Learning from Contemporary Conflicts to Prepare for Future War

Learning from Contemporary Conflicts to Prepare for Future War – H.R. McMaster, Foreign Policy Research Institute E-Note

This essay is based on his full-length article in the Fall 2008 special issue of Orbis on “The Future of War.”

War is the final auditor of military institutions. Contemporary conflicts such as those in Afghanistan and Iraq create an urgent need for feedback based on actual experience. Analysis of the present combined with an understanding of history should help us improve dramatically the quality of our thinking about war. Understanding the continuities as well as changes in the character of armed conflict will help us make wise decisions about force structure, develop relevant joint force capabilities, and refine officer education and the organization, training, and the equipping of our forces.

But first we need to reject the unrealistic, abstract ideas concerning the nature of future conflict that gained wide acceptance in the 1990s. Flush with the ease of the military victory over Saddam’s forces in the 1991 Gulf War and aware of the rapid advance of communications, information, and precision munitions technologies, many observers argued then that U.S. competitive advantages in these technologies had brought about a Revolution in Military Affairs. It was assumed that there would be no “peer competitor” of U.S. military forces until at least 2020. Military concepts based on this assumption promised rapid, low-cost victory in future war. Ultimately, these ideas and their corollary of reduced reliance on military manpower became subsumed under “defense transformation.”

Defense transformation advocates never considered conflicts such as those in Afghanistan and Iraq—protracted counterinsurgency and state-building efforts that require population security, security-sector reform, reconstruction and economic development, building governmental capacity, and establishing the rule of law. Our experiences in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as the 2006 Lebanon war, provide strong warnings that we should abandon the orthodoxy of defense transformation and make appropriate adjustments to force structure and development…

Much more at FPRI.