Soldiers from China's People's Liberation Army march on Red Square during a military parade in Moscow, Russia, on June 24, 2020.  (Pavel Golovkin / POOL / AFP)

China has surpassed the U.S. military in terms of ground, missile, and naval forces, along with some emerging technologies such as hypersonic weapons. Regaining an edge against Beijing will require U.S. military forces that are capable of responding not only to large-scale conflict, but to the low-intensity 'gray-zone' campaigns increasingly favored by America's adversaries.

Unless the Pentagon takes action, America will find itself with two versions of the U.S. military—the one that trains at home and the one that fights in the field. In a new policy memo, Bryan Clark, Dan Patt, and Tim Walton detail how the U.S. military can regain battlefield superiority by revamping its metrics to prioritize the resilience and adaptability of its forces.

See below for key takeaways from their latest policy memo, and join us next week for a discussion of U.S. policy options to counter Russian saber-rattling on the Ukrainian border. 

Key Takeaways

From the policy memo, "Can the US Regain Battlefield Superiority against China? Applying New Metrics to Build an Adaptable and Resilient Military"

1. The Military's Current Metrics Do Not Reflect Modern Warfare

Today’s readiness measures do not reflect the way that U.S. military forces would wage war, [since] a peer military like China could impose potential challenges beyond high-intensity combat. By establishing local numerical and capability superiority and exploiting internal lines of support, the PLA could present the U.S. military with multiple and differing “worst-case” scenarios.

For example, in addition to intense regional conflicts such as would result from China’s invading Taiwan, the PLA and associated paramilitary units could conduct low-intensity campaigns that exhaust U.S. and allied militaries in the South China Sea, instigate episodic confrontations in the Western Pacific that both fatigue and attrite U.S. forces, or initiate multi-theater conflicts across the Pacific and Indian Oceans that would stretch U.S. forces geographically and temporally.

2. New Capabilities Require New Measurements of Effectiveness

Like the marriage of stealth technology and precision-strike warfare tactics during the Cold War, the next military competition could combine software-defined tactics built using artificial intelligence with unmanned systems in such new approaches as DARPA’s Mosaic Warfare concept and Hudson Institute’s Decision-Centric Warfare concept. [These approaches] rely less on traditional metrics such as speed, range, and firepower of individual platforms and more on new metrics of force-level adaptability, resilience, and sustainability. 

3. Optionality-based Readiness Offers a Forward-Looking Approach

The advent of high-performance edge computer processing, secure cloud computing environments, and increasingly available data create an opportunity for the U.S. military to reform how it assesses readiness. Rather than a retrospective view of administrative units’ availability and performances in artificially constrained certification events, optionality-based readiness would provide a forward-looking view of unit components’ contributions to operations in the field under the military’s emerging generation of operational concepts.

Quotes may be edited for clarity and length.

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