Remarks by Colonel Marco J. Lyons at the United States Army War College School of Strategic Landpower (SSL) National Security Seminar (NSS), Carlisle Barracks
I deeply appreciate General Ron Clark’s leadership and the opportunity he has provided me to share with you some thinking from the United States Army Pacific.
Hello everyone – I would like to thank “Buddy” Frick for the offer and Major General Hill for allowing me to participate today. The views expressed are my own and do not necessarily represent the views of the Department of the Army or the Department of Defense. My intent is to highlight some pressing issues surrounding the rivalry with China, beginning with a review of key assumptions and ending with some implications for military strategy.
First, some assumptions before getting into the issues. Great power rivalry sets the stage for the remarks that follow.
Great power is definable for the purposes of military strategic planning based on the global level of international relations, reputation, and influence – the main instruments of national power – and the pursuit of policy preferences. Great power is a mass of existing or latent national strength – combining military, economic, and diplomatic means – which may be equaled but not significantly surpassed by that of any other actor in the international system. Great powers are top-ranking, compelling, and almost always, to a certain extent, threatening.
Rivals are distinct from challengers and spoilers. So, after the end of the Cold War, Russia became a global challenger (recently it may have slipped to a global spoiler) while Iran and the DPRK are regional spoilers – though Pyongyang acts like it aspires to be a regional challenger. China is a great power and is a rival of the United States for the position of global hegemon. The idea of a Sino-American hegemonic war should be reframed as essentially a land conflict – centering on Asia – which is, not to say, an Army conflict.
The interests of great powers are bound to clash, and concerning core interests, great power rivals should not be expected to cooperate. The strategic literature is still too skewed toward cooperation, even though the structure of Sino-American relations no longer suggests such a focus is warranted. All states compete, even friendly ones.
Great power rivals are in conflict, but armed conflict – or war – is not inevitable. Great power rivalry may be managed given an extremely high level of bipartisan American political support for a carefully crafted ‘managed rivalry’ policy agenda – and something similar on the opposing side – and given dedicated bilateral and supporting multilateral diplomatic forums to overwatch security mistrust and regulate economic competition. To paraphrase Graham Allison at the Kennedy School of Government, destiny deals the hands, but individual leaders play the cards.
For military planning purposes, China is an adversary – an adversary is a potential enemy. The United States has not faced an adversary of any great significance since the Soviet Union. This helps explain the disconnects between our conventional thinking about war with China and what actually applies today.
U.S. military strategy in the Indo-Pacific should focus on war, specifically because China is a global rival and a military adversary. A military strategy is a warmaking strategy, to echo the words of Major General (Retired) Brad Gericke, former Army Staff G-3/5, now nonresident senior fellow with the Atlantic Council. Military strategy should focus on defeat of the adversary and not on deterrence, which is foremost a policy, understanding that maintaining global hegemony is also a policy requiring military force.
The idea of a ‘strategy of deterrence’ (or of ‘denial’) is, at the national level, entailing all instruments of power. What militarily supports a national policy of deterrence is a military strategy that defeats the adversary. The U.S. government continues to pursue a policy of deterrence. It is the role of the military strategy to lay out how force will support the achievement of policy, including not losing a hegemonic war, especially with deterrent capabilities, concepts, and posture.
Campaigning should be about securing decisive advantage in relation to moving into a great power crisis and armed conflict. There will be peacetime interests, like international trade, democratic reforms, and support of liberal values and human rights, covered by military strategy, but they are not central – they indirectly support security. Essentially, military strategy in terms of an adversarial great power rival should not be derailed by non-warmaking interests.
Second, some key issues for military strategy in the Indo-Pacific in the form of conventional views and the corresponding ‘new school’ of thinking. While still not a full-fledged intellectual movement, I argue that a new consensus is coalescing through the work of Hal Brands, Oriana Mastro, Andrew Krepinevich, Charlie Flynn, and others.
New school thinking forms a large part of the conceptual basis for the classified 2024 USARPAC Theater Army Strategy signed by the Commanding General a year ago (July). This developing new school of military thinking is driven in part by growing recognition that standing views need to be challenged and even overturned. So, in the historical dimension, the land war in the Pacific during World War Two was far more important and substantial than so much published literature would suggest. I can commend everyone who hasn’t already done so to take a look at John McManus’ trilogy on the U.S. Army in the Pacific War.
In the national strategic dimension, after moving steadily from seeing China as a cooperative partner to a strategic competitor to now a great power rival, the disconnects between policy, strategy, and military power in the region are becoming increasingly clear. U.S. military strategic thinking today is straightjacketed by 1990s ideas about military-technological dominance, regional contingencies, force projection, expeditionary warfare, and net-centricity. The new school of military thinking seeks a wholesale reset across these and more.
The conventional thinking presented here dates to the post-1945 international order, when China was poor. It has been shaped by the aftermath of World War Two, the Pacific in Cold War strategy, the post-Cold War environment, and the U.S. policy of engagement with Beijing. So, to be clear, the roots of this conventional thinking run deep.
Now for the issues presented as contrasting conventional and ‘counter-conventional’ views.
The conventional view: The United States is in a ‘competition’ with China. Since 2017, the U.S.-China relationship has been characterized as strategic competition, which still assumes a shared ‘playing field.’ Furthermore, the conventional thinking goes that the risk of armed conflict can be successfully managed through direct engagement and building economic and security integration between China and the West.
Against the conventional view is a ‘new view’: As a great power rival, China is interested in setting the common ‘playing field’ for the world, nothing less. Evidence mounts that Beijing wants a China-centric world order unshackled from Western influence. Since at least 2018, important East Asian scholars like Jennifer Lind have argued that China is quickly on path to become the regional hegemon, which directly threatens a U.S. core interest.
By some accounts, Xi Jinping not only believes that China has already achieved historic levels of power – so-called ‘comprehensive power’ – but that he can use it to change the course of world history in Beijing’s favor. It is “indisputable” that Xi Jinping’s ambition is globe-spanning and includes surpassing the United States, according to Elizabeth Economy, another important China expert.
Next – a second conventional view: Beijing’s initiation of a major war against the United States would be so ‘risky’ that it is very unlikely to happen, based in part on the idea that economic interdependence deters armed conflict. The interconnectedness of the U.S. and Chinese economies through trade and investment creates a strong disincentive for large-scale conventional war, as both nations would suffer immense economic harm. There is long-standing orthodoxy that China will not risk harming the international order that has served it so well.
The new view: Strategic calculations of high politics are not made on economic factors alone. In the words of the Brazilian political scientist, Heni Ozi Cukier, “Economics may explain what can be done, but politics decides what will be done.” Great power rivals risk being caught in a “trade-security spiral” – an idea described by the professor of international affairs, Dale Copeland.
It should be clearer today than at any time since 1991 that fear, honor, and glory still bear on international decision-making. It should also be remembered that the United States does not control all inputs to Beijing’s strategic risk calculus. We should reexamine our approach to risk management in the context of Sino-American rivalry as it actually is.
Conventional view: The United States has superior strategies, operational concepts, and forces, through Operation PATHWAYS, HELLSCAPE, Agile Combat Employment, Marine Littoral Regiments, and future Army Multidomain Commands – for example, to secure overmatch against the PLA. The 2018 NDS mandated accelerated modernization to maintain overmatch against rapidly investing competitors. After the fall of the Soviet Union, the Second Offset Strategy ensured Joint Force overmatch for more than two decades based on sensor networks, precision strikes, and stealth aircraft.
New view: Advantageous loss exchange ratios do not by themselves indicate operational advantage, and this may be especially true when assessing great power rivals. Winning battles will remain important, but in great power war, the U.S. Joint Force/Combined Forces will need to effectively link tactical actions to objectives to decisive points to lines of operation that progress directly and indirectly to the adversary’s operational and then strategic centers of gravity. This is no less true today than in the days of Henry Lloyd and the Seven Years War.
The United States also still relies on a hub-and-spoke arrangement for allies and partners in the region. This is the least effective for waging war against a peer adversary. The outward expanding spokes dissipate the efforts of a Combined Force operating to achieve the strategic ends of a warmaking Coalition.
Conventional view: A future war in the Indo-Pacific will be short. A Sino-American war will be over in a matter of days or weeks, and, therefore, there will be no role for the Army in major combat operations. Only fast-striking forces from the sea and the air will be relevant.
New view: This conventional view seems to apply a 1990s superpower conception of war – of low cost, low risk, rapid and awe-inspiring attacks at strategic distances – to the current reality of a great power rival and peer adversary. The fit is a poor one indeed.
There is growing awareness over only the last few years of the potential for protracted conflict. When globe-straddling great powers with hegemonic armed forces and sprawling alliances face off, they introduce protraction with their expansive war aims, strategic depth, and large amounts of latent power. While not ‘alliances’ in the Western sense, China may be expected to rely on ‘comprehensive strategic partnerships.’
Conventional view: A future war in the Indo-Pacific will be sharp. The idea of sharp refers to very high levels of intensity and destruction over relatively short periods. Sharp wars are also usually thought of as being particularly decisive. So, we can think of early and massive strikes on air bases, aircraft carriers, and critical infrastructure.
New view: The idea of a sharp war overanalyzes the impact of long ranges, precision, and lethality. Traditional operational problems of maneuver, mass and concentration, and seizing the initiative, remain, and we can see these playing out in limited form in the ongoing war in Ukraine. Some analysts, including James Russell, rightly point out that strike warfare – long-range strikes by aircraft and missiles – has rarely achieved its declared political and strategic aims.
Conventional view: A major war will be geographically confined to a part of the Central Western Pacific. There will be no significant incentives to escalate horizontally. The U.S. national security establishment remains focused on planning for a short, sharp war with China conducted around Taiwan in the first island chain.
New view: More and more, key security partners in the region see a Chinese war against Taiwan as engulfing much more than only the island and immediately surrounding seas. After decades of staying quiet on Taiwan, over the last few years Tokyo has indicated that a Chinese war against Taiwan would be a ‘security emergency’ for Japan and that Taiwan’s security interests are linked to Japan’s. Additionally, Japan has been working with the EU on a security partnership.
A Sino-American war would spread across the Western Pacific and beyond because of the need for ports, movement corridors, and maneuver space on land and in the maritime domain to secure power centers and key populations. In great power war, as operations protract and the overriding need to threaten centers of gravity sets in on both sides, the tendency to geographically spread out will likely grow.
Conventional view: It is sufficient for the United States to plan for a single operation in a single joint operations area, similar to Operation DESERT STORM, rather than the full range of actions, operations, and campaigns.
New view: For the U.S. Joint Force/Combined Forces and the PLA to fully employ – or fully exploit – available forces and capabilities means that both sides will seek multiple operations areas and will almost certainly need to conduct operations over more than one campaign. This is what is expected when great powers are targeting each other’s strategic centers of gravity.
With horizontal escalation, and possibly also vertical escalation, and protraction, the opportunities to launch varied types of operations, including airborne, amphibious, and air assault, will expand. I see no compelling arguments for why these cross-domain operations are obsolete in a great power war.
Conventional view: The United States has the best structures for planning, preparing, and commanding future warfare, given a character of war that includes robotics, autonomous systems, and artificial intelligence. Ross Babbage, a nonresident senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, has summarized this well: The United States and allies possess substantial government and private sector organizations that are capable of highly networked, combined arms warfare; and when partnered with well-trained military personnel, the resulting forces can dominate most battlefields in conventional operations.
New view: The technological dominance that we unveiled and used so devastatingly against Iraqis, Serbians, the Taliban, and Libyans in the post-Cold War period was – it should be admitted – not seriously challenged. In one sense, as things stand now, the question is not so much whether the foundations of American national strength – economic production, social organization, and democratic governance – are resilient enough to withstand the extreme demands of a major power war, but how fast could the transition to a wartime footing be made.
Next, the new school of military strategic thinking in the Indo-Pacific leads to some key implications.
The U.S. Army must develop a ‘Pacific Force.’ This was resisted by important institutional stakeholders as recently as a year and a half ago, but now appears to have the endorsement of the Vice Chief of Staff of the Army, General James Mingus, in a recent Center for Strategic and International Studies interview.
The U.S. Army should advocate for and begin preparations for an Indo-Pacific collective security alliance as recently proposed by Ely Ratner, former ASD-IPSA (Assistant Secretary of Defense for Indo-Pacific Security Affairs), in the pages of Foreign Affairs.
The U.S. Army should pick up the mantle of joint force development – particularly as it applies to the Indo-Pacific. The Indo-Pacific, with its massive Asian landmass and extensive archipelagos, is easily the most complex warfighting environment in the world. Operations in this region are inescapably joint. The Army has the most to gain by championing full-dimensional joint force development.
Finally, a closer: The ‘return of everything’ – even though the phrase may be inelegant, the idea seems to be enveloping us. In only the last few years, Mara Karlin, who was recently the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Strategy, Plans, and Capabilities, in stunning fashion, wrote about the return of total war. A Professor of Political Science at the University of Minnesota (Tanisha M. Fazal) only early this year published a piece on the return of conquest. Monica Duffy Toft, of Tufts University’s Fletcher School, also earlier this year described the return of spheres of influence. Vladimir Putin talks about Russia as an ‘imperial’ power.
Admittedly, it is not quite clear yet that we have been thrown back into a world of empires and wars of expansion, but it is clear that U.S. military strategy is more dynamic than at any time since the 1950s. To paraphrase what Elbridge Colby, now Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, has said: We are in a race for our lives against an incredibly formidable China and should take nothing for granted. I would add that our military strategy – solidly grounded in war with China – should take nothing for granted.
Thank you, and I look forward to the discussion.
