By WallStreetDaily.com

War isn’t always combat on a battlefield — not when the battlefield is everywhere, all the time.

For better or worse — and like it or not — the United States has been the most dominant power the world has ever seen.

Say what you will about our spiraling federal debt, including the off-the-books stuff.

And yeah, the budget deficit — if Congress ever gets around to passing a new spending bill — is something to behold.

For all the drama it generates, our domestic strife — including “culture wars,” identity politics, and the battle for social justice and equality — is but a distraction to our real business these days.

That business is empire.

According to the budget-and-deficit scolds at the Peter G. Peterson Foundation, the United States spends more on defense than China, Saudi Arabia, Russia, the United Kingdom, India, France, and Japan combined.

A former paratrooper with the 82nd Airborne Division of the U.S. Army, replying to a question on Quora, “How much stronger is the United States military as compared with the next strongest power?” answered, “1,000 times. Maybe more.”

He added: “No other military or combination of militaries could even begin to inflict the slightest numbers of casualties on the United States military in a conventional war.”

China, our No. 2 “rival” in defense spending, with outlays equal to about a third of ours, defines its six theaters of command entirely within the bounds of its borders.

For all the drama it generates, our domestic strife — including “culture wars,” identity politics, and the battle for social justice and equality — is but a distraction to our real business these days.

U.S. theaters of command span the globe.

We stepped into a vacuum created by the destruction of World War II.

During the Cold War, we knitted the world together based on our self-interest, which was to expand markets and to extend our moat of security.

The International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the U.S. Treasury Department established economic principles that we know as the “Washington Consensus.”

And thus the “Pax Americana” was born.

U.S. theaters of command span the globe.

In the post-9/11 era, we’ve traded — if not explicitly then certainly implicitly through our choices at the ballot box — personal liberty for national security. So we’ve evolved from the skepticism of standing armies to the fear of threats from abroad.

And Congress — a body thought by the Framers closest to the people and therefore most protective of its liberties — through the years, decades, and centuries, has learned how to use its constitutional power to “raise and support Armies” and “provide and maintain a Navy” not only to prop up a permanent a military but to aggrandize themselves in the bargain.

War has come a long way since 1789. And we’ve been there almost every step of the way, benefitting from ancient European rivalries and conflicts to the extent that we got to pick up the pieces after the two great wars of the first half of the 20th century.

“Empire” does not, however, necessarily mean “inertia.” And our national security and defense experts continue to innovate in order to meet threats old and new.

After all, we know from Sun Tzu that “the art of war is of vital importance to the state” and that “every battle is won before it’s ever fought.”

Though the Cold War has long since given way to the Global War on Terror, it is that once-and-future Great Power Russia that is again proving itself a “pacing competitor” in the eternal game of global domination.

Russia’s recent military incursions in Ukraine and Syria suggest the U.S. has some gaps to fill, particularly when it comes to cyber and electronic warfare, if it’s to maintain operational and tactical superiority.

China’s very different concept of cyber espionage — where there’s no distinction between peacetime and wartime — also requires a new, round-the-clock footing.

“Empire” does not, however, necessarily mean “inertia.” And our national security and defense experts continue to innovate in order to meet threats old and new.

While the political branch of the mainstream media got its gears up for the one and only vice presidential debate of the 2016 campaign on Tuesday, the Association of the United States Army held is annual conference in Washington, D.C.

It’s “the biggest defense conference of the year” — prom for national security professionals.

There, Deputy Defense Secretary Robert Work endorsed a future of “multidomain battle” fought in the air, on land, at sea, in space, and in cyberspace.

He said, “This isn’t about Skynet and Terminator. This is about Ironman.” That’s a pithy and dramatic assessment, though I don’t get the distinction.

It does, however, illustrate the remote, fantastical endeavor — at least relative to most Americans — that modern warfare has become.

Remote and fantastical, sure, but can it too be more efficient?

According to Sydney J. Freedberg Jr., of Breaking Defense, “Even as the U.S. defense budget shrinks, the Army is prioritizing new investments in downing drones, hacking networks, jamming transmissions, and even sinking ships at sea. Far from triggering interservice rivalry, however, the Army’s ambitious concept seems to have buy-in from its sister services and the Office of the Secretary of Defense.”

It’s “the biggest defense conference of the year” — prom for national security professionals.

Work was at the AUSA conference not just to promote the idea but to put our money where his mouth is.

Although he didn’t offer a specific figure, implicit in his presentation was the probability that the gap between the Army’s modernization budget and those for the Navy and the Air Force — about $40 billion — will be closed.

According to Army Gen. David Perkins, commanding general of U.S. Training and Doctrine Command, developing “additive, correlational forces” will be the central factor determining the durability of U.S. military hegemony.

Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. David Goldfein explicitly framed the 21st-century landscape in digital terms:

How do we use some of the technologies, the autonomy, the machine-to-machine language, learning software… How do we use some of that to take the volume of ones and zeroes and pull that together so that commanders who are trying to make a decision can actually decide and move forces… at a pace that the enemy can never keep up with? We want them guessing.

Welcome to the next phase of the Pax Americana.

Money Quote

And do not imagine that what we are fighting for is simply the question of freedom or slavery: There is also involved the loss of our empire and the dangers arising from the hatred which we have incurred in administering it. Nor is it any longer possible for you to give up this empire, though there may be some people who in a mood of sudden panic and in a spirit of political apathy actually think that this would be a fine and noble thing to do. Your empire is now like a tyranny: It may have been wrong to take it; it is certainly dangerous to let it go.

— Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War

Smart Investing,

David Dittman
Editorial Director, Wall Street Daily

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