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It seems that “protraction” as a way of war is having a moment, especially through the lens of a future war against China. The Army is holding wargames and conferences addressing it. Even fresh scholarship is skeptical of short wars. All of which is somewhat bewildering because history is replete with long wars, and the record of long wars is one of much blood and great cost. Tinkering with notions of protracted war allows military decision-makers to be distracted and to make a poor bargain, like the trade made by the legendary Doctor Faust that comes with extraordinary cost. 

Clearly, the cost of long wars is extraordinarily high. In every respect, long wars should be an unwelcome result, not an outcome to be acquiesced. The Army especially cannot afford to mischaracterize the inevitability of long war. Acceptance of protraction as an inevitability is to surrender the United States’ best way to win militarily against China, which is to fight and win the first battle of any war. Appearing to accept that the United States will not win the first battle in a US-China war could also fatally undermine deterrence by signaling a lack of confidence in US capabilities. Winning in a future contest and strengthening deterrence means making decisions now: real choices must be made regarding forward posture, organizational structure, training, and modernization to create a battlefield system that leverages US advantages.

Of course, wars become long when they aren’t concluded promptly. That seemingly tautological outcome is often due to a failure to identify war objectives and to align warfighting means properly. Or maybe, as game theory suggests, long wars are caused by information asymmetries. Whatever the reason, long wars are a recurring feature of the international state system, and not one to encourage. There isn’t space in this short essay to fully parse “long” war from “total” war, but it is a fair assumption in an era of all-domain contests that the longer a war protracts, the more total it will become, and the more awful the butcher’s bill. In every respect, the longer the war the more it becomes a widening conflagration and a losing hand for the United States. The present dalliance with protraction can only lead to expenses the United States cannot afford, and strategic ends it cannot determine. Because the United States doesn’t have many good ways to escape long wars once they become, well, long, the best approach is to plan and resource its armed forces to win at the onset of conflict.

Today neither the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) nor the United States is seeking the elimination of the other party. Hence, today’s immediate war-waging problem is not one of preparing for an existential fight between the United States and China. Whether the flashpoint is the South China Sea, Southeast Asia, Northeast Asia, or Taiwan, the military problem to solve is not how to eliminate China as a great power but to defeat its armed forces. In other words, the challenge is how to fight and win a regional, limited war against a nuclear-armed great power—that is, a short war. In the Pacific, such a war with China is the kind the United States is most likely to confront, and one that it can win.

There is no doubt that the historical record of war is not encouraging. In the Western military tradition, even the names of long-ago conflicts are suggestive of drawn-out carnage. The details of the Hundred Years’ War (1337–1453) between England and France and the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1634), which caused prolonged bloodshed between most of the powers of Europe, might be distant cultural memories, but their costs and consequences were felt for centuries thereafter.

Closer to home, the United States’ own military history features winning decisive battles, but America’s record of winning at the onset of conflict is inconsistent. In the Asia-Pacific theater, the US Army’s comprehensive defeat after Pearl Harbor and through the first half of 1942 as American forces were swept out of the Philippines is perhaps the twentieth century’s most noteworthy example of the costs of unpreparedness. 

Of course, the United States’ adversaries face the same challenge regarding first battles. The Japanese failed to compel the United States in World War II despite their early victories. For instance, they won the battle of Pearl Harbor but not as decisively as they could have—as Admiral Chester Nimitz himself pointed out. The timing of the attack meant that the US carrier fleet escaped unscathed, while the narrowly focused and short raid also failed to destroy the submarine base and the vast stockpiles of fuel at Pearl Harbor. Carriers, submarines, and fuel proved critical to enabling the US counteroffensive in the months and years that followed. They attacked without enough force to deliver an irrevocable battlefield outcome. The same became true on the Korean Peninsula. The US Army’s performance in June 1950 in the form of Task Force Smith was a tragic defeat, yet North Korea’s invasion ultimately failed. Again, the opening blow was insufficient and long war ensued. All of which is to say that winning early is not a panacea. But readying armed forces to win early, and decisively, is still better than submitting to attritional wars of protraction.

The Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905) is deserving of further consideration as a template for future conflict in the Pacific. While that war resulted in large numbers of casualties and demanded mass mobilization by each side to equip their armed forces, it also featured sustained campaigns of maneuver and military initiative, especially by Japan on both land and sea that led to the war’s termination in nineteen months. Longish wars admittedly happen frequently, but it is also true that decisive battles occur regularly. The fact remains that being ready to wage a decisive first battle is the best outcome.

Against China specifically, a short, regional, and limited war is how US armed forces avoid nuclear escalation and global, all-domain conflict that can be enormously damaging to each nation’s key infrastructure. It is in such damage to state cyber, space, and communication assets that real escalatory risk resides. Thus, the logic of each side’s objectives converges on a short, sharp war as the best way to settle a conflict if deterrence fails.

An opening campaign can be won by maneuver on and from the ground, enabled by on-time and on-target fires. Maneuver, which is simply the requirement to seize and hold ground, is the only way to obtain the battlefield ends that can lead to diplomacy and, ultimately, a return to civil order. The United States was swept out of the Pacific in 1942 because its garrisons could not maneuver and lacked strike capabilities that could destroy, or at least damage, invading Japanese forces. Even its largest concentration of forces in the Philippines lacked the depth to evict the Japanese. The result was three more years of savage killing and serious destruction to the Japanese homeland before the war ended. This is not the kind of future war the United States want to fight. While its adversaries in the Pacific have changed, the topography and the populations concentrated near and on mainland Asia remain. If war in the Pacific comes, this is where it will be waged.

It is important to highlight that it has become conventional wisdom in US policy and strategy circles that a future war in the Pacific will be primarily a naval and air conflict. That has not been the case historically, as demonstrated by the Boxer Rebellion, Philippine Insurrection, World War II (in which more than twenty US divisions deployed), Korean War, and Vietnam War. Nor will it be so in a future war. Ground forces in the Pacific create operational advantage by influencing or controlling a series of sustained and protected positions, as ground forces are more difficult to target than, for example, large naval surface combatants. This undermines the adversary’s decision space and morale. US Army forces can pursue positions of advantage primarily through offense, but positional advantage applies to both offense and defense. In terms of defense, positional advantage allows US land forces to defend key terrain over large areas. Against a peer adversary, mastery of positional advantage is essential.

Positions of advantage can be physical or non-physical. Physical or geographic positions of advantage in the Indo-Pacific include maritime chokepoints (such as the Sunda and Lombok straits), major political-economic centers (such as Seoul; Taipei; and Makati, Philippines), and major transportation hubs (such as Shinjuku City, Tokyo; and Makassar, Indonesia). Non-physical positions of advantage might include adversary leadership’s confidence in its information systems or the connectedness a population feels with its defense forces.

From these positions, Army forces provide the collection, command and control, protection, and sustainment to enable operational endurance. This is critical to maneuvering and attacking from multiple ranges and directions against the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), which benefits from shorter lines of operation. When Army forces are integrated with the Joint Force, the PLA (or any adversary) will lose both time and space, which denies the enemy’s maneuver and also protects populations, land resources, and borders.

Likewise, land-based effects into other domains provide a suite of tools to integrate into the Joint Force’s kill chains from the onset of conflict. This includes short-, medium-, and long-range precision fires to strike adversary formations across the depth of the battlefield. Army forces provide tailorable, theater-level command posts for integrating and synchronizing joint and combined military actions across the battle space. A war in the Pacific cannot be conceived, nor will it be waged, in terms of a straight line penciled on a map from Hawaii to any part of the Pacific, whether that be North Korea, Taiwan, or the South China Sea.

The United States must train, equip, and posture both the Army and Joint Forces as an operational system that enables ground-gaining fires and maneuver. The PLA’s leadership certainly understands this. Mao Zedong spoke and wrote extensively about protracted war. In the years following Japan’s invasion of Manchuria in 1931, Mao developed an extensive theory about China’s fight to expel Japan. It is worth noting that he considered a protracted conflict inevitable because of the disparities in China’s and Japan’s war-waging capabilities at the onset of the conflict. But the war-winning phase of the conflict was one of “quick-decision offensive warfare” characterized by “mobile warfare.” He recognized the key feature of how a war is won is the maneuver of friendly forces to compel an adversary so that it has no other choice, or only worse choices, and must yield to avoid obliteration.

Winning early and winning on land is the responsibility of the US Army, and it is the Army that must lead the Joint Force by building and sustaining a first-win operational warfighting system. It is time for Army leaders to make needed decisions. The key components of winning early from the land include the following:

• Forward access and presence: The warfighting-campaigning-wargaming approach being undertaken by US Army Pacific (USARPAC) to build habitual land-power access and combined-arms proficiency is a template that is working. A robust experimentation program of testing and evaluation of both concepts and technologies adopted by the entire Army will improve interoperability with partners and allow the United States to expose gaps in its capabilities that it can then solve.
• Highly trained forces: There is no substitute for tactical units that are ready to fight. Individual soldier skills and expert collective task performance are bedrocks of small-unit readiness. The US Army excels at this already. But integrating all arms both operationally and tactically remains problematic and merits further organizational solutions. More Army units should be trained in the Pacific theater under combat-like conditions, including with US Joint Forces as well as partner armies they will fight alongside.
• Focused, dynamic sustainment: The Army must possess all kinds of supply in forward-stationed packages that can be distributed in greater quantities and more channels than they are today. Army Prepositioned Stocks must be thoroughly reformed. They must be tailored to the force packages that the Army and Joint Forces plan to deploy in the opening days of a conflict. Redundant and resilient ways and means of medical and personnel support must likewise be built and rehearsed.
• Strategic deployment: Rapid deployment of land forces over long distances is remarkably challenging, and the throughput of Army forces that can move from home station is not sufficient today. It is therefore imperative that Mobilization Force Generation Installations be made much more ready. Present deployment timelines are too long, and the reserve components are not sufficiently aligned to overseas contingency missions. It should be a principle that every Army organization in a war plan must be able to deploy to its assigned position in a forward theater within six months of receiving its order. Any Army unit that cannot get out the door in that time frame should be considered for restructuring, assignment to a different Army component, or elimination from the force structure.
• All-range fires convergence: The Army’s Multi-Domain Task Forces (MDTFs) should become the template for future Army Corps and divisional designs. The MDTFs should no longer be viewed as experiments foremost. Instead, they point to how Multi-Domain Operations, the Army’s new doctrine, will be executed. Yet the Army is reluctant to change its structure. It must do so and do it aggressively and comprehensively.
• Globally integrated plans: Major operational war plans against China and other state actors must be integrated across Combatant Commands (COCOMs) and services from inception. In 2018–2019, the Joint Staff led such planning, but indifference from the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) and COCOMs caused the plans to be abandoned. The Department of Defense’s Unified Command Plan leads to a regionally focused department whose subordinate echelons resist globally integrated US capabilities. Short of congressionally supported COCOM reform, globally integrated plans are the only way to fight and win.
• Divesting: The Army’s Mobile Protected Firepower system (M10 Booker) is a head-scratcher. The Army’s attempt to brand it as a tank for the infantry is a clumsy attempt to obfuscate the fact that the Service is fielding an unneeded weapon. In real terms, the M10 is simply a “light” tank that is not light and sub-optimizes both protection and firepower. There is no requirement for a forty-plus-ton tank in any significant operational plan that the long-serving Abrams cannot perform. The Booker is simply an unnecessary and expensive platform. The Army must make choices to save both people and dollars; this is an easy trade. Eliminating outmoded unmanned aerial systems (UAS) is another obvious opportunity to harvest savings from legacy force structure.

It is imperative that military planners and decision-makers keep their eyes on building battlefield warfighting systems that can fight and win a short war, especially on the land, to achieve national policy ends in the shortest time possible. Fighting and winning a short war saves both lives and treasure. An Army and a Joint Force that are unready to fight and win tonight make a self-imposed long war nearly a fait accompli. Planners should not accept that only surrender or protracted war are the United States’ fate in the Pacific or anywhere else. They should build forward-postured, trained, ready, rehearsed, equipped, and dynamically sustained forces as the best way to win and deter at the lowest cost. Doing so is not easy, but the cost of failing to do so will be much higher. Ultimately, the best way to deter the start of what could become a long war could be to visibly improve the ability to fight a short one.

Major General Bradley Gericke, US Army (ret.), is a nonresident senior fellow in the Indo-Pacific Security Initiative at the Atlantic Council’s Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security.

The Tiger Project, an Atlantic Council effort, develops new insights and actionable recommendations for the United States, as well as its allies and partners, to deter and counter aggression in the Indo-Pacific. Explore our collection of work, including expert commentary, multimedia content, and in-depth analysis, on strategic defense and deterrence issues in the region.

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Image: Artillerymen fire the M77A2 Howitzer during a combined arms live-fire exercise alongside the Republic of Korea Army. (US Army photos by Captain Nancy Gomez)