The gruesome ongoing war in Ukraine should have shattered any remaining illusions that the U.S. military can count on swiftly and decisively defeating any capable adversary in a future war. History is filled with examples of states that planned to fight a short, sharp war, only to become ensnared in conflicts that dragged on inconclusively for weeks or months or years — and which consumed vast quantities of munitions, equipment, and lives in the process.
Since 2018, the Department of Defense has focused primarily on a possible future war with China. Some analyses suggest that such a war would end relatively quickly (though at high cost), while others are far more pessimistic and believe that it could last for several years or more. Such a wide range of uncertainty alone would make it prudent for the U.S. military to plan for the possibility of a protracted war. But as China, Russia, North Korea, and even Iran increasingly cooperate with each other, a future war against one of them could rapidly evolve into war against some or all of them. Indeed, the recent report of the Commission on the National Defense Strategy clearly warned that that there is a “high probability that the next war would be fought across multiple theaters, would involve multiple adversaries, and likely would not be concluded quickly.”
Since the end of the Cold War, neither the military nor the nation as a whole has given much thought to how we would fight, endure, and prevail in a protracted war. What would such a war require, whether against a single adversary or some nefarious alliance of hostile states? We believe that a comprehensive U.S. plan to fight and win such a war should include four critical elements: mobilization, contested logistics, the limits of the defense-industrial base, and protecting the homeland during wartime. Each of these challenges is enormous, and volumes could be written on each one. Yet the rapidly changing strategic environment means the United States does not have the luxury of time to address them individually or sequentially. Here we offer some broad thoughts on each one.
Mobilization
Today’s all-volunteer force would almost certainly remain too small for a protracted war even after the reserves have been activated. U.S. Army doctrine assumes that a major theater war would incur 24,000 casualties each month. In a war with China for Taiwan, a recent series of unclassified wargames found that thousands of U.S. and allied personnel would be lost in the first few weeks of a conflict. Steep aircraft losses mean that many replacement pilots would be needed quickly. On land, the increasing vulnerability of deployed land forces would require the Army and Marine Corps to provide large numbers of individual replacements and to regenerate combat-ineffective units. And the longer the war lasts, the more casualties would need to be replaced. Heavy casualties, such as those seen in the Ukraine war, are something that the U.S. military has not faced in decades. The resilience demonstrated by the Ukrainian military is closely tied to its robust training pipeline that has adjusted to a constant need to fill depleted units. As we note below, such a pipeline does not exist for the U.S. military today.
In a protracted global war against multiple adversaries, the fact that the U.S. military has been sized to fight a single war means that it may need to expand by hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of people. This would be especially true for the forces that fight on the ground — the Army, the Marine Corps, and most special operations forces — because land would likely be the primary domain in one or more theaters of conflict, such as Europe, Korea, or the Middle East. And if China were one of the adversaries, the Army would still have to provide enabling support for the joint force in the Pacific while fighting on land against adversaries like Russia, Iran, or North Korea. It would be profoundly undersized to fight two major ground adversaries simultaneously.
The first step in any major wartime mobilization would be fully activating all part-time military forces — the one million people who serve in the individual service reserves and the National Guard. Yet integrating the reserve component into active operations during a major war presents numerous challenges, from cross-leveling understrength units to bringing training levels up to wartime readiness before deployment. And even that boost of manpower probably would not be enough for the military to effectively fight against one or more major-power adversaries over a prolonged period of time.
The idea of enacting a draft has been anathema to the American public and the military since the end of the Vietnam War, but the prospect of a protracted war against one or more capable adversaries requires that it be seriously considered. In fact, some in the U.S. military have argued that they would need to request authorization for the draft “almost immediately” after a war begins, in order to ensure enough manpower for the duration of the conflict.
A draft would also require congressional approval and the support of the American people, neither of which is assured. But there would also be many technical challenges to implementing a draft, which can and should be addressed now. Congress is debating requiring the automatic registration of all men between 18 and 26 living in America to improve the current haphazard system, but that only begins to address a much larger problem. In 2019, the U.S. Military Entrance Processing Command found that “there are currently no valid DOD-level documents establishing requirements, responsibilities, and roles to implement the induction of draftees into military service in support of mobilization.” A new report by Katherine L. Kuzminski and Taren Sylvester found that it could take more than six months to generate 100,000 recruits under the best-case assumptions, and more than three and a half years to do so under more pessimistic assumptions.
Conscripting people into service is just the first step, however. Those people then need to be trained and integrated into units, which would be another monumental challenge. The Military Selective Service Act requires new inductees to have a minimum of 12 weeks of training before being sent overseas, but the U.S. military lacks the facilities that would be necessary to do so. The Army, for example, only maintains two installations for mobilization and force generation, down from the eight it kept running to support the relatively limited wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. These facilities would be woefully insufficient for mobilizing the service reserves and the National Guard, much less for mobilizing the conscripts who could be needed for a prolonged great-power conflict.
Kuzminski and Sylvester offer many helpful ideas that would improve future mobilization. In particular, they recommend updating the Master Mobilization Plan (last released to the public in 1988, and which covers both conscription and training) to address the rapidly changing strategic environment and to include lessons from full-scale mobilization exercises. Their many wide-ranging recommendations should be urgently implemented by lawmakers and Pentagon officials alike for, as they argue, a draft won’t necessarily help the U.S military win the first battle of the next war — but it would help “ensure that it can win the last battle of a protracted war.”
Contested Logistics
Unlike any of its potential adversaries, the United States will have to commute over long distances to get to the next war. Simply getting to the fight will be difficult, as smart and capable adversaries will seek to disrupt U.S. power projection efforts as much as possible. But in a protracted war, continuing to sustain U.S. forces over long periods of time may be as much of a challenge as winning frontline battles.
Threats to the U.S. logistics pipeline, which would begin in the United States and stretch over thousands of miles to the combat zone, are multiplying and are becoming more complex. These threats start at home, where most military supplies and equipment begin their long journey. These supplies often travel on commercial rail and civilian traffic networks, which would be highly vulnerable to adversary cyber espionage and attack. The military would also rely upon major commercial companies to ship much of its heavy equipment and supplies overseas, but these companies lack the ability to conceal, much less protect, their cargoes from enemy action while in port or along the way. And the military today has far too few warships and airplanes to be able to fight effectively and simultaneously escort unprotected commercial cargo ships and transport planes over thousands of miles of sea and airspace to their destinations.
Some policy measures could help alleviate this problem, including prepositioning more equipment and munitions overseas and enabling more units to 3D-print their own replacement parts and supplies. But the scale of this problem is so vast that it will never be completely solved. In our experience, senior U.S. military leaders readily acknowledge the challenge of contested logistics. But they still spend far more time and energy preparing for future warfighting challenges rather than developing effective concepts and capabilities to address these daunting logistics obstacles. They ought to heed the increasingly dire warnings coming from the logistics community, since U.S. forces simply will not be able to fight (or keep fighting) if their logistics pipelines remain vulnerable and unprotected.
The Limits of the Defense-Industrial Base
One critical lesson from the war in Ukraine is that major wars devour enormous amounts of ammunition, weapons systems, and other materiel. The insatiable Ukrainian demand for 155-millimeter artillery shells has clearly revealed the stark limits of the U.S. defense-industrial base. Before the 2022 invasion, the United States produced 14,000 of these rounds each month. But once the war began, Ukraine began expending as many as 8,000 each day, and would likely have consumed far more if they had been available. Since early 2022, the U.S. Army has spent several billion dollars to increase 155-millimeter round production, which is expected to soon reach 70,000 to 80,000 rounds per month. But that has taken almost three years to achieve — and the stark reality is that artillery expenditures by the U.S. military and its allies in any major war could quickly dwarf that amount. And that is just a single munition. Any major conflict would devour vast numbers of artillery and tank shells, smart bombs, and air defense missiles — and would also cause considerable losses of tanks, ships, and warplanes. These entirely predictable losses in a protracted U.S. war would trigger enormous demands on the defense-industrial base that it simply will not be able to absorb.
The Department of Defense is well aware of this problem. It released the first-ever National Defense Industrial Strategy last year, and just published an implementation plan for the strategy at the end of October. These documents provide much-needed guidance and structure for revitalizing key elements of the defense-industrial base, from improving production and supply chains to ramping up industrial collaboration with allies and partners.
Several innovative efforts to address the structural problems of the U.S. defense industrial base are already underway. U.S. Navy shipbuilding capacity has now shrunk to only four shipyards, ensuring replacements for sunk warships will take years, if not decades. A recent initiative to leverage South Korea’s massive shipyard industry to repair U.S. Navy ships in the Pacific offers prospects for in-theater repair for war-damaged U.S. vessels. These same yards could also offer potential options for building some future U.S. warships more quickly and cheaply than in the United States. However, doing so would be politically fraught, and would require congressional approval or a presidential emergency exception. A less politically contentious initiative involves sharing munitions production with allies such as Australia to serve as a backstop to U.S. production — which could also ease logistics problems by increasing production closer to potential wartime theaters.
Though the incoming administration will set its own strategic priorities, Donald Trump did focus on strengthening the defense-industrial base during his first term, and seems likely to do so during his second term as well. But time is of the essence here. The longer it takes to revitalize the defense-industrial base, the less likely it is that the United States will have the materiel it needs to fight a protracted war.
Protecting the Homeland During Wartime
Since 2014, the Department of Defense has warned that the U.S. homeland is no longer a sanctuary. Yet, despite this acknowledgement, the department has not sufficiently thought about how homeland attacks during a war will force tradeoffs with overseas warfighting plans.
Any protracted war will require mobilizing and deploying the National Guard, to reinforce Army and Air Force combat units and to replace capabilities and units that have been destroyed. When at home, the Guard normally operates under the command of state governors, and is the first military responder to civil disturbances that exhaust the capacity of state and local authorities. They regularly support state and local authorities by providing water, power generation, medical support, food distribution, and security during and after hurricanes, wildfires, and other natural disasters.
However, the president has the authority to federalize Guard units at any time, which brings them under his command. U.S. presidents have regularly done so to support overseas military operations throughout the nation’s history, and the long wars in Iraq and Afghanistan simply could not have been fought without extensive contributions from federalized Guard units. A future protracted war against a capable adversary would undoubtedly cause the military to rely on the Guard even more heavily than in the recent wars, given the extensive losses that the United States would surely suffer in the early weeks, months, and perhaps even years of such a conflict.
In past wars, these dual domestic and overseas missions have never really clashed with each other, since the U.S. homeland has always been well protected by the two large oceans and two friendly neighbors that surround it. But the vulnerability of the homeland today means that this is no longer the case. North Korea just tested an intercontinental ballistic missile that would be able to hit anywhere in the United States, for example. And some hypersonic missiles carrying conventional weapons can already reach the U.S. mainland, against which there are few defenses.
Yet the starkest threat to the homeland comes from the cyber realm, which enables adversaries to alter, disable, and even destroy targets anywhere in the United States without ever encountering the formidable U.S. military. Groups affiliated with potential U.S. adversaries already pose a significant threat to the homeland. In a time of war, any smart adversary would likely target the mobilization and sustainment pipelines upon which U.S. military forces would rely — including the beginnings of those conduits in the United States, as well as other parts of the nation’s critical infrastructure. That would inevitably require the Guard to help secure ports, airports, and railways from enemy disruptions, as well as provide humanitarian support to civil authorities and help to maintain order if critical infrastructures are temporarily disabled or even destroyed.
The National Guard, unfortunately, cannot be in two places at once. Though the president clearly has the power to prioritize the overseas battle, it is not at all clear that he or she would choose to do so. If one of the three major regions of the U.S. power grid goes down, for example, the governors of those states would probably demand that the president stop federalizing their Guard units so they can respond to the ensuing crisis. It is hard to imagine that a president would decide to keep sending Guard forces overseas instead of helping American citizens suffering at home.
Some of the same logic applies to the service reserve forces as well. Though they have no state role and are always under the command of the president, they contain vital support capabilities that could be needed simultaneously at home and abroad. In May 2020, for example, more than 6,700 members of the Army, Air Force, and Navy Reserves were activated to help respond to the COVID-19 pandemic. Today, the Army Reserve contains 56 percent of the Army’s medical, transportation, and quartermaster capabilities — a figure that rises to 67 percent for medical capabilities alone. Defense Department war planners and the combatant commanders should therefore prepare for scenarios where they do not receive some or all of their expected Guard or reserve forces and determine the best ways to mitigate those shortfalls.
These four challenges are all wicked problems that policymakers often avoid addressing, because they are too hard, too unpopular, or too politically risky. But they ought to be addressed now — in order to help deter a future protracted war and, if necessary, to fight and win one. As Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Marshall ruefully remarked in July 1940 on the cusp of America’s entry into World War II, “For almost twenty years we had all of the time and almost none of the money; today we have all of the money and no time.” The U.S. military should use the time it has now, before a protracted war erupts, to better prepare for the challenges posed by mobilization, contested logistics, the defense-industrial base, and protecting the homeland during wartime — to ensure it can fight as long as its adversaries can.’
Lt. Gen. David W. Barno, U.S. Army (ret.), and Dr. Nora Bensahel are Professors of Practice at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, and are also contributing editors at War on the Rocks, where their column appears periodically. Sign up for Barno and Bensahel’s Strategic Outpost newsletter to track their articles as well as their public events.
Image: Master Sgt. John Hughel via DVIDS.
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