Recently, at Foreign Policy in Focus, John Feffer reported:
“I’d say the war with China will probably take place in the next 10 years,” opined Professor Joseph Siracussa of the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. Former commander of the U.S. Pacific Fleet James Lyons, along with security analyst Richard Fisher, had a pointed recommendation for the Obama administration: “Either it leads the way to a new ‘armed peace’ in this region, or China will soon commence a war for domination.”
Meanwhile, in an article at Politico magazine titled The Pentagon’s Fight Over Fighting China, Mark Perry chronicles how the Army was left out of the military version of the U.S. government’s pivot to China, which was originally called AirSea Battle.
If the United States were to fight a war with China at some point, it wouldn’t be the pushover that the Iraqi military was in 1991 and in 2003. … launched a new military doctrine called AirSea Battle (ASB for short) that became official Pentagon policy in 2010. ASB was meant to be a revolution in the U.S. military: The new plan updated the AirLand Battle doctrine that had guided the military’s Cold War thinking about how the United States and NATO would fight in Europe against the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact. AirSea Battle intended to create a unified war plan that would help the Navy and the Air Force dominate the “battle space” of a war in an environment like, say, the Pacific against, say, an enemy like China.
But
It didn’t go unnoticed … that the new doctrine removed the Army from its central role in America’s future war-fighting equation; pride of place was suddenly given to “air and naval forces” that will be responsible for countering the “growing challenges to U.S. freedom of action.” That realization ignited a titanic battle in the Pentagon, little noticed outside defense circles, that still reverberates today.
Thus …
As the Navy and Air Force joined up to demand more funding under the evolving ASB idea, the U.S. Army—knowing this meant less money for its troops—did everything it could to shoot down the idea.
Long story short, the Army eventually reconciled itself to the doctrine and, in turn, the name of AirSea Battle was changed to Joint Concept for Access and Maneuver in the Global Commons, or JAM-GC (rolls right off the tongue, doesn’t it?), to be more inclusive of the Army, as well as the Marines. You are hereby urged to read the rest of this outstanding article by Mark Perry at Politico magazine.