Denying an enemy access to a particular piece of air, land or sea is a strategy as old as warfare but the term entered the popular military consciousness in the late 1990s and the early 2000s as a shorthand for the modern threat the U.S. faces as precision weapons proliferate to potential adversaries, Bryan Clark with the Center for Budgetary and Strategic Assessments told USNI News on Monday.
The A2/AD grew in popularity in the early 2000s as the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessments – headed then by Andrew Marshall – focused on China’s military capability.
“Over time China’s development of long-range precision strike capabilities would provide it with the means to begin shifting the military balance in the western Pacific progressively in its favor, increasing the risks that [Beijing] would one day be tempted to undertake coercive or aggressive acts against U.S. allies and partners in the region,” wrote Andrew F. Krepinevich and Barry D. Watts in their book on Andrew Marshall, The Last Warrior: Andrew Marshall and the Shaping of Modern American Defense Strategy.
Since then, “as a shorthand it’s probably outlived its usefulness,” Clark said