Ryan Shaw
As the Pentagon readies its new National Defense Strategy, the commentariat—unsurprisingly—has some thoughts. While the perspectives are, no doubt, as varied as the array of think tanks and universities from which they spring, there seems to be a significant piling on against both the “Great Power Competition” that animated Trump-era guidance and the (allegedly distinct) “Strategic Competition” terminology advanced by the Biden administration. But “competition” is a rare instance of bipartisan continuity because it speaks to real and important dynamics in the international system, and it has led to important new thinking in our approach to national security. We should not be so quick to discard it.
Rather than abandoning competition, it is time now to double down. The Pentagon strategy should embrace a robust concept of integrated deterrence, and the White House should lead with a National Security Strategy (NSS) rooted in a holistic approach to Competitive Statecraft.
The critics are right that Great Power Competition (“GPC”) has become a vacuous catch-all, a magic word, as CNAS’s Wasser and Pettyjohn tell it, that can justify “every force, capability, or resource request.” But that’s a perennial bureaucratic tendency; the same was true of CT and then COIN in the Bush and Obama years, and probably any number of terms du jour in prior eras. We should always work to minimize these abuses, but we won't eliminate them as long as we use words to describe our priorities. Other critiques are less valid and far less helpful.
The idea that an emphasis on competition precludes the possibility of cooperation is an unhelpful reductio ad absurdum. Pundits may not be able to sustain two competing ideas at once, but the international system always does, and the military clearly can: emerging U.S. doctrine envisions a competition continuum, in which “the joint force… campaigns through a mixture of cooperation, competition below armed conflict, and armed conflict calculated to achieve the desired strategic objectives.” As Daniel H. Nexon points out, “Even during the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union worked out a variety of formal and informal rules that helped them manage competition, limit nuclear proliferation, and otherwise structure international relations.” (It is unclear how Nexon intends this observation to support his argument against competition.)
Equally unhelpful is the common complaint that the phrase “‘strategic competition’ reflects uncertainty about what that competition is over and what it means to win.” Here again, while it might stymie the pundits, this intellectual hurdle seems not to have tripped up our military leaders—they have been consistent in identifying the stakes of this competition as the “rules-based international order that brought prosperity and relative peace for the last seven decades.”
And “what it means to win” is just the wrong question—that’s the whole point. Echoing George Kennan ("We have been handicapped … by a popular attachment to the concept of a basic difference between peace and war…"), the competition discussion is enabling the military to finally—against all odds—shed the idea of war as a finite game that starts with an opening salvo of munitions and ends with a ceasefire and a treaty. The fixation on “winning” breeds fatal short-termism—see the common refrain that we didn't fight a twenty-year war in Afghanistan, but rather twenty one-year wars.
What all these simplistic critiques miss is the simple old truth that the enemy gets a vote. Nexon wants us to consider competition as a means rather than an end. But it’s neither—it’s just a plain fact of our strategic environment, and the last round of guidance intended to highlight it as the most salient one for U.S. strategy. It may or may not have been true, but we operated for much of the last thirty years as though we did not have any real competitors, ideologically or materially. The “end of history” trope after the Cold War was premised on the absence of an ideological alternative to liberal democracy; and if 9-11 proved that wrong, the “asymmetric” modifier we appended to the “warfare” of the Global War on Terror reassured us that proponents of radical Islam lacked the resources to make their vision an existential threat.
But the long-term ascendency of liberal, democratic ideals and rules-based international order is neither inevitable nor irreversible. There are alternatives on offer, and they are actively being pursued by adversaries whose capabilities across many domains threaten to eclipse our own in the not-so-distant future. These are the facts, and they demand our attention. The last NSS and NDS were right to frame them that way.
We must prevent the loss of our competitive advantage and deterrent capacity in conventional and nuclear warfare—competition should not prevent that; properly conceived, competition demands it. (The Pentagon understands this, too.) But the most pernicious element of these arguments against competition is the insinuation—or the outright assertion—that we can or should focus on high-end capabilities to the exclusion of all else. This requires a willful disregard of everything we have learned about the gray zone/hybrid warfare/choose-your-appellation. After all, while our high-end advantage has eroded, it is not gone. We have so far deterred major conventional and nuclear war, but our adversaries—especially those near-peer “great powers”—have found countless ways to improve their strategic position and degrade ours without triggering a conventional military response. High-end deterrence is necessary, but it’s clearly not sufficient. The accumulation of minor setbacks can be existential, not just because of their obvious and immediate effects, but because they can degrade our long-term ability to generate and project conventional power.
For all its emphasis on GPC, the last NDS recognized the interrelated nature of threats at all points on the competition continuum. This was made especially clear in the Irregular Warfare Annex: “State adversaries and their proxies increasingly seek to prevail through their own use of irregular warfare, [suggesting] the need for a revised understanding of IW to account for its role as a component of great power competition.”
What we need is not a narrower concept of deterrence but a broader one that focuses not just on the future conflict we could lose but also on the ongoing competition we are currently losing. Perhaps this is where Secretary Austin’s nascent “integrated deterrence” idea is headed. He seems to want to integrate across domains and technologies and with allies, and who could argue? Well, lots of people, including Representative Mike Gallagher (R, WI), who has apparently been reading his Pettyjohn: “What we actually need to integrate is more conventional hard power—more ships, more long-range missiles and more long-range bombers in the Indo-Pacific.”
Gallagher here is giving voice to a perpetual false choice we frame between conventional and irregular capabilities. But as the IW Annex said, competing in the contested space “does not require significant new resources… it requires new ideas and new means of employing existing capabilities.” The limiting factor is not in our pocketbooks, it’s between our ears. Educating for IW may not lead to great photo-ops, but it could lead to better outcomes below the threshold of major war, which would be worth a great deal more. Unfortunately, after our inglorious exit from Afghanistan, it seems we are determined to repeat what the Annex called “the ‘boom and bust’ cycle that has left the United States underprepared for irregular warfare in both Great Power Competition and conflict.”
Some Congressional leaders are pushing back. Last year's NDAA included authorization to establish a DOD center for studying irregular warfare. This year's bill is still in draft, but both chambers have provisions demanding an implementation plan for the IW Annex, and the House bill would require a report on the establishment of the center. Educating for IW may not lead to great photo-ops, but it could lead to better outcomes below the threshold of major war, which would be worth a great deal more.
With all due respect to Secretary Austin, an integrated deterrence worth its name would be integrated both vertically and horizontally. Vertically, it would supplement our nuclear and conventional deterrence with unconventional deterrence to provide creative and seamless response options other than “do nothing” and “all-out war.” Horizontally, along with allies and partners, it would integrate military force with the other instruments of U.S. national power.
But here is another point on which the critics are right: neither integrated deterrence nor holistic competition can be led by the Pentagon. That is why the White House must lead with a National Security Strategy that doesn't abandon competition but rather frames it properly as a whole-of-government/whole-of-society concern to which the military is just one—and usually not the lead—contributor.
We need not ignore the reality of a competitive international environment, but rather rise to the challenges it presents through Competitive Statecraft, the integration and synchronization of all instruments of national power during both peace and war to secure the nation's interests by advancing its values. Of course, that requires some level of consensus on our interests and values, and the Pentagon can't do that, either—the White House must lead.
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