"History repeatedly shows that failing to identify and execute the right big ideas - the right strategy - as the nature of warfare changes exacts terrible costs." David Petraeus and Isaac Flanagan open their historical case with Vietnam, where the United States spent 13 years pursuing a war of attrition before recognizing in late 1968 that large-unit search-and-destroy operations could not prevail. By then, domestic support for the war had already collapsed.
The pattern, the authors argue in a Foreign Affairs essay, has repeated itself across every major conflict since, as "Hvylya" reports.
In Afghanistan, the U.S. military took eight years to develop an effective comprehensive civil-military counterinsurgency campaign, then another year to assemble the right inputs. Less than a year after the strategy began working, a drawdown commenced that was "based more on conditions in Washington than those on the ground." In Iraq, the critical shift was not the 2007 troop surge itself but the change in strategy from "clear and leave" to "clear, hold, and build" - including living among the Iraqi population and establishing gated communities to keep insurgents out. That and several other adjustments drove violence down by nearly 90 percent within 18 months. The pattern of empires failing to learn from their own history is hardly new.
Petraeus and Flanagan argue that the same pattern now threatens the autonomous warfare transition. The U.S. military is accumulating unmanned hardware without developing the operational concepts, doctrine, organizational structures, or educated leaders needed to employ them. "Failure to get the big ideas right about the autonomous transition would be catastrophic for the U.S. military edge," they write. China is codifying AI warfare doctrine. Russia is iterating on the battlefield. Neither will wait. Foreign Affairs has separately warned that America's simultaneous global commitments risk spiraling out of control.
The difference this time, the authors stress, is speed. In past conflicts, the United States had years - often a painful decade - to adapt. The pace of autonomous warfare development will not grant that luxury. Ukrainian drone units already operate in cycles where techniques become obsolete within days. The question is not whether Washington will eventually adapt, but whether it can do so before the window closes. The U.S. military's procedures for institutional adaptation, Petraeus and Flanagan note, "were designed for a time when platforms lasted decades and doctrine evolved between major wars." That time is over.
Also read: "How Republics Slowly Die": Foreign Affairs Links America's Escalating Conflicts to Imperial Decline.