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America’s Future—Defense Policy Principles, Part IVb

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In the post just below, I described some of the force structures needed to help secure our future.  In this post, I complete that description.

We must maintain and improve (not reduce through decimation) a strong “traditional” combat force capability.  Our enemies will continue to include, for the foreseeable future, nation-states fully capable and willing to fight open, pitched war for a variety of reasons, the same reasons such wars have been initiated in the past: resources, land/power grabs, and so on.  The last major war fought, WWII, involved our combat capability for nearly four years (and it had been in progress for more than two years by the time we joined) with roughly 6.5 million men under arms and Defense spending of roughly 37% of GDP and 89% of total federal spending in 1945.  Our force structure must be as capable today of fighting that kind of war for survival, for at least that long.  The People’s Republic of China, for instance, has nearly 2.3 million soldiers under arms today, during nominal peace.  It’s aggressively expanding its naval power projection capabilities and aggressively threatening just the sort of land and resource grabs of past wars today in, among other places, the South China Sea, thereby threatening US allies like the Republic of the Philippines, and potential allies like the Socialist Republic of Vietnam.

Such “traditional” forces, though, need not look like the last century’s forces: indeed, they cannot and fight effectively today.  Today’s forces must be  lighter, faster, and more mobile yet with vastly increased lethality.  To achieve this will take technological improvements, but many of these are already in various stages of prototyping.  This will also take a revision of traditional mindsets of how to equip and fight a “traditional” force.  In the latter regard, Rumsfeld was right to scrap the Crusader “self-propelled” howitzer, even though it could hit a gnat’s left eye from enormous ranges and it was the darling of artillery enthusiasts, procurement officers, and defense contractors alike.  It wasn’t mobile, requiring multiple C-5 sorties to deliver a single howitzer with its supporting systems and initial ammunition load out.  It couldn’t move affectively under its own power in hilly or mountainous terrain.  Not being able to reach an engagement position rapidly, it had very little engagement value.  So it is with the USAF’s F-22 Raptor.  This airplane costs $150 million each (or more if development costs are amortized in), and while loaded with many magic capabilities, must achieve a kill ratio greater than 10:1 to pay for itself compared to the unit cost of its adversary aircraft.  The capabilities of both weapon systems are nice to have, but procurement and defense contractor paradigms—and understanding of the imperatives of speed and mobility—need to shift heavily.  These weapons’ capabilities, unimproved as they truly are, have little value on a modern battlefield or above it.

Our “traditional” forces (at this point I’ll stop discriminating between defense and offense; they are in the end two sides of the same coin) must be capable of winning both long-range engagements and close-in knife fights.  This places an emphasis on long-range weapons such as nuclear-armed ballistic and cruise missiles, conventionally armed cruise missiles, rail guns with 100+ mile range (currently undergoing testing with examples from three developers), torpedo equivalents of cruise missiles, littoral-capable combat ships, and so on.  Additional long-range weapons must include EMP delivery systems.

The close in fight must include close air support capable aircraft.  The A-10 is an excellent example of this type of aircraft, with its highly survivable capability coupled with its precision lethality on the battlefield while friendly soldiers are in close contact/engaged with the enemy.

But there’s more to this knife fight than air cover.  The soldier and Marine himself must be lethally armed, and his pack load out must include, for instance, a single battery type for all of his equipment—the weight savings over the total battery transport must be given over  to such consumables as food and ammunition.  The fighter’s personal weapons need increased lethality.  Entering prototyping development is an example of this: a bullet with terminal guidance capability to improve its target hit likelihood: the bullet (in its current iteration) carries a seeker head and fins to acquire a separately laser-designated target and guide to it.  (As an obvious aside, this technology would greatly improve artillery accuracy, including that rail gun.)  But a knife fight includes shorter ranges than rifle-firing.  These men and women must be able to fight effectively in urban streets, in the rooms of the buildings of these urban areas, in wooded/hilly terrain, and so on.  Their weapons must be optimized for those ranges, as well.  One way to achieve this is with a rapidly changeable set of weapon barrels (no more than three) that can, with literally a minute’s advanced planning, be swapped out for the barrel optimized for the coming terrain.

The Navy will benefit from the improved weaponry, including the rail gun (indeed, it’s the Navy doing the testing mentioned above), and also from combat shipping capable of fighting lethally close in to shore.  Amphibious assaults benefit greatly from the ability of the Navy to deliver artillery and air bombardment in support of the landings.  But the shipping delivering the Marines, soldiers, special operations forces (given enemy discovery of the latter in progress), and equipment should also be able both to fight their way to a contested landing and to support any landing with lethal, close in, fires of their own.  This means, for instance, shallow draft ships armed with those rail guns (with shorter design ranges and so smaller power packs and faster rates of fire) and guided bullets.

The emphasis of our new force structure must lie in our special operations forces, however.  These must cease to be an adjunct to, or an afterthought of, our “traditional” force structure and gain a stature, funding, and purpose of their own.  SOCOM is a good start here, but the command must be beefed up with combat personnel and equipment, without sacrificing the intensive training that special operations forces ordinarily receive.  These are the forces most suited to fighting the amorphous asymmetrical wars that are thrust upon us, as well as attacking and destroying enemy communications, economic, and space facilities without committing “traditional” forces, needed elsewhere, to these targets.  Especially given the costs of modern “traditional” war, the wars most frequently fought will be the asymmetric wars of terror.

While the use of UAVs has expanded, this expansion and their improvement and lethality needs to be accelerated.  Coordination with cyber forces is critical here, especially in terms of hardening the devices’ control and computer systems.  Coordination with communications forces also is critical, in order to protect control of the devices.  Integration with “traditional” forces must increase, also, beyond target coordination.  The surface (and underwater) components of the “traditional” forces will benefit greatly from expanded use of improved unmanned combat vehicles (UCV)—these will greatly multiply the forces committed to battle while not increasing friendly casualties.  EMP delivery must be part of these forces’ capability, just as it is with “traditional” forces.

Finally, while each of these forces must be capable of separate, independent action, they all must be tightly integrated at the same time: equipment load-out and hardening and targeting imperatives overlap far too much for the forces to operate solely without regard to the capabilities and activities of the other forces.  I’ve mentioned above areas of overlap and integration; those are merely illustrative, not exhaustive.

In sum, we are still going to have to fight yesterday’s set-piece war, hence the need for powerful “traditional” forces.  But that war will be fought from the start with modern weapon systems of vast lethality.  The ability to guts up a war machine from next to nothingness, as we did for WWII, no longer exists: that lethality will overwhelm and crush our forces—and our nation—if the forces in being at the initial attack are inadequate.  Yet we’re also going to have to fight a new style war, against an amorphous, non-national entity whose own forces are diffuse, hard to identify, even spread across a range of nation-states.  The present war on Terror is only the beginning of this blaze.  Such wars will demand an emphasis on a new set of forces—those special operations forces.  Moreover, the high ground has moved into space.  We must control that high ground. Finally, the speed of a modern war also demands sound, secure, reliable, fast computational capability and communications—hence an emphasis on cyber and communications forces that warrants their separation into distinct entities, while remaining tightly integrated with the other forces.

Update: Corrected the name of the howitzer that Rumsfeld cancelled.

America’s Future—Defense Policy Principles, Part IVa

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Part III was posted here (and from there can be found the chain of links containing the full series of these posts—or search on “America’s Future” in my blog’s search functionality).  In this final post of this occasional series, I’ll write about the general force structures needed to effect our Defense principles and policies.  Much of what I suggest below will require technological development; however, none of that is futuristic—indeed, some of that technology already is in one or another prototyping stage today.  Further, these force structures support another concept: never fight fair—only fight to win with maximum enemy casualties and maximum damage to enemy entity infrastructure and with minimum friendly casualties and minimum damage to friendly infrastructure.  War is not a sporting event; national survival is in the balance.

I will write here about five essential forces: cyber, communications, space, “traditional,” and special operations.  None of this is to deprecate other areas, for instance intelligence; this is simply a nod to practicalities: I’m writing a too-long post, not a book.

Guiding my remarks are two premises first articulated by  former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld in his Known and Unknown: A Memoir.  These are that the time required to recognize the nature of a new threat and to develop counters to it is far too long.  Without going further into bureaucratic imperatives, the SecDef who’s going to bring about these force structures needs to have the courage and stubbornness, as well as the backing of his President and of Congress, to not waste time arguing with those who will not or cannot adapt to the new culture.  Those roadblocks, civilian and military, need to be promptly and decisively terminated.

The other premise is that our systems, which include the people who use them as the critical part of each of those systems, must be more flexible and more lethal, while simultaneously being lighter and more mobile.  This is especially critical for the individual soldier and Marine with his small arms, ammunition, communications, and battery load-out.

Our cyber forces, as I mentioned in an earlier post, must include both defensive and offensive capabilities.  The easiest attack to mount is a simple, brute force denial of service, wherein the attacker simply overwhelms the targeted system(s) with requests for service.  This can include such things as overloading the CPUs with computational demands or overloading the network interface card with demands for communications services.  Other attacks include inserting malware into the computer system(s) for the purpose of corrupting data; blocking access to hard drives; and recording keystrokes (to collect passwords, for instance), collecting actual data, and then broadcasting the collected information back out of the compromised network to the attacker or an accomplice.  Malware can be inserted through a variety of methods ranging from direct, hacked insertion to “social engineering,” where a user, while on his personal system outside the target network, is fooled into downloading malware onto a memory stick and then bringing that memory stick into the target network.  This last is speculated to be one means by which the stuxnet worm was inserted into the Iranian networks.

Defensive forces here include physical and software firewalls and constant, proactive research into malware with associated development of counters to these.  But they must also include human training—and not just the annual routine security refresher that’s so often used.  Training in this area must be as active and rigorous as any of the rest of the soldier’s or Marine’s combat training—cyber combat is every bit as real  and lethal.  But another aspect of defense is to turn the attack and seize the initiative.  Methods and software must be developed to trace malware—whether discovered in situ or during an insertion attempt—back to its source, with the tracing mechanism carrying its own malware for insertion into the originating network(s).  The payload here should include both tracking/reporting software and software intended to disrupt/destroy the originating systems, with a capability of both automatic and manual remote triggering.

Offensive cyber forces will include force capabilities that look a lot like the active defense described just above, with the difference that the payloads here are being inserted on the attack, rather than in counterattack.  The malware being inserted also will have a broader range of payloads: payloads designed for residence in computer chips manufactured for sale overseas, designed for specific systems in the enemy entity’s suite, and so on.

Our communications forces also will need both defensive and offensive capabilities.  Communications always will be a prime target of our enemies, as they seek to isolate command from the forces in contact (for instance).  Thus, communications systems must be protected from physical attack and electronic disruption.  Brute force power-out on the transmission side will be useful as will be increasingly sensitive antennas on the receiving side.  Both systems—and cyber systems generally—will need hardening against power surges, for instance from repeated EMP.  Further, all communications must be encrypted using the strongest encryption possible consistent with rapid coding and decoding (which also puts a premium on communications-supported research into encryption techniques and CPU capacity and speed).  Moreover, since none of this can be guaranteed 100% successful, the systems must be highly and rapidly redundant, and the codes—and code styles—rapidly changeable.

On the offensive side, enemy communications nodes of our choosing must be attacked and destroyed as early as possible in the conflict, with the replacement nodes also of our choosing just as promptly destroyed.  I do not advocate blindly destroying all of his communications facility, however.  Useful nodes should be identified, and these should be used for inserting misleading information into the enemy’s communications.  Such insertions can range from falsified communications from his forces in the field (including individual terrorist cells or individual terrorists) providing misleading status to accessing an enemy’s display systems and placing false information onto them.

Notice here that there will be considerable overlap with other force structures.  Destruction of communications nodes will involve either “traditional” or special operations forces, or both.  Insertion of false information will involve (depending on the spoof being run) special operations forces and/or cyber forces.  Cyber forces especially will be involved in hacking the enemy displays, and this will also require technological advances beyond today’s capabilities.

Our space force structure must be designed to give us both assured and rapid access to space, at all operational altitudes—including in the near term to lunar altitudes.  Assured access includes more than lots of boosters sitting in the rack ready to be rolled out, though.  Our launch facilities are woefully outdated, too few in number, and too slow to ready for a subsequent launch.  Commercial launch facilities should be supported as well as government ones (and commercial access should be made available to the government ones on terms useful to both).  This support, though, should not come in terms of “shared” costs, but more in terms of government getting out of the way of such things as licensing the facilities and each launch.

Military space facilities, both launch and on-orbit, need to be hardened against a variety of attacks: cyber, communications, energy weapon, and many forms of physical attack.  Hardening against cyber and communications attacks have been described above.  Energy weapon attacks can be defended in a variety of ways (while a variety of such attacks need technological advances in understanding their nature as well as means of defending against them): gas or dust ejections can attrit the arriving energy in a number of bandwidths.  Reflective and ablative surfaces (with current technology, both capacities in the same surface aren’t possible; this is another area wanting research and advance) which can dissipate arriving energy before it penetrates beyond those surfaces are among those ways.  Physical attack defenses include weapons that destroy incoming weapons before impact or fusing (whether individual “anti-missile missiles,” sprays of “gravel” to increase the likelihood intercept), evasive maneuvers by the targeted system (of greater or lesser utility depending on the mass and momentum of the target and the presence or absence of terminal guidance and maneuverability of the attacking weapon).

As above, there must be an offensive capability here, as well.  Enemy space systems, including his on-orbit facilities, must be subject to destruction by our forces.   I’ve suggested some attack mechanisms above.  Our forces, though, must be capable of terminal maneuvering so as to defeat target maneuvers; they must be capable of penetrating a gravel shield (initially by overwhelming it with numbers of attacks from a variety of directions, rather than by paying the payload penalty from hardening each weapon against “gravel” impact—of dubious practicality, anyway, given the energies involved in the impacts); they must have energy of sufficient density, and with aiming quality sufficient to allow dwelling on the initial impact point long enough, to penetrate defenses.

This offensive capability also must integrate with special operations forces and “traditional” forces.  While ballistic payloads of sufficient size can be deorbited to fall from orbit, survive reentry, and kinetically impact enemy launch facilities, communications nodes, and other targets (essentially, dropping high-speed rocks on them), attack by special operations and/or “traditional” forces will play a crucial role, as well.  Moreover, offensive forces must be capable of destroying the enemy’s access to space at any time post-launch, as well: from boost to any staging section of flight, through cruise to pre-impact or pre-arrival at his own space facilities.

In my next post, I’ll complete the description of our needed force structures: a discussion of our “traditional” force structure and of our special operations force structure.

America’s Future—Defense Policy Principles, Part III

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I wrote about fundamental principles of Defense policy here.  In this post, I want to talk about some of the Defense policies themselves that are necessary to implement those principles; in a later post I’ll talk about force structures needed to begin to give concreteness and bite to our Defense.  I won’t go into identifying those policies that are suitable and already in place, or unsuitable ones that should be removed, nor will this post presume to be an exhaustive list of policies.  Instead, I’ll  identify what I consider the important with a view to offering a point of departure for continued discussion.

For the sake of review, these are the fundamental principles:

  • defense must be built around the concept winning across the full spectrum of conflict, and across the full spectrum of kinds of enemy combatants;
  • control of the high ground, which means space: LEO today, near-lunar space and at lunar altitudes in the very immediate future, Mars and along Mars’ orbit around the sun within 20 years, and Jupiter and beyond by the end of the century; and
  • flexibility, which includes mobility, agility, and adaptability of both weapons and their support systems and of the soldiers themselves.

There are a broad range of defense policies, from procurement through training, that I’ll ignore in this post.  The overriding policies about which I’ll write here are those involving the nature of combat, cyberspace, communications, and space.

Modern warfare is no longer limited to the classic set-piece battles of the last century.  Those will continue to be a major component of modern and future warfare, if for no other reason than that it always will be necessary to seize and hold the enemy’s real estate, since even his cyber equipment must have a physical location or a network of physical locations.  Those physical locations, though, will no longer be confined to earth (and already haven’t been confined to the surface for some time, now ranging from the bottom of the oceans to high atmospheric operations).

There are two other kinds of combat today, however, and these are no less a lethal threat to our country’s existence: terrorist warfare conducted by non-national entities, and supported to a greater or lesser degree by one or more nation-states, and cyber warfare.  We have seen the deadliness of terrorist war in the attacks on us at the start of this century, in the intimidation of Spain into leaving the coalition fighting terrorists in Afghanistan, and in Afghanistan itself with the terrorist war conducted for years against Afghan women and girls, and the terrorist attacks today against the body politic of that nation.  The current terrorist war that is tearing apart the nascent Iraqi democracy, before that nation can grow out of its infancy is another example.

Terrorist war, though, doesn’t only involve nation-states, and those nation-states that are involved usually participate in a supporting role.  The primary actors here are the terrorist non-national entities themselves.  Examples of these include al-Qaeda and its offshoots (al-Qaeda in Iraq, al-Qaeda in Yemen, and so on), the Taliban, and the terrorists in Iraq today who make war on Sunni and Shiite Iraqis and sometimes on themselves in efforts to frame the other.  These entities are much more diffuse and harder to identify, they use women and children as tools of their war as well as targets, and their targets are nearly completely indiscriminate: the only unifying concept of terrorist targets is how much damage and fear they can cause for the terrorists’ enemy.

Cyber warfare wasn’t even possible until the end of the last century.  Cyberwar is a contest to protect our own computer systems—in weapons systems, communications systems, national infrastructure, financial networks and systems, and so on—from penetration or disruption by our enemies together with our efforts to do exactly that to our enemy’s computer systems.  This is a shadow war that runs from malware disrupting the functionality of the systems to spyware that collects information from those systems without disrupting them to additional malware that lies dormant until activated to carry out their missions.  The malware can be implanted at any time, from being embedded in the chips comprising a system’s CPUs, xROMs, RAM, and so on at the time of chip manufacture to an email or an email’s imagery or attachment to a “memory stick” plugged into the UBS port of a laptop or PC.

Before we can do anything else, then, we must understand the nature of our enemy and the techniques he is using this time to make war on us, as well as successfully estimate how he or another enemy will make war the next time.  Thus, our most important policy in Defense must be one that both supports and facilitates intelligence gathering and fusion (the knitting together of information and estimates from a broad variety of sources into a coherent, single picture).  But this isn’t enough.  This policy also must generate a capacity for political and social research to better understand how war evolves its techniques, how technology evolves and how that impacts the evolution of war, and how all of this is influenced by the more general political, social, and economic evolution of the various societies and nations around the planet.

With this understanding in progress now, it is critical for our Defense establishment to have a policy in place that facilitates our capacity in cyberspace.  This capacity includes not just a defensive one of securing (both through encryption and through assured operations) our computational capability (for instance, but not nearly limited to, our communications, our information displays, our weapons systems, our control over our space-based systems), but also an offensive one.  We must be able to carry the war that our enemy has inflicted on us into his cyberspace (including initiating combat in that milieu, beating our enemy to that punch where possible), with a view toward the destruction of his computational capacity—in his communications, in his information displays, in his weapons systems, his control over his space-based systems.

Our cyberspace policy, to be effective, also will impact procurement.  All of our existing computing chips—those CPUs, xROMs, RAM, and so on—must be swept for malware that might have been embedded by a foreign manufacturer—especially those chips we might buy from the People’s Republic of China.  It goes beyond this, though.  Malware and malware defense are just like any other arms race:  the offensive side nearly always leads, and the defensive side nearly always is behind.  Thus, it’s entirely possible that malware will remain simply because we haven’t identified the new evolution, yet.  Accordingly, new computing chips should be obtained solely from domestic manufacturers.  Some will argue that this will elevate the cost of those chips.  These will be right, at least in the near term (I won’t go into the evolution of costs from an established domestic chip manufacturing industry in this context).  However, the elevated costs of domestic chips also must be weighed against the costs of communications failures, broken water and electricity delivery infrastructures, eviscerated financial systems, weapons that won’t fire, and so on to our survival as a free nation.

Finally, our cyber policy must facilitate our ability to target both non-national entities and their supporting nation-states.  This is especially critical when we’re fighting terrorist war.  We must deny the non-national entity all support from those nation-states that have declared their enmity toward us by supporting our enemy’s active war.  Those nation-states, by that support, will have made themselves active participants in that war, and so their capacity to fight and to support the others’ fight have become legitimate—and necessary—targets, as well.

Note that this dimension of war necessarily is asymmetric.  We have vast networks of computing systems that have become critical to our nation’s functioning, even to our existence.  Many of our enemies are not so dependent.  The reasons for this are broad.  At one end of the spectrum, the enemy simply is not that advanced, as was the case with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and the Taliban-run Afghanistan.  At the other end of the spectrum is the diffuse nature of the enemy, who while technologically sophisticated, has no major computing systems of his own (beyond cell phones and laptop computers and the like), but who relies on the technological infrastructure of his supporting nation-states.

Next, our communications policy must facilitate support our three fundamental principles.  As with cyberspace policies, our communications policy must include both defensive and offensive (including information war) guidance.  After protecting our computing systems, and so the infrastructure and other systems which depend on these for functionality, communications is most important.  An intact cyberspace is foundational to our Defense capability, but we must be able to communicate with our soldiers, our systems, and our infrastructure, our finances, and we must be able to disrupt, to destroy, our enemy’s ability to communicate with his.

Thus, our communications policy must be aimed at ensuring the security of our communications—both in terms of hardening against espionage or real-time eavesdropping and in terms of reliability.  When a unit commander needs to communicate with a soldier, or a space asset, he must be able to do so promptly and with assured contact, and when Headquarters must communicate their commanders in theater and so on down the chain, and/or with a space asset, they must be able to do so promptly and with assured contact.  The information coming back to the commander (at this point I’m deliberately eliding civilian communications, for instance with financial entities; in this context, civilian communications are variations on  this principle theme) must be rapid, reliable, and as accurate as the sensors and soldiers who are initiating the information.

Our communications policy must have two offensive components.  One is an ability directly to attack our enemy’s ability to communicate with his soldiers, his systems, his infrastructure, his finances, and this capability must be able, at our choice, freely to eavesdrop on and to fatally disrupt, if not completely destroy, those communications.  The other component is information dissemination.  Our communications policy must facilitate the rapid, reliable spread both of truth and of propaganda to our enemy’s civilian population, and it must support the rapid and reliable spread of disinformation to our enemy’s military and civilian leadership.  And we must be able to strike, if not first, then in immediate response, as well as repeatedly without regard to our enemy’s subsequent actions.

Finally, space is almost as new a conflict terrain for us as is cyberspace, and we have lost our access to it, except through begging rides from our potential adversaries.  We do retain an ability to reach LEO, in a benign environment, with satellites, but our most likely nation-state adversaries are capable of reaching farther into space—reaching higher ground—and they have active programs for improving on that, including increasing their military capabilities in space.  Accordingly, our next most important policy, and one directly related to our first fundamental Defense principle, is an effective space policy.

It is critical that we rebuild our failed national space program and that we make our own progress along this dimension.  This effort must involve both a new Federal space agency, replacing the wholly dysfunctional National Aeronautical and Space Agency with a body that is capable of assisting DoD in developing the requisite space-oriented and -based assets, and a commercial industry capable of exploiting the resources in space and of supporting national control of that high ground.

Thus, our space policy must center on development of transportation into space and the development of weapons and communications systems that either will pass through space en route to their destinations or that will reside in space.  This policy also must facilitate commercial exploitation of space and of the bodies in space, beginning with the moon and the debris that collects at L4 and L5, and moving outward (and inward) in the solar system.  This facilitation, though, should be limited to a sharing of technologies and techniques with our domestic commercial enterprises.  An example of this sharing is early NASA’s technology transfers to private enterprise during NASA’s heyday of the Mercury and Apollo programs.

With these policies in place, which are primary in supporting our three fundamental principles, along with effective policies covering such other important Defense needs as acquisition, training, general technology development, and so on, we can begin to outline the force structures that will effect our fundamental principles.  That’s the subject for a later post.

National Defense Cuts vs National Defense Purpose

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Yochi J. Dreazen  of the National Journal describes the announced US military reduction as follows.  He characterizes the reduction as “a decisive shift away from manpower-heavy counterinsurgencies like Afghanistan,”  and this isn’t inaccurate.  Our military leadership, in fact, insists

that ground wars like Afghanistan are a thing of the past while air and naval conflicts with nations like Iran or China represent the most important threats of the future. The document explicitly said the Pentagon will shift military and financial resources away from Europe and toward the Middle East and Asia-Pacific regions.

and consequently,

potentially significant cuts to the size of the Army and Marine Corps[.]

However,

Both men [Panetta and Obama] have previously indicated that the purchases of costly armaments like the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter, the most expensive warplane ever built, and several next-generation types of warships may be slowed or reduced to save money, though they offered no new details on Thursday.

There are some problems with this thinking, though.  In the first place, if the primary upcoming threats are Iran and the PRC, then what do they call the terrorist organizations like the ones actively at war with us now?  These are just competitors, then?

Secondly, if we’re to rely on our Navy in the Asia-Pacific region, and PRC is building up its navy, its long-range counter-ship capability, and its air force, how will we deter and defeat that threat without modernized—and more—ships?

Thirdly, do we no longer care about the safety of our only reliable ally in the Middle East, Israel?  Are there no important threats there to our interests or to our ally?  Or, for how long do the Pentagon and the White House expect that Israel can hold out while we’re “spoiling” an attack there, perhaps one by a nuclear Iran, while we are fully engaged elsewhere?

Additionally, air and naval forces can’t seize and hold territory—which is what terrorist organizations and their supporting nations, as well as directly threatening nations occupy.  To defeat these enemies, we need to take their territory away from them and hold it ourselves until a more peaceable government can be installed.  That requires ground forces not merely equipped and trained to the task, but numerous enough for it, as well.

Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta says

The U.S. joint force will be smaller and it will be leaner.   The Army and Marine Corps will no longer need to be sized to support the kind of large-scale, long-term stability operations that dominated military priorities…over the past decade.

He’s partly correct.  The Marines are an expeditionary force, best used for power projection and for breaking down the barriers to entry into enemy territory, and it’s the Army’s job to complete that entry and then to effect the subsequent destruction of the enemy’s ability to prosecute his war against us.  Reversion of the Marines to its primary role—if that’s what’s actually intended, and not simply a “cost-saving” across the board slashing of manpower for its own sake—is a useful move.  However, also stripping the Army of the numbers it needs to do its job—and there is a threshold number required, regardless of skill and equipage—simply strips us of our ability to protect ourselves.

Dreazen adds

Canceling or curtailing planned weapons buys is always difficult politically because lawmakers typically work to shield armaments built in their states as a way of saving jobs. It is likely to be even harder now because of election-year partisanship and legitimate concerns about the Pentagon taking steps that would almost certainly mean job losses at a time of deep economic weakness throughout the U.S.

To a large extent, though, as with the “smaller and leaner” bit above, this is only partially true.  Where weapons systems cuts are legitimate—the F-22 is a prime example of a boon-doggle, and the F-35, within the new defense concept, is of questionable value, unless it can deliver the goods in the secondary “spoiling” engagements elsewhere in the world that is a part of this new “fight one and hope for the best everywhere elsedenying and deterring aggression elsewhere” strategy—the systems should be eliminated and the funds put to better use in the DoD.

On the other hand, systems that are necessary for this new strategy (vis., modernized and enlarged naval forces, longer-ranged air forces with larger payloads and better protection systems, and additional forward basing systems in places like, oh say, the Republic of China, the Republic of the Philippines, the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, the Republic of India) will need to be increased, not cut.  Congressmen of all parties and independencies will have to decide whether they’re going to be partisan hacks for favored private companies or Representatives of their constituents come together with their fellows at the Federal level, and look to doing what’s best for the nation as a whole: making the requisite cuts here and increases there, regardless of personal political profit.

Finally, I have to ask:  Is Panetta now suggesting we have no more need of dealing with terrorists?  The GWOT is over?  As I mentioned above, neither insurgency and its associated terrorism, nor terrorism directed against us or our friends and allies, are destroyed unless someone is prepared, in the aftermath of the fighting, to occupy the territory and engage in “stability operations.”  In the end, assuming we’ve won the proximate fight, who else will conduct the stability operations?  The just defeated nation?  With what resources, and to what motivated end?  Europe?  With what resources?  They ran out of bombs five minutes into the Libyan No Fly campaign and had to drop American ordnance for the duration.  Given that failure, from where will Europe get the manpower and equipment—including civil engineering manpower and equipment—to conduct stability operations?  Or is Panetta’s plan to simply to shoot up the area, crush the enemy forces in the field, for today, and then just walk away?  This seems somehow…incomplete.

In the end, the Pentagon and the White House seem to have lost sight of a fundamental tenet: quantity has a quality of its own.  What’s the value of the best trained, best equipped, most courageous and dedicated force in the world if it can be overwhelmed by sheer numbers from an attacker that cares not a whit about his own casualty rate, so long as he kills and wins the battle?  The terrorists in the World Trade Center attacks achieved ~110:1 kill ratio, and at Mumbai the terrorists achieved a kill ratio of nearly 20:1.  Across both attacks, one attacker survived.  The enemy simply didn’t care; he achieved his goals.

In the Korean War, the PRC forces kept coming against the American and Republic of Korean forces, absorbing enormous casualties to achieve their victories.  Over the course of the Chosin Reservoir battle, for instance, the Chinese absorbed nearly 50% casualties in their attempt to pen up and destroy an Allied force half their size at the start of the battle.  Even though the allied force escaped, the Chinese carried the battlefield, and so they counted the outcome as worth its cost.

Our enemies don’t think like us; it’s foolish—and fatal—to base our planning, strategy, and tactics on the assumption that they do.

It appears the present “draw-down” is based more on political rationale than on the evolving threat environment.  Our new national defense concept seems based on a muddled, ill-thought out view of the purpose of our national defense, and of who the threats against us really are.

There are nation-states that remain our enemies and would like nothing more than to see our destruction.  War is not out of the question with these.  There are non-national organizations that already are at war with us, intending to destroy us.  The force structures and capability sets necessary to engage and destroy these threats are as different from each other as are the threats themselves.

Does any rational person really think the proposed rump military that will result from the present reduction will be capable of being fully engaged simultaneously against both types of threats and defeat them—rather than itself being destroyed in those battles leaving us disarmed and helpless?  Or that it’ll be able to function at all without control of the high ground—space—which went completely unmentioned?

National Defense or National Security

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When did they become mutually exclusive concepts?  In the Progressive meme, the downsizing of the US’ status in the world is in full force.  Because of cuts to our national security—our defense—budget driven by Progressive intransigence in cutting spending anywhere at all and their parallel intransigence in demanding increased taxes, our military capability is shrinking dramatically.  Rather than being able to fight two wars simultaneously, which we have been able to do for decades, the defense cuts will reduce us to being able only to

…fight and win one major conflict, while also being able to “spoil” a second adversary’s ambitions in another part of the world while conducting a number of other smaller operations, like providing disaster relief or enforcing a no-flight zone.

Notice that: we’ll be able to win once (maybe—war always is an iffy thing) and only hold elsewhere, hoping for a miracle there.

This is based on the idea of a superfluous military—we won the Cold War 20 years ago, for crying out loud, and if we hadn’t had this large military-industrial complex, we would never have been able to start those evil wars in Iraq or Afghanistan.  Besides, defense spending has been going up and up and up, and we need to stop it.

But here’s a graph that sheds some light on that last (I’ll not dignify the others with a response.  (a hostile Russia and China, 9/11, a nuclear Iran, Saddam’s inhuman butchery are sufficient answer.)

Notice that.  As a percent of GDP, defense spending has been remarkably stable.

Nevertheless, for the sake of national security, defense spending must be cut—the deficits and debts are too great and they threaten the weal and the safety of the nation.  The debt and the deficit picture certainly are as threatening as they’re made out to be, but consider: with no defense capability, where is the security?

What do we gain, though, by cutting defense?  Consider these items, courtesy of Neptunus Lex:

…shutting the doors on DoD entirely would still result in an $800 billion increase to next year’s aggregate deficit….

…radically reduce the ground forces, a couple of fighter wing equivalents and at least one or two aircraft carriers—the same forces which have allowed the US since the Cold War days to provide forward presence and deterrence.

Which is actually OK, because the Islamic Republic of Iran has just told us that the USS John C. Stennis is no longer welcome in their neck of the woods….

Well, at least one of those carriers won’t be needed, since it’s worn out its welcome in Iran as well as in DC.

One Progressive argument is that we can get away with such draconian cuts.  Even with cuts as deep as 90%, we can still wipe our attackders off the face of the earth.  But there are a couple of flaws with this argument.  The first is a moral one—and so a practical one.  With such deep cuts, we could wipe our enemies off—by going nuclear.  But with no intermediate capabilities, we’re stuck with the moral, and practical, choice of nuclear war or surrender.  There aren’t any intermediate options with such deep cuts.

The other flaw, though, goes to that ability to go nuclear.  Our nuclear weapons are aging.  They need testing and upgrade.   That takes money that’s being cut from the defense budget.  In the end, we have to ask ourselves, “what is the value of our nuclear weapons when we can’t count on them working?”  while our enemies are asking us, “Do you feel lucky, punk?  Well, do you?”

But the whole “we can cut defense” attitude suffers from another fundamental misconception.  It assumes that our enemies think like us, that their pain level is similar to ours, that their goals are similar to ours.

What do we gain by cutting defense rather than cutting somewhere else?   We keep three entitlement programs that are bankrupting us, and that will continue to do so, even after gutting national defense: Social Security, and Medicare, Medicaid.  But those are the programs that politicians use to buy votes with which to stay in power.

In the end, national defense and national security aren’t mutually exclusive.  Without both, we have neither.