Secret of Future Defeat

Throughout the past 15 years, both the Western allies and the Russians have entered into a series of military engagements that have in one way or another spectacularly failed to achieve the results intended, namely a decisive military victory which would in turn deliver a solution to the original political problem. The nature of US military operations in the recent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan has achieved dramatic military victories but has failed to deliver the political aims of the conflicts. Many analysts attempt to explain the phenomenon by describing changes in the strategic environment that have rendered conventional interstate warfare ineffective or even irrelevant or obsolete. Many even claim that the age of conventional warfare is over, and that the world has transitioned to a new irregular paradigm of conflict. Other analysts point to organizational and cultural preferences for conventional warfare or for material-based or technological solutions that are inappropriate to the situation. However, these concepts are merely symptoms, or at best precipitating causes and not the proximate cause of this seeming lack of military effectiveness in securing national policy objectives. Instead, the principal cause of the lack of efficacy in the modern military art is a flawed conceptual approach and design to current joint and Army doctrine. Conceptually, the essential problem is that combat operations and stability operations are fundamentally different forms of operations, yet are tightly interconnected. To resolve this tension, a military doctrine must not only account for both combat and stability operations, but must also effectively integrate the two into a comprehensive and workable framework. Although current US joint doctrine and the Army’s doctrine of Full Spectrum Operations both include stability operations, their flawed conceptual approaches intersect to produce an unworkable operational framework for the conduct of both stability operations and combat

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