Real Clear Defense Phase Zero of the Coming War By Andrew A. Michta September 06, 2024

 Real Clear Defense

Phase Zero of the Coming War

By Andrew A. Michta

September 06, 2024

Hans-Jörg Walter with material from Imago

The world today is more fractured and unstable than at any time since the end of the Cold War, and by all indications we are heading for a period of protracted systemic instability, with Europe, the Middle East and the Indo-Pacific increasingly at risk of descending into a wider general war.  The war in Ukraine is in its third year since Russia’s second invasion, and the war in the Middle East threatens to escalate into a major regional conflict between Israel and Iran.  China and Russia are arming at speed and scale, while the United States and its European allies continue to lag when it comes to defense spending and defense production.  Russia and China are de facto allies, having openly declared a “no-limits” partnerships that forms the core of the new “Axis of Dictatorships,” aided and supported by Iran and North Korea.  China, which has surpassed the United States as the manufacturing powerhouse, continues to bid for regional hegemony in the Indo-Pacific as it works to unravel the power balance in Asia.  For its part, Russia continues to pursue its revisionist course in an attempt to re-litigate the post-Cold War settlement and re-establish its empire in Eastern Europe.   At the same time, the United States is politically split, threatened both from within and without.  And while NATO maintains its political support for Ukraine, Europe remains divided when it comes to appetite for risk-taking, with countries further away from the eastern flank reluctant to spend the money to rearm.  

Over the past two decades America expended vast resources to fight scheduled wars that, at a strategic level, resulted in failure.  The grand “nation-building” and “state-building” projects pursued by successive administrations, Democrat and Republican, depleted our national resources, shrank the nation’s military to the point where we are able to fight only in one major theater, reduced and consolidated our defense industrial base such that we no longer have the capacity to produce weapons and munitions at speed and scale, and most of all, sapped public confidence that our leaders are able to provide effectively for our security and defense, and to do so at an acceptable cost.  During the two decades of the Global War on Terror and “overseas contingency operations” we seem to have forgotten the basic verities of great power politics, i.e., that there is no substitute for hard power, and that in a state-on-state near-peer conflict a country’s military capabilities ultimately rest on its manufacturing capacity, its manpower reserves, and its human capital, for without them no nation will have the requisite resilience to deter and, if need be, defeat its enemies.   

For over a decade the policy community in Washington has spoken of a new era of “strategic competition” between great powers.  This narrative has been replete with normative assertions about defending the “rules-based international order,” as though a values-based rhetoric could overshadow our growing hard power deficit.  Perhaps that is one reason why our policy elites and our key national security documents have studiously avoided using the “w” word, as in “war.”  However, the reality is that the United States and its allies are not engaged in strategic competition; rather we are already in Phase Zero of a protracted conflict with Russia and China, with the adversaries shaping the terrain in real time and space, as well as through cyber and influence operations.  We face this challenge amid significant resource constraints and with a diminished defense industrial base.  Today the United States has a military too small for the task of fighting a two-theater war, and our defense spending is about half of what we spent on average during the Cold War. 

We are deficient when it comes to national resilience, and are vulnerable to malicious actors exploiting our critical infrastructure through cyber.  Russia has made significant strides in some aspects of military technology, especially in hypersonics and nuclear submarine propulsion.   About a decade ago China overtook the United States with the largest navy in the world; it is currently building the equivalent of the entire British Royal Navy every two years.[i]  For its part, Russia has put its entire economy on a war footing, reconstituting its armor at rates that allow it to field over a thousand tanks a year, both refurbished and new production.   At the same time, China and Russia produce their weapon systems and munitions at a fraction of the cost of that of the U.S. defense industry.  The U.S. approach to weapons procurement, which has prioritized ever-more exquisite and capable systems that the Services can buy only in limited numbers, has left us with no choice but – as was the case when we helped defend Israel from its recent attack by Iran – to shoot millions of dollars in ordnance at drones that cost a few thousand dollars to produce.

The United States needs a generational investment in defense, an effort that will require the next administration to articulate a clear vision of victory – not in normative terms and values, but one that speaks directly to geopolitics, our economic welfare, and the security of our homeland.  We need a strategy that returns national security priorities to our economic policy-making, speaks directly to the imperative of re-shoring our critical manufacturing and supply chains, and most all is grounded in the clear articulation of the hierarchy of our national interests.  Those critical of increased defense spending argue that the American public will not support more military spending, but the truth is that as of today nobody has made a clear case to the public about how dangerous the international system has become, and what is at stake.  We need our leaders to address plainly the reality that Russia constitutes a chronic threat to transatlantic security, and that China poses an existential threat to the United States and its allies, in Europe and Asia alike, for it seeks to build a system of global governance resting on its economic and military power.  Until we have these issues put front and center before the American public, no “pivot to Asia” or “China first” or any other similar strategic sleight of hand will give us a path forward that can preserve and defend the United States’ vital national security interests, keep our homeland safe and maintain our access to resources worldwide. 

Andrew A. Michta is Senior Fellow and Director of the Scowcroft Strategy Initiative at the Atlantic Council of the United States. Views expressed here are his own.