Dear Sir or Ma’am:
I fought in Operation Iraqi Freedom as a member of an elite U.S. Army Infantry unit. I was far from the best Soldier to ever wear the uniform. But I did have the physical toughness to make it through the U.S. Army Infantry School and the courage to get on a plane with a rifle and go to war, and I’m quite proud of that. I was a small part of a noble tradition.
I was also part of what may be the last of generation of fire-and-maneuver warfare. The Napoleonic wars ushered in the era of fire-and-maneuver warfare. You will learn its principles when you study Clausewitz, as you inevitably will. Clausewitz learned the lessons of Napoleon, and mixed German profundity with French specificity in his writing. After reading Clausewitz you will never be able to return to your prior thinking because—in addition to gaining clever tactical insights—you will see the big picture of the nation as a base for drawing resources and producing military capability.
We have entered a new era of war and of the profession of arms. We are no longer in the age of modern war. We are in the age of postmodern war. I call this new style of war target-and-deploy warfare. Target-and-deploy warfare sounds simple: target an asset and deploy a capability to service that target. But target-and-deploy warfare is anything but. First, the asset being targeted could be anything from an individual, group, infrastructure, system, node, network, ideology, or even public opinion. The capability could be anything from a leaflet written in some attempt at Arabic or Farsi to a classified drone technology so advanced it does not even have a proper name. To make matters worse, the battlespace is now global in so many senses I shudder at the prospect of having to unpack them all.
This notion of targeting and deploying a capability, since I am using terms like asset and capability so broadly, might not sound like something all that new. After all, is it not the case that this has been precisely how armed conflicts have been fought from time immemorial? What makes it a new style of warfare is its relationship to other forms of fighting. Target-and-deploy warfare is now dominant and is to a significant degree replacing other forms of warfare, at least as a substitute if not an outright new framework for approaching problems that require some form of controlled aggression to resolve.
To effectively contend with these new realities you as a military leader will need to be politically astute, culturally sensitive, and technically proficient in ways that are increasingly demanding. To best understand assets you will have to understand their value in a dynamic political context. To best prioritize and ultimately decide upon the assets to target you will need to be able to reliably anticipate the cultural impact of servicing those targets with available capabilities. To best deploy capabilities under your command you might need a working knowledge of the technical details of advanced physics, electrical engineering, artificial intelligence, population genetics, or number theory.
The actual practice of target-and-deploy warfare may not explicitly eschew strategy—but it is not altogether strategic. This practice is point-specific and exhaustively comprised of tactics with no general strategic direction. The emergence of radical context-specificity has changed war and mission planning. For instance, it stands to reason almost by definition that a very important asset to focus on is the high value target. But what gives the target its “high value” character is context-specific and contingent upon the position of the target in a network of similarly-situated nodes. Yet, future military leaders will need to evolve beyond contemporary thinking and must be Clausewitzian enough to understand how to shape a nation capable of sustained engagement in this kind of war and how to employ national advantages into producing a new and, with any luck, favorable political reality. There may be many small moving parts, but you will have to be able to follow all the action while keeping sight of something much larger and more ominous.
The security environment you will have to map, model, and dominate will require full spectrum responses. The most overwhelming dangers that you will face are not just a threat to the nation, but potentially to the survival of the species. These threats include:
•Strategic (nuclear) war and nuclear terrorism,
•epidemiological and natural disasters,
•essential resource depletion and ecological collapse,
•global financial crises and economic depression, and
•Great power conflicts.
The nature of these threats is such that no nation, however mighty, can face them alone. The future of true security requires political and military integration to accompany the already occurring economic integration. A corollary of this is that a future role for military leaders, both in uniform and civilian, is the planning of civil-military integration with other nations. You will also need to be armed with the intellectual curiosity on required only of general staff officers, as you shape policy as part of unconventional units, or conventional units with unconventional missions. Future military leaders need to think broadly about what security truly means for the people of the nation, and not just rely on provincial conventional thinking about the national interest. The national interest may seem relatively concrete, but it is no less abstract than our shared interests in the global commons. I wish you the best.
Sincerely,
Nathan Jaco