Tag Archives: defense policy

Another Thought on Self Defense

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I wrote, a short time ago, about individual self-defense.  In this post, I’d like to explore a little bit of the self-defense rights of a nation.  Senator Jon Kyle (R, AZ) asked, in a Wall Street Journal op-ed, “What’s at Stake in the Missile-Defense Debate?”  His question also raises a larger question concerning a nation’s right to self-defense.  I’ll address the second question first, then I’ll talk about the role of missile defenses within that right.

As our Declaration of Independence acknowledges, all men have a right, among other things, to our Lives, our Liberty, and our Happiness.  In that earlier post I demonstrated the right, and the obligation, of each individual to defend himself—lethally, if necessary—against threats to himself, his family, his property, and to extend that defense to others whom he might see under similar threat.

Far too often, that individual is incapable of conducting that defense, even acting in concert with a few of his fellows.  This is why, as Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, et al., have demonstrated, men come together to form social compacts, nations, with governing structures.  Universal among these men’s demonstrations was a purpose of those compacts: to defend the individual members against external threats.  Thus, nations are formed for an explicit purpose of defending its citizens—of defending itself.

The right of a nation to defend itself thus flows directly from its members’ individual rights to defend themselves.

Within a national right of self-defense, where do missile defenses fit?  Plainly, a nation that does not use all of the tools at its disposal is limiting itself in its ability to carry out its duty of defending its citizens, of defending itself.  A nation that disgorges itself of any of the tools it has, and/or turns its back on acquiring all the tools it might, that are useful in defending itself is turning its back entirely on its obligation to defend itself.

This failure is exacerbated in a nuclear world, where one of the weapons of attack is fully capable of destroying an entire city, murdering the hundreds of thousands or millions of people who live(d) there.  A missile defense capability becomes critical to national defense, even to national survival, when such offensive destruction is possible.  Certainly, a missile defense of the kind discussed by Lyle and dismissed by President Obama is useful only against missiles and is not proof against those missiles.  However, with our enemies capable of missile delivery of nuclear destruction, not defending against that threat is not just amoral, it’s actively immoral.

For the United States to walk away from a maximally capable defense capacity solely to appease our enemies who have that nuclear offensive capability is not just amoral, it’s actively immoral.  Yet this appears to be the path on which Obama is setting us.  He already has withdrawn missile defenses against rogue Iranian missiles from eastern Europe (where they could defend Israel and Europe against Iranian attack) at Russia’s behest.  Now he’s telling outgoing Russian President Dmitri Medvedev and incoming Russian President Vladimir Putin that, given time to win his reelection before being pressed on our missile defense system, he’ll then no longer be accountable, and he can give the Russians everything they want in the complete removal of any American missile defense capacity.

Senator Kyle rightly points out legal concerns about this course.

[President Obama] may have to ignore or circumvent commitments he made to Congress to secure support for the 2010 New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (Start)—among them, that he would deploy all four phases of planned U.S. missile-defense systems for Europe, and that he would modernize the Ground-based Midcourse Defense (GMD) system for the protection of the U.S. homeland.

Never mind that acceding to Russian demands would eliminate

…the only U.S. theater missile-defense system capable of catching intercontinental-range Iranian missiles, making it important for the defense of our homeland.

Senator Kyle adds

It is questionable whether concessions on missile defense would induce Russia to further reduce its nuclear arsenal.  Unlike the U.S., Russia maintains a robust nuclear warhead production capability, and its national security strategy is to increase reliance on nuclear weapons.  Russia is also modernizing ICBMs and submarine-launched ballistic missiles.

Indeed.  I’m reminded of the Third Punic War.  Rome insisted that Carthage disarm itself, and Carthage acceded to the demand.  After that, Rome attacked, razed Carthage to the ground, occupied all Carthaginian territory, and enslaved its surviving people.

But Obama has said of his moves to eliminate our missile defenses

As a nuclear power – as the only nuclear power to have used a nuclear weapon – the United States has a moral responsibility….

Sorry.  The one who would unilaterally remove our ability to defend ourselves is in no position to discuss any part of our military posture.

Further, the champion of wealth distribution, of “you’ve made enough money,” give up what I’ve determined for you as excessive for me to redistribute; the champion of denying anyone his right to live his life to the fullest of his own potential through that wealth redistribution is in no position to lecture anyone on morality.

Some Thoughts on a Missile Shield

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Having gotten us to accede, back in 2009, to Russian demands that we not defend ourselves or our European allies against nuclear missile attacks from rogue states like Iran, the Russians are pushing the Obama administration around again.

Russian outgoing President Dmitry Medvedev is saying that any improvement to our—or to NATO’s—missile defense capability will be taken as breaking the existing nuclear parity with Russia, and they “will be forced” to retaliate.  Medvedev insists

No one has explained to me why we should believe that the new missile defense system in Europe isn’t directed against us.

He also has instructed his defense establishment that

By 2017-2018 we must be fully prepared, fully armed.

And he repeated an earlier threat to aim missiles at the U.S.-led NATO missile shield.  Left unspoken was his generals’ earlier explicit threat to immolate Poland with nuclear war if we were to put missile shield components there.  Never mind that the US has never been a threat to Russia or to Russian allies, while Russia has actively invaded and partitioned ours—Georgia being only the latest example, with Russian interference with Ukrainian elections their latest non-military interference.  And don’t forget the cyberwar they inflicted on Estonia in 2007.

President Obama’s response?  He hasn’t made one of substance.  “I don’t bluff,” he said in a different venue.  But what does that mean, if he has to protest that he doesn’t?

It’s clear to me that the Russian threats are a prime reason for going ahead with the deployment of a missile shield at our fastest pace.  And for updating and upgrading our military establishment generally, including our nuclear and cyber forces.

US and China’s Strategy

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Last week, Stratfor Global Intelligence published an assessment of the People’s Republic of China’s emerging strategy for dealing with the outside world.  In sum, there are three basic tenets to the developing strategy:

  • Paramount among them is the maintenance of domestic security.
  • The PRC’s industrial base, by design produces more than its domestic economy can consume, so the PRC must export goods to the rest of the world while importing raw materials.
  • The third strategic interest is in maintaining control over buffer states.

These are sequential interests; that is, each depends on the one prior, and internal security is, as Friedman writes, paramount.  Internal security in a nation of vast wealth and wealth mobility differences between, in China’s case, the coastal regions and the interior depends on keeping the people employed.  (On a related side note, it’s useful to recognize that these differences are exacerbated, among other things, by growing cultural differences between a coastal region that trades externally and so is exposed to the influences of the West and of the Republic of Korea and Japan on the one hand, and an impoverished interior, on the other, that still is “old-school” and is seen, also, as existing to supply those coastal regions with goods for export trade).  Thus, a need not only for export customers exists, but relevant to this post, a need for ensuring China’s sea lane security.  That third imperative is driven by a need to protect the population of core Chinese—Han China—which is concentrated in those coastal regions and the eastern third of China that is near those coastal regions.  Among other buffer states, the PRC count Tibet, and they would like to count the Republic of China sitting off the southeastern coast on Taiwan (which, by the way, sits on the northern mouth of the South China Sea and the southern mouth of the East China Sea).

As alluded to above, sea lanes for trade are important to Chinese economic, and so domestic, security.  Overland trade routes are both physically fraught with danger, given the terrain that must be crossed and the distances involved, and politically fraught: the countries that control that land aren’t entirely sympathetic to Chinese interests.  Those sea lanes, though, must pass through the South or East China Sea.

Mainland China has historically had difficulty depending on others for its own sustenance, originating from China’s view that it sits at the center of Heaven and so has no need of outside cooperation—the cooperation should move in the other direction.  This position has gone through a number of evolutions but remains essentially the same: we’ll go it alone, thank you very much; you’re welcome to come with us if you wish.  The view of not depending on others also is smart: what others might give, they can also take away, and then where would a dependent state be?  So China looks to securing, itself, its sea lanes, rather than depending on the British, and for the last 80 years,  the US—to maintain freedom of the seas.  China looks, though, not for freedom, but dominance over its seas as the optimal means of maintaining security.

Unable to engage the US Navy in a direct confrontation, though, China is developing other means of countering our Navy; although Friedman suggests that those alternate means are flawed.

While China has a robust land-based missile system, a land-based missile system is inherently vulnerable to strikes by cruise missiles, aircraft, unmanned aerial vehicles currently in development and other types of attack. China’s ability to fight a sustained battle is limited.  Moreover, a missile strategy works only with an effective reconnaissance capability.  You can’t destroy a ship if you don’t know where it is.  This in turn necessitates space-based systems able to identify U.S. ships and a tightly integrated fire-control system.

Friedman is right that this alone is insufficient, and he points out that China also is looking for sea ports in friendly (or at least “tradable with”) nations that are on the other end of some of those sea lanes.  China is paying, for instance, for most of or the construction of a sea port in Gwadar, Pakistan, as well as looking for similar accesses to ports in Colombo, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and elsewhere.  But having anchorages on either end of the sea lane doesn’t address the security of the lanes themselves.

It’s easy enough, the thinking goes, to effect a blockade of China by sitting on the outside edge of the two Seas, but until those anti-shipping missile sites have been taken out, even at that range, the blockading ships would be at risk.  (I discount the reduction in risk from the ships being mobile targets: even given the relatively slow flights of cruise missiles, ships are even slower; besides, en route and target area guidance systems—even on board ones—aren’t that hard to do anymore.)

For our part, the US is in the beginning stages of implementing a major strategic change and moving to emphasize the Pacific, and in particular the PRC, and deemphasizing Europe and the Atlantic.  DoD is intending to realign our military so that, for instance, 60% of our Naval assets will be focused on the Pacific and China, vice the current 52%.

But what does this mean in practical terms?  DoD, under President Obama’s instruction, is reducing its ship total from 285 as of last September to 220 by 2020, including a reduction from 11 carriers to 8, 53 attack submarines to 40, and eliminating altogether our guided missile submarines.  Worse, the average age of our Navy’s ships will be allowed to increase from its current 14 years to 19.  From a back of the envelope estimate, that “increase” of 52% to 60% of the Navy’s assets concentrating on the Pacific results in an actual reduction from 148 ships to 132.

It also ignores another part of the equation: while we’re busily becoming a threat (in Chinese eyes) to China’s nearby sea lanes, what about China’s more distant sea lanes—the ones that pass through the Indian Ocean, the North and South Atlantic, the Panama Canal?  And what about our own, more nearby sea lanes—those traversing the same North and South Atlantic Oceans and the Panama Canal?  And the Indian Ocean, which is important to us not only for commerce, but to support our allies and friends in the Middle East, western Asia, eastern Africa?  And to get to our allies and friends that form the rim of the South China Sea and to support our own Navy operating in theater?

So the question for the Chinese, and for our administration, comes down to this: in the event of a conflict between the PRC and the US that gets serious enough that we’d need to consider a blockade, what happens next?

China will look at the conflict between us and northern Korea and between us and Iran over whether either of those two should possess nuclear weapons (and in one case, then destroy, utterly, a life-long ally of ours), and it will decide to press ahead with its actions and run a US blockade, at gunpoint, if needs be—even with their inferior navy.  Indeed, given our administration’s repeatedly demonstrated penchant for shaking its finger very firmly at our adversaries and then accommodating them, on what basis would China take our Navy’s still superior capability seriously?  When have northern Korea or Iran—or Israel recently—taken our capabilities seriously?  What is the value of military superiority, or capability of any sort, when there is no will to use it, and China, northern Korea, Iran, and now Israel know that?

Iran, Nuclear Weapons, and Sanctions

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Our intel suggests that Iran can build a nuclear weapon in about a year.  The Obama administration that that’s time for economic sanctions to work and to convince Iran not to go ahead.  This week, President Obama implored Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu not to go through with a preemptive attack on Iran’s nuclear development facilities.  But is it true?  If Iran is within a year of building a nuclear weapon, can sanctions work at all anymore?

Consider: for sanctions to work, the Iranian government must agree that the costs of those sanctions are greater than the gains from possessing nuclear weapons.  Stipulate, arguendo, that the latest round of sanctions work insofar as oil sales are cut off, that Russia and China don’t continue to trade with Iran, simply bypassing the global financial network.  What are those costs?  Economic dislocation.  High prices.  Scarcity of goods.  But no one dies.  Everyone is safe.

Think about the sanctions that have been in place all these last several years: the Iranians don’t have any gasoline for their cars, for instance—and this one is largely self-inflicted.  They’re major oil exporters, but they’ve made a conscious decision not to do any refining domestically.  Food is expensive, the transportation network undermaintained and cumbersome to use.  Internet, cell phone, etc. contact with the outside world for the general population is hard to achieve.  Most goods beyond bare necessities are hard to come by, and their prices are very high.  Yet their nuclear weapons development program is proceeding apace and has been all along.  What are the gains?  I’ll come back to these below.

Consider: why does Iran want nuclear weapons?  It isn’t only for the status of being a nuclear power.  There are three primary purposes for nuclear weapons.  On the occasion of their first use, the reason was to hold down total casualties—both friendly and enemy—associated with invading a mountainous island nation.  Later, the weapons’ purpose was in their existence: to deter attack by others, whether those others also were nuclear powers  or not.  The third reason for having nuclear weapons is to use them, and/or to give/sell them to surrogates who will use them.

In a 2005 interview with an American journalist, the then leader of Hezbollah (an Iranian proxy terror organization), Hussein al-Moussawi, said

We are not fighting so that you will offer us something. We are fighting to destroy you.

Moreover, the Iranian government is on record, repeatedly, as saying that they want to see Israel wiped off the map.  They want to kill the Great Satan (i.e., us).  It’s clear that Iran wants nuclear weapons to use them and/or to pass them to others who will use them.

For sanctions to have the effect on the Iranian government we expect them to have, the Iranian government has to think like we do.  But they don’t think like us.  Moreover, their tolerance for pain is higher than ours.

What will Iran gain from obtaining nuclear weapons?  The destruction of Israel.  Weapons to pass to surrogates for use within the United States—and Europe—to kill as many of us and them as can be done—even to destroy us.

Will sanctions work on Iran?  Can Iran be dissuaded without military force, in this environment and with this mind set, from obtaining nuclear weapons?

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.