What's the end result of incresingly asymmetric warfare? More terrorism?
"we must have the ability to create an overwhelming burden of cost and complexity on our adversaries"
What worries me about this philosophy is that it's all very well to engage in a cold arms race with the new bad, Emperor Xi, who's happy to escalate, but elsewhere it encourages said adversaries to move their confrontations away from the battlefield towards softer targets - civilians and infrastructure, whether via traditional terrorism or the cyber variety. Retaliation, as we've seen in the Yemen, Palestine/Israel, and Afghanistan, is inevitably directed towards the civilian targets among whom our adversaries shelter. Tsar Putin rattles his sabre, but conducts his war online with impunity (unless Russia is also suffering unreported cyber assaults).
Warfare has become increasingly something that militaries inflict on civilians, rather than each other. This might be better for our warfighters, as they like to call themselves these days, and for above-the-line military expenditure, but is it really an improvement over confrontations limited to a traditional battlefield?
Biting the hand that feeds IT
