What the QDR Should Be Asking, But Isn’t
What the QDR Should Be Asking, But Isn’t – Armed Forces Journal Op-Ed by Peter W. Singer.
When today’s leaders compare our turbulent times to the drawdown era of the 1990s, they’re missing the target for a more useful historical lens. In the years surrounding World War I, fundamental political transition was accompanied by a wave of technological progress that seemed to leap from science-fiction novels. Just as submarines, tanks, and airplanes disrupted tactics, doctrine and organizational identity in the early 20th century, so today we are struggling with deep changes wrought by the likes of drones, cyber and lasers. And, strategically speaking, the U.S. at present is akin to Great Britain then: no longer a rising power but a status quo empire of global commitments, striving to maintain dominance in a changing world. Our military, like Britain’s during the Boer Wars and other colonial endeavors from Iraq to Afghanistan, has been fighting a series of tough, painful and exhausting deployments. But they have been “small wars,” not on par with the challenges from rising peer competitors…
