How to Avoid a Great-Power War

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

General Mark Milley has his work cut out for him. As chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, he’s helping to guide U.S. strategy in Ukraine.

At the same time, he’s trying to figure out how the United States should navigate in a very different world—one where it is no longer the sole superpower; where tension with both Russia and China is growing; and where for the first time in decades, it is all too easy to imagine a great-power war.

General Milley, thanks for doing this. 

GENERAL MARK MILLEY

Hey, thanks Dan, appreciate it. 

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

So let’s jump right into the subject that has no doubt dominated most of your last year, and we’ll dominate your next five months on this job. What do you expect a likely Ukrainian offensive in the coming weeks to achieve, and what would the path be from a successful offensive to a negotiated outcome to this war?

GENERAL MARK MILLEY

I don’t want to speculate on a specific offensive or not. What I will say is that over the last several months, the Ukrainians have asked us for assistance, military assistance, to help them, to train, to man, to equip their forces. Specifically about nine brigades worth of combined arms, armor, and mech infantry type forces. Also, there’s some light infantry, ranger type units, that we helped train. And I say we—I mean NATO, all of the European partners, and we did that.

So I would tell you that the Ukrainians right now have the capability to attack, they can conduct offensive operations, and they also have the capability to defend, significantly enhanced from what they were just a year ago for conventional operations. So, I think their capability has significantly increased. So they can either do attack or defense. So I don’t want to suggest that they may or may not conduct an offensive operation in the coming weeks. That’ll be up to them.  They’ve got a significant amount of planning and coordination and all of that to do, if they were to do an offensive operation. But they’re prepared to do offense or defense.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

And the path from there to a negotiated outcome? You’ve stressed again and again the need for this war to end in a negotiation, as has President Biden, President Zelensky, and many others. How do we get there given the assessments from senior U.S. government officials that Putin is not exactly in a mood to negotiate at this point?

GENERAL MARK MILLEY

I would say a couple things. First, all wars do end, sooner or later, and how they end really is the question. And in this case, you know, what is war about to begin with? War is about imposing your political will on your opponent by the use of organized violence. And wars happen when diplomacy fails. 

So when the Russians decided to invade, they had strategic objectives. One of their strategic objectives was to collapse the Zelensky government; capture the capital of Kyiv, to do that relatively quickly; advance from the Russian border all the way to Dnipro River, do that in a short amount of time, four to six weeks, perhaps; and then also to cut off Ukraine’s access to the sea, to the Sea of Azov, by securing Kherson and Odessa. Very short order—the invasion started on the 24th of February—in very short order, Russia fell short of their strategic objectives, really within about a month or so. And the Russians could not militarily achieve what they set out to do. 

And then what happens is, at the end of March, maybe beginning of April, in that timeframe of last year, Putin readjusts and resets his strategic objectives. And then he says, I’m just going to limit my objectives to the southern border, the southern oblasts—provinces—of Ukraine, and to consolidate power in Donbas, secure the Crimea, and so on. So he takes his entire military, shifts them further to the south and to the east. And then he launches a second set of what I would call operational objectives—and he failed there as well.

 So he has not yet completely secured the Donbas. He has not yet achieved his operational objectives, down in that region. And yet you’ve got, I don’t know, maybe 200 plus thousand—maybe 250,000, a large number—of Russian casualties, killed and wounded. And he has replaced them with his first tranche of mobilized reservists, about 300,000 of those guys, two to 300,000. So there’s still around 200,000 Russian troops—poorly led, not well trained, poorly equipped, not well sustained—in Russian-occupied Ukraine. But they’re there. 

For the Ukrainian side, in about August timeframe the Ukrainians launched two sequential offensives. One offensive—counteroffensive—was up in the Kharkiv region, and then it’s advanced across the river, and it’s now really the frontline traces in and around Crimea; and they were very successful in doing that. And then they launched an offensive, a counteroffensive, down in the Kherson region; and they were very successful in doing that. So they have two very successful counteroffensives where they compelled the Russians to withdraw, and closed their lines and reestablished their defense. And then things set in for the winter. And for the winter, even though there’s been a lot of fighting, almost World War I style fighting, there’s been very little change of hands of significant pieces of territory with the possible exception of Bakhmut.

So you’ve got essentially a situation along a frontline that extends, I don’t know, probably Washington, D.C. to Atlanta, something like that. It’s quite a ways. And that front line hasn’t changed hands. It’s essentially been stalemated. And then the Ukrainians asked us for help to build up their force so that they had the capability, anyway, of conducting offensive operations with combined arms maneuver with heavy forces, mechanized armor and infantry. We’ve done that, and we have not yet seen what that’s going to result in—you know, this planning. But I’m not going to discuss that in this form, so we’ll see. 

Then the question becomes, how does it end? Let’s just say for the sake of argument that there is an offensive. And now you’re dealing in probabilities and speculation, which is always a dangerous thing to do. But I think that it’s fair to say, if there were an offensive, that there’s a possibility of a variety of outcomes. Clearly one of those outcomes could achieve significant success and collapse the Russian frontline across the board. And that’s happened before in previous wars—World War I, for example. So there’s a possibility of that. Then there’s a possibility of partial success. There’s a possibility of limited success. There’s a possibility of no success. So all of these are ranges of outcome if there were an offensive operation. Then the opposite is true—maybe the Ukrainians are going to do a defensive operation, and the Russians would have a great challenge mounting an offensive operation. So we’re going to see what the future holds. 

I do think, though, that the probability of either side achieving their political objectives—war is about politics through the sole use of military means—I think that’s going to be very difficult, very challenging. And frankly, I don’t think the probability of that is likely in this year. But I do think the Russians have suffered a tremendous amount. They’ve lost a lot of casualties. Their economy has been hurt significantly. Their ground forces, at least, have suffered enormously. 

And I think that rational folks, as part of the Russian decision-making process, will conclude—I believe, over either months or a year or two—they’re going to conclude that the cost exceeds the benefit,  and it’ll be time to do something, at least from a negotiating standpoint. That time may not be now—I can’t read minds. I don’t know when Putin will be ready to do that—but at a certain point, if he’s rational, he needs to do that. He could do it tonight; he could end the war tonight. Of course, he has political constraints internal to Russian politics. But they’re going to have to figure that out because they’re not going to win. 

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

If we look back a year ago, it striking to me that we were all thinking a lot about escalation risks, including nuclear escalation risks. That’s not front of mind for most of us—maybe we’re deluding ourselves, but how have you thought about managing escalation risks in this context, and how has that shaped our assistance, our advice to the Ukrainians or approach to the conflict in general? 

GENERAL MARK MILLEY

Well, I think that it’s in everyone’s interests not to escalate. Russia does not want a war with NATO or the United States, and NATO and the United States don’t want a war with Russia. So it’s in everyone’s interests in that regard, and Ukraine certainly doesn’t want that scale of war in its territory. So it’s in everyone’s interests not to escalate. Having said that, the possibility of escalation is very real. Wars are highly emotional; there’s a tremendous amount of fear, there’s pride, there’s interest, as Thucydides would tell us. And all of that is at play all at the same time, in varying degrees of inputs. So the possibility of escalation is always there. 

Every single day, we are always—any action we take, or any action we see the Russians taking, we are always calculating the possibility of escalation. Why? Because the consequences of escalation are so severe, and the consequences of armed conflict between the United States and Russia, or any of NATO and Russia, would be devastating for both sides. So it’s in everyone’s interest not to have it. We always calculate it and we’re always conscious of any move and the possibility of escalation, and we manage that as closely as we can.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

If we were talking about great-power war 18 months ago, we’d be focused on China. One thing that has been striking about the last year or so is the growing closeness of Russia and China. I’m curious how you see that relationship, what your assessment of that relationship is, especially in the context of the war in Ukraine, looking at what Xi Jinping wants to achieve vis-à-vis the war. And then is there anything you see the U.S. able to do to prevent that from becoming an enduring feature of the international security landscape? 

GENERAL MARK MILLEY

Unlike the Cold War, now, you’ve got three great powers in the world: the United States, China, and Russia. All have significant inherent power potential in their populations, their economy, and of course their military. And all three have substantial nuclear arsenals. So the United States is the most powerful by any measure. But having said that, Russia and China are quite powerful as well. So it is not in the U.S. interest to see Russia and China form a strategic military alliance, and we should do what we can to make sure that that doesn’t happen. 

But three is going to be more complicated than two, where the Cold War relationship was between the Soviet Union and the United States, you know, and there were other powers that hovered around each of those two countries. But it was really a struggle between the Soviet Union and the United States. So it was a bipolar world, even though I acknowledge that there were other powers. Today we’re in a tripolar world, so three is more complicated than two—and that relationship is very difficult to manage. 

So what we have to be conscious of, and careful of, is not to drive China and Russia close together in a military sense. There’s going to be relations between countries, so competition’s not the issue here. The issue is conflict and war. So we want to make sure that Russia and China don’t form some sort of geostrategic, political, military alliance against the United States.  There are some indicators out there of China and Russia becoming closer together. I would say that, they bear watching very, very closely, although—

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

But it’s not yet that geostrategic military alliance that we feel.

GENERAL MARK MILLEY

I wouldn’t say that it is—yet. It may yet develop into that. But we’ve seen some economic assistance; not strong in terms of the military piece of this. Whatever exercises they do are small, relatively inconsequential. I mean, they’re not without consequence, but they’re not huge military exercises together. In terms of military support and lethal support to Russia, nothing really significant yet. The Russians have asked, for sure; they’re asking a lot of countries for ammunition and so on. But there is a relationship, military relationship, with Iran and Russia, for example—that’s not good. 

But with China it’s been very, very modest. And President Xi, I would argue that he—very, very tough guy, hard guy, consummate realist. Very ruthless, Chinese Communist Party, very ruthless; but they’re very realist in the sense that they are keenly aware of cost, benefit, and risk, and they too do not want outright armed conflict with the United States. They recognize—the Chinese do—how powerful the United States is. Despite what people may say out there, the Chinese are fully aware of how powerful the United States is. And so they’re not looking for that kind of armed conflict either. They want to achieve their national objectives, but they want to actually do it without armed conflict. 

So we’ll see where that goes, but we’re not seeing yet a full-fledged, really cemented, long-lasting, resilient geopolitical alliance between China and Russia. Could that happen in the future? It could, and we need to be wary of that, and we need to do what we can to make sure that doesn’t happen. 

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

When you look at the risk of armed conflict in Asia, you tend to talk a lot about the need to do more to deter China. As you look at the war in Ukraine and the lessons of that, what are you bringing to the Pacific theater, to concerns about deterring China, and where do you think we need to be doing work when it comes to that deterrence challenge given changing technology and everything else?

GENERAL MARK MILLEY

The first thing to remember is no two wars are alike. An invasion of Taiwan by China is not going to look like an invasion, necessarily, of Ukraine by Russia. The fundamentals are different, in the sense that—just the terrain and the weather, it’s obvious. You’ve got a landlocked country of Ukraine, with a land border with Russia. And Russia was able to mobilize and place into assembly areas and attack positions for an invasion, you know, 140,000, 150,000 troops just in the lead echelons, with another a hundred thousand behind them, on multiple axes of advance across a land border. So then they have ground lines of communication, et cetera. 

The Chinese problem is fundamentally different. In order to attack Taiwan, they would have to mount an amphibious invasion combined with paratroopers and air assault, rotary wing helicopters, missiles, all the prep fires that would go into that; they’d have to isolate beachheads and then have to have the amphibious lift in order to do that; and cross basically a hundred miles of water, which is challenging in and of itself. Then they’d have to ensure that the subsurface of the water was secure, as well, from submarine attack. They’d have to clear mines, clear beaches, they’d have to go in and essentially attack and seize an urban area that’s about three and a half million people, in a country that’s very mountainous and lends itself to the defense.

So I would tell you that, you know, be careful about drawing straight-line lessons or conclusions. I think one lesson, though, that the Chinese are probably witting of is that real war is quite a bit different than war on paper. And when real people are dying, and real tanks and infantry fighting vehicles are being blown up, and real friction is occurring, sometimes things don’t go exactly the way you may think they go. 

So, the Chinese have not, at least to our knowledge, we have not seen the level of training and exercises that would be warranted to conduct that size, scale, scope of an invasion. Think about Normandy. At Normandy, the United States and Britain put about 120,000 troops ashore—plus they dropped in three airborne divisions the night before, and they put about 120,000 troops on the beach, I think before noon or by the afternoon; and then there were follow-on troops in the days afterward. 

Now, the Taiwanese military is not, you know, the Wehrmacht of 1944, but it’s not zero either, the Taiwanese military does have capabilities. That military that landed at Normandy had already done the invasions of North Africa, had done the invasion of Sicily, had done the amphibious operations in Italy, and they had the benefit of the lessons learned of, I don’t know, probably a hundred or so amphibious operations in the Pacific during World War II. And they were led by experienced, seasoned leaders that were hitting the beach, et cetera. 

So that military, even as good as it was at the time in 1944—don’t forget that Eisenhower wrote a letter of resignation in the event of failure the night prior. And that was over the English channel, which is, whatever it is, 30 miles, something like that. And now you’re looking at a hundred miles with a military that has never done anything like that at all. And to do that and pull it off successfully—even against the Taiwan military, which is not the Wehrmacht, granted—but the terrain is much tougher, much more complex terrain in Taiwan than it was at Normandy. I think it’s a real heavy lift, and I think the Chinese know that. 

So what do we do? We need to deter armed conflict. And how do you deter? We know through history that the way to deter is to have a very, very strong, capable, multi-domain military, and ensure that your opponent knows that you have that capability, that that capability is overwhelming, knows that you have the will to use it, and you’ve communicated that to them. So what we need to do is make sure the United States military is not only just a little bit better, but a lot better, it’s overwhelmingly better than the Chinese military—to make sure that they know it and that we have the will to use it in the event of a crisis.

The other thing that has to happen, I think, is Taiwan needs to significantly and rapidly improve their defensive capability. And this includes essentially what you saw the Ukrainians do, which is a nation in arms—the Russians aren’t just fighting the Ukrainian army, they’re fighting the Ukrainian people. And you need to kind of review your defensive doctrine and develop your military into a capability that—many strategists have used the term porcupine strategy, which tells the Chinese that if you attack, you may achieve some limited success, but the cost is going to exceed the benefit, and the cost of attacking to seize Taiwan would be extremely high. And my guess is we have a relatively limited amount of time to ensure President Xi calculates like that, and that’s what deterrence is about. 

[AD BREAK]

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

It strikes me that you seem much more assured in having this conversation than the general environment in Washington. There’s a line of argument that we in the American policy debate have gotten a bit hysterical about the threat from China. Do you have concerns that we are overreacting, creating self-fulfilling prophecies? Where do you think we are on assessing the challenge from China, and how do you see the debate here?

GENERAL MARK MILLEY

I kind of fall back to, you know, the old saying from Teddy Roosevelt’s time, right, Which is, you know, speak softly, carry a big stick, that sort of thing. And that’s where I think we should be. I think we should develop our military to such a—modernize our military to such a degree that it is overwhelmingly obvious to the Chinese that they cannot defeat it. So that’s one thing. And to make sure that we do all the right moves, diplomatically, economically, et cetera, to assure our friends and allies in the region that we’re going to be there, and we’re going to help deter, prevent, Chinese military aggression. 

But we’re in a period, we’re in a pivot point—I think we’re in a pivot point, anyway—in terms of what I’ve referred to in the past as the character of war. And what I mean by that is, you’ve got the nature of war and you’ve got the character of war. The nature of war, arguably, is immutable. War is politics. That war involves fear and friction, uncertainty, chance—that’s the realm of the nature of war. And as long as humans are involved in war, then I would say those fundamentals about the nature of war—probably true. So the nature of war arguably doesn’t change.

But the character of war changes frequently. So the character of war refers to the tactics, the techniques, the procedures, the organization, the weapons, et cetera. And the character of war changes often; every time you get a software upgrade, technically the character of war has changed somehow. But the character of war only changes fundamentally once in a while. Think the development of the wheel, and then all of a sudden you’ve got chariots. Think of putting a bit in a horse’s mouth, and now you have the development of cavalry. Think about putting lands and grooves inside a metal tube and you go from a musket to a rifle. The biggest fundamental change that is commonly cited historically is between World War I and War War II, where you get the introduction of three technologies—the airplane; mechanization, the wheeled and tracked vehicles; and then those are linked together through wireless communications, through radio. 

So I would argue that in today’s world, we are undergoing the most fundamental change in the character of war ever in recorded history, and it’s primarily being driven by technology. So what are some of those technologies? Well, first of all, you’ve got precision munitions and you’ve got ubiquitous sensors. So we can conduct long-range precision fires with greater accuracy, at greater range, than at any time in human history, period. And it’s not only us, but the Russians and the Chinese and other countries can do the same. And now we’re seeing the advent—in addition to long-range and precision, you’ve got the advent of speed hypersonics, so you’re introducing weapons that can travel at speeds that essentially, with today’s defensive technologies, are not defensible against yet. So you’ve got some fundamental changes in the ability to shoot. 

You’ve also got fundamental change happening in the ability to see. So anyone who wears a Fitbit or GPS watch or runs around an iPhone—that’s a sensor. You know, it’s a means of communication for most people, and some track your health, I guess. But for other people it might be a sensor, a tracker. So we have an ability to sense and see the environment, and to pick up signals because there’s so much electronic signals in the environment. We have the ability—not just we, Russians, Chinese, et cetera—have the ability to see and sense that environment like never before. You can go on Google Earth today and get mapped data and see satellite imagery that was only available to the world’s most advanced militaries as late as, like, five years ago, 10 years ago. So our ability to sense the environment is incredible. 

So the ability to see, and the ability to shoot, and shoot at range with accuracy, never before like it is today—just those two fundamentals in and of themselves augur a change in the fundamental character of war. But throw on top of that the rapidly developing technology of robotics—we already use robotics, UAVs, unmanned aerial vehicles, for example. We are now experimenting and developing unmanned maritime vehicles, both surface and subsurface. We’re conducting experiments with modern fighter aircraft or bomber aircraft that will be essentially unmanned. You’ll see in the future trucks and tanks and ground forces—you’ll see a very large percentage of those will be unmanned, So robotics is coming very, very rapidly into all militaries, much faster than people may think.

Throw on top of that some other things, the most significant of which is the ability to make decisions rapidly with great accuracy. So you could potentially—potentially—see artificial intelligence and quantum computing combined with robotics, become a dominant factor in the conduct of war. Combine that with the domains of cyber and space. There’s a lot of things happening undersea, and there’s about 20 other technologies that I won’t go over. But you’ve got this convergence of technologies that is driving, fundamentally driving, significant change in civil society, in human relationship to work, for example, our relationship to each other.

And there’s zero doubt in my mind that that’s going to have a huge impact on the conduct of military operations in the future. And just like in the past, the country that optimizes those technologies for the conduct of warfare—that country is going to have a decisive advantage, at least at the beginning and the opening shots of the next war. I want that country to be the United States.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

And what needs to change about the way we do strategy, the way the U.S. military operates, in order to prevent the Chinese from gaining that advantage?

GENERAL MARK MILLEY

Well, there’s several things we’ve got to do. One of the things we are doing is, you have to have a concept of war fighting. But at the same time, you’ve got to then also develop the war fighting organizations that would execute that concept. Once you figure that out, you’ve got to also figure out the technologies, the weapon systems, that these organizations would employ in order to successfully execute the concept. Then you’ve got to figure out the human piece. What is the type of people, the talent management, the training, the skills, the knowledge, the attributes, that are going to be required to be successful in that operating environment? So for example, I would argue that the future operating environment will be extraordinarily more lethal than that which we’ve seen in the past. Why? Because you can see better. Sense the environment better. You can hit it with precision better. You can probably hit at speed with, for example, a hypersonic weapon.

I think it’s also highly probable that decision in future war will more often than not occur in highly dense urban areas. And why do I say that? We know that by midcentury, we’re going to have something around the tune of about maybe 8 billion people in the world. We know there’s something like 10 or 15 megacities today defined as over 10 million people in the city. We know that midcentury, at least the projections that I’ve seen, show that we’ll probably have something like 50 megacities. And megacity—think about Seoul, for example, as a megacity, where you’ve got 27 to 30 million people, basically from the militarized zone all the way down to Ulsan. 

So you’ve got these massive urban belts—think of Northern New Jersey and New York City, think of Rio de Janeiro. These are megacities, so, these are where people are going to live. And war will probably shift to be conducted more in highly dense urban areas than not. So for, I don’t know, hundreds of years, maybe thousands of years, the conduct of warfare has occurred—and armies and militaries have been optimized to fight wars—in rural areas, in deserts, in the rolling hills of northern Europe, that sort of thing. I would argue that decision in war in the future will probably fundamentally be decided in highly dense urban areas. We’ve seen some movie trailers, so to speak, or some previews of that, in recent wars. The war against ISIS was decided in Raqqa and Mosul, as an example. 

So in any given war, you’re seeing the indicators, the leading indicators of the likely technologies, the tactics, the techniques, the procedures—you see them before that war starts. So, as we move into the next decade and decades that follow, I would submit that the outcomes of war will be decided fundamentally in urban areas. And the side that optimizes their military to fight in urban areas, that optimizes the technologies that are coming at us very quickly, and the the side that basically gets there firstest with the mostest, so to speak, and has the largest, most capable force that that optimizes those two things, I think will be successful. 

And the last thing is, in order to be successful, you have to survive. And because it’s going to be a highly lethal environment, you’re going to be able to be seen. What are some of the attributes of a future force? It is entirely conceivable to me that a future force will need to be lots of small entities, small organizations that are in constant states of movement in order to survive on a highly lethal battlefield. And you’ll have to be invisible, either through technology or through basic cover and concealment sort of thing. But speed, size, and being nearly invisible will be fundamental to survival on a future battlefield. 

And we will have to transform our military. We’re not going to throw the baby out with the bathwater here—70 percent of our navy is going to be still with us 10 years from now, 70 percent of the air force, 70 percent of the army. But about a third of that force we will need to fundamentally transform in order to continue to outpace anything that Russia or China can throw at us.

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Let me close by stepping back even further—in historical perspective, you’re a student of history, you know that it’s pretty rare to go through a period of many decades without a great-power war. We’ve defied the odds already; with every passing year it seems like the odds of that go up in ways that must scare someone in your position.

GENERAL MARK MILLEY

I think that’s true. The World War II generation, the last group of people that fought a true great-power war, they’re passing very quickly. I went to Normandy a few years ago, when I was Chief of Staff of the Army, and I saw this guy who was a paratrooper from the 82nd Airborne Division. He’s in a wheelchair, he’s an older guy. And I leaned over to him and talked to him, and I said, so, tell me, Sergeant, what was your lesson that you want to tell the Chief of Staff of the Army, what’s your lesson from World War II? And I thought he was going to tell me something about tactics or, you know, three second rushes, or how to shoot a weapon or whatever. And his eyes filled with tears, and he looked at me and he said, General, never let it happen again. Never let it happen again. 

And my father was very much like that as well. There were 7,000 Marines who died in 19 days on Iwo Jima, where my dad landed at Blue Beach. 34,000 wounded in 19 days at the Meuse-Argonne from October to November in 1918, 26,000 Americans killed in action from the beaches of Normandy to the deliberation of Paris. 26,000 Americans killed in a short period of time—not even counting the 40 million Soviet citizens, the Russian citizens who were killed in World War II, the 30 million Chinese, the 20 million Japanese, 20 million—I mean, it’s horrific. It’s unbelievable. 

So that memory’s gone from our day-to-day existence. There’s no one in uniform in any military in the world who experienced a great-power war. There are no politicians currently in office that I’m aware of that have firsthand experience. And it’s worthwhile to remember how horrific it is, and that all of us should recommit ourselves to preventing such a horrific catastrophe, and try to resolve differences in means other than the use of the levels of violence that come with great-power war. And we need to again remember the methods that have worked in the past—deterrence, powerful militaries, capable militaries, strong militaries, transmitting your will to your opponent. These are things that have worked in the past and they’re likely to work in the future regardless of the weapon system, the modernization.

But we, the United States, if we do not meet that challenge, then it’s going to be a bad day and things are going to get really rough in the not-too-distant future. I think we’re up to that challenge. I think our country’s up to it. I know our military is; we’re very, very capable and strong and ready right now. But we do have to make some fundamental changes as we move forward. 

DAN KURTZ-PHELAN

Well, that is a good note to end on. General Milley, thank you so much for doing this. 

GENERAL MARK MILLEY

Thanks, Dan. Appreciate it.