Provocations - Michael J. Mazarr and
The Folly of 'Asymmetric War'
The rapidly emerging conventional wisdom in U.S. defense policy suggests that the dominant threats we face today and will face over the coming decades are nontraditional, asymmetrical, and insurgent-terrorist in character, rather than the large-scale, interstate wars about which U.S. defense planners obsessed from the 1930s until about 1989. According to this line of thinking, U.S. force structure, doctrine, planning, and procurement programs ought to shift to meet this new series of threats, toward combating terrorism, insurgencies, "fourth generation wars," and the like. This conventional wisdom builds on thoughtful concepts of the future of warfare and has the best interests of the United States very much at heart but, if taken seriously, would distort U.S. defense priorities for years to come and trap the U.S. armed forces in endless conflicts that military power cannot win.
Some sort of paradigm shift in the nature of conflict may in fact be underway. Interstate war has indeed become less likely. What is open to serious question, however, is the implication that major components of U.S. military forces ought to be specialized for asymmetric, nontraditional forms of warfare, particularly their most elaborate and demanding versions: counterinsurgency and nation building. The U.S. defense community may have jumped to a conclusion that, on closer examination, is neither obvious nor warranted. Redirecting U.S. military forces substantially to an asymmetric threat is misguided for three reasons. First, it allows U.S. national security officials and military planners to ignore the real degree of the revolution in conflict that is underway. Second, it promises to get and keep the United States involved in conflicts in which it is often counterproductive to become militarily embroiled. Finally, it risks forfeiting the much more important global role for U.S. military power: deterring and responding to major conventional aggression. The argument here is not that the United States should ignore asymmetric conflicts around the globe or that they pose no threat to U.S. interests. Rather, such conflicts represent less of a threat to the United States than has become fashionable to assume, and the military instrument of statecraft is the wrong tool to deal with them. The United States should powerfully enhance its efforts to reduce instability, conflict, and radicalism in key areas of the world and to shore up institutionalization and governance in critical states. It should do so, however, by relying on an expanded and deepened set of nonmilitary tools and do so largely in an anticipatory and collaborative manner rather than an ex post facto and interventionist one.
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