What a Future War with China or Russia Would Really Look Like

In this episode of the At the Boundary podcast, Dr. Guido Rossi speaks with Dr. Peter Mansoor, a professor and the General Raymond E. Mason Jr. Chair in Military History at The Ohio State University. Their conversation delves into counterinsurgency warfare and preparing the American military for future threats. 

Mansoor opens with the state of U.S. counterinsurgency doctrine, referencing Field Manual 23-4 and the foundations of counterinsurgency warfare, such as population persuasion. He notes that the wars between Ukraine and Russia and between Israel and Palestine do not qualify as counterinsurgencies and warns of the potential for larger scale hybrid conflicts in the United States’ future. He argues that the American military needs to stay educated and trained in counterinsurgency warfare, as well as continue to evolve its strategy to include drone warfare. In the future, NATO and Pacific allyship will be crucial for countering China and Russia should they decide to pursue a large-scale conflict against Taiwan or Europe, respectively.  

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Transcript

Jim Cardoso: 0:00

Jim. Hello everyone. Welcome to this week's episode of at the boundary, the podcast from the global and national security Institute at the University of South Florida. I'm Jim Cardoso, Senior Director for GNSI, and your host for at the boundary. Today on the podcast, we're going to talk with Dr Peter Mansour, the General Raymond e Mason, Jr, Chair of military history at Ohio State University. He's retired US Army colonel and former senior military fellow at the Council of Foreign Relations in New York, and he authored two memoirs on his combat experience in Iraq. He'll be talking today with GNSI Research Fellow, Dr Guido Rossi, who just happened to be a protege of Dr Mansoor while earning his PhD at Ohio State with the US strategic shift from counterinsurgency back to Great Power competition and large scale combat operations, the two discuss whether the shift truly aligns with future conflict, if the counterinsurgency capabilities should still be retained, and what lessons from the years of Practicing counterinsurgency can be applied to large scale combat operations. While it's not exactly the same as the young padawan confronting his former Jedi Master, it's still a great opportunity to listen in as the student reunites with his teacher,

Dr. Guido Rossi: 1:37

Dr Mansour, thank you so much for for joining us and talking to us today.

Dr. Peter Mansoor: 1:42

Pleasure to be on. Thanks for the invitation.

Dr. Guido Rossi: 1:45

It's it's always good to see you ever since Ohio State University, you were, you were my advisor then, and the Ohio State University, you're right, you're right. But the sort of today, today we're talking about how the US military is now shifting away from counterinsurgency and counterinsurgency doctrine, coin doctrine, and preparing in cell itself instead for great power competition and large scale comet operations, specifically against China or Russia, or both and But first, I'd like to begin by asking you, what is your personal involvement with coin doctrine?

Dr. Peter Mansoor: 2:31

Yeah, so I was in the army for 26 years. I was an armor officer. So the first part of my career, I was deeply involved in winning the Cold War, commanded a tank company on the East West German border. And then there was that interim period after the Cold War ended, where we're united states army was trying to figure out what it was all about, and peace keeping operations were in there in the Bosnia conflict, and eventually, after 911 the army had to shift focus to counter insurgency warfare, particularly the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. I had two tours in Iraq. I was a brigade commander in Baghdad, you know, 304 and then, after a stint at the Council on Foreign Relations, and then at Fort, Leavenworth as as the head of the US Army Marine Corps counter insurgency center, General Petraeus selected me to be his executive officer To go to Baghdad with him in 2007 2008 and help to execute the surge of US forces under a new counter insurgency doctrine, Field Manual, 23 dash four, which which I helped to edit a bit Before heading over and implementing its concepts in combat,

Dr. Guido Rossi: 4:03

any specific aspects of 23, four that you supervise Exactly? Yeah.

Dr. Peter Mansoor: 4:12

So when the manual was nearly done, General Petraeus sent me the digits, and he said, make any changes that you want, and I'll take a look at them. And I was pretty adamant that we should put some sort of measure of how many troops were needed in counterinsurgency operations. And so there's a part in there that says successful counterinsurgency operations require somewhere between 20 and 50 counterinsurgents for every 1000 people in the population. And I did that mainly because I didn't want political leaders in the future. Are competing with each other as to how few troops they could send over to win these types of conflicts, because currency warfare is, is troop heavy. And I needed, I wanted there to be a measure in doctrine where we could say to political leaders, you know, you're saying that eight guys on horseback can win the war. And I'm telling you, doctrine says, you know, you need 20 to 50 car insurance for every 1000 people, and eight guys on horseback aren't going to cut it. So that was the part of the manual that I had the most impact on.

Dr. Guido Rossi: 5:37

Yeah, that's really interesting. Politicians are usually very good at selling war, promising that he will take just a few troops, just a few millions of dollars, not so much fuel, but

Dr. Peter Mansoor: 5:49

in three months. Yeah,

Dr. Guido Rossi: 5:52

both Afghanistan and Iraq proved proved otherwise. Do you? Do you feel like the concepts that you developed with General Petraeus were then validated

Dr. Peter Mansoor: 6:07

for the kind of war we fought in Iraq. Yes, so that's the conflict that we were all thinking about when we drafted 23, four in you know, the base of FM 23 dash four is that the population is the key. You have to control or protect the population in order to basically make it impossible for the insurgents to gain their support, or course, their support, and thereby win. But that sort of assumes that the population, you know, there's a small percentage that are pro government and a small percentage that are pro insurgent, and that there's this big gap in the middle where the population can can be coerced or protected and moved one way or the other, either towards the pro government side or towards the pro insurgent side, where that sort of assumption is not operative, then the precepts of field manual 23 four won't work, but they did work in Iraq, and That was the most important conflict we had to fight in the war on terror, and

Dr. Guido Rossi: 7:28

what, well, what do you think then? Now about the from, from a point of view then of conducting counterinsurgency, about the, you know, Russian occupation of of Ukraine, considering that there is insurgency occurring in the areas in some of the areas that Russia has occupied, or, for instance, in the occupation of Gaza by The Israeli army, do you think they are affecting effectiveness? Counterinsurgency doctrine. Or how do you how do you evaluate their efforts?

Dr. Peter Mansoor: 8:09

Yeah, so I think this is a situation where FM 23 dash four does not apply. Neither of those situations, because the population can't be swayed in Ukraine to be pro Russia. They're just not. They're going to be against Russia. Even if Russia wins the conflict, they're going to rule over a sullen and combative population, and there's likely to be a guerrilla warfare, guerrilla conflict that Russia cannot win. I don't think it can win period, but they certainly can't win it by trying to convince the people to side with whatever government they install in Kiev. I just don't think it's going to happen same way with Israel and Gaza. They're never going to convince the Palestinian people to support them. Maybe they can find a Palestinian government, perhaps the Palestinian Authority that would be more attractive for support, and maybe then they could fashion their operations in order to support that government, and that might work, but if they were to go in and occupy Gaza, they will be met by resistance, regardless of whether it's Hamas or some other form of Palestinian resistance.

Dr. Guido Rossi: 9:36

So basically, regardless of time commitment or a troop commitment, correct?

Dr. Peter Mansoor: 9:45

You know what Israel has sort of devolved to is a strategy of mowing the grass. It doesn't want to occupy Gaza, and so it will go in periodically and conduct more. Three operations to kill Hamas fighters and destroy their weapons caches, and then they'll leave and they'll do it again years or months later, and we'll see what happens after this conflict, because mowing the grass worked until it didn't. And on October 7, 2023 we found out exactly how badly the Israelis miscalculated that their strategy would tamp down Hamas to an extent that was acceptable to Israelis

Dr. Guido Rossi: 10:38

so but think again about the conflict in Gaza and the conflict in Ukraine. Presently, those are two types of insurgencies, right? And at the same time, though, the US military has been saying at least as far back as 2018 with the national defense strategy published then and then restated again in 2022 that insurgencies is no more and that we better shift off to preparing instead for large scale common operations in the context of grid power competition, or also called peer to peer or near peer, adversaries. So the first question that I have, even before asking you if it's if you think this is a wise move, do you think again, like the first time that they stated that this was stated was in 2018 and it wasn't followed the time, because the efforts against ISIS were renewed then, and we're in 2025 almost 2026, do you think it will start to be followed, or it will just still be, you know, just wars on paper.

Dr. Peter Mansoor: 11:51

So first I have to take a small exception to what you said about Ukraine being an insurgency. There is an element of insurgency there, but it's a hybrid conflict, and there is a large element of large scale combat operations ongoing in that conflict. Gaza is much more of an insurgency, but even there, that's also a hybrid conflict, so we see a lot of conventional operations that the US military can look at and refashion their forces in order to conduct in the future, especially the integration of drones into combat forces, which you can see in Ukraine in a big, big way that drones have have refashioned the way forces can fight. I mean, basically you you need to have air superiority to conduct maneuver warfare, and neither side has it, neither side is able to gain and maintain air superiority in Ukraine, and thus the front lines are frozen solid. But going back to whether the US military should train for large scale combat operations today, I'm reminded of people who asked many while we were fighting in Iraq, you know, what should the US Army train for? And my response was, you know, as long as we're fighting here in Iraq and Afghanistan, we need to train for counterinsurgency warfare. But once those wars are over, I believe that the US Army should once again train for large scale combat operations and but educate broadly. If you educate the leaders on a broad range of military operations, including counter insurgency warfare, the troops can be retrained relatively quickly if you if you find yourself in a situation like Iraq or Afghanistan, you know, it's only going to take a matter of months to retrain the troops, but it takes years to, you know, re wire someone's brain, and If the officer corps is not educated in counter insurgency operations, then they will simply revert to doing what they know how to do, what to do, and that is kill people and break things that did not work in the first few years of the war in Iraq. And thus we had to redo the doctrine and conduct the surge. We should never be in that kind of situation again, where we throw out the lessons learned from Vietnam, because we'll never fight that kind of war again. You know, we we rejiggered the US Army and the Air Force to fight the. Red Army in Europe after we came out of Vietnam, and we did that very successfully. Air land battle was, you know, an excellent concept, and worked really well in the Gulf War, but it wasn't a concept for fighting the kind of war that we found ourselves in Iraq or Afghanistan after the initial large scale combat operations were done, and we had not trained or educated the officer corps to understand those kinds of counterinsurgency conflicts, and so that it took a while to to rewire their brains. And, you know, and basically have them understand that killing a lot of the enemy wasn't going to get the job done, that you had to get the protector control the people in order to win this kind of war.

Dr. Guido Rossi: 15:59

So, so, so at the very least, you think that a perhaps with an emphasis maybe on preparing for large scale and combat operations, but the possibility for training also for counterinsurgency, at least from the leadership education.

Dr. Peter Mansoor: 16:17

So after Vietnam, all the courses at the Command and General Staff College in Fort Leavenworth on counter insurgency were jettisoned over the course of 1970s they'd be they first started out as the majority of courses, and then it was a minority. Then it was just one, and then it was zero. And then in the 1980s there was a group of instructors who tried to create just an elective course on counter insurgency warfare, and they went to the JFK School of Special Warfare in Fort Bragg to ask them for their files on Vietnam, only to be told that they had been thrown away in the 1970s because the army staff said that we'll never fight that kind of war again. We can't go down that road again. We need to at least have a course in the Command and General Staff College, in the War College on counterinsurgency warfare or hybrid warfare, so that the officer corps is not caught flat footed again,

Dr. Guido Rossi: 17:21

a bit like, maybe, maybe I'm mistaken, a bit like jungle warfare that throughout the late 90s and then early 2000s was was also abandoned. And then while the Marines, since they continued training for it with a with, I forget where the the jungle warfare school for them was, but then the army, just a few years back, reopened the jungle warfare training center in Hawaii. So kind of a similar concept, the idea of maintaining the possibility that capability, and then the possibility of expanding it, in case, then we get involved in that type of warfare again,

Dr. Peter Mansoor: 18:03

yeah, similar, but different. Jungle warfare is just a different environment. You know, you can fight a conventional war in the jungle. You can fight counterinsurgency operations in the jungle. The jungle is, is the environment and not the type of war. With counterinsurgency, it's a type of war. So I think the jungle warfare would require a training center where counter insurgency warfare doesn't require a training center. Requires courses.

Dr. Guido Rossi: 18:38

Okay, yes, makes good. And it sounds like a very sensible recommendation to me in the in the larger scheme of things. Do you? Do you think that I always think about predicting the future warfare as reading the tea leaves, right? It's not an exact science. Do you do you think that's where the world and history is headed right now? Are we heading more to again, large scale, common operations and the context of great power competition, or, you know, or what do you think will be the role of insurgencies in the near future.

Dr. Peter Mansoor: 19:22

So the US military has a pretty good track record of getting the next war wrong. In the 1990s if someone had said, you know, your next two wars are going to be in Iraq and Afghanistan, they would have been, you know, told to go to an insane asylum. If in the 1980s someone would have said, your next war is not going to be in Europe, it's going to be in Europe. It's going to be in Kuwait in Iraq. Again, they would have been told they're nuts. We don't have a very good track record of getting the next war right, and so the military needs to train. Or a broad array of of conflicts focusing on those that are are have the most significant risk and outcomes to the United States right now, I think most of the military would agree that China should be a pacing threat. The Trump administration might not agree with that. They seem to be focused on the Western Hemisphere and right now Venezuela. But I think if you look at what's the most dangerous conflict for the United States, it would be one with China over Taiwan, or if Russia decided to launch a hybrid war of the Baltic states, for instance, and got NATO involved. Those are the sorts of conflicts I think that we need to be training for.

Dr. Guido Rossi: 20:51

And in your opinion, is it much more China than Russia, or much more Russia than China? Which one is more likely?

Dr. Peter Mansoor: 21:00

So it's both but we have the advantage in Europe of having a lot of NATO allies that can that are ramping up their defensive capabilities and their armed forces. So I think that's a short term problem. In the medium, longer term, I think we're going to see your European allies significantly augment their military capabilities, and that would allow the United States to focus more on on China, because in Asia, there are no there is no power groups of power absent the United States who can stave off a Chinese attack on, say, Taiwan, Japan can't do it alone. Vietnam is too small. Australia is too far away and too small. So it is the United States that's the key player there, and South Korea as well, yeah, South Korea as well. They are. They'll be focused on defending just their own homeland, much less defending Taiwan.

Dr. Guido Rossi: 22:07

So do you so well? So these brings to the front of my mind the European allies. Do you think the, do you think the contribution of the NATO allies in Europe will be an essential asset for preparing for great power competition, particularly if we're fighting we will be facing not just one of the two enemies, but both,

Dr. Peter Mansoor: 22:36

absolutely so during the Cold War, at least from the mid 60s on, the United States could focus on Europe, because China was not necessarily an ally, but they were. They were not going to necessarily attack us interests in Asia, they were focused on their northern border with the Soviet Union, primarily and on internal struggles, primarily economic. So the United States could focus on Europe and position several 100,000 troops there. It was not only the wolf closest to the sled, but it was the most dangerous Wolf. Today. We don't have that luxury. We have a de facto alliance between China and Russia, and they're both, you know, they're both out to combat the United States in whatever, whatever way they can. Right now, it's, it's in gray zone conflict. But if that turns into a shooting war, then we're going to need our European allies to stave off any sort of Russian incursion in Europe, while we focus on on China and Asia, because we can't, we don't have the military forces to do both right now,

Dr. Guido Rossi: 24:17

Some some analysts and commentators, they're a bit pessimistic about the Not, not only about the ability, abilities of the forces at hand that the United States have right now for confronting China, or, well, China more than Russia, but also about the mobilization capabilities. How do you how do you evaluate those? Do you well? First of all, do you think enough has been is being done presently to prepare for these fights? And do you think that the United States would be able, through a proper mobilization, to prepare enough forces and mobilize the industry, enough. To fight such wars.

Dr. Peter Mansoor: 25:03

I think right now, we would be hard pressed to fight a World War in the 1920s and 1930s the United States put a lot of effort into figuring out industrial mobilization and troop mobilization. We had the luxury of time. In fact, we started mobilizing after the fall of France, and weren't involved in the shooting war for 18 months, and that gave us a head start. I'm not sure we'll get a head start the next time, and I think it's going to take much longer to gin up our capabilities. The Selective Service system is moribund at best. It'll take a while. I'm not sure we have the number and size of training bases that we need. The industry is not in a position to ramp up its capabilities, and you know, it could get there if you just threw a lot of money at them. But then looking at our national debt, we're not in a position necessarily financially, to fight a great power conflict, especially if it's a world war. So we've got a lot of work to do. I'm afraid that neither party in Washington is is well equipped to handle it, and certainly they're not going to work together. So this is a real issue. We could actually, I could envision a world war in which the United States loses, which is not a good prospect.

Dr. Guido Rossi: 26:48

I will just ask you. So if, if you were, if you could establish some priorities, what do you think the way you think the most glaring gaps or shortcomings that should be addressed with priority right now. Which what will be the priorities that you think that should be addressed right now to prepare for these conflicts?

Dr. Peter Mansoor: 27:15

Yeah, I think at the moment, the military, all the services, need to focus on unmanned systems and drone warfare and figure out how to operate in that kind of environment and win in that kind of environment that includes the use of AI to command drone swarms, the manufacturing capability to create drone swarms in the hundreds of 1000s and and to have the capability to replenish those drones when they get destroyed, we need to figure out drone to drone air warfare so that we can gain and maintain air superiority over their future battlefields using drones. And this is going to take a mindset shift among the military. We're very good at creating very expensive, bespoke systems. You know the F 35 fighter, the the B 21 Raider bomber, the you know the predator and Global Hawk drones, for instance. But we're not very good at what's happening in Ukraine right now, which is swarms of drones, some of them small, some of them large, all of them lethal, that are dominating the aerospace and we got to figure that out, and I think we can, but that's got to be the Priority, at least tactically and operational strategically, it's a different story. We need to knit up our alliances and focus on on integrating alliance partners into our operations, which I hope we're doing. But unfortunately, some of the rhetoric coming out of the Trump administration is less than helpful in that regard.

Dr. Guido Rossi: 29:23

The last question I will ask you is, what doctrines, what lessons learned, specifically from from the universe of counterinsurgency and from counterinsurgency doctrine could be applied also to large scale combat operations?

Dr. Peter Mansoor: 29:38

Well, a lot of these wars that we can envision are going to be hybrid conflicts, where there's going to be high end combat, for sure, but there's also going to be asymmetric conflict. You see that right now in Europe, where Russia is launching drones into Western Europe and. And inhibiting their their use of their own airspace, even for peaceful purposes. We can see that with their assassination attempts and assassinations of key individuals, with their with their interjection into elections and their use of social media so this sort these are the same sorts of things that happen in counterinsurgency warfare, that you're in a fight for the people, and that fight is in all realms, and not just the military realm, and it's in the intelligence realm. It's in the information space. It's in the diplomatic realm, and you can take those lessons and apply them to the sorts of hybrid conflicts that we are ongoing today, and not just in Europe, but in Asia as well. And I think those lessons will be quite useful going forward.

Dr. Guido Rossi: 31:00

I can only thank you so much for for talking to us today. And I'll just say that I was in Boston recently, and I saw on the bookshelf your latest book, redemption MacArthur and the campaign for the Philippines. So I got a copy for myself, and it's, it's on the bookshelf, and it'd be my next read. Awesome.

Dr. Peter Mansoor: 31:19

Well, thanks for thanks for the contribution. I hope you enjoy the book. I as much as I did in writing it. It was a labor of

Dr. Guido Rossi: 31:27

love. I remember that you were, you were conducting research. I think when I, when I was still to defend my own dissertation at Ohio State, at The Ohio State. So that's it, awesome. Thank you so much. Thanks, Guido.

Jim Cardoso: 31:50

Special thanks to Dr Peter Mansour, retired US Army officer and the chair of military history at The Ohio State University, as well as Dr Guido Rossi GNSI Research Fellow. It was a great conversation, and we hope you enjoyed it before we end the podcast today, a couple things to tell you about congratulations to USF Associate Professor and GNSI Senior Faculty Fellow, Dr Steven Neely, a previous at the boundary guest on the publication of his new book The anxious state stress polarization and elections in America. Dr Neely explores the physiological toll of exposure to political conflict, the role of the media and social media in heightening anxiety and the strain on personal relationships caused by polarization at the risk of attempting sarcasm on an audio only podcast that's not at all a timely and relevant topic, right? His book is available for pre order, and we'll drop a link in the show notes. We're also looking forward to the St Petersburg conference on world affairs coming up in early 2026 GNSI will partner with the St Petersburg World Affairs Council to convene outer space collaboration and competition on February 11 at the USF St Pete campus. The conference will highlight national security issues in outer space, but also touch on law, diplomacy, space research and the enormous aerospace industry in Florida. Astronaut Nicole Stott, a 27 year NASA veteran who lives right here in the Tampa Bay area, will be our keynote speaker. We'll have more information in the weeks ahead as we finalize the agenda. If you're new to the podcast or to genocide in general, I recommend you explore our library of genocide decision briefs as the name implies. They're short, easy to read. Explanations on today's national security issues such as drones, critical minerals, Golden Dome, Israel and Iran and Russia's invasion of Ukraine, we also cover under explored but important topics, such as the US military recruiting crisis, the use of hunger as a weapon of war, and how to best educate and prepare future national security leaders. You can find all them on our website, just click publications. Thanks for spending some time with us today, next week on the podcast, we're going to discuss the recently completed first ever Florida security forum. It featured an essential exploration about the physical and cyber security of Florida's ports and the national security implications even while we're working on the post conference deliverables, it's never too early to explore important takeaways. We'll bring together key members of the conference team for a mini roundtable next week on at the boundary. You don't want to miss that episode or any other Be sure to rate, subscribe and let your friends and colleagues know. If you're watching on YouTube, hit that like button, subscribe and turn on the alerts. You can also follow along with GNSI on our LinkedIn and X accounts at USF, underscore. GNSI. GNSI, and check out our website as well, at usf.edu/gnsi, that's going to wrap up this episode of at the boundary. Each new episode will feature global and national security issues we found to be insightful, intriguing, maybe controversial, but overall, just worth talking about. I'm Jim Cardoso, and we'll see you at the boundary. You.