U.S. Marine Corps Transformation Path (eBook)

Chapter One:

The Shift from the Land Wars
to Preparing for the High-End Fight

It cannot be overstated how different the decade ahead preparing for the high-end fight and engaging in full-spectrum crisis management is from the past twenty years of Middle East land warfare. In my interviews over the past few years, I have talked with a number of officers in the USMC, U.S. Navy or the USAF as well as several allied militaries who entered the service towards the end of the Cold War. There are few remaining officers who have served in this period, but they are a very precious commodity because they bridge back to the peer fight with the Soviet Union to the current 21st century authoritarian competitors.

It is not the Cold War, of course. Russia is not the Soviet Union, and China is a very different animal than the Soviet Union. But the experiences of the 1980s were rooted in dealing with a core peer competitor. Air and sea dominance could not be assumed as it has been in the period of the past twenty years of engaging in the U.S. Army–led approach to counterinsurgency and stability operations.

We began to see movement towards the peer fight with the shift in the Middle East required to destroy ISIS strongholds and with the Russians bringing their naval and air forces to Syria and engaging in shadow war with the United States and its allies. But it was just a foreshadowing of how different the decade ahead would be from the past two decades.

The use of airpower against ISIS-held territory saw the beginnings of a return to what airpower really is all about as opposed to supporting the ground scheme of maneuver. I interviewed my colleague Ben Lambeth, who wrote a very important book about this transition and how hard it was for the Army-led CENTCOM. And it took the election of a new president as well to authorize the kinds of air strikes which are more relevant to peer warfare than the past twenty years of the use of airpower.

In his book entitled Airpower in the War against ISIS, Lambeth provided his assessment of the shift from the pure dominance over airpower of counterinsurgency operations to the fight against ISIS, a fight which required airpower to remove the Army’s shackles on its proper use against a state-like competitor.1

Lambeth noted: “Clearly, as counterinsurgency operations became the predominant American way of war after 2003, the USAF lost a lot of muscle memory for doing much of anything else by way of higher-end force employment. And the predominant Army leadership at U.S. Central Command continued to apply its long-habituated Army thinking going forward into an entirely different situation that was presented by the rise of ISIS. A more assertive leadership in CENTCOM’s air component at the time would have pressed for a different response to the challenge it was handed in 2014 by arguing for targeting ISIS not as an insurgency, but rather as a self-avowed state in the making.

“However, CENTCOM’s commander, U.S. Army General Lloyd Austin III, simply assumed ISIS to be a regenerated Islamist insurgency of the sort that he was most familiar with, which it was not at all, and accordingly proceeded to engage it as just another counterinsurgency challenge. Eventually, his air component’s second successive commander, then-Lieutenant General C. Q. Brown, finally prevailed in arguing for deliberate strategic air attacks against critical ISIS infrastructure targets in both Iraq and Syria, not just for on-call air ‘support’ to be used as flying artillery for the ground fight.

“One must remember that the vast majority of today’s serving U.S. Air Force airmen are only familiar with Operation Desert Storm from their book reading. And even much of the USAF’s more senior leadership today has never really been exposed to higher-end aerial warfare as we last experienced it over Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in 2003. Only now are we slowly coming to realize the opportunity costs that were inflicted by this neglect for nearly two decades, during which time we fixated solely on less-intense counterinsurgency warfare.”

The other transitional moment was when the U.S. and its closest allies conducted a strike on Syrian chemical weapons facilities. This was done within the threat envelope of potential Russian counter-engagement against those forces. Ed Timperlake provided his assessment of this event from the side of the United States: “… the surface Navy can also undertake independent offensive operations, as the Russians in combat support for the President of Syria recently found out, after the Syrian President used chemical weapons on his opponents:

“When President Trump gave the go order to attack Shayrat Air Base Syria, where a chemical attack had been launched, two U.S. Navy surface warships stood ready to implement the order. In one shining moment with Tomahawks fired from USS Porter and USS Ross, the world knew a new Commander-in Chief was at the helm. It was reported that 59 of the 60 Tomahawks hit the intended target. Our way of war was to actually warn the Russians to minimize any chance of Russians being hit or killed — how nice for them.”2

Murielle Delaporte reported on the French engagement in the operation, which also presages how the allied engagement changes as the strategic shift begins to unfold. “France was in charge of hitting two facilities assembling and stockpiling chemical weapons near Homs. They were hit simultaneously by a combination of airborne and sea-based missiles: a total of 12 out of the 105 fired by the three countries, which, when added to the British salvo of eight Storm Shadows, constitutes the usual percentage of the French and British contributions to coalition operations (roughly 20 percent)….

“Being able to strike every 10 minutes from different platforms using different types of missiles meant working in perfect synchronicity on a trilateral basis (the U.S., the UK and France) and among the three countries’ different services, something that cannot be improvised.

“Political meetings beforehand and constant contacts and coordination among the three countries’ ministers of defense and military chiefs were crucial to prepare a pretty risky mission both politically and technically, but what counted to achieve that kind of success have been the decades of mil-to-mil relationship and training among the three allies. Building the trust necessary so that a French mission commander based in the Mediterranean could direct part of the strikes in an autonomous manner did not just happen overnight. This is the result of years and years of flying and sailing together and operating together whether in Afghanistan or over Libya or in Niger. It is also the result of the joint planning done in 2013, albeit in a very, very different threat environment.”3

In a way these two developments framed the transition. But a brutal transition it is and a difficult one. As the United States was focusing on the Middle East and pouring treasure, manpower and equipment into those wars, the Chinese put their money on shaping their version of a 21st century combat force and their version of the revolution in military affairs. The Russians are somewhat different in terms of their investments and their approach, but they seized Crimea and refined new methods of warfare central to the challenges of direct defense today in Europe. The Russians had already experienced their Afghan nightmare and were no going to go down that rabbit hole again.

And the latest version of their military doctrine released on July 2, 2021, provides a very clear statement of how they are approaching the conflict with the liberal democracies. What is asserted is the priority for Russian values against Western values. And in this defense of Russian values, information war is highlighted as a key reality facing the Russian federation as the West using the various modern means of information, such as the internet, to seek, in the Russian view, to disrupt the Russian value system and way of life. This means that the Russians see themselves as free to do the same, and to use information warfare to do the same. Indeed, the document does not use the word cyber warfare whatsoever. It focuses on political warfare and information security.

And in the Russian military mind, information war is an ongoing element of the global competition which allows them to get inside the adversary’s decision-making cycle, and inside the debates and conflicts within Western societies and in their alliances, and to do so in ways that weaken the West and lead to disintegration of Western values.

It is not just about intrusion for classic military effect; it is about a much wider agenda of undercutting Western values, protecting the “Russian way of life,” and preparing the way for the Russians to use various lethal means to achieve their objectives short of widespread direct armed conflict. It is about using lethal force to achieve their objectives without triggering a wide-ranging conventional confrontation but being prepared to master escalation control.4

The peer fight has little to do with how to manage a slo-mo counterinsurgency control the ground campaign. It is about the right tools, managed in the right way, to achieve escalation control. It is about compressed time operations; it is about understanding that when dealing with nuclear powers, the counterinsurgency model has really no relevance whatsoever.

In this...