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.

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.