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When it comes to future conflicts or present-day war games, they have all the advantages and we have none! Or as Eric Edelman, a former undersecretary of defense for policy, told CNN recently, "Russia and China are playing a home game, we are playing an away game." And mind you, we're talking about a home game that could stretch from the Baltic Sea and the Arctic regions of Eurasia to the South China Sea. Those two "near-peer rivals" (as the U.S. military has taken to calling them) seem to have all the luck. I mean, count on one thing: imagined future flare points for conflict "a fictional global crisis erupting on multiple fronts" in those war games won't be in the Caribbean, off New York City, or near the Baja Peninsula. As a result, the U.S. will have to be fully prepared, at staggering expense, to deploy and support forces thousands of miles away for the future conflicts the Pentagon is now imagining.
Fortunately, that military is, it seems, planning ahead for just such a future. As CNN's Barbara Starr recently reported, this summer it's going to engage in highly classified computer war games with two near-peer enemies with fictional names. No one, however, should doubt for a second that they will be China and Russia. This will happen just as the next Pentagon budget is being set in place and, in a recent exercise gaming out a future conflict against such adversaries, an anonymous Defense Department official confirmed to Starr that "we found the Blue Team, the U.S. and allies, kept losing."
Uh-oh! And expect similar results again this summer especially since, if the U.S. military budget, already larger than that of the next 10 countries combined, is to grow even bigger, it will obviously be helpful for that military to look needy. As Dave DeCamp of the invaluable Antiwar.com wrote recently, "The results of the war games could have an impact on troop numbers around the world and could be a factor in making decisions on military budgets."
In this way, as retired Air Force lieutenant colonel, historian, and TomDispatch regular William Astore reports today, that military, after almost 20 years conducting a disastrously unsuccessful war on terror across much of the Greater Middle East and parts of Africa, is heading back to the future. It seems increasingly intent on returning to a Cold-War world its commanders remember oh-so-well from an era that, though almost 30 years gone, may now seem strangely consoling to a military that has been at sea (even when on land) for so long. Tom
Back to the Future at the Pentagon
Why 2021 Looks So Much Like 1981 And Why That Should Scare Us
The future isn't what it used to be. As a teenager in the 1970s, I watched a lot of TV science fiction shows, notably Space: 1999 and UFO, that imagined a near future of major moon bases and alien attacks on Earth. Movies of that era like Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey envisioned colossal spaceships and space stations featuring international crews on mind-blowing missions to Jupiter and beyond. Who'd have thought that, 20 years after Kubrick's alternate reality of 2001, we humans would effectively be marooned on a warming "sixth extinction" planet with no moon bases and, to the best of my knowledge, no alien attacks either.
Sure, there's been progress of a sort in the heavens. Elon Musk's Space X may keep going down in flames, but the Chinese now have their very own moon rocks. As the old-timey, unmanned Voyager probe continues to glide beyond our solar system, Mars is a subject for research by new probes hailing from the United Arab Emirates, China, and the U.S. Meanwhile, the International Space Station continues conducting research in low-earth orbit.
As with space exploration, so, too, with America's military. What amazes me most in 2021 is how much of its structure and strategy resembles what held sway in 1981 when I joined the Air Force as a college student in ROTC. Instead of futuristic starship troopers flying around with jetpacks and firing lasers, the U.S. military is still essentially building the same kinds of weaponry we were then. They're newer, of course, glitzier, if often less effective, but this country still has a Navy built around aircraft carriers, an Air Force centered on fighter jets and stealth bombers, and an Army based on tanks, helicopters, and heavy brigades. Admittedly, that Army may soon spend $20 billion on "augmented reality goggles" for the troops. (Perhaps those goggles will be programmed so that "reality" always looks like we win.)
As in the days of the old Cold War and we may indeed be heading into a new cold war in 2021 America is even witnessing a $100-billion revival of land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles, weapons that were vulnerable by the 1960s and obsolete by the 1980s. Consider them doubly-obsolete and no less escalatory in the 2020s. And despite having an ever larger and overly secretive military within the military, Special Operations Command, today's forces are generally structured in a way eerily similar to those I joined two generations ago. Think of it as the Pentagon's version of science fiction in which stasis rules instead of progress.
It's true, of course, that, thanks to the vanity of our last president, a new Space Force has been added to the services (though without moon bases, alien interceptors, or much of anything else yet). And one sci-fi-style "advance," drone warfare, has become increasingly automated and unbounded. Otherwise, this country's war song of 2021 remains much the same as 2001 or even 1981. It still has a force structure designed first and foremost to deter and defeat another great power like China and Russia, the very bogeymen I first raised my right hand to defend America against 40 years ago. Indeed, the Cold War is simply being rebooted and rebranded for a new century, a century more likely to be China's than America's.
Nowadays, instead of speaking about the "containment" of communism and the Soviet Union, as in the Cold War, the talk is of prevailing in "near-peer" conflicts. (Note how the U.S. military may have near-peers but is ultimately peerless, since there can't be any question that we're number one, militarily speaking.) Who are those "near-peers" so intent on challenging America and spoiling our freedom-driven version of imperialism? China and Russia, mainly, with Iran and North Korea tossed in as minor-league risks. Again, for my 1981 junior military self, it's de'jà vu all over again. Iran as a perfidious enemy? Check. Russia and China as autocratic menaces? Check. An unpredictable North Korea? Check.
Thinking about this the other day, I realized that the generals and admirals currently making force-structure decisions for our military are my contemporaries. They're men (and a few women) who, like me, are in their late fifties and early sixties. They came of age as I did after the calamity of the Vietnam War and largely agree, I assume, that President Ronald Reagan's defense buildup of the 1980s was instrumental in the collapse of the Soviet Union and America's putative victory in the Cold War. They're still going with what they know, and what they know are aircraft carriers, fighter jets, and tanks, with plenty of nukes thrown in as what still passes for a "deterrent."
Is this a classic case of a known tendency among military commanders to prepare for the next war by refighting the last one? Or is there even more at work here? And if, by the way, this country supposedly won the last Cold War roughly 30 years ago, why is our military so earnestly preparing to contest it again, using essentially the same weapons and mindset? Why risk refighting a war you've already won?
Before tackling these questions, consider the moment when I joined the military. In 1981, America's armed forces were still recovering from the trauma of defeat in Vietnam (and Laos and Cambodia). And if there was one thing the Pentagon knew for sure, it was this: it didn't want to repeat the disaster of the Vietnam War ever again. The safe way to go was to focus on the Cold War against President Ronald Reagan's term the "evil empire" of the Soviet Union. Such a course had the particular benefit of feeding and fattening the military-industrial complex in the Reagan era without the need to fight another disastrous counterinsurgency war.
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