David Petraeus: ‘The Chinese military is spreading its wings’
The former top American general tells Lynne O’Donnell about the threat of China, how Ukraine has changed warfare and why the West must focus on Africa.
December 1, 2023 (The World Today)—David Petraeus could be the United States’ most famous living general. He commanded American and allied NATO forces in Iraq and Afghanistan; he was 10th commander of US Central Command and director of the CIA. He now advises civilian and military leaders on strategy, most recently telling Benjamin Netanyahu, Israel’s prime minister, how to proceed against Hamas after the October 7 atrocity. His latest book is ‘Conflict: The Evolution of War from 1945 to Ukraine’, with historian Andrew Roberts. It examines the major wars of the past 80 years within strict parameters: the strategic, tactical and technological successes and failures of each conflict.
What are the major evolutionary impacts of warfare that you are aiming to capture in your book?
What Andrew and I recognized was the crucial importance in conflict of strategic leadership, at the very top of the civilian structure – presidents and prime ministers – and then, on the battlefield, the senior commander who is turning the really big ideas at the civilian level into a strategic campaign plan, and then into reality on the battlefield.
In essence, strategic leaders have to perform four tasks. The first is to get the big ideas right, to understand all the elements of the context, so the strategy that is determined and then implemented is the right one for all of these circumstances.
Second, is to communicate the big idea effectively throughout the breadth and depth of the organization that the strategic leader is overseeing, and to everyone who has a stake in the outcome. Then, to oversee the implementation of the big ideas.
And there’s a final task which has to be done formally: to sit down and determine how you need to refine the big ideas, the strategy, the campaign plan, the policies, practices, individual programmes so they can be communicated and implemented. And you do this again and again and again.
This was the single biggest revelation for each of us. I sensed this, I didn’t think that I knew this already because I had developed this intellectual construct I’ve just described for you before I went back to Iraq for the surge, and then used it during that command, and then subsequently at US Central Command, and then Afghanistan. And at the CIA. It’s also an intellectual construct that applies in any field of endeavour, not just combat, conflict, but also the civilian sector, the non-profit world, your family.
In your book, you say the war in Ukraine has racked up many ‘firsts’ in the evolution of war. What are these?
In Ukraine, you have elements that are literally of the First World War with trenches, barbed wire; you have Second World War massive artillery and substantial armour forces. And all the elements on the battlefield are from the Cold War era. You also see some extraordinary advances –increasingly sophisticated use of unmanned systems.
The Ukrainians, in particular, have deployed maritime drones so effectively they have essentially forced the Russians to withdraw the bulk of the Black Sea Fleet from the Crimean port of Sevastopol. You also see the advent of suicide drones that are quite sophisticated. We’ve even seen the Russians use a hypersonic missile system, which happily was shot down by the Patriot system that the US provided to Ukraine.
We have never had a war that has been so transparent because everyone on the battlefield has a smart phone, can take videos and photos, and have access to the internet and upload them on social media platforms.
There are all sorts of ways that this war is a throwback to the past, and also a vision of the future. It is not what we envision the very highest of high-end war will be in the future, in which there are innumerable unmanned systems, not just in the air or on the sea, but sub-sea, on the ground, outer space and the equivalent in cyber space, and where increasingly these systems are not remotely piloted but are algorithmically piloted.
Is the democratic world equipped to fight in this new, yet-to-be-defined landscape?
We have to be ready for different types of conflicts, including nation-state warfare and defence of the homeland because we are involved still in counter-insurgency campaigns. Yes, we may be doing it through what may be termed, ‘advise, assist and enable’, so we are helping a host nation or local partner to deal with it, as we are in Iraq and north-eastern Syria.
There we are helping local partners keep an eye on Islamic State and ensure that it cannot do what it did before … which was to reconstitute. We are doing the same in a variety of other places around the world, with modest forces. We have to retain that expertise.
And, of course, ensuring that our forces are capable at the very highest end of the conflict spectrum, so that deterrence is maintained. Here, you think most significantly of the Indo-Pacific area, including the Korean Peninsula, but more broadly speaking between the US, our allies and partners, and the People’s Republic of China, hoping we never have to fight them.
But you have to deal with the world the way it is, not the way you would like it to be. Therefore we have to ensure that the elements of deterrence – which are the potential adversaries’ assessment of your capabilities – on the one hand, and your willingness to employ them, on the other.
How much of a threat does China pose? Can the US manage the threats to global security?
China is a superpower without question, economically and in terms of its security forces, in which it has invested a great deal in the past decade or more, albeit not with the capabilities that the US has, but not focused on the entire world the way the US has to. Rather focused on a sub-set of the world while expanding its military, spreading its wings, and expanding the areas in which it is active.
The US is capable of keeping all these plates spinning, keeping in mind that we have others that help us to do that. But unquestionably the US does have to lead this particular effort and it should appreciate its allies and partners and work hard to strengthen the various relationships that manifest.
And I think we are. This also underscores why we have to have capabilities all the way up and down the spectrum of the conflict.
Technology is now in the hands of billionaires, such as Elon Musk. How will the personalization and potential politicization of vital technology affect security, strategy and planning?
The United States still is very much the inventor and innovator in the security realm, and by and large leading in the AI sector. There are other countries that have advanced dramatically. China would probably be foremost among those.
The innovation that we have sparked or funded or propelled has often been carried out by private sector partners. So that is not unique. It’s where the innovation is most significant these days, in the US, Britain and other countries. It’s the private sector where the rewards are the greatest, where the agility is the most significant, where the bureaucracy is the least.
Once they get to the scale of the major industrial companies, the sense of agility can be a bit less. And when you are talking about massive major programmes you have to have a lot of bureaucracy, detail and contracts, and that means you are not able to turn on a dime.
That innovation, entrepreneurship and invention all are continuing at a very rapid pace. In the case of Star Link [the satellite internet constellation operated by Musk’s company SpaceX], there was an interruption of the service (in Ukraine), and then the Department of Defence took it over. So, the department is paying for Star Link in Ukraine and it is on all the time, without interruption and without interference by the chief executive of that particular effort.
Is NATO still relevant? As it expands, can it function as anything more than an adjunct of US power?
Yes. The essence of NATO is the US foundation. We have seen this repeatedly – in Afghanistan, when the US decided to withdraw, all the other countries, many of them NATO members, had wanted to stay but could not without the US. To accomplish something significant, the US is going to have to provide the foundations, and a considerable degree of leadership.
That’s not to say that NATO cannot carry out lesser activities; it has done so with a considerable degree of success in the former Yugoslavia and so forth. But if it is going to be really big, you are going to need the really big partner, and that is the United States.
Keep in mind that the US doesn’t just spend more on defence than all its NATO partners together, it spends more than 2.3 times all of them put together. The rest, to varying degrees, are a bit fragmented in terms of their capabilities. They are certainly not as robust as the US.
When it comes to Africa, what are your concerns, and what should be the US and western priorities in Africa?
The concerns in many of the countries of Africa, by no means all, are inadequate security, numerous different threats – principal among them that of various Islamist extremist groups. In other cases, essentially civil wars. And in other cases, large criminal entities.
You have a lack of adequate governance, a lack of integrity in governance, and a variety of other challenges, corruption certainly, that make it very difficult to invest in Africa when it comes to large western firms.
This means that competing with China’s Belt and Road Initiative is difficult – that is obviously a state endeavour; there aren’t the concerns about corruption, inadequate governance, the environment, nor frankly, in many cases, the people of the country and employing them, and using their skills in the design and materials and construction.
Because of the levels of corruption, there is a willingness to use organizations such as Wagner, which are essentially mercenary outfits that don’t much care about the environment, how the workers are treated or corruption. Therefore, some of the leaders of some of these countries are comfortable having them. They don’t care much about violations of the Geneva Conventions and the law of land warfare.
We have seen, very sadly, the withdrawal of French forces from a number of countries in West Africa, a number of coups in some of those same countries, and then you have seen the expansion of Islamist extremism in those same countries. It’s a downward spiral that is very concerning.
As is the challenge for when it comes to investing in countries that have extraordinary quantities of strategic minerals, especially those needed for the transition to renewable energy and associated technologies, especially electric vehicles. The US and the West haven’t really come to grips with how to deal with that.
‘Conflict: The Evolution of War from 1945 to Ukraine’, William Collins, £26