Some Hard Truths Glossed Over in our Vocabulary

Dave Maxwell has a very thoughtful article about "Unconventional Warfare" and whether or not it's the exclusive purview of the SF guys (hint: he says "no"). But just as interesting is the way he frames UW. Here's the intro:

“US Army Special Forces is the only force in the Department of Defense organized, trained, equipped, educated, and optimized for the conduct of unconventional warfare.”

I have written those words many times in the past thirty plus years of my military service. With those words I have implied that the unconventional warfare mission belongs solely to US Army Special Forces (SF). I was wrong.

I began to realize this in 2009, when I participated in a working group established by the US Army John F. Kennedy Special Warfare Center and School to re-examine the definition of unconventional warfare. The revised definition that resulted was a compromise that did not satisfy everyone in the Special Forces (SF) or wider Special Operations Forces (SOF) community. Nonetheless, the definition currently resides in Joint Publication 1-02 the Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms and is now the foundation for US military unconventional warfare doctrine: Unconventional warfare consists of “activities to enable a resistance or insurgency to coerce, disrupt or overthrow a government or occupying power through and with an underground, auxiliary, and guerrilla force in a denied area.”

But here's where he goes 90% of the way in tying together the uncomfortable vocabulary that most of us hard core militarists inherently understand, but that the rest of the country is likely loath to admit

Due to the prevailing wisdom that SF owns the UW mission, many senior decision makers, policymakers and strategists both inside the Beltway and at the Geographic Combatant Commands (GCC) rarely consider the strategic option of conducting UW. Furthermore, as evidenced by our myopic view of terrorism, we do not fully comprehend that our enemies are, in fact, conducting unconventional warfare. As a result, we do not consider potential strategies to conduct “counter-unconventional warfare,” instead focusing solely on the means and methods of counterterrorism.

(our emphasis)

See, in admitting that AQ is conducting "unconventional warfare" we can easily hit the button on the Patented GrogNews Vocabulary Substitution Machine™ (not sold in stores) and swap out "UW" for "insurgency":

Due to the prevailing wisdom that SF owns the insurgency mission, many senior decision makers, policymakers and strategists both inside the Beltway and at the Geographic Combatant Commands (GCC) rarely consider the strategic option of conducting insurgencies. Furthermore, as evidenced by our myopic view of terrorism, we do not fully comprehend that our enemies are, in fact, conducting insurgencies. As a result, we do not consider potential strategies to conduct “counter-insurgency,” instead focusing solely on the means and methods of counterterrorism.

Hmmmm... we know we're conducting counter-insurgencies, right? We've been talking about it for 10 years now. We know that AQ is formenting insurgencies all over the world. But we have to be very careful about how we frame the UW-COIN vocabulary substitution. If we admit that AQ has been conducting worldwide UW, but then focus on their terror campaigns, what does it say about the US that we have a dedicated UW doctrine, when UW becomes a synonym for "terrorism"?

So we have a doctrine in the US for conducting UW (read: insurgency). We don't particularly want a doctrine for conducting UW (read: terrorism). And I'm OK with that.

What do you think? How would the US public react if it became explicitly clear that we had, and actively developed, trained, and disseminated doctrine about creating insurgencies in places where we don't like the government? Is it better that we obfuscate the capability behind the kabuki dance of shuffled vocabulary words? Or is this something that deserves a serious and sober conversation with the American public* that they might fully understand the broad spectrum of capabilities that we offer our government through the use of the military?


By: Brant



*note that I am fully aware of the general inability of the American public to make mature and thoughtful decisions regarding complex socio-geo-political issues like this

Commentary on Operational Design and the Center of Gravity

When (and how) do you define the conflict's center of gravity? And once you do, then what? A new article from NDU poses that question an offers some thoughts. An excerpt:

The problem is not the enemy COG. The problem merely defines the adversary or enemy system. (Note, in this context, the terms adversary or enemy do not imply hostility, only that they are obstacles to obtaining the goals. They are “the problem.”) This adversary system contains a center of gravity that must be identified by studying the system. This is where some argue that design’s problem statement actually replaces the COG. This is an incorrect understanding. The defined problem is not the center of gravity. Rather, it determines what the adversary system is and sets up a systems analysis based on the adversary’s goals, capabilities, and requirements that contribute to the COG identification and analysis process of that system. Planners using a systems perspective analyze the adversary system that is causing the problem to determine the enemy center of gravity. More simply, design’s problem identification defines for commanders and planners the system in which to look for an enemy center of gravity. Once the adversary or enemy center of gravity is identified, the next logical step is determining how to solve the problem.

By: Brant

New Landpower Analysis Group Being Set Up

The Army and SOCOM are setting up a new "landpower" group at the Pentagon.

The Army and Special Operations Command are starting a new strategic land power cell. The brand-new initiative, known only to a small group of planners thus far, is the brainchild of Army Chief of Staff Gen. Ray Odierno and will take shape over the next few months. The group, which will also include the Marines, is designed to fuse the military's land cultures, from the conventional land power of "Big Army" to the people-oriented skills of Special Forces to technology and cyber efforts. Ultimately, the planning cell could include general officers from each of the major land components, Situation Report is told.

By creating a group focused on integrating those pieces, military strategists believe they can make more effective use of land power -- especially at a time when ground forces, after more than 10 years of war, are perceived to have fallen out of fashion in the hallways of the Pentagon. Ultimately, the effort could have implications for military doctrine, for the integration of conventional and specialized forces, and even for acquisition, according to an individual familiar with the nascent group.

The group's formation is bound to be controversial for the perception it will create at a time of a major budget crunch and the move to Asia - in effect, that the land forces are looking to lobby for more resources and influence But the individual familiar with the group pushes back on the notion that this is anything more than the ground forces taking a strategic approach to working better together.

"The Strategic Landpower initiative is intended to harness the lessons learned over the past decade of population-centric warfare, retain what worked, and then determine what that means for land forces going forward," the person told Situation Report. "Understanding the relationship between people, technology and the environment will improve our efforts to shape the environment in positive ways that prevent war, just as it should allow us to make lasting process in future conflicts if we have to fight."

By: Brant

German Army Revises Domestic ROE

Germany is widening the "crisis role" of its army.

The German military will in future be able to use its weapons on German streets in an extreme situation, the Federal Constitutional Court says.

The ruling says the armed forces can be deployed only if Germany faces an assault of "catastrophic proportions", but not to control demonstrations.

The decision to deploy forces must be approved by the federal government.

Severe restrictions on military deployments were set down in the German constitution after Nazi-era abuses.

The court says the military still cannot shoot down a hijacked passenger plane - fighter jets would have to intercept the plane and fire warning shots to force it to land.

After World War II the new constitution ruled that soldiers could not be deployed with guns at the ready on German soil, the BBC's Stephen Evans reports from Berlin.

The court has now changed that, saying troops could be used to tackle an assault that threatens scores of casualties.

By: Brant

COA Development For Non-Kinetic Ops

Tangentially related to the current ongoing stability ops discussions, Small Wars Journal has an excellent article about Wargaming Courses of Action During Other-Than-Major Combat Operations

An excerpt from them:

Another idea.

One student group developed their own wargaming matrix that captured their analysis in Figure 10 below. Their particular matrix was laid out horizontally using five columns. The “critical event” was the first entry. The five columns are laid out accordingly left to right:

“IF” represents the “action” (the critical event to be wargamed) normally initiated by another group (militia, civilians, etc…).

“AND” represents what should be the expected protocol for that case, but for some reason has failed, thereby forcing a decision upon the command.

“THEN” represents the friendly reaction (or decision). This is where the command begins to integrate the various warfighting functions.

“SO WHAT?” represents the results of this process (the actual analysis). This includes the likely counteractions of the key leaders / populations, along with instructions to subordinate units as well as determining possible preemptive measures.

So how can the training tools of the ongoing CGSC Stability Ops discussion be re-purposed to support MDMP wargaming on similar operations?

By: Brant

BUB: AirSea Battle

The Marines have a nice reasonably-concise, if buzzword-heavy, Air-Sea Battle concept summary

The Air-Sea Battle Concept centers on networked, integrated, attack-in-depth to disrupt, destroy and defeat (NIA-D3) A2/AD threats. This approach exploits and improves upon the advantage U.S. forces have across the air, maritime, land, space and cyberspace domains, and is essential to defeat increasingly capable intelligence gathering systems and sophisticated weapons systems used by adversaries employing A2/AD systems. Offensive and defensive tasks in Air-Sea Battle are tightly coordinated in real time by networks able to command and control air and naval forces in a contested environment. The air and naval forces are organized by mission and networked to conduct integrated operations across all domains.

The concept organizes these integrated tasks into three lines of effort, wherein air and naval forces attack-in-depth to disrupt the adversary's intelligence collection and command and control used to employ A2/AD weapons systems; destroy or neutralize A2/AD weapons systems within effective range of U.S. forces; and defeat an adversary's employed weapons to preserve essential U.S. Joint forces and their enablers. Through NIA-D3, air and naval forces achieve integrated effects across multiple domains, using multiple paths to increase the resilience, agility, speed and effectiveness of the force.

Air-Sea Battle is a limited operational concept designed to address an adversary's A2/AD capabilities. It is not a concept aimed at any particular potential adversary, nor a campaign plan designed to accomplish a specific national objective. Instead, it is a concept that will spark innovation and development of the means to support future operations. The Air-Sea Battle Concept identifies the actions needed to defeat A2/AD threats and the materiel and non-materiel solutions required to execute those actions.

AOLDefense asks the important question: "what do you do once you're in the area where access was denied?"

In the budget wars between the services, "hybrid threats" and "AirSea Battle" have become rallying buzzwords of two opposing camps.

On one side, Army leaders talk of hybrid threats, whose blend of guerrilla tactics and high-tech weapons pose the greatest plausible threat on land, now that Soviet-style tank armies are extinct and the nation has largely sworn off large-scale counterinsurgency. On the other, Air Force and Navy leaders speak of AirSea Battle as a way to coordinate their expensive hardware in a high-tech war with regional powers like China or Iran.

[Since there has to be a middle way, of course, there is also the threat posed to ships by land-based missiles, such as those Hamas used against the Israeli ship Hanit in 2006. A Chinese-built missile is believed to have heavily damaged the ship and killed four sailors.]

While the services tend to use these concepts to justify their budgets, one of the fathers of the hybrid war idea, retired Marine Frank Hoffman, tells AOL Defense they are less contradictory than complementary, especially in a potential conflict with Iran.

AirSea Battle and hybrid war theory address two parts of the same strategic problem, Hoffman said: how to project American power around the globe when potential adversaries from militia groups to the Middle Kingdom are developing new tactics and new weaponry to stop us. (The painfully awkward term of art for such an enemy strategy is "anti-access/area denial"). "AirSea Battle is basically the outer half of the problem: how do you get into a region," he said. "The inner half [is] once you get inside a region, how can you operate" in the face of hybrid threats.

In the meantime, others are wondering if AirSea Battle is already obsolete?

But it’s also clear that the United States should develop its own symmetrical and asymmetric strategies to counter such threats. A joint operational concept of AirSea Battle combined with a strong cyber component could damage, deter, and destroy any Chinese A2/AD capabilities and ensure U.S. maritime access. A newly reconstituted “AirSeaCyber” operational concept would give U.S. forces the best chance to defeat Chinese or any other nations’ A2/AD forces now and in the future.

Of course, the present Joint Operational Access Concept does make strong mention of cyber operations. However, an even stronger emphasis on cyber warfare is needed beyond present day convention. In short, AirSea Battle as an operational concept might already be obsolete.

By: Brant

Focus on China? Or Just Seeking a Focus?

Is AirSea Battle's focus on China an approach with built-in belligerence? And if not China, what threat out there guides strategic developments of the military?

In spite of this, AirSea Battle and its most recent manifestation, the Joint Operating Access Concept, are controversial. Some critics see it as an attempt by the navy and the air force, after a decade of relative neglect, to grab the lion’s share of a shrinking defence budget—already being trimmed by about $480 billion over the next ten years.

Others fear that although the concept does not mention China by name, it is the only opponent with the range of capabilities the new thinking is designed to counter. (Significantly, the Chinese defence minister did not attend the Shangri-La get-together; see article.) And whereas the 1980s predecessor of AirSea Battle, AirLand Battle, was intended to meet the real threat of a thrust by Soviet forces into Western Europe, the threat from China to America and its regional allies is harder to define. In a speech last month at the Joint Warfighting Conference, General James Cartwright, vice-chairman of the joint chiefs of staff until last year, said of AirSea Battle: “To some, it’s becoming the Holy Grail…[but] it’s neither a doctrine nor a scenario.” Worst of all, said General Cartwright, “AirSea Battle is demonising China. That’s not in anybody’s interest.”

Nathan Freier, of the Washington-based Centre for Strategic and International Studies, argues in a recent paper that although conflict with China “might be the most lethal set of circumstances from a traditional military standpoint, it is also the least likely and the most speculative.” North Korea, Pakistan and Iran (with their actual or putative nuclear arsenals) and even Syria all represent more realistic A2/AD challenges, which might well require the insertion of the ground forces that AirSea Battle ignores.

Other critics, such as Noel Williams, an adviser on strategy to the marine corps, point to the risk of escalation—because of the dependence on deep strike against Chinese targets on land—and to the absence of ideas about what happens without ground forces once a strike is made.

By: Brant

The Sage of Brigade-Based Ops, Douglas MacGregor, Weighs In On Reforming the US Army

How'd we get here? and how do we get back to where we want to be?

In the United States, it’s popular to focus on technology to the exclusion of all else. The Service bureaucracies are comfortable with this approach because it models “gadgets against gadgets” in simulation. This approach treats the anachronistic organizational status quo as irrelevant and unchangeable. The possibility that command structures, organization for combat and human understanding could be at least if not more decisive is not even considered.

It’s the victory of what Don Vandergriff (Major, US Army, retired) attributes to the destructive impact of Frederick Taylor’s industrial age model. Those who dismiss criticality of how we organize our forces and equipment, how we train and educate to fight miss the point that organization in particular reflects cultural patterns that shape thinking and behavior or how we interact with the technology of war and events in action, (an argument Delbrueck made). Ultimately, organization tells you how we think about warfare. If the organizational paradigm never changes, it tells you the thinking, policies and culture have not changed either.

These points notwithstanding, change is not always possible. In 1973, the Egyptian Army’s rigid, top-heavy command structure stifled fresh ideas, tactical flexibility, and honest communication from lower levels. After successfully crossing the Suez in a carefully planned and well-rehearsed operation this military culture contributed decisively to Egypt’s defeat at the hands of the Israel Defense Force. However, in practice, Egypt’s leaders knew Arab culture demanded that every action be scripted from the top down to the individual soldier. The point is: Egyptian national military and political leadership had little choice in the matters of organization, leadership and tactics, let alone operational art. What they did was all that they could do.

A similar dilemma confronted the Soviet military leadership during WW II. The Stavka had to organize and move tens of millions of illiterate, and largely unwilling Slavic and Mongol-Turkic soldiers into battle against a highly educated, competently led German Army. (Ivan’s War is a recent work informed by the NKVD archives now closed, and worth reading on this point). As I was told during an official visit to the Russian General Staff Academy in November 2001, unavoidable tactical rigidity together with the brutal subjugation of millions who did not want to defend Stalin’s Russia produced at least 40 million Soviet dead, twice what the Soviets publicly admitted, but the communists were always great liars.

By: Brant

GameTalk - Doctrine and Tactics

Should games enforce historically accurate battle tactics and doctrine, or should they allow players to use ahistical methods in the name of game-play and "what if" theories? Do you allow the French and Spanish fleet to turn into and meet the British at the battle of Trafalgar (thereby preventing the Brits from "cutting the line")? Must Napoleon's Infanty close on the enemy in an assualt column formation, or can they deploy into firing lines?

By: Jack Nastyface

What's in a Name?

The Army is changing the name of their "HBCT" to "ABCT".
This does not in any way affect tomorrow's sunrise. As far as we can tell.



By: Brant

DoD Announces Changes to Afghan Missions, Units

The DoD has announced changes to the organization and missions of upcoming units deploying to Afghanistan.

The Army announced today a new mission to meet requirements in Afghanistan. Four brigade combat teams (BCTs), one separate brigade and an Army command, each in a modified configuration, will deploy between April and August 2012. Approximately 1,460 active component officers and senior non-commissioned officers along with approximately 300 DoD civilians will deploy in 18-person teams to provide training assistance to Afghan National Security Forces (ANSF).

The majority of those BCT soldiers and leaders not deploying will be reassigned to other units, in most cases on their respective installations. The remainder will focus on schooling, training, gunnery, and equipment maintenance and accountability.

Beginning in the 3rd quarter of fiscal 2012, these security force assistance teams will help to further generate, employ, and sustain the ANSF during the transition of security responsibility to the Afghan government and its security forces.

The units ordered to deploy are:

• 2nd BCT, 101st Airborne Division (Air Assault), Fort Campbell, Ky.
  
• 2nd BCT, 3rd Infantry Division, Fort Stewart, Ga.
  
• 3rd BCT, 4th Infantry Division, Fort Carson, Colo.
  
• 4th BCT, 1st Armored Division, Fort Bliss, Texas.
  
• 162nd Infantry Brigade, Fort Polk, La.
  
• 1st Army, Rock Island Arsenal, Ill.

By: Brant

GameTalk - AirSea Battle

How is the new US AirSea battle doctrine going to play out on the cardboard battlefield? What C2 changes will need to be realized in wargames? What are some current games you see that can allow you to test-drive the new AirSea doctrine, and what mods would need to be made to those games to allow you to model the doctrine correctly?


Your thoughts below!

By: Brant

Marines Returning to Their Roots

They're practicing large-scale amphibious warfare, and storming the beaches of the US mid-Atlantic coast.

A small group of Marines trudged onto the beach sands in pitch-black night with an armada of U.S. Navy warships sailing just off the shore. Their mission: root out insurgents that threatened to attack another American force to the south.
The careful operation under cover of darkness wasn't an assault in the Middle East or Asia. It was a training exercise on the coast of Virginia and North Carolina, designed to return thousands of Marines to their amphibious roots and train for a more modern version of the well-known beach assaults conducted during World War II.
Military officials say the operation being conducted in Virginia and North Carolina is the largest amphibious training exercise they've attempted in at least a decade. Marines have been fighting wars in landlocked countries like Iraq and Afghanistan for years, and many have never even set foot on a Navy ship. That's of particular concern as the military shifts its strategic focus toward the coastal regions of the Middle East, such as Iran, and the Pacific, where North Korea and China are drawing increasing attention from the U.S.

Uh, just a note for Vergakis and Felderbaum (the journalists credited in the byline): Iraq is not landlocked...


View Larger Map

By: Brant

Let's Hope They Get More Time Than Last Time

When the combat role wound down in Iraq, and the training role was emphasized, the troops there barely got 2 years to do what they could before leaving Iraq in a Rube Goldbergian set of political machinations. Let's hope that with the announcement of the 2013 shift to training that the 2014 "see-ya" date isn't that hard and fast. I mean, the Afghans haven't even learned to wipe shit in a toilet yet, and we expect them to secure their own country?

The US will seek to wind down combat operations in Afghanistan during 2013, more than a year before a deadline for withdrawal, the defence secretary says.

Speaking while travelling to a Nato summit, Leon Panetta said the US hoped to switch to a role training and supporting Afghan forces.

It is the most detailed public indication of when US troops might pull back from America's longest war.

Some 68,000 troops are due to remain in Afghanistan after the end of 2012.

There are currently some 99,000 US troops in the country, with 22,000 scheduled to return home during this year.

Until now, though, there had been little information how the Pentagon planned to manage the main bulk of the drawdown, committing only to a full withdrawal of troops by the end of 2014.

By: Brant

The Army's Struggle for Doctrinal Relevance

The Army is having trouble envisioning how they fit into the country's long-term strategic plan. Really? You can't envision anywhere you'd need to fight? Or nowhere that you can politically admit to cough*Pakistan*cough?

"We're looking with a bit of envy at AirSea Battle," said one junior officer, Maj. David Williams, in a frank presentation to a panel of generals – all outranking him by at least three paygrades – on January 12th. And, Maj. Williams went on, many officers are "nostalgic" for AirSea Battle's inspiration, the Army's "AirLand Battle" concept published in 1982 to defeat the Soviet Union in Central Europe. Both visions offer the clarity of "a specific threat, a specific location, a simple narrative" to present "to the American Congress and the American people," Williams went on. By contrast, "if you take the national security priorities recently released...there's a bunch of things out there," he said. "We need to pick one, [and] the most important thing is focusing on the hybrid threats."

Hybrid is the buzzword for adversaries combining the tactics of guerrillas with the firepower of a state. Israel's humiliation by Hezbollah in Lebanon in 2006 is the prime example of a hybrid war, but there are aspects of the phenomenon in America's own experience from Korea and Vietnam to Afghanistan and Iraq. One of the most influential advocates of the theory, RAND scholar and Army veteran David Johnson, argued at the conference that the U.S. could learn from the Israelis, who after 2006 focused on the hybrid threat – with significant success, as shown by their improved performance against Hamas in Gaza in 2008 – while remaining flexible enough to "build up" to a major state-on-state conflict or "build down" to irregular warfare.

From a public relations perspective, hybrid war gives the Army a scenario sufficiently scary and sufficiently probable to justify its budget. For internal audience, the attraction is a single, unifying mission that allows the Army to simultaneously draw on its decade of experience in counterinsurgency and revitalize its skills for larger-scale combat. One outspoken officer at the conference, Col. Wayne Grigsby of the Army's Combined Arms Center at Fort Leavenworth, advised the generals to drop the current doctrine's array of tasks in favor of a single Army "core competency" in "joint combined arms fire and maneuver" – i.e. fighting – while deemphasizing counterinsurgency-focused functions such as "wide area security."

But the top brass weren't so sure. "Decisionmakers don't want large-scale land campaigns today for a variety of reasons," said Lt. Gen. Richard Zahner, the Army's chief of intelligence (G-2). "They're going to come looking for you because you can offer them solutions they don't otherwise have, [and] no decision maker wants to have just a single option." Instead, Zahner said, the Army's pitch to policymakers bent on budget cuts should be pragmatic: "Listen folks, you may not want us, but we're the guys who are going to give us a whole range of new options when Plan A doesn't come out the way you anticipated."

By: Brant

JCS Releases Joint Operational Access Concept (JOAC)

And as near as we can tell, the Joint Operational Access Concept (JOAC) is not pronounced "joke".

The President and Secretary of Defense’s strategic guidance for our Joint Force is clear – we will answer our nation’s call and sustain the trust of the American people amidst a rapidly changing security environment. As we shape the Joint Force of the future in this increasingly complex and competitive world, gaining access to the right place at the right time presents an ever more pressing challenge.

So today I released the Joint Operational Access Concept (JOAC). This framework describes how we will gain entry and maintain access anywhere and in any domain: land, air, space, sea, and cyber. No matter how formidable our forces, if we are unable to bring our capabilities to bear in any of these domains, we may not be able to complete the mission or meet our nation’s needs. Our adversaries know this as well.

Accordingly, the JOAC outlines how we will confront emerging Anti-Access/Area Denial (A2/AD) threats by state and non-state enemies across the globe. A2/AD is not new, but it is a defining characteristic of today’s operational environment. Confronting this challenge will require more integration—across all domains and at all echelons—than ever before.

Pull down the PDF here.

By: Brant

Guest Column: Games and Simulations, with Dr James Sterrett

Following up on last week's GameTalk - "Games or Simulations" - we have a guest article written by Dr James Sterrett, an instructor at the US Army's Command and General Staff College. Please note that these are his ideas and are not reflective of official US Army policy, doctrine, canon, religion, or other official imprimatur.


+++++++
Brant and I have cheerfully sparred over the distinction between games and simulations over the years.  What follows is my take, focused on training & education, in two different variants.  The first is useful as a snappy comment, while the second works better analytically.  In the end, both point to the objective of an activity as more important that the software (or paper rule set) being used, and neither variant is perfect.

(read the rest after the jump)

Whither the Marines? Marines Wither?

Look, given their propoganda machine, the USMC isn't going away... ever. But that hasn't stopped the latest existential crisis in Marine-land as the draw-downs happen.

With the Iraq war ending and an Afghanistan exit in sight, the Marine Corps is beginning a historic shift — a return to its roots as a seafaring force that will get smaller, lighter and, it hopes, less bogged down in land wars.
This moment of change happens to coincide with a reorienting of American security priorities to the Asia-Pacific region, where China has been building military muscle during a decade of U.S. preoccupation in the greater Middle East. That suits the Marines, who see the Pacific as a home away from home.
After two turns at combat in Iraq — first as invaders in the 2003 march to Baghdad and later as occupiers of landlocked Anbar province — the Marines left the country in early 2010 to reinforce the fight in southern Afghanistan. Over that stretch the Marines became what the former Joint Chiefs chairman, Navy Adm. Mike Mullen, has called their own "worst nightmare:" a second American land army, a static, ground-pounding auxiliary force.
That's scary for the Marines because for some in Congress it raises this question: Does a nation drowning in debt really need two armies?

By: Brant

US Army Looking Forward for Answers

The Army is looking to revise its Capstone Concept and develop their plans for the future of the force.

Escalating cyber threats, a struggling economy, the rise of China, and the unpredictable impact of the Arab Spring will dominate the next decade. At least, that's the best collective guess of a conclave of academic experts, government officials, and military officers from the U.S. and abroad, convened by the United States Army. Their objective: This March the service plans to revise its Capstone Concept, issued in 2009, to outline the Army's missions for the post-Afghanistan, post-budget-cut era. The road to that rethinking is a series of conferences and wargames called Unified Quest 2012, which kicked off at the end of October with a symposium to predict the future.

Instead of seeking – or simply imposing – a consensus around a single, supposedly authoritative vision of the world to come, the Army deliberately solicited a range of plausible "alternative futures." "We're not going to get 2020 right," said Lt. Gen. Keith Walker, deputy commander for "futures" at the Army's Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC), which convened the conference. But, Walker went on, "if we don't consider all the possibilities of what we might have to do for the nation and try as hard as we can to get as many diverse views as we can, then we're guaranteeing we'll get it wrong."

There were certainly some sharp differences about what the Army should prioritize. At the final session of the "futues" conference, as excitement about cyber-war rose among the assembled experts, counterinsurgency crusader John Nagl spoke up sharply. "I want to push back pretty hard against this cyber [emphasis], not because I don't think it's an emerging field of conflict – it is – but I don't think it's the Army's primary responsibility," said Nagl, an Iraq veteran and retired officer who now co-chairs the Center for a New American Security. "The Army's going to be judged [by] how well Afghanistan turns out, and in the near future I think we should be thinking about... building partner capacity" – military jargon for advise-and-assist missions like those planned for Afghanistan after U.S. combat forces withdraw. Another attendee countered that given the spread of hacking technology, even counterinsurgency conflicts will have a cyber aspect in the future. "I don't disagree with that," replied Nagl, "but the Taliban isn't going to beat us with cyber."

More on this soon, I hope. Gotta find the time to collect, collate, sift, analyze, and write.

By: Brant

AirSea Battle Now Institutionalized

The DoD is establishing an AirSea Battle office at the Pentagon.

The Department of Defense announced today the creation of a new office to integrate air and naval combat capabilities in support of emerging national security requirements.

In the 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review, former Secretary of Defense Robert Gates directed the Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps to develop a comprehensive concept to counter emerging anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) challenges. The services collaborated to develop the Air-Sea Battle (ASB) concept. On Aug. 12, 2011, Navy Adm. Jonathan Greenert, Marine Corps Gen. Joseph Dunford, and Air Force Gen. Philip Breedlove established the Air-Sea Battle Office (ASBO), creating a framework to implement the ASB concept.

The ASB concept will guide the services as they work together to maintain a continued U.S. advantage against the global proliferation of advanced military technologies and A2/AD capabilities. Air-Sea Battle will leverage military and technological capabilities that reflect unprecedented Navy, Marine and Air Force collaboration, cooperation, integration, and resource investments.

The ASBO will oversee the concept implementation by facilitating coordination among the services, influencing service wargames, fostering development and integration of air and naval capabilities, and collaborating with the joint forces. The Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps will each dedicate a minimum of two field grade officers or civil service equivalents to the ASBO.

Implementation of the ASB concept by the Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps will foster positive change in the institutional relationships among the services, the integration of acquisition strategies, and the conceptual approach to warfare. The ASB concept is a natural and deliberate evolution of U.S. warfighting to counter emerging A2/AD threats that include conventional ballistic missiles, long-range precision cruise missiles, advanced integrated air and missile defense systems, electronic and cyber warfare capabilities, submarines, surface combatants, and modern combat aircraft. Air-Sea Battle will enable the projection of force in defense of U.S. interests and those of our allies and by sustaining stability and freedom of access throughout the global commons.

So a few random thoughts...

1. Is this an over-reaction by the non-Army services to the Army having the lead over the past two wars? Are the Navy/USAF looking for their moment in the bright light of relevance after being second-banana for a decade?

2. At some point those planes gotta land and the boats gotta dock. Who's going to secure those berths for them?

3. You want to game it?
WPG has Fleets 2025: East China Sea
Also check out Red Dragon Rising from S&T.


By: Brant