By Kaley Scholl
In their article “Divided We Fall: How the U.S. Force is Losing Its Joint Advantage over China and Russia,” authors Col Dan Sukman and Ltc Charles Davis (Ret.) argue that U.S. military “jointness” is eroding relative to China and Russia’s focus on joint operations. As our key national security and military strategies magnify the virtues of a whole of government approach to strategic competition, the Department of Defense (DoD) still struggles to achieve “jointness” across the military services.
Historically, the U.S.’s approach to achieving national security objectives has been led by using the military instead of non-kinetic instruments of U.S. national power. To successfully compete in today’s complex world, it is necessary to develop a new concept of competition that goes beyond the U.S. military’s joint force. For the U.S. to be competitive, and to achieve national political objectives in the complex 21st century geopolitical environment, the U.S. government must rethink “joint operations” as a coordinated, interagency approach using the trinity of diplomacy, defense and economic power through development. Once our interagency objectives are aligned and synchronized, the U.S. can compete at a higher level against adversaries who combine all elements of their national power to further U.S. objectives around the globe.
Today’s Adversaries
Speaking at the Russian Academy of Military Sciences in 2019, Chief of General Staff General V. V. Gerasimov announced the “emergence of new spheres of confrontation in modern conflicts and methods of warfare increasingly shift towards the integrated application of political, economic, informational, and other nonmilitary measures, realized with reliance on military force.” To that end, Russia’s military often incorporates nontraditional forces such as the Federal Security Service, Interior Ministry, and the Ministry for Emergency Situations that can place the Russian military subordinate to other interagency departments. For the Russian military to be a supporting component in an interagency “joint operation” requires a significant paradigm shift that the U.S. military has not yet made.
Similarly, the national strategy of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) fuses social and economic development strategies to meet its political goals of national rejuvenation while modifying the liberal rules-based international order. After taking office in 2003, President Hu Jintao prioritized the need for “military-civil fusion,”a literal shift in Chinese linguistic characters from “combination” to “fusion,”marking a wider scope and deeper level of military-civil integration that current President Xi Jinping exalted to the status of national strategy. In practice, military-civil fusion creates and leverages connections between PRC military modernization and economic development efforts (both domestic and foreign) in order to synchronize resources, talent, and innovation. This military-civil fusion involves synchronizing national-level efforts to include technology, big data, industry and defense mobilization . According to The Science of Military Strategy 2020, the PRC is pursuing a strategy in which “comprehensive national power is the sum of all material and spiritual power of a country – the totality of political, economic, military, technological, and spiritual power that can be used or mobilized for military conflicts.”
Our adversaries are employing a wide range of civilian, paramilitary, and military instruments across diplomatic and development projects to showcase a synchronization of national assets that the U.S. once practiced, but has since atrophied.
Case Study: Interagency Coordination Success in Nigeria
In Nigeria, the trinity of American diplomacy, defense, and economic development disrupted a PRC port construction project. During their third deployment in Nigeria, a team from the 91st Civil Affairs Battalion noticed a billboard with Chinese characters accompanying a photo of the southern Port of Harcourt. The team sent a photo of the billboard to a cross-functional team of the 3rd Special Forces Group and the 7th Psychological Operations Battalion. The cross-functional team recognized the significance of this Chinese activity and with information operations and intelligence teams from Fort Bragg, uncovered a Chinese conglomerate active in Nigeria that had announced the construction of a deep-water port as part of the PRC’s Belt and Road Initiative. The team conducted a campaign to highlight Chinese activities which ignited long-standing friction between Nigerian workers and Chinese corporations. Within two weeks, the Chinese construction company lost 60% of its required labor pool for the port expansion as the Army Special Forces team worked with the U.S. Embassy, U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and local non-governmental organizations to establish a job fair near protest areas to provide employment for disaffected Nigerian workers..
Simultaneously, Nigerian security forces brought in by Army Special Forces discovered an illegal weapons cache traced back to the construction company. Nigerian security forces also obtained port construction blueprints, which when sent to the Defense Intelligence Agency for analysis, it was discovered that the concrete footings were designed to support surface-to-air and shore-to-ship missiles. Armed with this analysis, the U.S. Ambassador informed the Nigerian host counterparts that the port would become a strategic target and potential war zone between great powers; the Nigerians seized the Chinese-purchased land and halted the port construction. This whole of government approach halted construction of the PRC’s first Atlantic Ocean port capable of hosting weapons within range of the continental U.S..
Case Study: COVID Vaccine Diplomacy in Latin America and the Caribbean
Cold War U.S. diplomatic efforts in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) were inextricably linked to using defense initiatives to thwart Communist influence in the Western Hemisphere. A scarring smear on 20th century U.S. diplomatic efforts includes supporting diplomatic initiatives that used paramilitary actions resulting in future DoD-led efforts being perceived with hesitation or outright suspicion of imperialism. Therefore, the U.S. interagency must approach any efforts to further strategic goals using the other levers of the trinity. For example, to support larger U.S. goals, USAID provides unique regional access and placement, working with community partners and volunteers on the ground in both urban and rural environments. Historically, USAID has developed grassroots relationships and understands cultural contexts in ways that can shape U.S. diplomatic objectives and, in turn, U.S. military training and assistance programs. By using the other levers of the trinity, the U.S. interagency is able to achieve far-reaching strategic goals with a much more diversified toolkit beyond the scope and authorities of the DoD alone.
Vaccine-related diplomacy facilitated both China’s and the U.S.’s broader engagement in the region. While the U.S. military was instrumental in providing the logistics for vaccine delivery, U.S. COVID-19 vaccine donations served broader strategic goals, such as combating the root causes of migration flows of displaced persons heading north by improving security conditions and bolstering economic prosperity during the economic uncertainty of the pandemic. In addition, U.S. vaccine diplomacy efforts shored up confidence in the U.S. as a partner of choice as perceptions of U.S. vaccines versus those vaccines donated from the PRC and Russia were markedly different. Brazil President Jair Bolsonaro repeatedly questioned the efficacy of the Chinese vaccine, preferring the U.S. vaccines for the Brazilian immunization campaign. To complement its great power ambitions, Moscow pursued a state-sponsored social media effort to promote Sputnik V, its COVID-19 vaccine, in LAC. However, Russia’s efforts were met with apprehension due to a lack of transparency in research data combined with a dearth of supplies, allowing vaccine diplomacy to reinvigorate American diplomacy and shore up broader U.S. strategic objectives, including economic equality, fostering private sector innovation, and developing climate-related industries to stimulate job growth.
Developing the Trinity for Global Competition
Africa
According to an AfroBarometer survey, the policy priority preferences for most Africans include democratic governance, investment in health and education, and infrastructure. Complicating U.S. development assistance in Africa is the requirement that U.S. initiatives are tethered to economic or political conditions. Juxtaposed against U.S. requirements to reduce risk and encourage responsible behaviors, the PRC provides African countries with unconditional spending coupled with increased diplomatic attention. This dichotomy of action translates to competitors who steadily gain influence on the continent while the U.S. falters.
Recommendations
The current U.S. strategy towards Sub-Saharan Africa and other regions enumerates four objectives including open societies, the promotion of democratic and security dividends, pandemic recovery and economic opportunity, and climate adaptation balanced against a just energy transition. To advance national strategic goals, the U.S. should focus the trinity on investing in climate-resilient infrastructure projects. Where the PRC has notably dominated in infrastructure projects globally attributed to its Belt and Road Initiative, the U.S. first can focus on climate-resilient infrastructure that serves the community, such as a school, which serves as both infrastructure and community space – an outcomes-focused investment coupling education with income equality. Also, as opposed to PRC projects built with Chinese labor, an American trinity can focus on jobs and opportunities for the local populace. And, as regional terrorism feeds directly into destabilization, human migration, and food insecurity, the trinity of American resources can and should be leveraged to address stabilization efforts at their core, including projects focused on energy and climate-resilient agriculture to bolster economic development and clamp down on the sources of terrorism recruitment. Investment in human capital will create more-engaged citizens to build the foundation for stable democracies as validated by a study conducted in Nigeria that found that the cohort of students that benefited from the introduction of universal primary education in the mid-1970s was found to be more engaged in political life, paying closer attention to the news, attending community meetings, and voting more often than those who did not go to primary school. As PRC and Russian engagement in at-risk regions continues to increase, the U.S. must harness the trinity to rethink political, economic and security engagements with African and other developing states.
Conclusion
Successfully rethinking operations across U.S. agencies can result in a better-balanced, competitive approach towards achieving U.S. foreign policy objectives as well as thwarting the advancement of authoritarianism. The realignment of political objectives across the trinity of diplomacy, defense and economic development will promote democratic norms and ideals and serve the greater good in national emergencies. For example, in 2018 agencies supporting a U.S. trinity of resources made international news when they worked with their Thai and international counterparts to support the rescue of 12 children and one adult after they became stuck in a northern Thai cave. The Royal Thai government requested assistance from the U.S. Embassy and U.S. Indo-Pacific Command to support a coordinated search and rescue operation. For the U.S. to remain a partner of choice, the U.S. must rethink “jointness” and harness the trinity in a coordinated, interagency approach to achieve foreign policy objectives and uphold democratic values around the world.
About the Author:
Kaley Scholl is the Deputy Director of the Strategic Assessments Branch at the Joint Chiefs of Staff J5- Strategy, Plans, and Policy at the U.S. Department of Defense. In addition, Kaley is a Non-Resident Fellow at the Joint Special Operations University, and completed her Master’s in Global Policy at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, D.C. The views expressed in this report are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Department of Defense or the U.S. Government.