***Military Power, The Core Tasks Of A Prudent Strategy, And The Army We Need

Brigadier General (Ret.) Huba Wass de Czege

August 6, 2014 |

The following is Brigadier General (USA Ret.) Huba Wass de Czege’s Keynote Address given at the “West Point Senior Conference 50: The Army We Need in an Uncertain Strategic Environment,” held on June 2, 2014.

Our current Army Chief of Staff, General Raymond T. Odierno, often reminds his audiences of the 1951 admonition from the first Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Omar N. Bradley: “American armed strength is only as strong as the combat capabilities of its weakest service. Overemphasis on one or the other will obscure our compelling need—not for airpower, not for seapower—but for American military power commensurate with our tasks in the world.”2

My purpose here is to present testable hypotheses about what makes a prudent strategy, what military tasks and purposes comprise it, and the logic that transforms military capability into power toward each task. By this reasoning, the Army can make a far more solid case for its relevance to military strategy than it can by making the case for a “land domain” and “land power” within that domain, reasoning that mimics the illogical and shallow arguments being made in Washington for a share of the budget by the other services. The surest guide to the Army we need emerges from the role Army forces play within the Armed Forces as they work together and with allies to deter aggression, defend a status quo, enforce changes to an intolerable situation, and pacify a violent population within a prudent grand strategy.

An Uncertain and Unstable World.

Seeing mostly prosperity and stability in the relations of major global powers, post-Cold War statesmen have come to believe in a durable, mostly self-sustaining, peace between them. They trust foreign statesmen to recognize the common benefits of the peace, and to act in their rational self-interest to maintain it. They thus assume that all future military interventions will be optional, limited in scale and aim, and relegated to the unruly global fringe.

These assumptions have no basis. Prosperity and stability among major global powers can easily become conflict and chaos when statesmen make rational decisions on illogical premises, or when premises are sound enough, but reason is clouded by emotion. Either case is common historically, and could lead to unexpected events that can easily spiral out of control. Going to war is, in many cases, not a matter of choice. War comes unbidden to all but the aggressor, and not in a way anticipated.

In their optimism, post-Cold War great power statesmen have allowed the old peacekeeping mechanisms of the Cold War to atrophy. They have not built new ones for modern times, even though there is widespread concern about the rise of expansionist regional bullies. Therefore, great power strategists should exploit the easy fruits of prosperity derived from great power stability and cooperation, while they guard against the possible decent into conflict and chaos.

Post-Cold War statesmen, their admirals, generals, and civilian defense policy advisors have not done the hard, unpopular work of thinking deeply about the unthinkable—potential states of conflict between great powers. If it is not done promptly, today’s statesmen and their military leaders will underestimate the difficulty of causing other statesmen, acting in the service of an emotionally aroused and numerous people, to react as intended in a crisis.

Three Questions Worth Answering.

If we agree that the future is uncertain, and possibly unstable, then what is the Army we need? Well, that depends entirely on our grand strategic view of the world and consensus concepts of military power within our strategy. That makes three questions worth answering. What makes a prudent strategy? What military tasks and purposes comprise it? Finally, what logic transforms military capability into power toward each task?

With regard to the first and second questions, is it prudent to base strategic design and forecasts for defense requirements on worst-case scenarios and on how many wars we should be able to fight simultaneously? Or should we instead think about how to keep an advantageous peace among the great powers, keeping in check the clearly comprehensible danger of conflict between them, and thus providing a stable platform for dealing with suddenly emerging dangers that we will not be able to predict? I think the latter.

Many may think we can still make strategy by projecting the present we see into the future and reason backward from that projection to optimize the ways and means we will need. Those who think this way are prone to two errors. First, by backward-planning, we assume that our plans do not affect the image from which we are backward planning—but of course they do, especially in matters of grand strategy. The second error of strategic planning by projection is that not only have we failed to predict future conflicts as an empirical matter, but overreaction to a threat not yet real could trigger exactly the unstable situation that we fear.

The Inevitable “What” of Any Prudent Strategy.

More specifically, we cannot predict the “when,” the “where,” and the “with whom” of future scenarios, but we can predict and think logically about the “what.” That is very useful. Though history may not repeat, it can educate about both the broad tasks and purposes to which military forces have been put, and the logic that transforms military capability into power toward each such purpose.

Therefore, the logic of strategic design can emerge from the logic of the “what” projected onto the dynamic global situation, as we understand it, and from the reasoning that pertains to four broad and basic categories of purpose—deter aggression, defend a status quo, enforce changes to an intolerable situation, and pacify a violent population.

Wise military strategy is based on reasoning that begins by understanding what about the current security situation that must be maintained and how to deter the evolution of known and comprehensible dangers to it. To this end, strategists think through, and continually reevaluate, an undergirding layer of reciprocal promises with selected allies to stand together to deter attack and, if that fails, to defend each other, and when that fails, to restore what is lost by aggression. On this logical foundation of stable major power relationships, wise strategists construct a basis for responding to dangers that cannot be predicted or deterred, including the continuing, and “shape shifting,” transnational menace of violent criminals and fanatics. If the underlying collective security provisions deter the evolution of known and comprehensibledangers, then those that cannot be predicted can be isolated and addressed more effectively through great power collective action.

Not only do we approach military strategy the wrong way, but we also suffer from faulty thinking about military power.

Faulty Thinking about Military Power.

It is surprising that, as consequential as military power is, the language with which concepts of military power are currently formulated and expressed is so crude. Thinking in terms of air power, sea power, land power, space power, and cyber power may be useful to the proponents of these categories of “power” in budget battles at home, but it impedes clear and imaginative thought about defense policy and military strategies toward the world at large. These “powers” promise the control of certain conceptual “domains,” but the sort of control envisioned is difficult to achieve in water, air, space, and cyberspace, while being nearly impossible on land—where most human activity takes place. Controlling domains—air, land, sea, space, and cyberspace—is one thing, controlling the decisions and behavior of people by way of “coercive force” in those domains is quite another. People do not respond to military force as such models predict. Moreover, this leads to a fragmented mode of thinking about military power.

To me, the evidence of 16 years as a senior mentor to Joint Task Force commanders and staffs engaged in service “futures wargames”3 is that the output of the entire Joint force is amplified when synergistic integration across services increases. Thinking in terms of disaggregated domains is counterproductive. Leaving any dimension uncontested cedes advantages to the adversary. Such evidence was plain to this infantry soldier at an early age. We on the ground could never have been as bold as we were in our 1967 battles against invading North Vietnamese divisions had it not been for the pilots of all three services and the gunfire of supporting battleships offshore. The very term “land power” therefore confuses more than it clarifies.

Our past actions suggest that we are prone to confuse potential lethal force with power. This was certainly true during the Vietnam War. In both Afghanistan and Iraq, an opening “shock and awe” battle-winning strategy was not followed with a well-thought-through war-winning one. Good things do not necessarily follow the removal of a “bad” regime. As a result, interventions expected to be short became very long.

One root cause of this outcome was a growing belief among the Western defense community that modern technology could produce the same result with fewer boots on the ground. Another was mistaking the power to win tactical engagements and battles with the power to achieve strategic intentions.

Let me now turn to address the first of these broad strategic purposes that comprise the inevitable “what” of any prudent strategy, and the logic by which force potential is transformed into the power to deter adversaries from taking an intolerable action.

The Logic of Deterring Military Power.

Deterrence is the most economical form of military power when it is credible and crafted logically. It is a matter of perceptions and the calculations based on them. What counts toward deterrence is what the object of it makes of the military capabilities in readiness to defend the status quo. This must make the potential aggressor ask, “Is the risk of losses worth the prize?” Since the power of individual deterrents is directed at specific objects, strategists must choose wisely when deciding whom to deter from doing what. It is impossible to deter all aggression. One incredible case erodes others.

The U.S. Army was deployed in Europe during the Cold War not to fight its way to Moscow, but to convince the Soviet leadership that they could not reach the Dutch ports by “blitzkrieg” before the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) agreed upon a nuclear weapons release. I thought of it then as fighting to halt the war in the shadow of nuclear release and without losing a sliver of land! How can we impose some form of this model on the modern situation to maintain a state of open and interactive peace with China, Iran, and Russia? When critical allies who are threatened by major powers become “blitzkrieg proof,” the most dangerous dilemmas of deterrence are solved.4

The fundamental strategic question today is how to deter effectively major power aggression by “blitzkrieg,” and put such a deterrent in place without harming the positive and mutually beneficial global interactions in other grand strategic dimensions. Not only are the economies of all the major powers greatly interactive today, but some of America’s allies are more deeply entwined with their potentially aggressive neighbors’ economies than with America’s. Nonetheless, the important principles of deterrence cannot be violated. This means choosing, region by region, whom to deter from doing what; getting them to realize they cannot achieve their aims before the United States and its allies can mount a coordinated response; doing it with means that are clearly defensive rather than offensive; and steadily constructing a credible and logical mutual deterrence system, while at the same time promoting positive and mutually beneficial global interactions.

For instance, the promise to go to war in the defense of an ally, and suffer the consequences, is credible only when allies see the tangible evidence of that commitment. Even a small ground force contributes in a manner that is out of proportion to its size toward the credibility of the deterrent force. This contribution can be seen credibly by the object of deterrence as being of more value in defense than in offense. While space, air, and naval forces would contribute the bulk of military potential required to defend in many situations, this great defensive potential is mostly offshore and easy to underestimate. Thus they are less powerful in their deterrent role than they certainly will prove to be when America makes the decision to join the defense. What really counts toward deterrence is not the hardware arrayed in readiness, but a demonstration of how well Americans today have thought through their defensive response to aggression.

The Logic of Defensive Military Power.

After deterrence, the next layer of prudent military strategic provisions is to ensure a successful defense when deterrence fails. What matters then is the immediate effectiveness of established defenses. In general, it is less costly for the defender to retain the status quo than it is for the aggressor to change it. All other things being equal, the defense merely has to cause the attack to fail to achieve its aim. Well-prepared defenses tend to improve the power of weapons to achieve this purpose by eroding the attacker’s momentum, constraining his freedom of action, and causing the attack to culminate before it succeeds. When the defense is well conceived and resourced, the enemy’s culmination may come quickly and without loss of territory. Thus strategists need to consider what can be done economically to strengthen the power of allied and home defenses without provocation.

These advantages of the defense are magnified by systems of integrated defensive strike networks tuned to the signatures of a high-tech blitzkrieg attack.5 The logic of defensive strike networks is relatively simple, consistent, and predictable. The power of integrated strike networks derives from the combination of the very short time from initial sensing to striking (making it more likely that dynamic targets will be engaged) and from the precision, potency, and scale of responding defensive strikes. Any penetration of the area of surveillance is immediately identified “friend or foe,” an engagement decision is made, the best available response is selected, targeting data is sent to the responding weapon system, the target is engaged, damage is assessed, and the cycle may repeat again if required. This entire kill chain can be automated. The possibilities for various kinds of integrated strike networks will explode. Capacities will increase, while costs will decrease.

After helping key allies “blitzkrieg proof” their own defenses, the wise strategist realizes that there will be little time to respond after receiving the first unambiguous warning of attack. Available response times will be short. Air and naval reinforcements of the integrated defensive strike networks will be most valuable, as will be morale boosting defensive ground force deployments to signal allied solidarity and lend credibility to the promise of further relief. Pre-hostilities reinforcements must deter rather than provoke preemption.

However effective defenses may be, it is imperative that they be backed up by sufficient counteroffensive potential to not only restore losses, but to enforce on the enemy whatever changes in the situation a stable peace demands. Moreover, the lack of a credible and compelling counteroffensive capability weakens deterrence and encourages “blitzkrieg” attacks.

The Logic of Offensive Military Power.

Changing any existing status quo is more ambitious than deterrence and defense, which is why wise strategists begin their security assessments with deterrence and work their way up to offensive requirements. It is thus vital to understand the peculiar logic that transforms military force into power to achieve desired changes.

Specializing in this kind of potential, and making it credible where it counts most, is the most important contribution American Armed Forces can make toward global stability and peace between global powers. However, currently dominant theories about offensive military power require revision. They are mostly attempts to breathe new life into outdated theories of offensive war with modern weaponry.

Pre-Clausewitzian theories of offensive war—that the destructive military instrument operates on the state of mind of leaders, followers, and supporters, causing them to give up fighting and accept the will of their enemy—still exert a firm grip on military minds. Anyone who has read the correspondence among senior American military officers of all services and civilian leaders during the Vietnam War recognizes this as the primary logic of the war strategy. Such thinking today allots undeserved causal power to the “shock and awe” of modern air and naval weaponry over the decisions of hostile governments and other relevant human actors. It skews the cost-benefit calculus of choosing war by minimizing the costs of success and exaggerating the efficacy of its methods. Worse still, it ignores an important scientific finding by Canadian Psychologist J. T. McCurdy about the 1940 London “Blitz” that has not been proven wrong since its publication in 1943—the inevitable hardening of will beyond the immediate deadly and traumatizing range of lethal effects.6 Regardless of what happens to networks and infrastructures, when countries like China or Iran are attacked, based on this theory, enemy leaders and the people of the country will decide to continue resistance. Events will have solidified the people more than cowed them.

This old logic won Civil War battles, but did not win the war. Then President Abraham Lincoln and General Ulysses Grant had a different idea: not only to fight with great determination to win the necessary battles, but to convince their opponents that capitulation options were narrowing inevitably day by day through constricting land and sea maneuver. To this day, that two-armed strategy for changing an intolerable grand strategic status quo remains the root logic of offensive military power.

Thus, it is wise to pursue offensive war along two complementary lines. The first combines powerful measures aimed at influencing the decisions of the enemy’s uppermost leadership and softening their will. A second combination of strong measures and maneuver makes the decisions of enemy leaders irrelevant by negating their power to resist conditions that we might wish to impose on them regardless of how their will is affected. The power in this approach is how these two “arms” combine, rather than what they achieve separately.

The first arm is a logical extension of the measures short of force initiated during any prewar crisis to influence the decisions of the enemy. Prewar efforts are prudently continued and merged with military efforts. This combined civil-military arm employs all means of influence to cause the enemy to submit. The military portion of this arm targets things of value to the enemy’s political leadership. A considerable portion of this effort would also focus on destroying physical systems of defense and facilitating the entry, freedom of action, and success of the other arm of the operation.

The second arm constricts and contains the choices of the enemy, defeating their power to resist the intentions of the attacker. Going into an uncertain and unpredictable venture, it is better to err on the side of too much—rather than not enough. Strength adjustments cause delays that benefit the enemy, cost blood and money, and risk premature culmination. Whatever capability is required when working in tandem with the other arm, more would be required without it.

Offensive maneuver, once comprised of complementary contests in the air, at sea, and on land, is today and will be in the future comprised of integrated contests in new dimensions as well—in space, in the media, and in cyberspace. Failing to contest any of these vital dimensions cedes advantages to the enemy.

In theory, four sequential but overlapping objectives frame the logic of modern offensive maneuver: 1) negating the enemy’s external defenses; 2) securing control of conventional air, land, and naval forces; 3) selectively gaining local control of regular and irregular forces; and, 4) following through to achieve the new desired concrete conditions. The more achieving these objectives is compressed in time, the greater the psychological impact on the regime and population; the more military power is derived to overcome resistance and produce desired outcomes, the fewer the friendly casualties, and the shorter the war.7

A conceptual flaw in recent U.S. Joint Doctrine is in naming the second of these objectives the “decisive” phase of operations. In practical terms, seizing control of conventional armed forces may precipitate regime collapse, as it did in both Afghanistan and Iraq, but only ungoverned chaos results. The remaining tasks—gaining local control of regular and irregular forces; and following through to achieve the new desired concrete conditions—Joint doctrine has relegated to a last phase called “Stability Operations.” It is all too fashionable to blame civilian leaders for not taking the crucial remaining tasks of “regime change” seriously enough.

Today we all know that the key to regime change is not knocking down the regime and the forces of a small and backward country. We have demonstrated the ability to do that in a few days. Rather, the key is to fill quickly the power vacuum that follows regime collapse, and pacify the population before the legitimacy of a “liberator,” in many eyes, becomes the illegitimacy of an occupier, in all eyes.

A better strategy to accomplish this would be a “super-surge” in the wake of regime collapse to gain rapid control of all population centers, and to commence effective governance and security infrastructure-building from the beginning. This would permit a more visible and rapid draw down and replacement of foreign with “good enough” indigenous security forces. We may not have deliberately chosen to have “long wars” in Afghanistan and Iraq; but, faulty logic surely took us there.

A strong and capable Army, equipped and trained as an integral part of a capable Joint Force for the core purposes of changing the status quo is still indispensable to U.S. military power. Without it, our nation will lack the capability to enforce its terms in the fights it cannot refuse and cannot afford to lose. Continuing to assert otherwise will only perpetuate the excessive cost of lives of young patriots in long, potentially wrong, indecisive, and costly military enterprises begun with unrealistic hopes. Settling this issue is important unfinished business and the keystone issue in the arch of modern military art. If we reach firmer ground on this issue, we are likely to reach firmer ground on others as well.

The Logic of Pacifying Military Power.

However effective the deterrence, defensive, and offensive potential of American Armed Forces may be, U.S. strategists cannot neglect a small set of pacification tasks—the fourth “what” or basic purpose of military forces. It is important that the demands of pacification be calculated on top of, and in conjunction with, the other three strategic purposes of military power.

Broadly speaking, pacification includes all efforts to restore peace within a state or across states when normal policing agencies can no longer enforce the lawful behavior of hostile movements, warring factions, or violent criminals. I also include in this fourth purpose of military power the ongoing global pacification effort aimed at the al-Qaeda inspired movement. Whatever the peculiar circumstances, pacification also has its own unyielding logic.

Successful pacification strategies are generally designed around three major lines of effort. The first of these is the struggle over the legitimacy to govern, make laws, and enforce them. The second is defending the population from the “armed propaganda” of the violent enemies of the state. The third is the offensive effort to defeat these enemies. The power of this trinity derives from synergy among the three major lines of effort, but a weakness in one cannot be compensated in another.

Winning the legitimacy to govern requires separating the enemy from the support of the people. Violent enemies of the state rely on the people where they live and operate for protection, intelligence, supplies, funds, and recruits. There is no such thing as “ungoverned space” except when it is unpopulated. Some form of governance takes shape organically in a vacuum, and violent enemies of the state will either impose their form of order, or influence the existing one to their advantage. There is no useful objective standard for governance, only a relative one. The state and its agencies must be better in the eyes of the people than the alternative. People will favor indigenous governors over foreign ones. This is why foreigners have such difficulty with winning the struggle for the legitimacy to govern.

The second struggle of this trinity—defending the population from the “armed propaganda” of violent enemies—is crucial to being able to govern legitimately. This effort entails defeating the effort of violent movements to gain intelligence, support, and recruits. Without these enablers, violent movements will wither. The proverbial “three men, a knife, and an idea” in an otherwise uncontested community can control the people. A fearful and exposed population is lost to the government. The antidote is around-the-clock security, which is costly and difficult to emplace from the outside and is best done from inside out and bottom up, with motivated and trusted self-defense forces.

Keeping people safe and getting them on the side of peace under a legitimate government is not enough. The violent enemies must be fought and defeated. To do so, we must seize the initiative from the national level down to the local and apply focused and discriminating force to enforce the peace. The required two-armed approach to accomplish this will depend on knowing the enemy very well, having very good intelligence, and being more creative and strategically savvy than the enemy. One arm unifies physical and psychological pressure to affect the choices of insurgent leaders, followers, and supporters; and the other arm takes away their best options one by one, and relentlessly. Just as any use of force to change an intolerable status quo, it is not sufficient to rely on military operations that merely generate losses among enemy leaders and followers. As in the London Blitz, the “remote misses” become more, not less, motivated to continue fighting, while the casualties are replaced with new recruits at the bottom and upward mobility at the top. This places a greater burden on the enforcing offensive arm of counter insurgent strategy—taking away the insurgents options other than peace, one by one. This option-eliminating and constricting arm includes relentless pursuit into sanctuaries to eliminate safe havens and constricting, then stopping, all forms of support (that is, the means of a movement—money, arms, food, supplies, information and, most of all, recruits). These enforcement challenges can be overcome only when the other two elements of the trinity—defending the population from armed propaganda and winning the population to the side of peace under better governance—function well.

It is easy to see why pacification is the most ambitious of the four broad tasks of military strategy. It is very difficult to do; there are no technological shortcuts. It can succeed only on the basis of integrated operations containing robust ground forces. This is especially true for post-regime collapse forms of pacification in which the fundamental choice of legitimate government is between a foreign occupier and a homegrown competitor.

Not only is pacification a very difficult mission, but it is also the most expensive in terms of trained and armed manpower. Some studies based on rare historical successes have judged the price to be no less than 20 security personnel per 1,000 citizens.8

Pacification missions for American forces are most likely to come in three forms.

One of these follows regime collapse either from internal causes, or from external “regime change” interventions like the ones in Grenada, Panama, Haiti, Afghanistan, and Iraq. As frequently as these have been in our past, we cannot rule them out in a case that threatens a vital interest so important that we see the benefits of this remedy decidedly greater than the costs in blood and money that some past cases have extracted. Unlike the post-regime collapse cases of the past, these pacification efforts should be fully anticipated; undertaken in full appreciation of the known challenges; planned thoroughly with detailed knowledge of the country and its people; and begun immediately in the wake of active or potential combat operations.

The second form of pacification is when governments fail in their own efforts to quell increasingly violent internal turmoil and request cadres of experts to train and assist government forces. Such requests are difficult to ignore when a vital regional security partner is in trouble. A current example is the assistance being rendered to the Philippines. Requesting countries are far more likely to want such help to trickle in rather than to flood the land with armed outsiders, which would make their struggle for legitimacy all the more difficult. These demands, too, can be anticipated well ahead of time and satisfied with well-prepared rotating long-term cadres.

Finally, I anticipate that the global pacification struggle with the al-Qaeda inspired movement will continue into the foreseeable future, and both they and we will keep learning and adapting. American leaders should learn that the strategy of defending the homeland, while waging an old fashioned one-armed offensive abroad is a formula for perpetual warfare. We have yet to see the effects of the option-eliminating, constricting, peace-enforcing arm of an offensive strategy anywhere. While the movement’s “armed propaganda” offensive is failing in the West, it is spreading to more and more places. It gains legitimacy in many areas it operates in, while losing in others. What America must learn to do is to shape the global strategy and lead a global effort based on the logic of the “trinity” as outlined in this discussion. This will mean leading while remaining mostly in the background as the main struggle is fought “by, with, and through” Muslim allies.

Conclusion.

In conclusion, we need to reform American military strategic thinking, concepts of military power, and master the difficult “troops to task” calculus. Basing our defense requirements on the number of wars we might have to fight, and how we might elect to fight them is nonsensical “voodoo” strategy. This is betting on the horse that you are doing everything you can do to keep from getting out of the starting gate.

Arguments for Army requirements based on “land domain control” and “land power” perpetuate faulty sectarian thinking among the services, and plays to the advantages of the others. Continuing to think and argue along those lines is like building sand castles to stem the tide.

General Bradley’s advice from 1951 is still sound today. Our compelling need is not for domain-specific forces, but rather U.S. Armed Forces commensurate with their fundamental tasks and purposes in the world. We need to restructure our thinking about how these tasks relate within a global military strategy, how force becomes power to keep the peace we intend to keep.

The surest guide for the Army we need emerges from a strategy based on the strategic reasoning I have outlined here and from understanding the role Army forces play within the Armed Forces as they work together to deter aggression, defend a status quo, enforce changes to an intolerable situation, and pacify a violent population within a prudent strategy. I have demonstrated how the Army contributes to military power toward each of these purposes. I have also demonstrated how the Army can begin to calculate and explain troop to task requirements convincingly.

However, guiding the mainstream thinking of our nation's leaders toward the strategic reasoning I have outlined here has to begin within the Army, with strong commitment at the top. When a new Army consensus is won, then the Army needs to win consensus among military professionals of all the services. Only then, when military professionals come together in their thinking on these vital matters, will political leaders be compelled to listen to the military strategic advice given by the military professionals. Political logic will always rule, but a robust military logic put forward by a united military profession is a powerful contribution to statecraft. Accomplishing that reform will be very difficult, but it is the only way to get the Army we need for the nation we love and serve.

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ENDNOTES

1. My only previous speaking engagement at a West Point Senior Conference was at the 1982 conference on the topic of the “’Military Reform’ Debate: Directions for the Defense Establishment for the Remainder of the Century.” Mr. William “Bill” Lind, a Senate staffer, represented the dominant outside reformer model for Army doctrine, “Maneuver Warfare.” I represented the “insider model,” a doctrine that came to be known later as AirLand Battle. For a history of that process, see Huba Wass de Czege, “Lessons from the Past: Making the Army’s Doctrine ‘Right Enough’ Today,” Landpower Essay 06-2, Washington, DC: Association of the U.S. Army (AUSA), September 2006.

2. For example, see General Raymond T. Odierno, “Today’s Army: The Strength of Our Nation,” Army, October 2012, p. 25.

3. This period spanned 1994 through 2010, during which my main employment was being a senior mentor to active duty Army officers planning Joint campaigns for the purpose of learning about new scenarios, new strategic challenges, and new technical advances in weapons and weapons platforms.

4. Brigadier General Huba Wass de Czege, “The Costs and Risks of AirSea Battle,” Army, November 2011. Also see Huba Wass de Czege, “Strategizing Forward In the Western Pacific And Elswhere,” Landpower Essay No. 13-4, Washington, DC: AUSA, October 2013, available from www.ausa.org/publications/ilw/DigitalPublications/Documents/lpe13-4/index.html.

5. See Huba Wass de Czege, “Net War: Winning in the Cyberelectromagnetic Dimension of ‘Full Spectrum Operations’,” Military Review, March-April 2010, especially the discussion on “creating and defeating “super efficient” defensive and offensive “integrated strike networks.”

6. J. T. McCurdy, “The Structure of Morale,” cited in Malcolm Gladwell, David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants, New York: Little, Brown & Co., October 2013, pp. 128-135.

7. For a fuller discussion, see Huba Wass de Czege, “The Logic of Offensive Air Land Sea Maneuver on Any Scale,” Army, July 2011.

8. See James T. Quinlivin, “Force Requirements in Stability Operations,” Parameters, Winter 1996-96. Also see Huba Wass de Czege, “Policing The Frontiers of Freedom,” Army, July 2006.

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