The United States today suffers from a critical deficit in strategic thinking about the most consequential challenge of the current era: the rise of China and the threat it poses to U.S. interests in the western Pacific and beyond. Addressing that deficit is a matter of the utmost importance and urgency.
The prospect of 21st-century great power war is terra incognita. The vast majority of officers in the U.S. armed forces and civil servants in the U.S. government entered service after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Union. For them, the notion of great power competition is at best a theoretical and historical matter; it is certainly not one of personal experience. The novelty of the current situation is compounded by the emergence of new technologies, concepts of operations, and organizations that presage wars that will look very different from past conflicts.
It is the professional obligation of U.S. military leaders to ensure the U.S. armed forces are prepared to fight and win the nation’s wars, including developing strategies and supporting joint operational concepts to do so. As Vice Admiral Stansfield Turner noted during his first convocation address at the Naval War College in 1972, the military “profession can only retain its vitality so long as we ourselves are pushing the frontiers of knowledge in our field.”1 It is the role of civilian leaders to hold the military accountable for developing approaches to meet the challenges the nation faces, not wish them away. Similarly, it is the responsibility of civilian leaders to define the parameters within which strategy and concepts are developed, to include the political constraints and operational assumptions that are necessary to ensure new ways of war are politically useful and strategically relevant.