Defense Horizons

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  Rediscovering the Infantry in a Time of Transformation

  E.J. "Bing" West

  In the summer of 2001, the Bush administration expressed impatience with the military services, suggesting that unspecified legacy capabilities had to give way to a “transformation” that would be based upon “stealth, precision weaponry, and information technologies.” Operations in Afghanistan, however, have shown the wisdom of today’s balanced force structure. In the current campaign, all-source intelligence has been used to vector teams on the ground, which in turn have identified targets for aircraft that have shattered the opposing forces. The result has been devastating air power controlled by Americans on the ground, with a psychological effect rippling far beyond Afghanistan. All governments inclined to harbor anti-American terrorists now understand that the consequences may be their removal from power, not just a few cruise missiles hitting empty buildings.

  U.S. ground forces, however, are still vulnerable; they lag far behind the resources devoted to air and high-level command, control, and communications (C³). Now is the time to recognize the multifaceted roles of the rifleman and to recapitalize the infantry. A transformation based upon facts rather than theory would shift resources from C3 niceties for high-level staffs to force protection essentials for the people doing the fighting.

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  High-Energy Lasers: Technical, Operational, and Policy Issues

  Elihu Zimet

  After more than 30 years of technology development and many billions of dollars in investment, the Department of Defense is poised to operationally deploy its first high-energy laser (HEL) weapon system, the airborne laser. The unique attributes of an HEL—speed-of-light delivery of energy, surgical precision, variable lethality, and multiple target engagement—could significantly alter the balance between offensive and defensive weapons or provide options for nonlethal weapons. On the other hand, the long development period and large outlay of funding to date suggest the significant technical, operational, and policy challenges of fielding such systems.

  This paper considers the unique and promising attributes of HEL weapon systems and examines the technical challenges, at both the system and component level, that need to be overcome for an HEL to be competitive against alternative weapon systems. Related operational and policy issues are also discussed. The paper concludes that advances in HEL technology emphasizing speed, precision, and flexibility together with the ongoing transformation of the military services have both indicated the need and provided the opportunity for further HEL development and testing.

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  Computer Simulation and the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty

  Peter D. Zimmerman and David W. Dorn

  All nuclear weapons now in the American stockpile were developed with the aid of computer models validated by comparison with nuclear tests. However, those models required the use of parameters that were not well understood and often needed adjustment to make computation and test agree. Facing the possibility of a test ban, the Department of Energy initiated a Stockpile Stewardship Project to develop a predictive capability with validated, physics-based simulation tools at its core. This program is charged with maintaining the performance, reliability, and safety of U.S. nuclear weapons without nuclear testing. To meet the requirement for maintaining the enduring stockpile, the Department of Energy engaged the three national weapons laboratories in creating the Accelerated Strategic Computing Initiative (ASCI). ASCI advanced computational capabilities and three dimensional models, combined with major experimental and testing facilities, should make it possible for the United States to maintain its present nuclear stockpile indefinitely. The authors believe that the ASCI computational capabilities also will enable nuclear weapon designers to draw on archived data from more than 1,000 nuclear tests to adapt proven designs to future mission requirements. Through extensive computer modeling and nonnuclear testing, new nuclear weapons could be designed and introduced into the stockpile, so long as the new weapons used design concepts similar to those proven in nuclear tests.

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  Maritime Access: Do Defenders Hold All the Cards?

  Arthur H. Barber III and Delwyn L. Gilmore

  National security strategy depends on sustaining access to world markets for American commerce in peacetime and for the Armed Forces to various parts of the globe in times of crisis or war. Potential nation-state adversaries understand the importance of this access and are devising strategies and investing in systems to delay, discredit, or deny U.S. entry to those regions of vital interest where they wish to become the dominant power. Most of these regions are adjacent to international waters where American naval forces freely operate today.

  Naval forces provide a valuable degree of sovereign and secure access in a strategic environment in which overseas land bases are becoming increasingly restricted politically and vulnerable militarily. The mobility and layered defensive capabilities of American warships, particularly those operating in carrier battle groups, make them the hardest of all tactical forces for an adversary to find, target, and effectively strike with antiaccess systems, such as cruise or ballistic missiles.

  State-of-the-art long-range surveillance systems, such as satellites, are ineffective against moving targets at sea. Mobility also keeps ships from being vulnerable to ballistic missiles and makes accurate, long-range targeting of antiship cruise missiles a great operational challenge. Moreover, the latest generation of weapon systems for defense against submarines and cruise missiles is extremely effective against the current and projected systems of potential adversaries. These defensive systems are fielded on many, but not all, U.S. ships because of budget constraints and past estimates that likely adversaries had minimal naval capabilities. As national strategy changes to one that accounts for more demanding antiaccess threats, the technology and operational skill will become available to sustain assured access for American naval forces.

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  UCAVs—Technological, Policy, and Operational Challenges

  Charles L. Barry and Elihu Zimet

  The Bush administration and Congress are in concert on the goal of developing a fleet of unmanned aircraft that can reduce both defense costs and aircrew losses in combat by taking on at least the most dangerous combat missions. Unmanned combat aerial vehicles (UCAVs) will be neither inexpensive enough to be readily expendable nor—at least in early development—capable of performing every combat mission alongside or in lieu of manned sorties. Yet the tremendous potential of such systems is widely recognized, and allies as well as potential adversaries are moving quickly to mount their own research and development programs. The United States is committed to fielding UCAV capabilities by 2010, principally for the missions of suppression of enemy air defense and deep strike, which are among the highest risk tasks for the Air Force and naval aviation.

  Currently, UCAVs are unproven, infant technologies just being designed, simulated, and demonstrated. Enthusiasts must be aware that significant technological, policy, and operational challenges must be met. An operational UCAV capability is not expected to be available to U.S. field and fleet commanders for 10 years. Yet a nexus of mature technologies, policy support, and operational needs has been reached, and it is both possible and necessary to accelerate development of UCAVs. Their potential is apparent, and there is sustained momentum behind programs for all the services.

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  Adapting Forces to a New Era: Ten Transforming Concepts

  Hans Binnendijk and Richard L. Kugler

  A key Department of Defense goal is to build highly capable forces whose mastery of high-tech warfighting will allow decisive victories against new threats and well-armed opponents in future operations. A set of new operational concepts, many of which have surfaced in the ongoing defense strategy review, may facilitate this goal. They focus on rapid and decisive operations in distant theaters rather than on homeland defense. As generic concepts for future warfighting, they offer valuable insights on combat capabilities that should be acquired. Before these principles can be adopted, they must be scrutinized on their individual merits and integrated to provide balanced guidance to force development.

  New operational concepts must be embedded in a sensible transformation strategy that should be carried out in measured, purposeful ways. The strategy should focus on the mid term, during which new threats may appear but entirely new forces will not be able to be built. The standard of preparing for two regional wars should be replaced with one that focuses on capabilities for the widening spectrum of conflict and operations in new geographic locations. A three-theater standard should be adopted that readies forces to wage one big war in any single theater while also having sufficient assets for medium-sized strike missions and traditional operations elsewhere. Transformation should strive to create adaptable forces that can handle shifting challenges, unfamiliar missions, and periodic strategic surprises. It should produce a future posture dominated by improved legacy forces but including some ultra-high-tech forces for special missions. If new operational concepts are capable of producing such forces and capabilities, they may deserve serious consideration.

  Ten new operational concepts have emerged as candidates for inclusion in transformation and Joint Vision 2020. These concepts focus on building better forces for multiple purposes and employing these forces in specific ways. If the concepts are adopted, creating combat and support forces for them will require programmatic measures. Many of the concepts can be pursued by reorganizing existing forces, continuing normal modernization, or acquiring new information systems and smart munitions. Nonetheless, they will require some budget increases plus a resource strategy that responds to fiscal constraints. Investing wisely in a full set of new concepts will produce stronger forces than focusing on a few concepts in ways that deprive others of funds. The combination of new concepts, not any of them individually, offers promise for the future. Moreover, these concepts, which focus on creating high-tech strike forces, must be accompanied by capabilities for low-intensity conflict and by investments in such often-overlooked areas as logistic support, bases and infrastructure, maintenance, and war reserves.

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  Managing Change: Capability, Adaptability, and Transformation

  Hans Binnendijk and Richard L. Kugler

  The Bush administration defense review is pointing to an era of far-reaching change in military strategy, forces, and technology. To succeed, this effort must be guided by a new set of strategic precepts. Since 1997, the precepts of shape, respond, prepare have helped guide how national security policy has approached change. In the coming years, capability, adaptability, and transformation can perform a similar function. The first and third precepts are well documented. The second, however, needs greater attention—not only because adaptability is important although easily overlooked, but also because it is a bridge between the other two precepts. These three precepts incorporate the main characteristics needed by the Armed Forces:

  • A core military capability to win wars today and support peacetime goals—a near-term concern.
  • The adaptability to modify that existing core capability to meet new strategic conditions—a mid-term concern.
  • A wise transformation that reorients the military to take advantage of new technologies for the long term.

  These precepts are compatible but must be pursued in a balanced and integrated manner that reflects their interconnection. The pursuit of near-term capabilities should be accompanied by enhanced efforts to create broader options for the mid term, in ways that establish a sound strategic foundation for longer-term visions. The near-term capability of the military can be preserved by keeping them sufficiently large and ready and by improving them in selected areas. In the mid term, their flexibility can be strengthened by adopting broader employment plans, reengineering current organizational structures, and fielding emerging technologies. In the long term, they can be transformed not only by modernizing existing weapons, but also by acquiring new types of platforms and technologies. Even in an era of tight fiscal constraints, this threefold challenge can be met if a balanced approach is followed—thereby preserving the hard-won strategic effectiveness of the military not only in the coming years but the distant future as well.

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  Resurrecting Transformation for the Post-Industrial Era

  Douglas A. Macgregor

  We must hold our minds alert and receptive to the application of unglimpsed methods and weapons. The next war will be won in the future, not in the past. We must go on, or we will go under.

  —General of the Army Douglas A. MacArthur, while serving as Chief of Staff, 1931

  The Bush administration took office amid high hopes for the fundamental transformation of the Armed Forces. Yet within months, the problem that transformation was designed to solve—changing a large, expensive Industrial Age structure, especially the Army, into a leaner, more strategically agile Information Age force—receded as more pressing issues arose. Instead of being transformed, Cold War military structures will remain unchanged for the time being, while morale and quality of life are shored up. Into this policy vacuum, military leaders have tossed an expensive collection of wish lists that tend to one of two extremes: a bigger, faster, better version of some platform already in use, or something out of science fiction with delivery timelines that stretch all the way to 2032.¹ Although these modernization programs are billed as promoting transformation, they are business as usual.

  Fortunately, this is not the whole story. Help may be on the way. The terms of reference for the current Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) anticipate the emergence of new ground, naval, and air forces reorganized for “more rapidly responsive, scalable, modular task-organized units, capable of independent combat action as well as integration into larger joint and combined operations”² sometime after 2006. How the bureaucratic politics of service-centric operational thinking and single-service modernization will produce this outcome is unclear.

  This statement also begs the question, why wait until 2006 to build joint warfighting capabilities with today’s forces and technologies when the United States needs—and can achieve—these capabilities now to protect its global interests? Experience in the private sector demonstrates that successful corporations do not plan to transform in the distant future; they transform constantly, just as the world around them transforms. Military transformation is a process, not an end-state that depends on exotic technologies that may not be available for decades. America can lose its position of military dominance only by standing still and investing in the past.

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  Current Export Policies: Trick or Treat?

  David R. Oliver Jr.

  Any discussion of export controls needs some context. How did the current system evolve? What is it intended to protect? More than two decades ago, during the height of the Cold War, a well-placed spy told us that more than 5,000 Soviet war systems depended on U.S.-made parts. To throw sand in the communist machine, Richard Perle, then in the Reagan administration, conceived of a system of export control licenses, with accompanying stiff financial and jail penalties, to stop American companies from exporting anything that might conceivably be of technological value to the Soviets. A bureaucracy of hundreds of people at Defense, State, Commerce, Justice, and Treasury was put into place to enforce this policy. Most people, and I am one of them, believe Perle's system worked and was precisely the right system for that time.

  But times change, and bureaucracies, once in place, do not atrophy for lack of relevance. Outside stimulus is required. The people put in place during the Cold War have since worked diligently to perfect their system. Not only were they determined to prevent gun running and the export of items to construct nuclear weapons but also, with the passage of time, they began to ensure nothing of possible military value crossed our borders. This bureaucracy has become increasingly more complex and stifling. Three years ago, when a U.S. company imported a key component for a satellite control station from France (a traveling wave tube), and, when the tube was found to be broken, the U.S. company was denied permission to send it back to France to get a refund! The bureaucracy knows not what it does. The Berlin Wall has fallen, the Soviet Union has collapsed, Kosovo has come and gone, but nothing has changed in the bureaucracy's warren of regulations, reviews, and delays. Working on a Cold War course, the bureaucrats have succeeded in digging a regulatory pit so deep as to cripple the most powerful arm of U.S. foreign policy--trade--as well as the international relationships and friendships that come from commerce.

  As soon as they hear the word trade, most Americans lose interest. We have mixed feelings about industry. We worry whether there is sufficient (if any) patriotism in the boardroom of a multinational corporation. In addition, we do not like to think of America as an arms merchant. We are not interested in making some fat-cat American industrialist rich at the expense of a shopkeeper in Brazil. But the real issues for America are much, much larger. With our current export control policy, we limit and hurt friends and weaken the U.S. military and our allies.