“Like the European powers at the start of World War I, we could find ourselves tremendously unprepared,” said Tom Mahnken, president of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. “We’re likely to find ourselves surprised, and unpleasantly surprised.”…
Now, Work and Milley aren’t resigned. They’re exploring new technologies and concepts — Multi-Domain Battle, the Third Offset Strategy, human-machine teaming — to give the US a winning edge. But it’s a truly brutal problem to solve, and a recent interview with the head of arguably the most influential thinktank on future conflict made clear that the hard thinking’s hardly begun…
“It’s a good thing that the Defense Department senior leadership has begun talking about great power competition” — in essence, deterring Russia and China instead of bombing terrorist thugs — “but I think we are at the very early stages of thinking through what that’s going to mean,” Mahnken said.