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Lurkers in the wretched hive of scum and villainy—the Chinas, Russias, and North Koreas of the world—are channeling Abraham Lincoln.

During the American Civil War, President Lincoln divined that it verges on impossible for an outnumbered force to make itself strong enough everywhere along a distended defense perimeter to hold off a superior antagonist. Accordingly, he instructed Union generals to choreograph multiple, concurrent offensives around the Confederate perimeter, on the logic that one or more such probes would smash through the frontier. Southern armies would be too weak to defend everywhere. But where Lincoln wanted to break into hostile territory, red teams in Beijing, Moscow, and Pyongyang long to break out. They are mounting coordinated offensives around the Eurasian rim, reckoning that they can breach a line thinly defended by overstretched U.S. forces.

Strategic logic favored the Union cause back then. It could come to favor Eurasian malefactors today. To rebuff them, U.S. leaders need to discipline themselves. They need to husband finite resources, setting and enforcing priorities rather than demand that the U.S. military tamp down every crisis that comes along. No armed force is omnipotent. A force that tries to do it all, everywhere, at all times, ends up accomplishing little, anywhere, at any time. In other words, U.S. commanders and their political masters need to school themselves on strategy.

Fortunately, the strategic plight before Washington today is less dire than the one that confronted Confederate magnates. Leaders decked in gray faced an unenviable task. Their breakaway slave republic bestrode death ground. The Confederacy could fight to its utmost or die. Field commanders had little alternative other than to guard all along the Southern periphery, lest they cede home ground to a hostile army and hasten the defeat and downfall of their cause. And for some time they made a spirited struggle of it. Generals such as supreme commander Robert E. Lee mastered the art of maneuvering around the defense perimeter to meet imposing but sporadic Union thrusts.

In other words, Lee & Co. exploited the advantages of the interior position. Interior lines are like the radii of a circle. The combatant on interior lines enjoys short, direct routes from the center to battlegrounds around the circle’s circumference, which is equivalent to the interior contestant’s outer defense line. By contrast, the combatant ranging along exterior lines must move around the circle’s circumference to reach the same points of impact. Just to get to the battle, it must overcome all the geospatial and logistical headaches that go with moving lumbering forces across long distances.

Enter Lincoln. Old Abe was a self-educated strategist. At the outset of the Civil War, he basically had the Library of Congress send its collection on military affairs and history over to the White House. Then he read it. Among the strategic concepts Lincoln imbibed from his studies was “concentration in time.” Generally speaking, operational art involves mustering enough combat power at the time and place of battle to prevail. It’s the art of “concentration in space.” Force, space, time is the litany for practitioners of joint military operations. Now, employing the singular—“the” force, “the” place, “the” time—implies that a fighting force undertakes one battle or engagement at a time. Its commanders wage tactical encounters, one after the other, until the army reaches its final objective, whether that means vanquishing an enemy host or wresting away a piece of ground. This sequence of endeavors comprises a campaign.

And that way of looking at things makes perfect sense—in theory.

In the practical world, though, campaigns seldom if ever unspool so neatly. In part that’s because, no matter how desirable it might be, it’s hard to group all forces on one field of battle at the same time to overpower the foe. Military sage Carl von Clausewitz catalogs some reasons why. Terrain may inhibit movement to the battlefield. Command-and-control of large formations poses problems, making it hard to act in unison. A force must guard fragile supply lines, so it leaves behind soldiery to protect them. The firepower from soldiers overseeing supply lines is not present for the main show. Allies have their own political processes to abide by, and may not do the leading ally’s bidding instantly or to the full. Etc.

Concentration in space is an elusive ideal. So, out of expediency, forces commonly operate in units fragmented from one another.

But that need not mean they operate in random, uncoordinated fashion. From ransacking military history, Lincoln shrewdly observed that armies maneuvering independently in geographic space could still concentrate their efforts in time. And they should: it imposes dilemmas on the foe. Southern armies were adept at shifting from side to side along interior lines to meet offensives by the materially superior Union Army. They could handle Union advances one by one. But Lincoln reasoned that they would be hard pressed to meet multiple thrusts at different places at the same time. And the Union could afford to equip forces to stage multiple assaults. The North outclassed the South by most any index of physical strength, from economic productivity to military-related industry to manpower. It could scatter armies around on the map yet—given skillful commanders—orchestrate them to strike nearly simultaneously. Eventually a Northern army would break through a weak segment of the line into the backfield, seizing Southern ground and carrying the North toward victory.

U.S. Navy Assault Ship. Image Credit: Creative Commons.

And the scattershot approach worked—albeit not without four long years of bloodletting. Lincoln’s presidency is a case study on managing concentration and dispersal of armed might.

Today, U.S. forces are once again operating along exterior lines, this time in the marginal seas and skies adjoining the Eurasian supercontinent. By commanding offshore waters, U.S. forces can mold events in the rimlands to the advantage of America and its regional allies, partners, and friends. But this is a case of role reversal. The United States is now playing defense. It wants to uphold a longstanding, largely beneficial status quo. Preserving what is constitutes a strategically defensive aim by any standard. Meanwhile rimlands contenders are essaying a breakout from Eurasia. They aspire to drive U.S. maritime forces from the marginal seas. If successful they will deny the United States and its allies the maritime access they must possess to radiate power ashore, while at the same time guaranteeing their own access to the wider world.

If hostile capitals coordinate their efforts smoothly, they can concentrate in time along interior lines in pursuit of a breakout. They can rally Lincoln’s logic behind strategically offensive aims.

And it seems such an effort is afoot. I’m not one to affix cutesy labels like “axis” of this or that to describe the red teams, as many commentators have taken to doing. No solemn covenant unites them. Nevertheless, it is hard to construe the concurrent crises now convulsing the Eurasian rim except as a mutual effort by the supercontinent’s malefactors to puncture the U.S. cordon. These crises may be fragmented in geographic space, but they are suspiciously concentrated in time. And they come at a juncture when the red teams work together openly in the military realm. North Korea has sent troops to fight Ukraine. Iran has supplied Russia with aerial ordnance while sponsoring the Houthi assault on mercantile shipping. China furnishes Russia invaluable support for its aggression against Ukraine, touting the “no-limits” partnership Beijing and Moscow announced shortly before the invasion.

We are witnessing opportunism at a bare minimum. And signs of outright collusion are becoming too glaring to ignore.

Yet U.S. leaders have options. Unlike Confederate commanders in the Civil War, they don’t have to defend the line to the utmost everywhere around the Eurasian perimeter. They can be choosy, applying resources to the most critical flashpoints—chiefly East Asian flashpoints—while delegating lesser priorities to local allies, partners, or friends. Indeed, strategy demands they do so. If the Indo-Pacific is the prime theater for American endeavor, as successive administrations have agreed it is, then that’s where the bulk of U.S. resources must go.

Or the leadership can keep trying to do everything, everywhere, all the time—defining every commitment as commanding the same surpassing value and warranting the same burdensome, open-ended levy of martial resources. That would be strategic malpractice. Indiscipline among the leadership attenuates the resources available for genuinely compelling priorities such as the Taiwan Strait or South China Sea. It hobbles efforts to counter the gravest threats looming in world affairs.

In short, we cannot do it all. Let’s rediscover the habit of setting and enforcing priorities, tending to what matters most ourselves while trusting to allies, partners, and friends to handle the rest.

About the Author: Dr. James Holmes

Dr. James Holmes is J. C. Wylie Chair of Maritime Strategy at the Naval War College and a Distinguished Fellow at the Brute Krulak Center for Innovation & Future Warfare, Marine Corps University. The views voiced here are his alone.