Future of war: how the game is changing of war.

• Author: Erwin, Sandra I.

The U.S. military today has no grand strategy. But that's no reason to panic. The world is too volatile to distill into Pentagon-friendly Venn diagrams and clever acronyms. "It's hard to concentrate on a grand strategy when your house is on fire," said Marine Corps Gen. James Mattis, head of U.S. Joint Forces Command.

But even as they cope with the frantic demands of two major wars, military leaders say they have a clearer sense of the future than they did in the 1990s, after the Cold War ended and nobody knew what was coming next. "It is now becoming more and more obvious what we face," Mattis said. "Clarity is forming for us."

Clarity in this case means that the military now envisions a future of "hybrid" wars. Pigeonholing contingency planning into neat categories of "conventional" or "irregular" conflicts sets the military up for failure, the current thinking goes. Once an enemy identifies U.S. strengths, it will find the Achilles' heel and will exploit that vulnerability, as insurgents did in Iraq with roadside bombs. If the assumption is that wars will be hybrid--a combination of conventional warfare and Iraq-like counterinsurgency--the U.S. military will have to be ready to counter both asymmetric threats, such as buried bombs, and conventional weapons, such as cruise and ballistic missiles.

"Looking at irregular warfare as being one kind of conflict and conventional warfare as a discreet kind of warfare is an outdated concept," said Defense Secretary Robert Gates. "Conflict in the future will slide up and down a scale, both in scope and in lethality."

The nation's military strategy and how the Defense Department will organize and equip for the future are the topics of a sweeping review that is now under way at the Pentagon. This year's Quadrennial Defense Review, or QDR, is expected to once and for all banish the Cold War belief system and acknowledge that the U.S. military must be geared up to contend with morphing threats--transnational terrorist groups, failing states, or well-armed militias that espouse extremist ideologies.

"We know we have to adapt," said Mattis. "If we don't, we're going to be dominant but irrelevant."

QDRs typically have been exercises in distributing resources with-in the Pentagon so that there would be enough forces to be able to fight two major combat operations. "That is not a realistic view of the world," Gates said. "We are already in two major conflicts. So what if we have a third one or a fourth one or a fifth one? Past reviews failed to acknowledge the role of non-state groups as legitimate military threats, he noted. "How do you characterize a Hezbollah that has more missiles and rockets than most countries or a violent extremist group that may acquire a weapon of mass destruction?"

Gates also will seek to institutionalize the concept of"smart power," which says that winning conflicts requires the strengths of not just the military services, but of other government agencies as well. Both Defense and State Department leaders have called for a multifaceted approach involving military, political, economic and diplomatic fronts.

Iraq turned into a nightmare for the United States because of what Mattis described as "wrongheaded thinking" about the extent and reach of U.S. military power. "The fundamental nature of war is not going to change to suit us. We embraced wishful thinking, untested concepts; we didn't do our homework."

The U.S. military has to be able to cope with surprises, Mattis said. "War cannot be precisely orchestrated .... There's no room for 'my way, or the highway.'" Military planning for many years has been encapsulated in a four-quadrant chart--representing disruptive, catastrophic, traditional and non-traditional wars--that is not reflective of reality, he said. Such planning was based more on what the Pentagon wanted to do instead of what it was realistically going to have to do. That is a recipe for trouble and ultimately failure, said Mattis. "We have to prevent doing silly things like grabbing concepts that are defined in three letters and then wonder why the enemy dances nimbly around you."

In Washington, the biggest source of anxiety about the QDR is how it will affect defense spending, the size of the force, or the weapons the United States should buy in the future. That's yet to be determined. But regardless of how the review turns out, a new consensus about future warfare already is shaping up. Following are some bits of new conventional wisdom that have emerged:

Traditional Tools of Deterrence No Longer Work

What does deterrence look like in the 21st century? The United States has not yet figured that out, said Marine Corps Gen. James Cartwright, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. "You need something that deters a conflict, and you need more choices than just nuclear."

There is no assurance that dispatching bombers, aircraft carriers or Marine expeditionary units to a hotspot dissuades anyone from starting a war or an insurgency. "It's more art than science," said Cartwright. "You have to convince your enemy that you will not tolerate any mischief."

One possible means of deterring enemies is by securing a "global strike" capability for the U.S. military to reach targets around the world in less than an hour.

During the past two years, the Pentagon and Congress have debated possible ways to achieve global strike. One proposal was to place conventional warheads on nuclear submarine-launched Trident missiles. That...