The Pentagon Is Preparing To Fight The Wrong War

David Axe, Daily Beast: This Is What War Looks Like in 2029

America has the most military hardware of any country—but experts say the nature of war is shifting underground and online, and the U.S. may struggle to keep up.

The U.S. House of Representatives on Dec. 11 passed its version of the 2020 National Defense Authorization Act, clearing the way for the U.S. Senate to approve the measure. If President Donald Trump signs the bill, it will channel a staggering $740 billion into the Pentagon’s accounts.

That’s by far the biggest military budget of any country. The United States lavishes on its armed forces more than twice as much as No. 2 spender China does, and more than 10 times what No. 6 Russia does.

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WNU Editor: This is one of those must reads.

A Discussion On The Future of Nuclear Weapons And The Next Great War

A static display of intercontinental ballistic missiles at the F.E. Warren Air Force Base, Wyo., front gate the evening of April 4, 2012. From left are the Peacekeeper, the Minuteman III and the Minuteman I. The planet Venus is visible in the sky above the Minuteman missiles and Jupiter is visible to the left of the Minuteman I. (U.S. Air Force photo by R.J. Oriez)

Bloomberg: The Future of Nuclear Weapons and the Next Great War

A Q&A with Elbridge Colby about how the U.S. prepares for the global conflicts of 2070 and beyond.

I spend a great deal of my life thinking about nuclear weapons. You can imagine I'm murder at a cocktail party. As the Cold War faded, and the possibility of a nuclear holocaust with it, people like me were considered yesterday’s news. Now, as the world enters a renewed era of great-power competition, I like to think we were simply prescient.

If so, there was a whole lot of prescience on display at the Council on Foreign Relations last month at an event aptly titled “Do Nuclear Weapons Matter?” It featured a lively and intelligent debate between Nina Tannenwald of Brown University and Elbridge Colby, director of the defense program at the Center for a New American Security. She took the “no” side and he took the “yes.” While I like to maintain a journalistic objectivity, there may be a clue to my bias in that I decided to interview him.

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WNU Editor: I am one of those who always finds it hard to believe that people are actually thinking of wars 50 years from now and beyond.

What Will War Look Like In The Fourth Industrial Revolution

David Barno and Nora Bensahel, War Is Boring: War in the Fourth Industrial Revolution

Retiring Chinese general He Lei recently made news by suggesting that China’s greatest military weakness compared to the United States was that it has never fought a real war. He noted none of Beijing’s increasingly advanced weapons, jets, and ships have been tested in combat. Moreover, the large People’s Liberation Army continues to rely upon conscripts rather than the long-serving professionals in the U.S. military. He argued the Chinese military “will be ridden with doubts until they get into a real fight.”

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WNU Editor: Bottom line .... wars in the future will be different than how we fight wars today. This is a good summary on what is coming down the "pipeline".

Are We Going To War Against Iran?

Jonah Shepp, NYMag: Are We Going to War With Iran?

When U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley on Thursday presented what she claimed was irrefutable evidence that Iran had supplied a missile launched at the Saudi Arabian capital by Houthi rebels in Yemen last month, it was hard not to recall the last time an American diplomat stood before the U.N. with evidence that a rogue Middle Eastern state was engaged in proliferation of dangerous weapons.

As it turned out, then-Secretary of State Colin Powell’s 2003 speech explaining the Bush administration’s rationale for going to war with Iraq was based on lies and fabrications, and of course, Iran says Haley’s evidence is fabricated as well. Iran’s proxy relationship with the Houthis is well-known, but the U.N. itself is not as sure as the U.S. seems to be that the two short-range ballistic missiles fired by the Houthis were Iranian-made, while some experts suspect Saudi Arabia of overstating Iran’s meddling in Yemen, the better to justify its own.

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Update #1: Iranian missiles fired at Saudi Arabia: how US can respond (Stephen Bryen, Asia Times)
Update #2: Why Saudi Arabia cannot go to war with Iran (Maysam Behravesh, Middle East Eye).

WNU Editor: The question on "are we going to war with Iran?" is moot .... Iran is already involved in a number of wars in the Middle East either directly or through proxies. Its support for extremist groups that have attacked U.S. targets has been extensively documented, and its rhetoric makes it very clear that from the Iranian point of view (a view that has been persistent since the revolution) they are in a life and death struggle with the U.S.

As for the U.S. .... its support for those who are fighting against Iran has also been well documented. The questions that remain unanswered are the following .... with the war against the Islamic State now dying down, will the U.S. now focus on Iran and stopping its goal of establishing a "Shiite crescent" from Iran to the Mediterranean Sea, and if so .... how will they do it and with whom. And if this does happen .... what will be the Iranian response?

Here Are 10 Horrifying Future Wars That We May Live To See

List Verse: 10 Horrifying Future Wars We Will Live To See

War is one of humanity’s constants. No matter how enlightened we become or how much our technology changes, we’ll still spend our time killing one another. As such, it is inevitable that today’s younger generation will experience war. The only question is when.

These 10 examples of war could well blow up within the next few years. Some are regional, some are global. Some are small, some are big. The only constant is how horrifying these conflicts could potentially be.

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WNU Editor: I could add a few more possible wars and conflicts to this list.

If The "Thucydides Trap" Is Real, Is A U.S. - China War Inevitable?

David Ignatius, RCW/Washington Post: Is War Between a Rising China and a Dominant America Inevitable?

WASHINGTON -- Let's imagine a Chinese "applied history" project, similar to the one at Harvard's Belfer Center that helped spawn Professor Graham Allison's widely discussed book "Destined for War."

Allison's historical analysis led him to posit a "Thucydides Trap" and the danger (if not inevitability) of war between a rising China and a dominant America, like the ancient conflict between Athens and Sparta chronicled by the Greek historian Thucydides. A study by the Belfer Center's Applied History Project identified 16 similar "rising versus ruling" cases over the past 500 years, 12 of which resulted in war. What would the Chinese say about the lessons of past interactions with the West?

Chinese analysts, from President Xi Jinping on down, have nominally rejected Allison's pessimistic analysis. "There is no Thucydides Trap," Xi has argued, claiming that he had devised an alternative "new type of great-power relations" that would avoid war by recognizing that each Asian giant had its own legitimate interests. More recently, he has shifted to arguing that "China and the U.S. must do everything possible to avoid [the] Thucydides Trap."

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Update #1: Why the White House Is Reading Greek History: The Trump team is obsessing over Thucydides, the ancient historian who wrote a seminal tract on war. (Michael Crowley, Politico).
Update #2: The White House, Wonder Woman and What to Know About Thucydides (Olivia B. Waxman, Time)
Update #3: Can an Ancient Greek Win America's Wars? A Q&A with Fred and Kimberly Kagan on the hottest book in the Trump inner circle: Thucydides' "History of the Peloponnesian War." (Tobin Harshaw, Bloomberg)

WNU Editor: The link to Harvard's Thucydides Project is here .... Thucydides's Trap (Belfer Center). If you want to download a free ebook copy of Thucydides' book " The History Of The Poloponnesian War", you can go here and click on the bottom "Download Free PDF".

Will The Defeat Of The Islamic State Result In More Wars?

Liz Sly, Washington Post: 10 new wars that could be unleashed as a result of the one against ISIS

The borders of the Islamic State's "caliphate" are shrinking fast. The group’s strongholds in Iraq and Syria are collapsing one by one. The U.S.-led war has reached a point where questions are being raised about what comes next.

So far, the answer seems likely to be: more war.

That’s partly because the U.S. strategy for defeating the Islamic State relies on a variety of regional allies and local armed groups who are often bitterly at odds. Though all of them regard the Islamic State as an enemy, most of them regard one another as enemies, too. As they conquer territory from the militants, they are staking out claims to the captured lands in ways that risk bringing them into conflict with others who are also seizing territory. New wars are brewing, for control of the post-Islamic State order.

Here is a list of 10 of them, in no particular order. There are doubtless more. Some have already started. Others may never happen. But any one of them could increase the Islamic State’s chances of survival, perpetuating the conditions that enabled the group to thrive — and perhaps entangling the United States in the region for many years to come.

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WNU Editor: There were wars in the Middle East before the Islamic State .... there will be wars after the Islamic State.

How Our Dependence On Technology Can Start World War III

Nick Bilton, Vanity Fair: Are We At The Start Of A Tech World War?

It’s a battle unlike any we’ve ever seen before.

During this past year, various theories have been posited to suggest that our current political mood might foretell a reckoning so dark that it could eventually spiral into a veritable international crisis—some terrifying World War III doomsday scenario. Some of these hypotheses have been undeniably hysterical, for sure. But others have been remarkably, even eerily, sober. And now, with a world on edge, they have gone mainstream.

In the weeks preceding the Brexit vote, outgoing prime minister David Cameron admonished listeners that the United Kingdom’s divorce from the European Union could cause instability in the region that might indeed lead to a significant geopolitical conflict. Various members of the media echoed this sentiment, and offered up a theory that other countries might subsequently exit the E.U. (Sweden, Holland, Hungary, and Greece are on the short list to try to walk first), potentially setting off a battle of influence between Russia and the United States, a Cold War 2.0.

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WNU Editor: I am sceptical on many of the authors assertions in this post .... and conclusions. But he is raising a valid point .... technology has completely changed our world ... for better and worse.

The Rise Of 'Gray-Zone' Wars And How Some Future Conflicts Will Not Be Decided On The Battlefield

Protests in Egypt. Photo from Bikyamasr

Peter Pomerantsev, The Atlantic: Brave New War

A new form of conflict emerged in 2015—from the Islamic State to the South China Sea.

From China in Asia to Russia in Europe and the Middle East, and ISIS just about everywhere, 2015 has seen the flourishing of conflicts that exist in a gray zone, one which is not quite open war but more than regular competition, which is attuned to globalization, which liberal democracies are ill-equipped to deal with, and which may well be the way power is exercised and conflict conducted in the foreseeable future.

Described by scholars as “hybrid,” “full-spectrum,” “non-linear,” “next-generation,” or “ambiguous”—the variations in the description indicate the slipperiness of the subject—these conflicts mix psychological, media, economic, cyber, and military operations without requiring a declaration of war.

WNU Editor: I disagree with Peter Pomerantsev's use of Ukraine in explaining his analysis .... Russia may not have helped the situation, but the Ukrainians did more than enough to mess up their country independent from Moscow. But having said that .... it is true .... some of the conflicts around the world involves the manipulation of legal understandings, media/communications, and psychology .... and China is doing it masterly in the South China Sea. The Islamic State is also a master of this .... and their weapon platform of choice is social media.

A Look Ahead At The Future Of War

Peter Singer, Defense One: 2016 Predictions: A Look Ahead at the Future of War

New America polled former Navy SEALs, Pentagon officials, technologists, historians — and here’s what they expect

Imagine you had a time machine that could take you back to compare what people thought would happen in 2015 with what actually did occur.

Some of the events of the last year, like the Syrian rebel training programs falling apart, were utterly predictable. Others were deeply surprising; the scale of the OPM breach left U.S. cybersecurity experts, and also likely the attackers themselves, agape at the massive harvest of data. Still other events, such as Russia’s doubling down in Syria, were in fact predictable, yet surprising to too many. And, finally, other events, like the formal admission of women into combat roles, were not merely predictable, but belated.

WNU Editor: A collection of opinions from "The Experts".

A Look At The Future Of Land Warfare

(Click on Image to Enlarge)

Michael O'Hanlon, Brookings: 'The Future of Land Warfare'

In my new book, "The Future of Land Warfare" (Brookings Institution Press, 2015), I attempt to debunk the new conventional wisdom (which began with the Obama administration but also permeates thinking beyond): Messy ground operations can be relegated to the dustbin of history. That is a paraphrase and dramatization, to be sure—but only a modest one, since the administration’s 2012 and 2014 defense plans both state that the U.S. Army will no longer size its main combat forces with large-scale counterinsurgency and stabilization missions in mind.

This is, I believe, a major conceptual mistake, even if not yet one that has decimated the Army. But it will cause increasing harm with time if we buy into the idea. The active-duty Army is already below its Clinton-era size and only slightly more than half its Reagan-era size. Reductions to the Army Reserve and Army National Guard have been almost as steep. None need grow at this juncture, but the cuts should stop.

WNU Editor: What I find interesting about this report are "possible future scenarios". The Korean war scenario with Chinese involvement predicts the involvement of 400,000 U.S. soldiers .... hmmmm .... I do not think so. A war with China will involve the entire U.S. military .... and if it escalates .... conscription and the probable use of nuclear weapons.

How Robots Are Becoming Weapons For Terrorists

Marc Goodman, Defense One: How Terrorists Are Turning Robots Into Weapons

Terrorists and college kids already have hacked into government drones. It's time to rethink security with the rise of robotics.

In late 2009, as the war raged on in the Middle East, U.S. Predator drones flew nearly constantly above the skies of Iraq.

Their missions varied from intelligence collection to “kinetic operations against high value targets” such as launching Hellfire missiles against insurgents. The drone pilots remotely carrying out these operations seven thousand miles away in the Nevada desert intently watched live video feeds of their targets as they navigated their UAVs in pursuit of their quarry. As it turns out, they weren’t the only ones watching.

Shia militants had figured out a way to hack the American flying robotic fleet and capture its live video feeds. Using a $26 piece of Russian hacker software known as SkyGrabber, commonly sold in the digital underground to steal satellite television signals, the insurgents were able to intercept the video footage emanating from the classified Predator drones. Thus as the Americans were watching the insurgents, the insurgents were watching back, providing them with a tactical advantage and vital intelligence on coalition targets. If the militants saw their house coming into close video focus, they knew it was definitely time to rapidly consider alternative housing options.

WNU Editor:The information is all out there .... terrorists or criminals .... if they take the time learn these things (which they are) .... they will adapt and end up using the same tools against us.

Will Asia Spark A Third World War?

Will Asia Repeat Europe's Mistakes? -- Alistair Burnett, Real Clear World

Historical analogies often take the place of analysis - even more so when the implications of analogy are too horrendous to be spelled out. As we prepare to mark the centenary of the outbreak of First World War, ominous parallels are being drawn between rising tension between Japan and China and that between Germany and Britain before the outbreak of the World War. Such comparisons are relevant. China and the United States and its ally, Japan, today may not be the mirror image of European powers which came to blows, but the cascading alliances that led to the conflagration in 1914 still hold lessons for today.

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My Comment: Asia is not Europe .... far from it. Asia and it's history is unique .... and one should look at the tensions in the region from this perspective and not from a European one. As to the possibility of a future World War starting in Asia .... I just do not see it. But as to the possibility of a regional conflict .... unfortunately .... between countries like China and Japan, or China and India .... the possibility may be very remote but .... it is still a possibility.

China And Argentina Are Pursuing Oil Policies That Could Provoke War

A China National Offshore Oil Corporation oil rig in the Bohai sea. Photograph: Reuters

The Coming Oil Wars -- Jed Babbin, American Spectator

China turns on the spigot on Obama's pivot.

Accidental wars only happen in the movies. What’s happening now in the East China Sea is a calculated Chinese provocation that could lead to war. At the same time, the Argentine-engineered crisis in the waters off the Falkland Islands is just as dangerous because Argentina may be more reckless than it was when Margaret Thatcher defeated it and Britain is so much weaker. It is of such events that wars can be made.

War for oil isn’t new. When Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941, its principal grievance was the American decision to cut off most of its oil supply.

On November 23, China declared a new “air defense identification zone” that extends to the north close to South Korea, to the south within miles of Taiwan, and to the east to encompass the Senkaku Islands, a short chain of uninhabitable islands off southern Japan that the Japanese have claimed ownership of since 1895.

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My Comment: The pursuit of oil may be a factor for both Argentina and China in what they have done .... but it is really internal politics that are in play in both countries.

Will The U.S. Military Be Tempted To Use Child Soldiers In The Not So Distant Future?

Ender’s Game: A Fictional Future That The US Military Is Terrifyingly Close To Realizing -- Extreme Tech

[This story containers spoilers. If you haven't read the book Ender's Game, or you're saving yourself for the movie, you should probably leave this page now.]

In his book Ender’s Game, Orson Scott Card envisioned a not-so-distant future where intergalactic war is waged and won by child soldiers. Unlike today’s idea of child soldiers, though, where military regimes equip children with rifles and send them off to war to kill and be killed, in Ender’s Game the battles occur inside a simulator, where no physical harm can befall the kid. It doesn’t take a genius to see the parallels between this, and the US military’s move towards UAVs and combat robots that are controlled by soldiers who are hundreds or thousands of miles away from the battlefront.

These American soldiers, though, are adult; adults with free will, ethics, and the ability to critically question whether it’s right to blow up an enemy combatant with a Hellfire missile. Wouldn’t it be so much more efficient, though, if the US military instead used children to control its killer arsenal of unmanned drones and robots? Not only are children faster, but more importantly they’re not lumbered down by morals, critical thinking, and other pesky adult mental processes. If you tell a child to do something, perhaps under physical or psychological duress if you need to ensure compliance, they will do it. Or, if you’re of the sappy persuasion, the US military could just take a leaf out of Ender’s Game and trick the children into thinking that they’re playing a game instead of fighting a real war.

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My Comment: Some hard questions are being asked in this essay .... and it is true .... as armies become more robotized and dependent on drones .... should children (who are masters at using this tech) be the ones at the switch.

How Warfare Has Been Revolutionized By Cyberwarfare And Drones

Network defender at the US Air Force Space Command Network Operations & Security Center. Photo: Rick Wilking/Reuters

How Cyberwarfare and Drones Have Revolutionized Warfare -- Tim Hsia and Jared Sperli, New York Times

Since World War II there have been many advances in military weaponry, communications and technology. In early May 1942, naval forces from Imperial Japan and the allied forces of Australia and the United States fought in the Battle of the Coral Sea. That engagement was the first battle in which naval ships did not shoot upon or even see the opposing force. Aircraft carriers directly engaged one another using aircraft, with their long-distance reach, as their sole offensive weaponry. This new type of warfare, the carrier versus carrier, was an inevitable escalation of the air, radio and radar technology of the day. It was viewed as a revolution in military affairs.

There is a tendency within military circles to call a particular advancement in technology a “revolution.” That was the case when former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld trumpeted technological advances as enabling the United States to wage war in Afghanistan and Iraq without significant numbers of troops. More often than not, an advancement in technology ends up only incrementally changing how war is fought.

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My Comment: It should be noted that while the focus now may be on drones and cyberwarfare .... one can only imagine what other new developments are in the pipeline .... and how they may make today's drones and cyberwarfare as obsolete as old battleships and crossbows.

Pentagon: Future Wars Will be Dictated By The 'Human Domain'

Generals: ‘Human Domain’ Will Dictate Future Wars -- DoD Buzz

The leaders of the Army, Marine Corps and Special Operations Forces have offered their response to the Air Force and Navy’s Air-Sea Battle with an exclusive task force of their own: Strategic Landpower.

Army Chief of Staff Gen. Raymond Odierno, Marine Corps Commandant Gen. James Amos and Adm. William McRaven, head of U.S. Special Operations forces, each signed a white paper released May 13 that outlines their plans to ensure the nation’s investment in its land warfare forces doesn’t waver in the face of budget cuts and a national defense strategy that emphasizes the Pacific.

Odierno, Amos and McRaven have listened to their sister service leaders explain to Congress how Air-Sea Battle is the right operating concept to respond to emerging threats in the Asia-Pacific region. The three have similarly watched as the Air Force and the Navy have seen more modernization programs survive under recent budget pressures.

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My Comment: This is the Army/Marine Corps/and Special Operations Forces response to the Air Force and Navy’s Air-Sea Battle. What's my take .... the Army/Marine Corps/and Special Operations Forces are trying to justify their budgets .... and trying to prevent future cuts.

Will The Next World War Start In Asia?

Map of the disputed Diaoyu/Senkaku islands

The Dangerous Drift Towards World War In Asia -- Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, The Telegraph

At ground zero in Hiroshima the inscription for victims of the world's first Atomic bomb is a pledge. We will never again repeat the evil of war.

The Japanese original is vague on who "we" is, but the English translation tactfully refers to mankind as a whole.

Families come from all over Japan in a pilgrimage to visit the peace shrine. They look through the Cenotaph to the "A-Dome", the old Industrial Promotion Hall. This six-story building that was directly below the blast, 600 metres above, and for that reason survived as a gaunt half-wrecked structure when almost everything else was flattened instantly for a radius of two kilometres.

They walk through the museum in total silence learning the details of what happened on August 1945, and the gruesome aftermath. The learn about the 2000 degree heat shock that lasted three seconds and incinerated anybody in the epicentre instantly, but left those in the suburbs to die more slowly with burnt skin hanging from their bodies.

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My Comment: It is hard to believe that in the 21rst century the possibility of a global conflict is being discussed .... but it is being discussed. The three spots in the world that I am always worried about are Middle East, India-Pakistan, and Northeast Asia. In this commentary Ambrose Evans-Pritchard makes a case for why we should be concerned about Northeast Asia.

Are We Entering A Period Of Non-Stop Global Generational Conflict?

Coalition force members prepare to conduct village stability operations in Khak-E-Safed, Farah province, Afghanistan, Oct. 20, 2012. Afghan National Security Forces have been taking the lead in security operations, with coalition forces as mentors, to bring security and stability to the people of the Islamic Republic of Afghanistan. U.S. Army photo by Sgt. Pete Thibodeau

West Sleepwalking Into Endless War- Important New Study -- The Guardian

• wake-up call from former soldier
• distinction between war and peace dangerously blurred
• lessons from Afghanistan
• warning, too, from Tory MP

First it was Iraq, then Afghanistan. Who is next? Britain and other liberal democracies face the prospect of sleepwalking into endless conflicts as the traditional distinctions between war and peace get blurred.

This is the stark warning of an important and thought-provoking study of recent military operations. War from the Ground Up, Twenty-First-Century Combat as Politics, by a Gurkha infantry officer with experience of three tours in Afghanistan, should be read by all aspiring military commanders and their Whitehall masters.

War used to be clearly defined – brutal, decisive, and finite, said Carl von Clausewitz, the great Prussian military thinker still essential reading at British military academies.

Now, we have the War on Terror, and the Long War as tribal and ethnic conflict is often described.

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My Comment: So much for the dream of a "new world order".

Why The U.S. Military Can't Predict The Next War

Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta and Army Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, conduct a press conference in the Pentagon press briefing room, May 10, 2012. DOD photo by Glenn Fawcett

100% Right 0% Of The Time -- Micah Zenko, Foreign Policy

Why the U.S. military can't predict the next war.

Two weeks ago, General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, delivered the Landon Lecture to hundreds of U.S. servicemembers and students at Kansas State University. During the question and answer session, a cadet in the Air Force ROTC asked, "What [do] you see being the focus of our nation in 5 to 10 years, where I'll be serving?"

Paraphrasing a quote by hockey legend Wayne Gretzky, Dempsey replied: "Somebody said to him once, you're not really a physically imposing guy, how come you're such a great hockey player? He said, 'I skate to where the puck is going to be, not to where it's been.' That's what we're trying to do."

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My Comment: I like the Russian mindset on predicting future conflicts .... expect and prepare for the worse, be happy and surprised when it is not.