Perspective: New warWhy America Isn’t Equipped for the New Rules of War

Sean McFate is a former paratrooper in the U.S. Army’s 82nd Airborne Division; he’s also worked as a private military contractor in West Africa. Today he’s a professor at the National Defense University and Georgetown’s School of Foreign Service.

His book The New Rules of War, published earlier this year, dissects the ways warfare must change in order for America to succeed. MIT Technology Review’s war reporter Janine di Giovanni sat down to ask him about his vision for the future of conflict.

Here are excerpts:

Q: So let’s say you were appointed national security advisor tomorrow. What would be different?
A: The first thing that I would do is I would push to slash the Department of Defense budget in half. And then I would pump up things like the State Department, which has been left to die on the vine. But the State Department needs a cultural revolution of its own. 

We have to think about what is war and what is warfare, and then: How do we achieve our strategic effects? Why is Iran a national security threat? We think of it as existential—and it is if you’re like Israel or Saudi Arabia, but not the United States. We’ve forgotten what an existential threat is. 

I would implement strategies across the globe that utilize and harness the new rules of war for us. They’re all doing it: Russia, China, Iran… They’re all fighting these things called shadow wars, and they’re very effective. We need to get back in that. And we used to do this during the Cold War, but we’ve forgotten how.

Q: What is a shadow war? How would you describe it?
A:Shadow wars are a certain type of war where plausible deniability eclipses firepower in terms of effectiveness. Think about how Russia was in Crimea. In older war tactics, when they would put their heel on another state, they’d send in the tanks. Now, in 2019, that’s not how they do it. They have military backup, but they use covert and clandestine means. They use special forces, they use mercenaries, they use proxies, they use propaganda—things that give them plausible deniability. They manufacture the fog of war and then exploit it for victory.

Q: Your idea that there will be more ‘shadow wars’ or proxy wars in the future: Is this being accepted, or shoved aside?
A:It’s being shoved aside. I mean, true war prophets are like Cassandra from Greek mythology: she had the gift of foresight, but the curse was that nobody could believe her. There’s examples of that throughout my book: Billy Mitchell, JC Fuller—there’s a guy called William Olson in the 1980s in the height of the Cold War. He saw past the US-Soviet rivalry and saw a post 9/11 world. And there are others!.

Q: So who gets it? Who is listening to what the new rules of war are? And who are your foes?
A:The CIA likes it, Special Operations commands like it, Special Operations units love it,  vets love it, Marines and Army land forces generally love it. Who doesn’t like it? Air Force and Navy, the high tech services, Lockheed Martin, and of course think tanks. Most think tanks in DC get money from Raytheon and all these players. A lot of them love and fetishize technology. But as you know, one of the things that Africa has taught me is that ultimately wars are politics and there is no technological solution to it. There is no missile that will fix the political circumstances on the ground of Syria or Taiwan. But that’s how we think. That’s why we struggle.