Joint Warfighting Concept 2034-2044

Excerpt

For decades, U.S. warfighters have stated that offensive action is the key to victory. However, recent massive advances in sensors, command and control systems, and precision weapons produced en masse are creating a period of defensive dominance in the land, sea, and air domains. To respond, the Joint Warfighting Concept must change to focus on timely offensive operational maneuver designed to give U.S. forces the advantage of the tactical defensive.

The Guadalcanal Campaign is a good example of this concept. U.S. forces got ashore quickly, dug in, and forced the Japanese to attack against an all-domain defense. Although U.S. naval and air forces had inferior training and equipment at that point in the war, the Japanese forces tasked to eject the Marines had to fight through both air and naval forces before they could even get ashore. The Japanese ground forces took such heavy attrition during transit that they never achieved superiority against the Marines.

The second major change needed in the JWC is accepting that any war with China will be a long war – measured in years. Unfortunately, the Joint Force consistently wargames short conflicts. But since 1750, conventional conflicts between healthy major powers have lasted years to decades. At the time, national leaders assumed each of these wars would be short — Seven Years War, French Revolutionary/Napoleonic Wars, U.S. Civil War, First and Second World Wars, and Korean War. Unfortunately, they lasted from three to twenty-three years. There have been short conventional wars since 1750 such as the Austro-Prussian War, Franco-Prussian War, Sino-Japanese War, Russo-Japanese War, and Spanish-American War. But each of these shorter wars saw a rising power smashing a collapsing one.

Dr. Thomas X. Hammes is a retired U.S. Marine officer and counter-insurgency warfare specialist at the Institute for National Strategic Studies. Rear Adm. (Ret.) Mark Montgomery is senior director at the Center on Cyber and Technology Innovation and a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.