By Franz-Stefan Gady
America’s enemies have gone to school and are developing counter-strategies to challenge its military supremacy.
Last week, in a speech delivered to a Rand Corp. audience in Washington D.C., U.S. Deputy Defense Secretary Robert Work preached his usual sermon about the slipping technological edge of the United States military and the growing danger posed by effective countermeasures to the American Way of War primarily based on precision-strike regimes (see: “The End of the American Way of War?”).
“Big state powers like Russia and China are catching up,” Work warned. “This is going to require a fundamental rethinking of how the joint force operates.” Precision-guided warfare has slowly spread among U.S. competitors across the globe and, as a consequence, can no longer be counted on as providing U.S. forces with the decisive edge to achieve victory in combat. Consequently, the American way of war has to change Work emphasized:
The first thing on any offset policy is to have a demonstrated capability to win the emerging guided munitions salvo competition. That is job number one. This demonstrated ability to win this competition will underwrite our conventional deterrence in the 21st century, and if we don’t have it, we are going to be faced with a lot of problems that we do not want to face.
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