Report: The U.S. Is Not Ready for a War with Russia or China

Zachary Keck

Security,

And the reasons seem obvious.

The United States military has been preparing for the wrong conflicts with China and Russia, according to a new report by an influential think tank.

The report, entitled “Force Planning for the Era of Great Power Competition,” was published earlier this month by the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA), which I have previously called a “think tank’s think tank.” Its main conclusion is that while the U.S. military has focused on preparing for high-end conventional conflicts like the First Gulf War, China and Russia have been crafting strategies to achieve their ends without fighting those wars.

Beijing, for instance, has pursued an “Informationized Warfare” strategy where the “primary target” is an adversary’s political decisionmakers. Moscow’s New Generation Warfare similarly “uses propaganda, proxy and paramilitary troops, and material support to create pro-Russian movements in its near abroad.” Both approaches are similar in that their primary objective is not destroying an adversary’s armed forces, the traditional focus of Western military strategy. Relatedly, both strategies rely on using peacetime actions to achieve their strategic ends.

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As the report puts it: “Informationized Warfare and New Generation Warfare combine nonmilitary diplomatic, information, and economic actions with low-intensity gray zone military operations supported by high-end military capabilities to gain influence and territory without having to escalate to a major conflict.” The last part is especially crucial: both China and Russia have put their faith in Sun Tsu’s maxim that “the supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.”

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