WHOM WILL WE FIGHT?
Instead of betting the future on failed conceptual approaches, consider the value of a new approach that exploits contemporary history and human behavior as components of a way to see into the future. Too often, generals are accused of trying to “fight the next war like the last.” I suggest that much of our failure to anticipate the future properly rests on the fact that generals fail to look closely at the past, particularly the history and past behaviors of our enemies. Since the end of World War II, the generals have gotten it more wrong than right by ignoring “last wars.” President Eisenhower’s New Look sought to replace conventional with strategic forces, and the nation went to war in Vietnam woefully underresourced for a manpower-intensive counterinsurgency campaign. We paid a similar price in 2003, when U.S. command delayed too long in applying the lessons of Vietnam to the insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan. Of course, in today’s Beltway, culture, history, and behavior are neither studied nor understood adequately. Thus, touting the past as a reliable road map for the future is a tough sell.
The power of an historical-behavioral approach comes from the realization that regardless of region, actor, motive, geopolitical circumstances, intensity, or type of conflict, our enemies have consistently repeated behaviors that they believe offer the greatest chance of success against us in battle. Patterns of behavior wind their way through all of our contemporary wars and are repeated at all levels of war, from strategic to tactical.
Lately, the historical-behavioral approach to future-casting has gained serious intellectual reinforcement within the social sciences. The Nobel Prize–winning research of economists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky reveals how humans behave when they make serious decisions in life. Many of these decisions are made less from logic and data than from the psychology of personal biases and past behaviors and experiences. Phillip Tetlock, a psychologist from the University of Pennsylvania (and a colleague of mine), takes Kahneman a step further in his book Superforecasting.1 Kahneman concludes that even the most powerful and politically savvy fall victim to what he terms “scope insensitivity.” Every human being, no matter how connected with the outside world, eventually gets to a point where there is nothing more in his understanding of the political environment. Tetlock uses the term “WYSIATI,” or “What you see is all there is,” to describe the phenomenon of scope insensitivity. In other words, human behavior derives only from what the person sees. Scope insensitivity explains why leaders choose to go to war in circumstances doomed to failure. To someone outside the inner circle, the leader might be totally nuts, as well as dangerous. But the leader acts only on what he sees, on the basis of his perception of the realities of the world. Thus, behavior driven by experiences in dealing with the outside world might just be the most powerful single indicator for forecasting the future decisions of global leaders and the course of world events.
Everyman’s scope insensitivity is different from the insensitivity of those who start wars. Everyman is powerless. But leaders who control militaries and populations have the power to act and be destructively swayed by their social insensitivity. The difference lies in an old war-college equation: “threat equals capability times will.” An example: in his heyday, Fidel Castro would have reveled in the military defeat of the United States. His scope insensitivity was formed from a wacky Caribbean version of Marxism that drives him to this day. However, Castro was and is powerless. His “capability” against us is virtually zero. Thus, his threat to us is nil. Of course, Vladimir Putin is a different story. No one can really anticipate what Russia will do in the future without understanding Putin’s behavioral history, the history of his state since the end of the Cold War, and the limits of Putin’s social insensitivities.
So let us apply Tetlock and Kahneman to the usual suspects. Then let us expose their scope insensitivities to the war-college equation, threat equals capability times will, to see what behavior and history tell us about whom we will fight in the future.
Without question, the Beltway believes (and some in that realm even hope) that our future enemy will be China. The Chinese are perfect enemies. Their capability score is big and growing. They may be the only potential adversary whose matériel capabilities make it worthy of our expensive, high-tech weaponry. The big defense corporations can rely on the modernization of the Chinese military to justify almost a trillion dollars (yes, that’s with a t) of new aircraft, ships, and missiles. The Chinese threat touches all of the schools: the technologists warn of Chinese missiles capable of killing our aircraft carriers; the scenario makers love to anticipate crushing the new Chinese navy in a great sea battle; and the concept theorists are thrilled with the chance to showcase U.S. weaponry as the best tools for confronting nascent Chinese expansionism.
But if we apply the template of behavioral history and score their social insensitivity, the Chinese simply do not fit the profile of an enemy ready to go to war against us. First, the obvious: great nuclear powers simply do not go to war with great nuclear powers. The proliferation of nuclear weapons among enemies like China, Russia, and soon Iran offers good news and bad news: the good news is that no large power can threaten us; bad news—we can never return the favor. There is no logical, strategic reason for the United States to bomb a major power to achieve any end other than national survival. Thus, the presence of nuclear weapons has virtually eliminated any chance of great powers fighting each other in big wars that demand the mobilization of the nation and the commitment of massed forces. Likewise, the muting effect of the nuclear ceiling on great-power violence eliminates the possibility of massive air or naval campaigns, because the risk-versus-reward curve is simply out of kilter.
Second, the tenets of geostrategy argue against a war with China. Simply put, the United States cannot fight a war on the continent of Asia and expect any strategically useful outcome. There are two countries on the planet that are unconquerable: China and Russia. China in particular cannot be conquered because of its vast spaces and a three-thousand-year-old culture, strictly averse to fighting extraterritorial threats . . . that is more than a billion people, by the way, with an army five times the size of ours.
Another even more subtle argument for focusing on China comes from the current administration’s new strategy that calls for a “pivot to Asia,” a thinly veiled expression of intent to shift focus away from the Middle East. Truth is, the pivot toward China is really just a cynical, strategic “head fake.” The administration knows we will not fight China. Yet the pivot allows it to perpetuate the myth of muscular U.S. military power after leaving the Middle East—all without having to expect a real war.
The AirSea Battle gurus beat the drums for a war against China by citing the growing strength of its navy and air forces. Of course, the Chinese military is growing. Throughout history, all emerging great powers have sought to express their places in the world by spending on their militaries. Theodore Roosevelt gave the British fits at the turn of the last century as the United States began to flex its naval muscles. However, this time, the war-college equation gets in the way; a threat is a multiple of capability times intent. If intent is zero, the threat is zero. There is ample evidence in Chinese history that the Chinese, while nationalistic, are not expansionistic. They already have their empire; they just want to keep it.
Of course, the Chinese view us with suspicion. Any two great powers juxtaposed across the Pacific would act in a similar fashion. But suspicion, envy, and cultural jingoism are not sufficient to justify a war against a nuclear power. It just does not make sense to them, and it should not for us either.
Next in the line of the most popular “usual suspects” is North Korea. During my career I served four years in the Republic of Korea—as a major, colonel, and general. All of my service was with tactical units, preparing to fight the North. I commanded an artillery battalion whose mission was to protect