America’s new National Defense Strategy (NDS) seeks to compete with, deter and in the event of war defeat potential adversaries. Major focus is on the long-term strategic competition with Russia and China. Other regional and transnational threats in line with a weakening international order also are covered by the NDS.
The NDS is explicitly based on three lines of attack: making the joint force more “lethal, agile and resilient,” particularly against well-armed adversaries in highly contested environments; dependence on allies and friends; and reform of the process to maximize the effectiveness and efficiency of how every defense dollar is spent.
But several critical assumptions and key foundations of the unclassified NDS are purposely unstated and implicit.
First, defining the Russian and Chinese threats and dangers that must be deterred and defeated.
Second, explaining why these are the most threatening and potentially destabilizing for the United States and its allies.
Third, explicitly stating how these two strategic competitors are to be deterred, and if needed, defeated.
Russian and Chinese strategies are largely based on antiaccess/area denial (A2AD) capabilities to prevent potential hostile forces from operating in proximity to their homelands. As neither competitor seeks a world war, a more likely threat is a Russian land grab or assault into Europe as it did in Ukraine, using A2AD and numerical superiority in tactical or shorter-range nuclear weapons to present NATO with a fait accompli. China also is pursuing a similar A2AD strategy for imposing outcomes on the region that advance Chinese influence and expand physical control of territory in part by fortifying tiny islets in the China Seas.
Anticipating how Secretary of Defense James Mattis thinks, the NDS could be following the advice of Sun Tzu, the famous Chinese general and chronicler of war. Sun Tzu argued that the most effective strategy is to attack and defeat the enemy’s strategy. If correct, the NDS principally is directed at attacking the enemy’s A2AD strategy. And with sufficient lethal, agile, and resilient forces to defeat A2AD, deterrence would be strengthened through neutralizing any potential fait accompli situations. But is the soundest approach?
During the Cold War, the United States never fully understood Soviet military strategy too often “mirror-imaging” by assuming Russians thought as Americans did. Unfortunately, the same mistake may be repeating. If this analysis of the NDS underpinnings is correct, three dangers lurk.
First, suppose Russian and Chinese strategies are designed to defend against direct enemy attacks on the homeland and not threatening fait accompli scenarios. Does this negate the NDS?
Second, the U.S. will need very capable and very expensive forces to defeat A2AD defenses. Are they affordable for the long term?
Third, what other strategies might be considered taking into account these concerns as well as countering Russian “active measures?”
Clearly, even if China and Russia are designing their strategies and military forces to protect and defend sovereign territory they can be used for other reasons, as Russian interventions into Georgia and Ukraine demonstrated. Any strategy must be prepared for this contingency.
How else then might the United States and the West respond to the advances in Russian and Chinese military capabilities? One option is to use A2AD against both Russia and China with a strategy to contain rather than breach these defenses. In essence, this means creating a “no man’s land” in which no military force can be assured of survival. Russia and China would be prevented from breaking out beyond each mainland. A “Porcupine Defense” can achieve this containment by imposing unsustainable costs of any attempts at “break out.”
A Porcupine Defense would restrict Russian and Chinese forces to within their borders and limited geographic boundaries. As the United States and its allies have no reason to attack Russia or China first, a Porcupine Defense would reinforce the other side’s A2AD strategy, assuring a no man’s land in which all sides would be at considerable operational jeopardy.
Such a defense uses geography and allies and friends to advantage. Major changes in force structure and operational concepts would follow to rely more heavily on large numbers of very mobile, long-range, highly lethal unmanned vehicles and related systems, complemented with advanced electronic and other modern capabilities. The operational concept is to achieve mission kills against enemy forces to render them ineffective rather than outright destruction. The Black and Baltic Seas are ideal for such defenses.
In the Pacific, a parallel defense would be constructed to keep Chinese forces contained inside the first island chain that runs from the tip of Alaska in the north to Vietnam in the south. As a first approximation, such a strategy should be more affordable than one that attacks A2AD directly.
Containment succeeded in the Cold War. There is no reason a 21st-century version will not work just as well.
