Advantage America

Greg Torode

About the best thing that can be said about US President Barack Obama's push into Afghanistan after eight years of war is that he has played the strongest cards from a bad hand of options. Outright positives are hard to spot. Even the word "victory" was conspicuous by its absence in Obama's appeal last week to his war-weary nation.

Yet, for regional strategists who fear that China's military build-up makes conflict with the US inevitable at some point, it may still produce an advantage for Washington - and a reason for Beijing to be cautious.

The prospect of a quagmire may play right into China's script that the US is a declining power, but such a view overlooks a key point. Washington's strength, reach and influence may indeed be on the wane but recent years of war on two fronts make it a battle-hardened foe and one able to make full use of its resources. The vast US military machine is now steeped in active warfare, far beyond anything experienced in more than a generation.

Military strategists of all shades know that this kind of experience is invaluable; it cannot be bought, or forged simply through the rigours of training and discipline. Hundreds of thousands of troops now have frontline experience, along with their officers - even America's "weekend soldiers", the volunteer National Guards, are battle-tested. Less visibly, nearly a decade of war also means the hard business of supply and logistics, and the computerised linking of command, control and communications with reconnaissance and intelligence assets, has been refined.

Significantly, those being promoted across the US armed services, including in the navy, tend to have experience in the Iraq or Afghanistan theatres, preferably both. That means the leadership for years to come will have experience of the demands of combat.

During the long decades of the cold war, the Pentagon prepared to fight in two hemispheres at the same time - a doctrine that became as much theoretical as practical. Now it has nearly a decade of fighting on two fronts and has learned the hard way just how difficult that is. Obviously, that experience has come at great expense to Washington - a bill in terms of political will and public exhaustion that has yet to be paid. But, in strategic terms, the future military importance of that experience is difficult to underestimate.

That experience feeds into the two great military questions of our age. "Great Power" theorists tell us history dictates that conflict between a power on the rise and a power on the slide will happen. It is a question then of when and how, rather than if.

Then there are the imponderables about how the Chinese military would perform, from the question of how the People's Liberation Army can link up its increasingly impressive array of assets, to doubts about leadership.

Certainly, any Sino-US conflict over, say, Taiwan, North Korea or a naval dispute that gets out of control, would be a world away from the counter-insurgency action mounted by the US in recent years. Yet, for all that, the region remains a strategic priority for Washington. Its Hawaii-based Pacific Command is its biggest, and it is growing.

Intriguingly, Beijing has faced a battle-hardened foe in the recent past. In early 1979, PLA forces surged across China's border with Vietnam under orders of Deng Xiaoping to "teach Vietnam a lesson" for its invasion of Cambodia. The battle raged for just a month but proved exceptionally bloody. Despite having their best units tied down in Cambodia, Vietnamese soldiers and village militias killed tens of thousands of Chinese troops in a resolute defence honed during three decades of constant war.

The impoverished but highly motivated forces of Vietnam three decades ago are obviously a different proposition to today's US military, just as the PLA is a much more advanced creature.

But whether the lessons of its last military adventure have been relearned, however, is a question that a nervous region hopes will remain theoretical.

Greg Torode is the Post's chief Asia correspondent