By Ann Roosevelt
Facing the complexity and uncertainty of military operations in the 21st century, the military must make superiority in irregular warfare a core capability, according to a top general.
“We’re superior to the enemy in terms of nuclear warfare right now…we are superior in conventional warfare…we are not superior in irregular warfare and that’s what we’ve got to do,” Marine Gen. James Mattis, NATO Allied Commander Transformation (ACT), and Commander, U.S. Joint Forces Command (JFCOM), said in an address at a Foreign Policy Research Institute conference in Washington, D.C., on Feb. 12.
As Mattis has said previously, militaries transform, change and modernize because of one thing: “they’ve identified a problem and solved it.”
However, the fundamental nature doesn’t change, he said. “If I was to sum up everything I’ve learned in 35 years of wearing this uniform, it would be summed up in three words when you go into a fight: improvise, improvise, improvise.”
The more militaries study and try to anticipate and solve problems ahead of conflict, the less they will have to improvise, he said.
Working to get it right, JFCOM wrote the Joint Operating Environment (JOE), which laid out what the future operating environment looks like. It examined the big trends such as climate change and demographics and examined the military implications for joint operations. Thus, the JOE lays out the problem.
The JOE then was incorporated into Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Mike Mullen’s Capstone Concept for Joint Operations (CCJO), which describes how the joint force is going to operate in the future. This was an effort where Mullen was very hands on.
The common theme of the CCJO implications is the creation of a balanced, more adaptive and versatile force. Within that, the services must “improve knowledge of and capabilities for waging irregular warfare,” the CCJO states.
“Now we take that solution and we test it, we experiment with it, we shoot holes in it, that sort of thing,” Mattis said. “We have all sorts of people help us…Because if we don’t set the problem right we are probably going to get it wrong.”
If the concepts are wrong, as Israel found in the second Lebanon war, people will die and the objective won’t be accomplished, he said.
“Our job is not to get it [the future] 100 percent correct–you will never get it 100 percent correct–we just don’t want to get it completely wrong,” he said.
In the 21st century, warfare is certain, the United States will fight in coalitions and will be fighting against enemies in hybrid conditions, Mattis said.
When asked why the term “irregular” war is used, Mattis said, “if we don’t set up some type of tension, some kind of magnet to pull the department out of its mano-a-mano conventional war, if we don’t do that, we won’t shift the budgeting, we won’t shift the focus over to where it has to go.”
Essentially, the military does not want U.S. forces to be dominant and irrelevant in the future, he said. This can be avoided by getting the right problem and solution.
“You take on the U.S. Air Force or Navy aviation or Marine aviation at 15,000 feet in a fighter, NATO air forces, you only have one role: fugitive,” Mattis said. “You better fly away real fast or you’re going to be shot out of the air. You take on the U.S. Navy in the high seas, they’ll burn you to the water line–that’s all there is to it. You take on the U.S. Army in the open desert, in open terrain in mechanized warfare the Army will annihilate you, and will take on whatever the air forces leave untouched, which won’t be much.”
But the U.S. military is not superior in is irregular warfare, and that will be addressed, he said.
“We are going to make irregular warfare per Secretary Gates’ speech about balance, we are going to make it a core competency of the U.S. military.”
The military will now work out who does what, he said. Not every service will have or need the same irregular expertise matching expertise and capability in conventional and nuclear capability. But it does lead to full spectrum capabilities.
“The bottom line is, we’ve identified what we think is the fundamental problem and that is gaining competency at the national level and right down to the tactical level under strategic to tactical compression in irregular warfare without surrendering our nuclear superiority and our conventional superiority behind which the international community gains great benefit.”
Consider that a year ago Mattis would have said border changes in Europe would be unlikely. However, borders were changed by force in Europe in Georgia.
What that says about the future is, “we surrender our superiority in conventional war at our own peril. You think it’s expensive to keep a conventional war force alive. It’s a lot more expensive to have to fight a conventional war.
“The paradox of war is the enemy will always move against your perceived weakness,” Mattis said. “So either we maintain conventional war superiority with very well trained and educated leaders, and that includes enlisted leaders, who can fight across the spectrum and adapt to the kind of surprises that we know are coming, again we know surprises are coming, or we’re going to end up creating the very thing we don’t want, which is a conventional war.”