The military brass is often accused of fighting the last war, but a group of retired officials says the U.S. is already flirting with losing the next one.
That’s the grim warning from a commission created by Congress to review the Trump administration’s national defense strategy. The commission has laid out a series of nightmare scenarios, from the Pacific to eastern Europe, where the country could be brought to its knees or cowed into retreat by its top global adversaries.
Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said he is “not in the least” worried the U.S. could lose a war with Russia or China when asked point-blank during the Reagan Defense Forum in California.
“I think my real job description is, how do you keep the peace one more year, one more month, one more week, one more day, one more hour, so the diplomats can work their magic, our allies can work with us, and we can keep another tragedy of war from breaking out,” he said.
But the Commission on the National Defense Strategy is far less certain.
“We don’t have the margins that I would like to see to guarantee a win,” said retired Adm. Gary Roughead, the former chief of naval operations and co-chair of the commission created by Congress to review Trump’s national defense strategy.
War in the Baltics
The commission sees even a darker replay of Russia’s attacks on Ukraine in Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia. As a pretext, Moscow could float false reports of atrocities against Russians in those countries to mount an invasion disguised as a peacekeeping mission.
“As U.S. and NATO forces prepare to respond, Russia declares that strikes against Russian forces in those states will be treated as attacks on Russia itself — implying a potential nuclear response,” the commission writes.
The move to seize European territory could be coupled with a disorienting blow to the U.S. at home. Russia could use its submarines to sever ocean-based fiber-optic communication cables, its military to destroy communications satellites, and hackers to shut down domestic electric grids.
“Even as the U.S. military confronts the immense operational challenge of liberating the Baltic states, American society is suffering the devastating impact of modern conflict,” according to the commission.
The financial system would be thrown into chaos; Internet and cellphone service would drop.
“I would talk about power, raw power. When you look at Russia and the cavalier use of force, the cavalier discussions about nuclear weapons, clearly Russia needs to be dissuaded, deterred from going down a path that too often Putin appears willing to go down,” Mattis said.
The Great Wall of Missiles
China has already spent years preparing for a potential conflict in its backyard. It now has a series of artificial islands in the South China Sea armed with surface-to-air missiles, what the top admiral in the Pacific recently called a “great wall of SAMs.”
Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson called China the “pacing threat” for the U.S.
“China aspires to be a global military power and they have been open about that, and they have a timeline that they are working toward,” Wilson said at the Reagan Forum.
The commission sees a time in the early 2020s after which China will have spent nearly a decade loading the islands with military hardware and creating a ring of fortifications in one of the world’s busiest trade corridors.
“Amid tense U.S.-Chinese trade talks, China begins harassing commercial shipping in international waters that China claims as part of its exclusive economic zone,” the commission writes.
If the U.S. and allies in the region failed to oppose the move, Beijing could begin charging heavy tolls on shipping and restricting American transit, which accounts for 14 percent of domestic maritime trade.
Yet by then it could be a fait accompli.
“The potential military costs of reversing China’s control over the South China Sea seem so high, and Washington confronts so many other global challenges, that America can only acquiesce,” the commission writes.
Nuclear standoff
According to Bob Woodward, President Trump once drafted, but never sent, a tweet announcing the removal of all military families and dependents from South Korea amid tensions with the North over its nuclear program.
If nuclear tensions again rise, Trump could direct the withdrawal of civilians as a precaution, yet touch off conflict if and when “Kim Jong Un misinterprets this as prelude to war and strikes first. North Korean artillery hammers Seoul. Conventionally armed ballistic missiles strike ports, airfields, and U.S. military facilities in South Korea,” the commission writes.
As the U.S. counterstrikes, the North could use ballistic missiles with nuclear warheads to strike American military installations with tens of thousands of troops on Okinawa and Guam.
“As the U.S. president considers how to respond, Kim announces that if America does not accept an immediate cease-fire, North Korea will launch nuclear-tipped intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) at the continental United States — a threat against which U.S. missile defenses offer only uncertain protection,” according to the commission.
Levels of conflict we haven’t seen
The prospect of losing a major war has added new urgency to warnings by Pentagon brass and defense analysts that the world has reached its most complex and dangerous point in decades.
It has also charged the debate over President Trump’s push to slash defense spending by 5 percent, which is already drawing strong opposition from Republicans in Congress.
“We’ve been used to conflict over the last 17 years at the lower level of the spectrum — counter-insurgency, counter-terrorism operations,” said Eric Edelman, a commission co-chair and former under secretary of defense. “We’re talking about a kind of level of conflict we haven’t seen in an extremely long time and having to fight in a way that we haven’t had to fight in a long time and having our adversaries understand we are capable of doing that.”
