Note #2: The spectre of total mobilisation
Will US imperialism get on the juice?
We have entered a period that will be defined by the struggle for supremacy between Washington and Beijing. In the last two years, war has become a key feature of world politics—particularly Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and Israel’s invasions of Gaza and Lebanon. While US imperialism has played a central role in both conflicts (primarily as a supplier of arms), its chief strategiests view all conflict through the prism of a potential confrontation with China, with theatres in the western Pacific and northern Indian oceans.
This post is a research note about recent developments in US imperial thinking. It was first published last year in a now discontinued newsletter. It’s a little bit technical, but hopefully you find it useful.
World War … is a mobilisation that requires extension to the deepest marrow, life’s finest nerve. Its realisation is the task of total mobilisation: an act which, as if through a single grasp of the control panel, conveys the extensively branched and densely veined power supply of modern life towards the great current of martial energy … Who can doubt that America … emerged the obvious victor [of World War One]? Its course was already decided not by the degree to which a state was a “military state”, but by the degree to which it was capable of Total Mobilisation.
— Ernst Jünger, Total Mobilisation (1930)
[The US public] have not internalized the costs of the United States losing its position as a world superpower ... The biggest difference between today and the Cold War is in the homeland. The Cold War demanded a national mobilization for military service, an economy geared more toward production for national security, and a unity of effort across government (including Congress) behind shared security missions that are missing today.
— “Report of the Commission on the National Defense Strategy” (2024)
“The return of great power competition” has become the standard frame through which to understand geopolitics in the last seven years. But recent US strategy documents have underestimated China’s power and failed to grasp entrenched US weaknesses, according to a recent evaluation presented to the US Congress.[1] The Commission on the National Defense Strategy, established in 2022 to review the Pentagon’s quadrennial National Defense Strategy (NDS)[2], rubbishes previous assessments of the global balance of forces and US capabilities as, at best, exercises in kicking the can down the road or, at worst, wishful thinking.
“The magnitude of the threats the United States faces is understated and significantly worse than when the NDS was issued”, the commissioners write. “Urgent action” is required, they say, to turn around the situation—giving a horizon of “within the next two or three years”.
The Commission’s report, an unclassified version of which was released in July, came less than two years after the US Department of Defence’s latest NDS, which closely followed the White House’s National Security Strategy (NSS)[3]—the irregular grand strategy document of US imperialism. The 2017 NSS warned that China and Russia were challenging American power and that US military advantages were diminished, mainly because of the erosion of the country’s defence industrial base.[4] Following this pivot, the 2022 NSS used phrases such as “inflection point” and “decisive decade” to signify the urgency of US imperialism’s current situation. Yet, as the Commission views it, there has been an ongoing failure to fully appreciate the rate and scope of Chinese military development and a yawning gap between acknowledged problems of US preparedness and the remedies currently being pursued.
“The United States last fought a global conflict during World War II, which ended nearly 80 years ago. The nation was last prepared for such a fight during the Cold War, which ended 35 years ago. It is not prepared today”, the commissioners note. “The lack of preparedness to meet the challenges to U.S. national security is the result of many years of failure … The United States is still failing to act with the urgency required, across administrations and without regard to governing party.”
Key findings of the report include:
China has “largely negated” US imperialism’s advantage in the western Pacific, and its military could soon “be a peer, if not superior” competitor
The US defence industrial base has atrophied and is incapable of meeting the military’s needs
The politically divided US Congress “has become a major impediment to national security”
The US public understands neither the stakes of great power competition nor the sacrifices it will need to make in the coming years
China and Russia’s strategic alliance has augmented the power of each to the detriment of US interests
The existing National Defense Strategy does not sufficiently recognise “the very real threat” that a conflict in one region could quickly become a multi-theatre or even global war
Proposed solutions include:
Increasing military spending to at least 5 percent of GDP (it is currently about 3.4 percent) so that the armed forces are capable of waging war in at least three theatres simultaneously
Increasing taxes on individuals and companies and cutting “entitlements” to fund this expansion of military power
Passing a suite of policies to fast-track the rebuilding of the military industrial base
Planning for a “broader mobilisation”, potentially involving conscription
Initiating government efforts to increase “engagement and patriotism among the American people”
Integrating the goals of all key executive agencies to further national security objectives: the State, Treasury, Commerce, Labor and Education departments, and the Small Business Administration, among others
An ongoing focus on international military and security partnerships, with an eye to integrating allies under the US military umbrella
‘All elements of national power’
The individual recommendations are suggestive of something much broader. The Commission acknowledges that US imperial capacity cannot be rebuilt piecemeal; there must be an integrated response, deploying what it calls “all elements of national power”:
We recommend going beyond a “whole-of-government” plan and building a coordinated and resourced all elements of national power approach to national security that goes beyond [the Pentagon] and the rest of the federal government and that includes industry, the American public, the U.S. educational system, nonprofit and civic organizations, and U.S. allies and partners.
The “all elements of national power” framework, which the commissioners tout as a departure from the 2022 NDS’s more limited concept of “integrated deterrence”, is not new, despite their suggestion.[5] It holds that a country’s capacity to project power is a function of its combined and applied diplomatic, economic, informational (intelligence and propaganda) and military capacities. This fits with what socialists have argued about the nature of imperialism for more than a century—that it involves, to greater or lesser degrees, the fusion of state and capital, or at least the marshalling of the latter by the former to project geopolitical power.
It is unsurprising, then, to find the framework featured in US strategic documents going back at least as far as the first National Security Strategy, which was issued by the Republican administration of Ronald Reagan in 1987.[6] That paper casually referred to “the carefully integrated employment of all facets of national power”—suggesting that the framework was already part of the vocabulary of foreign policy and/or national security circles before the end of the Cold War. It was subsequently used in the grand strategy documents of both the Clinton[7] and Bush II[8] administrations, the Joint Chiefs of Staff’s 2000 “Joint Publication 1”[9] and 1999’s “Joint Publication 3-35”[10], the Obama administration’s 2010 NSS[11], the Atlantic Council’s 2014 “All Elements of National Power” strategy document[12], the 2017 National Security Strategy[13], the 2018 National Defense Strategy[14], and the 2022 National Security[15], National Defense[16] and National Military[17] strategies.
While the framework sounds comprehensive, its previous iterations often were relatively limited. The 2000 “Joint Publication 1”, for example, lists four interrelated systems supporting national security, all directly related to the Pentagon and the military command’s resourcing, planning and coordination. The role of government outside of budgetary support and interagency cooperation is hardly considered in the document, particularly in the economic sphere, where its responsibility is conceived simply as “facilitating economic and trade relationships worldwide”.[18]
The Atlantic Council’s document is almost entirely about interagency restructuring and realignment—a proposal of sorts for a civilian-military fusion of the State and Defense departments to increase efficiencies and coordination within and between the diplomatic and military spheres. “All elements of national power” is said to be the framework, but the authors admit that their brief is limited to just two of the instruments.
The 2022 NDS similarly invokes the language of “weaving together all elements of national power”. While that document had a broader focus, including the defence industrial base,[19] its framework remained limited to the Pentagon’s interventions, such as collaboration with the private sector and the academy to expand the domestic military economy and recruit adequately trained personnel to the Defense Department.
The Commission on the National Defense Strategy seems to depart from recent official strategy in two respects. First, it abandons lip service to the concept “all”—stretching beyond “all of government” to something approximating “all of society”. Second, it acknowledges that the framework has not been applied seriously since “the height of the Cold War”.
Will the next US administration be willing or able to implement the CNDS report as policy? It seems implausible, short of a major crisis. Yet the question is whether the report’s prognosis of the state of US imperialism is accurate. If it is, then its recommendations, or something approximating them, will likely become policy at some point—it being only a matter of if and when imperialist tensions reach a point at which the US state moves to discipline both its own capitalist class and broader society. Similar policy has been seen before: civil life and civil departments subordinated to Pentagon prerogatives; all life subordinated to the drive to destruction.
All this brought to mind Ernst Jünger’s 1930 essay Total Mobilisation, quoted above. An excerpt could have come from Bukharin’s Imperialism and World Economy or Lenin’s Imperialism: The Latest Stage of Capitalism. But Jünger’s organic, rather than technical, framing—not railroads but veins, not capital but energy and current, not monopolies but branches, not value but marrow and nerve—seems more apt. Not analytically, but as more reflective of the human stakes in what could be both marshalled and obliterated, perhaps within the next decade, if the strategiests of imperialism get their way.
A future newsletter will critically examine some of the Commission’s assertions, particularly those relating to the atrophy of the US defence industrial base.
End note on US strategy documents
The key documents of US imperialism—those publicly available at least—are, in order of precedence:
The National Security Strategy issued by the White House. This is each administration’s grand strategy document, outlining US interests and objectives worldwide. It doesn’t generally deal with the specifics of how to achieve the objectives
The National Defense Strategy issued by the Pentagon. This is subordinate to the National Security Strategy (defence policy being subordinate to foreign policy) and published afterwards. The NDS outlines the military’s role in supporting the grand strategy of US imperialism and is, in theory, the Pentagon’s review of itself
The National Military Strategy, issued by the Joint Chiefs of Staff. This is derived from the NSS and NDS and is more narrowly about military strategy
Further to these is a congressionally mandated independent review of the NDS. This is not an official strategy document because it doesn’t emanate from the executive and need not be incorporated into government policy.
The National Defense Strategy’s origin is a 1990 “Base Force analysis” by the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Bush I administration and the 1993 “Bottom-Up Review” of the Clinton administration. In 1996, Congress mandated that the secretary of defense conduct a Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR). These were published in 1997, 2001, 2006, 2010 and 2014.[20] The NDS replaced the QDR in 2018, though I’m unsure if anything is substantively different beyond the name change.
When Congress mandated the QDR/NDS, an independent panel was also mandated to assess each of the Pentagon’s reviews. There had already been a 1995 Commission on Roles and Missions of the Armed Forces, followed by the 1997 National Defense Panel’s “Transforming Defense: National Security in the 21st Century” (which reviewed the 1997 QDR). There was no panel convened in 2001, but the Joint Chiefs of Staff conducted their own review: “QDR 2001: Strategy-Driven Choices for America’s Security”. Again in 2006, no panel was convened.
There have been panel reviews of each QDR/NDS since then:
2010’s “The QDR in Perspective: Meeting America’s National Security Needs In the 21st Century”[21]
2014’s “Ensuring a Strong U.S. Defense for the Future”[22]
2018’s “Providing for the Common Defense”[23]
2024’s “Report of the Commission on the National Defense Strategy”[24]
[1] Commission on the National Defense Strategy, Report of the Commission on the National Defense Strategy, July 2024. rand.org/nsrd/projects/NDS-commission.html
[2] US Department of Defense, National Defense Strategy, October 2022. media.defense.gov/2022/Oct/27/2003103845/-1/-1/1/2022-NATIONAL-DEFENSE-STRATEGY-NPR-MDR.PDF
[3] White House, National Security Strategy, October 2022. whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Biden-Harris-Administrations-National-Security-Strategy-10.2022.pdf
[4] White House, National Security Strategy, December 2017. trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/NSS-Final-12-18-2017-0905.pdf
[5] On “integrated deterrence”, see, for example: Joint Chiefs of Staff, National Military Strategy, 2022. jcs.mil/Portals/36/NMS%202022%20_%20Signed.pdf
[6] White House, National Security Strategy, January 1987. history.defense.gov/Portals/70/Documents/nss/nss1987.pdf
[7] White House, National Security Strategy, May 1997. history.defense.gov/Portals/70/Documents/nss/nss1997.pdf
[8] White House, National Security Strategy, September 2002. history.defense.gov/Portals/70/Documents/nss/nss2002.pdf
[9] Joint Chiefs of Staff, Joint Warfare of the Armed Forces of the United States, 14 November 2000. bits.de/NRANEU/others/jp-doctrine/jp1%2800%29.pdf.
[10] Joint Chiefs of Staff, Joint Deployment and Redeployment Operations, 7 September 1999. bits.de/NRANEU/others/jp-doctrine/jp3_35%2899%29.pdf
[11] White House, National Security Strategy, May 2010. obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/sites/default/files/rss_viewer/national_security_strategy.pdf
[12] Atlantic Council Combatant Command Task Force, All Elements of National Power. Moving Toward a New Interagency Balance for US Global Engagement, July 2014. atlanticcouncil.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/All_Elements_of_National_Power.pdf
[13] White House, National Security Strategy, December 2017. trumpwhitehouse.archives.gov/wp-content/uploads/2017/12/NSS-Final-12-18-2017-0905.pdf
[14] US Department of Defense, National Defense Strategy, 2018. dod.defense.gov/Portals/1/Documents/pubs/2018-National-Defense-Strategy-Summary.pdf
[15] White House, National Security Strategy, October 2022. whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/Biden-Harris-Administrations-National-Security-Strategy-10.2022.pdf
[16] US Department of Defense, National Defense Strategy, October 2022. media.defense.gov/2022/Oct/27/2003103845/-1/-1/1/2022-NATIONAL-DEFENSE-STRATEGY-NPR-MDR.PDF
[17] Joint Chiefs of Staff, National Military Strategy, 2022. jcs.mil/Portals/36/NMS%202022%20_%20Signed.pdf
[18] Joint Chiefs of Staff, Joint Warfare of the Armed Forces of the United States, 14 November 2000. bits.de/NRANEU/others/jp-doctrine/jp1%2800%29.pdf
[19] The National Defense Strategy was complemented by 2023’s National Defense Industrial Strategy. businessdefense.gov/docs/ndis/2023-NDIS.pdf
[20] Office of the Secretary of defense, Historical office, Quadrennial Defense Review. history.defense.gov/Historical-Sources/Quadrennial-Defense-Review
[21] Quadrennial Defense Review Independent Panel, The QDR in Perspective: Meeting America’s National Security Needs In the 21st Century, 2010. usip.org/sites/default/files/qdrreport.pdf
[22] National Defense Panel, Ensuring a Strong U.S. Defense for the Future, July 2014. usip.org/sites/default/files/Ensuring-a-Strong-U.S.-Defense-for-the-Future-NDP-Review-of-the-QDR_0.pdf
[23] National Defense Strategic Commission, Providing for the Common Defense, 2018. usip.org/publications/2018/11/providing-common-defense
[24] Commission on the National Defense Strategy, Report of the Commission on the National Defense Strategy, July 2024. armed-services.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/nds_commission_final_report.pdf