Idiosyntactix Strategic Arts and Sciences Alliance The Brand Name of the Media Revolution

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2015:
POWER and PROGRESS

(Continuation)
July 1996
Edited by Patrick M. Cronin

3. THE SHAPE OF WAR TO COME

Technology itself determines neither the shape nor the outcome of wars. Operations, geography, strategies, and rules of engagements play a large role in determining what works and what does not. Merely to list a few of the major questions is to illustrate how many assumptions are needed for even plausible forecasting.

Who will U.S. forces have to take the field against peer competitors, sophisticated mid-range opponents with and without peer help, unsophisticated clones of the former Soviet Union, and sophisticated but poor clones of Mao's forces? Will the next war be fought for limited objectives, or will we be forced to terminate the other side in order to terminate conflict? Will a conventional attack come as a surprise (whether deliberately or through an unplanned concatenation of events), or will the conventional phase be planned as the ultimate phase of a campaign whose early stages featured guerilla conflict? Where, and for which interests, will the United States get involved? What, if anything, will be off-limits--to us, to the other side? To what extent will the United States have to coerce the uninvolved in order to remove an information conduit to the other side? Will weapons of mass destruction be involved? Will we fight in alliances, in coalitions, or unilaterally?

What would we be fighting for (and thus what means would we use): to defend itself, but more often its friends (and other allies), preserve regional stability, inhibit the rise of a peer competitor, or keep lines of communications open (e.g., SLOCS, information infrastructure)?

If the odds of a direct clash with a major power are small, the most prototypical challenging situation is for the United States to face a technologically savvy (but not necessarily equally large), middle-income country (e.g., a national income 2 to 20 percent that of ours--a category that includes Japan circa 1941) seeking unwarranted coercive influence in its region. It is useful to remember that although few middle-income countries today possess much in the way of militaries, those that are aggressive are well armed (e.g., Syria, North Korea). Any of many middle-income countries that might turn ugly over 20 years will have had plenty of time to acquire militaries disproportionate to their incomes; thus the potential threat base is much larger than the threat base at any one time.

Adding to the stress is the possibility that the threat may enjoy the tacit support of another great power. The United States will have a tough time holding that power accountable if its support is dovert or if the evidence is ambiguous. The United States is limited in the casualties it will accept, the casualties it is willing to inflict on civilians (and even, as the reaction to media reports from the "Road of Death" illustrates, on other soldiers), and the casualties it is willing to put at risk (e.g., from WMD actions of the other side); the other side may well have few such limitations (other than as prudence dictates). One quick implication is that a war that trades life for life (even at fairly favorable ratios) may be a strategic defeat for the United States; one which trades equipment dollar for dollar (even at fairly unfavorable ratios) is more likely to result in a strategic victory. What can we say about the parameters of such a conflict, what are the limits of U.S. action, and how should the U.S. military be organized to meet such a challenge?

REFIGHTING THE LAST WAR

If something as complex as the U.S. role in the Gulf War can be summarized in six words they would be: ship in, cut talk, run wild. That is, we moved a mountain of material over a 5-month period to the Persian Gulf, used air power to destroy Iraq's communications, and then ran wild (first with bombers, then with tanks) over their miserable forces. These three are precisely what U.S. forces will be unable to do in the challenging scenario 20 years hence.

Ship In

Few doubt that U.S. forces will have to travel much farther to the next big battlefield than our foes will. Despite complaints over current organic lift assets, it is likely that one way or the other, U.S. forces will have to use lift to get there. Whether they will be able to survive doing so is another matter. Technology 20 years hence is threatening to make the littoral more hazardous. Surface ships are almost impossible to hide against the wide variety of organic and third-party surveillance assets available to even technologically unsophisticated foes. Doctrinally, most nations recognize that Iraq's allowing the United States time to deploy and organize was a major contributor to their defeat. Technically, a combination of very smart mine/torpedoes and saturation-type cruise or ballistic missile attacks could very well disable a nontrivial fraction of assets near shore; the only question is where between 10 and 1,000 kilometers from land the killing zone starts. Airlift may be more survivable because its exposure time is less, but relying on airlift limits the kind of assets that can be moved and such aircraft are, themselves, hardly stealthy; only if the foe is fastidious about not downing civilian aircraft are they likely to come in unchallenged.

Complex land targets such as ports and airfields are even more vulnerable than lift assets. Logistics dumps and command centers, however, may be tenable if they can be broken down into many little pieces; successful operations would then require a highly distributed information processing regime to overcome dispersion. If U.S. forces can also be spread out sufficiently widely, they may be able to ride out WMD attacks; however, dictates of geography (e.g., passes, isthmuses, valleys, islands) may prevent that strategy.

The up side of surface ship vulnerability comes from the potential shift from Europe to Asia as the cockpit of the world's wars. Islands and peninsulas dominate Asian far more than European geography. Thus for one Asian country to threaten another with invasion will more often require naval (or at very least widebody airlift) control, a far more difficult proposition when ships (and such aircraft) are as visible as they will be. Although Trojan Horse strategies (e.g., military assets masking as civilian ones) may work, they are self-defeating as threats for obvious reasons.

Cut Talk

Some theorists of information warfare see a coming bureaucratic conflict between those who would destroy an enemy's communications infrastructure and those who would keep enough intact so they could listen in. Unfortunately, despite Allied success in the Gulf, by 2014, we may not be able to do either.

Can counter-C2 warfare keep headquarters from talking to the troops? With every passing year the task becomes harder. A wireline system can be disabled by bombing central office switches. A distributed wireless system would be much less vulnerable, particularly if circuitry were reduced to sizes that could be placed on trucks or even in briefcases. Cellular transmissions leak, but decoy radiators can be constructed with ease. Furthermore, sidebands from microwave transmissions are easier to control.(Note 8) Broadcasting digital messages to trusted relays in the field would provide an enemy another reliable method of communicating. He could also transmit on the sub-bands and blanking intervals of an uplink from a third-party live feed, such as a developing-world version of CNN; use focused transmissions from multiple ground sites through satellite terminals; or employ a public global cellular system, such as Iridium or Inmarsat-P. Compression allows messages to be multiplied on the same bandwidth. The technical details can be debated, but the means and density of global communications are constantly increasing, and finding a way of getting the message out is getting continually easier.

Indirect methods of attacking command and control systems via the power grid can currently cut the flow of information, but such techniques will have decreasing effect over the next 20 years. The Gulf War raised the perceived value of having considerable power backup for key military nodes if they face attack. If photovoltaic power continues to gain efficiency and to become less expensive (e.g., holographic films which may reach the critical 6 cents/kwh mark), a large part of a country's total power supply could be provided from sources too dispersed to target.

If American forces cannot interdict these possible communications flows, could they intercept and interpret them? This will become increasingly difficult, as well. Digital signals are inherently harder to intercept than analog ones. The combination of public key cryptography and triple-DES (data encryption standard) means that any digital point-to-point bit-stream can be rendered unreadable except by the party for whom it is intended. This will be true regardless of how powerful code-breaking computers become. Even if quantum computers, only a theory today, can be constructed they will not be available by 2015. The relative cost of using a larger encryption key is far smaller than the cost of breaking a message stream so encrypted. This is notwithstanding the U.S. Government's attempt to limit its spread via the Clipper chip, which permits encryption but leaves some official access to keys for decryption. The same technology used in digital signatures makes it virtually impossible to alter the source of a message or its content without having the receiver reject the message as corrupted. If applied to computer network operations, our ability to infiltrate a virus, worm, or "Trojan Horse" into an enemy network would be sharply curtailed.

True, the digitization of the global communications infrastructure will take decades. Even afterwards, human error will inevitably occur on the enemy side, insider assistance may be available to American forces, and source-level or destination-level eavesdropping would still yield useful information. Whatever American forces could learn would be helpful, but they should not expect to acquire a great deal of information from such sources in 2015.

Run Wild

It is a truism of the Gulf War that Allied forces used dominating maneuver to deliver the coup de grace to Iraq's force. The Left Hook put forces where Iraq did not expect them, and their immobilization made them sitting ducks. Advocates of maneuver warfare argue that, despite the increasing difficulties its execution may face over the next 20 years, it will still offer success to its practitioners in 2015. Moving forces are harder to strike than immobile forces and maneuver places them in a superior position from which to strike the enemy. Furthermore, the surprise that springs from maneuver can disorient opponents and reduce their well-laid plans to chaos.

But these arguments could carry far less force in 20 years. First, moving targets per se, are easier to hit. Movement generates far more signatures than immobility and few moving platforms can outrun precision weaponry. Rather than break a target lock, movement only may confirm it. As long as information generated by movement can be relayed to a weapon, its ability to strike will be maintained.

Second, range may be of decreasing importance in warfare. Sensor proliferation, especially when decoupled from platforms, as well as their increasing employment in space, means that target signatures will be acquired almost as easily from great as from small distances to targets. The greater the range, the greater the cost of landing steel on targets. But for high-value targets such as ships, armored vehicles, and aircraft, long-range strike remains cost-effective--given a $10,000 per kilogram cost of launching a GPS/INS-guided weapon from open ocean. Systems such as the Army Tactical Missile System (ATACMs) or emerging technologies such as electromagnetic rail-gun artillery may permit even more cost-effective strikes from closer but still-standoff distances.

Third, while humans will be as vulnerable to surprise and confusion 20 years out, silicon will be as invulnerable 20 years out as well. For the purposes of target acquisition (and perhaps target servicing) silicon is taking over more and more functions from humans. This transition will take place neither overnight nor completely (man-in-the-loop will remain and rules-of-engagement differ from war to war), but the trend is clear. In recent years the U.S. Army has developed new ways of producing concentration of firepower without concentration of forces. The fact remains that, against a sophisticated foe, the advantages of running wild have come and gone.

WAR IN 2015

If the Gulf War model is unlikely to retain its validity against a sophisticated foe, what might replace it? Perhaps a look high, run low model best describes what conventional war is coming to.

Look High

If sensor proliferation increases the information available to combatants, logic dictates a transition from local to global information loops in the ageless game of hide-and-seek. The difference between local and global loops may be illustrated by differences in mechanized warfare between 1991 and 2015.

In the local loop model as used in the Gulf War, the armor commander was provided with basic intelligence data on enemy location. He then found and destroyed targets on his own, using organic sensors. In the global loop model the search for the enemy would be conducted in real time by a wide variety of sensors--from space to air to ground, including sensors organic to the armored group. The inflow of data would be fused and then exploited by the armored force. Even in the 4 years since the Gulf War, the reliance upon direct visual sightings prior to target engagement has been slowly replaced by direct transmission of coordinates to tank or armored group. The logic of the Army's digital battlefield initiative still presumes that broadband information will be sent to the operator, rather than the operator being prosecutor of findings. As empowering as this presumption is to the soldier, it may not accord with the logic of future conflict. Giving every soldier access to the location of all friendly forces and individuals may yield a catastrophe if just one friendly node is turned.

Although the transition from local to global loops preceded the Gulf War (e.g., submarine warfare) and will still be incomplete after 2015 (e.g., SOF operations), the trends are clear. The side best capable of gathering, fuzing, and acting quickly on target information will, everything else being equal, do better.

As they become core practices of the American military over the next 20 years, sensor deployment and data fusion will require their own doctrine and concept of operations. Space-based systems, UAVs, mobile, over-the-horizon radar imaging and a wide variety of ground-based sensors will certainly play a larger role in tactical and operational situations than they do at present. Constructing the necessary communications links and deciding what information they transmit back to command and/or operational nodes (as opposed to what information is processed locally) will present an immense task. So would be the management of the information flood generated in an escalating crisis, as data from stand-off sensors increasingly will be supplemented by intrusive sensors.

In the mid-1990s, each service or subservice community acts on the basis of estimates formed by its own organic sensors. Even so, readings from different sensors primarily are fused so that one can back up the readings of others. Coordination and standardization alone are used to create information unity. This approach, which already showed strains in the Gulf War, is a vestige of a time when space operations were oriented to strategic ends and most information loops were local. It is not clear how well such a model would work as military space operations are redesigned to fit tactical and operational requirements and non-space-based sensors receive wider battlefield use. An Information Command or Corps may be needed to coordinate such functions effectively.

The separation of information processing and target prosecution has ramifications beyond those of internal Defense Department organization. If sending large forces overseas becomes increasingly difficult, how would the United States assist beleaguered allies? Bytes are far easier to move than bombs, bullets, and beans. The logic of information-based warfare would prescribe the functions of the members of vertical coalitions. Those under attack would provide the combat forces, as well as direct their emplacement, direction, and movement. The United States would provide the information systems to multiply the effectiveness of fighting forces. Easiest for the United States to provide would be the various data streams coming from our space and sea-based sensors. Next easiest would be software and systems integration to fuse all the data we would provide, along with the information collected by American allies. Simulation software for training and mission planning would fall in the same range of difficulty. The delivery of American sensors (those that could not be bought on the open market) would prove more difficult. Most difficult would be the delivery of American weapons themselves. Their shipment would expose U.S. forces to dangers similar to those that would be encountered in transporting a large force.

Vertical coalitions can overcome the two fundamental strategic weaknesses of U.S. operations: a greater sensitivity to casualties (compared to local forces) and a greater logistics challenge. There may also be times when we would like to help a friend but would be loathe to find ourselves responsible for harming the friend of another great power. Vertical coalitions offer, within bounds, the promise of being able to provide assistance while minimizing fingerprints as well as footprints.

Such a scheme has its drawbacks. For an ally, a vertical coalition is always a second-best alternative; nothing says long-term commitment like spilled American blood on foreign soil. Donated data are never as trusted as organic information. What we consider important information may not accord to the realities on the ground, or to their doctrine. Finding out whether or why target estimates proved to be false negatives or false positives will be difficult without our people in country. Interoperability will be a major concern, as will be the risk of letting any other country understand how our systems work to the degree necessary to make vertical coalitions possible. Still, second-best may be the best we have left, given the difficulties of projecting surface forces.

Run Low

Contemporary conventional warfare centers on platforms containing operator, weapon, sensor, and emitter, but the logic of such platform design will diminish by 2015. A multitude of sensors would allow precision in targeting and will generate overlapping and reinforcing readings, but a commensurate multiplication of platforms would be highly expensive to produce and would risk huge casualties if engaged. Detached weapons fired by remote control would generate far less signature than similar activity by platforms. If such weapons were destroyed before use, the human consequences would be greatly diminished. However, there are two great disadvantages to a distributed weapons architecture. First, they require more movement of individual unprotected items into position. Second, they send and receive information in a deliberately noisy electromagnetic environment.

When two sophisticated opponents confront each other in conventional war the result is likely to be not a rapid clash of arms but a slow motion test of competing information systems. The side that tries to start operations by the sudden and violent eruption of platforms will find its weaponry picked off and blown to pieces by hidden missiles linked directly to sensor systems and impervious to shock. The real trick is to find out exactly what the other side sees. Barring direct observation (e.g., infiltrators), the next best method is to bait with various worms and see which fish bite. For instance, an enemy may know in advance that the United States possesses weaponry that homes in on the sound of a tank coupled with infrared signatures. Can it devise a warm noisy decoy that will attract attack or are their other signatures that are needed to induce an attack? Will the weapon be fired against individual tanks or does it wait for a tank column? Conversely, would attackers be advised to let some talks roll unimpeded in hopes that the enemy builds a false confidence that it has fooled the system?

In such circumstances, war could become very slow (after all the interesting assets impossible to hide have been reduced to rubble) as both sides try to keep their equipment signatures beneath the envelope that signals identification; most of the successful engagements may affect the occasional but fatal mistakes that show up as live targets. As noted, it is not necessary that equipment signatures be reduced to below noise level; it may suffice to reduce signatures of military equipment to where they can be confused with signatures of civilian equipment.

Such an environment would be ideal for special operations forces; their training accustoms them to minimizing their signatures. Furthermore, the vertical coalitions previously described could depend on direct human support from U.S. special forces and would provide tangible evidence of U.S. engagement, protect key intelligence assets, and report back on how information systems were really performing, rather than what our allies might want us to believe. Even if human participation in combat could not be eliminated, it could be minimized in a way that radically altered the nature of American intervention in foreign conflict.

Does this mean that the U.S. Armed Forces can dispense with firepower and platforms altogether? Not by 2015. After being retrofitted with some new information technologies, our platforms would remain capable of exerting tremendous force against less sophisticated foes. Against an enemy with sophisticated information-based systems, however, U.S. forces would find themselves at great risk. In any conflict, we could rely on our stand-off weapons including long-range stealth bombers, cruise missiles and perhaps hyperkinetic artillery; however, in the most likely conflicts in which the United States might become engaged in 20 years, we would employ our information-based systems first and follow with weapon platforms only if necessary.

4. CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS

In 1915, the enraged American reaction to the sinking of Lusitania by a German U-Boat first raised the possibility that the United States might become engaged in the Great War and be required to send an Allied Expeditionary Force across the Atlantic.

2015 will mark the centennial of that event. Will the era of heavy intervention forces be over? Most military assets, particularly those large enough to wield powerful weaponry, will be too visible to survive long in the information-based warfare environment previously described. Will there be any defense interests between now and 2015 that would justify very high casualty rates? How many casualties would the American public tolerate before calling for a review of tactical nuclear options?

Even if heavy intervention is abjured, the United States will be able play a large role in international security. Look-high capabilities will permit American forces and, more so, those of American allies to operate far more effectively than their foes. In some cases, particularly when helping an ally defend his territory against encroachment, such American capabilities may prove decisive. In other cases, however, such as defending civilian commerce, recovering territory or overcoming a military disadvantage created by subversion or deception, our relative advantage may be nullified by unfavorable military circumstances.

But despite the imperatives created by the technological developments described in this section, the United States may not reorganize, re-equip, and retrain its forces appropriately. Selfish bureaucratic interests may resist such changes successfully. Nor is it likely that the United States will become engaged in a war between now and 2015 that would teach the harsh lessons for the need for such changes. Thus, a significant dissonance may develop between American military needs and military realities. Several policy-related implications flow from the influences of the information-based military-technical revolutions on American and foreign military forces.

PROGRAMMING

If weapon platforms are declining rapidly in utility, purchasing more of them makes little sense. Initiating a major development cycle to manufacture more tomorrow makes even less sense. Platform-centric organizations may place faith in stealth to maintain the viability of their weapon systems. Unfortunately, stealthy platforms are expensive, difficult to maintain, and usable only under certain circumstances, such as night flying. Furthermore, some platforms, such as surface combatants, are inherently unstealthy. The application of stealth probably should be limited to submarines, some bombers and special operations equipment. There may be some virtue in retrofitting existing equipment with stealth technology to reduce their signatures, but purchasing entirely new systems to achieve the same result is not cost effective. In any event, today's stringent budgeting environment has eliminated most major acquisition systems, with the proper exception of information-intensive systems and munitions that can incorporate new information technologies. Insofar as platform inventories will shape American force structure, the replacement of conventional warfare units by information-based warfare units will follow.

PARTNERS

Where the costs of projecting a large surface force is deemed too expensive, the United States will have to find new ways to provide military support to its allies. In that case, besides standoff and special operations, our interventions could involve contributions of bytes than battle formations. But forming such vertical coalitions would present both political and technological challenges. The former would entail persuading actual and potential allies that the terms for American military engagement had changed. As a carrot, the United States could argue that its military contributions, while far less visible, would be sufficiently valuable to warrant our participation in the planning for war and war termination. As a stick, the United States could very well explain that, in the absence of major threats to our vital national interests, American assistance would be provided only on a take-it-or-leave-it basis.

The technical dimensions of such cooperation would be daunting. We would have to solve the difficult problems of systems engineering to ensure that our information-generating systems and their information reception systems could communicate fully. Given the enormous difficulties, perhaps impossibility, of ad hoc systems engineering, the United States justifiably might begin establishing standards for interoperability now, so that other nations have the option of developing systems that could mate with ours in 10 to 20 years. We also would have to resolve doctrinal and operational issues to ensure that the information we would provide would be both trusted and suited to a partner's method of warfare.

PRESENCE

The prepositioning of military forces might seem the solution to the problems of overseas intervention. But foreign bases do not obviate the requirement for logistics. No overseas American forces currently are sufficient to mount a credible and sustainable defense of their positions without a major, thus visible, source of supplies and manpower. Large bases are themselves visible and vulnerable targets. But replacing conventional U.S. forces with special operations and standoff forces would be inhibited by the negative political and psychological influence on the morale of our local allies and thus would undermine the cohesion of the alliance. At the same time, information-based warfare increases the requirement for American overseas presence. As noted, the ability to interoperate our military information systems with an ally's is facilitated by intimate knowledge of how the ally operates, ranging from technical specifications to operational considerations. Finally, the presence of U.S. forces in an allied country would facilitate greatly the placing and maintaining sensors as a cooperative effort. Consequently, while American military presence overseas would retain its value, the form and context of this presence must be adopted to the shifting parameters of conventional warfare.

IMPLICATIONS FOR MILITARY ORGANIZATION

Technology suggests alternative military organizations; it may permit them but it cannot compel them. Whether or not the U.S. Armed Forces adapt to information technologies will depend on bureaucratic forces, whatever tasks it is called on to do over the next 20 years, and the laws of chance. The same goes for foreign armed forces. That said, the following changes logically follow from advances in information technology.

First, technology's ability to shrink the loop between target detection and engagement puts a premium on similarly quick command-and-control structures. Clearly the middle layers need to shrink, but should decisionmaking fall to the bottom or rise to the top? The former is in vogue; put unit commanders in charge, and enable them to command strike forces from a wide menu. The latter permits commanders to exercise "rudder controls" from over-the-horizon. Relegating more chunks of the decision to automated systems may free up the commander to devote more energy to the strategic side of warfighting. With expert systems, alternative courses of action (including the pre-assignment of targets to shooters) may be established for operational units; decisions on which to employ could be modified on the fly as battlefield exigencies dictate.

Although organization must reflect circumstances (e.g., steppe and jungle engagements are fought differently), the push-data-up model may emerge simply because the opportunities for U.S. forces to fight close-in during high-intensity engagements are going away. The greater the concentration on standoff weapons, the more a centralized model makes sense.

Second, managing the sensor-to-shooter cycle may require a corps specialized for that task. An information corps, as such, would make fundamental decisions about the deployment of sensors, build and maintain the command-and-control links necessary to keep them operational, construct and update the software that converts individual readings into a coherent whole, manage the process by which readings are converted into fire-control solutions, and oversee whatever advanced training and learning tools (e.g., simulation) are needed to help users work the system. There will still be a role for commanders; indeed command will still be central to any warfighting detail. However, the management of information systems will be devolved.

Third, by contrast, the day of the mass military against sophisticated foes may be coming to an end in two senses. First, the agglomeration of platforms (e.g., think of D-Day), and the various signatures attendant to such agglomerations will be inadvisable in tomorrow's warfare environment. Indeed, if large platforms are of decreasing utility, so will organizations built around them. Second, whether the subject be a information corps tending to software, special operators tending to threats in their environment, or anything in between, the information environment of every military operative will differ more and more over time--everyone will be solving different problems with less and less relationship to each other. Information differentiates functionality. With every advance in technology, the number of different skill categories proliferates. Uniformity--the historic basis of military organizations--may be harder to find.

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