**Fighting on the Edges: The Nature of War in 2020**

**by Major General Robert Scales, USA (ret.)**

**The views expressed in this and other papers associated with the NIC
2020 project**

**are those of individual participants. They are posted for discussion
purposes**

**only and do not represent the views of the US Government.**

**Fighting on the Edges: The Nature of War in 2020**

**by Major General Robert Scales, USA (ret.)**

If the past is prologue a decade and a half will produce very little
change in the nature and character of warfare. Nor will the
technologies, structures and apportionment of the defense establishment
change all that much either. Bureaucratic friction, fiscal inertia and
the traditional cold war fixation on big ticket programs and platforms
will ensure that apportionment of the budget among services and agencies
will remain about where it is today.

The enemies most challenging to our vital interests will continue to
challenge in familiar ways. Systems and organizations currently
undergoing transformation will continue along expected courses. Change
will occur in the margins driven more by changes in the enemy's
attitudes and actions toward the United States rather than by any
farsighted directional shift made either by enemies or by US policy
makers anticipating a new era of warfare. During the Cold War dominance
of the global strategic environment allowed the United States in large
measure to influence the course of military confrontations and more
often than not the actions of the enemy. The Soviet Union might have
reacted forcefully to American actions but ultimately they danced to the
tune played by the United States. In this new era of conflict it is the
United States that must play to the tune composed by others whose
actions remain both unfamiliar and difficult to anticipate. In a word,
the initiative has shifted to the other side. The course of conflict,
its nature and shape will be determined by red, not blue.

The world of 2020 will remain threatening across the entirety of the
spectrum of conflict: from unconventional warfare on the left to the
threat of thermonuclear warfare on the extreme right. By then the United
States will have gained an even more secure hold on the middle of the
spectrum. Even with fiscal discipline driven by a burgeoning deficit the
American military dominance in precision strike and the ability to see
the battlefield with great clarity will prevent an enemy's ground forces
from winning conventional set piece land engagements. The United States
will continue to own the seas and skies. While non western enemies may
gain the wealth to acquire sophisticated air and sea weapons they will
not likely gain the organizational skills to employ them with any degree
of competence. Simply put: those nations capable of practicing the
western way of war competently will not fight us and those inept in the
practice will. It is a curious fact and testimony to the horrifically
high price western warfare demands that it would be in America's best
interest for competitors to spend themselves into penury chasing a
conventional western style technological advantage that they will never
be able to apply effectively on the battlefield.

However the more solidly the United States dominates the middle the more
likely an enemy will seek advantage at the ends. Adversaries will
continue to internalize the lessons from recent conflicts. They have
learned that the only profitable way to challenge American conventional
superiority will be to threaten at the extreme ends of the spectrum:
either on the right by possessing nuclear weapons and demonstrating the
resolve to use them to impede American intrusion or on the left where
unconventional methods will allow a disadvantaged adversary the means to
turn a short sharp war into a lengthy and costly war of attrition.

The war against a terrorist ideology will continue to demand that the
United States focus on its Middle Eastern adversaries, both state and
non state. Losing a conflict there exposes America's most vulnerable
center of gravity: available fossil fuels. While other regions may
harbor terrorists only in the Middle East are the densities of Islamic
fundamentalists sufficient to create a mass of evil sufficient to
threaten the vital interests of the United States. Perhaps in the
distant future enemies may appear in other regions but for now the only
true threat comes from the Middle East. Middle Eastern enemies gain
strength in the knowledge that while they are 0 and 7 when fighting wars
western style against Israel and the United States so far at least they
can claim a record of 5-0-1 in unconventional fights against Israel, the
Soviet Union and the United States. Even a leader with the intellectual
vacuity of Saddam Hussein understood this fact the second time around
and eschewed the use of fighter aircraft, tanks and integrated air
defenses to favor fighting in pickups, SUVs and on foot using shoulder
fired SAMs, AK 47s and RPGs. Success is there for all to see and
emulate. There is no reason not to expect that Middle Eastern enemies
will deviate from this pattern of behavior over the next decade and a
half.

From a grand strategic perspective not much will change over the next
fifteen years. In spite of the certainty of the threat from the left the
United States has no choice but to remain strong at all points along the
spectrum. Most of the nation's resources will be devoted to holding the
center. Without question, the maintenance of overwhelming air and sea
strength must remain a cornerstone of American defense policy. In the
future as the practical application of warmaking activity shifts toward
the left conventional air and sea weapons will increasingly become more
conventional instruments for deterrence rather than weapons to be
employed in great numbers against competent enemies who possess and can
use them effectively.

This change in warmaking emphasis will demand a subtle realignment of
defense priorities in which air and sea components will contribute to a
strategic holding action intended to hedge the advantage in these
dimensions. The long term goal will be to build and improve air and sea
capabilities just enough so that America might remains uncontested on
the seas and in the air while committing the Air Force and Navy to the
greater and most dangerous task of improving their capabilities for
supporting a protracted Middle Eastern ground war fought at the center-
left of the spectrum. Seapower in particular must remain visibly robust
in order to prevent others from making a run at American hegemony on the
seas. The most sweeping change in naval posture will be directed toward
the task of supporting actions ashore. Specifically, they will slowly
begin to transfer funds from air and missile defense and big ship
programs and increase the numbers of systems devoted to getting ground
forces to a distant theater quickly and supporting them with fires one
ashore. Increasingly the "Navy Marine Corps Team" will become an
anachronism as the Navy begins to devote a more proportionate balance of
resources to support all ground forces acting together in protracted
ground campaigns.

Air forces, to include aerial systems from all services, will continue
to be a deterrent hedge essential for maintaining America's absolute
dominance of the third dimension. Dominance of the air will remain the
sole nonnegotiable advantage of American military power. The fundamental
premise of the American way of war is the assumption that the
battlefield will always be safe from enemy aerial intrusions. The focus
of air forces will gravitate downward. The challenge over the next
decade and a half will be to improve the manner in which the aerial arms
exploit this dominance on the ground...in a cost effective fashion. Thus
the air to air function will diminish in proportion to the lessening of
the enemy air threat. Job one will be the increasingly more challenging
task of transporting ground forces to distant and relatively
inaccessible places, sustaining them there and providing them with
discrete, surgical, timely and intimate precision fires.

Not much can be said in terms of defense policy regarding the right of
the spectrum. The United States to be sure will be challenged to keep
the number of nuclear club members to a minimum. The only heartening
prospect is that with the exception of Iran and Pakistan most nations
that succeed in joining the club will do so without creating much of a
threat to American strategic interests. Even Pakistan's membership will
remain relatively benign. Pakistan's nuclear face off with India is
simply none of our business and as long as the spread of radical Islam
doesn't infect that nation the odds of a nuclear threat to the United
States from there remains remote. The principal task at the right end
will be to thwart nuclear blackmail from states temped to join with
Islamic fundamentalists to create nuclear mischief.

Given that the focus of American strategic interest will be on
prosecuting military operations at the left end of the spectrum what do
these realities portend for the future of warfare? First, Heisenberg's
law is at play on the left. The increased attention placed there by the
world's greatest super power and the reaction to that attention by
Middle Eastern enemies will change the shape and slope of the spectrum
considerably. Conflicts there will become more frequent and protracted.
The spectral lines will become compressed on the left as the dividing
line between conventional and unconventional war will continue to merge.

Battle lines will solidify along the traditional fault line between
Western and Islamic cultures. As the magnet of intercultural conflict
increasingly draws both together the probability that the United States
will be obliged to fight any mirror image culture such as Western
Europe, Japan or even China will grow increasingly remote. Enemies in
the Islamic world will spot us dominance of the air and sea in exchange
for the opportunity to fight a protracted ground war that begins on the
extreme left with protracted terrorist actions in the region and within
the United States and continues far enough to the right to embrace
distributed, dispersed, low intensity conventional battles intended to
capture the allegiances of indigenous people and to discredit American
influences there. Our enemies have learned that our most vulnerable
center of gravity is on the ground. So their greatest challenge is to
prepare the ground to best defeat us. Preparing the ground infers the
need to create conditions on the ground in which his advantages are
maximized and ours minimized.

Several timeless imperatives will continue to influence warfare on the
left. The global strategic center of gravity increasingly will focus on
populations rather than terrain. Thus controlling countries should be
done only with the population in mind. Rather than points for objectives
we will find populated areas that must be controlled to contain and turn
populations to our side. Enemies already have been taught the lesson
that America military prowess diminishes with distance and remoteness.
Since the enemy controls the strategic initiative he will choose points
of conflict in the farthest corners of the region or even in more remote
battlegrounds at the periphery of Middle Eastern territories. The enemy
will continue to become more unapproachable by seeking to hide in the
most remote sanctuary located at the very extreme corners of the Islamic
world and, in some cases, in remote areas on the periphery of the Middle
East: in Africa to be sure and perhaps in Islamic regions of Asia.

Experience in both Gulf wars has taught terrorist enemies and their
Islamic fellow travelers the value of packaging military forces into
small entities. By 2020 they will have perfected the techniques and
technologies to create a true dispersed, distributed, protected
"non-nodal" military capable of remaining viable in the field for
extensive periods without exposing a vulnerable mass to the destructive
effects of American precision. Non nodal will not mean small. The enemy
must still be able to sustain a force that will be sufficiently large to
take on American field forces when the opportunity arises. He will seek
to capture the trappings of state or state like equities such as
sovereignty, financial legitimacy and international recognition. No
enemy will be capable of threatening a vital center of gravity without
state support of some sort even if only symbolic.

While terrorist entities will succeed in capturing selected states they
will gain greatest strength through political, economic and military
dispersion. Their reach will be global with discrete entities netted
together in a fashion that offers no assailable flanks or indirect
approaches. Their networks will be cultural, not technological. Already
they have learned to combine in loose coalitions of cultural fellow
travelers. Unity and resolve will be achieved through the sharing of a
common loathing of the West. Time and common purpose will be the glue
that ties there cultural networks together. The longer these culture
networks exist the stronger and more legitimate they will become.

They have learned the painful lesson that possession of cutting edge
technologies expressed as weapons systems are merely an expensive means
for creating lucrative targets. In the future the term "systems" will
take on a different meaning to Middle Eastern enemies. Knitting together
simple weapons and increasing their killing power through the use of
simple craft technologies will allow enemies to make existing weapons
far more effective against American forces. The advantage in this
emerging contest between Eastern mass and Western quality could go to
either side. Recent experience in Iraq and Afghanistan reinforces the
American experiences in Korea and Vietnam. In these earlier conflicts
the margin in effectiveness between masses of simple weapons made better
by simple craft improvements versus fewer but very effective (and
expensive) weapons grew more narrow as the enemy learned how to take
advantage of his simpler weapons and minimize the technological
advantage of American weapons. The wonders of Rivet Joint, JSTARS, and
Global Hawk fail to impress an infantryman who sees his contest between
M4 and AK 47 as virtually a technological even match. Should an enemy
over the next decade succeed in the relatively simple task of increasing
the reach of shoulder fired heat seeking missiles a few thousand feet
the result could well seriously threaten the ability of American
airpower to provide effective precision fires and deliver ground combat
power to remote regions.

Wars against Middle Eastern enemies will be protracted with the dividing
line between combat and stability operations becoming so indistinct as
to become irrelevant. Ground forces will be obliged to stay engaged in a
theater of war until all necessary conditions for peace and stability
are met: social, political and military. Increasingly the American
military will be driven to create forces (principally Army and Marine)
capable of fighting effectively fully across the left end of the
spectrum. A dispersed enemy will demand that ground forces disperse in
turn. A patient enemy will create the requirement for ground forces to
organize for sustained combat lasting years, perhaps even decades. This
commitment is not for the constabulary functions attendant to
peacekeeping. It is for combat---at times intense and at all times
potentially deadly. In this new era of warfare mass will count. A low
tech enemy committed to killing in the shadows will no longer allow
machines to substitute fully for manpower. American killing power
perfected by superior precision and aerial intelligence will in many
cases be subordinated to the need to control people.

The American military learned in Afghanistan and Iraq that the center of
gravity of this new style of war rests with the ability to control and
influence the attitudes of indigenous peoples. Thus the art and science
of killing must be refined such that when necessary it is done with
great discretion, precision and speed. Restraint, patience and a
willingness to accept less than complete destruction of an enemy force
must become essential ingredients of American fighting doctrine. To be
sure attitudes of population can be shaped by occasional demonstrations
of shock and awe but shock and awe of a different sort represented by
the ability to deliver overwhelming killing power at a place, time and
on targets most likely to quell an enemy force, stun it into inaction
and acquiescence rather than to incite it to further violence by
creating resentment and hatred.

Given new realities those few opportunities for reshaping American
military forces over the next decade and a half should be governed by
several new realities and shaped by new initiatives. The need for
protracted conflict at distant places against a determined dispersed
enemy will eventually force a convergence of roles and functions between
those charged with doing virtually all of the fighting and dying:
Marine, Army and special operating close combat forces. This process of
convergence will occur gradually as the practical demands of the
battlefield overcome friction generated by traditional service cultures.
The defense establishment will continue to resist increases in the
number of close combat forces in the hope that a return to "net-centric"
warfare will allow permit bloodless victories. But the numbers will
increase nonetheless. Middle Eastern enemies will force the United
States into fighting their way, a way that will demand a countervailing
revival of the close in, dirty and bloody methods of war. This Darwinian
imperative will drive the American military establishment to evolve a
more robust and effective ground arm.

The processes for selecting, training and bonding infantry, armor,
combat engineers and military police units will become more demanding.
The realization will eventually sink in that mature, well trained and
superbly led close combat soldiers will not only perform better for
longer periods in combat but will suffer far fewer deaths as well. Those
skills and qualifications unique to special forces will continue to
gravitate to other less "elite" forces and the dividing line between
them will blur. Eventually the fighting model of the Marine Corps will
follow the close combat model of other services. Marine infantry units
will accept the need for longer serving infantry at lower levels.
Likewise the leadership models of close combat units will change. Leader
entry will become more select as the ratio between leaders and followers
will increase. The ground services will learn that the industrial age
tables of organization can no longer accommodate the requirement for
close combat units to remain longer on more isolated and dangerous
battlefields.

These same universal imperatives will force the creation of more multi
dimensional close combat forces. Army, Marine and special operational
forces will be structured and trained to become more autonomous with the
capability for fighting across the entire spectrum of land conflict.
They will be required to move seamlessly between all levels of war and
will acquire the ability to shift without interruption or pause from
fighting to humanitarian tasks and back again as the exigencies of war
demand.

These combat forces will become multifunctional as well as
multidimensional. They will increasingly be required to perform a
variety of tasks tangential to killing skills such as intelligence,
medicine, civil affairs, civic action, information operations, direction
action, nation building, etc. Superior training and selection alone will
not be sufficient to create a body of men capable of performing with the
degree of skill, knowledge, empathy and maturity needed for this new age
of warfare. A cohort such as this can only be created within the culture
of the American military by separating it from the routine, pedestrian
track of today's recruiting and training systems and replacing them with
a closed system focused exclusively on preparing combat soldiers through
a long term process of socialization and unit bonding. Years of training
and education will be needed to inculcate necessary skills and to raise
solder and leader competence to such a heightened level. Such a corps of
professionals will be obligated to serve together continuously for years
if not decades. The opportunities for reserves to join this new band of
brothers will be very limited indeed.

From the height of the republican expansion to the fall of the empire
the Roman Army succeeded in keeping the imperial peace and guarding the
extreme limits of the empire by creating a very long service army that
remained deployed and virtually at war for over three hundred years.
Intense combats were rare, catastrophic defeats even more infrequent.
The Roman Army learned to insulate itself from the vagaries and
corruptions of Roman politics and even to some degree managed to fight
effectively in spite of wrongheaded imperial strategy and incompetent
and corrupt leadership. Enemies crowded at the periphery of the Empire
remained subdued not so much by the aggressiveness of the Romans but by
the realization that mischief in the form of direct or indirect
confrontation was not an option given the reputation of the Roman Army
for competence and persistence. Imperial service became mostly routine,
engagement with peripheral cultures more important than active combat.
Rome was not an armed state but a state that maintained its dominance by
possessing an army that was more respected than feared, that commanded
the borders through moral intimidation rather than continuous killing.

The American military does not protect an empire but it does protect
vital interests whose geographical centers of gravity are nested at the
extreme limits of military reach. As with the Romans long term
tranquility in these regions can only be secured by a military equipped,
trained and dedicated to protecting American interests over the long
term. Success will come only when the world realizes that the American
military and ground forces in particular are capable of winning
decisively and staying the longer course of war until its strategic ends
are met and sustained. America's new borders are a great distance from
her shores. A military force engaged there can only be effective in the
long term if it becomes an institution with staying power, and if it
seeks to win through moral intimidation and patient engagement rather
than continuous combat.