With the unveiling of the 2018 National Defense Strategy, then-Secretary of Defense James Mattis announced that great power competition was now the “primary focus of U.S. national security.” After nearly 20 years of muddling through counterinsurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan and special operations forces conducting counterterrorism operations around the world, the conventional U.S. military is echoing its post-Vietnam days by forgetting its recent conflicts and renewing focus on large-scale combat operations. The irony of this focus is that the day-to-day struggle in great power competition is anything but direct armed conflict.
