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These ideas are discussed at length in A Swift, Elusive Sword by Col. Chester Richards (Ret.), a study published by the Center for Defense Information.
1.
Two great military strategists - the most ancient one, Sun Tzu, and a 20th Century one, the late Air Force Col. John Boyd - have much relevance for today's world, and for future U.S. national security strategy. Broadly, these strategists focused on how to win by outmaneuvering an enemy mentally, so as to limit the need for actual combat.
2.
Sun Tzu and Boyd suggested that military force is not the only, or necessarily the best, means of achieving national goals. Excessive or inappropriate use of force breeds resentment and plants the seeds of future conflict.
3.
In grand strategy, Boyd emphasized the approach of attracting allies to one's own side, and subtracting them from an opponent's side.
4.
Boyd suggested that success in conflict and war depends most upon people, then ideas, and least upon hardware.
5.
The strategies of Sun Tzu and Boyd focused on two major and complementary elements: creating "harmony" and cohesion on one's own side, and fostering chaos and paralysis on the other side.
6.
One tool for creating chaos is to surround the opponent with sustained ambiguity, deception, surprise, isolation, and menace, for example by pursuing multiple approaches and attacks, then switching between them and developing new thrusts faster than the opponent can cope. This involves the interplay of the expected and unexpected, the orthodox and unorthodox, distracting moves and decisive moves - or in Sun Tzu's terminology, cheng and ch'i.
7.
U.S. military thinking and planning is largely stuck in second-generation, industrial age warfare of bloody and destructive attrition, based in part on the works of 19th Century strategist Carl von Clausewitz. Because of U.S. dominance in this type of warfare, however, opponents instead are likely to fight using the ideas of Sun Tzu and Boyd — either using third-generation maneuver warfare (between regular armed forces) or, more likely, fourth-generation irregular warfare (involving terrorist, asymmetrical, and guerrilla attacks on vulnerable military units, population, infrastructure, culture, institutions, and society).
8.
To allow a transition to third- and fourth-generation warfare capabilities, the strategy of Sun Tzu and Boyd suggests that the U.S. military needs to give primacy to people. Broken leadership and fraying cohesion in the military needs to be fixed, in part by ending constant personnel rotation among units, halting the system of automatic and premature discharge of officers, and training and empowering officers to exercise more initiative.
9.
The military also needs to end its fixation on complex hardware. High-tech hardware is not only unreliable and extremely expensive, but — even worse — it creates complex organizations to build, deploy, operate, supply, and fix it. Complex, ponderous bureaucracies and organizations are unsuited to exercising the most important components of third- and fourth-generation warfare strategy: agility, quickness, flexibility, responsiveness, creativity, initiative.
10.
U.S. forces should be structured and equipped so that they: are agile and flexible; provide commanders with multiple options; can switch between different thrusts quickly; continuously reshape themselves through experimentation and training; and most importantly, are well-led.
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