Reyes Cole
Introduction
Military leaders received a post-holiday gift on January 19th of 2019, in the unveiling of the new National Defense Strategy (NDS). The document is exactly what the services have waited for since the fall of the Soviet Block: designated high-end threats. Threats on which the services can effectively focus their efforts in capability development and prioritize service funding. Per the NDS Summary the central challenge to U.S. prosperity and security is “strategic competition.”[1] Revisionist powers and peer threats such as China and Russia seek regional hegemony. Rogue regimes and near-peer threats like Iran and North Korea continue to create regional instability. And lastly, threats from designated Violent Extremist Organizations (VEOs) will persist. However, the services seem to be focusing less on competition, in lieu of focusing energies into traditional warfare scenarios and capabilities.
The belief that peer/near-peer/VEO competitors and adversaries will only fight us via traditional warfare, man to man, tank to tank, ship to ship, and plane to plane, are missing the historical and present day reality that these designated threats are currently competing and prevailing over us via Irregular Warfare (IW) activities in the competition space, and doing so quite successfully. Additionally, those same threats have had a long history of effectively using IW to achieve their strategic goals. Many of the IW skills developed during Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, are the same skills needed in irregular activities needed in great power competition. If this is all true, it begs the question; why are the services retreating from IW and its lessons learned in favor of its preferred method, traditional warfare.