What is Great Power Competition

Executive Summary: The recently published strategy by the US Navy’s Tenth Fleet offers a great conversation on the strategic environment characterized by Great Power Competition (GPC). What follows is an overview of that discussion.

Disclaimer: The Tenth Fleet strategy version is pulled directly from its public-facing website. This conversation is entirely unclassified. If you are interested in having an FOUO conversation, please join the conversation here: https://blogs.intelink.gov/blogs/rochefortgroup (CAC-enabled)

GPC Overview

GPC is not just a buzz word. It is real, both now as well as in the long term. The National Defense Strategy states the re-emergence of Great Power Competition is the central challenge to U.S. prosperity and security. That competition is global, and being engaged in every domain.

GPC is a challenge between two different visions for the future – between democracies and authoritarian regimes; between freedom of navigation, access to markets and ideas, and one of coercive restraint. It is not the Cold War. Our long-term strategic competitors are executing activities to alter the international order.

The 2018 National Defense Strategy (NDS, unclassified summary) characterizes GPC as the “reemergence of long-term, strategic competition" by revisionist powers. According to the NDS, the “long-term strategic competitions with China and Russia are the principal priorities for the Department of Defense, and both require increased and sustained investment, because of the magnitude of the threats they pose to U.S. security and prosperity today, and the potential for those threats to increase in the future.”

Why is this significant? Historically, to undermine a state’s power required territorially-focused, overt armed attacks or physical invasion. While that is, and will always remain a possibility, technology has provided our adversaries with the ability to achieve their objectives without traditional military force.

The National Security Challenge

There is a growing understanding that the opening rounds of the next 21st-century conflict will be launched in the electromagnetic spectrum, and/or space and cyber domains. The opening chapters of the book Ghost Fleet offer a great description of what the opening salvo might look like in the information environment.

General Douglas MacArthur once said: The history of failure in war can almost be summed up in two words: 'Too late.'                          

Too late to understand our adversary’s intentions, too late to prepare, too late to mobilize, too late to deter, too late to stand with our allies and partners, and most importantly, too late to act first.

[Author comments] There is a trend in the history of American warfare that we lose the opening battle, but because of our geo-strategic safety bordered by two vast oceans, we could regroup, regenerate, and redeploy. Attacks, with first-mover advantage, are favored in the information environment. If we look at Russian cyber-attacks in Ukraine, more recent cyber-attacks in the Middle East, civilian infrastructure has become a popular military target. The United States can no longer rely on the great oceans to buy us time and space. Imagine the cities of Washington DC, Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York without power and access to fresh water, for starters and then a declarative statement by our adversary that they are in control. If we lose in the opening round in the information environment, we could be suing for peace in the first week.

Those who recognize change, understand change, and exploit change to their advantage, win! ~ Colonel John Boyd

Let that be us.