The Maturing Revolution in Military Affairs (Pt. 1)

2011

How much has the United States embraced the late-20th century Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA)? And how might this particular RMA impact the conduct of war over the coming decades? In attempting to answer these questions, Barry Watts offers a short but honest answer – it depends.

Chapter 1: Overview

In 1992, the Office of Net Assessment (ONA), Office of the Secretary of Defense, began circulating an assessment of a prospective late-twentieth-century military-technical revolution (MTR). Soviet military theorists had been discussing the possibility of a third twentieth-century revolution in military affairs (RMA) since the mid-1970s.[1] Written by (then Army Lieutenant Colonel) Andrew F. Krepinevich, ONA’s MTR assessment sought to explore the hypothesis that Soviet theorists were right in predicting that advances in precision munitions, wide-area sensors, and computerized command and control (C2) would bring about fundamental changes in the conduct of war.[2] As Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov, then chief of the Soviet General Staff, observed in 1984, these developments in non­nuclear means of destruction promise to “make it possible to sharply increase (by at least an order of magnitude) the destructive potential of conventional weapons, bringing them closer, so to speak, to weapons of mass destruction in terms of effectiveness.”[3] The Soviets introduced the term “reconnaissance-strike complex” (or “RUK” from the Russian Рекогносцировочно-yдарный комплекс) to describe the integration of missiles with precision-guided sub-munitions, area sensors such as the airborne Pave Mover SAR/MTI (synthetic-aperture radar/ moving-target-indicator) radar, and automatedC2.[4]

By 1987, Andrew Marshall, the Pentagon’s Director of Net Assessment, had concluded that the Soviets were correct in their judgment that these new tech­nologies would not merely make current forces marginally better in fighting with existing operational concepts and organizations, but would revolutionize war’s conduct.[5] In late January 1991, with Operation Desert Storm underway and mounting evidence of the efficacy of “stealthy” F-117s and F-111Fs delivering laser- guided bombs (LGBs) against key Iraqi targets, Marshall asked Krepinevich to undertake what became the 1992 MTR assessment.[6] Krepinevich had originally been hired by Marshall to work on the military balance in Europe between North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and Warsaw Pact forces. But with the tear­ing down of Berlin Wall in November 1989, German reunification in October 1990, and serious negotiations between George H. W. Bush’s administration and the Soviet leadership under Mikhail Gorbachev on reducing conventional forces in Europe, further work on this assessment had obviously been overtaken by events.

ONA’s 1992 MTR assessment precipitated the debate within the U.S. national security establishment during the 1990s over the RMA and, later, over defense transformation. In time, discussion of the RMA and transformation spread over­seas. In the case of NATO, the institutional manifestation of this ongoing debate is the Allied Command Transformation organization, created in 2003 to lead the military transformation of alliance forces and capabilities using new operational concepts and doctrines.[7]

What kind of transformation did the MTR assessment and ONA anticipate? As early as the summer of 1993, Marshall was suggesting that one plausible way in which warfare might change was that long-range precision strike would be­come “the dominant operational approach.” [8] The other idea about how warfare might change was the emergence of “what might be called information warfare.”[9] Starting in July 1993, Marshall also began substituting the term “revolution in military affairs” for “military-technical revolution” to emphasize his sense that while technological advances were making this particular MTR possible, the revo­lution itself would only be realized when new operational concepts had been devel­oped and, in many cases, new military organizations had been created.[10] Contrary to the presumption of many observers, he thought that technology would be the least important element of a mature RMA predicated on precision strike.

What exactly is a revolution in military affairs? Building on his 1992 MTR assessment, Krepinevich argued in 1994 that an RMA is:

what occurs when the application of new technologies into a significant number of military systems combines with innovative operational concepts and organizational adaptation in a way that fundamentally alters the character and conduct of con­flict … by producing a dramatic increase—often an order of magnitude or greater—in the combat potential and military effectiveness of armed forces. [11]

A decade later, Michael Vickers and Robert Martinage wrote that military revolutions “are periods of discontinuous change that render obsolete or subor­dinate existing means for conducting war.”[12] Their characterization is very close to Richard Hundley’s 1999 definition of an RMA as a paradigm shift in military operations that obsolesces one or more core competencies of a dominant player or creates one or more new core competencies.[13] In all these definitions, it is not the speed with which changes in war’s conduct occur but their magnitude as re­flected in the emergence of new operational concepts and organizations, thereby generating new military competencies or obsolescing earlier ones.[14]

By 2009, more than a decade and a half had passed since ONA’s 1992 MTR assessment. Given the protracted nature and exigencies of ongoing conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, very few in the U.S. national-security establishment were giving much thought to RMAs and transformation during 2008 or 2009. For this reason, the time seemed ripe to take a fresh look at past progress and future prospects for changes in war’s conduct fundamental enough to be considered rev­olutionary or a paradigm shift. Toward this end, in 2009 ONA sponsored a series of three workshops aimed at addressing the following questions:

· First, how much progress has the American military made since the early 1990s in exploiting the late-twentieth century revolution in military affairs foreseen by Soviet theorists since the mid-1970s?

· Second, what progress have other nations or competitors made in exploiting the RMA?

· Third, assuming one or more RMAs are in fact underway, will their further development or maturation necessitate major adjustments in military technol­ogy, weaponry, operational concepts, and organizational structures between now and 2050—particularly for the U.S. military?

Chapter 2: Metrics for Assessing Progress

The initial RMA workshop in March 2009 largely floundered over the first of the preceding questions: How much progress has the U.S. military made since 1992 in exploiting an emerging RMA precipitated by precision munitions, wide-area sensors, and computerized C2? Marshall had long used the interwar years 1918–1939 as a yardstick for estimating how much progress the U.S. Army, Navy, Marine Corps and Air Force had made in embracing new ways of fighting cen­tered on the prospect of reconnaissance-strike complexes dueling one another from long distances. In 1993, for instance, he argued that the use of precision munitions, the stealthy F-117, and the Joint Surveillance and Target Attack Radar System (JSTARS) in the 1991 Persian Gulf War should be seen as something like the British Army’s initial attempt to employ massed tanks to break through German lines and restore movement to the battlefield at Cambrai in November 1917: a “first trial of new technology and new ways of operating.”[15] Using this tem­poral benchmark, the U.S. military Services in the early 1990s were, at best, on the threshold of a new warfare regime but still had a long way to go in mastering it. In the analogy to the military innovations of the 1920s and 1930s, Marshall felt that the American military in 1993 was “perhaps in 1922”—not yet fully able to foresee how war’s conduct would change.[16]

Marshall’s 1993 assessment that the American military was no further along than 1922 in the analogy to the interwar innovations such as Blitzkrieg and carrier aviation was not especially surprising. In 1993 American exploitation of emerging precision-strike capabilities was still immature. What precipitated controversy at the March 2009 workshop about American progress to date was Marshall’s insistence, a decade and a half later, that the American military Services had still not progressed beyond the equivalent of the late 1920s in the analogy to the period between the First and Second World Wars. Asked for his judgment on U.S. prog­ress to date at a March 2008 conference on net assessment, he replied that the U.S. military was still “not at 1930.” [17] Nor was Marshall at all inclined to revise this assessment after it was disputed at the March 2009 RMA workshop.

The most substantive argument advanced at the March workshop for thinking that the U.S. military Services have progressed much further than the late 1920s was based on their burgeoning use of precision munitions. The U.S. military, some workshop participants insisted, was already well down the road in making the transition from the unguided weapons regime that had dominated warfare since ancient times to the precision-strike era of guided weapons and battle networks that began emerging late in the Vietnam War. To give a sense of how far the U.S. military has progressed, in 1991 some 92 percent of the more than 230,000 mu­nitions expended in the Operation Desert Storm air campaign were unguided; in 2003, total expenditures in the Operation Iraqi Freedom air campaign were less than 28,000 munitions, of which some 65 percent were guided and included both LGBs as well as all-weather Joint Direct Attack Munitions (JDAMs).[18] Moreover, harking back to the definition of an RMA as an order-of-magnitude increase in effectiveness, after Desert Storm a Defense Science Board task force estimated that precision-guided munitions were twelve to twenty times more effective than unguided ordnance on a per-target-killed basis.[19] Today the U.S. military is the world leader by far in non-nuclear precision strike. No other military has a com­parable capability to bring non-nuclear precision weapons to bear at global dis­tances within hours to a few days. In light of these developments, one workshop participant went so far as to argue that, in Marshall’s analogy to 1918–1939, the American military had already progressed to the early 1960s.

Marshall did not buy this argument. His reason was that it depended on making the wrong choice of a metric or analytic measure for judging prog­ress. Unquestionably the U.S. military has come a long way in embracing non- nuclear guided munitions since 1991. But like the German campaign in Poland in September 1939, the conflicts the U.S. military has fought in Afghanistan and Iraq have not been against major adversaries with comparable military capabil­ities. Against the Taliban, the Iraqi army, al Qaeda terrorists, Sunni and Shia insurgents, and various jihadist fighters from Iran and elsewhere in the Arab world, the increasing use of guided munitions by American forces has been less about new ways of fighting than about improving the efficiency and effective­ness of traditional methods and organizations. U.S. progress in embracing the precision-strike-based revolution in military affairs should be assessed in rela­tion to capable adversaries with their own precision-strike capabilities rather than relative to opponents with third-rate military capabilities. Until the American military has undertaken the changes in weaponry, operational concepts and or­ganizations needed to cope with an opponent possessing large numbers of guided munitions and effective targeting networks, what a mature precision-strike re­gime would look like is essentially unknowable. This point goes to the heart of Marshall’s insistence that the American military is still not very far along in the precision-strike RMA. In hindsight, then, the disagreement at the March 2009 RMA workshop over U.S. progress to date in embracing the RMA was ultimately a disagreement over the proper choice of analytic measures.[20] Those who thought Marshall was wrong to argue that the American military was still not at 1930 in the analogy to 1918–1939 had, in his view, chosen the wrong metric.

Chapter 3: Focusing on Precision Strike

Marshall’s early hope for the three RMA workshops in 2009 was that they would generate fresh, concrete answers to the question about the changes in war’s conduct that a mature RMA might require. To unpack this issue a bit further: What significant changes in how wars are fought seem likely between now and 2050? How consequential might those changes be for the American military Services? And to what extent might other powers field weaponry, develop new operational concepts, or create new military organizations to exploit the unfolding RMA? Over the course of the three workshops Marshall narrowed his emphasis from future war in general to the narrower issue of a maturing precision-strike regime. In 1996 Michael Vickers had produced a comprehensive vision of how war’s conduct might change by 2015–2025.[21] Marshall’s initial intention was to have the workshops update Vickers’ 1996 forecast and extend it to mid-century. This goal proved too ambitious. By leaving the door open to everything from precision strike to cyberwar, bio- and nano-technologies, and directed energy, the insights on how war’s future conduct might change remained too sweeping and lacking in detail to satisfy Marshall. So, by the third workshop, in December 2009, he expressly narrowed the focus to precision strike. From this perspective the key questions seemed to be:

· In what ways, and to what extent, might the proliferation of both long-range and short-range precision-strike capabilities alter war’s conduct by mid-century?

· What other nations or groups besides the United States might exploit these capabilities and could they substantially reduce the U.S. lead?

· What are likely to be the key warfare areas in which it would be vital for the United States to preserve or create dominant positions in a maturing precision-strike regime?

In the early 1990s, after the 1992 MTR assessment was circulated, ONA began sponsoring a series of meetings, workshops and seminar-style war games aimed at helping the military Services think through the future of conventional war­fare. A common assumption in those events—particularly the war games—was that both sides would possess long-range strike systems. Nonetheless, as already mentioned, U.S. conventional forces have not yet been confronted with the chal­lenges of fighting within reach of enemy reconnaissance-strike complexes. Given the accelerating proliferation of guided munitions and targeting networks, how­ever, the day when American forces will face enemy precision-strike systems is surely approaching. The Chinese have developed over-the-horizon (OTH) radars that can locate U.S. carrier battle groups well out to sea along with a variant of the Deng Feng-21 (DF-21) ballistic missile to attack the carrier itself.[22] Fixed installa­tions such as Kadena Air Force Base on Okinawa are already within range of the DF-21.[23] Moreover, OTH radars and an anti-ship version of the DF-21 appear to be elements of a much broader effort by the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) to prevent U.S. forces from basing or operating close to the Chinese mainland. As defense secretary Robert Gates observed in 2008, Chinese “investments in cyber and anti-satellite warfare, anti-air and anti-ship weaponry, submarines, and bal­listic missiles could threaten America’s primary means to project power and help allies in the Pacific,” including U.S. bases, air and sea assets, and the networks that support them.[24] More recently, Admiral Robert Willard, commander of U.S. Pacific Command, disclosed that the Chinese were no longer merely trying to develop a conventional anti-ship ballistic missile (ASBM) based on the DF-21/ CSS-5; they were actually testing the new weapon.[25]

Nor is the People’s Republic of China (PRC) the only nation developing anti-access/area-denial (A2/AD) capabilities to constrain U.S. conventional military power. Aided by the more confined geography of the Persian Gulf, the Iranians are also fielding offensive and defensive missile systems that, in conjunction with advanced mines and the various naval combatants, could one day enable them to affect the flow of oil through the Strait of Hormuz. While Iran’s A2/AD capabili­ties are unlikely to have the long reach and sophistication of China’s, they could eventually be effective enough to make it very difficult and costly for U.S. naval forces to operate inside the Persian Gulf. Indeed, this is precisely the outcome that surfaced in Joint Forces Command’s Millennium Challenge war game in 2002. The Red Team, led by retired Marine Lieutenant General Paul Van Riper, mounted an unconventional surprise attack using the forces Iran was projected to have in 2007 and promptly sent sixteen U.S. ships to the bottom of the Persian Gulf. [26] Suffice it to say, as Iran’s anti-access/area-denial capabilities mature over time, they will be able to make it more difficult and potentially more costly for U.S. forces to operate in and around the Persian Gulf.

While U.S. thinking about an emerging precision-strike regime in the 1990s emphasized long-range RUKs, it is becoming increasingly apparent that the pro­liferation of short-range precision munitions will also pose challenges for the U.S. military. These systems include: guided rockets such as the U.S. Army’s Guided Multiple Launch Rocket System (GMLRS) and Excalibur 155-millimeter guided artillery round; the Precision Guidance Kit (PGK), which adds Global Positioning System (GPS) guidance to ordinary 105-mm and 155-mm artillery shells with a package that screws into the projectile’s fuse well; and various guided mortar rounds being developed in the United States and overseas. The fact that coun­tries such as France, Sweden, Israel, Russia, and Germany are making and sell­ing guided rocket, artillery, and mortar rounds argues that, in time, these sorts of precision munitions will even end up in the hands of terrorist organizations such as Hezbollah. Recall that in the summer of 2006, Hezbollah fired some four thousand rockets into Israel, the overwhelming majority of which were unguided 122-mm and 107-mm Katyushas.[27] It does not take much imagination to realize how much more devastating Hezbollah’s attacks would have been with precision munitions. Most of Hezbollah’s rockets in 2006 were aimed at entire Israeli cities due to their lack of accuracy, much as the Germans had been forced to do with the V-2 in 1944–1945. [28] But with modern guidance technologies, Hezbollah’s attacks could have been orders of magnitude more destructive than they proved in 2006. Even with a circular error probable (CEP) of 30 or 50 meters, Hezbollah fighters would have been able to aim at specific facilities rather than whole cities.[29]

The threat that precision weapons in the hands of third-world militaries, in­surgents or terrorists will pose for the U.S. military in coming years, then, is an emerging one. In Afghanistan and Iraq, mortars and rockets fired at U.S. bases have rarely been aimed with great precision, much less been precision guided. But as Marine Lieutenant General George Flynn has noted, the prospect of even non-state actors being able to hit more or less everything they aim at with precision-guided mortars, artillery and short-range rockets is not only worrisome, but un­avoidable as relatively inexpensive guided weaponry proliferates worldwide.[30]

The story of conventional precision strike from the early 1990s to the present, then, has been largely one of U.S. monopoly and dominance. That happy situa­tion, however, is coming to an end. In the years ahead, U.S. forces will be con­fronted with long-range RUKs such as those the Chinese are developing as part of a broader A2/AD strategy in the Western Pacific. At the same time, it appears to be simply a matter of time before American forces will be confronted with short-range precision weapons. The maturing precision-strike regime, therefore, will be one in which countries large and small, as well as terrorist organizations, will possess a variety of long- and short-range guided weapons.

Chapter 4: Possible Changes By 2050

What are some of the more consequential implications of the accelerating prolif­eration of precision-strike capabilities? A number of possibilities were discussed during ONA’s three 2009 RMA workshops. The December session was particu­larly fruitful in detailing how future wars between first-rate militaries are likely to be fought. The nuclear missile age matured during the 1960s as both the United States and the Soviet Union began fielding growing numbers of intercontinental-range ballistic missiles with the thermonuclear warheads. Although conventional guided weapons with “near-zero miss” had been foreseen by American strate­gists as early as 1975,[31] the era in which non-nuclear missiles—from guided mor­tar and artillery rounds to intercontinental ballistic missiles—would increasingly dominate warfare is only now dawning. Looking to the future, major changes in war’s conduct stemming from the maturation of conventional precision strike are likely to include the following:

· Growing U.S. dependence on space and cyberspace may prove a major vulner­ability to the operational concepts and organizations American forces have increasingly utilized since the early 1990s.

· Naval surface combatants such as aircraft carriers may no longer be sufficient­ly survivable when operating within reach of enemy anti-access/area-denial systems.

· The advantages of stealth—understood as mission planning and tactics plus low-observable platform signatures—may be eroded by advances in sensors and surface-to-air missile systems, especially for manned strike platforms op­erating inside defended airspace.

· Large or massed ground forces, major ports, and bases are likely to become highly vulnerable to enemy guided artillery, mortars, and missiles.

· Finally, traditional approaches to overseas power projection of conventional forces may grow too difficult and costly to sustain.

This list should not be construed as exhaustive. It omits, for example, the pos­sibility that the growing effectiveness of U.S. conventional precision weapons has already provided strong incentives for states such as Iran to develop nuclear weapons as insurance against the kind of regime change that the United States imposed on Saddam Hussein’s Iraq in 2003. Nevertheless, these five prospective ways in which significant changes in war’s conduct could occur provide consid­erable insight into the future evolution of the RMA based on the maturation of precision strike. Each will be explored in greater detail below.

Perhaps the most significant implication of these five possibilities is that the conduct of war is likely to change more fundamentally between now and 2050 than it has since the early 1990s. If so, then the changes in the dominant cul­tures, operational concepts and doctrines, and organizations that the U.S. mili­tary Services will need to embrace in coming years will be more significant and wrenching than any they have had to make since ONA’s 1992 MTR assessment. Here one need look no further than to the possible end of the era in which aircraft carriers dominate the world’s oceans.

Chapter 5: U.S. Dependence on Space and Cyberspace

Since the 1980s, the U.S. military’s approach to conventional operations has become ever more dependent on access to space-based systems—particularly long-haul satellite communications and the precision navigation and timing information provided by Global Positioning System constellation. During Operation Desert Storm in 1991, laser-guided bombs, Tomahawk Land Attack Missiles (TLAMs) and the GPS-aided Conventional Air-Launched Cruise Missile (CALCM) demonstrated that U.S. strike forces had the capability to hit almost any target whose location could be pinpointed. For this reason, the U.S. military has invested heavily in developing battle networks to detect, identify, and track targets with sufficient precision and timeliness to enable them to be struck. Intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance (ISR) systems such as the RQ-4 Global Hawk, the GPS constellation, and photo-reconnaissance satellites are examples of systems that reflect how dependent U.S. forces have become on access to the orbital and cyber dimensions of the global commons.

Figure 2 includes target imagery produced during an MQ-9 Reaper training mission at Creech Air Force Base in Nevada. The imagery is high quality and requires high bandwidth (understood as the rate at which data can be sent over a given communications link). [32] Figure 3 illustrates the dependence of the RQ-4 Global Hawk, MQ-1 Predator, and Reaper on Ku-band communications satellites (COMSATs) when these unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are operated over Iraq or Afghanistan from mission control centers located in California or Nevada. Currently, a single Predator orbit requires data rates up to 6.4 million bits/second (Mbps); and the electro-optical, infrared and synthetic aperture radar feeds from a single Global Hawk can potentially consume as much as 274 Mbps. These band­width requirements have been met by military and commercial COMSATs in geo­stationary orbits.[33] In addition, the UAVs themselves depend on GPS for precise geo-location of whatever their sensors are “seeing.” Thus, the targeting and battle- management networks integral to current U.S. strike operations contain vulner­abilities ranging from jamming C2 links to the covert insertion of false data into U.S. networks. During the major combat phase of Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF) in March–April 2003, the Combined Air Operations Center (CAOC) in Saudi Arabia used 31 military and 27 commercial COMSAT terminals with a capacity of nearly 210 Mbps.[34] Overall, the total information flow in and out of theater dur­ing OIF’s major combat phase is estimated to have peaked around three billion bits per second.[35] As for the dependence of OIF strike operations on space, nearly 44 percent of the guided munitions expended in the air campaign used inertial/ GPS-aided guidance to home in on their aim points.

Against the adversaries the United States and its allies have faced in Afghanistan and Iraq since September 11, 2001, dependence on geostationary-earth-orbit (GEO) communications satellites for battle management and operating UAVs from distant locations, on the medium-earth-orbit (MEO) GPS constellation for precision location and timing information, and on low-earth-orbit (LEO) recon­naissance satellites for target identification and battlespace awareness has not been problematic. The Taliban, al Qaeda, Sunni insurgents, and their supporters have had little capability to interfere with any of these systems. Even so, as a sign of things to come, in 2009, Iranian-backed militants in Iraq succeeded in using the inexpensive SkyGrabber software (priced as low as $25.95 on the Internet) to regularly capture unprotected video feeds from U.S. Predator drones. [36]

A major power such as China, however, is another matter entirely. Specialists on the People’s Liberation Army concluded during the 1990s that war in space would eventually be a necessary and logical extension of other forms of military conflict, and that “space supremacy” would become an integral part of overall supremacy over future battlefields.[37] As Larry Wortzel wrote in 2007:

Space operation and warfare in space are components of what the PLA calls “in­formationalized,” or information age, warfare. In general, PLA strategists are convinced that … “future enemy military forces will depend heavily on informa­tion systems in military operations.” Therefore, they believe, China needs to break through the technological barriers and develop information system countermea­sures in space. [38]

Toward this end, the Chinese are investing in everything from jamming to counter-network attack (the offensive form of cyber warfare), anti-satellite (ASAT) systems, and directed-energy weapons. Retired Vice Admiral Mike McConnell, who has both headed the National Security Agency and been the Director of National Intelligence, argued in February 2010 that the United States is fighting a cyber-war today, and losing it, particularly against China. [39] As for more “kinetic” approaches to taking advantage of U.S. dependence on unimpeded access to space and cyberspace, in January 2007 China went so far as to demon­strate a direct-ascent ASAT capability by destroying one of its own aging weather satellites in low earth orbit.[40] The Feng Yun 1-C weather satellite was orbiting at an altitude of about 535 miles above the earth’s surface. The Chinese destroyed the satellite with a kinetic-kill vehicle launched by a two-stage solid-fuel missile fired from a mobile transporter-erector-launcher at the Xichang space facility in Sichuan province, creating a debris field of more than thirty-five thousand shards larger than one centimeter.[41]

U.S. military dependence on relatively unimpeded access to the global com­mons in both space and cyberspace has expanded enormously since 1991. At the heart of this dependency is the requirement of current U.S. guided muni­tions—notably the LGBs and JDAMs that have been three-quarters of combat expenditures—to have precisely located aim points. Recognizing this fact, U.S. adversaries have taken numerous steps to deny this information to U.S. forces by making their forces and strategic assets more and more difficult to locate in time and space. In addition to camouflaging, concealing, relocating, hardening, or deeply burying prospective targets—which even terrorists can do—the PRC, among others, has invested in capabilities to attack the space- and cyberspace-based information flows on which U.S. target acquisition, battlespace manage­ment, and C2 depend.

Marshall has long argued that the primary challenge of any revolution in mili­tary affairs precipitated by technological advances is

to be the best in the intellectual task of finding the most appropriate innovations in concepts of operation and making organizational changes to fully exploit the tech­nologies already available and those that will be available in the course of the next decade or so. [42]

In the case of the growing U.S. dependence on unimpeded access to orbiting satellites and cyberspace, the evidence suggests that the American military has yet to heed this advice. The most fundamental line of solution to the potential vulnerability stemming from the need for the pinpoint location of targets in time and space would be to develop guided munitions able to find imprecisely located targets on their own. The Low Cost Autonomous Attack System (LOCAAS) pro­gram, sponsored by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the U.S. Air Force, set out to do precisely this. By 2005 it appears that the program succeeded in developing a robotic system that could loiter in a small area and use a laser-detection-and-ranging (ladar) sensor together with automatic-target­recognition algorithms to find and attack a range of targets, including mobile missile launchers. However, due to unease among senior airmen with autono­mous battlefield robots, the Air Force walked away from LOCAAS. The tech­nology was preserved for a time as the Loitering Attack Munition (LAM) in the U.S. Army’s Non-Line-of-Sight Launch System (NLOS-LS). But in April 2010 the Army terminated NLOS-LS. The reticence regarding LOCAAS and LAM ap­pears to stem from a cultural inclination to maintain tight control over kinetic attacks, combined with an intellectual failure to grasp the importance of being able to address imprecisely located targets. So, while the technology to deal with them has been demonstrated, the U.S. military Services have not chosen to field autonomous robotic weapons.[43]

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[1] According to Soviet theorists, the first twentieth-century MTR was precipitated by the advent of motorization, the airplane, and chemical weapons during the First World War (William E. Odom, “Soviet Military Doctrine,” Foreign Affairs, Winter 1988/89, pp. 120–121). The maturation of this MTR was manifested in the Second World War with Blitzkrieg (mobile armored operations) based on the tank and the Panzer division, strategic bombardment as epitomized by the Anglo-American Combined Bomber Offensive against Germany, and the displacement of battleships by aircraft carriers in naval warfare. The second twentieth-century MTR was triggered by the devel­opment of ballistic missiles and atomic weapons at the end of World War II. It reached maturity in the early 1970s when the Soviets achieved rough nuclear parity with the United States.

[2] See Andrew F. Krepinevich, Jr., “The Military-Technical Revolution: A Preliminary Assessment,” Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, 2002, pp. 1, 3 (available online at external pagehttp://www.cs­baonline.org/4Publications/Archive/R.20021002.MTR/R.20021002.MTR.pdf). This published version of the 1992 ONA MTR paper contains reflections by Marshall and Krepinevich.

[3] Marshal N. V. Ogarkov, “The Defense of Socialism: Experience of History and the Present Day,” Красная Звезда [Red Star], May 9, 1984; trans. Foreign Broadcast Information Service, Daily Report: Soviet Union, Vol. III, No. 091, Annex No. 054, May 9, 1984, p. R19.

[4] The Russians used the term reconnaissance-fire complex (рекогносцировочно-огневой комплекс)

when they were thinking about precision strike using short-range weapons such as artillery.

[5] A. W. Marshall, “Future Security Environment Working Group: Some Themes for Special Papers

and Some Concerns,” ONA memorandum for Fred Iklé, September 21, 1987, p. 2.

[6] Krepinevich, Jr., “The Military-Technical Revolution,” p. iii.

[7] As of April 2010, General Stéphane Abrial, French Air Force, is NATO’s Supreme Allied Commander, Transformation. His headquarters is collocated with the U.S. Joint Forces Command in Norfolk, Virginia.

[8] Andrew W. Marshall, “Some Thoughts on Military Revolutions—Second Version,” ONA memorandum for record, August 23, 1993, p. 3.

[9] Marshall, “Some Thoughts on Military Revolutions—Second Version,” p. 4.

[10] A. W. Marshall, “Some Thoughts on Military Revolutions,” ONA memorandum for record, July 27, 1993, p. 1.

[11] Andrew F. Krepinevich, Jr., “Cavalry to Computer: The Pattern of Military Revolutions,” The National Interest, Fall 1994, p. 30.

[12] Michael G. Vickers and Robert C. Martinage, The Revolution in War (Washington, DC: Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, December 2004), p. 2.

[13] Richard O. Hundley, Past Revolutions, Future Transformations: What Can the History of Revolutions in Military Affairs Tell U.S. About Transforming the U.S. Military? (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 1999), p. 9.

[14] Krepinevich, Jr., “The Military-Technical Revolution: A Preliminary Assessment,” p. 3. Not everyone agrees that these definitions suffice to characterize an RMA. Stephen Biddle, for in­stance, insists that all the definitions offered by RMA proponents fail to identify a single period of revolutionary change in war’s conduct since 1918 (Stephen Biddle, “Military Power: A Reply,” The Journal of Strategic Studies, June 2005, p. 457). To make this view more plausible, Biddle restricts his claim to conventional warfare, thereby avoiding the need to explain the atomic and thermonuclear revolutions that grew out of the Manhattan project.

[15] Marshall, “Some Thoughts on Military Revolutions,” p. 2. For a firsthand account of the British experiment with tanks at Cambrai, see Brevet-Colonel J. F. C. Fuller, Tanks in the Great War 1914–1918 (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1920), pp. 140–153. British Mark IV tanks did initially break through German lines at Cambrai, but they were unable to hold the ground gained, much less exploit their breakthroughs as German Panzer units were able to do in France in May 1940.

[16] Marshall, “Some Thoughts on Military Revolutions—Second Version,” p. 3.

[17] Mie Augier and Barry D. Watts, “Conference Report on the Past, Present, and Future of Net Assessment,” Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, 2009, p. 227.

[18] Barry D. Watts, Six Decades of Guided Munitions and Battle Networks: Progress and Prospects (Washington, DC: Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, March 2007), p. 20.

[19] Alexander H. Flax and John S. Foster, Jr., “Report of the Defense Science Board Task Force on Tactical Air Warfare,” Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Technology, November 1993, pp. 16–17.

[20] For the classic discussion of the difficulties of choosing analytic measures, see the section on the criterion problem in Charles J. Hitch and Roland N. McKean, The Economics of Defense in the Nuclear Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960), pp. 158–181.

[21] A somewhat shorter version of Vickers’ 1996 paper “The Revolution in Military Affairs and the Military Capabilities: Broadening the Planning Parameters of Future Conflict” was published the following year in Robert Pfaltzgraff and Richard Shultz (eds.), War in the Information Age: New Challenges for U.S. Security Policy (London: Brassey’s, 1997), pp. 29–46.

[22] For the profile of a DF-21 variant with terminal homing to strike surface ships from a Chinese pub­lication, see Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD), “Military Power of the People’s Republic of China,” Annual Report to Congress, 2009, p. 21. For further discussion of Chinese target-acquisition and ship-attack capabilities, including OTH radars, see “Report: Chinese Develop Special ‘Kill Weapon” to Destroy U.S. Aircraft Carriers,” March 31, 2009, online at < external pagehttps://www.usni.org/forth­emedia/ChineseKillWeapon.asp>; Sean O’Connor, “OTH Radar and the ASBM Threat,” November 11, 2008, online at < external pagehttp://geimint.blogspot.com/2008/11/oth-radar-and-asbm-threat.html >; and Tony Capaccio, “China’s New Missile May Create a “No-Go Zone’ for U.S. Fleet,” November 17, 2009, online at < external pagehttp://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20670001&sid=annrZr9ybk7A>.

[23] John Stillion, “Fighting Under Missile Attack,” AIR FORCE Magazine, August 2009, pp. 34–37.

[24] Robert M. Gates, Speech at the National Defense University, September 29, 2008, online at < external pagehttp://www.defenselink.mil/speeches/speech.aspx?speechid=1279>.

[25] Andrew Erickson from the U.S. Naval War College’s China Maritime Studies Institute, “China Testing Ballistic Missile ‘Carrier-Killer’,” Wired Magazine’s Danger Room, March 29, 2010, on-line at < external pagehttp://www.wired.com/images_blogs/dangerroom/2010/03/asbm_graphic_admiral­willard-testimony_chinese-article.png>.

[26] Malcolm Gladwell, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking (New York: Back Bay Books/Little, Brown and Company, 2005), pp. 102–111; also Sean D. Naylor, “War Games Rigged? General Says Millennium Challenge 02 ‘was almost entirely scripted’,” Army Times, August 16, 2002.

[27] Uzi Rubin, “The Rocket Campaign against Israel during the 2006 Lebanon War,” Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies, Study No. 71, June 2007, pp. 10–11.

[28] Mark Wade estimates that the real-world accuracy of the V-2s Germany launched toward the end of World War II was 6-12 kilometers (Mark Wade, “V-2,” online at <external pagehttp://www.astronautix.com/lvs/v2.htm>.

[29] CEP is the radius of a circle around the aim point within which 50 percent of the munitions can be expected to fall statistically.

[30] Dan Lamothe, “More-Accurate Artillery Concerns General,” Marine Corps Times, posted April 21, 2010, at < external pagehttp://www.marinecorpstimes.com/news/2010/04/marine_mortars_042010w/>.

[31] See Dominic A. Paolucci, “Summary Report of the Long Range Research and Development Planning Program,” Lulejian and Associates, Falls Church, VA, February 7, 1975, p. 45. Albert Wohlstetter was the primary drafter of this report. The great promise he saw in “near zero miss” conventional munitions was the possibility of providing the president with strategic-response op­tions that would be alternatives to “massive nuclear destruction” (ibid., pp. 11, 45). This idea was later incorporated in the “New Triad” adopted in the 2001 Nuclear Posture Review.

[32] Strictly defined, bandwidth is the width of the frequency spectrum of a signal in Hertz—John F. Pane and Leland Joe, Making Better Use of Bandwidth: Data Compression and Network Management Technologies (Santa Monica, CA: RAND, 2005), p. xi. However, the term is widely used to refer to the rate at which data can be sent over a given channel in bits per second.

[33] Major Timothy Jacobs, “Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) of Commercial SATCOM,” Headquarters Air Combat Command/A8UC, December 7, 2006, slides 10 and 11. Jacobs’ projec­tion for 2009 was that the Air Force would be operating 23 Predator and Reaper combat orbits requiring 147 Mbps, plus three Global Hawk orbits requiring another 822 Mbps.

[34] J. R. Wilson, “Satellite Communications Key to Victory in Iraq,” Military & Aerospace Electronics, August 2003, online at < external pagehttp://mae.pennnet.com/articles/article_display.cfm?Section=ARCHI&C=News&ARTICLE_ID=183379&KEYWORDS=SATCOM&p=32>. Since the commercial COMSATs had an average capacity of 6 Mbps compared to only 1.5 Mbps for the military ones, the 27 commercial COMSATs provided over 75 percent of the capacity used by the CAOC.

[35] Geoffrey Forden, “How China Loses the Coming Space War (Pt. 2),” Wired, January 2008, online at < external pagehttp://blog.wired.com/defense/2008/01/inside-the-ch-1.html>.

[36] Siobhan Gorman, Yochi J. Dreazen and August Cole, “Insurgents Hack U.S. Drones,” The Wall Street Journal, December 17, 2009.

[37] Larry M. Wortzel, “The Chinese People’s Liberation Army and Space Warfare,” American Enterprise Institute, 2007, p. 2.

[38] Wortzel, “The Chinese People’s Liberation Army and Space Warfare,” p. 2.

[39] Mike McConnell, “Mike McConnell on How to Win the Cyber-war We’re Losing,” The Washington Post, February 28, 20010, pp. B1, B4.

[40] Ashley J. Tellis, “Punching the U.S. Military’s ‘Soft Ribs’: China’s Antisatellite Weapon Test in Strategic Perspective,” Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Policy Brief 51, May 2007, p. 4.

[41] Ashley J. Tellis, “China’s Military Space Strategy,” Survival, September 2007, pp. 41. China’s three previous ASAT tests failed (ibid., p. 43).

[42] Marshall, “Some Thoughts on Military Revolutions—Second Version,” p. 2.

[43] Dima Adamsky, The Culture of Military Innovation: The Impact of Cultural Factors on the Revolution in Military Affairs in Russia, the US, and Israel (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), pp. 132–136.

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