Unpreparedness is a Choice
The 2020s are markedly more volatile than at any time since the end of the Cold War, resembling more and more the combustible geopolitical world of the latter 1930s. Great Power rivalries and power politics are intensifying, with rank-and-file powers beginning to align into what appears to be the foundations of opposing war coalitions. While a Great Power war between the free world powers associated with and formally apart of the U.S. alliance system and the authoritarians is not inevitable, the winds of war are blowing in increasing intensity. Leon Trotsky’s amorphism continues to hold true, that we “may not be interested in war, but war is interested” in us. The risk of a general war breaking out with the United States and other core defenders of the free world on one side and the autocrats on the opposing side is growing. Failing to adequately prepare for a protracted, multi-theater general war is a choice.
A State of Unpreparedness
The United States should be very concerned about the present state and trajectory of the correlation of forces and means between America and its allies, and the opposing confederation of authoritarian powers, including the People’s Republic of China, the Russian Federation, North Korea, the Islamic Republic of Iran, etc. Over the last several decades the relative strength of the free world has been expended, eroded, or allowed to atrophy, resulting in ever thinner margins of strength and increasing areas of vulnerability, particularly if faced with a protracted general war. Achieving a to be developed wartime theory of victory will be very costly today, but the outcome of such a war five years hence would be in doubt based on current trends of America and its allies making slow incremental progress to improve their war preparedness, as if hoping the authoritarian threat will pass, while the authoritarian powers are aggressively pursuing rearmament programs that has already shifted the balance of power in key strategic locations such as the first island chain in the Indo-Pacific. One may dispute this assertion, but the United States needs to move beyond the misplaced belief that our American (and Western) exceptionalism will see us through and soberly face the facts as they are. The United States and its allies are unprepared for a multi-theater general war and our adversaries now have both a starter’s advantage and are better positioned for a grinding, protracted multi-theater general war that goes beyond one year.
In a multi-theater general war, victory ultimately hinges on the ability to maintain superior logistics and sustain the political will of the nation. While the United States is presently unique in its ability to project power globally, it projects this power under benign, relatively uncontested circumstances. The Homeland is no longer a sanctuary; America’s adversaries now possess an enormous suite of advanced capabilities to kinetically and non-kinetically attack civil and military targets within the continental United States, disrupting mobilization and force deployments, the transportation and banking systems, critical infrastructure, and adding friction across the entirety of the economic supply chain. Moreover, significant power projection capabilities currently in service and necessary to fighting a multi-theater general war, including Roll-On/Roll-Off shipping, Fleet Replenishment Oilers, Expeditionary Transport Docks, Army Watercraft, Amphibious Assault shipping, the Ready Reserve Force, the National Defense Reserve Fleet, etc., are aging out and rusting out at an ever-alarming rate with no coherent buy-back or replacement strategy in place. Absent a robust and resilient logistics and power projection capability we risk finding ourselves in a similar strategic position of the Japanese in the last great Pacific war, with forces withering on the vine across multiple theaters for want of basic logistics because the nation proved ill-suited to fight a protracted war.
Here in the West, defense practitioners in particular, all kind of chuckled in 2022 when it came to light that the Russians had resorted to stripping washing machines of their chips to feed their armaments industry. If we avoid preparing for protracted conflict, we could find ourselves doing the very same in a few short years. The state of multi-year backlogs in foreign military sales, the 2020 and beyond COVID supply chain problems, and the war in Ukraine have exposed the poor state of our logistics posture and our national industrial capacity for what it is – brittle and insufficient to provide surge production to meet the demands of a protracted, high-intensity war, and not what we’ve been panegyrically telling ourselves for the past several decades.
During World War II, General of the Army Omar Bradley once opined that “amateurs talk strategy, professionals talk logistics”. The modern corollary to this might be professionals talk logistics, while amateurs talk tactics. This is offered because the U.S. Armed Forces have regressed as a military profession over the last three decades, with an intellectual vacuum arising amongst the officer caste along with a corresponding erosion of competence by non-commissioned officers. We shouldn’t be surprised that the generational experiences of two decades of small wars has produced some very good brush-war tacticians and terrorist exterminators. However, those same skills and experiences found useful in counter-terror operations might not translate very well to sustained, high intensity large-scale combat against a peer adversary or coalition of powers.
Over the past 24 years of prosecuting the Global War on Terror campaign, the U.S. Joint Force has developed a counter-productive culture which places an almost myopic level of attention to all-things lethality. Close combat forces truly appreciate the value of firepower, but the lack of interagency planning and coordination, combined with the atrophy and lack of investments in power projection and logistics capabilities, puts the United States at strategic risk of not being capable of defending our national interests. The probability of the U.S. facing its own Suez moment is growing, where the U.S. Armed Forces are militarily incapable of force projection to secure lines of communication, support our allies, or defend American territory beyond the Continental United States.
Perhaps worse would be for the U.S. Armed Forces to have the capability (or be directed) to initially force project, but not be capable of sustaining the fight, and culminating in a protracted conflict for want of basic material needs. The United Kingdom risked such a predicament in 1982 in the Falklands War. British expeditionary power had appreciably declined in the decade prior to the Argentine invasion, but the British Armed Forces maintained a thin balance to pull off the campaign unilaterally. Within two years of the conclusion of that war the United Kingdom lacked any real unilateral expeditionary capability, and despite some recent investments to resurrect their carrier capability, is doubtful the British could field a Falkland-like force today.
In a protracted general war, the U.S. Joint Force and any allies fighting alongside will fight the first year with the force they have and the logistics already in hand or on order. Protracted wars are ultimately won by equipment that is produced after the war starts, and by forces not yet conscripted, trained and put into the field. The Department of Defense (DOD) has known for decades that nothing of consequence will be produced and delivered by industry inside of 12 months of surge production starting, confirmed since 2022 by the inability of industry to meet Ukrainian material war demands. At the end of the day, if the shelves are bare, the nation can’t just-in-time logistics, control supply rate or weaponeer our way to victory in a protracted Great Power war. If the United States expects the industrial base to deliver on any kind of timeline needed to fight a protracted general war, then the vehicle for realizing such an outcome will be investments made in the baseline industrial capacity today that extends beyond the roughly two percent of gross domestic product currently supporting the defense industrial base. At their peaks, the last two wars that required mobilization of the United State consumed over 40% of the economy during World War II and roughly 13% of the American economy during the Korean War.
One of the most valuable strategic positions of strength held by the United States has been and remains its network of alliances, followed closely by its ability to marshal the commercial sector for strategic ends. That said, the United States should be frank and honest that it is presently now over-reliant on both the commercial sector and international allies & partner nations to deploy and sustain the Joint Force. The United States must accept that not all commercial resources it has grown accustomed to power project and sustain the Joint Force will be available in a general war. As an example, for much of the last 20 years the United States has relied on contractors to provide critical support functions and foreign shipping and aircraft to power project forces, masking the significant sustainment and power projection gaps within the Joint Force.
Moreover, not all of America’s “friends” will be with it should the shooting start, and in a shooting war hash-tags and best wishes won’t be helpful. American historian and author Dr. Stephen Kotkin has succinctly pointed out the true state of many of America’s allies when he asserted that its most strategically important alliance, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), “is an alliance of pacifist countries, with small defense budgets that don’t want to fight a war again.” Fully acknowledging this is another relatively uncomfortable prospect to consider, and some may also declare as heresy that not everyone in the alliance network or that American industry can be relied upon. Some of America’s own treaty allies question U.S. commitment, and opening talk of it in terms of risk, and what they might have to do should America not come to their aid in a time of need. The U.S. should have the same conversation internally, planning for allied operations, but preparing to go it largely alone with a much smaller group of committed allies if need be.
In the spirit of debate, the recent Houthi threat to Red Sea lines of communication is submitted as indicative, on a relatively small scale, to what the United States is likely to see in a Great Power war: lackluster free world support to defending the commons, and by extension, the international system, and second, the commercial sector reaction to opt out, avoiding involvement in the contested zone. As an example, what if international shipping lines, such as Maersk, elects to or is pressured to by our adversaries to sit out a Great Power general war as a neutral, and the United States is unable to compel their support as it is able to do with U.S. flagged shipping? Without permissive access to international shipping to support a war effort, the United States won’t have the capability to deploy, much less sustain even a third of its 19 Army and three Marine Corps Divisions.
It is a fallacy to believe that a war termination outcome in a general war favorable to the United States can be achieved largely through sea and air domains, augmented by special forces raids. Sizable ground forces will be required and serious fighting will occur to secure key and decisive terrain necessary to realize victory. Hoping to win on the cheap without ground forces is founded on an exaggerated and false understating of history and war. Therefore, if the United States desires to project power globally, it must have the shipping, the mariners to crew them, and a balanced, resourced Joint Force to protect it.
The United States (and the West) of 2025 are not a product of their circumstances. The strategic position they find themselves in are a result of their decisions. For much of the last 35 years the West’s post-Cold War strategic judgment has been poor, exacerbated by ahistorical naïveté that unipolarity and the absence of war on the European plain was a natural state. Peace is not the natural state of affairs, but it can be maintained through strength and preparedness. Our adversaries have communicated their intent and are actively preparing themselves for war through their unprecedented military build-ups and increasingly coordinated actions. Policy makers and those advising them should reflect on this moment and how history will judge them, the United States, and the West. If wishing away the authoritarian threat and half-measures are continued, the United States and the West will face the hard reality of our adversaries increasingly strong position at some point. We either get serious real fast and prepare for the next big conflict, or risk losing it all.
A Choice to Prepare
The road forward is challenging, but not insurmountable. Real preparedness is achievable through sustained and disciplined strategic vision and leadership. DOD cannot prepare the nation for a protracted general war alone. First and foremost, the executive and legislative branches must make national emergency preparedness a real priority as it did in the late 1970s and 1980s with senior official active involvement and budgetary follow-through. DOD has a very big part, for only DOD has the organizational capacity and institutional power to get national preparedness and mobilization established as a priority within the next National Security Strategy (NSS). However, while DOD will need to be a leader and do its part for the defense enterprise, the rest of the Federal Government has a critical role and must join the effort through aligning their legacy national security roles under the leadership of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). DOD must partner with FEMA, and together they can marshal the rest of the Federal Government to kick-start national mobilization planning and preparation.
With national mobilization established as a priority in the NSS, DOD must revisit the current National Defense Strategy to account for the prospect of a protracted, global general war, and consider returning to a resourced two-theater, or perhaps even a more realistic multi-theater, war strategy that includes the Homeland as one of the theaters. Such an approach will require both the executive and legislative branches of our government to reach a consensus on a National Security Council (NSC) 68 like grand strategy for a more complex environment. Such a national policy, at its heart, will involve intense rivalry, increasing crises and preparing the nation to fight multiple adversaries simultaneously, with the People’s Republic of China at the center as the designated primary opposing belligerent. Such a strategy must deal with significantly more complex economic issues than NSC 68 posited and confronted throughout the Cold War.
The 2030’s security environment will require a strategy that commits to resourcing a major program of rearmament here in the mid-2020s akin to, and perhaps greater than, the Reagan Administration build-up in the 1980s and likely beyond what the All-Volunteer Force can support. The nation is not yet ready for a discussion on rearmament or the need to return to conscription to support an expanded force, so the argument needs to be made for the debate to start. The nation will rise to meet the challenge if the case is properly made.
With national emergency preparedness established as a priority in the NSS, DOD should, through DHS, start an enduring, deliberate planning effort with FEMA. The DOD, DHS, and FEMA team should establish a crash planning effort to produce a Federal National Mobilization Plan (FNMP), as DOD and FEMA did in the 1980s, to marshal the nation’s resources for a protracted general war. The United States has not conducted interagency national mobilization planning since 1994, when FEMA followed DOD’s decision to move on from planning for global general war, eliminating the bulk of their mobilization planning infrastructure in the process. FEMA shifted its primary planning focus to disaster response, a natural response following the 1992 failure of the Federal Government’s response to Hurricane Andrew.
A general war against either Russia or China would require a unified campaign across most of the geographic Combatant Commands. As an example, war with the People’s Republic of China would require a global war plan that requires synchronized campaigns in the following geographic Combatant Commands: United States Northern Command (USNORTHCOM), United States Indo-Pacific Command (USINDOPACOM), United States Southern Command (USSOUTHCOM), United States Central Command (USCENTCOM), and the United States Africa Command (USAFRICOM). A war with China would likewise require integration of the functional Combatant Command’s war plans, including United States Strategic Command (USSTRATCOM), United States Special Operations Command (USSOCOM), United States Cyber Command (USCYBERCOM), and of course United States Transportation Command (USTRANSCOM). Therefore, DOD should direct the Joint Staff to lead global campaign planning akin to the inter-war color-coded “rainbow” plans conducted in the lead-up to World War II.
Contemporary rainbow planning must include developing plans for protracted war against a coalition of adversaries. Moreover, while the above recommended rainbow planning should focus on what the United States must prepare to do, including our core allies and their collective defense measures. The United States needs to remain committed to its treaty commitments, but America’s commitments need to be measured by both importance to the national interest and allied commitment to defending the international order. In short, the United States should cultivate and nurture core allies that demonstrate their commitment to collective defense of the international order, and minimize our reliance on the free riders who have off-shored their defense responsibilities onto the United States. We can’t do it all, nor should we care more about someone else’s defense than they do. Therefore, our defense planning may need to de-prioritize certain allied defense needs to focus on the strategic requirements and operational realities of a Great Power war in the Indo-Pacific.
In conjunction with a rainbow planning effort, the Joint Staff should develop a force expansion plan to prosecute the war over time. Using the Victory Plan of 1941 as the historical inspiration, the Joint Staff should develop a Victory Plan of 202X, which would frame out the basic structure required should the Joint Force be called to expand the force from its present size of two million troops to five or ten million required to fight and win a multi-year Great Power general war. A Victory Plan of 202X would serve as the foundation of most subsequent national mobilization planning, including the development of an industrial war plan, conscription planning, strategic reconstitution (e.g. Joint Force expansion), and the operational reconstitution of attritted forces. Without such a strategic framework, i.e. a victory plan, all Joint Force and national war planning would be aiming for targets in the dark, and anything that would come out would be of very limited value.
Should the United States and the free world be forced to fight a protracted general war in the next decade, time is not on its side. Policy makers and those advising them might reflect on the wisdom of Martin Luther King Jr from his 1963 Letter from a Birmingham Jail in regards to confronting danger head on through direct action, rejecting the myth that preparedness can wait or be achieved through moderation. “Such an attitude stems from a tragic misconception of time, from the strangely irrational notion that there is something in the very flow of time that will inevitably cure all ills. Actually, time itself is neutral; it can be used either destructively or constructively. More and more I feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than have the people of good will. … Human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevitability; it comes through the tireless efforts of men willing to be coworkers with God, and without this hard work, time itself becomes an ally of the forces of social stagnation. We must use time creatively, in the knowledge that the time is always ripe to do right. Now is the time …”
Now is the time to act. The United States must rearm, rebuild its national preparedness program, and re-establish its national mobilization architecture it assembled in the 1980s so that it can fight and win a protracted multi-theater general war against the autocrats if they elect to pursue aggression and war. Doing so will re-establish deterrence and reduce the likelihood of war even occurring by persuading the autocrats through strength, that today is not the day to start a war they will lose.
