Steven Metz
The U.S. military doesn’t spend much time thinking about how America could lose a war. Neither do America’s political leaders and security experts. Whether described in operational plans, strategic wargames or even fiction, the pattern mirrors the Civil War or World War II: Things are hairy at first and defeat even seems possible since an aggressor struck first, but then the United States gets serious, turns the tide and fights its way to victory. In the collective American memory, armed conflicts that have not followed this script—Vietnam, Korea—are largely forgotten or attributed to political ineptitude. Victory is still considered the norm.
While optimism is a laudable characteristic, it can be dangerous if not tempered by cold realism. The United States should plan and hope for victory in war but also needs to think about how it could be defeated. After all, America’s potential adversaries are certainly doing so.
Of course, predicting specific events in the future security environment is impossible. There is simply too much complexity and too much uncertainty in human decisions, particularly when something as important as armed conflict is under consideration. Nearly every war in history surprised political leaders, experts, planners and prognosticators. Nonetheless, thinking about future war is important since it provides at least a chance to prevent or limit it. It is both the bane of strategists and an obligation.
For American planners, current trends suggest at least six feasible scenarios that could lead to a U.S. defeat in war. I will sketch three of them here, and the other three next week.
The first possible option for a future U.S. adversary might be to drag a war out. Today the United States is the master of short, intense wars when it can bring its superior military training, preparation, deployability, logistics, intelligence and technology to bear. Long wars might be a different matter. From the Viet Cong to the Taliban, insurgents have tried, with mixed success, to hang on until American patience erodes, but someday a conventional enemy might try the same thing. In major wars of the past, the United States was able to expand its military and, importantly, its war production, allowing it to grow stronger as the war progressed.
It is not clear that this would happen in a future war. Unlike at the beginning of the Civil War, World War I or World War II, the United States has little excess industrial capacity today. The U.S. military depends on foreign suppliers, often China, for key electronic items like integrated circuits and transistors. This means that that the United States might not be able to expand or even replenish its stockpile of sophisticated weapons. If the U.S. military ran out of them while a conventional war was underway, political leaders would have to choose between fighting on knowing that without its high-tech advantage, the U.S. military might suffer greater casualties, or negotiating peace from a position of relative weakness. While this might not be an outright military defeat, it would be a political one.
While optimism is a laudable characteristic, it can be dangerous if not tempered by cold realism.
A second scenario for a U.S. defeat might be called “grab and dig in.” An adversary would launch a surprise attack, seize territory and then hope that the United States will decide that the cost of rolling back the invasion is too great. This is what Japan did at the beginning of World War II. It didn’t work then because Americans were incensed by the attack on Pearl Harbor and felt that they could reverse the Japanese gains at a reasonable cost. The island battles in the Pacific were horrible, yet tolerable for an angry nation.
But what if a future invader had nuclear weapons? Imagine territorial aggression by China, Russia, North Korea or a nuclear-armed Iran. Any of these potential adversaries would put their vital national interests at stake in a conflict, while the United States might not. A threat to use nuclear weapons by such hypothetical aggressors would be credible. American policymakers then would have to decide whether it was better to risk a nuclear exchange or simply accept a land grab such as a Chinese annexation of Taiwan, a North Korean occupation of part of South Korea, a Russian seizure of a Baltic state, an Iranian takeover of Shiite-majority territory in Iraq, or something similar. Put differently, if a nuclear-armed adversary avoided the mistake made by the Japanese in 1941 and did not directly attack the United States, chances are that American policymakers would grudgingly tolerate its aggression.
A third scenario might be an American loss in what security experts call the “gray zone”—the “no-man’s-land between peace and war, reflecting the sort of aggressive, persistent, determined campaigns characteristic of warfare but without the overt use of military force.” Used by revisionist powers like China and Russia, gray zone aggression is an effort to alter the strategic balance without reaching a level of intensity where the United States would use its massive military power. Think Russia’s annexation of Crimea and backing of separatist groups in eastern Ukraine, or China’s assertive claims in the South China Sea, including building military installations on coral reefs and other outcroppings. In this type of conflict, the United States might find that it had lost a war without firing a shot. It would be hard to mobilize congressional and public support in the face of an adversarial fait accompli, particularly if the aggressor was able to gin up local support.
These potential scenarios are not far-fetched. Based on current conditions and trends, they are at least feasible. Next week, I’ll look at three other potential scenarios for how the United States could lose a war, and offer some suggestions on how it might avoid them.
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