John Delury
AUSTRIAN MILITARY analyst Franz-Stefan Gady has been studying the American way of war for a long time, from up close doing field research with troops in Afghanistan and Iraq and at a distance from his perch in Europe. Gady has come to identify its central premise as a strategy of rapid, decisive victory. This military urgency to “go big or go home” stems from political imperatives to keep casualties low and make the fighting short. American commanders are inculcated with the ideal of “shock and awe,” bringing a bazooka to a knife-fight and overwhelming the adversary with total superiority in materiel and technology. Despite a string of defeats and unpopular wars fought since 1945, this default remains the same. In How the United States Would Fight China, Gady imagines how the American way would play out in a war over the island of Taiwan. An alternate title of his book might be, How the United States Would Lose to China.
Focusing on military strategy, concepts and doctrines, Gady gives new meaning to the oft-repeated phrase “US-China systemic competition.” For the Pentagon as for the People’s Liberation Army, great-power war in the 21st century is anticipated to be a war between systems — you could even say, systems of systems. This includes, at root, political systems, given that war is “fundamentally a contest of wills.” The collective will of the American people is unleashed in a messy back and forth of two-party democracy while that of the Chinese people is driven forward by the harness of Communist Party rule. But Gady’s focus is not political systems. Instead, he takes us deep into the world of defense systems, focusing on the ways in which the US military is preparing to fight China over Taiwan — joint operations, cyber, space, air, sea and land.
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