Yet, while this new emphasis on campaigning rather than campaigns, and continuous competition instead of finite operations, is a helpful step forward, it is not enough. U.S. doctrine, to include the new Joint Concept for Competition, are overly focused on adversaries—nations against whom U.S. policymakers can envisage using force. However, for the U.S. and its military to truly compete in all arenas short of war, it must recognize that integrated campaigning requires not just a different mindset and toolkit, but an entirely new perspective. When considering campaigning, the adversary focused, force-centric approach embedded in operational planning must take a back seat and make room for an interest-focused, alignment-centric approach to take hold.
An Innovation Inflection Point
Warfare, and its planning, is inherently conservative. The deadly consequences of error in the conception and execution of war tends to breed caution in its practitioners. Innovation and adaptation in both the theory and practice of war is uneven, often requiring jolts from outside forces or events to dislodge the orthodoxy.[2] Yet, when the conditions demand, vast doctrinal and theoretical shifts are possible. The development of operational art, adoption of the idea of a deep battle, and the concept of targeting an enemy as a system of systems all grew out of a period of shifting military technology and political demands.[3] While still controversial in some circles, the departure from a linear battlefield, defined by engagements along a frontline, to a conception of a deep battlefield with interlinked actions across distance and time drove much of the American military’s change in the 1980s. Concurrently, development of weapons such as the Army’s Big 5 or precision strike weapons for the Navy and Air Force made implementing the theory of deep battle or effects-based targeting possible.[4] Politically, the Goldwater-Nichols act drove doctrinal and policy reforms necessary to harness these new systems. In many ways, this process culminated in the sweeping victory of Operation Desert Storm. While some have seen Desert Storm as the opening war in a new era of history, it may be more useful to see it as the final battle in America’s last great period of military innovation.
The limits of the last innovative era are approaching. Evolutionary changes in the reach and precision of weapons continue, but more revolutionary changes in the way nations compete strain the current system’s ability to keep up. While operational art was developed to meet the increased physical reach and power of military formations, the very success of that formulation drove opponents to consider new ways of warfare.[5] While the idea of competition below the threshold of armed conflict is not new, the emergence of the so-called gray zone as a pivotal battlefield harkens back to the emergence of the deep battlefield’s rise in the development of operational art. Instead of new military hardware, it is the rise of social media, cyber warfare, and the blurring of combatants through the use of unmanned or unacknowledged forces that characterizes much of gray-zone warfare. Operational art’s development acknowledged the shift in international struggle from a linear, border-focused battle to a much larger battlefield, characterized by deep strikes and attacks on an enemy’s systems of command and control. Today’s challenge expands that struggle beyond even the confines of traditional warfare or even declared hostilities to encompass tactics such as information strikes against an opponent’s very culture and attacks on a nation’s cognition.[6]
Meeting the challenge of the gray zone and great power competition will require a return to innovation. Some of this work has already begun under the guise of integrated deterrence, but there is still far to go. As in the last great period of innovation, a wholesale reexamination of America’s way of war is needed. The culmination of the 1990s was the embrace of jointness, but the joint force, and the entire national security enterprise, must now lift its eyes to the horizon. The field of competition has expanded beyond where current conceptions of force can win the day. To meet these new challenges, America must embrace the challenge of a new innovative era, find what lies beyond Joint, and, most importantly, craft the tools we will need to get there.
Adversary-Focused, Force-Centric vs. Interest-Focused, Alignment-Centric
An adversary-focused, force-centric approach is vital to proper operational planning. It is impossible to develop a plan to defend Korea, for example, or restore access to the Persian Gulf without a clear focus on the likely adversary. This type of thinking is fundamental to good operational design, military campaign planning, and, to some extent, force design and budgetary formulation. This type of thinking generates a myriad of operational plans, base estimates, and other documents that detail how the United States will prepare for and fight its adversaries. While the nation has found long-term strategic gains elusive, the force-centric approach has proved remarkably effective at fielding a military that has dominated battlefields since the 1990s. As such, adversary focus and centrality of force are correctly at the core of joint planning and underpin much of the work at both the Defense Department and within the combatant commands.
Yet, an adversarial focus has its limits. When considering improving America’s overall security, a force-centric, deterrence-focused model may paradoxically reduce American security. The Clausewitzian conceptualization of warfare as a violent struggle between opposing parties is a valuable tool for understanding war, and by extension, the deterrence of war. The Clausewitzian analogy of a wrestling match provides the proper logical framework for force-centrism, placing primacy on gaining positional, temporal, or material advantage to win a fight, or, in the case of deterrence, showing an opponent they could either never win or only win at an unacceptable cost. Yet, this formulation reduces any third parties to either permanently uninvolved, irrelevant observers or participants eventually subsumed into one side of the equation of the other. While this may be a generally accurate view during armed conflict, applying this force-centric lens to relationships outside of open warfare may preclude a more nuanced approach.
In contrast, an interest-focused approach considers particular issues as problems to be solved. Rather than a wrestling match, the interest-based approach sees all parties as facing a problem together, such as disputed boundary lines in the South China Sea.[7] This is not to say that an interest-based approach equates to a cooperative approach. Some parties, antagonists, will be opposed to the preferred outcome of the United States. Other nations, protagonists, will be in support of the preferred outcome, but still may differ in approach or levels of interest. Interestingly, countries normally thought of as either allies or adversaries may be either protagonists or antagonists to a U.S. position, depending on the issue. The two statuses are not intrinsically linked.
Unlike the force-centric approach, using an interest-based model leads to an alignment-centric approach. The binary dichotomy of the wrestling match, so central to the effective use of force, gives way to a game of many players. In this multi-party game, the U.S. goal is to shift the environment to increasingly align other nation’s interests with the U.S. position. While force, or the threat of force, may play a role, the importance of a wider variety of techniques takes hold. Ultimately, the key to the interest-based model is acceptance that the United States and its security interests are not at the center of other nations’ decision making. Where the adversary-focused model distills struggles down to an “us vs. them” formulation, the interest-based approach leaves room to acknowledge and shape the varied interests of each party on their own merits, rather than as an eventual counterweight to deter a potentially shared adversary.
It is on this front that the Joint Concept for Competing may be most in need of improvement. The Joint Concept for Competing explicitly states that its precepts apply only to competition with nations that are potentially hostile and against whom the use of force may be envisaged, parties defined as adversaries in Joint Doctrine.[8] Yet, competition is not a binary state, nor limited to just two-party contests. Nations compete with each other in nearly all they do, from establishing trade agreements to setting immigration policy. Constraining the military’s mindset to considering only adversarial relationships in relation to competition is unhelpful and antithetical to the concept of integrated campaigning. When facing the need to either use or deter the use of force, the joint force must rightly adopt the adversary-centric approach. But, if integrated campaigning, which is to say the integration of the military instrument alongside all others, is to succeed, it must do so from an interest-centric perspective.
The Tools of Force vs. The Tools of Interest
As previously noted, when facing conflict, adversary-centrism works. While varying approaches are available, from center-of-gravity tactics to the never-ending search for the decisive point, an adversary-centered mindset is the foundational intellectual framework behind military success on the battlefield. At its core, adversary-centrism hones tactical logic, or the logic one uses to develop plans that gain decisive positional, material, or temporal advantage for the use of force on an enemy.
It is important to note that the term tactical, often used somewhat pejoratively in certain circles, does not imply a lower or less difficult form of intellectual endeavor. The use of tactical logic at the theater scale, such as War Plan Orange or Desert Storm, requires massive skill and military genius. Indeed, some have referred to the practice used to develop plans at this scale with terms such as military strategy or operations to delineate them from “simple tactics.”[9] Clearly, the practice of tactical logic at the theater or global scale is the province of only the most experienced, educated practitioners. While orders of magnitude more difficult and broader in scale than small unit tactics, however, the core logic behind these massive operations is not different. Each plan, fundamentally, sought to defeat an adversary through gaining positional, material, or temporal advantage.
