Description
Drawing from the International Relations (IR) literature on strategic culture and security imaginaries, this paper examines the transition in American defense planning from the Global War on Terror (GWOT) to great power competition. Since the mid-2010s, IR scholars have paid increasing attention to the subject of great power competition, especially as it relates to the development of military applications of artificial intelligence (AI) and autonomous weapon systems (AWS). However, there has been much less focus on how these developments relate to GWOT-era debates on military transformation, what they reveal about the processes of change and continuity within American foreign policy, and why the great power competition framework has been so rapidly embraced by the Pentagon. This paper provides new insights into these dynamics by empirically tracing the evolution of the Department of Defense’s thinking on the role of technology in war, from post-9/11 debates on military transformation through subsequent initiatives under Obama (Project Maven, Third Offset Strategy), Trump (Mosaic Warfare), and Biden (Joint All-Domain Command and Control, Replicator Initiative). Theoretically, it brings the literature on strategic culture into greater dialogue with recent advances in the study of security imaginaries to extend understanding of U.S. cultural conceptions of what war is and how war “ought” to be fought. Through this intervention, this paper makes a wider contribution to IR scholarship by examining how Pentagon officials have interpreted the great power competition framework as a means of accelerating the return of high-intensity, high-technology warfare against a (near) peer competitor as the focus of American defense planning.
