Robert “Jake” Bebber
INTRODUCTION
Andrew F. Krepinevich argued recently in The Origins of Victory that the world finds itself today in the midst of a new period of disruption in military affairs. The precision-strike regime that the United States developed in the late Cold War has matured to the point that the US no longer enjoys an overwhelming advantage over peer competitors. Technologies that are disruptive not only in degree but also in kind—such as artificial intelligence, additive manufacturing, quantum computing, and synthetic biology—are reshaping the character of warfare. Communist China and Russia have introduced conventional capabilities at scale to contest, and in some cases overmatch, US conventional forces in most domains. These adversaries are now reshaping the global order to their advantage and, in the case of Communist China, intend to achieve global hegemony. While national security experts largely agree that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and Russia threaten American security, there remains no consensus on the direction the US should take to address these threats. Neither political nor military leadership has united around operational challenges on which to focus the military’s efforts toward disruptive innovation.
There is nothing new about using information-based strategies to achieve strategic aims. While strategists often hold up the ancient aphorism “Divide and conquer” as a model, classical theorists such as Sun Tzu, Aristotle, Niccolò Machiavelli, and even William Shakespeare suggest the best way to divide enemies—either internally or in alliances—is to break their mutual trust. As Michael Warner and John Childress note:
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