The Last Warrior

by Andrew F. Krepinevich

  The notion that targeted strategy and policy choices could dissuade other prospective adversaries from competing militarily with the United States was not, of course, anything new under the sun. At the heart of Marshall’s 2001 strategy review was the idea of maintaining US military preeminence in order to achieve a long peace. But the underlying notion of shaping the security environment so as to dissuade prospective competitors from mounting major military challenges to the United States went back much further. The 2001 QDR’s strategy goal of dissuading military competitions can be traced back to Weinberger’s adoption of competitive strategies in the mid-1980s, which in turn had its origins in Marshall’s 1972 RAND paper on a long-term competition framework for competing with the USSR. The leaking of the February 1992 draft DPG had clearly created controversy over the proposed strategy of trying to dissuade potential adversaries from trying to compete with the US military. While the strategy was sound, the image of the United States as the world’s policeman generated strident political opposition.

  While the controversy surrounding the 1992 DPG swirled, Marshall, as usual, was looking further ahead than most everyone else. The lure of China as a vast untapped market led many in the United States, both during the 1990s and the early 2000s, to dismiss the possibility of the PRC emerging as major military competitor to the United States even within East Asia. Marshall’s inclination, by contrast, has been to concentrate on what the Chinese were actually thinking and doing, ignoring the “popular wisdom” of the time. His focus was on data—on empirical research into China’s long-term goals, strategic culture, history, and the evolving military capabilities of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA).

  To him, the starting point for any coherent long-term strategy for dealing with China’s rise was, as Aaron Friedberg put it in 2000, to “see the situation plain—namely, that in several important respects a US-PRC strategic competition is already underway.”27 It would be going too far to claim that ONA’s research has determined the United States’ strategy toward the PRC. Yet, on the surface at least it has undoubtedly helped to frame the context of US strategy toward China in much the same way that ONA’s MTR paper framed the debate over the military revolution. In the late 1990s ONA was one of the first offices in the US government to warn of Chinese efforts to begin fielding A2/AD capabilities aimed at limiting the ability of US forces to project power into the Asia-Pacific region, long considered an area of vital interest to America’s security. In 2002 Marshall stated in a memo to Secretary Rumsfeld that US defense strategy required “some redirection of attention within DoD towards Asia.”28 In the same memo he recommended that the military services be directed “to plan for the types of military challenges a malevolent China may pose over the long-term, and incorporate these into service and joint war games, training and exercise programs, including routine wide-area USN-USAF [Navy-Air Force]-special forces exercises.”29

  Since then the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission has published a series of annual reports on the national security implications of China’s rise, including the PLA’s “area control” strategy in the western Pacific.30 Eventually, in 2012, President Barack Obama directed a rebalancing of the United States’ posture toward the Asia-Pacific region. If nothing else, this rebalancing suggests that, as with the MTR, Marshall once again managed to peer further into the future than most others in the US government.

  The net assessments that Marshall’s office has produced since the early 1970s remain classified except for the 1978 European and 1992 MTR assessments. However, since the Cold War ended much of ONA’s outside research on Chinese economic development and strategic culture, the maturation of precision strike, and the proliferation of nuclear weapons has been unclassified. ONA’s research in these and other areas provides a window into Marshall’s thinking about various military competitions since 2000.

  One of ONA’s most fruitful areas of research during the Cold War was the long-term effort of John Battilega’s Foreign Systems Research Center to translate and understand the Soviet literature on operations research. Over time this line of research produced systematic insights into Soviet military strategy, doctrine, planning, and technical calculations by revealing just how different Soviet assessments of the USSR’s competition with the United States were from US and NATO assessments.31 Once the Cold War ended, Marshall directed Battilega to reorient his research center to focus on China and continued to fund research into China’s strategic culture by other scholars such as Michael Pillsbury.

  There was every reason for Marshall to expect that Chinese modes of thought would be even more alien to American ways of thinking than the Soviet leadership’s had been, and that some insights into the thinking of China’s political and military leaders could be gleaned from surveying open source writings. Pillsbury’s work on China, which Marshall had encouraged and supported since the early 1970s, illustrates both points. In 1995 the PLA’s Academy of Military Science (the equivalent of DoD’s National Defense University) hosted a delegation from the Atlantic Council in Beijing.* Pillsbury, who was then a fellow at the Council, returned with one hundred-odd Chinese books and professional military journals.32 While he was told that PLA officers could not publish on current military issues for security reasons, they were free to write about the future of war. The eventual result was the 1998 Chinese Views of Future Warfare, which contained Pillsbury’s summaries and translations of a selection of the PLA writings on war’s future that he had acquired in 1995.

  Chinese Views contains articles on the RMA, two of which approvingly cite the ONA director concerning future warfare.33 As Major General Wang Pufeng wrote, “Andrew Marshall of the Pentagon believes the information era will touch off a revolution in military affairs, just as the cannon in the 15th century and the machine in the past 150 years of the industrial era touched off revolutions.”34 Wang concluded that for the PLA, figuring out how to “adapt to and achieve victory in . . . information warfare,” which China would face from now on, “is an important question” that its military would “need to study carefully.”35

  The evidence is now convincing that the PLA has since studied this question intensely and drawn its own conclusions. Chinese military theorists have concluded that “informationalized” war is a new type of war, dominated by “informationized” forces.36 As a result China’s rulers have firmly committed the country to building an “informationized military”—one that can dominate local wars under “high-tech conditions” by having more and better information than the opponent, even against an opponent such as the United States that is stronger in most other respects.37 Significantly the Chinese have not only been developing a comprehensive theory of informationized warfare, but the PLA’s General Staff Department has recently made organizational changes to reflect this theory.38

  Marshall and Krepinevich, of course, had concluded in the early 1990s that the information dimension of warfare might become increasingly central to combat outcomes. If it did, then establishing information superiority over one’s opponent would become a major focus of the operational art. But in making this point in 1993 Marshall’s intended audience was the US military, not China’s. Pillsbury’s research, however, made it clear that the PLA had adopted Marshall’s definition of the current RMA. In a sequel to his 1998 volume on Chinese views of future war, Pillsbury noted that Wang Zhenxi, a senior adviser to the China Institute of International Strategic Studies, used the same definition of the RMA as had ONA’s MTR assessment.39

  The fact that the Chinese have embraced Marshall’s definition of the RMA does not mean that Chinese views on informationized operations are a mirror image of US views on cyber and information operations. To the contrary, Chinese writings about informationized war in the early twenty-first century are couched in the idioms and framework of statecraft from the Warring States period (475–221 BC) in China’s ancient history.40 The lessons the Chinese military have drawn from this period include accumulating comprehensive national power while avoid
ing destruction at the hands of a predatory hegemon and, should war become unavoidable, winning before the first battle by exploiting superiority in selected areas such as information superiority.

  The differences between Chinese and US modes of military thought and strategic culture go even deeper than seeing the lessons of the Warring States period as being applicable to China’s situation today vis-à-vis the United States. Marshall has been particularly impressed by François Jullien’s analysis of Chinese thought and strategy. On the former Jullien writes, “Chinese thought . . . never constructed a world of ideal forms, archetypes, or pure essences that are separate from reality but inform it. It regards the whole of reality as a regulated and continuous process that stems purely from the interaction of the factors in play (which are at once opposed and complementary: the famous yin and yang).”41 As for Chinese strategic thought in the Warring States era as well as in the twenty-first century, he explains, “Two notions lie at the heart of ancient Chinese strategy, forming a pair: on the one hand, the notion of a situation or configuration (xing), as it develops and takes shape before our eyes (as a relation of forces); on the other hand, and counterbalancing this, the notion of potential (shì), which is implied by that situation and can be made to play in one’s favor.”42 Shì can be viewed as achieving a positional advantage that can be exploited now or in the future. While this notion resonates with Marshall’s notion of gaining competitive advantage, the Chinese perspective grounded in shì is not regularly found in US strategic thought—especially in the area of decisions regarding the value of new military capabilities.

  In light of the chasm between US and Chinese worldviews, Marshall’s support of Pillsbury’s work on Chinese strategic thought and culture was a natural line of long-term research for ONA. In fact it followed the same general path as ONA’s efforts to understand Soviet assessments had done during the Cold War. Characteristic of Marshall’s approach is that he has sought insight into Chinese strategic thought and culture from a number of researchers besides Pillsbury, to include Battilega’s Foreign Systems Research Center, Jacqueline Newmyer Deal’s Long Term Strategy Group, the Hudson Institute’s Laurent Murawiec, and Princeton’s Aaron Friedberg.

  Marshall’s relations with Friedberg illustrate both the former’s influence as a mentor as well as the subtle impact on US strategy he has exerted through the members of St. Andrew’s Prep. In the late 1970s Marshall provided office space for Friedberg in ONA to do an unclassified history of US strategic doctrine while serving as a consultant to both the NSC and ONA.43 At the time, Friedberg was a doctoral candidate in government at Harvard University. In 1986 he completed his dissertation on Great Britain’s relative decline as the world’s dominant power during 1895–1905, which was published two years later as The Weary Titan.44 In the preface he credited Marshall for planting the seeds for his work, adding that he was very pleased to add one more item to the long list of studies for which Marshall has been directly or indirectly responsible.45

  Two decades after its publication The Weary Titan was followed by Friedberg’s A Contest for Supremacy: China, America, and the Struggle for Mastery in Asia. Friedberg dedicated this book to the two men whom he believes have had the most profound impact on his intellectual development: Andrew Marshall and the late Samuel Huntington.46 A Contest for Supremacy was motivated by Friedberg’s experience late in the Clinton administration, when he was asked to review the US intelligence community’s assessments of China’s economic development, political stability, strategic intentions, and military power. The experience left him puzzled and frustrated by what seemed to him to be a willful, blinkered optimism that Sino-US rivalry was highly unlikely, in part because it was too dangerous to contemplate.47 By 2011, however, the thesis Friedberg had advanced in 2000—that “there is a good chance that United States will find itself engaged in an open and intense geopolitical rivalry with the People’s Republic of China”—had become more widely accepted.48

  Friedberg summarized China’s post–Cold War grand strategy for dealing with the United States and with the outside world with three axioms:

  •Avoid confrontation with the global hegemon.

  •Build China’s comprehensive national power.

  •Advance incrementally.49

  Put somewhat differently, and reflecting the views of such Chinese military theorists as Sun Tzu, China’s leaders hope to achieve hegemony in the Asia-Pacific region without fighting. But should war become unavoidable in the meanwhile, the PLA plans to achieve “victory before the first battle” through such stratagems as developing “secret weapons that strike the enemy’s most vulnerable point (called an acupuncture point) at precisely the decisive moment” and mastering informationized operations.50 Particularly against a foe as technically superior as the United States, PLA theorists increasingly see winning the information confrontation as the key to winning before the first battle.

  All three elements of China’s strategy are served by the PLA’s development of A2/AD capabilities aimed at making it ever more difficult and costly for US air and naval forces to project power close to China’s shores. The most conspicuous element of these capabilities has been the PLA’s Second Artillery Force’s growing inventory of highly accurate, land-based ballistic missiles, which are now estimated to number over 1,100. This missile force has the potential to place fixed targets on Taiwan and, eventually, Kadena Air Base in Japan and Anderson Air Force Base in Guam under threat of ballistic-missile bombardment. When operational the Deng-Feng-21D anti-ship ballistic missile (ASBM), now under development, could eventually threaten moving targets such as US carrier strike groups operating in the western Pacific. The Second Artillery’s missiles, however, are just one component of the PLA’s A2/AD capabilities. Other systems aimed at denying access to China’s littoral waters, coastal areas, and airspace include over-the-horizon (OTH) radars, HQ-9 (HongQi-9) surface-to-air-missiles, ocean surveillance satellites for real-time target tracking, advanced fighter interceptors, submarines, hit-to-kill antisatellite weapons, radio-frequency jammers, cyber weapons, and ground-based lasers. Viewed in their entirety, these various systems and capabilities are intended to disable or destroy the United States’ battle networks and precision-strike forces, the core elements of the RMA outlined in ONA’s 1992 assessment.

  As China accumulates these capabilities, and as they proliferate over time to other nations, major US rivals will be able to employ their own A2/AD forces to establish “no-go” zones into which it would be too difficult and costly for the United States to project military power using the overseas bases and forward-deployed expeditionary forces its military has relied upon since World War II. Granted, the costs in blood and treasure that US decision makers might be willing to bear would depend on the United States’ stakes in any future conflict in the Asia-Pacific region. But as Marshall has repeatedly warned, the diffusion of A2/AD capabilities poses a growing challenge to long-standing US approaches to power projection.

  What are the implications for traditional power projection in a future in which a number of nations, starting with China, possess robust reconnaissance-strike capabilities? And what might this ultimately mean for America’s role in the world? These are the kinds of first-order questions Marshall has always raised and is still posing to the military and OSD civilians through war games, workshops, and studies. Arguably Marshall’s persistence in raising these questions has influenced US defense strategy. The Air Force and Navy have looked at China’s evolving anti-intervention strategy in the western Pacific and concluded that there will come a day when neither service, fighting more or less independently of the other, will be able to project power effectively in the face of China’s mounting A2/AD capabilities. This possibility has led them to develop Air-Sea Battle as an operational concept to defeat A2/AD threats. As the heads of the Navy and Air Force, Admiral Jonathan Greenert and General Mark Welsh, have written, Air-Sea Battle seeks to take down the enemy threat to US power-projection forces by “first, disrup
ting an adversary’s command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (C4ISR) systems; second, destroying adversary weapons launchers (including aircraft, ships, and missile sites); and finally, defeating the weapons an adversary launches.”51 To a great extent, the Air-Sea Battle concept describes the clash of reconnaissance-strike complexes envisioned in ONA’s 1992 MTR assessment. Air-Sea Battle, in turn, is nested within the overarching Joint Operational Access Concept that the US military services are developing to deal with A2/AD threats.

  Marshall’s views on these developments are perhaps most apparent in the assessment of the future security environment through 2030–2040 he offered at a 2008 dinner talk he gave to business leaders from the Chicago Council on Global Affairs. He began by stating the obvious: the future security environment will be shaped by such factors as demographic trends, differential rates of economic growth, and technological developments. Second, he cited three long-term challenges confronting the United States: the long “war” with Islamic extremists; the rise of China, whose military modernization is proceeding more rapidly than anticipated; and the likely proliferation of nuclear weapons to Iran, which many think could trigger a proliferation cascade in the volatile Middle East.52 Third, Marshall pointed out that there is an alternative—less obvious—way of looking at the future security environment. The United States is in the midst of a period of enormous change. Geopolitically these changes include the relative decline of Europe, Russia, and Japan; the rise of China; and possibly the rise of India as well. At the same time warfare itself is undergoing profound transformation due to the maturation of long-range precision strike, the military use of highly vulnerable satellites, the growing importance of undersea warfare, the blossoming of cyber threats, and the spread of advanced weaponry, including nuclear weapons as a counter to US conventional preeminence.53 How, he asked, should the United States prepare for these developments should they play out? What is the United States’ long-term strategy? Unfortunately, he noted, the crafting of an effective long-term strategy appears to be an area of growing American weakness when compared to the Truman administration’s development of containment or the Eisenhower administration’s adoption of massive nuclear retaliation. Consequently, Marshall concluded, much hard intellectual work remains to be done.