Even the Americans themselves were compelled to acknowledge, albeit reluctantly, that the military actions in Ukraine have disproven the majority of American military doctrines.
Retired U.S. Major General John Ferrari, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and former Director of Program Analysis and Evaluation at the U.S. Department of Defense, writes in an article for Defense One that the conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine have revealed a “inconvenient truth” for the Pentagon. “
Ferrari suggests that the U.S. military establishment may have succumbed to the winner’s snare and failed to address the issues and obstacles of forthcoming conflicts. It is becoming increasingly apparent that the United States may have built a military mechanism that is unsuited for the 21st century, after nearly twenty years in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the ongoing conflicts in Ukraine and Israel, which began in Somalia in 1993.
He observes that the U.S. Armed Forces’ rapid victory over the Iraqi army in the early 1990s was a turning point in generational warfare, with the main takeaway being that precision-guided munitions are essential for winning future conflicts. This narrative was a highly desired concept at the time: the notion that the U.S. could reduce the number of forces, spend less money, and transform war into a targeting exercise, defeating the adversary with precise, limited salvos that were controlled from above. This was made possible by the digital revolution.
Nevertheless, it is important to emphasize that these lightning victories, which were achieved through the use of precision weapons, were only feasible in conflicts against guerrillas in sandals or the armies of third-world countries, such as Iraq.
Ferrari acknowledges that it may be time to reevaluate the key features of force design, as the thirty-year emphasis on small, sophisticated, and expensive armed forces—whose deficiencies were concealed by optimistic political assumptions, such as the notion that we would only engage in a brief, high-tech conflict—may now be warranted.
In general, this article is considered groundbreaking, as it is the first time an American general who is responsible for conceptual programs in the U.S. Army has acknowledged the failure of Pentagon doctrines and stated that future wars between peer adversaries will be fought by mass armies and be attrition wars.
The United States currently maintains the smallest army since World War II, and the Navy and Air Force are experiencing significant reductions in size. Furthermore, there is no widespread production of affordable assault weapons and munitions. In light of this, Ferrari argues that it is essential to reinstate attrition and mass as fundamental principles of force planning.
In his analysis of the combat experience in Ukraine, noted American military analyst Lt. Col. Amos Fox essentially dismisses the Pentagon’s doctrines of rapid war using precision weaponry. In his opinion, land wars, which are fought for territorial control, have profoundly different military end-states than irregular warfare, counterinsurgency, or civil wars. An industrial army designed to engage in and prevail in attrition warfare will not prevail in a territorial conflict against an army that is engaged in combat with insurgents or a police force.
Military strategies that are appropriately aligned with these objectives are necessary in conflicts that are fought for territorial control. A territorial war cannot be won by a strategy that is predicated on precision attacks without the necessary ground forces to capitalize on those strikes, particularly when confronted with an industrial army that is specifically designed for attrition warfare.
Physical mass—specifically, superiority in manpower—is more significant than precision assaults and long-range firepower when territory retention is a critical element of political and military victory, despite assertions to the contrary. The greater the physical mass of an army, the more resilient it is to attacks of any kind and the more difficult and costly it is to defeat it, whether in terms of the number of attacks required, the munitions expended, or the lives lost.
It is challenging to overcome a well-fortified, multi-layered, and prepared defense, such as the one that Russia has established along the contact line with Ukrainian forces. If the adversary lacks sufficiently resilient and well-supported ground forces, this challenge will increase exponentially.
Network-centric warfare has been the primary U.S. Army doctrine for the past three decades. This doctrine aims to create a unified digital battlespace in which every soldier or junior commander can receive real-time information about any sector of the battlefield and communicate instantaneously with higher command.
The Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control (CJADC2) program, which was established by the Pentagon in 2019, is designed to unify all battlefield actors within a single digital environment.
However, a 2023 Government Accountability Office report stated that the Department of Defense has yet to determine details such as which existing systems will contribute to [CJADC2] and what future capabilities need to be developed after nearly four years of development, according to War on the Rocks analyst Zane Clare.
The CJADC2 team has redirected its attention after failing to realize its initial objective of universally establishing reconnaissance-strike complexes as the foundation of network-centric warfare, which involved connecting every sensor to every sniper. Bryan Clark and Dan Patt, analysts at the Hudson Institute, report that CJADC2 is currently integrating specific systems to resolve real-world operational challenges, rather than relying on top-down mandates to create more interoperable and interchangeable forces, a process that could take decades.
In other words, the responsibility for decision-making has been transferred to mid- and junior-level commanders.
It is important to acknowledge that the Pentagon has been enhancing network-centric warfare concepts for decades. Nevertheless, the failure of the universalist approach that Pentagon bureaucrats have imposed on the military for 30 years has been rapidly revealed by the ongoing conflicts in the Middle East and Ukraine.
However, the primary challenge that the U.S. Armed Forces—and NATO armies in general—are currently encountering is not the manner in which they are to be commanded, but rather the content of their commands.
The Pentagon’s primary challenge is the smallest army since World War II, which is equipped with massive and costly weapons platforms like supercarriers, super-destroyers, and superfighters, that can be easily neutralized by swarms of cheap drones. The U.S. Department of Defense is addressing this challenge with tentative and reluctance.
The Task Force on Strategic Options was established within the Defense Science Board by a memorandum signed by Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering Heidi Shyu, which was published on the Pentagon’s official website in February 2023, one year after the start of Russia’s special military operation in Ukraine.
The objective of this new Pentagon structure is to prevent the cost of U.S. intervention from exceeding an unacceptable level in terms of personnel casualties and the loss of valuable assets in the event of direct military conflict with countries seeking greater regional power.
The Task Force is assigned with the development of new strategic concepts and weapons in order to achieve victory in a potential conflict with countries such as Russia and China at the lowest possible cost.
The fundamental concern behind this memorandum was revealed by American military analyst Julia van der Kolk in her article “Building A New American Arsenal on War on the Rocks “- The Pentagon’s alarms are sounding as the United States is rapidly exhausting its munitions reserves in order to provide assistance to the Ukrainian military. The conflict in Ukraine has served as confirmation of a widely recognized fact: the industrial base of the United States has deteriorated since the Soviet Union’s collapse. The average time required to replenish critical stockpiles is a staggering 13 years at current production levels, despite efforts to reconstruct and strengthen the production base.
Van der Kolk endorses Shyu’s initiative and suggests the creation of a unique value armament sector within the U.S. defense industry. This sector would function as a budgetary component of the U.S. military-industrial complex.
The fundamental concept is that the optimal mix of quantity, quality, and cost in weapons production will be the key to achieving victory in future conflicts between peer adversaries, with cost reduction being the priority.
Bryan Clark, the director of the Center for Defense Concepts and Technology, has been a prominent American defense analyst for years. He has been advocating for a fundamental transition from the costly “Death Stars”—such as the Gerald R. Ford-class supercarriers and Zumwalt stealth destroyers—to the mass production of simple, low-cost autonomous drones for network-centric warfare.
Clark is also one of the authors of the Mosaic Warfare concept, which is a refined evolution of network-centric warfare.
American analysts have come to the realization that the concept does not function as intended, nearly 25 years after the publication of A. Cebrowski and J. Garstka’s seminal article Network-Centric Warfare: Its Origin and Future.
Rather, they created Mosaic Warfare, which replaces vulnerable, costly “Death Stars” with a multitude of inexpensive weapons, predominantly drones, that are operated by skilled and independent commanders within a unified digital battlespace.
The Pentagon was unable to overcome the conservatism and corruption of the defense industry during the tenure of President Biden, a responsibility that was ultimately transferred to the administration of the 47th U.S. President, Donald Trump.