The Maturing Revolution in Military Affairs (Pt. 2)

Chapter 6: The Dawning Vulnerability of Naval Surface Combatants

The U.S. Navy has been concerned about the vulnerability of its surface combat­ants to air attack since late 1943. In September 1943, the sinking of the Italian battleship Roma as a result of two hits by Fritz-X radio-controlled glide bombs delivered by German Donier-217s generated early anxiety about the future sur­vivability of U.S. surface combatants, particularly aircraft carriers. This concern was reinforced in October 1944 by the success of the first large-scale suicide attacks by Japanese Kamikaze pilots against American naval forces in the Leyte Gulf, which included the sinking of the escort carrier USS St. Lo on October 25. The Navy’s institutional response was the establishment of Project Bumblebee in November 1944. Project Bumblebee began development of radar-guided surface­to-air missiles (SAMs) to defend the Navy’s carrier battle groups. It eventually produced the first generation of U.S. naval SAMs, which included the short-range Tartar, the medium-range Terrier, and the long-range Talos.[44]

The Navy’s second generation of naval SAMs consisted of the Standard Missile (SM) family deployed on Aegis guided-missile destroyers and cruisers. The ma­ture Aegis combat system that emerged in mid-1980s was built around a four-megawatt, phased-array SPY-1 radar able to track up to one hundred targets; the RIM-66C/D SM-2 version of the Standard Missile; high-speed computers; and, starting with CG-52 (USS Bunker Hill), twin Mark 41 Vertical Launch System (VLS) installations containing up to 122 Standard Missiles.[45] In conjunction with the E-2 Airborne Early Warning aircraft and the F-14 Tomcat, equipped with the AWG-9 track-while-scan pulse-doppler radar and long-range AIM-54 Phoenix air-to-air missiles, Aegis provided a fairly robust defensive capability for U.S. aircraft carriers.

Nevertheless, as the “blue-water” capabilities of the Soviet Navy matured in the 1980s, the threat to U.S. carrier battle groups became substantial. The Soviets’ first problem was locating American carriers in the vastness of the oceans. After all, if the exact location of a U.S. nuclear carrier is known at one moment in time, within thirty minutes the vessel could be anywhere within a circle of 700 square nautical miles (nm).

Starting in the 1970s, the Soviet solution to the location and over-the-horizon targeting problems was to develop both radar and electronic intelligence ocean reconnaissance satellites (RORSATs and EORSATs). The EORSATs located op­posing naval forces by triangulating on their radio and radar emissions. The RORSATs, which had nuclear power plants, used active radar to pinpoint U.S. na­val forces. However, the RORSATs were generally launched in conjunction with major Soviet naval exercises and their duration at LEO altitudes was limited, the longest being 135 days. [46] Arguably, locating and tracking U.S. aircraft carriers with sufficient precision and duration for targeting with long-range missiles re­mained a challenge for the Soviets through the end of the Cold War. But assum­ing that the Soviets could locate and track a carrier battle group, T-22 Backfire bombers with Raduga Kh-22 missiles, which could be launched up to 400 kilo­meters from the carrier and attain speeds approaching Mach 4, presented the carrier’s F-14s with the formidable challenge of intercepting the Backfires before they could launch their missiles.[47]

Nor were Backfire regiments the only challenge the Soviet Navy posed for U.S. carrier battle groups. In the 1980s the Soviets began fielding Oscar-class nuclear-powered guided-missile submarines (SSGNs), each armed with twenty-four P-700 Granit supersonic cruise missiles, which were specifically designed to at­tack U.S. carriers from distances of up to 500 kilometers. Through the end of the Cold War, the Soviets commissioned two Oscar-I and six Oscar-II SSGNs. [48] The Granit missile, which the Oscars could launch while submerged, was developed as part of an integrated naval RUK that assimilated intelligence and targeting data from multiple sources.[49] The employment concept of the Oscar SSGNs was to overwhelm a carrier battle group’s defenses, including its Aegis combatants, with salvos of Granits. Like Soviet Backfire regiments, Oscar-I/II SSGNs posed a growing challenge to the survivability of U.S. carrier battle groups in the late 1980s, especially if they attacked in conjunction with Backfires.

From the U.S. Navy’s perspective, the Soviet Navy’s mounting challenge to the survivability of U.S. aircraft carriers rapidly evaporated following the collapse of the communist state in December 1991. But subsequent events led the Chinese to take up where the Soviets had left off. Tension between China and the United States over Taiwanese president Lee Teng-hui’s leanings toward independence in 1995–1996 culminated in the United States deploying carrier battle groups into the region to coerce Chinese leaders to back down from their efforts to intimidate Taiwan through missile firings and amphibious exercises. U.S. military deploy­ments during this period included the transit of the Taiwan Strait by the USS Nimitz in December 1995, and the movement of two carrier battle groups into the area the following March. In the aftermath of this crisis, Chinese leaders em­barked on a program to develop the military capabilities to “deter or counter third-party intervention in any future cross-Strait crisis” by being able “to attack, at long ranges, military forces that might deploy (anti-access) or operate (area-denial) within the western Pacific.”[50] One element of this effort involves “combining conventionally-armed DF-21 ASBMs, C4ISR for geo-location and tracking of tar­gets, and onboard guidance systems for terminal homing to strike surface ships.”[51]

The Defense Department estimates the range of the DF-21 ASBM to be 1,500 kilometers (810 nm), and that of the DF-21 intermediate range ballistic missile (IRBM) for attacking fixed targets to be at least 1,750 kilometers (945 nm).[52] The IRBM variant’s range is sufficient to reach Guam in the Mariana Islands from the PRC’s coast, and the ASBM’s range is enough to force U.S. carriers to operate at distances from the Taiwan Strait that are beyond the unrefueled combat radius of their air wings. The unrefueled radius of the F/A-18E Super Hornet is in the vicinity of 390–450 nm depending on the mission profile and ordnance. And while the goal for the carrier variant of the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter is an unrefu­eled combat radius of 730 nm, the performance threshold is only 600 nm.[53] Aegis combatants armed with the SM-3 offer a capability to defend against limited numbers of IRBMs, and countermeasures such as radio frequency (RF) aerosols could provide carriers and other surface combatants with additional protection from ASBM warheads with terminal radar terminal guidance. Note, too, that the ASBM variant of the DF-21 has only undergone component testing and, as of 2009, DoD estimated the total of DF-21 IRBMs (all variants) actually deployed to be no more than eighty to ninety.[54] Nevertheless, in the long run, growing PRC inventories of ASBMs and anti-ship cruise missiles, which can be launched from a variety of air, surface and sub-surface platforms, are likely to make it increas­ingly risky to operate carrier battle groups within reach of the A2/AD capabili­ties the Chinese are developing. Aircraft carriers have ruled the oceans since the early 1940s, and the United States has been able to use them to project power ashore. It is conceivable, however, that maturation and proliferation of the preci­sion strike regime will eventually bring the era of the aircraft carrier to an end.

Chapter 7: The Future of Stealth

In 1996 Vickers introduced the notion of a “hider-finder” competition between information acquisition and information denial. He suggested that the balance between acquiring and denying information could well be the central determinant of how theater war would be conducted through 2025. [55] One aspect of this competition involves the requirements of most current precision weapons to have their targets pinpointed in space and time. Another aspect of this competition is the information competition between penetrating strike platforms like the B-2 and advanced SAMs such as the Chinese HongQi-9 or HQ-9 (probably derived from the Russian S-300PMUs that China purchased from Russia), and the Russian S-300P and S-400, which are designated the SA-10, SA‑20 and SA-21 by NATO.[56]

In recent years there has been speculation that ongoing advances in radar detection and tracking will, in the near future, obviate the ability of all-aspect, low-observable (LO) aircraft such as the B-2, F-22, and F-35 Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) to survive inside denied airspace. Those taking this view emphasize at least two promising approaches to counter-LO, both of which are being pursued by the Russians, Czechs, and others. One involves very high frequency (VHF) and ultra high frequency (UHF) radars, which use relatively long wavelengths of about 30 centimeters to six meters. The radar cross section (RCS) of an aircraft not only varies with the wavelength of the radar trying to detect the plane, but the aircraft’s RCS is larger for long-wavelength search radars compared to its RCS as seen by the shorter, X-band radars typically used by SAMs for fire-control. [57] Radar phys­ics, therefore, argues that VHF and UHF search radars offer greater potential to detect and track stealthy aircraft. Granted, the historically poor resolution in angle and range has prevented traditional long-wavelength radars from pro­viding fire-control-quality data. However, as fully digital versions of these radars incorporating active electronically scanned arrays (AESAs) proliferate, they will present a growing challenge to current and even future stealth aircraft.[58]

The other promising approach to counter LO has been passive systems such as the Czech VERA-E, which uses radar, television, cellular phone and other avail­able signals of opportunity reflected off stealthy aircraft to find and track them.[59] The main limitation of such systems has been the enormous signal-processing power and memory required to analyze all these emissions, differentiate real targets from ghost signals, noise and clutter, and keep the false alarm rate to manageable levels.[60] One potential outcome, however, is that as long-wave radars transition to AESAs (and assuming computational power continues to double every two years or so in accordance with Gordon Moore’s “law”), information acquisition will overwhelm the capacity of aerospace engineers to reduce plat­form signatures. [61] The balance between information acquisition and information denial will swing dramatically in favor of the former. Or, to put the point more bluntly, there will come a time in the not-too-distant future when the SAMs will almost always win against air-breathing penetrating platforms, rendering opera­tions inside denied airspace too costly to bear.

Is this forecast accurate? A definitive answer to this question would obviously require access to data on current and projected capabilities for reducing radar signatures and countering advanced SAMs that are highly classified (and rightly so). Nevertheless, there are substantial reasons to doubt this conclusion. First and foremost, the very same shift to digital AESA radars and continuing growth in computational power that aids the “finders” can also be exploited by stealthy “hiders.” For example, the JSF’s sensor suite and computational power, which can be easily upgraded over time due to the plane’s open avionics architecture, gives the F-35 an ability to adjust its flight path in real time in response to pop-up threats, something neither the F-117 nor the B-2 have been able to do. Second, the F-35 has an AESA radar that can be used for electronic attack of enemy air de­fenses as well as digital radio frequency memory (DRFM) capabilities that offer the potential to increase survivability “by delaying, denying, and defeating threat air-to-air and surface-to-air missile systems operating in the radio frequency spectrum.”[62] A DRFM countermeasures system can duplicate an incoming signal from enemy radars by converting it from analog to digital and back again. In between, DRFM can modify the digital duplicate so that, when converted back to analog and retransmitted, the manipulated signal will be coherent with the threat radar. [63] DRFM signal manipulation can deceive threat radars by altering the target’s apparent RCS, range, velocity, and angle. Third, unlike the F-117 and B-2 that operated singly (and only at night), the F-35, like the F-22, has the sur­vivability for daytime operations and will probably operate in networked groups of four or eight aircraft, thereby greatly multiplying their capacity to overcome enemy air defenses, to include destroying S-300/400/500 class SAMs. There is, then, a lot more to the information competition between hiders and finders than the shift to digital electronics and advances in computational power. Exploiting ongoing technological advances is not limited to SAM “finders,” and historically airmen have proven surprisingly adept time and again at finding ways to over­come adversary air defenses.

Finally, there is the issue of the extent to which the U.S. military has actually embraced all-aspect, LO combat aircraft since the Air Force declared a limited initial operational capability (IOC) with the F-117 in October 1983.[64] When the last of the Air Force’s 187 F-22s are delivered, all-aspect, LO fighters and bomb­ers will still constitute less than 8 percent of the Service’s inventory of combat aircraft. If Navy and Marine combat aircraft are included, the percentage drops to 5.5 percent. It would appear, therefore, that more than a quarter-century after the F-117’s IOC, the Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps have yet to embrace stealth as a numerically significant component of their combat air forces. If the 2,443 JSFs now planned are eventually procured, this situation will be reversed and all-aspect, LO aircraft will make up around 70 percent of the U.S. inventory by 2035, when the last of F-35As are produced for the Air Force. The senior DoD de­cision makers who remain firmly committed to the JSF program are, of course, in positions to evaluate the viability of all-aspect, low observability into the 2040s. Implicitly at least, their continuing commitment to the F-35 suggests that they do not believe that the era of stealth aircraft is about to come to an end.

Chapter 8: Ground Forces and Mature Precision Strike

In the 1950s, after the ceasefire in Korea, budget constraints and the challenge of dealing with nuclear battlefields prompted the U.S. Army to develop divisional structures with fewer troops than those employed during the Korean War.[65] By 1960 the Army had shifted all its division tables of organization and equipment (TO&Es) to pentomic structures to enable them to “fight and survive on nuclear as well as conventional battlefields.”[66] The pentomic TO&Es offered two ways of coping with battlefield nuclear weapons. Adding atomic artillery and the nuclear-capable MGR-1 Honest John rocket increased the organic firepower of Army divi­sions. At the same time, pentomic organizations were more dispersed than tradi­tional triangular division structures, which offered greater survivability against these sorts of tactical nuclear weapons.[67]

Insofar as reconnaissance-strike complexes approach the effectiveness of tac­tical nuclear weapons against most battlefield targets, they confront traditional ground forces with the same susceptibility to being destroyed from a distance as atomic weapons presented in the 1950s. Not surprisingly, the responses to this vulnerability suggested by early RMA war games were similar to those associated with the Army’s pentomic divisions. The RMA war gaming ONA supported in the mid-1990s suggested the need for greater dispersal on the battlefield by small­er, lighter, more agile forces with greater ability to hide while achieving massed effects despite being themselves “de-massed.”[68] These lighter, more dispersed units needed stealthy vehicles both for insertion into areas dominated by enemy RUKs and for logistic support; also, RMA ground units needed to be highly net­worked and supported by unmanned ground vehicles, UAVs, microrobots, and long-range precision fires; and some of the later games even envisioned individu­al soldiers being equipped with performance-enhancing exoskeletons.[69]

The “Hunter Warrior” experiment conducted by the U.S. Marine Corps in 1996 explored some of these ideas about future ground forces, admittedly in a rudimentary form. The central question Hunter Warrior sought to answer was whether small numbers of dispersed, lightly armed teams could dominate con­ventional ground forces in relatively large coastal regions. Hunter Warrior’s operational concept was to insert six- to eight-man long-range contact patrols (LRCPs) deep into enemy territory by air, use UAVs and advanced and integrated command, control, communications, intelligence (C3I) to achieve shared situ­ational awareness, and then bring extended-range precision fires to bear on the opposition.[70] Conducted over a twelve-day period at the U.S. Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center at Twentynine Palms in California, Hunter Warrior in­volved over six thousand marines in a free-play, force-on-force battle ranging across some four thousand square kilometers of battlespace. The Hunter Warrior RMA force was a Special Purpose Marine Air Ground Task Force Experimental (SPMAGTF(X)) made up of about two thousand marines, although its presence ashore typically involved around one hundred troops and a small number of ve­hicles; the SPMAGTF(X) was opposed by a mechanized opposing force (OPFOR) of nearly four thousand troops and four hundred vehicles.[71]

The results of Hunter Warrior were somewhat mixed, as well as hotly debated within the Marine Corps. Despite losing three hundred of the five hundred vehi­cles targeted by SPMAGTF(X) teams, the OPFOR achieved most of its objectives, including taking a key port facility and airfield. [72] The broader point, however, is that Hunter Warrior, like many of the land-focused RMA war games and ex­ercises since 1992, explored ground force organizations and equipage substan­tially different from those that predominate today. One of the possibilities that the Army After Next (AAN) program and RAND’s Arroyo Center considered in the late 1990s was a Light Battle Force that could be rapidly inserted and had excellent inter-theater mobility, but leaned heavily on networked sensors and “reach-back” for dispersed, indirect precision fires and the capability to achieve information dominance while denying enemy situational awareness.[73] As origi­nally envisioned in the Army’s Future Combat Systems (FCS) program, the next generation of ground combat vehicles would employ signature management and active protection to improve survivability while giving up considerable weight (armor) to achieve rapid deployability by air. [74]

The assumption implicit in all these possibilities remains, as John Schmitt emphasized in his critique of Hunter Warrior, “that anything that moves or mass­es on the battlefield can be targeted and anything that can be targeted can be destroyed by precise, long-range fires.” [75] Even before Hunter Warrior, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral William Owens, had advanced a version of this premise, which he labeled Dominant Battlefield Awareness (DBA). DBA was the hypothesis that it would be possible by 2015 or so to pro­vide U.S. war-fighters with near-perfect information on all observable phenom­ena throughout a volume of battlespace covering an area on the ground some 200-by-200 nm—large enough to encompass North Korea. In 1994 Owens tasked ONA to explore this possibility in a 2015 Korea scenario. [76] Over time, Owens’ DBA concept morphed into Dominant Battlespace Knowledge (DBK), the even more visionary conjecture that the emerging U.S. “system-of-systems” would not only enable war-fighters to be aware of all observable phenomena in a volume of battlespace large enough to encompass North Korea, but know what all the phenomena meant.[77]

These assumptions obviously fly in the face of the view that the fundamen­tal nature of war is essentially an interactive clash—a Zweikampf or two-sided “duel,” as Carl von Clausewitz characterized it—between independent, hostile, sentient wills dominated by friction, uncertainty, disorder, and highly nonlin­ear interactions.[78] Can sensory and network technologies eliminate the frictions, uncertainties, disorder, and nonlinearities of interactive clashes between oppos­ing polities? As of this writing, the answer appears to be “No.” American combat experiences in Iraq in 1991, in Bosnia in 1999, in Afghanistan from 2001 to the present, and in Iraq since 2003 provide ample grounds for concluding that the frictions, uncertainties, disorder, and nonlinearities of war will persist even in a maturing precision-strike regime.

What does this history suggest for the composition and structure of future ground forces as precision-strike systems proliferate and become increasingly ca­pable of hitting anything they can find and track? On the one hand, if advanced sensors and associated targeting networks one day succeed in rendering ground combat environments more or less transparent—thereby achieving Dominant Battlefield Awareness—then heavy armored and mechanized forces could be de­stroyed from afar. In that case, one would expect future ground forces to evolve in the direction of the Light Battle Force the Army envisioned in the late 1990s, or possibly even toward Hunter Warrior’s LRCP teams. On the other hand, the per­sistence of friction, uncertainty, disorder and nonlinearity argues that war on the ground—particularly in complex terrain such as urban or mountainous areas— will continue to occur in relatively “cluttered” environments. In cluttered terrain there will be powerful incentives to retain heavy armor if at all possible. As de­fense secretary Robert Gates stated when he recommended cancelling the vehicle component of the FCS program in April 2009, one of his reasons was concern over whether “lower weight, higher fuel efficiency, and greater information aware­ness” could compensate adequately for heavy armor in light of “the lessons of counterinsurgency and close quarters combat in Iraq and Afghanistan.”[79] Combat experience from those ongoing conflicts has proven time and again that today’s battlefields are far from transparent despite enormous U.S. technical and material advantages in state-of-the-art ISR sensors and platforms. So while the prolifera­tion of both long- and short-range PGMs may necessitate smaller, more dispersed ground forces, they do not necessarily support abandoning heavy armor.

Chapter 9: Power Projection

Starting in World War II and continuing to the present, one of the core competen­cies of the U.S. military has been the capability to project conventional military power overseas on a large scale. On August 7, 1942, some 14,000 U.S. marines went ashore on Guadalcanal, Tulagi and Florida in the Solomon Islands. Once the Japanese had finally withdrawn from the Solomons the following February, they were forced onto the strategic defensive in the Pacific and remained on the defensive for the rest of the war. In November 1942, Guadalcanal was followed by Operation Torch, which began with Anglo-American landings in French Morocco and Algeria. These landings involved the coordination of two armadas, one sail­ing from Britain and the other from the east coast of the United States; altogether they carried more than 100,000 troops to North Africa.[80] By May 1943, Allied forces had occupied Tunisia and, in conjunction with the British 8th Army ad­vancing west from Egypt, had driven the German and Italian forces from Africa. In June 1944, the cross-Channel Allied landings in Normandy were the largest of World War II. On D-Day, June 6, the Allies put almost 133,000 troops ashore at five landing beaches and inserted another 23,000 airborne troops).[81] The na­val armada assembled for the initial assault included over 1,200 warships along with 4,100 landing ships and landing craft.[82] On D-Day some 5,400 British and American fighter aircraft and 6,000 other planes supported the landings.[83] By mid-August 1944, the Allies had broken out of the beachhead, forced the German garrison at Cherbourg to capitulate (June 27), taken St. Lo (July 25), and then driven to the western end of the Cotentin Peninsula. By August 21, the Allies had landed just over two million men in Normandy in addition to vast quantities of vehicles, equipment, ammunition and supplies.

The power-projection capabilities the United States manifested during World War II were later utilized in Korea in 1950, in Vietnam in 1965, in Iraq in 1990– 1991 and, most recently, again in Iraq for OIF in 2003. Prior to the official begin­ning of OIF’s major combat phase on March 19, 2003, the United States amassed around 175,000 troops in theater.[84] By mid-April Saddam Hussein’s regime had been overthrown and some 92,000 U.S. troops were occupying Iraq.

A common element in all these examples of traditional U.S. power projection has been the buildup in overseas theaters of large, massed air-ground forces, in­cluding mechanized and armored units as well as combat and combat-support aircraft concentrated on regional airbases. Another hallmark of the longstanding U.S. approach to power projection has been the ability to gain control of the air, to attack the full range of targets inside enemy airspace, and to utilize combat air­craft to support ground operations while protecting in-theater bases and ports. Emerging anti-access/area-denial capabilities appear to be explicitly designed to mitigate or negate key elements of the U.S. military’s traditional, “industrial” approach to overseas power projection.

The PRC is the nation that is developing the most comprehensive A2/AD capabilities. In the long run, though, the proliferation of significant precision-strike capabilities to smaller countries and even terrorist organizations seems inevitable.[85] As a likely harbinger of things to come, the Russian firm Kontsern­Morinformsistema-Agat has begun marketing its Club-K cruise missile con­cealed inside a 40-foot shipping container that can be deployed on trucks, rail cars, or merchant vessels.[86] The land-attack variant of Club-K is similar to the U.S. Tomahawk Land Attack Missile (TLAM), but has a smaller warhead (400 kilograms) and shorter range (250 kilometers) than TLAM. Kontsern­Morinformsistema-Agat’s promotional video appears to be aimed at coun­tries such as Iran and Venezuela. The vulnerability to such systems of surface ships, ports, airfields and fixed installations of all sorts is that U.S. forces at­tempting to project ground forces and air power into overseas theaters within range of enemy short-range systems could face substantial attrition or even be denied entry—at least until the adversary’s ISR and targeting networks have been negated. The question therefore becomes: Will the emergence of long-and short-range precision strike in the hands of various opponents eventually render the costs of traditional power projection too high in blood and treasure for the United States to bear?

At present, the implicit American assumption seems to be that the answer is “No.” Early in any conflict against an opponent with precision-strike systems, U.S. forces expect to be able to take down the other side’s long-range strike capabilities, much as American air forces have done in previous conflicts by roll­ing back or negating enemy air defenses. With adversary RUKs suppressed or destroyed, U.S. forces could then revert to traditional power-projection practices based on large ground forces supported logistically through major ports, and air forces operating from a small number of regional air bases. Unfortunately, the growing proliferation of relatively inexpensive short-range precision strike capabilities—guided mortars, artillery shells, rockets, etc.—suggests that even if the adversary’s long-range precision-strike capabilities could be eliminated at the outset, it still might be difficult and costly to cling to traditional U.S. power-projection practices. Forward bases and massed ground forces would remain highly vulnerable to precision attacks from dispersed enemy forces using shorter-range systems. Thus, alternatives might have to be found to strategic airlift with planes such as the C-17, to depending on surface shipping to deliver the bulk of equipment and supplies to overseas ports, and to the massing of large, mecha­nized ground forces in forward theaters.

Worse, if enemy long-range RUKs are able to persist past the opening phase of the campaign, then forcible entry into an overseas theater will become more difficult, as will sustaining those forces once they are in theater. Large forward bases and massed forces seem destined to grow increasingly vulnerable to both long-range and short-range precision strike. In the Western Pacific, for example, it is likely that air bases as far forward as Kadena on the island of Okinawa will no longer be able to sustain meaningful sortie rates or avoid the loss of any high-value assets parked there, including ISR assets such as JSTARS and air-refueling tankers. In that case, some rethinking of the U.S. basing structure in that part of the world may be necessary. Further, long-range adversary RUKs that cannot be quickly suppressed will fundamentally diminish the value of short-range systems such as tactical aircraft, whether land-based or operating from aircraft carriers.

Ultimately, these challenges to traditional U.S. power projection could one day render deploying large, heavy forces overseas and sustaining them through ports and fixed bases prohibitively costly in terms of casualties and equipment attrition. One alternative would be to develop a new approach to overseas power projection. Presumably, the platforms used for forcible entry and logistical sus­tainment of ground forces within the reach of enemy RUKs would have to be quite different from those relied upon today.[87] Also, ground forces would have to be far more dispersed than in the past. Among other things, it might become too difficult to insert or operate heavy armored forces within range of the opponent’s precision strike capabilities, which would be a difficult change for the U.S. Army. An even more disturbing possibility is that the United States’ capacity to inter­vene in overseas crises and theaters will become so constrained that the coun­try’s role in the world may end up becoming far less active and interventionist than it has been since 1942.

Chapter 10: Conclusions

Today, the U.S. military appears to be in a comparable position to that in which RAND’s civilian strategists found themselves during the early 1950s when they began trying to come to grips with the emergence of thermonuclear plenty and ballistic missiles on both sides of the Iron Curtain. A maturing precision-strike regime in which prospective adversaries—states large and small as well as nonstate actors—possess advanced sensors and precision weaponry will present challenges fundamentally different from those the U.S. military has had to face since the end of the Cold War. Dealing with these challenges will require innovative thinking, new operational concepts and organizations, and new long-term strategies if the United States is to retain a dominant military position while avoiding imperial overstretch and economic exhaustion in the years ahead.

From ONA’s 1992 MTR assessment to the present, the American military has enjoyed a near monopoly on conventional precision strike. While Soviet military theorists did a better job of thinking through the long-term implications of reconnaissance strike and fire complexes for future warfare than their American counterparts, the “operational execution of MTR ideas and massive fielding of MTR weapons was beyond the political, economic, and cultural capacity of the Soviet state.”[88] As a result, the need of the U.S. military since the early 1990s to change their traditional approaches to conventional operations has been minimal. However, as precision-strike capabilities proliferate, it will become less and less feasible for the U.S. military Services to continue simply using precision strike to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of traditional ways of projecting conventional military power and fighting. How fundamental are the changes in weaponry, concepts, and organizations likely to be? The growth and proliferation of anti-access/area-denial capabilities, together with short-range guided munitions, have the potential to bring the era of the aircraft carrier to an end, obviate the ability of short-range, tactical U.S. air power to operate from forward bases, and substantially raise the difficulties and costs of moving heavy ground forces into overseas theaters, much less sustaining them once there. A further complication is that if the technologies and capabilities for precision strike at intercontinental distances emerge and proliferate widely, so will the temptation in time of war to attack the adversary’s homeland directly. How this prospect may be affected by the continued existence of nuclear arsenals remains to be seen. But a real possibility is that kinetic and non-kinetic capabilities for directly attacking a country’s economic, financial, transportation, and information infrastructures could lower nuclear thresholds.

How soon the U.S. military Services will be forced to begin adapting to these new realities is by no means set in stone. The best guess is that responding to them will become unavoidable within fifteen to twenty years. But there is an important caveat that must be appended to this forecast. The new ways of fighting have yet to be tested in a major conflict between capable adversaries. Until such a test occurs,

U.S. military institutions may be able to continue clinging to traditional ways of fighting and avoid the fundamental changes implied by the maturation and pro­liferation of precision strike. As one participant in ONA’s 2009 RMA workshops commented after the third event in December, without “some catalytic event, there would appear to be no strategic imperative for rapid investment in radical change, thus forestalling actual achievement of a true RMA force for decades.”[89]

What might a relatively mature precision-strike regime look like? John Stillion has suggested that the maturation of precision strike could propel the United States into a period comparable to that between the 1870 Franco-Prussian War and the beginning of World War I in 1914. Starting in the 1860s, the develop­ment of steam power for oceanic transport and railway networks fundamen­tally changed the time and distance factors of war; the telegraph permitted a previously-unheard-of degree of centralization in directing operations; and the development of machine guns and breech-loading, rifled artillery provided new levels of tactical lethality.[90] These were the sinews of industrial warfare based on iron, steam, and mass. Coupled with the German general staff system, they produced a new way of fighting during the wars of German unification, which culminated in May 1871 when Wilhelm I was crowned emperor of the German Empire—the Second Reich.[91] This new way of fighting may have helped create the German state, but against opponents who had yet to master industrial war. That more stringent test came in 1914, and on the Western Front it led to the costly stalemate of trench warfare. In September 1914, with the Germans bringing up reinforcements to drive through to Paris, General Joseph Gallieni mobilized an armada of Paris taxicabs to move thousands of troops to the front at the critical point, just in time to stymie the German advance in the Battle of the Marne.[92] Thereafter, massive firepower severely constrained movement and maneuver, and the fighting on the Western Front “took on a wholly attritional nature.”[93] Stillion’s point is that the proliferation of precision fires could lead, once again, to a period in which “firepower dominates movement, and … battles between power­ful opponents tend to become costly and inconclusive.”[94]

Of course, this vision of future warfare presumes that neither side can elimi­nate the other’s RUKs, particularly their associated sensors and targeting net­works. Yet in early 1990s RMA wargaming, with both sides armed with robust precision strike capabilities, eliminating the opponent’s ability to see and strike deep tended to surface as the overriding operational priority. Moreover, for ei­ther side, the ability to win what Krepinevich has termed the “scouting battle” is likely to hinge on the precise relationships between information acquisition and information denial—Vickers’ hider-finder competition. Here, even a slight edge could very well prove decisive. That said, sufficient advantage in the hider-finder competition at some future date to enable one side to blind the other would surely depend on tactical details that are impossible to predict with any certainty. If survivable reconnaissance-strike complexes proliferate, and if it proves dif­ficult to hide large military forces even in cluttered environments, then tradi­tional overseas power projection against any competent foe could become too costly to remain viable. Such an outcome might eventually force the American national security establishment to rethink the United States’ role in the world. At the same time, should A2/AD capabilities proliferate widely enough, they could also constrain overseas power projection by other countries, including China. But although both outcomes are possible, they are by no means certain. They hinge ultimately on changes in operational realities and the international security en­vironment that are extraordinarily resistant to prediction.

How much and how fundamentally may the conduct of war change by 2040 or 2050? The short but honest answer is: it depends. This paper has explored five of the more obvious and consequential possibilities. Some of them are undoubt­edly better understood and more imminent than they were in 1996 when Vickers produced his broad vision of war in a non-nuclear missile age in which guided conventional munitions approach the effectiveness of nuclear warheads. It is also important to keep in mind that others may, for cultural reasons (among others), exploit the maturing precision-strike regime in ways quite different from those embraced by the U.S. military Services.[95] So far at least, the United States has not tried to develop the kind of “keep-out” zones based on A2/AD capabilities that the Chinese are pursuing. Nevertheless, the honest answer to the question about how fundamentally war’s conduct will change—and how soon—remains: it depends.

[44] Watts, Six Decades of Guided Munitions and Battle Networks, p. 4–5. In 1968, the guided missile cruiser USS Long Beach downed two North Vietnamese MiGs with Talos, and in 1972 a Talos from the USS Chicago got another MiG.

[45] VLS cells can hold Standard Missile SAMs, Tomahawk Land Attack Missiles (TLAMs), and Anti-Submarine Rockets (ASROCs). ASROCs could carry a nuclear warhead or an acoustic homing torpedo.

[46] Sven Grahn, “The US-A Program (Radar Ocean Reconnaissance Satellite—ROSAT) and Radio Observations Thereof,” online analysis, downloaded December 4, 2009, at < external pagehttp://www.svemgrahn.pp.se.trackind/RORSAT/RORSAT.html#Summarycall_made>. Grahn was a pioneer in Swedish space activities.

[47] The Soviets fielded Kh-22 in the early 1960s, and it became the standard armament used by Soviet naval aviation Tu-22M Backfires to attack U.S. carrier battle groups. The early Kh-22 could carry either a 1,000-kilogram high explosive shaped charge or a 250–1,000 kiloton nuclear warhead. Guidance was inertial with an active terminal seeker. In the 1970s, the missile was updated with new attack profiles, increased range, and a data-link for mid-course corrections.

[48] The Russians eventually completed eleven Oscar-II SSGNs at Severodvinsk. Three more Oscar IIs were planned but never completed.

[49] Richard Scott, “Russia’s ‘Shipwreck’ Missile Enigma Solved,” Jane’s Intelligence Weekly, September 10, 2001, excerpt available online at < external pagehttp://www.janes.com/defence/naval_forces/news/jdw/jdw010910_6_n.shtmlcall_made>.

[50] OSD, “Military Power of the People’s Republic of China,” 2009, p. 20.

[51] OSD, “Military Power of the People’s Republic of China,” 2009, p. 21.

[52] OSD, “Military Power of the People’s Republic of China,” 2009, pp. 29, 66.

[53] Major General C. D. Moore, F-35 Program Office, “Selected Acquisition Report (DRAFT SAR),” RCS: DD-AT(Q&A)823-198, March 26, 2010, p. 10.

[54] OSD, “Military Power of the People’s Republic of China,” 2009, pp. 29, 66. In December 2010, Admiral Robert Willard, the commander of U.S. Pacific Command, told Asahi Shimbun’s correspondent Yoichi Kato that the Chinese had not yet conducted an over water test of the complete DF-21D system against a moving ship (Andrew S. Erickson’s blog, at external pagehttp://www.andrewerickson.com/2010/12/admiral-willard-compacom-tells-asahi-shimbun%E2%80%99s-yoichi-kato-that-china%E2%80%99s-anti-ship-ballistic-missile-asbm-has-reached-equivalent-of-%E2%80%9Cinitial-operational-capability%E2%80%9D/call_made, accessed December 29, 2010).

[55] Michael G. Vickers, “The Revolution in Military Affairs and Military Capabilities: Broadening the Planning Parameters of Future Conflict,” School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University, 1996, p. 11; Pfaltzgraff and Shultz, War in the Information Age: New Challenges for U.S. Security Policy, p. 40.

[56] The Russian have produced four variants of the S-300P family: the S-300PT or SA-10A; the S‑300PS or SA-10B (export variant the S-300PMU); the S-300PM or SA-20A (export variant S‑300PMU1); and the S-300PMUs or SA-20B (exported as the S-300PMU2 Favorit; the export variant of the Russian S-400 (or SA-21) is the S-400 Triumf. (Sean O’Conner, “Soviet/Russian SAM Site Configuration, Part 2: S-3o0P/S-400/SA-10/20/21, S-300V/SA-12, 2Kll/SA-4, 2K12/SA‑6, 3K37/317/SA-11/17,” January 2010, at < external pagehttp://www.ausairpower.net/APA-Rus-SAM-Site-Configs-B.html#mozTocId647809call_made>.

[57] Rebecca Grant, The Radar Game: Understanding Stealth and Aircraft Survivability (Arlington, VA: IRIS Independent Research, 1998), p. 32. In general, the RCS of an airborne platform relative to a radar attempting to detect the platform is a function of radar’s frequency and polarization as well as the azimuth, range and elevation of the vehicle relative to the radar.

[58] Russia’s Nebo VHF radar is fully digital and incorporates an active electronically scanned array (Carlo Kopp, “Russian VHF Counter Stealth Radars Proliferate,” Defence Today, December 2008, p. 32; also, Bill Sweetman, “Retro Radars,” December 30, 2008, at external pagehttp://www.aviationweek.com/aw/blogs/defense/index.jsp?plckController=Blog&plckScript=blogscript&plckElementId=blogDest&plckBlogPage=BlogViewPost&plckPostId=Blog%3A27ec4a53-dcc8-42d0-bd3a-01329aef79a7Post%3A95781e5e-6ba1-4037-b302-4278cb55e8aacall_made(accessed December 28, 2010).

[59] In February 2006, defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld told the defense minister of the Czech Republic that the Department of Defense had completed a site acceptance test on VERA-E and concluded that the system met its performance specifications (Libor Slezak, “Passive Detection of Low Observable Targets,” ERA, 2006, slide 10).

[60] Dimitris V. Dranidis, “Airborne Stealth in a Nutshell—Part II: Counter Stealth—Technologies and Tactics,” Waypoint, December 2003, pp. 119–120.

[61] Bill Sweetman, “Worth the Cost?”, Jane’s Defence Weekly, July 19 2006, pp. 63. In 1965, Gordon E. Moore projected that the number of transistors and resistors that could be packed into a single inte­grated circuit would continue to double each year through 1975 (Gordon E. Moore, “Cramming More Components onto Integrated Circuits,” Electronics, April 19, 1965, pp. 115–116). By 1975 he modified his original observation to a doubling of processing power every two years, and that rate of increase has held from Intel’s 4004 processor in 1971 to its most recent, the Itanium processor in 2010.

[62] William Balderson, Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Navy (Air Programs), statement before the Airland Subcommittee, Senate Armed Services Committee, April 26, 2007, p. 4, online at < external pagehttp://www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/congress/2007_hr/070426-balderson.pdfcall_made>.

[63] This description of DRFM-based electronic countermeasures is based on Richard J. Wiegand, “Electronic Counter Measure System Utilizing a Digital RF Memory,” Patent 4,743,905, May 10, 1988, pp. 1–2, online at < external pagehttp://www.patentstorm.us/patents/4743905/fulltext.htmlcall_made>.

[64] David C. Aronstein and Albert C. Piccirillo, Have Blue and the F-117A: Evolution of the “Stealth Fighter” (Reston, VA: American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, 1997), p. 165.

[65] John B. Wilson, Maneuver and Firepower: The Evolution of Divisions and Separate Brigades (Washington, DC: Center of Military History, 1998), pp. 266–267. For example, an infantry di­vision structure suggested by the Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth in September 1954 cut nearly 4,000 troops from the 1953 division (ibid., p. 267).

[66] Wilson, Fire and Maneuver, p. 263.

[67] Wilson, Fire and Maneuver, p. 271.

[68] See Commander Jan van Tol, annotated ONA briefing, October 23, 1995, slide 12; William J. Hurley, Dennis J. Gleeson, Jr., Colonel Stephen J. McNamara, Joel B. Resnick, “Summaries of Recent War Games,” Joint Advanced Warfighting Program, Institute for Defense Analyses, October 21, 1998, p. 13, which summarizes the Dominating Maneuver Workshop IV in 1996; and James Blackwell, notes provided to Barry Watts in 2006 on the Dominating Maneuver Wargames II and III, both of which took place in 1995.

[69] Michael Vickers and Robert Martinage, “Future Warfare 200XX Wargame Series: Lessons Learned Report,” CSBA, December 2001, pp. 11–13, 29, 45–52.

[70] Andrew May, Christine Grafton, and James Lasswell, “The U.S. Marine Corps and Hunter Warrior: A Case Study in Experimentation,” SAIC, August 30, 2001,” p. i.

[71] May, Grafton, and Lasswell, “The U.S. Marine Corps and Hunter Warrior,” p. 26

[72] May, Grafton, and Lasswell, “The U.S. Marine Corps and Hunter Warrior,” p. 33.

[73] John Matsumura, Randall Steeb, Thomas Herbert, Scot Eisenhard, John Gordon, Mark Lees and Gail Halverson, “The Army After Next: Exploring New Concepts and Technologies for the Light Battle Force,” documented briefing, RAND, 1998, p. 11.

[74] Brigadier General Edward T. Buckley, Jr., Lieutenant Colonel Henry G. Franke, III, and A. Fenner Milton, “Army After Next Technology: Forging Possibilities into Reality,” Military Review, March–April 1998, p. 7.

[75] Major John F. Schmitt, “A Critique of the Hunter Warrior Concept,” Marine Corps Gazette, June 1998, p. 13.

[76] The first of the DBA simulations was held in October 1994. ONA assembled a contractor team of SAIC, BDM and Booz Allen to conduct the simulation using BDM’s METRIC model with hu­man inputs (Jan van Tol, slides for a briefing of the DBA study program prepared for the Joint Resources Oversight Committee (JROC), undated, slide 6. Commander van Tol was the military assistant on the ONA staff who oversaw the DBA games. Owens’ original question was, “What if we could see all the signatures on the battlefield?” (Ibid.). A second DBA simulation was conducted in June 1995 (Maggie Belknap, memorandum to Admiral Owens, “Dominating Maneuver—Game 2, 20–22 June 1995,” June 23, 1995).

[77] Admiral William A. Owens, “The Emerging U.S. System-of-Systems,” Strategic Forum, National Defense University, Number 63, February 1996, online at <external pagehttp://www.ndu.edu/inss/strforum/SF_63/forum63.htmlcall_made>; Admiral William A. Owens with Ed Offley, Lifting the Fog of War (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000), p. 203.

[78] Carl von Clausewitz, Peter Paret and Michael Howard (ed. and trans.), On War (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976), pp. 75, 139; Werner Hahlweg, Vom Krieg (Bonn: Ferd. Dümmlers Verlag, 1980 and 1991), pp. 191, 288.

[79] Robert M. Gates, Office of the Assistant Secretary of Defense (Public Affairs), “Budget Press Briefing,” as prepared for delivery on April 6, 2009, available online at < external pagehttp://www.defenselink.mil/speeches/speech.aspx?speechid=1341call_made>.

[80] Rick Atkinson, An Army at Dawn: The War in North Africa 1942–1943 (New York: Henry Holt, 2002), p. 22.

[81] David G. Chandler and James Lawton Collins, Jr., (eds), The D-Day Encyclopedia (New York:Simon & Schuster, 1994), pp. 11, 41, 120–121.

[82] Chandler and Collins, The D-Day Encyclopedia, pp. 380–381.

[83] Chandler and Collins, The D-Day Encyclopedia, p. 11.

[84] Michael R. Gordon and General Bernard E. Trainor, Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of Iraq (New York: Pantheon Books, 2006), p. 551. Cobra, of course, had been the code name for the Allies’ July 1944 breakout operation from the Normandy beachheads.

[85] On July 14, 2006, Hezbollah fighters damaged the Israeli corvette Hanit with a cruise missile, most likely a Chinese-designed C-802. At the time, the Hanit was patrolling ten nautical miles off the coast of Beruit

[86] Thomas Harding, “A Cruise Missile in a Shipping Box on Sale to Rogue Bidders,” Telegraph, April 25, 2010; Reuters, “Deadly New Russian Weapons Hides in Shipping Container,” The New York Times, April 26, 2010.

[87] During Operation Desert Storm, more than three-quarters of the 3,150,796 short tons moved into the theater of operations came by sea—Gulf War Air Power Survey, Vol. V, Part I, Lewis D. Hill, Doris Cook, and Aaron Pinker, A Statistical Compendium (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1993), pp. 80, 84, 90. During World War II, half of the total tonnage shipped from the United States was the six billion barrels of oil the country sent overseas—Daniel Yergin, The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money and Power (New York: The Free Press, 1991 & 2009), pp. 361, 364.

[88] Adamsky, The Culture of Military Innovation, p. 37.

[89] James FitzSimonds, “Thoughts from the 11 December 2009 RMA Meeting,” p. 2.

[90] General Rupert Smith, The Utility of Force: The Art of War in the Modern World (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), pp. 70–71, 75–78, 81 91 Smith, The Utility of Force, pp. 97, 102.

[91] Smith, The Utility of Force, pp. 97, 102.

[92] Yergin, The Prize, pp. 152–154.

[93] Smith, The Utility of Force, p. 115.

[94] John Stillion, “11 December Workshop on the RMA at CSBA,” December 10, 2009, email, p. 2.

[95] For insight into just how different U.S., Russian, and Israeli approaches to the RMA have been, see Adamsky’s 2010 The Culture of Military Innovation. To a considerable extent these differences in approach are reflected in the specific organizations that led thinking about the RMA in these three countries. In the Soviet Union the lead institution was the General Staff; in the United States it was the Office of Net Assessment, and in Israel it was the Operational Theory Research Institute. To put it mildly, these were vastly different organizations with dramatically different cognitive styles, charters, and positions within their respective defense establishments.