Rather, the United States will be confronting China, Russia, Iran, and foreign terrorist organizations in places where the environments are primitive, remote, and austere, and where modern, highly sophisticated aircraft and the supporting people and parts needed to keep them flying will struggle to operate. History suggests that great power confrontation will most likely be waged through surrogates or proxies, and these conflicts are unlikely to transpire in the hoped-for battlespaces. The Air Force, in particular, needs to understand and adapt to this reality. As Army Chief of Staff General James McConville has observed, in this new era of strategic competition between the three major powers, there will likely be more, not fewer, instances of limited war, and those will take place far from where the services are planning, training, and equipping to fight China and Russia. If history offers any insight for the future, deterring war between strategic peers virtually guarantees the growth of limited, irregular conflicts. However, there are serious limitations to a deterrence strategy focused on a narrow set of capabilities, as the United States discovered when it was unable to assist East German, Polish, and Hungarian uprisings against the Soviet Union during the early decades of the Cold War. This makes a degree of sense given Chinese and Russian military investments, policy declarations, and aggressive behavior toward their neighbors. Deterring a land war in Europe against Russia is a second priority, while managing aggression from Iran, North Korea, and violent extremist organizations collectively holds third place, although Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has shown that the relative priority of these threats can and will change, disrupting strategic planning. The Department of Defense and the services are reorienting away from the messy, unpleasant, and irregular wars the nation fought in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria over the last twenty years, to their preferred paradigm: deterring conventional, multidomain warfare, with China as the pacing threat for organizing, training, and equipping US forces. According to a RAND study, over the past century war between nations has become “increasingly rare and occurs mostly at lower intensities.” US defense planning, however, is again focusing almost exclusively on peer competitors. In modern history, the overwhelming majority of wars have been limited.
The myopic focus on peer competitors that characterizes US military institutional thinking today is a mistake. The service might not have a roadmap to direct its actions after two decades of post-9/11 wars, but this character in a six-decade-old French novel is a good place to start. Raspéguy’s commentary is especially relevant to the inflection point at which US Air Force finds itself today. Time and again, once the shooting stops, a flawed peacetime logic prevails: SOF are supposedly no longer needed and the military services can go back to the business of preparing for the conventional war they hope never happens. Raspéguy’s thoughts give voice to the dilemma special operations forces (SOF) have faced after every major war. That’s the army in which I should like to fight.
The other would be the real one, composed entirely of young enthusiasts in camouflage battledress, who would not be put on display but from whom impossible efforts would be demanded and to whom all sorts of tricks would be taught. One would be “for display, with lovely guns, tanks, little soldiers, fanfares, staffs, distinguished and doddering generals.” Success in Algeria, he argues, would need two armies. In Jean Larteguy’s 1960 novel The Centurions, Colonel Raspéguy-the fictional commander of French paratroopers during the 1954 Battle at Dien Bien Phu and again during France’s war in Algeria-reflects on the repeated failures of regular armies throughout history to effectively counter well-organized guerrilla forces.