterrence based only on the threat of retaliation is less likely to work against leaders of rogue states who are more willing to take risks, to gamble with the lives of their people and the wealth of their nations.
They mark the transition from the co-government of a world with a legible adversary (Soviet Moscow) in the common interest of survival to a new grammar of international confrontation. Thus:
Today, our enemies see weapons of mass destruction as weapons of choice. For rogue states these weapons are tools of intimidation and military aggression against their neighbors. These weapons may also allow these states to attempt to blackmail the United States and our allies to prevent us from deterring or repelling the aggressive behavior of rogue states. Such states also see these weapons as their best means of overcoming the conventional superiority of the United States
It is the passage from the bipolar to the unipolar order. There remained the traditional will to maintain the United States’ total global hegemony (even towards Western countries); then there was the accessibility to hydrocarbons in the Persian Gulf (today subject to partial revision by the US exporting “energy”), a priority during the Cold War. In fact, it is found in the Carter Doctrine of January 23, 1980 which reaffirmed the military necessity for the United States to guard the geo-economy of oil.
With the USSR lost, the image of the enemy was balkanized into the many faces of terrorism and “rogue states.” As a result, the Pentagon adapted its approach to the asymmetric conflict that seemed to claim the stage of the new century.
What is bringing confrontation, including conflict, between symmetrical powers back into fashion is the exhaustion of this project, which should have brought NATO to the extreme eastern border between Russia and a China integrated into the Western commercial order. The control of Eurasia is back to them.
US military culture made the theoretical phase transition with the concept of “multi-domain operations”, which updates the RMA to technological evolution. Furthermore, especially after Ukraine, the Pentagon is thinking about symmetrical military confrontations (Army 2030/2040).
Return to the past
Therefore, the military philosophy in Washington, and by implication that of the allies, is changing. This can be seen from the evolution of the NATO “Strategic Concept” over time. The 2022 version abandons the post-Cold War optimism which, as mentioned, even postulated a collaborative Moscow without global ambitions.
The Atlantic world seems to be overcoming an approach to the Armed Forces – the expression is by Muti of the Istituto Affari Internazionale (IAI) – “on demand”: that is, oriented towards crisis management and the protection of international legality in asymmetric operational environments. It is the emerging context that demands it. It is a slow return to “before the end of history”.
An open question is whether it is possible to recover, with the necessary updates, the level of US/NATO military capability that reached its zenith at the beginning of the First Iraq War and the collapse of the USSR. Or, at least, whether it is an achievable goal in the face of present challenges. It would be difficult in the immediate future.
On the subject, Mark Milley (Chief of Staff of the Army from 2015 to 2019 and then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff from 2019 to 2023) and Eric Schmidt (former CEO of Google and co-author with Daniel Huttenlocher and Henry Kissinger of The Age of Artificial Intelligence) give a rather alarming account of the United States’ military capacity, which requires a general rethinking to adapt to the rapid technological evolution (a sort of RMA 5.0).
Of course, the US, and therefore the West, remain superior at sea (Carrier Battle Groups and submarine technology) and in the air. However, to support Milley and Schmidt’s fears, the former is challenged by naval missiles (China) and the latter, while remaining, is also at risk. Because of this, many analysts believe there could be problems in both the Atlantic and Pacific theaters. Even simply in terms of deterrence, this could be quite problematic.
Here is where military and political aspects collide. In the USA this translates into relations between Democrats and Republicans. Obviously, the question returns to policy directions, where resources are even more “politically” scarce, and it is even more difficult to make the public choice to find an efficient balance between how much to invest in new technological frontiers (the future military has high costs) and how much as a partial alternative in readiness (maintenance and training). Then more generally, the relationship between warfare and welfare determines the foreign/military posture of the USA.
This is a difficult issue for democracies in the West. In recent years it has been clearly visible in the United States by observing the dialectic on military spending between the Oval Office, Congress and the guillotine of the Sequester (the automatic budget device that blocks spending when the public debt reaches the limit established by Congress itself). Although the abyss has been avoided with last-minute bipartisan agreements up to now, the fact remains that overseas there is a fragility of the political system that is potentially harmful to national security.
The point before military planning or budget is political strategy. What will Washington’s objectives be in a world that is both multipolar and increasingly narrow for everyone? Certainly, there will be a return to competition between Great Powers. Probably Washington and its allies will try, perhaps with fallbacks, to defend the current international hierarchy led by the USA. Mission impossible? Perhaps, but for a superpower there is no alternative.
Cover image: Three airmen train at Lackland AFB.
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