The USA is the world's sole superpower and has rarely lost a battle since the Second World War.
Despite this, America has lost nearly every war it has entered into since then.
Its time for America to stop losing, and this is how.
Threat: 'Other'
The west likes nothing more than to fight good old fashioned stand-up wars, and it's really
quite good at it when it does. However, going as far back as the American revolutionary war,
the west has lost nearly every conflict against irregular forces that it has ever faced. America
is no different, which is rather ironic given that its own birth- the revolutionary war- was an
irregular war fought against a global superpower that it wound up winning. Two centuries later,
it would be the global superpower and it would be the one losing to the exact same type of warfare.
Irregular warfare is defined as war with no clear enemy, battle lines,
and sometimes even objectives. In a conventional war the enemy wears the uniform of their nation,
fights for material strategic objectives, and war is waged along clearly defined battle fronts.
An irregular war however eschews all of this, is waged in the shadows,
and largely for poorly defined, intellectual objectives. America really sucks at this.
It's not necessarily the US's fault, for decades its primary concern has been fighting off endless
hordes of Soviet tanks pouring across the Fulda gap in Germany. When it got dragged
into irregular conflicts such as Vietnam, Somalia, Iraq, and Afghanistan, it brought the exact same
army and doctrine tooled to crush Soviet forces in Germany to bear against insurgent forces.
The unstoppable military Juggernaut was inevitably left reeling and blindly lashing out,
all while its enemies ran circles around it. Fighting an insurgency is not a military
action - it's a police action, and the use of the US military to fight insurgencies is like bringing
a hammer to perform surgery. The right tool needs to be applied to the right job. However,
the US has no correct tool in its arsenal for this kind of job - but one friendly nation does.
The French Foreign Legion has a reputation known all across the world, and has fought in conflicts
in nearly every continent. The Legion fights far from France's shores, and recruits from a
pool of candidates that come from all over the world. Service guarantees citizenship, and is
an honorable path into integration into French society for many who might otherwise choose to
try and enter France through other, illegal means. America needs its own Foreign Legion, and it needs
it twenty years ago. Not only is the US military the wrong tool for a policing anti-insurgency
role, but deployment of the US military for extended periods of time is very expensive,
saps morale, and is incredibly unpopular with voters. It also lessens readiness for
the military's main job: serving as a deterrent against China or Russia.
An American Foreign Legion, made up largely of non-American recruits, suffers from none
of these disadvantages. It could be deployed for very long terms without national morale issues
or voter fatigue back home, and establishing a semi-permanent forward presence dramatically
reduces operational costs. The AFL would allow US forces to be present in regional hotspots for
years, decades even if necessary, remaining forward-deployed for nearly its entire lifespan.
This would also grant the American Legionnaires a familiarity with the people and culture that would
be priceless in combating an insurgent force. Today, the Afghanistan Taliban has won victory
against US forces by simply exhausting them. The AFL would permanently negate this strategy,
because the AFL would remain in-country until the job was accomplished. While colonialism was
a terrible legacy, there is a reason why colonial strategies were very effective in combating
insurgencies- the permanent occupation favored the side with the most resources: the colonialists.
The AFL would not be a tool of colonialism- which would require strong public policy to
ensure- and it would operate only at the invitation of local governments.
But it would allow US forces to remain in the area and negate America's foes best strategy of simply
exhausting US will to keep troops overseas. The next way for America to begin winning
irregular wars is to ditch antiquated ways of thinking. When America blundered into
Afghanistan, it did so with a strategy of national unification under a strong democratic government.
This lofty ideal was doomed to failure at the outset. In order to win in the future,
clearer, more realistic goals need to be set and achieved.
Let's look at Afghanistan again. The US originally invaded the nation in order to shut down
Al-Qaeda's ability to operate and the Taliban's support for them. If the goal was to prevent
Al-Qaeda from using Afghanistan as a staging ground for attacks against the west, then military
action should have been limited to this one, singular goal. Sweeping the Taliban out of the
country and installing a nation-wide democratic system was certainly noble, but completely foolish
and only added to the misery of the Afghan people who've been in conflict for twenty years now.
Rather, the US should have pursued a singular objective: prevent Al Qaeda from using Afghanistan
as a staging ground. This means no peacekeeping patrols, no removal of the Taliban from
government, and no winning hearts and minds. You strike at AQ targets when they show themselves,
crush any Taliban forces that have an issue with that, and rinse and repeat until the
Taliban government has been punished enough to accept they can no longer support AQ.
It may not have been a pretty way of doing things, but it would have been far more
effective and saved many more lives in the end. Next, the US needs to focus more spending on
special operations forces in order to fight asymmetrical foes. Special forces
are designed and trained to fight the same shadowy conflicts that insurgent or terrorist forces wage,
while rank and file forces are cumbersome, clumsy, expensive, and typically cause massive
collateral damage. A single Ford-class aircraft carrier costs more than the US SOCOM budget,
and odds are that one of these carriers will never once be used for its primary purpose: fighting
China or Russia. Meanwhile US special forces are daily fighting conflicts its normal forces can't.
Threat: Russia The US military absolutely
dwarfs Russia. In war, Russia would be forced to resort to nuclear weapons if it wanted to avoid
a complete and total military defeat at the hands of the US. Despite this, Russia has been running
circles around the United States for decades. Russia's greatest weapon against the United
States is its ability to influence and manipulate the American population. Despite
overwhelming evidence that Russia had interfered directly in the 2016 US presidential election,
nearly half of Americans refused to believe it- with that refusal ironically powered by the same
Russian operations that influenced the election in the first place. Russia has weaponized trolls,
memes, disinformation, instagram and Facebook. They have succeeded in dividing America along
political lines, and shielded their actions by playing on false American patriotism,
painting political opponents as unpatriotic and outright enemies of the state.
Meanwhile, their asymmetrical forces operate in Ukraine, where it has seized 7.2% of the
country without ever formally declaring war. It has also reversed nearly all progress made by
American-backed militants in the Syrian civil war, winning for itself strategic ports along
the Syrian cost which it can use to threaten the Mediterranean. In October 2019, the US began to
withdraw nearly all of its troops from Syria, leaving Russia alone to dictate policy in the
region and influence it to its own interests. All along, American internal division has kept
the US too preoccupied to care. The superior US military is of no consequence
in this new style of war, and in order to counter Russia in the future the US will need to respond
with the same 'gray area' tactics, strategies, and forces that Russia operates so deftly against
the slow, lumbering American juggernaut. The US needs a strong investment into electronic
warfare- but not more radar jammers or spoofers, electronic warfare in the realm of digital social
life. Only by preempting Russian digital influence with its own, can the US mitigate its impact,
and shape global narratives to its own ends. Russia is already a fading power. Its population
has been in a downward trend since the end of the Cold War, and its economy has long
been in shambles, leaving many Russian citizens dissatisfied and disillusioned. Many of those
skilled and educated Russian citizens are joining a growing exodus of talent and intellect leaving
the nation for greener pastures in the west. If the US wants to win against Russia, it needs
to begin preparing to fight not a physical war that'll almost certainly never happen,
but the cyber war for hearts and minds that has already been raging for a decade.
Threat: China In 2020 the US Navy
finally admitted what many had suspected for a long time: in the case of war, it would no longer
be able to operate freely in the South China Sea. China had officially won the opening salvo
of a Sino-American war before it even started. For years China has been using a militarized
coast guard service to bully and intimidate other Southeast Asian nation's ships.
Meanwhile, its actual military has been busy constructing artificial islands in order to
enforce territorial claims to those same waters, despite an international ruling at The Hague
declaring this illegal. While the world debated the legality of Chinese artificial islands, it was
busy basing fighters, bombers, missile batteries, and long-range radar installations on them,
turning the islands into unsinkable fortresses. And now in the case of war against the US,
there's little the US could do about it without pulling troops away from responsibilities
in other theaters of the war. So what did America do while China’s
coast guard drove away other nation's fishing fleets and commercial gas and oil prospectors,
so that it could get to those same resources itself? Nothing. What was the US response when
China began to illegally militarize islands in other nation's exclusive economic zones?
It sailed ships past those islands to show China it didn't 'recognize its authority'.
Meanwhile China added even more anti-ship missiles to further strengthen that
authority that America wasn't recognizing. There is little that the US needs to improve
in its arsenal to militarily defeat China today. Even with the state of the South China Sea being
what it is, the US retains the long-term military advantage. Such a war would be dramatically more
difficult today thanks to US inaction than it would have been even ten years ago, but it is
still a very winnable conflict for America. Yet the US is rapidly losing the influence war
in the South Pacific, and if it continues to do so it will inevitably be shut out of the region
as it becomes clear to South Pacific nations that the real regional power is not America,
but China. With Chinese military forces now deep into the South China Sea, nations such as Vietnam,
the Philippines, and Taiwan are having to wake up to the reality that it's China, and not the US,
who controls the waters around them. Losing faith in the US will inevitably force them
into China's sphere of influence, which would only grow with each new nation to ditch its
historical cooperation with America in favor of not suffering the wrath of the Chinese military.
China doesn't even need to be able to win a war against the US to undermine American allies and
partner's faith in her. It simply needs to make the conflict so costly that it's no longer worth
it to oppose the Chinese Communist Party. Even if Manila knows the US will inevitably defeat China
in a multi-year war, it'll mean little if it has to suffer the economic devastation and possible
Chinese occupation during such a war. Better then to simply turn to the CCP and forge a new path.
To win against China, the US must strengthen ties in the region with historical partners
such as South Korea, Japan, Australia, Malaysia, and the Philippines. It must
also be willing to engage in new partnerships, no matter how difficult, such as with Vietnam,
whom itself is diametrically opposed to growing Chinese influence in the region.
Of special importance however is the growth of US influence in the region of the Straits of Malacca.
China may be growing a military capable of challenging the US Pacific Fleet,
but it has one glaring achilles heel- most of its trade, specially of strategic goods,
comes from overseas, and a large amount of that trade passes through the Straits of Malacca.
US presence in the straits, and partnerships with nations such as Singapore, Indonesia,
Vietnam, and Malaysia would effectively choke this vital trade artery for China in the case of war,
slowly bringing the nation into submission. But the US should be specifically seeking the
help of a sister democracy in the region. Since its independence, India has grown to
become a formidable military power, and today is the largest democracy in the world. As a
free and open democracy it is already a threat to the Chinese Communist Party,
who fear their 1.3 billion strong population making any real push for democracy themselves,
but India and China have had many recent disputes for a variety of strategic and political reasons.
This simmering hostility between the two nations has even led to open conflict along border
regions, the most recent taking place early in 2021 and resulting in many Indian deaths.
The US and India already share a common threat, and with strong democratic ties that bind the
two nations together, an alliance between the two would reshape the balance of power in not just the
South Pacific, but all of Asia. Historically, India has been reluctant to get too close to
america due to the US support of Pakistan. Today, Pakistan has proven it’s no friend to the US,
as it has been often caught red-handed protecting, training, and equipping the same insurgent
and terrorist forces that were killing Americans across the border in Afghanistan. It’s also almost
certainly a foregone conclusion that Pakistan was fully aware of Osama Bin Laden’s hiding place,
given that the city he was hiding in was Pakistan’s version of West Point-
an area with high concentration of senior military and intelligence officials.
But in a more practical sense, the US should begin to aggressively counter the actions of the Chinese
coast guard directly. Being thousands of miles away from US shores however, it's not practical
for the American coast guard to be involved in countering Chinese bullying of local fleets,
so instead the US should dedicate resources to the building and training of an indigenous fleet of
small craft, similar to the Chinese coast guard. For a fraction the cost of a supercarrier,
the US Navy could outfit an indigenous force capable of confronting the Chinese coast guard,
which so often precedes actual Chinese military vessels and military activity. For years, China
has used these 'gray area' forces to not outright declare war or carry out kinetic hostilities,
but still achieve the same effect. Its coast guard forces have allowed Chinese economic
exploitation of zones either in open ocean or directly inside the economic exclusion zone of
other nations such as Vietnam or the Philippines. Rather than engage in largely symbolic freedom of
navigation exercises, the US could make it very clear that it doesn't recognize Chinese influence
by instead using its naval vessels to directly support this force of indigenous ships
meant to harass and drive away China's own coast guard forces,
using the same non-kinetic tactics of ramming, intimidating, and blasting with water cannons.
Then, much like Chinese ships do today, US missile cruisers and destroyers could simply lurk in the
background, discouraging Chinese vessels- now on the defensive- from acting out of line.
This of course is not in keeping with established maritime laws,
but for two decades the US has stoically stuck to maritime law while it and its allies and
partners have lost ground to the Chinese navy one artificial island at a time. If
the US is to win against China, it has to not be afraid to operate in the same manner as China.
Now go watch These 7 Things Could Start World War 3, or click this other video instead!