From Mark E. Vinson, Small Wars Journal: “If, as President Obama asserted, “ideologies are not defeated by guns,” but by “better ideas,” then how should the U.S. military be used to help achieve strategic success in the growing number of protracted, irregular conflicts with ideologically-motivated violent non-state actors (VNSAs)? In Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, the Philippines, and many more countries around the globe, VNSAs, motivated by religious, political, ethnic and other status-quo-challenging ideas, have been remarkably resilient, perseverant, and influential. By surviving and rapidly recovering from punishing attacks by the United States and its partners—while continuing to carry out violent agendas against local, regional, and even global adversaries—these VNSAs can credibly claim that they are succeeding strategically.”
From Kirkland Donald, Jonathan Altman, and Jon Solomon, RealClearDefense: “The average American rarely if ever thinks about the United States Navy. Relatively few Americans today work in jobs or live in communities in which they directly and regularly encounter the Navy or its personnel. Moreover, the United States’ uncontested military dominance of the seas over the past quarter century, not to mention its general maritime superiority throughout the Cold War’s four and a half decades, has meant that neither the goods and information we transport via ships and undersea cables to our overseas markets, nor the foreign goods and services we bring to our shores to fuel our industries, have been seriously threatened since the height of Germany’s Second World War U-boat campaign. The fact that this superiority is not an inherently permanent condition is simply not contemplated by Americans beyond a relatively small community of navalists. Nor is there any evidence that traditional navalist talking points, such as how much of the world’s surface is covered by water or how much international trade is carried by ships, “move the needle” of American public opinion. The “demand signal” for seapower is simply not self-evident to Americans.”