Nov. 9, 2020
Anticipating the Human Costs of Great Power Conflict
As bipartisan calls to “end endless war” intensify, the U.S. military has already turned to its next challenge: great power conflict. Over the last few years, U.S. defense policy has undergone a formal reorientation away from counterinsurgency and counterterrorism and toward great power competition with countries like China and Russia. The Obama administration’s 2015 National Military Strategy focused on deterring, denying, and defeating State adversaries, while the Trump administration’s 2018 National Defense Strategy identifies China and Russia as the main priorities for the Department of Defense (DOD) because of the “magnitude of the threats they pose to U.S. security and prosperity today, and the potential for those threats to increase in the future.” This pivot has already resulted in concrete changes to DOD planning, training, budget requests, and overall strategic philosophy, with even more significant changes anticipated as each branch of the military continues to refine their warfighting concepts with an eye towards great power conflict. The 2017 update to Army Field Manual 3-0 (FM 3-0), for example, focuses almost entirely on deterring and defeating a major adversary, predicting a war “more chaotic, intense, and highly destructive than those the Army has experienced in the past several decades.”