Unbeknownst to most Americans, the U.S. military is in the midst of another of its many revolutions in thinking. As we depart Iraq and begin positioning ourselves to exit Afghanistan, the military appears in a rush to put the whole idea of Counterinsurgency Warfare behind it. All over D.C. one can hear the sounds of the nation’s deepest military thinkers closing the door on one era as they scramble about in search of the next big thing. Counterinsurgency had a good run — almost ten years. Few military fads, in recent decades, have had such a spectacular run. Entire forests have been decimated for the discussion of ideas such as Shock and Awe, Network Centric Warfare, A Revolution in Military Affairs, and Effects-Based Operations, none of which lasted half as long. You may have not have heard about any of these, but trust me, each, in turn, has absorbed the full mental capacity of nearly every defense intellectual in the country. And now these thinkers need something new.
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This is where the latest idea exciting the defense-intellectual community — Air-Sea Battle — comes in. Although the pedigree of Air-Sea Battle is a bit obscure, it got its most recent impetus from former secretary of defense Robert Gates, who in 2010 asked for a comprehensive plan to ensure that the United States could maintain its access to strategic waterways around the globe, even as the defense budget shrinks.
For the Air Force and Navy, Gates’s request was massive. As far as they were concerned, the Army and Marine Corps had been allowed to play the “We’re fighting two wars” card for too long. It was just too hard to claim a bigger portion of the budget when you had to justify taking it from the guys actually doing most of the fighting. To make sure they were not the big losers in any future budget cuts, the Air Force and Navy needed a big idea — a concept or strategy that would place them at the center of any future military effort. Gates’s request was the answer to their dreams. Almost immediately the two services (along with the Marines) established the Air-Sea Battle Office (ASBO), to start coming up with new war-fighting concepts that would catch the imagination of Congress for the next ten or twenty budget cycles. They did not even invite the Army to send a representative to the meeting.
In truth, the Air-Sea Battle concept addresses a very real problem: How does the U.S. military operate in a world where many potential foes can afford missiles and other weapons that could deny it entry to or use of an area. Problems arose, however, when this search for a technical fix to a tactical problem began to morph into a strategy, one that was widely perceived as being aimed at containing or if necessary militarily defeating China. As China is the one country that can afford a substantial amount of “area-denial” weapons, it was only natural that the planners should first consider how they would match the strongest potential force they may one day have to face. Unfortunately, a lot of the early commentary on Air-Sea Battle made it look like a modern redo of the pre–World War II Plan Orange, which envisioned the Pacific Fleet rushing headlong across the ocean to destroy the Japanese Imperial Navy. Only this time around, Japan was replaced by China as the enemy of choice.
Of course, given today’s political concerns and current diplomatic niceties, having the Pentagon work on plans for how to defeat China was beyond the pale. So, for the past several months, the Department of Defense has been busily walking back the idea that Air-Sea Battle is a “strategy” aimed at militarily defeating China. Rather, it is once again firmly in the “concepts” corral, where it is available to assist U.S. military commanders in any region where they might encounter an enemy with substantial “anti-access” or “area-denial” capabilities. To make sure it stays corralled, the Joint Staff last week issued the Joint Operational Access Concept (JOAC), which subsumes Air-Sea Battle into a larger war-fighting context applicable anywhere in the world.
If you want more than your share of fighting, join the Army. If you want more than your share of headlines, join the Marines. If you want more than your share of command billets, join the Navy. If you want more than your share of funding, join the Air Force.
If you just want to help people, join the Coast Guard.
I was an officer in the Army but I would disagree on the comments about the Marine Corps. They usually take higher casualties than the Army but they are very effective in accomplishing objectives. If you want a military organization that will accomplish objectives regardless of the cost then you can depend on the Marines.
As an active duty officer and seeing the Marines it always made me ashamed that both the soldiers and myself were not more hard core.
However....
Given the fact our politicians use the Marines as a defacto Foreign Legion (no real political consequence to pay if it goes bad and all the glory if the ops go well) I do wish the National Guard was five times the size of its present size.
Why?
Because we want the citizens to debate the merits of going to war.
A foreign legion allows the the citizens to ignore their duty.
Where do you come off calling the Corps a foreign legion? Obviously, you have not availed yourself of JPME.
The official mission of the Marine Corps is established in the National Security Act of 1947, amended in 1952. Marines are trained, organized and equipped for Offensive amphibious employment and as a “force in readiness.”
According to the Act, Marines stand prepared to meet mission requirements as the nation's 9/11 first responders. Not an expendable foreign legion or throw away toy.
As to increasing the size of the National Guard why waste limited resources? Thanks to Obama and Democrats we must now shepherd our resources and choose between necessary and worthwhile defense projects while China’s military expands and Obama’s extremist fellow-travelers takeover the Middle East. Anyone who thinks the next decade will be one of peace and prosperity has been asleep since Obama and the appeaser seized power (he's making the pro-Muslim foreign policy of Bill Clinton look enlightened).
Better an erratic Newt than Obama or his Muslim apologist soulmate Ron “Osama” Paul.
Reagan said the closest thing to immortaility is a government program.
Like our insane WWII era empire.
Look at Brazil. A big country, bordered by theocean and weak neighbors. Plenty of oil and other stuff. Like us.
Brazil spends 4% of what we do on the military.
Never lost a war. Never been invaded. Never worried about atomic attack. Never got worked up about the rights of Afghani women. Never needed truckloads of body bags.
Maybe the beltawy consultants should benchmark a sucuessful paradigm.
Nah, might stop the gravy.
"Never lost a war. Never been invaded. Never worried about atomic attack. Never got worked up about the rights of Afghani women. Never needed truckloads of body bags."
Brazil is a poverty ridden nation with a bloated government bureaucracy that can barely provide electricity to its major cities. It is exactly where the Democrat oligarchs would like to take us -- 2d world status.
As for the followers of culd leaders and Muslim apologist Ron Paul why don’t you emigrate to Brazil or even better Iran where Jew hating, women beating and man love Thursday are right up your “alley.”
Want to keep our Armed Forces busy without too much bloodshed? How about we invade Venezuela while we are getting ready for the war with Iran? Or, how about invading some Caribbean Islands just like the old days when we were protecting the world from the evils of those Cuban engineers down on Greneda?! We could call it "Operations Smedley Butler". Now there is something those "defense intellectuals" can do for us while earning their pay.
In a recent book I read on the development of America's military doctrine since the Founding, I was surprised to learn that the Pentagon destroyed all of the documentation produced by America's soldiers on counterinsurgency coming out of Vietnam. I could hardly believe it; in an age when counterinsurgency wars seem to be the norm, why would our Army, noted for its willingness to learn, do that? It made me remember the days of my youth, when it was said in Army circles (among many other things) that counterinsurgency units were formed from elites, that acknowledging and maintaining elite units caused superior troops to be taken from the regular troops, that one should not seek to serve in Special Forces or Ranger units because they were dead ends for the career-minded, and so on.
Then along came Grenada, the first Gulf War, Somalia, and Afghanistan and Iraq, and the value of counterinsurgency once more became obvious.
Also, the history of U.S. ground forces illustrates repeated successful use of irregular forces (e.g., the Ride Around McClellan and other exploits). So at least some attention paid to irregular and counterinsurgency fighting seems well-justified.
Air-sea battles are of course valuable and from time to time critical. But only in conjunction with seizing the enemy's ground and holding it, or destroying his forces until he can't fight any more.
Besides some annoying pompous comments such as the Navy and Air Force only assist the Army and Marines (what…are you mad at the Navy for beating Army this year??) I agree.
Assuming you don’t live on planet moonbeam where strategies are developed in a vacuum regardless if the tactics/technology/capabilities/will/political capital/etc exists to achieve the strategy. Tactics are used and if necessary developed to achieve the strategic goal.
Case in point – if strategy is to defeat China (*see note below) then a possible tactical plan would be covertly drop in special ops forces to take out ‘area-denial’ weapons. That tactic can be cut and pasted for a variety of strategies say Defeat Iran, or Defeat N. Korea or whatever the threat of the day is. Point is the tactical plan serves to help achieve the bigger strategic mission.
If strategic planning is reduced to or becomes equivalent to tactical planning, not only have you lost effective strategic planning but you have muddled and harmed tactical capability as well. This is a recipe for defeat in any endeavor.
(* note - mind you nothing wrong with a Defeat China Strategy. Before WW2 we had a Beat Britain strategy. It’s called contingency planning, its completely sane, rational and advisable to have plans for major contingencies on the shelf, otherwise you risk wasted valuable time starting from scratch when unexpected occurs. No need for political correctness, the Chinese will whine whatever we do and heck the Chinese sure as shoe shine have contingency plans to deal with us.)
"The Air Force is unconstitutional. It needs to be folded back into the Army "
I don't think it was unconstitutional (I could be wrong), but it was a silly idea to split the air force off and make it independent. Air-power exists, from beginning to end, to support ground objectives. Billy Mitchell was kind of a Steve Jobs of his day, a cult figure that had a reality distortion field all his own. But making a service based on air-power alone made no more sense than splitting the submarine forces off from the surface navy and establishing a separate branch. Part of the reason was pure envy. "Look, the Brits have a separate air force!".
The reason why for an independent air force was answered a long time ago--in WWII.
The Germans built a superb ground-support force in the Luftwaffe. They lost because their war aims required strategic bombing. Since the Luftwaffe couldn't knock out the UK or hit Russia's tank factories in the Urals, they lost. They did a good job supporting the drives of the German Army, but couldn't maintain air superiority over their homeland or France...and they lost.
Mitchell understood that the ground US Army force neither understood nor wanted to understand strategic bombing. The Navy certainly didn't, until Pearl Harbor settled the matter. The USAAF's heavy bombers crippled German industry, annihilated Japan, achieved air superiority everywhere the US was by 1944, and isolated battlefields far from the front line. A ground-support force wouldn't have done any of that.
I think Air-Sea Battle is flawed if its main concept is "we win the war with our bombers/carriers." That's never worked. Why it worked for us in WWII (and Korea, and to a certain extent Vietnam and wars since) was because we fielded both a long-range force *and* a ground-support force. We've done the same thing today. No reason to screw with what already works.
This sounds like the third or fourth rehash of Airpower will win the war. In WWII they thought they could bomb the enemy into submission. Didn't work out that way. In the 50's Atom bombs would eliminate the need for much infantry. That didn't work out either in more current times shock and awe and precision weapons would do the job. Nope that didn't work out either. Controlling access to the place where the fighting is will be a necessary condition to win but you still have to take the fight out of the enemy. They have to quit or die. In Iraq we played nice didn't tear up too much and pulled back to our bases for the Iraqis to start running things. Oops after 35 years of a dictator any one that could do that was dead gone. So we had to do the surge and reclaim what we had had near the beginning. The Navy and Air Force have huge missions but the Army and Marines will finish the deal. Ask them how many bridges and roads that had to be re-destroyed because no one was there to deny the enemy the chance to rebuild. There's an Enginner maxin an unobserved obstacle is not an obstacle. If you leave an enemy to live they will fight you another day.
I disagree. Our very existence and that of our allies is entirely dependent upon keeping control of the sea and air lanes. Were an enemy to deny us use of these, our economies would collapse.
Furthermore, were we to accept China as our chief adversary, they are becoming more dependent upon sealanes as well, so a strategy of denial using naval and air forces would be effective to a point.
Yes, ultimate victory depends upon ground troops, but is that likely? An argument can definitely be made that, for the wars we are fighting, we must place more emphasis on land forces. But our survival is dependent upon control of the sea and air - so long as we maintain dominance there, we can recover the rest, but, should that ever be lost, nothing else matters.
Yeah, the argument can be overdone, but we should not lose sight of the essentials just because we do not currently feel threatened.
One caveat. Especially with the growing importance of the Internet and electronic communications and data storage to our economy, we need to put a lot more effort into ensuring their security, something which doesn't fit neatly into the Army/Navy/Air Force paradigm.
Reading Mr. Lacey's column, it seems to me he is correct *if* future war involves large land conflicts such as are currently being fought in Iraq and Afghanistan. If we choose to do this, he is correct; the army and marines need more funding.
Question: Are the American people interested in fighting those kinds of wars?
If, on the other hand, your concept of foreign wars is more along the lines of Bosnia, Kosovo, or Libya, you don't need large land forces. You need a local ally to provide the ground forces (and do most of the dying), which can be supplemented by air and naval power. We can take command of the sea and air in any theater, creating a favorable battlefield for whatever local player we choose.
Thus it allows us to achieve a fair amount of impact while minimizing both expense and casualties.
What it doesn't allow us to do is to liberate a place like Iraq again. Somehow I suspect the American people won't mind making that sacrifice.
Put differently: If you're not going to launch conventional invasions and spend ten years fighting a counterinsurgency in the country you've liberated, why do you need the ground capability to do so?
