Is the Pentagon Organized to Fight a Cold War With China?

Capt. (Ret.) James E. Fanell and Bradley A. Thayer

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The National Security Act of 1947 organized the U.S. government to fight the Cold War, putting the big pieces in place for that conflict with the Soviet Union. The act had a great effect on the armed services, creating the Air Force from the Army, the Intelligence Community (IC), as it is the genesis of the CIA, and the national security community, as it birthed the Department of Defense from the Constitution’s original War Department and Department of the Navy, as well as the National Security Council.

Today, Congress and the Biden administration should consider conducting a “blank page” exercise and returning to the national security infrastructure that defeated the Soviets. The point of the exercise would be to determine whether — in the context of the threat posed by the Chinese Communist Party — the U.S. national security community should be reorganized. How might it need to be changed to ensure an effective fight against China? Of course, there are numerous changes that might be made for each of the military services and in the architecture of the Department of Defense, but in the context of the current cold war with China, there are two major points of consideration.

First, can the Defense Department institutionalize a focus on great-power threats and peer competition for each of the services, and place a demand on Congress and the IC for those threats to remain, respectively, a primary funding target and analytic responsibility? A new National Security Act would require the services to address great-power and peer-competitive enemies as their first priority, and for this to be the case across government. The costs of institutionalization would be considerable, but the result could be to prevent the risks of threat deflation.

Second, there is the salient issue of whether political warfare — in essence, waging war short of kinetic war — should be centered in the Department of Defense. The U.S. has a long and successful history of conducting political warfare during the Cold War that was rooted in the IC and the State Department. But it may be time to do what China has done and create a separate “Political Warfare” service within the Defense Department. As a communist state, China views political warfare as the highest form of warfare, one that seeks to defeat the enemy without resorting to kinetic war. It’s an idea as old as Sun Tzu’s assertions, and is reflected in the writings of other strategic Chinese thinkers, as well as being a principle in the West.

There is some value in placing political warfare under the Department of Defense, because it serves the mission of stopping peer-competitive threats by defeating or substantially diminishing their ideology. It permits the creation of policies to undermine the enemy’s hold on power before security competition turns into kinetic war. Congress and the Pentagon should examine the liabilities and strengths of the Department of Defense to execute the political warfare mission.

The U.S. also should consider making political warfare the equal of other services, in that it allows the Defense Department to recognize that war has a political aspect. That enables an understanding that war is a part of power politics that never ends.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken (R) and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin testify before the Senate Appropriations Committee on May 16, 2023, about investing in U.S. security and examining relations with China.Win McNamee/Getty Images

Since political warfare centers on ideology, U.S. policymakers and defense decision-makers should focus on the Chinese Communist Party’s ideology and its intention to trounce the U.S. and upend the international order. China intends to defeat U.S. national security interests globally, and will target the U.S. population and homeland. In the decades since the Cold War, U.S. officials have largely dismissed China’s communist ideology as “boilerplate,” seeing it as a legacy of the past that had diminished utility as China embraced capitalism, on a path toward becoming a democracy. But that assumption isn’t true.

This way of thinking in the U.S. has spawned failed policy and helped to promote China’s strategy of threat deflation. Far from abandoning its ideology, the Chinese Communist Party has sustained it and, under the leadership of Xi Jinping, strengthened adherence to it. In political warfare, senior civilian and military officials in the United States must think like China’s leadership when considering the Sino-American confrontation. Understanding Marxist-Leninist thought, and how Mao Zedong derived China’s ideology from that of Soviet revolutionary Joseph Stalin, remains relevant today. Knowledge of communism’s history, of the core ideas of its major proponents, and how the ideology drives conflict with the West, explains why Beijing believes that history is on its side. And this could help U.S. defense and intelligence leaders to devise more effective actions to defeat it.

China’s ideology demands that it confront and defeat the United States. Not taking this ideology seriously was — and is — a profound mistake of the engagement school of thought, and has misinformed decisions of several White House administrations. The belief that increased wealth or engagement with the West would “cure” China of its communism is a major misunderstanding of communist ideology. If U.S. defense officials view the world through the Leninist lens, they will understand why communist ideology will always trump economic growth in China and Beijing will always value control over the Chinese people.

There can be no accommodation with the Chinese Communist Party. The U.S. must fight to win this cold war — and must acknowledge that the Party’s ideology will drive it forward until defeat or victory.

Reconsidering the 1947 National Security Act would allow us to perceive what the U.S. got right against the Soviets, and how that might apply to confrontation with China. The Pentagon, Congress and the White House must be united in the goal of defeating a major threat to the U.S. with political warfare and, if necessary, cyber, terrestrial, maritime, air and space warfare.