Winning Without Fighting: Irregular Warfare and Strategic Competition in the 21st Century

Download PDF

Winning Without Fighting is an excellent new book crafted by four veteran scholar-practitioners that presents a strategic framework for winning the competition between the United States and its allies on the one side and an emerging authoritarian axis that includes China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea on the other. It explores irregular warfare (IW) in the broadest sense, but it makes little reference to insurgency, terrorism, or unconventional combat. Rather, the authors focus on IW as a broad set of competitive activities where “violence and coercion have their place but are unnecessary for an action to be part of an IW campaign.” In this book, irregular warfare is much like George Kennan’s political warfare: “the employment of all the means at a nation’s command, short of war, to achieve its national objectives.” The ends of these competitive efforts are “achieving relative power, influence, and legitimacy in the international system.” The means include information, military, economic, and diplomatic assets. The authors add resilience, both national and alliance-wide, to this set.

Rigorous and systematic in analysis, Winning Without Fighting begins at a key source of policy, the complex issue of strategic cultures. With thorough references to the scholarly literature, the authors conclude that U.S. strategic culture is not well suited to strategic competition in peacetime. Americans tend to see a clear division between war and peace and prefer to use overwhelming force in clear-cut situations. The Departments of Defense and Treasury dominate our coercive approach to deterrence. While the United States is poorly postured for gray zone warfare, “authoritarian regimes . . . prioritize centralized and coordinated IW campaigns as integral to strategic competition.” The authors write, “Unlike the [United States], Chinese strategic culture conceives of a fluid relationship between war and peace; indeed, all statecraft is essential to achieving power in their never-ending struggle.” Russia is less risk averse than China and is currently engaged in trying to restore greater Russia by attacking Ukraine and subverting Moldova and Georgia. The authoritarian nature of Russia and China helps them in some aspects of IW but drives them to excess and frequently alienates foreign clients and neighbors.

To build a bridge to the future, Winning Without Fighting examines the U.S. record of political warfare during the Cold War, an era roughly analogous to the present. During the Cold War, the United States waged political warfare by backing noncommunist parties, funding dissidents, and supporting various anticommunists. It “formed alliances whose purpose was to contain the spread of communism.”

To facilitate a strategy of containment, the United States formed key institutions like the Central Intelligence Agency, the United States Information Agency, and Radio Free Europe. Even the Marshall Plan and Truman Doctrine can be seen as instruments of political warfare. In the 1980s, the Reagan administration—working with allies and friends, like Pope John Paul II—orchestrated a coordinated campaign of rearmament and political warfare to help bring down the Soviet Union. Despite a strategic culture that did not lend itself to this type of conflict, the United States had significant successes in Cold War political warfare. At the same time, the authors argue that it is important to not mythologize the capabilities and limitations of the force in that 50-year era.

The next four chapters of Winning Without Fighting assess the various tools of statecraft: military, economic, information, and resilience. While necessary, these chapters are dense and focused on nonkinetic competition. Each of the chapters ends with strategic recommendations that make perfect sense. Some recommendations, however, like “avoid [economic] protectionism,” are out of fashion among U.S. politicians of both major parties.

The most interesting aspect of the analysis is considering resilience as a tool of statecraft. Nations and systems of governments have long recognized the importance of resilience, but few have set out to cultivate it. In this era, it is essential. Hostile powers will use their assets, particularly in disinformation, to break down trust in governments and prevent nations from adapting effectively to challenges. It is essential to combat disinformation and to plan for natural disasters and pandemics. The authors point out the importance of alliance-wide approaches in furthering resilience. They then turn their attention to the often ignored topic of measuring success in strategy in terms of power, influence, and legitimacy.

The concluding chapter is a worthy summation and set of recommendations. To summarize, the authors believe that:

Conventional military capabilities alone—or even primarily—are as insufficient for the coming era as they proved to be for the last one. American strategic and military culture must expand the aperture and embrace the thinking of Sun Tzu and Kautilya. Their emphasis on winning without fighting, prioritizing non-military tools of statecraft . . . and embracing myriad uses of information and disinformation provide a useful framework (224).

The authors conclude that this will require reinvestment in the assets like regional expertise and language skillshat “bolstered American competitive
statecraft during the Cold War.” More specifically, they recommend a focus on security cooperation, use of trade and economic statecraft, and  increasing collective resilience.

This is a welcome approach. We need better statecraft and integration of all instruments of national power. We need better policy assessment and a greater focus on resilience and restoring trust between the American people and its government. On the other hand, the recommendations here will not replace the importance of more defense spending. In fact, they may add marginally to overall government spending at a time of gargantuan budget deficits. An approach that is less Defense Department–centric will also put more planning and programmatic weight on the State Department.

None of these objections should detract from this excellent and original book. As we move into yet another novel security environment, it is essential that we get beyond buying another next-generation system, enlarging the iron mountain, and finding different terminology to describe the need to deter, fight, and win the first battle of the next war. We need to focus on how to succeed in competitive statecraft, which just may be the best way to avoid World War III. The authors of Winning Without Fighting are to be commended for their contribution to the discussion of IW and strategic competition. JFQ