The New Rules of War is a strategic re-imagining of the American armed forces that adepts to integrate new tactics made possible by modern tactics. Most of what we’ve learned in this arena means adopting the successful tactics of non-state actors, mostly terrorists but not terror. The discussion was detailed but completely lacked any discussion of the opportunity cost of such a policy. The author John Arguilla is a professor of defense analysis at the U.S. Naval Postgraduate School so he could probably flesh out the sorts of trade-offs we’d be making by pursuing this strategy. Foreign Policy gave him plenty of ink for it too. I’d be quite surprised that a smaller, faster, more spread out, and decentralized military would be more effective and cheaper across all forms of conflict.
The article is also wide open to the Lucas critique, strategic outcomes reflect equilibrium decision not off equilibrium ones. The reason Al-Queda in Iraq uses decentralized warfare is because of our massive conventional military superiority. If we didn’t have it then they’d have fought us the other way. Yes, America has massively dominated the skies for decades, but only by spending on advanced technology that has discouraging others from bothering. If you stagnate then others have the incentive to generate a next generation plane and we see different behavior. If you stop building submarines than other navies can build them to protect their ships. It within a framework of sky, water, and land dominance that we are able to fore our enemies to harass us. If we stopped investing in that stuff then maybe tanks, ships, artillery, and ships don’t look as old fashioned as weapons against us.
Also, for all the criticisms of modern American war, it is interesting that we have fought a war in two countries for almost a decade and that it still remains that entitlements are the biggest part of the budget. These wars are as cheap for us as any big wars have ever been. The casualties while tragic have been low and in the interim our Islamofascist enemies are unpopular and remain out of power. They have to live in caves without power or clean water while our way of life remains mostly unchanged. We may not be winning (though I believe we slowly are) but they do not appear to be winning.
