Americas Defense Meltdown - IT Acquisition Advisory Council

William S. Lind • 121China would represent a catastrophic failure of American strategy. Such wars wouldbe disastrous for all parties, regardless of their outcomes. In a world where the mostimportant strategic reality is a non-Marxist “withering away of the state,” the UnitedStates needs both Russia and China to be strong, successful states. They need theUnited States to be the same. Defeat of any of the three global powers by anotherwould likely yield a new, vast, stateless region, which is to say a great victory for theforces of the Fourth Generation. No American armed service should be designed forwars our most vital interest dictates we not fight.Beyond Russia and China, it is impossible to identify any potentially hostile navythat can do more than contest control of its local waters with the U.S. Navy. Thisbrings us back to where we began, with the need to reorient the Navy toward coastal(green) and inland (brown) waters. While it is possible that we may face the oppositionof local navies in coastal waters, cases where we do so will again almost alwaysrepresent a failure of strategy. With smaller states as with the Great Powers, defeat willtend to lead to disintegration of the state itself and the creation of another statelessregion. The futility (and cost) of our efforts to date to recreate the state we destroyedby invading Iraq should warn us of the folly of such conflicts.Rather, our presence in coastal and inland waters far from home should most oftenresult from a Fourth Generation conflict, a situation where a state has vanished (infact, if not in name) and non-state forces that threaten vital American interests aredominant. In such situations, the ability of the U.S. Navy to control coastal and inlandwaters, as part of an effort either to restore a state or to limit the spread of statelessdisorder, can be immensely valuable.The reason this is so is simple: when a state breaks down, it takes land transportationwith it. The railroads cease to run. The roads are fragmented by checkpointsmanned by local militias and bandits. Only water transport remains to permit lifebeyond the most local, subsistence level. Whoever controls the routes of water transport,both coastal and inland, controls a great deal. He can facilitate the use of thoseroutes by his friends and prevent their use by his enemies. In time, the advantagesaccruing to those who can transport their goods and people will help to make themdominant over those who cannot. It is through such indirect actions that America canbest work to restore order and defeat hostile 4GW forces in stateless regions.The ideas that guide the U.S. Navy need to evolve substantially before it canthink in these terms. At present, its thinking remains the prisoner of Alfred ThayerMahan, who believed that navies should concern themselves solely with winningdecisive battles between fleets of capital ships. The Navy needs to release Mahanto history, where he belongs, and turn to a more sophisticated theorist, Sir JulianCorbett. Corbett’s understanding of how maritime powers could use their navies inlimited wars for purposes reaching beyond control of the sea translates well into aFourth Generation world. 2