Treating the Pathologies of Victory: Hardening the Nation for Strategic Competition

The 2018 National Defense Strategy directs the military services to prepare for an era of great power competition which implies deterring and prevailing in large-scale conventional conflict made more complex by new technologies such as cyber, unmanned systems, hypervelocity weapons, and artificial intelligence. This is a sharply different world than what the military has known for nearly 30 years since the end of the Cold War. Military operations since then have been against enemies lacking air power, navies, armored forces, or artillery and who have had no capability to challenge the U.S. military’s ability to deploy and employ at will.

To what extent has America’s freedom to operate effectively unopposed, combined with our strategic victory in the Cold War that ended without a shot, blinded America to what “great power competition” implies for our military and for our country?

In a powerful new essay for The Heritage Foundation’s 2020 Index of U.S. Military Strength, Dr. Tom Ehrhard explains how America’s past victories have skewed its perception of the reality of strategic competition, and have left the American public overconfident and complacent when considering the needs for national defense. Ehrhard unsparingly diagnoses the “pathologies” and provides recommendations for treatment.

Join us for a unique opportunity to engage on this important subject, and to get a sneak peak at a section of the upcoming 2020 Index of U.S. Military Strength, to be released on October 30, 2019.