No impact to military decline – the military’s useless

For all its talk of great power competition, the US military—and the Army in particular—remains poorly structured to help the United States maintain a decisive advantage in contemporary strategic competition. This is largely because it still subscribes to a now outdated understanding of warfare. Losing to a materially inferior nonstate adversary like the Taliban is one thing, but the Army, as the joint force’s premier capability for strategic competition on land and in the human domain, is not able to help the United States “win without fighting,” as Sun Tzu put it, against the likes of Russia and China.

To contend with the unique challenges of strategic competition, the Army needs to think beyond doctrinal updates, techno-centric silver bullets, and operational quick fixes—it must fundamentally change its strategic and organizational culture. Rather than emphasizing geographic key terrain, the Army needs to recognize that traditional centers of gravity have shifted from the power of states and militaries to the perceptions of populations; it has to focus on what Maj. Gen. Robert H. Scales  nearly two decades ago as “capturing the psycho-cultural rather than the geographical high ground.” As the war in Ukraine is reaffirming, war, which is as much about people as politics, is above all a contest of wills.

Ultimately, how well the Army learns from its recent defeats, as well as from its partners in places like Ukraine, will determine how well it performs in the “” of strategic competition.

The American Way of War is Outdated

Today, the Army remains fixated on major combat operations and deterring conventional threats as its organizational identity. This imbalance reflects a limited understanding of competition, if not of modern war itself—an undervaluing of psychological factors compared to physical ones, disregarding Napoleon’s dictum that in war .

The central problem is that the United States remains heavily invested in a twentieth-century way of war involving overwhelming force, firepower, and technological superiority. This core playbook has remained unchanged since World War II. Despite its first major strategic failure in Vietnam, the United States again pursued a strategy in both Iraq and Afghanistan that tried to repurpose forces designed for short, sharp, force-on-force battles for protracted, people-centric, irregular warfare and stabilization, with similarly disappointing results.

The US military, in , has been “excellent at high-end technical combat but massively suck[s] at translating battlefield success into successful outcomes outside the narrow, technological definition of warfare.” As a result, it “,” and its “failure to engage with the building blocks of humanity—culture, society, politics, economics, and religion—leaves our strategies and plans untethered to reality.” For decades now, the way to beat the Americans has been an open secret—go asymmetric, irregular, and indirect. Attacking this US Achilles’ heel subverts both the material and moral advantages the United States would otherwise enjoy across the competition continuum.

The United States may not like winning without fighting, but it has also been , repeatedly failing to achieve political and strategic outcomes while winning battles and firefights on the ground. The military’s demonstrated inability to “” has produced what the Quincy Institute’s Andrew Bacevich calls a “” between its reputation and its actual performance. Its failure to win on the ground has called into question its ability to maintain the confidence of allies as well as deter adversaries. Many have surmised that the debacle in Afghanistan  Russian President Vladimir Putin to invade Ukraine, as China and Russia  “Great Game” against the West.

The Army’s cut-and-paste application of  conventional-force deterrence theory in its concept of competition doesn’t help matters, either. “Traditional deterrence no longer works,”  Sean McFate, author of The New Rules of War, because US adversaries “wage war but disguise it as peace.” In complex strategic competition, deterrence works more subtly, situationally, and regionally—and relies more on economic than military power. Besides, as the Royal United Services Institute’s Peter Roberts has , “what deters the Kremlin doesn’t necessarily deter Tehran.”