Books | When Future Coalesces With Present

Military institutions must make a series of bets on the likelihood of possible future scenarios and their potential impacts. An extract 

Mick Ryan

The services of the U.S Defense Department have adopted varying approaches to the development of this more lethal and effective multidomain force. The Army in December 2018 issued its capstone plan for multidomain operations, “The U.S. Army in Multidomain Operations 2028.” It describes convergence of capabilities in the physical, cyber, and influence domains at multiple levels so that they might “prevail in competition” but also be able to “penetrate and disintegrate enemy anti-access systems and exploit freedom of maneuver. In 2016 the Air Force chief of staff listed multidomain operations as one of his three focal areas. Later, he noted that “multi-domain operations is about thinking through how we penetrate, where we need to penetrate; how we protect what we need to protect inside a contested space; how we persist in that environment for the period of time.

The multidomain concept has begun to influence conceptual development and the procurement of weapons systems, and it is also shaping organizational reform. The U.S. Air Force has created a new Space Force that oversees U.S. access to space-based capabilities. The U.S. military has continued to explore different elements of the multidomain theory. One example of this is the work by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to develop mosaic warfare, described as “a new asymmetric advantage—one that imposes complexity on adversaries by harnessing the power of dynamic, coordinated, and highly autonomous composable systems.

The foundational idea of mosaic warfare is to overcome Chinese and Russian advantages in precision, long-range attack systems (including kinetic, cyber, and influence activities). It also seeks to generate a sustained, long-term advantage for U.S. forces. One study of this concept by the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments describes it as “leveraging distributed formations, dynamic composition and re-composition, reductions in electronic emissions, and counter-C2ISR [command, control, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance] actions to increase the complexity and uncertainty an adversary would perceive regarding U.S. military operations and degrade the decision-making of opposing commanders.” While several nations are acknowledged as the potential adversaries driving this work, much of the U.S. effort is focused on what it sees at the principal threat to global security—China.

One of the best-known treatises on war, The Art of War, is of Chinese origin. Upon this heritage, the Chinese people’s Liberation Army is constructing new theories of competition, warfighting, and military operations. China, and the motives of the Chinese Communist Party, are at times difficult for Western observers to understand. But there are sufficient Chinese documents available, such as defense white papers and the Military Forum journal, that supply insights into their thinking about how their institutions and ideas will underpin their future military activities.

American scholar Tai Ming Cheung, a long-time observer of Chinese military de