Essay about The Nature of War: Clausewitz

The United States from the Cold War and into the Global War on Terrorism (GWOT) continues to face challenges in translating military might into political desires due to its obsession with raising an army, electing politicians and assembling a diplomatic corp that continue to gravitate towards State-to-State engagements that if not rectified could lead to substantial delays in fighting terrorism and non-terrorist adversaries or worse total failure of the United States Military’s ability to properly carry out it’s politicians objectives due to being blindsided.

2. The National Defense Strategy (NDS) counterbalances the Defense Departments tendency to focus on winning conventional conflicts rather than irregular wars by empowering those small nations to improve the security of their countries to prevent conflicts from happening. The NDS focuses on the different irregular warfare tactics that can be used by our enemies in the strategic environment. It gives us guidance on what we need to do to prevent the use of these irregular warfare tactics. It was not until the last decade that the U.S. military started fighting the irregular wars; our Special Forces units were the ones that were fighting the unconventional wars. The U.S. military has had a difficult time changing its focus on fighting conventional wars to fighting irregular wars. During the Vietnam War, the U.S. military became very experienced in guerrilla warfare tactics. However, when that war ended the focus shifted back to fighting the conventional wars and that experience was lost. Now, because of the lack of experience, the U.S. military is having a difficult time fighting the unconventional wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

From the time when the first English colonies were established in North America until now, there has been some form of armed fighting force in place to protect the interests of the United States and its colonial progenitors. During the roughly four centuries in which this fighting force has existed, it has undergone numerous changes of varying degrees of significance. Technological advances have changed the nature of both defensive and offensive warfare, political advances have changed the nature of the relationship between the civilian population and its protectors, and geostrategic shifts have changed the role of the United States military with respect to the rest of the world. The most lasting and meaningful changes have occurred

With our country’s focus on the strengthening of military weapons and protection programs against foreign enemies,

The notion of an American way of war informs how scholars, policymakers, and strategists understand how Americans fight. A way of war—defined as a society’s cultural preferences for waging war—is not static. Change can occur as a result of important cultural events, often in the form of traumatic experiences or major social transformations. A way of war is therefore the malleable product of culturally significant past experiences. Reflecting several underlying cultural ideals, the current American way of war consists of three primary tenets—the desire for moral clarity, the primacy of technology, and the centrality of scientific management systems—which combine to create a preference for decisive, large-scale conventional wars with clear objectives and an aversion to morally ambiguous low-intensity conflicts that is relevant to planners because it helps them address American strategic vulnerabilities.

The Department of Defense (DOD) must decide how to rebalance the armed forces general force structure to meet future challenges and opportunities in an austere fiscal environment. The general force structure and capabilities of Joint Force 2020 necessary to adjust the force based on current strategic direction and fiscal constraints is a smaller, efficient, adaptable and integrated joint force. The 2014 Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) emphasizes US military forces will evolve and remain modern, capable, and ready while accepting some increased risk through force reductions. Rebalancing will require innovative approaches and solutions to protect the homeland, build global security, project power, and win decisively with a leaner force.

The Armed Forces of the United States stand at an inflection point. Fourteen years of sustained combat forged a seasoned force capable of success across the range of military operations from military engagement to joint and multinational major combat operations. Today, this seasoned force is tasked to reset from a decade plus of counterinsurgency operations and evolve capability and capacity to defend the Nation from an increasingly complex security environment. Furthermore, this transformation must be completed in the face of a stark fiscal federal budget.

The United States Marine Corps has an illustrious history forged in the trials of combat. Throughout its history, irregular warfare has and will continue to pose challenges for Marines facing new and radical enemy forces. The rapid, opportunistic, and flexible capabilities of maneuver warfare enables Marines to combat ambiguous enemies whose warfighting capability and doctrine is based on irregular warfare principles. Marine Corps units are organized and equipped to facilitate rapid deployment and to maximize the potential of each asset available to the Marine Air Ground Task Force Commanders. As we wage war against our nation’s foes, the elements of the Marine Air Ground Task Force are prepared to provide mutually supporting roles for the

Following over a decade of irregular war in Iraq and Afghanistan, the U.S. military is attempting to reset towards a conventional, regular type of warfare. The 2014 Quadrennial Defense Review describes a U.S. military shift to the Pacific and the supremacy of capability against near peer nations rather than support irregular of and counterinsurgency operations. As the QDR points out the U.S. military must “be prepared to battle increasingly sophisticated adversaries who could employ advanced warfighting capabilities while simultaneously attempting to deny U.S. forces the advantages they currently enjoy in space and cyberspace.” This is balanced against the reality that “our forces will no longer be sized to conduct large-scale prolonged

In a speech at George Washington University in November of 2015, the United States Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter also addressed challenges facing the United States, stating that the security of the US depends on a force better than it is today. This force not only includes the military services, but also extends to the civilian workforce of the combat support agencies, upon which this paper focuses. The vision of the future force is one that can quickly adapt and achieve success in a sophisticated, highly-technical and rapidly changing environment; maximize the benefits of commercial technology development; and address global military competition to defend the nation and make the world a better place.

There are no universal theories to explain the true nature and character of war, and any war theories are not a fact or absolute truth. All strategic principles are dynamic and contextual, so “every age had its own kind of war, its own limiting conditions, and its own peculiar preconceptions.” The battlefield environment of the 21st century will be the volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous, and nature of war will be completely different because of the Revolution in Military Affairs. Highly advance communication and information technologies, a dramatic increase in computing capabilities, developed of precision munitions, dominant air and space power ‘war could be waged by the projection of

Our government has put together plans and prevention checklists to do their best to deny any incoming attacks on U.S. soil. There are three stages of defense tactics.

The National Security Strategy (NSS) document represents a broad collection of different sensibilities and offers a tentative synthesis of different if not contradictory beliefs of American officials inside the administration. The document serves to set administration priorities inside the government and communicate them to Congress, the American people and the world. It also is intended as a framework for strategy documents produced by other parts of the government, including the Pentagon's national defense strategy. The NSS is not strictly a formal exercise; in practice it serves as a reference and justification for actual policy choices. In the coming months, the current administration will frequently quote this document to present and justify its

Carl von Clausewitz articulated a number of observations and principles describing the fundamental nature of war. First among these is his assertion that all military action, including war, is aimed at achieving a political objective. Additionally, he observed that each side in a conflict would resist the other with a degree of effort equal to the value of their political objective. Finally, he argued that it is essential to focus all efforts on overcoming an adversary’s principle source of strength, otherwise called their center of gravity. Modern strategists can employ these same principles to gain better understanding of their adversary and develop a plan to achieve their objective. The primacy of politics, resistance, and center of gravity are Clausewitz’s most profound insights and together they provide a tool that enable strategists to understand and overcome an adversary.

Giulio Douhet, in his seminal treatise on air power titled The Command of the Air, argued, “A man who wants to make a good instrument must first have a precise understanding of what the instrument is to be used for; and he who intends to build a good instrument of war must first ask himself what the next war will be like.” The United States (US) military establishment has been asking itself this exact question for hundreds of years, in an attempt to be better postured for the future. From the Civil War, through the American Indian Wars, and up until World War II (WWII) the American military’s way of war consisted of fighting traditional, or conventional, wars focused on total annihilation of an enemy. Since that time, there has been a gradual shift from the traditional framework towards one that can properly address non-traditional, or irregular wars. While the US maintains a capability to conduct conventional warfare, the preponderance of operations where the US military has been engaged since WWII have been irregular wars. Therefore, this question articulated by Douhet, as to understanding the character of the next war in order to properly plan, train, and equip, is certainly germane to the current discussion of regular war versus irregular war. In today’s fiscally constrained environment, the questions remains, which will dominate the future and therefore, garner further funding and priority. Based on the current threats and the US role as a superpower, the US