During his speech before Congress earlier this week, President Donald Trump offered just a single line of “clarification” on his administration’s intended war planning. It was that U.S. military forces have “only” one noteworthy obligation, underscored the president, and that is “to win.”
Although, at first glance, such a plainly expressed expectation seems reasonable and customary, it is out of date, and also prospectively catastrophic. Here is why.
Under longstanding international law, a true condition of belligerency – that is, a proper “state of war” – comes into existence only after certain specific declarations have been made, and ends only when a formal signing of war-terminating agreements has been completed. It follows, under such traditional rules, that there can be absolutely no credible ambiguities about when a particular war has actually been concluded and which participating states emerge as the conflict’s acknowledged winners and losers.
Today, however, in part because of the authoritative U.N. Charter’s explicit criminalization of aggression, no state is incentivized to expressly “declare war.” Among other things, this blurring of the lines between war and peace renders meaningless all of the customary and codified legal emphases on war termination and conflict outcome.
In essence, for the United States, this blurring means that an earlier jurisprudential focus on “winning” and “losing” no longer make any real operational sense. Consequently, our overriding military focus should now instead be on identifying the very specific tactical requirements of current and still-looming military conflicts. With this changed focus, moreover, an American president would be better able to allocate scarce fiscal and human resources according to concrete threat requirements, and not because of any naively abstract or a priori commitments to “victory.”
This updated awareness is especially urgent regarding any planned Trump expenditures for nuclear weapons, as the sole legitimate purpose of any such uniquely devastating ordnance must always be deterrence, not war-fighting. In order to meet all the presumptive requirements of effective strategic deterrence, American nuclear weapons need only be conspicuously secure from any enemy first-strike attacks, and also penetration-capable with regard to enemy missile defenses.
Until the actual onset of a nuclear era in world politics, states, city-states and empires were essentially safe from homeland destruction unless their respective armies had first been defeated. Of course, some national homeland vulnerabilities had arisen even earlier – linked together with the appearance of air power and air war – but even those significant exposures still generally required hard-to-mount penetrations by national enemy air forces.
There are urgently important lessons here for Trump. From the critical standpoint of ensuring any one state’s national survival, the classical objective of defeating an enemy army and preventing military defeat must now become a manifestly secondary goal. After all, there can be no cumulative benefits to waging a “winning war” if the defeated enemy still manages to maintain an undiminished capacity for generating massive civilian harms.
Apropos of this uniquely vital query, a daunting enemy of the United States could now be another state, a terror group, or even assorted hybrid (state-sub-state) combinations.
For Trump, the stunningly complex strategic implications of these transforming developments, whether prudently recognized or ignored, are both tangible and far-reaching. To adequately understand these bewildering implications, the president’s senior national security team must proceed analytically and dialectically, according to the immutable principles of correct reasoning first unraveled by Plato. Accordingly, the obligatory policy task must be to ask and answer key questions, systematically, in proper sequence, aiming toward an always-tentative but still required remedy.
For those countries in the cross hairs of any determined jihad, and this assuredly includes the United States, there is no need to worry about suffering a contemporary Thermopylae – that is, a final defeat in battle that removes one side’s entire military force apparatus from the field. There is, however, considerable irony to any such alleged freedom from worry. It is this: From our present American vantage point, preventing classical military defeat can no longer automatically assure our safety from mega-aggression or mega-terrorism.
In 480 BCE, at the now famously narrow pass at Thermopylae, the Persian king Xerxes literally annihilated the Spartan king Leonidas’ Greek armies. In those earlier days, such a devastatingly complete defeat of enemy military forces was an indispensable precondition to bringing grave harms to the enemy’s homeland. Not anymore.
For our most focused enemies – state, sub-state, and hybrid – there may no longer be any compelling reasons to work out what the generals typically call “force multipliers,” or even to calculate any optimal correlation of forces. Today, whatever our own diligently selected order of battle, some of these disparate enemies could wreak varying levels of harm upon us without first eliminating or even weakening our overwhelmingly powerful armies and navies. In some respects, at least, the still seemingly critical war outcomes in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan could ultimately turn out to be largely beside the point. This would be the case, for example, if enemy armies in those countries had all been effectively neutralized, but the expected incidence and magnitude of terror-attacks coming from Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan were still dangerously high.
Another pertinent case is North Korea. If, for example, US forces were to “win” against the regular army, air and naval forces of Pyongyang, that country could sometime (not quite yet) still inflict unprecedented levels of nuclear destruction upon U.S. or allied territories. In this connection, the most plausible scenario would involve the aftermath of an American attempt to preempt against certain developing North Korean nuclear assets and infrastructures. Such an attempt, one that Trump would then likely claim as a permissible expression of anticipatory self-defense, already seems increasingly plausible.
To date, our national security vulnerabilities generally represent the predictable by-product of constantly evolving military and terrorist technologies. To ensure that these vulnerabilities remain safely below any insufferable existential threshold – by definition, an unassailable goal – the United States will soon have to more suitably integrate all intersecting or even synergistic military options. Trump will also have to take a fresh look at ensuring viable arrangements for active and passive defenses, and, as corollary, at preparations for advanced cyber-defense and cyber-war.
In the unquestionably primal matters of war and peace, our new president must soon acknowledge, there can be nothing more practical than a well thought out and appropriately nuanced strategic doctrine. Immediately, therefore, he must learn to face the always-stubborn fact that our fragile American civilization could sometime be made to suffer without first going down to any traditional forms of national military defeat. This counter-intuitive conclusion will be a very difficult lesson for this president to learn, but the alternative could cause the United States to continually allocate available military resources according to fundamentally misconceived operational objectives.
For Trump, there is also some related good news. This is that what is now threatening to us, as Americans, is similarly threatening to our major enemies. Like us, these adversarial states and terror-groups will also have to confront consequential security vulnerabilities in the absence of suffering any prior military defeats.
For example, even if we don’t expressly “win” against determined Islamic State group forces in Syria or Iraq, these terrorist fighters could still be forced to suffer very grave harms at the hands of our military and its assorted allies. Similarly, even if an American preemption did not successfully overturn the regime in North Korea or fully defeat Kim Jong Un’s armies, it could still inflict overwhelming harms. All of this apparent good news is contingent upon enemy rationality, a preference-ordering where each relevant adversary consistently values its own collective survival more highly than anything else.
As an allegedly overriding objective of U.S. military planning, “winning” doesn’t now make any conceivable sense. In this connection, there are no longer any usefully measurable or applicable criteria of victory and defeat, especially in regard to our various sub-state terrorist adversaries. Moreover, in these starkly ambiguous times of diminished formal declarations and codifications, we can never ever know for certain whether any particular war is truly over (whether de jure or de facto), or if it is still active and ongoing.
Once again, this consequential lack of certainty is most notably problematic where terrorist sub-state or hybrid adversaries are our recognizable opponents.
Looking ahead, for America, “great military actions” should be guided solely by the presumptive operational requirements of readily identifiable wars and crises. Otherwise, as the poet St-John Perse had more generically observed, our rapidly expanding battlefields will be expansively littered with the bleached bones of wrongly sacrificed warriors. Amidst such utterly dreadful remainders of war, any once-heralded notions of victory and defeat would ring hollow indeed.
Reprinted with author’s permission from U.S. News
