Ammar Hakim, scion of a top clerical family, is set to lead a party that is the chief U.S. ally in Iraq, but has deep ties to Iran.
By Alexandra Zavis
Los Angeles Times, 30 August 2007
BAGHDAD — When a Shiite religious leader's phalanx was waved through a security cordon and into the Imam Hussein shrine in Karbala on Monday night, a crowd of rival militiamen grew incensed, sparking fighting that claimed the lives of at least 50 people and left parts of the holy city smoldering.
The man at the center of it was a soft-spoken 36-year-old cleric who has emerged this summer as the likely next head of the party that is the United States' most powerful political ally in Iraq.
Ammar Hakim is far from the secular, Western-educated men whom U.S. policymakers hoped would govern this land once Saddam Hussein was toppled. He wears the black turban of those who claim to be descended from the prophet Muhammad and was educated in the Shiite seminaries of Iran.
In the last few months, Hakim has taken the helm of the Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council, stepping in for his father, Abdelaziz Hakim, while he is being treated for lung cancer.
The younger Hakim's rise comes at a crucial time for the party. The supreme council commands one of the two largest Shiite Muslim groups in Iraq's parliament but has been losing influence on the streets to anti-U.S. cleric Muqtada Sadr, who controls the other bloc. If Hakim is able to counter Sadr, it could boost the Bush administration's hopes of maintaining Iraqi support for a continued U.S. presence here.
The increasingly violent feud pits the well trained men of the supreme council's Badr Organization against Sadr's seemingly less disciplined, but larger, Mahdi Army. At stake are political influence and control of the vast oil wealth in the overwhelmingly Shiite south.
This week's battle in Karbala shut down a major religious pilgrimage and sparked attacks against supreme council offices across Baghdad. Shiite leaders, who rarely accuse each other publicly, blamed the violence on remnants of Hussein's regime.
Ammar Hakim and Sadr are close in age, and both are the charismatic scions of clerical families that have long vied for leadership of Iraq's Shiite majority. But Hakim, a polished orator with a classical Arabic diction, is a sharp contrast to the gruff Sadr, who speaks in the colloquial dialect of the Iraqi poor. Hakim plays down the rivalry, noting that his mother is from the Sadr clan.
Hakim was groomed from an early age for a leadership role. The family home in Najaf was a frequent hide-out for men battling the Iraqi regime. In a recent interview with The Times, he said that from age 4, it was his job to pass food in secret to the fugitives. By the time he was 7, he was acting as a lookout to help his father elude Hussein's henchmen.
"I was able to spot the security men even if they were dressed in civilian clothing," he said, breaking into one of many smiles. His family fled to Iran in 1979 to escape persecution, and by age 9, Hakim was addressing thousands of Shiite faithful at mosques and religious festivals there.
Many here and in Washington are suspicious of Hakim's close ties to Iran, where he has spent more than half his life. Iran's Revolutionary Guard trained, equipped and at one point led the Badr Organization, which fought alongside Iran during the 1980s war against Iraq.
By contrast, Sadr is an Iraqi nationalist who routinely denounces both U.S. and Iranian influence, although he, too, has accepted assistance from Iran and spends considerable time there.
During constitutional negotiations after Hussein was ousted, some supreme council members advocated giving senior Shiite clerics, or ayatollahs, veto power over legislation. Hakim argued for changing the country's name to the Islamic Republic of Iraq, a proposal he now says was intended to recognize that most Iraqis are Muslim, not to exclude those who are not.
Hakim has alienated Sunni Arabs by pushing for greater regional autonomy and, until recently, resisting proposals to allow members of Hussein's ousted Baathist regime to take jobs in the government and military.
His tendency to travel in flashy convoys studded with gunmen have led some to dub him "Uday" Hakim, after Hussein's corrupt and violent son.
In February, U.S. troops detained him for several hours over questions about his passport as he returned from Iran in a heavily armed convoy. He complained at the time of being blindfolded and stripped to his underwear but accepted an apology from then-U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad.
Hakim emphasized his independence from Tehran in the interview, which took place in a marble hall furnished with gilt-trimmed sofas at his party's heavily guarded headquarters in Baghdad.
"We are not agents of Iran," he said. He pointed out that it was his father who had encouraged Iran to open a dialogue with the United States about Iraq, and he said it was in Iraq's interests to maintain good relations with both countries.
He cautioned against a sudden drawdown of U.S. forces, saying it would be dangerous for Iraq. He said he supported a U.S.-sponsored bill to regulate the distribution of Iraq's massive oil wealth. And he expressed willingness to compromise with Sunni Arab politicians.
At a time of mounting frustration with Prime Minister Nouri Maliki, a Shiite with the rival Islamic Dawa Party, Hakim distanced himself from moves to replace the Iraqi leader.
"The problems of Iraq cannot be reduced to one person . . . especially as there are no other alternatives," he said, a view shared by U.S. diplomats. "We have to put up with each other." The two groups are part of a larger ruling bloc, the United Iraqi Alliance.
But analysts say it is too soon to say whether Hakim intends to chart a course similar to his more reticent father's, or whether he could steer the party in a new direction.
"Getting into power and consolidating it is a long process in these systems," said Juan Cole, an expert on Shiite politics at the University of Michigan. "So it is a little unlikely that he would take early initiatives that differed starkly from his father's direction until he felt like he had his own power basis."
The elder Hakim's direction is one that U.S. officials describe as a voice of moderation in Iraq, despite the party's strong Islamist values and close ties to Tehran. U.S. officials regard the Badr Organization, which has been accused of running death squads targeting Sunnis, as more restrained than the Mahdi Army, also blamed for sectarian killings. And Badr has avoided open confrontations with U.S. forces, unlike Sadr, who has led two uprisings against American troops.
The tacit alliance has shielded Badr fighters from U.S. raids. But with tension mounting between the U.S. and Iran, it is increasingly difficult for Hakim's party to juggle the relationships with its two key benefactors.
There are signs that the supreme council is seeking other ways to counter Sadr's influence. Its leaders have adopted a nationalist tone closer to Sadr's, saying they will be guided by Iraq's most senior Shiite cleric, Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, rather than Iran's spiritual mentor, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
The Hakim family returned to Iraq after the U.S.-led invasion in 2003. Only a few months later, a massive car bomb outside the Imam Ali shrine in Najaf killed Ayatollah Mohammed Bakr Hakim, who had founded the supreme council in 1982 as a political home for Iraqi exiles in Iran.
The day his uncle was killed, Hakim said, he had prayed behind him at the shrine.
"He went to ride in his car, but I stayed behind to salute the people as he requested," he said. "I wish he had never made that request. I wish I had left with him. He became the 63rd martyr of my family."
Hakim says he has survived 13 assassination attempts, the most recent in April, when gunmen attacked his convoy as he drove through Baghdad on his way back from Najaf.
"Some people believe, when I have so many cars and guards, it is a kind of luxury," he said, seemingly bemused.
Within Iraq's clerical families, leadership is traditionally passed from father to son, but Hakim's ascent to the head of the supreme council is not assured. Talk of corruption has shadowed him, fueling disenchantment among some in Najaf, the party's stronghold.
"His influence doesn't go beyond the women who admire his looks," said Ali Hasnawi, a restaurant owner there.
An investigation by Iraq's Commission on Public Integrity found no evidence of wrongdoing by Hakim.
"I always find myself in a position where I have to explain myself," Hakim said. "In our society . . . we only praise the dead."
There are others in the party with more experience, such as Adel Abdul Mehdi, who is the supreme council's chief negotiator and a possible candidate for prime minister.
Asked whether he harbors prime ministerial ambitions, Hakim smiled again and shook his head.
"No," he said, adding that he looked forward to his father's return to work. "I don't feel very happy and relaxed in the position that I am now."
His confident demeanor, however, belies those words. A dynamic campaigner, Hakim heads the party's multimillion-dollar Shahid Mihrab foundation, which supports religious and welfare programs across Iraq.
Like his father, who had tried to make Abdul Mehdi prime minister, he may prefer the role of kingmaker. But it remains to be seen whether he can compete against Sadr and other Shiite leaders.
"The battle, I think, for Ammar is not taking over [the party], the battle is to shine at the center stage of Iraqi politics," said Vali Nasr at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey.
"He can very easily be anointed. . . . Whether he is a figurehead or an effective head remains to be seen."
alexandra.zavis@latimes.com
Special correspondent Saad Fakhrildeen in Najaf contributed to this report.
Citation: Alexandra Zavis. "Iraqi Shiite heir steps into a tough role," Los Angeles Times, 30 August 2007.
Original URL: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-hakim30aug30,1,7863492.story?coll=la-headlines-world
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31 August 2007
Iraq benchmark findings
By The Associated Press, 30 August 2007
Government Accountability Office findings on status of 18 military and political goals set by Congress for Iraq:
IRAQ HAS FULLY MET REQUIREMENTS TOWARD:
_Establishing supporting political, media, economic and services committees in support of the Baghdad Security Plan.
_Establishing all of the planned joint security stations in neighborhoods across Baghdad.
_Ensuring that the rights of minority political parties in the Iraqi legislature are protected.
IRAQ HAS ONLY PARTIALLY MET REQUIREMENTS TOWARD:
_Enacting and implementing legislation on procedures to form semiautonomous regions.
_Allocating and spending $10 billion in Iraqi revenues for reconstruction projects, including delivery of essential services, on an equitable basis.
IRAQ HAS NOT MET REQUIREMENTS TOWARD:
_Providing three trained and ready Iraqi brigades to support Baghdad operations.
_Ensuring that the Baghdad security plan will not provide a safe haven for outlaws, regardless of sectarian or political affiliation, as Bush says Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has pledged to do.
_Enacting and implementing legislation on de-Baathification.
_Enacting and implementing legislation to ensure the equitable distribution of hydrocarbon resources of the people of Iraq without regard to the sect or ethnicity of recipients, and enacting and implementing legislation to ensure that the energy resources of Iraq benefit Sunni Arabs, Shia Arabs, Kurds, and other Iraqi citizens in an equitable manner.
_Providing Iraqi commanders with all authorities to execute this plan and to make tactical and operational decisions, in consultation with U.S commanders, without political intervention, to include the authority to pursue all extremists, including Sunni insurgents and Shiite militias.
_Ensuring that the Iraqi Security Forces are providing evenhanded enforcement of the law.
_Increasing the number of Iraqi security forces units capable of operating independently.
_Ensuring that Iraq's political authorities are not undermining or making false accusations against members of the Iraqi Security Forces.
_Reducing the level of sectarian violence in Iraq and eliminating militia control of local security.
_Enacting and implementing legislation establishing an Independent High Electoral Commission, provincial elections law, provincial council authorities, and a date for provincial elections.
_Forming a Constitutional Review Committee and then completing the constitutional review.
_Enacting and implementing legislation addressing amnesty.
_Enacting and implementing legislation establishing a strong militia disarmament program to ensure that such security forces are accountable only to the central government and loyal to the constitution of Iraq.
Citation: "Iraq benchmark findings," The Associated Press, 30 August 2007.
Original URL: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070831/ap_on_go_co/us_iraq_benchmarks
Government Accountability Office findings on status of 18 military and political goals set by Congress for Iraq:
IRAQ HAS FULLY MET REQUIREMENTS TOWARD:
_Establishing supporting political, media, economic and services committees in support of the Baghdad Security Plan.
_Establishing all of the planned joint security stations in neighborhoods across Baghdad.
_Ensuring that the rights of minority political parties in the Iraqi legislature are protected.
IRAQ HAS ONLY PARTIALLY MET REQUIREMENTS TOWARD:
_Enacting and implementing legislation on procedures to form semiautonomous regions.
_Allocating and spending $10 billion in Iraqi revenues for reconstruction projects, including delivery of essential services, on an equitable basis.
IRAQ HAS NOT MET REQUIREMENTS TOWARD:
_Providing three trained and ready Iraqi brigades to support Baghdad operations.
_Ensuring that the Baghdad security plan will not provide a safe haven for outlaws, regardless of sectarian or political affiliation, as Bush says Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has pledged to do.
_Enacting and implementing legislation on de-Baathification.
_Enacting and implementing legislation to ensure the equitable distribution of hydrocarbon resources of the people of Iraq without regard to the sect or ethnicity of recipients, and enacting and implementing legislation to ensure that the energy resources of Iraq benefit Sunni Arabs, Shia Arabs, Kurds, and other Iraqi citizens in an equitable manner.
_Providing Iraqi commanders with all authorities to execute this plan and to make tactical and operational decisions, in consultation with U.S commanders, without political intervention, to include the authority to pursue all extremists, including Sunni insurgents and Shiite militias.
_Ensuring that the Iraqi Security Forces are providing evenhanded enforcement of the law.
_Increasing the number of Iraqi security forces units capable of operating independently.
_Ensuring that Iraq's political authorities are not undermining or making false accusations against members of the Iraqi Security Forces.
_Reducing the level of sectarian violence in Iraq and eliminating militia control of local security.
_Enacting and implementing legislation establishing an Independent High Electoral Commission, provincial elections law, provincial council authorities, and a date for provincial elections.
_Forming a Constitutional Review Committee and then completing the constitutional review.
_Enacting and implementing legislation addressing amnesty.
_Enacting and implementing legislation establishing a strong militia disarmament program to ensure that such security forces are accountable only to the central government and loyal to the constitution of Iraq.
Citation: "Iraq benchmark findings," The Associated Press, 30 August 2007.
Original URL: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070831/ap_on_go_co/us_iraq_benchmarks
30 August 2007
Leadership And Strategy
By Carnes Lord
Naval War College Review, Winter 2001.
Winston Churchill once said that most strategic failures in war are due to the "total absence of one directing mind and commanding willpower." During World War II, Churchill was determined to be that one directing mind, taking for himself a new cabinet portfolio for defense as well as the office of prime minister. Difficult as it may be to resist the ideas of one of the greatest leaders of the twentieth century, there are many today who will be skeptical of such a claim.
The literature of contemporary international relations (for all its hard-fought differences) is united when considering leadership as secondary in importance to military or political success. Realists believe the most important factor to be the unique strategic logic of each situation that imposes itself on world leaders. Liberals emphasize it is the power of institutions that shape ideas. Constructivists point to cultural and historical factors, or to the dynamics of collective psychology. [1]
In the narrower sphere of military affairs, the picture is not very different. For example, in Military Misfortunes (1991), Eliot Cohen and John Gooch criticize the tendency to blame strategic failure on the commander (the "man in the dock") and emphasize instead the central role of dysfunctional military organization. [2] (Debunking leadership in the academic studies of war is hardly new.) The distinguished British historian Michael Howard, in his well known paper on "the forgotten dimensions of strategy," for example, argues that the logistics, technological, and social dimensions of military success have been systematically neglected and undervalued when compared to the operational dimension, in large part because of the myth of glamour of the commander in the field. [3]
In professional military studies, the great captains of history continue to hold a place of honor, and military education maintains its traditional concern with practical leadership issues. Yet even in today's military, the standing of leadership is becoming increasingly pre carious. For many, the revolution in military affairs (RMA) validates Howard's emphasis on the technological dimension of strategy rather than the operational. Though rarely directly saying so, proponents of the RMA presume that leadership will inevitably become irrelevant as technology increasingly takes over that function.
The Gulf War is of particular interest here. In spite of much subsequent self-congratulation over the allied flanking maneuver that broke the Iraqi Republican Guards, what was most impressive and decisive in sober retrospect for the allied victory happened in the dimensions of logistics and technology, not in operations. Indeed, it could be argued that the war's outcome fore-shadowed for future wars how unimportant operational art and military leadership are becoming.
But did it? Let us look more closely at the Gulf War. The failure of the flanking maneuver to close the ring on the Republican Guards clearly reflected a failure of operational art and leadership at senior command levels, which greatly impacted the war's strategic outcome. Also, at the level of political-military decision making, a series of errors compounded this failure. The premature halt of the ground war for ill-considered public relations reasons, the signaling of the U.S. intent to withdraw from Iraq without a quid pro quo, the abandonment of the Kurds and Shiites, and more generally, the obvious absence of any serious planning for the war's endgame-all helped turn a stunning feat of arms into something considerably less than a strategic victory. [4]
Even a cursory review of the recent record of American military actions suggests that this state of affairs is not the exception. From Lebanon and Somalia to Bosnia and Kosovo, American political and military leadership has too often been operationally inadequate and unsure, internally divided, and shortsighted in its strategic decision making. Rarely has the world sensed in American councils the presence of "one directing mind and commanding willpower." At the same time, there are few signs that the military-technical revolution is easing the requirements for leadership at senior command levels. Recent U.S. military actions in Iraq, as well as in Kosovo, point to the futility of RMA-style precision bombing, absent appropriate operational concepts and serious thought about strategic outcomes. Technology cannot substitute for an appreciation of the logic of war; the responsibility of senior military leaders becomes that much greater when the logic of war is lacking in civilian decision makers. It is not even clear that the dynamics of the contemporary battlefield are reducing the scope of command authority. A good case can be made that the evolving technologies are at least as likely to recentralize control at relatively senior echelons. [5]
What exactly is the relationship between strategy and leadership? Searching for a productive way to come to grips with this large question, one could do worse than consult ancient history. The word "strategy" is derived from the classical Greek, strategia, which does not mean strategy as we define it but "generalship," or "leadership of the army," or more literally, "leading out the people in arms." (In contrast, "tactics" refers to drawing up an army in battle formation.)
Several points can be made here. First, strategy is not only a military function; the ancient Greeks saw little distinction between military and political leadership. [6] Second, strategy is less about operational maneuver than about motivating and disciplining citizen-soldiers. In classical Greece, to borrow Howard's terms once more, the key to strategy was not the operational, logistic, or technological dimension but the social dimension. This is apparent in Thucydides' famous account of the Peloponnesian War. His history is short on details of military operations (not to speak of logistics or technology), but he has taken great pains to record speeches made by generals and politicians designed to encourage troops in the field or to persuade citizens at home to support particular policies or courses of action. Third and finally, it is noteworthy that the Greeks also did not distinguish between strategy and diplomacy. In an age that lacked established diplomatic services, generals abroad necessarily played the ambassador's role, making friends and influencing people as they marched.
Obviously war is infinitely more complicated and technical now than it was 2,500 years ago--because of the reason just discussed, because of its sheer scale, and because it requires a much higher level of organization, teamwork, and discipline. However, none of this obviates the need for leadership. In fact, today leadership is all the more important.
In contemporary states, leadership is a vital strategic function for two reasons. First, it is essential to control and correct astrategic tendencies of modern military organizations; and second, it plays a key role in countering the astrategic tendencies of modern governments and societies.
Cohen and Gooch are certainly right to pinpoint organizational dysfunction as a prime cause of strategic failure. Organizational routines, service rivalries, the dominance of managerial perspectives, etc., often make contemporary defense establishments highly resistant to strategic rationality. The United States recognizes these problems and has made major changes in its defense organization (the Goldwater-Nichols reform legislation of 1986) that center on strengthening the leadership role of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Recent U.S. history has shown, however, that such problems call for continuing leadership from outside the ranks of the military as well. [7] The tendency for military establishments to develop a strong corporate identity and outlook is also well known. Therefore, informed and vigorous civilian leadership is essential, not only to en sure basic civilian control but also to maintain a genuinely strategic perspective and to facilitate broader cooperation between military organizations and other elements of the bureaucracy in common strategic enterprises.
Perhaps less well known is the requirement for strong leadership as a counter weight to the astrategic tendencies of contemporary government and society, particularly in the United States. As Alexis de Tocqueville put it almost two hundred years ago in his great work Democracy in America, "Democracy finds it difficult to coordinate the details of a great undertaking and to fix on some plan and carry it through with determination in spite of obstacles. It has little capacity for combining measures in secret and patiently waiting for the result. Such qualities are more likely to belong to a single man or an aristocracy. But these are just the qualities which, in the long run, make a nation prevail." [8] Planning, coordination, secrecy, and patience tend to be in short supply in ordinary democratic politics, and it is the particular burden of the democratic leader to provide or facilitate them.
More important, the democratic leader, whether political or military, has the equally difficult task of reconciling these requirements with the openness and accountability of a democratic government. (This is where the classical model of strategy or generalship may have some further relevance.)
Central to democratic leadership, particularly in time of war, is the task of persuasion, motivation, and inspiration. In a modern bureaucratic state, this task extends beyond the public to the legions of soldiers and civilians on which the government must depend for the implementation of its policies. In order to perform effectively, leaders (especially, though not only, political leaders) arguably need four qualities: an understanding of their country and its history; an understanding of the strategic environment they face, and of their actual and potential adversaries; a vision of the future; and an ability to communicate. Churchill's possession of all four qualities explains why he was the great leader that he was. [9]
However, the example of Churchill is likely to discourage as much as inspire, or else strike us as simply irrelevant. After all, the present strategic environment is very different from that of Churchill's. It is one thing to call for "one directing mind and commanding willpower" to lead a nation in total war, but quite an other to apply it during an era of ambiguous threats and politically constrained military operations. Under such circumstances, what may be required is not so much a leader but rather someone who is skilled at crafting compromise and consensus at home and abroad.
Churchill's dictum points out several important problems that currently confront U.S. leaders. One is the pluralism in national security policy making, the result of the constitutional structure of the American government, as well as certain developments of the last three decades that have strengthened the policy role of Congress. (Let it be said here that there is much left to do. Reforming the internal structures of Congress, rationalizing legislative authorities for various executive branch national security activities [the War Powers Act and perhaps even the National Security Act of 1947, for example], and repairing executive-legislative relations could have large payoffs for American policy. Although such steps are often dismissed as hopeless, it is far from clear why. The relatively benign international environment of the present offers a good opportunity to address these sorts of legal and institutional issues.) [10]
Another is the uncertain relationship between military and civilian authority within the executive branch. Although the alarmists have recently gained ground, when discussing U.S. civil-military relations today one should be concerned with the growing estrangement and lack of communication between the military and its civilian leaders, and with the continuing difficulties that the U.S. government as a whole encounters in articulating coherent doctrine for the use of force and in applying force with strategic effect. [11] While part of the problem is philosophical, much is a reflection of the clash between military and civilian cultures and their failures to craft new organizational solutions to the novel challenges of contemporary limited warfare and operations other than war. It is, therefore, a prime leadership issue, on both sides.
Finally, a few remarks may be in order concerning the personal dimension of leadership. It is often said that leaders are born and not made; there is no doubt of this. On the other hand, it is also a convenient excuse for not thinking very hard about how one finds, recruits, trains, and manages the careers of potential leaders. In particular, it is an excuse for ignoring the central but too often neglected issue of the intellectual (as distinct from the personality-based) requirements of leadership. In the business world, there has long been a tendency to separate leadership from substantive knowledge of a particular business sector or kind of enterprise, though the limitations of such an approach are by now frequently acknowledged. While perhaps not as pronounced, this tendency can also be seen in the political world and in government itself. What exactly do our leaders need to know to be strategically effective? We have only to pose this question to realize that an Ivy League education today gives little consideration to the subject; even a professional military education offers no guarantee.
A further point: good leaders do not necessarily make good strategists, and good strategists are not always effective leaders. The qualities that Churchill listed are more typically scattered among several individuals. From this perspective, the management of personnel and decision-making systems, both civilian and military, must be seen as an integral aspect of strategic leadership. Leaders should be more attentive to the individual talents and character of their subordinates and to the dynamics of team organizations, be they personal staff or interagency committees. Leaders must also be quick to recognize ineffective performance and deal with it decisively. This, of course, was one of Churchill's great gifts. It is not apparent that these matters should be handled any differently today. [12]
All this is easily summarized: leadership itself is today the truly forgotten dimension of strategy.
Carnes Lord recently joined the Naval War College faculty as professor of strategic studies. He has taught security studies and international relations at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, and at the University of Virginia. He also served on the staff of the National Security Council and in the office of the vice president. He is the author of The Presidency and the Management of National Security.
NOTES
(1.) For a classic presentation of the opposing case, see Sidney Hook, The Hero in History (New York: Humanities Press, 1943).
(2.) Eliot A. Cohen and John Gooch, Military Misfortunes: The Anatomy of Failure in War (New York: Vintage Books, 1990).
(3.) Michael Howard, "The Forgotten Dimensions of Strategy," Foreign Affairs, Summer, 1979; reprinted in his The Causes of Wars and Other Essays (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1983), pp. 101-5.
(4.) Michael R. Gordon and Bernard E. Trainor, The Generals' War: The Inside Story of the Conflict in the Gulf(Boston: Little, Brown, 1995), chaps. 19-20 and epilogue.
(5.) James R. FitzSimonds, "The Cultural Challenges of Information Technology," Naval War College Review, Summer 1998, pp. 9-21.
(6.) See Donald F. Kagan, Pericles of Athens and the Birth of Democracy (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991).
(7.) See Dick Cheney's leadership role in the Gulf War, as recounted in Bob Woodward's The Commanders (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991), pp. 290-6, 327-3, and passim.
(8.) Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. J. P. Mayer (New York: Anchor Books, 1969), pp. 228-9.
(9.) For a useful recent survey of Churchillian statecraft, see Robert Blake and William Roger Louis, eds., Churchill (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1993).
(10.) Consider, for example, Zbigniew Brzezinski's In Quest of National Security (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1988), chap. 6.
(11.) General John Shalikashvili remarked, shortly after his retirement as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, about the problems concerning U.S. policy in Bosnia: "We don't have a system that puts someone in charge of the overall operation that can coordinate the efforts." See Philip Shenon, "No G. I. Role Seen in Arrests of Bosnian War Suspects," New York Times, 29 August 1997. For a general discussion see Douglas E. Lute, Improving National Capacity to Respond to Complex Emergencies: The U.S. Experience (New York: Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict, 1998).
(12.) A striking case is the Falklands War, which the Argentines might have won had they not made the fatal mistake of appointing a military administrator, rather than an operationally oriented leader or strategist, as the island's governor. See Lawrence Freedman and Virginia Gamba-Stonehouse, Signals of War: The Falklands Conflict of 1982 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1991), pp. 147-9.
COPYRIGHT 2001 U.S. Naval War College
Citation: Carnes Lord. "Leadership And Strategy," Naval War College Review, Winter 2001.
Original URL: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0JIW/is_1_54/ai_75762218
Naval War College Review, Winter 2001.
Winston Churchill once said that most strategic failures in war are due to the "total absence of one directing mind and commanding willpower." During World War II, Churchill was determined to be that one directing mind, taking for himself a new cabinet portfolio for defense as well as the office of prime minister. Difficult as it may be to resist the ideas of one of the greatest leaders of the twentieth century, there are many today who will be skeptical of such a claim.
The literature of contemporary international relations (for all its hard-fought differences) is united when considering leadership as secondary in importance to military or political success. Realists believe the most important factor to be the unique strategic logic of each situation that imposes itself on world leaders. Liberals emphasize it is the power of institutions that shape ideas. Constructivists point to cultural and historical factors, or to the dynamics of collective psychology. [1]
In the narrower sphere of military affairs, the picture is not very different. For example, in Military Misfortunes (1991), Eliot Cohen and John Gooch criticize the tendency to blame strategic failure on the commander (the "man in the dock") and emphasize instead the central role of dysfunctional military organization. [2] (Debunking leadership in the academic studies of war is hardly new.) The distinguished British historian Michael Howard, in his well known paper on "the forgotten dimensions of strategy," for example, argues that the logistics, technological, and social dimensions of military success have been systematically neglected and undervalued when compared to the operational dimension, in large part because of the myth of glamour of the commander in the field. [3]
In professional military studies, the great captains of history continue to hold a place of honor, and military education maintains its traditional concern with practical leadership issues. Yet even in today's military, the standing of leadership is becoming increasingly pre carious. For many, the revolution in military affairs (RMA) validates Howard's emphasis on the technological dimension of strategy rather than the operational. Though rarely directly saying so, proponents of the RMA presume that leadership will inevitably become irrelevant as technology increasingly takes over that function.
The Gulf War is of particular interest here. In spite of much subsequent self-congratulation over the allied flanking maneuver that broke the Iraqi Republican Guards, what was most impressive and decisive in sober retrospect for the allied victory happened in the dimensions of logistics and technology, not in operations. Indeed, it could be argued that the war's outcome fore-shadowed for future wars how unimportant operational art and military leadership are becoming.
But did it? Let us look more closely at the Gulf War. The failure of the flanking maneuver to close the ring on the Republican Guards clearly reflected a failure of operational art and leadership at senior command levels, which greatly impacted the war's strategic outcome. Also, at the level of political-military decision making, a series of errors compounded this failure. The premature halt of the ground war for ill-considered public relations reasons, the signaling of the U.S. intent to withdraw from Iraq without a quid pro quo, the abandonment of the Kurds and Shiites, and more generally, the obvious absence of any serious planning for the war's endgame-all helped turn a stunning feat of arms into something considerably less than a strategic victory. [4]
Even a cursory review of the recent record of American military actions suggests that this state of affairs is not the exception. From Lebanon and Somalia to Bosnia and Kosovo, American political and military leadership has too often been operationally inadequate and unsure, internally divided, and shortsighted in its strategic decision making. Rarely has the world sensed in American councils the presence of "one directing mind and commanding willpower." At the same time, there are few signs that the military-technical revolution is easing the requirements for leadership at senior command levels. Recent U.S. military actions in Iraq, as well as in Kosovo, point to the futility of RMA-style precision bombing, absent appropriate operational concepts and serious thought about strategic outcomes. Technology cannot substitute for an appreciation of the logic of war; the responsibility of senior military leaders becomes that much greater when the logic of war is lacking in civilian decision makers. It is not even clear that the dynamics of the contemporary battlefield are reducing the scope of command authority. A good case can be made that the evolving technologies are at least as likely to recentralize control at relatively senior echelons. [5]
What exactly is the relationship between strategy and leadership? Searching for a productive way to come to grips with this large question, one could do worse than consult ancient history. The word "strategy" is derived from the classical Greek, strategia, which does not mean strategy as we define it but "generalship," or "leadership of the army," or more literally, "leading out the people in arms." (In contrast, "tactics" refers to drawing up an army in battle formation.)
Several points can be made here. First, strategy is not only a military function; the ancient Greeks saw little distinction between military and political leadership. [6] Second, strategy is less about operational maneuver than about motivating and disciplining citizen-soldiers. In classical Greece, to borrow Howard's terms once more, the key to strategy was not the operational, logistic, or technological dimension but the social dimension. This is apparent in Thucydides' famous account of the Peloponnesian War. His history is short on details of military operations (not to speak of logistics or technology), but he has taken great pains to record speeches made by generals and politicians designed to encourage troops in the field or to persuade citizens at home to support particular policies or courses of action. Third and finally, it is noteworthy that the Greeks also did not distinguish between strategy and diplomacy. In an age that lacked established diplomatic services, generals abroad necessarily played the ambassador's role, making friends and influencing people as they marched.
Obviously war is infinitely more complicated and technical now than it was 2,500 years ago--because of the reason just discussed, because of its sheer scale, and because it requires a much higher level of organization, teamwork, and discipline. However, none of this obviates the need for leadership. In fact, today leadership is all the more important.
In contemporary states, leadership is a vital strategic function for two reasons. First, it is essential to control and correct astrategic tendencies of modern military organizations; and second, it plays a key role in countering the astrategic tendencies of modern governments and societies.
Cohen and Gooch are certainly right to pinpoint organizational dysfunction as a prime cause of strategic failure. Organizational routines, service rivalries, the dominance of managerial perspectives, etc., often make contemporary defense establishments highly resistant to strategic rationality. The United States recognizes these problems and has made major changes in its defense organization (the Goldwater-Nichols reform legislation of 1986) that center on strengthening the leadership role of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Recent U.S. history has shown, however, that such problems call for continuing leadership from outside the ranks of the military as well. [7] The tendency for military establishments to develop a strong corporate identity and outlook is also well known. Therefore, informed and vigorous civilian leadership is essential, not only to en sure basic civilian control but also to maintain a genuinely strategic perspective and to facilitate broader cooperation between military organizations and other elements of the bureaucracy in common strategic enterprises.
Perhaps less well known is the requirement for strong leadership as a counter weight to the astrategic tendencies of contemporary government and society, particularly in the United States. As Alexis de Tocqueville put it almost two hundred years ago in his great work Democracy in America, "Democracy finds it difficult to coordinate the details of a great undertaking and to fix on some plan and carry it through with determination in spite of obstacles. It has little capacity for combining measures in secret and patiently waiting for the result. Such qualities are more likely to belong to a single man or an aristocracy. But these are just the qualities which, in the long run, make a nation prevail." [8] Planning, coordination, secrecy, and patience tend to be in short supply in ordinary democratic politics, and it is the particular burden of the democratic leader to provide or facilitate them.
More important, the democratic leader, whether political or military, has the equally difficult task of reconciling these requirements with the openness and accountability of a democratic government. (This is where the classical model of strategy or generalship may have some further relevance.)
Central to democratic leadership, particularly in time of war, is the task of persuasion, motivation, and inspiration. In a modern bureaucratic state, this task extends beyond the public to the legions of soldiers and civilians on which the government must depend for the implementation of its policies. In order to perform effectively, leaders (especially, though not only, political leaders) arguably need four qualities: an understanding of their country and its history; an understanding of the strategic environment they face, and of their actual and potential adversaries; a vision of the future; and an ability to communicate. Churchill's possession of all four qualities explains why he was the great leader that he was. [9]
However, the example of Churchill is likely to discourage as much as inspire, or else strike us as simply irrelevant. After all, the present strategic environment is very different from that of Churchill's. It is one thing to call for "one directing mind and commanding willpower" to lead a nation in total war, but quite an other to apply it during an era of ambiguous threats and politically constrained military operations. Under such circumstances, what may be required is not so much a leader but rather someone who is skilled at crafting compromise and consensus at home and abroad.
Churchill's dictum points out several important problems that currently confront U.S. leaders. One is the pluralism in national security policy making, the result of the constitutional structure of the American government, as well as certain developments of the last three decades that have strengthened the policy role of Congress. (Let it be said here that there is much left to do. Reforming the internal structures of Congress, rationalizing legislative authorities for various executive branch national security activities [the War Powers Act and perhaps even the National Security Act of 1947, for example], and repairing executive-legislative relations could have large payoffs for American policy. Although such steps are often dismissed as hopeless, it is far from clear why. The relatively benign international environment of the present offers a good opportunity to address these sorts of legal and institutional issues.) [10]
Another is the uncertain relationship between military and civilian authority within the executive branch. Although the alarmists have recently gained ground, when discussing U.S. civil-military relations today one should be concerned with the growing estrangement and lack of communication between the military and its civilian leaders, and with the continuing difficulties that the U.S. government as a whole encounters in articulating coherent doctrine for the use of force and in applying force with strategic effect. [11] While part of the problem is philosophical, much is a reflection of the clash between military and civilian cultures and their failures to craft new organizational solutions to the novel challenges of contemporary limited warfare and operations other than war. It is, therefore, a prime leadership issue, on both sides.
Finally, a few remarks may be in order concerning the personal dimension of leadership. It is often said that leaders are born and not made; there is no doubt of this. On the other hand, it is also a convenient excuse for not thinking very hard about how one finds, recruits, trains, and manages the careers of potential leaders. In particular, it is an excuse for ignoring the central but too often neglected issue of the intellectual (as distinct from the personality-based) requirements of leadership. In the business world, there has long been a tendency to separate leadership from substantive knowledge of a particular business sector or kind of enterprise, though the limitations of such an approach are by now frequently acknowledged. While perhaps not as pronounced, this tendency can also be seen in the political world and in government itself. What exactly do our leaders need to know to be strategically effective? We have only to pose this question to realize that an Ivy League education today gives little consideration to the subject; even a professional military education offers no guarantee.
A further point: good leaders do not necessarily make good strategists, and good strategists are not always effective leaders. The qualities that Churchill listed are more typically scattered among several individuals. From this perspective, the management of personnel and decision-making systems, both civilian and military, must be seen as an integral aspect of strategic leadership. Leaders should be more attentive to the individual talents and character of their subordinates and to the dynamics of team organizations, be they personal staff or interagency committees. Leaders must also be quick to recognize ineffective performance and deal with it decisively. This, of course, was one of Churchill's great gifts. It is not apparent that these matters should be handled any differently today. [12]
All this is easily summarized: leadership itself is today the truly forgotten dimension of strategy.
Carnes Lord recently joined the Naval War College faculty as professor of strategic studies. He has taught security studies and international relations at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, and at the University of Virginia. He also served on the staff of the National Security Council and in the office of the vice president. He is the author of The Presidency and the Management of National Security.
NOTES
(1.) For a classic presentation of the opposing case, see Sidney Hook, The Hero in History (New York: Humanities Press, 1943).
(2.) Eliot A. Cohen and John Gooch, Military Misfortunes: The Anatomy of Failure in War (New York: Vintage Books, 1990).
(3.) Michael Howard, "The Forgotten Dimensions of Strategy," Foreign Affairs, Summer, 1979; reprinted in his The Causes of Wars and Other Essays (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1983), pp. 101-5.
(4.) Michael R. Gordon and Bernard E. Trainor, The Generals' War: The Inside Story of the Conflict in the Gulf(Boston: Little, Brown, 1995), chaps. 19-20 and epilogue.
(5.) James R. FitzSimonds, "The Cultural Challenges of Information Technology," Naval War College Review, Summer 1998, pp. 9-21.
(6.) See Donald F. Kagan, Pericles of Athens and the Birth of Democracy (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991).
(7.) See Dick Cheney's leadership role in the Gulf War, as recounted in Bob Woodward's The Commanders (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991), pp. 290-6, 327-3, and passim.
(8.) Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. J. P. Mayer (New York: Anchor Books, 1969), pp. 228-9.
(9.) For a useful recent survey of Churchillian statecraft, see Robert Blake and William Roger Louis, eds., Churchill (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1993).
(10.) Consider, for example, Zbigniew Brzezinski's In Quest of National Security (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1988), chap. 6.
(11.) General John Shalikashvili remarked, shortly after his retirement as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, about the problems concerning U.S. policy in Bosnia: "We don't have a system that puts someone in charge of the overall operation that can coordinate the efforts." See Philip Shenon, "No G. I. Role Seen in Arrests of Bosnian War Suspects," New York Times, 29 August 1997. For a general discussion see Douglas E. Lute, Improving National Capacity to Respond to Complex Emergencies: The U.S. Experience (New York: Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict, 1998).
(12.) A striking case is the Falklands War, which the Argentines might have won had they not made the fatal mistake of appointing a military administrator, rather than an operationally oriented leader or strategist, as the island's governor. See Lawrence Freedman and Virginia Gamba-Stonehouse, Signals of War: The Falklands Conflict of 1982 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1991), pp. 147-9.
COPYRIGHT 2001 U.S. Naval War College
Citation: Carnes Lord. "Leadership And Strategy," Naval War College Review, Winter 2001.
Original URL: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0JIW/is_1_54/ai_75762218
Naval power for a new American century - defense policy, United States
By Roger W. Barnett
Naval War College Review, Winter 2002.
The vicious, unprecedented attacks on the United States on 11 September 2001 by terrorist extremists served to bring into sharp focus two important new factors on the global security scene. First, the United States experienced a sudden, shocking loss of homeland sanctuary. Sanctuary is another way of portraying what is usually referred to as national security. Sanctuary is the place where one feels secure. The central objective of security policy, and the reason for laws and their enforcers, is to allow citizens to enjoy their freedoms within the security of a sanctuary.
Sanctuary is not confined to fixed locations; for example, it follows U.S. citizens and armed forces wherever they go. The bombings of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983, the U.S. Air Force barracks at Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia in 1996, U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, and the USS Cole in 2000 violated the sanctuary the United States normally provides over its federal employees and military forces worldwide. Any or all of these events might have been labeled an "act of war," but since "act of war" is not a defined term of art but a political concept, politicians opted not to proceed down the path that leads to a declared war. Those brutal attacks, moreover, were directed against U.S. government employees who were at the time within another state's sovereign territorial responsibility. The 11 September attacks differed in two key aspects: they indiscriminately targeted civilians, and those civilians were located within the U.S. homeland.
The second factor was the demonstration of the devolution of control of very powerful weapons to individuals who were not associated directly with national governments. Heretofore, with only a few exceptions, weapons of mass destruction (WMD) have been exclusively under the control of governmental leaders. On 11 September, as it has been since, it was demonstrated that traditional WMD (biologicals) and other weapons of mass destruction (large civil airliners loaded with fuel) can be employed by other than central governments.
The placement of WMD into the hands of terrorists rather than governments has momentous security policy implications for all states. Most important, reliance on deterrence will necessarily have to be supplanted by reliance on protection in the form of active and passive defenses. Reestablishing sanctuary for U.S. citizens will require new emphasis on homeland security, an office with that vital responsibility having been established by President G. W. Bush only ten days after the 11 September attacks.
This change in U.S. core security objectives will be accompanied by an extension of the U.S. commitment to global security and political stability. There will continue to be objectives to be served and tasks to be accomplished beyond the purely defensive ones dictated by increased homeland security emphasis. For the most part, these international tasks will involve assisting friends to shore up their homeland sanctuaries, and penetrating the sanctuary that adversaries seek from U.S. military operations. Past objectives centering on preventing or defeating territorial aggression will be replaced by expeditionary operations to deny sanctuary to those who would harm the United States or its vital interests. That was what the operations against the Taliban and al-Qaida in Afghanistan were all about.
These new core security objectives--underwriting homeland sanctuary, helping others to create and sustain sanctuaries, and preventing successful use of sanctuary by adversaries--will have a powerful impact on the ways and means to fulfil them. Those ways and means will come burdened by their own set of associated risks.
When the decision is made to use or threaten the use of military force in pursuit of strategic goals, doctrines and strategies define the ways, and military forces the means. Risks articulate the closeness or lack of fit between ends, ways, and means. If the ends sought are too ambitious for the means available, or if the ways necessary to attain them involve the possibility of significant loss for marginal gain, the ends, ways, and means are not in harmony, and the risks must be assessed as high. Sometimes high risks must be accepted, but often decision makers have a poor understanding of the magnitude of the risks or of the consequences of the actions they are contemplating. In the framework of these relationships, this article will discuss the available ways in which naval power can contribute to the accomplishment of the new strategic ends, the naval means to effect the strategies, and the kinds of risks that will have to be accommodated. It will be argued that the U.S. Navy's participation in the ways to accomplish the ends sought are, in fact, limited in number, and that if sufficient resources are not forthcoming to undergird the optimal strategy, high risks will ensue.
WAYS
Doctrines and strategies comprise the ways, the "hows," by which military force is employed or threatened. They are closely related. Doctrine says, in essence, "All things being equal, this is how we would prefer to operate"; however, it is unspecific as to time, place, or adversary. Strategies in contrast, recognize the key factors that are never "equal." Strategies deal with concrete opponents in particular places at specific times. How one operates, doctrinally or strategically, has but two operational components: offense and defense. These are tightly interwoven, and because they cannot be entirely separated, they also cannot be prioritized. In order to succeed, a military force must be able to operate on both the offensive and defensive, concurrently and well.
All this is little more than a truism, yet it exposes the conceptual shallowness of the approach of the Joint Chiefs of Staff documents Joint Vision 2010 and, more recently, Joint Vision 2020. Those documents set forth four operational concepts: dominant maneuver, full-dimensional protection, precision engagement, and focused logistics. In that sense they represent little more than a restatement of the eternal verity noted earlier--ways for the application of military force consist of offense (precision engagement) and defense (full-dimensional protection). Support (focused logistics) and maneuver (dominant maneuver), however, are misplaced in this conceptual framework; neither support nor maneuver is ever undertaken for its own sake but only in order to optimize offense or defense.
Maneuver in itself makes no independent contribution to success. It is maneuver combined with attack or the threat of attack or maneuver, combined with defense, that works to produce the desired effect. While Muhammad Ali characterized his fighting style as "Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee," a perceptive defense analyst, probably Edward Luttwak, observed that the results of maneuver might well be, "Float like a butterfly, sting like a butterfly." It is not the "float" that makes the difference but the "sting." No choice can be made between maneuver and "fires" (broadly, campaign-level attacks); they are not binary opposites. Because maneuver is relational, one maneuvers for the purpose of rendering the offense, the defense, or both, more effective. (1) Similarly, support provides logistical depth to the offense or the defense. One is left with the straightforward understanding that warfare, the application of military force, is composed of offense and defense enhanced by maneuver and support. This is not very satisfying. One must delve, therefore, in greater detail into the levels of warfare at which specific approaches can be identified.
STRATEGIES FOR THE EMPLOYMENT OF NAVAL FORCES
With regard to the employment of naval power, six discrete strategies have historically been adopted by states: fleet battle, blockade, commerce raiding, fleet-in-being, coastal defense, and maritime power projection. (2)
Each of these strategy choices involves a different blend of offense and defense, underwritten in various degrees by maneuver and support. Moreover, as often as not, the strategies are not pursued separately but combined or pursued sequentially--sometimes even concurrently--during the course of a conflict. States with large, powerful navies have typically opted for the more offensively oriented battle, blockade, and power projection, while states less well endowed with naval power have selected one or more of the remaining three.
The contributions that naval forces make to the overall military strategies of the states they serve have value only insofar as they can influence political processes, which invariably take place on land. To sink an enemy fleet in isolation from an effect ashore--even a long-term, indirect effect--is to have accomplished nothing. Blockades that fail to alter policy are impotent. Power projection that does not succeed in deflecting the actions or intentions of an adversary is squandered.
Historically, belligerents had difficulty in directly attacking enemy centers of gravity (or coming to grips with the sources of enemy power); strategies for the employment of naval forces have typically taken extended periods of time to exert their effects. (3) Decisive battles among fleets have been few and far between, and their impacts have sometimes taken years to be felt. Blockades (nowadays, "embargoes") tend to be notoriously slow in acting. Power projection, therefore, the most direct expression of naval power, has come to be emphasized. Note that there is a positive relationship between the effectiveness of a strategy and the degree to which the adversary's sanctuary is threatened. The emphasis on power projection can also be seen as a by-product of the atrophy of many naval fleets. The lack of opposition to the establishment of sea control has permitted the few large and powerful navies to reorient their focuses in a landward direction.
The United States today has no adversary fleets to engage, nor may it reasonably expect to for the time being. Commerce raiding is incompatible with achieving U.S. objectives. "Fleet in being" strategies have historically been used by weak navies for purposes of deterrence or defensive response. For more than a century the United States has been the preeminent practitioner of "forward presence"--employing naval forces away from its homeland to deter adversaries, to reassure allies and friends, and to shorten the time for crisis response. This could be considered a different form of a "fleet in being" strategy, which the United States undertook in expanded fashion after World War II.
Increased participation in the homeland defense mission will involve the employment of ships as a sea-based adjunct to national missile--defense, and probably also to extend ballistic missile defense umbrellas over the territories of friends and allies. In addition, there will have to be an increase in U.S. coastal surveillance and reconnaissance, and in patrol capability. Antismuggling, anti-infiltration, and ship inspection functions at the more than 350 American ports will tax current and programmed U.S. Coast Guard assets significantly. Unquestionably, the number of units assigned to these tasks will have to increase, and the extra burden will have to be shouldered by the Navy--given the Coast Guard's size and breadth of assigned duties, which include major devotion to at-sea public safety and rescue, interdiction of maritime drug trafficking, and protection of American fisheries. The requirement here will be for air reconnaissance and surveillance, and for numbers of small ships, minimally armed. One adv antage enjoyed by the United States that, in general, is not shared among its allies is that most U.S. ports (except those close to Mexico or the Caribbean islands) can be approached only by capable, seagoing vessels. The threat of infiltration or smuggling by means of submarines, while it cannot be ruled out entirely, appears unlikely and small enough not to devote tailored resources to it.
DIMENSIONS OF MILITARY FORCE
From another perspective, "ways" address how to meld the three dimensions of the application of military force--space, time, and intensity. Examination of these dimensions provides insights into how naval forces can be optimally employed in the future to secure American security objectives.
The key characteristic that will be shared among the dimensions of military force in the future is nonlinearity. In space--that is, the geographic dimension of strategy--nonlinearity exists when few lines can be perceived in the battle area that describe or organize opposing forces. Such linear constructs as the forward edge of the battlefield, forward line of troops, fire support coordination line, and even the entire notions of front, rear, and flanks are the result of drawing lines in the battlespace. But forces in the future battlespace cannot be expected to array themselves in lines; attempts to visualize the battlespace in linear terms seem already anachronistic at best. As a consequence, geography and force positioning relative to geographic features will have far less impact on operations in the future, but there is a major exception to this generalization. When the strategy involves protecting targets that are geographically fixed--national infrastructure, for example--the battlespace will be rigidly linear. Nonlinearity will apply for the most part to offensive operations, and it is strongly related to sanctuary, because movement is one of the most effective ways to establish and sustain sanctuary.
In the time dimension, linearity manifested itself in the battlespace as sequential operations. One was obliged to perform one action before another could be undertaken. Tactical success was a prerequisite to operational or strategic efforts. Forces were required to be synchronized in time, and plans typically were prepared with time-phased branches and sequels--actions that took place successively in time. Today and foreseeably, however, many actions will, by preference, be performed simultaneously--in parallel, not in sequence--which will render moot many notions associated with linear, sequential operations.
Nonlinearity exists also with respect to intensity, to the extent that small actions can produce completely disproportionate effects. Systems that have significant feedback mechanisms tend to react in this non-Newtonian way. Outcomes, because they might bear little linear relationship to inputs, can thus produce elements of shock and surprise. (4)
In nonlinear situations, particular aspects of place, time, and intensity cannot be factored out and then reassembled. The ability to disaggregate and then reintegrate at will--called "additivity" or "superposition"--does not exist in nonlinear systems: "The heart of the matter is that the system's variables cannot be effectively isolated from each other or from their context; linearization is not possible, because dynamic interaction is one of the system's defining characteristics." (5)
Nonlinearities compress, or flatten, the levels of warfare--tactical, operational, and strategic. When geography interposes no impediment to addressing strategic targets directly, when time does not require a sequence of actions to achieve success, when small (tactical) actions can have effects of great (strategic) consequence, and when variables cannot be isolated, the classic levels of warfare lose much of their distinctiveness. On operations and planning, the impact of these trends toward nonlinearity is significant. Many of the precepts of the Joint Operational Planning and Execution System (JOPES) are brought into question. Indeed, current operations and planning systems seem incapable of performing well under such conditions.
Yet, all of these nonlinearities have been characteristic of warfare at sea throughout history. Few true "lines" have ever delineated or organized the maritime battlespace--not even the "sea lines of communication" about which some observers of naval matters have written metaphorically, and the "sea-lanes" along which the German navy in two world wars sought to interdict the transoceanic passage of forces and supplies. Naval strategists have long recognized that sea communication is most effectively interdicted at its termini, underscoring the point that the open sea provides much better sanctuary than geographically fixed ports. If ports of embarkation or debarkation can be closed, neither commerce nor seaborne reinforcement or resupply can flow. Thus are the "sea-lanes" rendered irrelevant. Only when ports cannot be cut off does attacking shipping at sea become necessary.
Naval warfare, since the advent of the aircraft and the submarine, has been truly three-dimensional in ways that other forms of warfare have not. An adversary's forces were never to be located across the battlespace on the other side of the "front lines." They could be virtually anywhere, even below the surface. In addition, in the maritime battlespace all targets are moving. In land warfare maneuver is a variable, an option; in the maritime battlespace, maneuver is a constant--a fact of life. (6)
Naval commanders and strategists have known for many decades that in such an environment--a nonlinear, three-dimensional battlespace in which maneuver is a constant rather than a variable--the most difficult problem is finding the adversary. This point brings us to two insights about warfare at sea. First, as mentioned above, sea-lanes are most effectively interdicted at their ends, not along their length. Secondly, most naval battles throughout history have occurred within the sight of land, where ships can more easily be located--thus, of course, the importance of maritime choke points.
Tracking an adversary once found is orders of magnitude easier than finding it, and putting a weapon on target is easier still. Of course, this explains why in the maritime environment submarines and aircraft have been exceptionally difficult adversaries; both enjoy a powerful comparative advantage over surface forces in their ability to create and sustain sanctuary for themselves and deny it to their foes.
The historical characteristics of the maritime battlespace have now begun to typify as well the landward battlespaces that U.S. forces can anticipate in the future. Wherever they might be, adversary forces can no longer be expected to be arrayed in lines, for lines confer few of the advantages they once did, either for defense or for the offensive massing of forces. Adversaries will employ all the dimensions of warfare to both offensive and defensive advantage, and they will endeavor not to present stationary targets--which afford no sanctuary, for they can now be attacked with great precision from long ranges. Potential adversaries already understand that finding the right target is the cardinal challenge for present and future forces. They will attempt to ensure that their forces cannot be found, identified, located, tracked, or attacked. They are seeking, in other words, to establish sanctuaries. Distance offers sanctuary, as does darkness, and as do stealth, secure locations such as caves or the depths of the seas, bad weather, and passive and active defenses--armor or anti-missile defenses, for example. Factors that increase the difficulty of finding targets aid and abet sanctuary.
Mobile Scud launchers in DESERT STORM, the ensuing years of severe targeting difficulties in Iraq, and the targeting fiascoes in the Kosovo conflict have offered only early glimpses of what will be a migration ashore of maritime characteristics, the land battlespace too will be nonlinear and three-dimensional, and all important targets will either move or be obscured by deception. Of course, adversaries will attempt to attack targets for which sanctuary is very difficult to provide--large, fixed, valuable nodes of national infrastructure will be prime.
ACCESS
The key concept for conducting expeditionary operations is access--the aggregated ability to deny sanctuary. Given access, targets can be selected, located, identified, tracked, and attacked (or threatened) to produce the desired effects; (7) without it, they cannot be. If a target can be selected but not located, one does not have access to it. If it can be selected and located but not identified, access has been stymied. If it can be selected, located, identified, and tracked but no attack can be delivered, access has not been achieved. Access does not require an actual attack. A credible threat to deliver a weapon or an attack of another form (computer network attack, for example) suffices to consummate access.
The kind of access suggested here might be thought of as instrumental access. That is, it is more than access to infrastructure located in a geographic area--such as air bases or staging points for army equipment. It is also more than just "being there." Having established such access, forces can undertake a variety of tasks. Access is prerequisite to power projection (striking or raiding targets on the land with explosives or with troops), blockade and quarantine, rescue and assistance, most types of information operations, and to essentially every conceivable operation in war or "military operations other than war." (8)
Access is vital, because most operational and strategic-level targets will be located on land. Operational-level targets are those that if successfully attacked result in changing the course or outcome of campaigns or major operations; strategic targets, by comparison, involve the course or outcome of the war. Conceivably, with the demise of battle fleets (and the unlikelihood of their resurrection), the only strategic or operational targets that it will be possible in the future to encounter at sea or in littoral waters will be ballistic missile-launching submarines and a state's commerce moved by ship.
As Colin Gray has written, "Very prominent among the distinctions of U.S. superpower was, and remains, its unique global military reach. That global reach is maritime in character for any operation with dimensions beyond those of a raid." (9) The end of "reach" is access, and (aside from raids) that access must have duration, a time dimension. Access is attained by reaching across one or more of the physical realms: sea, space, cyberspace, land, and air. Naval forces emphasize, in their attempts to secure access, those realms that are politically uncontrolled. The high seas, space, cyberspace, and the air above the high seas are free for all to use essentially without restriction, and they provide realms through which access to adversaries can be gained. (10) Figure 1 illustrates the relationships.
The use of the politically uncontrolled realms emphasized by naval forces incurs only minimal cost. The remaining realms--land, and air over land--are politically controlled, and costs are exacted for their use, whether they are controlled by friends, adversaries, or neutrals. The price might be monetary or political, or it might be in terms of casualties. But any use of those realms invariably involves payment.
Access constitutes the strategic and technical dimensions of targeting. But targeting includes a third dimension--the political. Once access has been gained, considerations that are essentially political surge to the forefront. First, there is the question of rules of engagement. Are the selected targets legitimate under the laws of armed conflict and in terms of the engagement policy? Then comes an assessment of collateral effects and unintended consequences. Will attacking the target result in unacceptable collateral damage, or can unintended consequences be foreseen? Next, one must consider fratricide. What is the risk to friendly forces? Targeting must focus on platform selection. Is a precision weapon or a "dumb" bomb the right attack weapon? Should one use a cruise missile or an aircraft to attack the target? Attack prioritization is an important part of targeting. What should be the priority in which targets are attacked, and why? Also, what will be the domestic political implications, if any, of the a ttack under consideration? Finally, attack timing must be considered. How does the proposed attack, and the target to be struck, mesh with the overall plan? What should be the interval between attacks? Should targets be struck simultaneously? All these decisions lie beyond the requirement to assure access through intelligence, reconnaissance, surveillance, and arraying the means of attack within range of the prospective target. None of these decisions, however, is pertinent in the absence of access.
Naval forces can work to gain access to strategic and operational targets ashore, but because they have little control over the targeting constraints that might be imposed, their effectiveness will be negatively affected by those constraints. Adherence to them directly increases the risks of failure. Of course, few of those constraints affect the operations of adversaries; thus, their effect is both negative and strongly asymmetric.
The subject of asymmetric warfare has basked in the limelight in recent years, without much rigor attending either its meaning or its impact. In general, it conveys the idea of adversaries taking advantage of one's weaknesses while emphasizing their own strengths. A clearer, tighter understanding of asymmetric warfare would focus on actions that adversaries can take against which the United States and its allies have no direct counters in kind. As examples one can cite terrorism but also hostage taking, siting one's weapons at or near protected targets (such as hospitals or religious shrines), using human shields, and conducting chemical and biological warfare. In this sense, the spawning ground of asymmetric warfare is in the realm of actions the United States cannot or will not take in its own defense. The battlespace is tilted by the constraints the United States places on its own use of force; asymmetric warfare describes an adversary's ability and willingness to take advantage of that unlevel field.
ANTI-ACCESS
The "flip side" of access is anti-access. Adversaries, of course, will seek to deny U.S. forces access to potential targets. In their attempts to discourage U.S. forces from gaining access they will use the same physical realms as the United States does to gain it, and they will face similar technical and strategic challenges, the central one being how to find the right target. For these reasons, adversaries will seek to increase the effective size of their defensive battlespace (to conceal their vulnerabilities) and to decrease the effective size of their offensive battlespace--to confine the attacker to a well defined killing zone.
"We're clearly moving to the point where it's going to be possible to track all ships every moment of the day and night. As it becomes easier and easier to find ships, they become more and more subject to unexpected attack." (11) This prediction dates from 1982, but it accurately describes the beliefs of many contemporary defense analysts. The assumption persists that modern intelligence-gathering systems of adversaries, coupled with longer-range and more accurate weapons, will aggravate the dangers to those who would approach their territory from the sea. In this regard, one analyst asserts, "It can hardly be imagined, given the state of current designs, that ships will be able to fulfill mission profiles and cope with naval antiship missile threats after about 2005." (12) An Air Force study weighs in with the claim that "in the 21st Century it will be possible to find, fix, or track and target anything that moves on the surface of the earth." (13) In other words, there will be no sanctuaries.
However technology reduces it the difficulty of locating the right target in the battlespace will remain. As one perceptive observer notes, "You may look at the map and see flags stuck in at different points and consider that the results will be uncertain, but when you get out on the sea with its vast distances, its storms and mists, and with night coming on, and all the uncertainties which exist, you cannot possibly expect that the kind of conditions which would be appropriate to the movements of armies have any application to the haphazard conditions of war at sea." (14) One fundamental reason for this difficulty is recognized by sailors and cartoon characters alike.
Another reason is that those who appreciate the central difficulties of a maritime battlespace also recognize a corollary implied above--that forces operating in a very large, spherical, nonlinear, three dimensional battlespace in which all targets are moving will take every precaution to ensure that they cannot be detected; if detected, not identified; if identified, not tracked; if tracked, not attacked; and if attacked, not hit. Even if the Air Force claim is fulfilled--which would require, at a minimum, a large constellation of active space sensors and extensive command and control arrangements--forces at sea can thwart access by breaking the adversary's intelligence, reconnaissance, surveillance, command and control, and attack chain. If any link (and surveillance is just one of them) is broken, the chain fails. Accordingly in the battlespace of the future, as in the maritime battlespace of the past, the survivability of a force can be significantly improved by offensive operations designed to attack the adversary's eyes and brains: his capabilities for command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance.
If offensive anti-access methods are ineffective or for some reason cannot be employed, defensive methods to thwart access can be found in operations security, deception, and active and passive defenses. Of these, operations security and deception are comparatively cheap and can be very effective. if the attacker does not know where ones forces are, or what they are, or if he cannot identify or track them, his odds for a successful attack on them are greatly diminished. Counters--active, passive, and computer network defenses--to such antiaccess measures are difficult and expensive but clearly necessary.
Of interest, deterrence is the last line of defense, and a comparatively weak one. Deterrence comes into effect if access cannot be prevented in other ways. States historically have sought to deter attacks from long-range nuclear-tipped missiles and by terrorists, for example, because other forms of defense against them have great difficulty denying access reliably. Figure 3 illustrates anti-access.
MEANS
Given the ends to be sought and a sense of the ways that might be used to attain them, what means should be developed and devoted to the requisite missions? A key component of new means being developed by the U.S. Navy is that of network-centric warfare. The Chief of Naval Operations in the spring of 1997 asserted, "For us, it's a fundamental shift from what we call platform-centric warfare to something we call network-centric warfare." (15) This revealed a fresh appreciation that the Navy had to focus not on the material instruments of the order of battle--what the Navy is (ships, aircraft, and weapons)--but on what the Navy can accomplish. Network-centric warfare draws its strength and its effectiveness from the power of the network, from what naval platforms and a host of other joint and combined contributors can achieve in concert with one another. The power to prevail is grounded in the ability not to hoard but to share information and act on it.
Network-centric warfare pivots on the establishment and maintenance of a common operational picture and on the decentralization of execution. The common operational picture is a function of the networks available to the warfighter. Conceptually, networks link together sensors, a command and control grid, and the ability to engage the adversary. Using the concepts of "smart push" and "warrior pull," the networks--underlain by a "global information grid"--will provide evaluated, formated, and analyzed information in the form the commander needs. Information that meets certain parameters (such as high-stress time requirements) is "pushed" to the commander without his asking for it. Other information will be available to commanders on demand, if they "pull" it.
In the future, most data collection, processing, analysis, and storage for network-centric warfare will not be organic to the naval force at sea. It will be accomplished off board. For the inputs that undergird information superiority, at-sea commanders will be, as never before, dependent on capabilities that lie beyond, perhaps well beyond, their direct control. Sensors, for example, might be space-based; they might include AWACS or J-STARS aircraft* under operational control of another commander; or they might be unmanned aerial or underwater vehicles. In such situations, shipboard sensors will be employed sparingly and, except in unusual occasions, primarily in self-defense. Ships, aircraft, and even ground--Army or Marine--units ashore will act as nodes in the networks. Some will appear on the engagement network, as ordnance deliverers, others on the sensor network, as collectors of data.
The networks are not reserved exclusively to naval forces. They are, and should be, shared by joint or combined forces that contribute to operations. If naval forces are first on the scene, the networks will effect a convenient, smooth, seamless, and comprehensive enlargement of the scale of operations as new units and kinds of forces arrive. Reliance on off-the-shelf civilian "plug-and-play" technologies should ameliorate interoperability problems among joint and combined forces in the future.
Actions will be undertaken in a decentralized fashion. Forces will self-synchronize from the bottom up. In many cases this will be necessary, because the on-scene forces will have both the best tactical picture and the ability to act quickly; speed will be of the essence in such situations. (16) Self-synchronization is enabled by doctrine (supplemented by the commander's intent and mission orders), by a common situational awareness, and by coordination among the forces involved. Thus, forces must be doctrinally prepared to react to situations they recognize, coordinating (if permitted by the commander's intent in a particular case) among themselves to accomplish the task at hand with no additional control or guidance from above. At the tactical level, this is but a small extension to the "command by negation" doctrine exercised by naval forces for over two decades. Whether self-synchronization is possible, or even desirable, above the tactical level has yet to be determined.
In brief, superiority in all operating domains will be required for success in future operations; in order to establish that superiority, U.S. military forces must be prepared to fight and win in every realm. One can opt not to operate effectively in a particular domain, but to do so cedes that domain to potential adversaries without a fight and jeopardizes the attainment of security objectives.
What kinds of platforms will be optimal? It seems clear that with most sensing and data-processing functions moved ashore, platforms can be much less complex. If they can be individually simpler, they can be smaller and more sparingly manned. This translates directly into lower operating costs, which means in turn that more numerous forces can be acquired for the same procurement funding.
Aircraft carriers can be very useful to the exercise of naval power. If land bases are far from the scene or unavailable, carriers might well be the only way to bring tactical airpower to bear. Whether or not highly capable conventional-takeoff-and-landing aircraft will be required in the future is more questionable, however, especially for carrier operations in defensive roles. If the need for high-performance, dogfighting aircraft subsides, it will be possible for carriers to be smaller--likely much smaller--than they are today.
The value of submarines will lie in power projection operations and will pivot on whether they can perform as fully functioning nodes on the network. If they can maintain connectivity at an acceptable level, a place for them will be easy to justify. They might, for example, provide survivable magazines for a large number of land-attack weapons. If they cannot be integrated into the network-centric framework, however, they will viewed as an expensive, highly specialized force useful only for a narrow range of tasks such as prearranged strikes, antisubmarine warfare, and covert insertions of special operations forces.
In the future security environment, numbers will be important. Greater numbers allow naval forces to be more places at once without overstretch. Second, they mean shorter average transit times to reach areas that need attention. Third, the power of networks is an exponential function of the number of networked nodes--more ships and aircraft, more nodes, more networked power. Finally, larger inventories of ships and aircraft of less individual value will reduce reluctance to place them at risk.
The inventory of naval ships has been declining steadily over the past decade, the reduction amounting to 46 percent from 1989 to 2000. The combination of increasing personnel and operating expenses, growing ship and aircraft unit costs, and declining budgets has squeezed ship procurement. As a result, ship force levels are approaching historical prewar lows. Figure 4 depicts the situation graphically.
Of consequence, ships have high unit costs and last a long time. Of concern, naval inventories must be maintained in peacetime. Once a conflict begins, it is too late to build a fleet. Henry Kaiser constructed fifty escort carriers in 1943-44, but today neither time nor U.S. industrial capacity would permit anything approximating that feat. "Whether a democratic government will have the foresight, the keen sensitiveness to national position and credit, the willingness to ensure its prosperity by adequate outpouring of money in times of peace, all of which are necessary for military preparation," warned Alfred Thayer Mahan in 1890, "is yet an open question." (17) It still is.
Naval forces are routinely deployed forward, assigned to the Sixth Fleet (Mediterranean), Seventh Fleet (western Pacific), and Fifth Fleet (Persian Gulf). There are barely three hundred ships in the deploying force; that means fewer than one hundred will be on deployment across the three fleet areas at any one time. Some ships will probably be near where a crisis erupts, but at most they will have to steam on the order of a thousand miles. At a speed of advance of sixteen knots, that will take almost three days. It is of serious concern, therefore, when projections by the Secretary of the Navy result in a ship total of 286 by the year 2007. (18)
Speed matters as well. Arguably, the potential for adversaries to act very quickly and present the United States with faits accomplis has increased and will probably become more acute over time. For a forward-deployed naval force the numbers of ships and aircraft is intimately related to speed. Smaller fleets result in less geographic coverage and longer response times.
A greatly increased role in homeland defense or defense of friends and allies from ballistic missiles, should that come to pass, will be met by ambivalence in the Navy. On the one hand, it constitutes a high-profile strategic mission for the Navy and will probably justify construction of more Aegis-equipped ships. On the other hand, it does not resonate well in U.S. Navy culture, for the positioning of the ships would be essentially fixed, depriving them of their most vital survival asset, mobility. Coastal defense of landward targets from the sea has not historically been in favor in the Navy; the tasks will be wholly defensive; and the mission is one essentially of garrisoning rather than of expeditionary operations.
RISKS
Like the selection of ends, ways, and means, the assumption of risks is necessary in combat operations, for "there is no zero-risk situation in war. The willingness to run a calculated risk and to absorb some damage is essential. In sum, heroes run risks. Smart heroes calculate the risks and take steps to shift the odds more in their favor. Those who avoid risks stay home." (19)
Risks are one measure of the fit between ends, ways, and means. If one believes that desired ends cannot be attained, operations assume high risk. In the abstract it is not possible to foretell where the fault lies. It might be that the ends are too ambitious, that the ways are insufficient, or that the means cannot produce the desired effects. It might be that the ends do not justify the risks. That was the reason for the U.S. withdrawal in 1993-94 from Somalia--there was insufficient U.S. interest to justify the loss of eighteen service members. This episode has often been cited as reflecting a U.S. unwillingness to take casualties, which some strategists argue will be a determining factor: "The prospect of high casualties, which can rapidly undermine domestic support for any military operation, is the key political constraint when decisions must be made on which forces to deploy in a crisis, and at what levels." (20) Official U.S. Army doctrine states, "The American people expect decisive victory and abhor unnecessary casualties." (21) The degree of reluctance prompted by casualty estimates, however, is not absolute. It is closely correlated to a perceived necessity to undertake a particular operation. If the operation is deemed vital or necessary to U.S. security, tolerance of casualties will be commensurately high; to the extent the operation is considered discretionary, that tolerance will be low.
Risk determination is related closely to damage assessment. In determining whether attacks on a radar site have been effective, one asks, does the fact that it is no longer radiating indicate that it has been so damaged that it cannot radiate? If a tank company has been attacked, how does one determine its residual combat power? Such appraisals tend to be difficult to make. The advent of weapons that are more precise but carry less destructive power, and of information operations (in particular, computer network attack), renders damage assessment even more problematic.
In future operations, especially information operations, however, the desired effect of military action should be neutralization: rendering enemies' actions ineffective, negating their hostile intentions, thwarting their objectives. Similarly, an analyst of the future battlespace writes:
All of this also will require discerning new and different "measures of effectiveness" for the application of force, that go beyond traditional "battle damage assessment." ... This implies an "effect-based attack" designed to manipulate the enemy, rather than a "target-based attack" designed to destroy. In turn, this could enable commanders to distinguish--at their will--between inflicting lethality and achieving effectiveness. (22)
If this is an accurate rendering, assessing neutralization should be simpler and less ambiguous than the more doctrinal measures such as destroy, neutralize, suppress, eliminate, disable, degrade, render ineffective, delay, or attrite. (23)
In any event, risks tend to be difficult to assess accurately. One must be specific about the risks being discussed and as to what underlying factors determine risks. One must also appreciate that it is in the adversary's interest to make risk assessment as difficult as possible. Saddam Hussein made obvious attempts at this several times prior to and during DESERT STORM, and he has done so since.
Recently, an analytical tool has been promulgated to assist commanders in assessing and managing risks. "Operational risk management" requires staffs to set forth methodically all recognized hazards of an operation and then translate those hazards into risks by analyzing the severity of the consequences of each hazard in light of its probability. Once the high risks have been identified--those with severe potential consequences and high probability--measures are considered to mitigate, or manage, them. While qualitative and often difficult, this method does offer the commander a more structured and systematic tool than mere guesswork. (24)
TO REMAIN AND PERSEVERE
Sinking an enemy fleet, conducting blockades and embargoes, and threatening sea-based attacks are all to no avail if they fail to alter adversaries' actions or intentions. Historically, navies have been able to influence events on land indirectly, because only with great difficulty or after prolonged periods of time could they place an opponent's sanctuary in jeopardy. Now, however, with the free use of the sea, the air over the sea, space, and cyberspace; with the power of information superiority enabled by networking; with long-range precision weapons; with the development of abundant and affordable new sensors; and with the techniques of information warfare, navies are becoming able, as never before, to penetrate adversary sanctuaries and influence events ashore rapidly, directly, and decisively.
The "Maritime Strategy" of the 1980s began a naval realignment process that continues today. It emphasized that the objective of seapower was no longer to defeat opposing fleets but to affect opponents' actions on land, where political processes transpire. The Maritime Strategy called for defending allied transoceanic shipping as far forward as possible and for applying power to the flanks of the Soviet Union in order to relieve pressure on the continental center, the inter-German border. In the 1990s, with the demise of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Treaty Organization, the threat to U.S. forces in deep waters subsided, and a new naval strategic vision, set forth in the white paper "... From the Sea," steered attention to the littorals, the green waters of the world. The 1990s also witnessed the shrinking of the U.S. military and a concomitant reduction in the size of the fleet.
Over time, the battlespace in military operations has become more and more nonlinear with respect to time, space, and intensity. Having been accustomed for centuries to battlespaces that are nonlinear and three-dimensional, and in which all targets are moving, naval forces are particularly well suited to understand and thrive in this environment. The key to future operations is access--because once access can be reliably secured, enemy sanctuaries can be compromised and objectives can be attained.
Unquestionably, naval forces will be required concurrently to deal with antiaccess efforts of adversaries. Because the fundamental challenge--for both sides--is to find the right target, operations security and deception will have greater leverage in the future, alongside active and passive defenses. Because information superiority must underwrite targeting efforts, information warfare in all its manifestations will become more and more important.
Naval ships should become smaller, and inventories of them should increase if the U.S. Navy is to continue to be highly effective. Most sensing and information processing functions will be accomplished off board, allowing platforms to be less complex and more numerous for a given procurement expenditure.
Questions remain regarding whether the right targets to vitiate adversary sanctuaries can be identified, whether they can be attacked effectively once they are identified, whether the effectiveness of attacks can be confidently assessed, whether decision makers are willing to assume the risks that might be necessary to approach a hostile shore or to engage adversary forces on the high seas, and whether self-imposed constraints will so reduce the degrees of freedom of U.S. forces as to render them powerless. The central contribution of naval forces is to be there to open the door, quickly and effectively, once these difficult questions have been resolved, and to remain and persevere for as long as it takes to secure national objectives.
[FIGURE 4 OMITTED]
* AWACS--Airborne Warning and Control System; J-STARS--Joint Surveillance and Target Attack Radar System.
NOTES
(1.) This is what distinguishes maneuver from movement. Maneuver is undertaken relative to adversaries in order to place at risk their centers of gravity or critical weaknesses, or to strengthen one's own defenses vis-a-vis enemy capability.
(2.) "Maritime power projection--Power projection in and from the maritime environment, including a broad spectrum of offensive military operations to destroy enemy forces or logistic support or to prevent enemy forces from approaching within enemy weapons range of friendly forces. Maritime power projection may be accomplished by amphibious assault operations, attack of targets ashore, or support of sea control operations." Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms, Joint Publication 1-02 (Washington, D.C.: Joint Staff, 23 March 1994, amended through 15 April 1998).
(3.) One of the themes of Colin S. Gray, The Leverage of Sea Power: The Strategic Advantage of Navies in War (New York: Free Press, 1992).
(4.) See, for example, David S. Alberts, and Thomas J. Czerwinski, eds., Complexity, Global Politics, and National Security (Washington, D.C.: National Defense Univ. Press, 1997); Barry D. Watts, Clausewitzian Friction and Future War, McNair Paper 52 (Washington, D.C.: Institute for National Strategic Studies, October 1996), pp. 106-7; and Harlan K. Ullman and James P. Wade, Shock and Awe: Achieving Rapid Dominance (Washington, D.C.: National Defense Univ. Press, 1996).
(5.) Alan Beyerchen, "Clausewitz, Nonlinearity and the Unpredictability of War," International Security, Winter 1992, pp. 59-90.
(6.) See Wayne P. Hughes, "Naval Maneuver Warfare," Naval War College Review, Summer 1997, pp. 25-49.
(7.) "Selection" of targets lies at the intersection of intelligence and policy. Selection, in this sense, distinguishes what is a target and what is not, and which targets can produce the desired effects if successfully attacked or threatened. Selection will rely heavily on the ability to collect, process, evaluate, and disseminate large quantities of information--on information superiority. While the great difficulty of selecting the "right" target should not be underestimated, it is not pivotal to this analysis.
(8.) The contemporary image of information operations is that it comprises computer network attack and defense. In fact, however, it is much larger, encompassing not only those subjects but deception, psychological operations, electronic warfare, operational deception, operational security, some types of physical destruction, and even, on occasion, public affairs.
(9.) Colin S. Gray, "Sea Power for Containment," in Navies and Global Defense: Theories and Strategy, ed. Keith Neilson and Elizabeth Jane Errington (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1995), p. 204. [Emphasis supplied.]
(10.) The "high seas" denotes those areas that are beyond the agreed twelve-mile "territorial seas" and other controlled areas (such as archipelagic seas) provided for in the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea.
(11.) Steven Strasser, with David C. Martin, James Doyle, Mary Lord, and John J. Lindsay, "Are Big Warships Doomed?" Newsweek, 17 May 1982, "News/Alnews," LexisNexis (accessed 27 March 1998)
(12.) Erbil Serter, "Warship Designs for the 21st Century," International Defense Review, Quarterly Report (Jane's Information Group, 1 December 1997), p. 3, LexisNexis (accessed 9 February 1998).
(13.) U.S. Air Force, Global Engagement: A Vision for the 21st Century Air Force, 1996, on the World Wide Web, http://www.af-future.hq.af.mil/2l/indext.htm, 2 December 1998.
(14.) Winston Churchill, The Gathering Storm (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1948), p. 601.
(15.) Remarks delivered by Admiral Jay L. Johnson, USN, Chief of Naval Operations, to the U.S. Naval Institute, Annapolis, Maryland, 23 April 1997.
(16.) "Most images of war are linked to destroying an enemy, controlling resources, maintaining sovereignty, and rearranging territory. Yet wars are won or lost, begun and ended, and conducted in time as well as space, with time normally the more important factor." Grant T. Hammond, Joint Force Quarterly, Spring 1994, p. 9.
(17.) Alfred Thayer Mahan, The Influence of Sea Power upon History: 1660-1783 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1957), p. 58.
(18.) As reported in "Navy Gives Rumsfeld FY-03 Budget to Buy 'Only' Five Ships, 81 Aircraft," Inside the Navy, 3 December 2001, p. 1.
(19.) H. Dwight Lyons, Jr., Eleanor A. Baker, Sabrina R. Edlow, and David A. Perin, The Mine Threat: Show Stoppers or Speed Bumps? (Alexandria, Va.: Center for Naval Analyses, 1993), p. 19.
(20.) Edward N. Luttwak, "A Post-Heroic Military Policy," Foreign Affairs, July-August 1996, p.36.
(21.) U.S. Defense Dept., Operations, Field Manual 100-5 (Washington, D.C.: Dept. of the Army, June 1993), pp. 1-3.
(22.) Douglas H. Dearth, "Imperatives of Information Operations and Information Warfare," in Cyberwar 2.0: Myths, Mysteries, and Reality, ed. Alan D. Campen and Douglas H. Dearth (Fairfax, Va.: AFCEA International Press, 1998), p. 396.
(23.) Rudy T. Veit, Joint Targeting: Improving the Playbook, Communications, and Teamwork, Strategy Research Project (Carlisle Barracks, Pa.: U.S. Army War College, 1996), p. 26.
(24.) For the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps, the governing instruction for the process of operational risk management is Opnav [Navy Staff] Instruction 3500.39/ Marine Corps Order 3500.27, 3 April 1997.
Dr. Barnett is professor emeritus at the Naval War College, where until September 2001 he held the Jerry O. Tuttle Military Chair of Information Operations. Retired from the U.S. Navy in the grade of captain, Dr. Barnett was a member of the U.S. delegation to the strategic arms talks with the Soviet Union in 1970-71. From 1983 to 1984 he led the Strategic Concepts Branch of the office of the Chief of Naval Operations.
[C] 2002 by Roger W. Barnett
COPYRIGHT 2002 U.S. Naval War College
Citation: Roger W. Barnett. "Naval power for a new American century - defense policy, United States," Naval War College Review, Winter 2002.
Original URL: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0JIW/is_1_55/ai_87146675
Naval War College Review, Winter 2002.
The vicious, unprecedented attacks on the United States on 11 September 2001 by terrorist extremists served to bring into sharp focus two important new factors on the global security scene. First, the United States experienced a sudden, shocking loss of homeland sanctuary. Sanctuary is another way of portraying what is usually referred to as national security. Sanctuary is the place where one feels secure. The central objective of security policy, and the reason for laws and their enforcers, is to allow citizens to enjoy their freedoms within the security of a sanctuary.
Sanctuary is not confined to fixed locations; for example, it follows U.S. citizens and armed forces wherever they go. The bombings of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983, the U.S. Air Force barracks at Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia in 1996, U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998, and the USS Cole in 2000 violated the sanctuary the United States normally provides over its federal employees and military forces worldwide. Any or all of these events might have been labeled an "act of war," but since "act of war" is not a defined term of art but a political concept, politicians opted not to proceed down the path that leads to a declared war. Those brutal attacks, moreover, were directed against U.S. government employees who were at the time within another state's sovereign territorial responsibility. The 11 September attacks differed in two key aspects: they indiscriminately targeted civilians, and those civilians were located within the U.S. homeland.
The second factor was the demonstration of the devolution of control of very powerful weapons to individuals who were not associated directly with national governments. Heretofore, with only a few exceptions, weapons of mass destruction (WMD) have been exclusively under the control of governmental leaders. On 11 September, as it has been since, it was demonstrated that traditional WMD (biologicals) and other weapons of mass destruction (large civil airliners loaded with fuel) can be employed by other than central governments.
The placement of WMD into the hands of terrorists rather than governments has momentous security policy implications for all states. Most important, reliance on deterrence will necessarily have to be supplanted by reliance on protection in the form of active and passive defenses. Reestablishing sanctuary for U.S. citizens will require new emphasis on homeland security, an office with that vital responsibility having been established by President G. W. Bush only ten days after the 11 September attacks.
This change in U.S. core security objectives will be accompanied by an extension of the U.S. commitment to global security and political stability. There will continue to be objectives to be served and tasks to be accomplished beyond the purely defensive ones dictated by increased homeland security emphasis. For the most part, these international tasks will involve assisting friends to shore up their homeland sanctuaries, and penetrating the sanctuary that adversaries seek from U.S. military operations. Past objectives centering on preventing or defeating territorial aggression will be replaced by expeditionary operations to deny sanctuary to those who would harm the United States or its vital interests. That was what the operations against the Taliban and al-Qaida in Afghanistan were all about.
These new core security objectives--underwriting homeland sanctuary, helping others to create and sustain sanctuaries, and preventing successful use of sanctuary by adversaries--will have a powerful impact on the ways and means to fulfil them. Those ways and means will come burdened by their own set of associated risks.
When the decision is made to use or threaten the use of military force in pursuit of strategic goals, doctrines and strategies define the ways, and military forces the means. Risks articulate the closeness or lack of fit between ends, ways, and means. If the ends sought are too ambitious for the means available, or if the ways necessary to attain them involve the possibility of significant loss for marginal gain, the ends, ways, and means are not in harmony, and the risks must be assessed as high. Sometimes high risks must be accepted, but often decision makers have a poor understanding of the magnitude of the risks or of the consequences of the actions they are contemplating. In the framework of these relationships, this article will discuss the available ways in which naval power can contribute to the accomplishment of the new strategic ends, the naval means to effect the strategies, and the kinds of risks that will have to be accommodated. It will be argued that the U.S. Navy's participation in the ways to accomplish the ends sought are, in fact, limited in number, and that if sufficient resources are not forthcoming to undergird the optimal strategy, high risks will ensue.
WAYS
Doctrines and strategies comprise the ways, the "hows," by which military force is employed or threatened. They are closely related. Doctrine says, in essence, "All things being equal, this is how we would prefer to operate"; however, it is unspecific as to time, place, or adversary. Strategies in contrast, recognize the key factors that are never "equal." Strategies deal with concrete opponents in particular places at specific times. How one operates, doctrinally or strategically, has but two operational components: offense and defense. These are tightly interwoven, and because they cannot be entirely separated, they also cannot be prioritized. In order to succeed, a military force must be able to operate on both the offensive and defensive, concurrently and well.
All this is little more than a truism, yet it exposes the conceptual shallowness of the approach of the Joint Chiefs of Staff documents Joint Vision 2010 and, more recently, Joint Vision 2020. Those documents set forth four operational concepts: dominant maneuver, full-dimensional protection, precision engagement, and focused logistics. In that sense they represent little more than a restatement of the eternal verity noted earlier--ways for the application of military force consist of offense (precision engagement) and defense (full-dimensional protection). Support (focused logistics) and maneuver (dominant maneuver), however, are misplaced in this conceptual framework; neither support nor maneuver is ever undertaken for its own sake but only in order to optimize offense or defense.
Maneuver in itself makes no independent contribution to success. It is maneuver combined with attack or the threat of attack or maneuver, combined with defense, that works to produce the desired effect. While Muhammad Ali characterized his fighting style as "Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee," a perceptive defense analyst, probably Edward Luttwak, observed that the results of maneuver might well be, "Float like a butterfly, sting like a butterfly." It is not the "float" that makes the difference but the "sting." No choice can be made between maneuver and "fires" (broadly, campaign-level attacks); they are not binary opposites. Because maneuver is relational, one maneuvers for the purpose of rendering the offense, the defense, or both, more effective. (1) Similarly, support provides logistical depth to the offense or the defense. One is left with the straightforward understanding that warfare, the application of military force, is composed of offense and defense enhanced by maneuver and support. This is not very satisfying. One must delve, therefore, in greater detail into the levels of warfare at which specific approaches can be identified.
STRATEGIES FOR THE EMPLOYMENT OF NAVAL FORCES
With regard to the employment of naval power, six discrete strategies have historically been adopted by states: fleet battle, blockade, commerce raiding, fleet-in-being, coastal defense, and maritime power projection. (2)
Each of these strategy choices involves a different blend of offense and defense, underwritten in various degrees by maneuver and support. Moreover, as often as not, the strategies are not pursued separately but combined or pursued sequentially--sometimes even concurrently--during the course of a conflict. States with large, powerful navies have typically opted for the more offensively oriented battle, blockade, and power projection, while states less well endowed with naval power have selected one or more of the remaining three.
The contributions that naval forces make to the overall military strategies of the states they serve have value only insofar as they can influence political processes, which invariably take place on land. To sink an enemy fleet in isolation from an effect ashore--even a long-term, indirect effect--is to have accomplished nothing. Blockades that fail to alter policy are impotent. Power projection that does not succeed in deflecting the actions or intentions of an adversary is squandered.
Historically, belligerents had difficulty in directly attacking enemy centers of gravity (or coming to grips with the sources of enemy power); strategies for the employment of naval forces have typically taken extended periods of time to exert their effects. (3) Decisive battles among fleets have been few and far between, and their impacts have sometimes taken years to be felt. Blockades (nowadays, "embargoes") tend to be notoriously slow in acting. Power projection, therefore, the most direct expression of naval power, has come to be emphasized. Note that there is a positive relationship between the effectiveness of a strategy and the degree to which the adversary's sanctuary is threatened. The emphasis on power projection can also be seen as a by-product of the atrophy of many naval fleets. The lack of opposition to the establishment of sea control has permitted the few large and powerful navies to reorient their focuses in a landward direction.
The United States today has no adversary fleets to engage, nor may it reasonably expect to for the time being. Commerce raiding is incompatible with achieving U.S. objectives. "Fleet in being" strategies have historically been used by weak navies for purposes of deterrence or defensive response. For more than a century the United States has been the preeminent practitioner of "forward presence"--employing naval forces away from its homeland to deter adversaries, to reassure allies and friends, and to shorten the time for crisis response. This could be considered a different form of a "fleet in being" strategy, which the United States undertook in expanded fashion after World War II.
Increased participation in the homeland defense mission will involve the employment of ships as a sea-based adjunct to national missile--defense, and probably also to extend ballistic missile defense umbrellas over the territories of friends and allies. In addition, there will have to be an increase in U.S. coastal surveillance and reconnaissance, and in patrol capability. Antismuggling, anti-infiltration, and ship inspection functions at the more than 350 American ports will tax current and programmed U.S. Coast Guard assets significantly. Unquestionably, the number of units assigned to these tasks will have to increase, and the extra burden will have to be shouldered by the Navy--given the Coast Guard's size and breadth of assigned duties, which include major devotion to at-sea public safety and rescue, interdiction of maritime drug trafficking, and protection of American fisheries. The requirement here will be for air reconnaissance and surveillance, and for numbers of small ships, minimally armed. One adv antage enjoyed by the United States that, in general, is not shared among its allies is that most U.S. ports (except those close to Mexico or the Caribbean islands) can be approached only by capable, seagoing vessels. The threat of infiltration or smuggling by means of submarines, while it cannot be ruled out entirely, appears unlikely and small enough not to devote tailored resources to it.
DIMENSIONS OF MILITARY FORCE
From another perspective, "ways" address how to meld the three dimensions of the application of military force--space, time, and intensity. Examination of these dimensions provides insights into how naval forces can be optimally employed in the future to secure American security objectives.
The key characteristic that will be shared among the dimensions of military force in the future is nonlinearity. In space--that is, the geographic dimension of strategy--nonlinearity exists when few lines can be perceived in the battle area that describe or organize opposing forces. Such linear constructs as the forward edge of the battlefield, forward line of troops, fire support coordination line, and even the entire notions of front, rear, and flanks are the result of drawing lines in the battlespace. But forces in the future battlespace cannot be expected to array themselves in lines; attempts to visualize the battlespace in linear terms seem already anachronistic at best. As a consequence, geography and force positioning relative to geographic features will have far less impact on operations in the future, but there is a major exception to this generalization. When the strategy involves protecting targets that are geographically fixed--national infrastructure, for example--the battlespace will be rigidly linear. Nonlinearity will apply for the most part to offensive operations, and it is strongly related to sanctuary, because movement is one of the most effective ways to establish and sustain sanctuary.
In the time dimension, linearity manifested itself in the battlespace as sequential operations. One was obliged to perform one action before another could be undertaken. Tactical success was a prerequisite to operational or strategic efforts. Forces were required to be synchronized in time, and plans typically were prepared with time-phased branches and sequels--actions that took place successively in time. Today and foreseeably, however, many actions will, by preference, be performed simultaneously--in parallel, not in sequence--which will render moot many notions associated with linear, sequential operations.
Nonlinearity exists also with respect to intensity, to the extent that small actions can produce completely disproportionate effects. Systems that have significant feedback mechanisms tend to react in this non-Newtonian way. Outcomes, because they might bear little linear relationship to inputs, can thus produce elements of shock and surprise. (4)
In nonlinear situations, particular aspects of place, time, and intensity cannot be factored out and then reassembled. The ability to disaggregate and then reintegrate at will--called "additivity" or "superposition"--does not exist in nonlinear systems: "The heart of the matter is that the system's variables cannot be effectively isolated from each other or from their context; linearization is not possible, because dynamic interaction is one of the system's defining characteristics." (5)
Nonlinearities compress, or flatten, the levels of warfare--tactical, operational, and strategic. When geography interposes no impediment to addressing strategic targets directly, when time does not require a sequence of actions to achieve success, when small (tactical) actions can have effects of great (strategic) consequence, and when variables cannot be isolated, the classic levels of warfare lose much of their distinctiveness. On operations and planning, the impact of these trends toward nonlinearity is significant. Many of the precepts of the Joint Operational Planning and Execution System (JOPES) are brought into question. Indeed, current operations and planning systems seem incapable of performing well under such conditions.
Yet, all of these nonlinearities have been characteristic of warfare at sea throughout history. Few true "lines" have ever delineated or organized the maritime battlespace--not even the "sea lines of communication" about which some observers of naval matters have written metaphorically, and the "sea-lanes" along which the German navy in two world wars sought to interdict the transoceanic passage of forces and supplies. Naval strategists have long recognized that sea communication is most effectively interdicted at its termini, underscoring the point that the open sea provides much better sanctuary than geographically fixed ports. If ports of embarkation or debarkation can be closed, neither commerce nor seaborne reinforcement or resupply can flow. Thus are the "sea-lanes" rendered irrelevant. Only when ports cannot be cut off does attacking shipping at sea become necessary.
Naval warfare, since the advent of the aircraft and the submarine, has been truly three-dimensional in ways that other forms of warfare have not. An adversary's forces were never to be located across the battlespace on the other side of the "front lines." They could be virtually anywhere, even below the surface. In addition, in the maritime battlespace all targets are moving. In land warfare maneuver is a variable, an option; in the maritime battlespace, maneuver is a constant--a fact of life. (6)
Naval commanders and strategists have known for many decades that in such an environment--a nonlinear, three-dimensional battlespace in which maneuver is a constant rather than a variable--the most difficult problem is finding the adversary. This point brings us to two insights about warfare at sea. First, as mentioned above, sea-lanes are most effectively interdicted at their ends, not along their length. Secondly, most naval battles throughout history have occurred within the sight of land, where ships can more easily be located--thus, of course, the importance of maritime choke points.
Tracking an adversary once found is orders of magnitude easier than finding it, and putting a weapon on target is easier still. Of course, this explains why in the maritime environment submarines and aircraft have been exceptionally difficult adversaries; both enjoy a powerful comparative advantage over surface forces in their ability to create and sustain sanctuary for themselves and deny it to their foes.
The historical characteristics of the maritime battlespace have now begun to typify as well the landward battlespaces that U.S. forces can anticipate in the future. Wherever they might be, adversary forces can no longer be expected to be arrayed in lines, for lines confer few of the advantages they once did, either for defense or for the offensive massing of forces. Adversaries will employ all the dimensions of warfare to both offensive and defensive advantage, and they will endeavor not to present stationary targets--which afford no sanctuary, for they can now be attacked with great precision from long ranges. Potential adversaries already understand that finding the right target is the cardinal challenge for present and future forces. They will attempt to ensure that their forces cannot be found, identified, located, tracked, or attacked. They are seeking, in other words, to establish sanctuaries. Distance offers sanctuary, as does darkness, and as do stealth, secure locations such as caves or the depths of the seas, bad weather, and passive and active defenses--armor or anti-missile defenses, for example. Factors that increase the difficulty of finding targets aid and abet sanctuary.
Mobile Scud launchers in DESERT STORM, the ensuing years of severe targeting difficulties in Iraq, and the targeting fiascoes in the Kosovo conflict have offered only early glimpses of what will be a migration ashore of maritime characteristics, the land battlespace too will be nonlinear and three-dimensional, and all important targets will either move or be obscured by deception. Of course, adversaries will attempt to attack targets for which sanctuary is very difficult to provide--large, fixed, valuable nodes of national infrastructure will be prime.
ACCESS
The key concept for conducting expeditionary operations is access--the aggregated ability to deny sanctuary. Given access, targets can be selected, located, identified, tracked, and attacked (or threatened) to produce the desired effects; (7) without it, they cannot be. If a target can be selected but not located, one does not have access to it. If it can be selected and located but not identified, access has been stymied. If it can be selected, located, identified, and tracked but no attack can be delivered, access has not been achieved. Access does not require an actual attack. A credible threat to deliver a weapon or an attack of another form (computer network attack, for example) suffices to consummate access.
The kind of access suggested here might be thought of as instrumental access. That is, it is more than access to infrastructure located in a geographic area--such as air bases or staging points for army equipment. It is also more than just "being there." Having established such access, forces can undertake a variety of tasks. Access is prerequisite to power projection (striking or raiding targets on the land with explosives or with troops), blockade and quarantine, rescue and assistance, most types of information operations, and to essentially every conceivable operation in war or "military operations other than war." (8)
Access is vital, because most operational and strategic-level targets will be located on land. Operational-level targets are those that if successfully attacked result in changing the course or outcome of campaigns or major operations; strategic targets, by comparison, involve the course or outcome of the war. Conceivably, with the demise of battle fleets (and the unlikelihood of their resurrection), the only strategic or operational targets that it will be possible in the future to encounter at sea or in littoral waters will be ballistic missile-launching submarines and a state's commerce moved by ship.
As Colin Gray has written, "Very prominent among the distinctions of U.S. superpower was, and remains, its unique global military reach. That global reach is maritime in character for any operation with dimensions beyond those of a raid." (9) The end of "reach" is access, and (aside from raids) that access must have duration, a time dimension. Access is attained by reaching across one or more of the physical realms: sea, space, cyberspace, land, and air. Naval forces emphasize, in their attempts to secure access, those realms that are politically uncontrolled. The high seas, space, cyberspace, and the air above the high seas are free for all to use essentially without restriction, and they provide realms through which access to adversaries can be gained. (10) Figure 1 illustrates the relationships.
The use of the politically uncontrolled realms emphasized by naval forces incurs only minimal cost. The remaining realms--land, and air over land--are politically controlled, and costs are exacted for their use, whether they are controlled by friends, adversaries, or neutrals. The price might be monetary or political, or it might be in terms of casualties. But any use of those realms invariably involves payment.
Access constitutes the strategic and technical dimensions of targeting. But targeting includes a third dimension--the political. Once access has been gained, considerations that are essentially political surge to the forefront. First, there is the question of rules of engagement. Are the selected targets legitimate under the laws of armed conflict and in terms of the engagement policy? Then comes an assessment of collateral effects and unintended consequences. Will attacking the target result in unacceptable collateral damage, or can unintended consequences be foreseen? Next, one must consider fratricide. What is the risk to friendly forces? Targeting must focus on platform selection. Is a precision weapon or a "dumb" bomb the right attack weapon? Should one use a cruise missile or an aircraft to attack the target? Attack prioritization is an important part of targeting. What should be the priority in which targets are attacked, and why? Also, what will be the domestic political implications, if any, of the a ttack under consideration? Finally, attack timing must be considered. How does the proposed attack, and the target to be struck, mesh with the overall plan? What should be the interval between attacks? Should targets be struck simultaneously? All these decisions lie beyond the requirement to assure access through intelligence, reconnaissance, surveillance, and arraying the means of attack within range of the prospective target. None of these decisions, however, is pertinent in the absence of access.
Naval forces can work to gain access to strategic and operational targets ashore, but because they have little control over the targeting constraints that might be imposed, their effectiveness will be negatively affected by those constraints. Adherence to them directly increases the risks of failure. Of course, few of those constraints affect the operations of adversaries; thus, their effect is both negative and strongly asymmetric.
The subject of asymmetric warfare has basked in the limelight in recent years, without much rigor attending either its meaning or its impact. In general, it conveys the idea of adversaries taking advantage of one's weaknesses while emphasizing their own strengths. A clearer, tighter understanding of asymmetric warfare would focus on actions that adversaries can take against which the United States and its allies have no direct counters in kind. As examples one can cite terrorism but also hostage taking, siting one's weapons at or near protected targets (such as hospitals or religious shrines), using human shields, and conducting chemical and biological warfare. In this sense, the spawning ground of asymmetric warfare is in the realm of actions the United States cannot or will not take in its own defense. The battlespace is tilted by the constraints the United States places on its own use of force; asymmetric warfare describes an adversary's ability and willingness to take advantage of that unlevel field.
ANTI-ACCESS
The "flip side" of access is anti-access. Adversaries, of course, will seek to deny U.S. forces access to potential targets. In their attempts to discourage U.S. forces from gaining access they will use the same physical realms as the United States does to gain it, and they will face similar technical and strategic challenges, the central one being how to find the right target. For these reasons, adversaries will seek to increase the effective size of their defensive battlespace (to conceal their vulnerabilities) and to decrease the effective size of their offensive battlespace--to confine the attacker to a well defined killing zone.
"We're clearly moving to the point where it's going to be possible to track all ships every moment of the day and night. As it becomes easier and easier to find ships, they become more and more subject to unexpected attack." (11) This prediction dates from 1982, but it accurately describes the beliefs of many contemporary defense analysts. The assumption persists that modern intelligence-gathering systems of adversaries, coupled with longer-range and more accurate weapons, will aggravate the dangers to those who would approach their territory from the sea. In this regard, one analyst asserts, "It can hardly be imagined, given the state of current designs, that ships will be able to fulfill mission profiles and cope with naval antiship missile threats after about 2005." (12) An Air Force study weighs in with the claim that "in the 21st Century it will be possible to find, fix, or track and target anything that moves on the surface of the earth." (13) In other words, there will be no sanctuaries.
However technology reduces it the difficulty of locating the right target in the battlespace will remain. As one perceptive observer notes, "You may look at the map and see flags stuck in at different points and consider that the results will be uncertain, but when you get out on the sea with its vast distances, its storms and mists, and with night coming on, and all the uncertainties which exist, you cannot possibly expect that the kind of conditions which would be appropriate to the movements of armies have any application to the haphazard conditions of war at sea." (14) One fundamental reason for this difficulty is recognized by sailors and cartoon characters alike.
Another reason is that those who appreciate the central difficulties of a maritime battlespace also recognize a corollary implied above--that forces operating in a very large, spherical, nonlinear, three dimensional battlespace in which all targets are moving will take every precaution to ensure that they cannot be detected; if detected, not identified; if identified, not tracked; if tracked, not attacked; and if attacked, not hit. Even if the Air Force claim is fulfilled--which would require, at a minimum, a large constellation of active space sensors and extensive command and control arrangements--forces at sea can thwart access by breaking the adversary's intelligence, reconnaissance, surveillance, command and control, and attack chain. If any link (and surveillance is just one of them) is broken, the chain fails. Accordingly in the battlespace of the future, as in the maritime battlespace of the past, the survivability of a force can be significantly improved by offensive operations designed to attack the adversary's eyes and brains: his capabilities for command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance.
If offensive anti-access methods are ineffective or for some reason cannot be employed, defensive methods to thwart access can be found in operations security, deception, and active and passive defenses. Of these, operations security and deception are comparatively cheap and can be very effective. if the attacker does not know where ones forces are, or what they are, or if he cannot identify or track them, his odds for a successful attack on them are greatly diminished. Counters--active, passive, and computer network defenses--to such antiaccess measures are difficult and expensive but clearly necessary.
Of interest, deterrence is the last line of defense, and a comparatively weak one. Deterrence comes into effect if access cannot be prevented in other ways. States historically have sought to deter attacks from long-range nuclear-tipped missiles and by terrorists, for example, because other forms of defense against them have great difficulty denying access reliably. Figure 3 illustrates anti-access.
MEANS
Given the ends to be sought and a sense of the ways that might be used to attain them, what means should be developed and devoted to the requisite missions? A key component of new means being developed by the U.S. Navy is that of network-centric warfare. The Chief of Naval Operations in the spring of 1997 asserted, "For us, it's a fundamental shift from what we call platform-centric warfare to something we call network-centric warfare." (15) This revealed a fresh appreciation that the Navy had to focus not on the material instruments of the order of battle--what the Navy is (ships, aircraft, and weapons)--but on what the Navy can accomplish. Network-centric warfare draws its strength and its effectiveness from the power of the network, from what naval platforms and a host of other joint and combined contributors can achieve in concert with one another. The power to prevail is grounded in the ability not to hoard but to share information and act on it.
Network-centric warfare pivots on the establishment and maintenance of a common operational picture and on the decentralization of execution. The common operational picture is a function of the networks available to the warfighter. Conceptually, networks link together sensors, a command and control grid, and the ability to engage the adversary. Using the concepts of "smart push" and "warrior pull," the networks--underlain by a "global information grid"--will provide evaluated, formated, and analyzed information in the form the commander needs. Information that meets certain parameters (such as high-stress time requirements) is "pushed" to the commander without his asking for it. Other information will be available to commanders on demand, if they "pull" it.
In the future, most data collection, processing, analysis, and storage for network-centric warfare will not be organic to the naval force at sea. It will be accomplished off board. For the inputs that undergird information superiority, at-sea commanders will be, as never before, dependent on capabilities that lie beyond, perhaps well beyond, their direct control. Sensors, for example, might be space-based; they might include AWACS or J-STARS aircraft* under operational control of another commander; or they might be unmanned aerial or underwater vehicles. In such situations, shipboard sensors will be employed sparingly and, except in unusual occasions, primarily in self-defense. Ships, aircraft, and even ground--Army or Marine--units ashore will act as nodes in the networks. Some will appear on the engagement network, as ordnance deliverers, others on the sensor network, as collectors of data.
The networks are not reserved exclusively to naval forces. They are, and should be, shared by joint or combined forces that contribute to operations. If naval forces are first on the scene, the networks will effect a convenient, smooth, seamless, and comprehensive enlargement of the scale of operations as new units and kinds of forces arrive. Reliance on off-the-shelf civilian "plug-and-play" technologies should ameliorate interoperability problems among joint and combined forces in the future.
Actions will be undertaken in a decentralized fashion. Forces will self-synchronize from the bottom up. In many cases this will be necessary, because the on-scene forces will have both the best tactical picture and the ability to act quickly; speed will be of the essence in such situations. (16) Self-synchronization is enabled by doctrine (supplemented by the commander's intent and mission orders), by a common situational awareness, and by coordination among the forces involved. Thus, forces must be doctrinally prepared to react to situations they recognize, coordinating (if permitted by the commander's intent in a particular case) among themselves to accomplish the task at hand with no additional control or guidance from above. At the tactical level, this is but a small extension to the "command by negation" doctrine exercised by naval forces for over two decades. Whether self-synchronization is possible, or even desirable, above the tactical level has yet to be determined.
In brief, superiority in all operating domains will be required for success in future operations; in order to establish that superiority, U.S. military forces must be prepared to fight and win in every realm. One can opt not to operate effectively in a particular domain, but to do so cedes that domain to potential adversaries without a fight and jeopardizes the attainment of security objectives.
What kinds of platforms will be optimal? It seems clear that with most sensing and data-processing functions moved ashore, platforms can be much less complex. If they can be individually simpler, they can be smaller and more sparingly manned. This translates directly into lower operating costs, which means in turn that more numerous forces can be acquired for the same procurement funding.
Aircraft carriers can be very useful to the exercise of naval power. If land bases are far from the scene or unavailable, carriers might well be the only way to bring tactical airpower to bear. Whether or not highly capable conventional-takeoff-and-landing aircraft will be required in the future is more questionable, however, especially for carrier operations in defensive roles. If the need for high-performance, dogfighting aircraft subsides, it will be possible for carriers to be smaller--likely much smaller--than they are today.
The value of submarines will lie in power projection operations and will pivot on whether they can perform as fully functioning nodes on the network. If they can maintain connectivity at an acceptable level, a place for them will be easy to justify. They might, for example, provide survivable magazines for a large number of land-attack weapons. If they cannot be integrated into the network-centric framework, however, they will viewed as an expensive, highly specialized force useful only for a narrow range of tasks such as prearranged strikes, antisubmarine warfare, and covert insertions of special operations forces.
In the future security environment, numbers will be important. Greater numbers allow naval forces to be more places at once without overstretch. Second, they mean shorter average transit times to reach areas that need attention. Third, the power of networks is an exponential function of the number of networked nodes--more ships and aircraft, more nodes, more networked power. Finally, larger inventories of ships and aircraft of less individual value will reduce reluctance to place them at risk.
The inventory of naval ships has been declining steadily over the past decade, the reduction amounting to 46 percent from 1989 to 2000. The combination of increasing personnel and operating expenses, growing ship and aircraft unit costs, and declining budgets has squeezed ship procurement. As a result, ship force levels are approaching historical prewar lows. Figure 4 depicts the situation graphically.
Of consequence, ships have high unit costs and last a long time. Of concern, naval inventories must be maintained in peacetime. Once a conflict begins, it is too late to build a fleet. Henry Kaiser constructed fifty escort carriers in 1943-44, but today neither time nor U.S. industrial capacity would permit anything approximating that feat. "Whether a democratic government will have the foresight, the keen sensitiveness to national position and credit, the willingness to ensure its prosperity by adequate outpouring of money in times of peace, all of which are necessary for military preparation," warned Alfred Thayer Mahan in 1890, "is yet an open question." (17) It still is.
Naval forces are routinely deployed forward, assigned to the Sixth Fleet (Mediterranean), Seventh Fleet (western Pacific), and Fifth Fleet (Persian Gulf). There are barely three hundred ships in the deploying force; that means fewer than one hundred will be on deployment across the three fleet areas at any one time. Some ships will probably be near where a crisis erupts, but at most they will have to steam on the order of a thousand miles. At a speed of advance of sixteen knots, that will take almost three days. It is of serious concern, therefore, when projections by the Secretary of the Navy result in a ship total of 286 by the year 2007. (18)
Speed matters as well. Arguably, the potential for adversaries to act very quickly and present the United States with faits accomplis has increased and will probably become more acute over time. For a forward-deployed naval force the numbers of ships and aircraft is intimately related to speed. Smaller fleets result in less geographic coverage and longer response times.
A greatly increased role in homeland defense or defense of friends and allies from ballistic missiles, should that come to pass, will be met by ambivalence in the Navy. On the one hand, it constitutes a high-profile strategic mission for the Navy and will probably justify construction of more Aegis-equipped ships. On the other hand, it does not resonate well in U.S. Navy culture, for the positioning of the ships would be essentially fixed, depriving them of their most vital survival asset, mobility. Coastal defense of landward targets from the sea has not historically been in favor in the Navy; the tasks will be wholly defensive; and the mission is one essentially of garrisoning rather than of expeditionary operations.
RISKS
Like the selection of ends, ways, and means, the assumption of risks is necessary in combat operations, for "there is no zero-risk situation in war. The willingness to run a calculated risk and to absorb some damage is essential. In sum, heroes run risks. Smart heroes calculate the risks and take steps to shift the odds more in their favor. Those who avoid risks stay home." (19)
Risks are one measure of the fit between ends, ways, and means. If one believes that desired ends cannot be attained, operations assume high risk. In the abstract it is not possible to foretell where the fault lies. It might be that the ends are too ambitious, that the ways are insufficient, or that the means cannot produce the desired effects. It might be that the ends do not justify the risks. That was the reason for the U.S. withdrawal in 1993-94 from Somalia--there was insufficient U.S. interest to justify the loss of eighteen service members. This episode has often been cited as reflecting a U.S. unwillingness to take casualties, which some strategists argue will be a determining factor: "The prospect of high casualties, which can rapidly undermine domestic support for any military operation, is the key political constraint when decisions must be made on which forces to deploy in a crisis, and at what levels." (20) Official U.S. Army doctrine states, "The American people expect decisive victory and abhor unnecessary casualties." (21) The degree of reluctance prompted by casualty estimates, however, is not absolute. It is closely correlated to a perceived necessity to undertake a particular operation. If the operation is deemed vital or necessary to U.S. security, tolerance of casualties will be commensurately high; to the extent the operation is considered discretionary, that tolerance will be low.
Risk determination is related closely to damage assessment. In determining whether attacks on a radar site have been effective, one asks, does the fact that it is no longer radiating indicate that it has been so damaged that it cannot radiate? If a tank company has been attacked, how does one determine its residual combat power? Such appraisals tend to be difficult to make. The advent of weapons that are more precise but carry less destructive power, and of information operations (in particular, computer network attack), renders damage assessment even more problematic.
In future operations, especially information operations, however, the desired effect of military action should be neutralization: rendering enemies' actions ineffective, negating their hostile intentions, thwarting their objectives. Similarly, an analyst of the future battlespace writes:
All of this also will require discerning new and different "measures of effectiveness" for the application of force, that go beyond traditional "battle damage assessment." ... This implies an "effect-based attack" designed to manipulate the enemy, rather than a "target-based attack" designed to destroy. In turn, this could enable commanders to distinguish--at their will--between inflicting lethality and achieving effectiveness. (22)
If this is an accurate rendering, assessing neutralization should be simpler and less ambiguous than the more doctrinal measures such as destroy, neutralize, suppress, eliminate, disable, degrade, render ineffective, delay, or attrite. (23)
In any event, risks tend to be difficult to assess accurately. One must be specific about the risks being discussed and as to what underlying factors determine risks. One must also appreciate that it is in the adversary's interest to make risk assessment as difficult as possible. Saddam Hussein made obvious attempts at this several times prior to and during DESERT STORM, and he has done so since.
Recently, an analytical tool has been promulgated to assist commanders in assessing and managing risks. "Operational risk management" requires staffs to set forth methodically all recognized hazards of an operation and then translate those hazards into risks by analyzing the severity of the consequences of each hazard in light of its probability. Once the high risks have been identified--those with severe potential consequences and high probability--measures are considered to mitigate, or manage, them. While qualitative and often difficult, this method does offer the commander a more structured and systematic tool than mere guesswork. (24)
TO REMAIN AND PERSEVERE
Sinking an enemy fleet, conducting blockades and embargoes, and threatening sea-based attacks are all to no avail if they fail to alter adversaries' actions or intentions. Historically, navies have been able to influence events on land indirectly, because only with great difficulty or after prolonged periods of time could they place an opponent's sanctuary in jeopardy. Now, however, with the free use of the sea, the air over the sea, space, and cyberspace; with the power of information superiority enabled by networking; with long-range precision weapons; with the development of abundant and affordable new sensors; and with the techniques of information warfare, navies are becoming able, as never before, to penetrate adversary sanctuaries and influence events ashore rapidly, directly, and decisively.
The "Maritime Strategy" of the 1980s began a naval realignment process that continues today. It emphasized that the objective of seapower was no longer to defeat opposing fleets but to affect opponents' actions on land, where political processes transpire. The Maritime Strategy called for defending allied transoceanic shipping as far forward as possible and for applying power to the flanks of the Soviet Union in order to relieve pressure on the continental center, the inter-German border. In the 1990s, with the demise of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Treaty Organization, the threat to U.S. forces in deep waters subsided, and a new naval strategic vision, set forth in the white paper "... From the Sea," steered attention to the littorals, the green waters of the world. The 1990s also witnessed the shrinking of the U.S. military and a concomitant reduction in the size of the fleet.
Over time, the battlespace in military operations has become more and more nonlinear with respect to time, space, and intensity. Having been accustomed for centuries to battlespaces that are nonlinear and three-dimensional, and in which all targets are moving, naval forces are particularly well suited to understand and thrive in this environment. The key to future operations is access--because once access can be reliably secured, enemy sanctuaries can be compromised and objectives can be attained.
Unquestionably, naval forces will be required concurrently to deal with antiaccess efforts of adversaries. Because the fundamental challenge--for both sides--is to find the right target, operations security and deception will have greater leverage in the future, alongside active and passive defenses. Because information superiority must underwrite targeting efforts, information warfare in all its manifestations will become more and more important.
Naval ships should become smaller, and inventories of them should increase if the U.S. Navy is to continue to be highly effective. Most sensing and information processing functions will be accomplished off board, allowing platforms to be less complex and more numerous for a given procurement expenditure.
Questions remain regarding whether the right targets to vitiate adversary sanctuaries can be identified, whether they can be attacked effectively once they are identified, whether the effectiveness of attacks can be confidently assessed, whether decision makers are willing to assume the risks that might be necessary to approach a hostile shore or to engage adversary forces on the high seas, and whether self-imposed constraints will so reduce the degrees of freedom of U.S. forces as to render them powerless. The central contribution of naval forces is to be there to open the door, quickly and effectively, once these difficult questions have been resolved, and to remain and persevere for as long as it takes to secure national objectives.
[FIGURE 4 OMITTED]
* AWACS--Airborne Warning and Control System; J-STARS--Joint Surveillance and Target Attack Radar System.
NOTES
(1.) This is what distinguishes maneuver from movement. Maneuver is undertaken relative to adversaries in order to place at risk their centers of gravity or critical weaknesses, or to strengthen one's own defenses vis-a-vis enemy capability.
(2.) "Maritime power projection--Power projection in and from the maritime environment, including a broad spectrum of offensive military operations to destroy enemy forces or logistic support or to prevent enemy forces from approaching within enemy weapons range of friendly forces. Maritime power projection may be accomplished by amphibious assault operations, attack of targets ashore, or support of sea control operations." Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms, Joint Publication 1-02 (Washington, D.C.: Joint Staff, 23 March 1994, amended through 15 April 1998).
(3.) One of the themes of Colin S. Gray, The Leverage of Sea Power: The Strategic Advantage of Navies in War (New York: Free Press, 1992).
(4.) See, for example, David S. Alberts, and Thomas J. Czerwinski, eds., Complexity, Global Politics, and National Security (Washington, D.C.: National Defense Univ. Press, 1997); Barry D. Watts, Clausewitzian Friction and Future War, McNair Paper 52 (Washington, D.C.: Institute for National Strategic Studies, October 1996), pp. 106-7; and Harlan K. Ullman and James P. Wade, Shock and Awe: Achieving Rapid Dominance (Washington, D.C.: National Defense Univ. Press, 1996).
(5.) Alan Beyerchen, "Clausewitz, Nonlinearity and the Unpredictability of War," International Security, Winter 1992, pp. 59-90.
(6.) See Wayne P. Hughes, "Naval Maneuver Warfare," Naval War College Review, Summer 1997, pp. 25-49.
(7.) "Selection" of targets lies at the intersection of intelligence and policy. Selection, in this sense, distinguishes what is a target and what is not, and which targets can produce the desired effects if successfully attacked or threatened. Selection will rely heavily on the ability to collect, process, evaluate, and disseminate large quantities of information--on information superiority. While the great difficulty of selecting the "right" target should not be underestimated, it is not pivotal to this analysis.
(8.) The contemporary image of information operations is that it comprises computer network attack and defense. In fact, however, it is much larger, encompassing not only those subjects but deception, psychological operations, electronic warfare, operational deception, operational security, some types of physical destruction, and even, on occasion, public affairs.
(9.) Colin S. Gray, "Sea Power for Containment," in Navies and Global Defense: Theories and Strategy, ed. Keith Neilson and Elizabeth Jane Errington (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1995), p. 204. [Emphasis supplied.]
(10.) The "high seas" denotes those areas that are beyond the agreed twelve-mile "territorial seas" and other controlled areas (such as archipelagic seas) provided for in the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea.
(11.) Steven Strasser, with David C. Martin, James Doyle, Mary Lord, and John J. Lindsay, "Are Big Warships Doomed?" Newsweek, 17 May 1982, "News/Alnews," LexisNexis (accessed 27 March 1998)
(12.) Erbil Serter, "Warship Designs for the 21st Century," International Defense Review, Quarterly Report (Jane's Information Group, 1 December 1997), p. 3, LexisNexis (accessed 9 February 1998).
(13.) U.S. Air Force, Global Engagement: A Vision for the 21st Century Air Force, 1996, on the World Wide Web, http://www.af-future.hq.af.mil/2l/indext.htm, 2 December 1998.
(14.) Winston Churchill, The Gathering Storm (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1948), p. 601.
(15.) Remarks delivered by Admiral Jay L. Johnson, USN, Chief of Naval Operations, to the U.S. Naval Institute, Annapolis, Maryland, 23 April 1997.
(16.) "Most images of war are linked to destroying an enemy, controlling resources, maintaining sovereignty, and rearranging territory. Yet wars are won or lost, begun and ended, and conducted in time as well as space, with time normally the more important factor." Grant T. Hammond, Joint Force Quarterly, Spring 1994, p. 9.
(17.) Alfred Thayer Mahan, The Influence of Sea Power upon History: 1660-1783 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1957), p. 58.
(18.) As reported in "Navy Gives Rumsfeld FY-03 Budget to Buy 'Only' Five Ships, 81 Aircraft," Inside the Navy, 3 December 2001, p. 1.
(19.) H. Dwight Lyons, Jr., Eleanor A. Baker, Sabrina R. Edlow, and David A. Perin, The Mine Threat: Show Stoppers or Speed Bumps? (Alexandria, Va.: Center for Naval Analyses, 1993), p. 19.
(20.) Edward N. Luttwak, "A Post-Heroic Military Policy," Foreign Affairs, July-August 1996, p.36.
(21.) U.S. Defense Dept., Operations, Field Manual 100-5 (Washington, D.C.: Dept. of the Army, June 1993), pp. 1-3.
(22.) Douglas H. Dearth, "Imperatives of Information Operations and Information Warfare," in Cyberwar 2.0: Myths, Mysteries, and Reality, ed. Alan D. Campen and Douglas H. Dearth (Fairfax, Va.: AFCEA International Press, 1998), p. 396.
(23.) Rudy T. Veit, Joint Targeting: Improving the Playbook, Communications, and Teamwork, Strategy Research Project (Carlisle Barracks, Pa.: U.S. Army War College, 1996), p. 26.
(24.) For the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps, the governing instruction for the process of operational risk management is Opnav [Navy Staff] Instruction 3500.39/ Marine Corps Order 3500.27, 3 April 1997.
Dr. Barnett is professor emeritus at the Naval War College, where until September 2001 he held the Jerry O. Tuttle Military Chair of Information Operations. Retired from the U.S. Navy in the grade of captain, Dr. Barnett was a member of the U.S. delegation to the strategic arms talks with the Soviet Union in 1970-71. From 1983 to 1984 he led the Strategic Concepts Branch of the office of the Chief of Naval Operations.
[C] 2002 by Roger W. Barnett
COPYRIGHT 2002 U.S. Naval War College
Citation: Roger W. Barnett. "Naval power for a new American century - defense policy, United States," Naval War College Review, Winter 2002.
Original URL: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0JIW/is_1_55/ai_87146675
Reading military texts from a different perspective - Thinking out of the Box
By Phillip J. Ridderhof
Naval War College Review, Autumn 2002.
Persuasive in peace, decisive in war, preeminent in any form of combat--with these goals in mind, and constantly using such terms as "full-dimensional," "full spectrum' "dominant," and "dominance," the Joint Staff white paper Joint Vision 2010 and its extension Joint Vision 2020 paint a picture of where U.S. military forces should head as they move into the twenty-first century. (1) "Vision" papers of individual services, such as Marine Corps Strategy 21, follow the lead of the joint documents in their proclamations of capabilities within specific competencies. The claims are bold indeed; these vision documents declare that the U.S. military will be able to go everywhere and do everything. Realistically, that is not possible, but a reader is hard pressed to discern from the language of the texts that hard choices have been made, significant alternatives rejected. There seems to be a sentence or phrase to cover every eventuality of future conflict. This, of course, gives the sense that the vision statements ar e pablum, saying nothing by saying everything.
That, however, is an unfortunate and inaccurate impression. The vision documents are in fact more nuanced than they appear. But how can we get at their full meaning? One way to explicate vision documents is to adapt "deconstruction," a technique of reading that arose as a postmodernist philosophical school. To "deconstruct" a text is to use perspectives, and viewpoints that are, ideally, useful for understanding. Through this approach, attentive readers can examine even U.S. military "vision documents," clarify their content, and develop implicit alternatives to their central themes. After briefly outlining the technique, we will apply it to two current case studies.
DECONSTRUCTION AND THE VISION TEXT
Broadly defined, deconstruction is a postmodern philosophy that denies the existence of objectively true meaning of texts. A "text" in this connection is anything that can be intellectually analyzed--a book, a film, even an activity. Deconstructionists argue that a given text has no single, independent "true" meaning established by the author but a variety of meanings that are totally dependent on the reader's perspective and that continually interact in different ways.
To "deconstruct" a text is to analyze it so as to discern not its putative central themes but those that are marginalized and left unsaid. A philosophical, literary, or academic deconstructionist goes farther, declaring these marginal and unspoken themes to be in fact the text's central meanings. By thus turning the text on its head, this method, taken to its logical conclusion, destroys the distinction between central and marginal meanings; for a deconstructionist there are merely different meanings, with arbitrary prioritization. (2) While useful analysis of military vision documents by this method requires a retreat from deconstruction's nihilistic extremes, much can be learned through this form of "thinking out of the box."
To get at marginal and "unsaid" themes, the first step is to identify clearly the central ones. In this connection, how something is said is as important as what is said. Military vision documents are written in the active voice, with strong verbs and modifiers. Central ideas can be identified by the repetition of words or phrases, especially as section titles, displayed quotations, graphics, or topic sentences of paragraphs. The organization of the text also points to central ideas. Vision documents tend to be put together in two ways: addressing the main point first and following with supporting material, and building up the supporting material into an argument that climaxes with the main point. Both patterns can be used simultaneously at different levels. For example, the overall structure of the text may be that of an argument building to a conclusion, while individual subsections are structured as main ideas followed by discussion. The central themes can be picked out fairly easily, by noting the repetit ion of certain phrases, examining the patterns of the writing, and discerning the placement of ideas within the patterns.
The central ideas of military vision texts can be divided into three conceptual parts: foundation, end state, and method. A foundation, the starting point for a vision statement, has two parts. One is an articulation of assumptions about the future security environment. These assumptions can have inwardly focused aspects (such as future U.S. national goals, interests, and policies) and outwardly oriented ones (directions of technological development, potential adversaries of the future). The second part of the foundation is a depiction of the present state of the organization. This description can consist of capabilities or current employment concepts, but it usually focuses on character traits--the heritage and "enduring values" that represent the spirit of the organization. The end state sets forth the ultimate goal--in a sense, the "vision "it self. The end-state discussion describes the specific organizations, capabilities, and operational concepts that the military will need in order to cope with the fut ure that has been portrayed. The end state, usually somewhat vague, focuses on concepts and capabilities rather than actual unit structures or hardware systems. The method is the "how" portion of the document--the path the service will take to proceed from the present force (described in the foundation) to that envisioned by the end state. The method is usually couched in terms of attitudes toward change and the relative importance of various aspects of expected change.
Central ideas may be repeated throughout the foundation, end-state, and method sections of the text. For instance, certain portions of the foundation discussion might be reiterated in the end-state portion in order to highlight the end state's logic by reconnecting it to its premises. Likewise, the end state will probably be addressed in the method portion in order to emphasize the linkage between the two. This repetition makes the central ideas mutually supportive and readily identifiable.
Marginal ideas are secondary to the central ones, but they appear in the text and may even be repeated. Sometimes the only noticeable differences between main and subsidiary points are slight shades of meaning or emphasis. Close examination of the structure of the text and alertness to the use of certain grammatical devices are crucial in determining which themes are subsidiary. For instance, secondary points are usually referred to in caveats, or qualifiers, to central points; phrases such as "While X can never be discounted" and "Also important is X" are clues that X is a marginal idea. The sequence in which ideas are discussed and the relative strength of the modifiers (adjectives or adverbs) applied to them are also indicative of what is primary and what is not. Points referred to in a long list of disparate items, seemingly "tacked on" at the end of a section of text, are likely to be of lesser priority.
If marginal ideas are those that the author considered barely important enough to mention, the "unsaid" points, the "possibilities left out," are those either thought not important enough to mention, or important not to mention, or not even thought of by the author. In any case--that which "goes without saying," that which is "better left unsaid," or that which was not recognized--this is an awkward concept to explain. Two techniques will help discern the possibilities that are implicit but left out: inferring the opposite of certain central ideas (especially in the foundation section) and elevating marginal ideas to central importance. The development of possibilities left out, however, is inevitably fraught with risk. For example, a discussion of central ideas dependent on new technology is likely to omit mention of the possibility that technological progress may stop; to identify it (simply because it is theoretically possible) as an unsaid idea, however, is not realistic or analytically very useful. Nonet heless, this deconstruction technique can reveal possibilities that, if not probable or congenial, are worth consideration.
The last step of deconstruction is synthesis. A text has by now been broken into three categories: the central, marginal, and unsaid themes. While the central themes embody the main thrust of what the text actually said, a study of the marginal and omitted ideas may be more fruitful and enlightening. All three categories, however, should be examined together, to see what synthesis they inspire--ideas that will represent the payoff from the labor of deconstruction.
JV 2010 AND JV 2020
Of the U.S. military vision documents now published, Joint Vision 2010 and 2020 are the most appropriate for a first demonstration of deconstruction-based analysis, because they address U.S. military power as a whole. Service-level visions, in contrast, intentionally marginalize and leave out important possibilities in order to observe the boundaries of service roles. Further, service visions should also fit under the conceptual umbrella of JV 2010 and JV 2020; deconstructing the joint texts first should lay the necessary groundwork for examination of the service visions.
Joint Vision 2010 and 2020 must be considered not as two documents but as one, divided into two parts. JV 2020 is the more current, but it is an addendum or extension of JV 2010 rather than a stand-alone document. It relies on JV 2010's foundation; in fact, the end-state section of JV 2010--a vision of the force in 2010-is part of the foundation of JV 2020. Analyzing the two texts as a single whole allows a more complete listing of marginal ideas and left-out possibilities. As will be seen, though, some of the more interesting points to be gleaned arise from the doctrinal changes that appear in JV 2020.
The foundation of Joint Vision 2010 postulates a future of evolutionary change, wherein U.S. interests and strategy do not significantly change. Military technology will be decisive and will continue to advance along its present lines, producing more precision and mobility, and also, most importantly, a vast increase in information available to forces, about both themselves and the enemy. The international environment also will present, in the JV 2010 vision, a continuation of current trends; there will accordingly be uncertainty, and the United States will have to be prepared to deal simultaneously with a wide range of state and nonstate adversaries. Joint Vision 2010 assumes that the United States will hold to its present policies of ensuring security for its people and possessions and of promoting domestic prosperity and worldwide democracy. The U.S. military will continue to be primarily a warfighting organization, characterized by highly professional personnel and technological superiority; it will not, however, see a large increase in resources made available to it (JV 2010, pages 1-34). (3)
The JV 2020 foundation is the same, with one important exception--that due to the rapid pace of worldwide change, U.S. forces cannot assume that they will enjoy technological superiority in all conflicts. In particular, asymmetrical options maybe available to foes that could neutralize technological advantages (JV 2020, pages 1-45).
The end states envisaged by JV 2010 and JV 2020 are basically the same. In both documents the U.S. military of the future will be a warfighting force that is small, protected, mobile, sustainable, and lethal. It will be able to react rapidly and throughout the world. It will mass its effects (that is, its "fires," the collective impact of its long-range attacks) and deliver them precisely, rather than massing physically the weapons themselves. JV 2020 differs from JV 2010 only by increasing the "degree" of its adjectives: smaller, more protected, more mobile, etc. The overarching concept of both JV 2010 and JV 2020 forces is to manifest "full spectrum dominance"--the ability to fight anywhere with sufficient superiority to defeat any foe with minimal loss to themselves (JV 2010, pages 1-34; JV 2020, pages 1-45).
The method sections of JV 2010 and JV 2020 are different, but they share two themes--the progress of technology and the development of the human element (organization, tactics, leadership). JV 2010's method is to exploit the American combined advantage of technology and highly professional personnel (JV 2010, pages 1-34). For its part, JV 2020, in line with its shift in foundation, emphasizes innovations in human factors in order to offset the potential loss of technological superiority. This shift in method is subtle but continuously repeated throughout JV 2020. In fact, the emphasis given this point in the text suggests that it may be the primary reason that JV 2020 was published (JV 2020, pages 1-45).
With the central themes thus developed, our next step is to identify the marginal themes. There are three significant marginal themes in JV 2010: the impact of the "fog" (uncertainty, imperfectness of information) and "friction" (delay, interference, inertia) of war on operations; the role of massed forces; and the conduct of "military operations other than war" (MOOTW).
Joint Vision 2010 mentions fog and friction only to deprecate them, to predict that their effects will be minimized by anticipated advances in technology:
While friction and fog of war can never be eliminated, new technology promises to mitigate their impact [JV 2010, page 16; emphasis supplied, here and throughout].
Although this will not eliminate the fog of war, dominant battlespace awareness will improve situational awareness, decrease response time and make the battlespace considerably more transparent to those who achieve it [JV 2010, page 13].
JV 2020, however, refutes the idea that fog and friction can be marginalized:
Information Superiority neither equates to perfect information nor does it mean the elimination of the fog of war [JV 2020, page 12].
Joint Vision 2020's recognition of the inevitability of fog and friction--declared positively, without the qualifications used in JV 2010--is representative of the shift in emphasis of the later document from technology to the human element in conflict.
Joint Vision 2010 always refers to the secondary concept of the physical assembling of large forces (as opposed to the concentration of their effects) only in the context of exceptions to the expected norm of future operations:
In the past, our capabilities often required us to physically mass forces to neutralize enemy power [JV 2010, page 17].
Extensive physical presence may later be necessary to accomplish the assigned mission [JV 2010, page 27].
Joint Vision 2020 does not mention massing of actual forces even as a secondary concern, but neither does it refute Joint Vision 2010 on this point. The clear implication is that for the smaller, mobile military foreseen by JV 2010 the ability to mass large forces for a campaign is not of primary importance.
The third secondary concept of JV 2010 is that of military operations other than war. Although MOOTW considerations are mentioned throughout the text, they are always presented as subsidiary to warfighting:
In addition we should expect to participate in a broad range of deterrent, conflict prevention and peacetime activities [JV 2010, page 4].
Other operations, from humanitarian assistance in peacetime through peace operations in a near hostile environment, have proved to be possible using forces optimized for wartime effectiveness [JV 2010, page 17].
Joint Vision 2020 follows the lead of its predecessor in treating military operations other than war as of less than vital importance:
It also includes those ambiguous situations presiding between peace and war [JV 2020, page 8].
Achieving full-spectrum dominance means that the joint force will fulfill its primary purpose--victory in war, as well as achieving success across the range of operations [JV 2020, page 9].
Joint Vision 2020 adds three new marginal ideas, points that are not present at all in Joint Vision 2010: technological innovation, information superiority, and multinational and interagency operations. The marginalization of technology in JV 2020 (though the white paper assumes that the technological improvements foreseen by the earlier document will occur) is in line with the paper's central idea, expressed in its foundation section, that the United States cannot assume it will enjoy technological superiority in the future. Joint Vision 2020 seeks to redress the imbalance in favor of technology of JV 2010:
Realization of the full potential of these changes requires not only technological improvement, but the continued evolution of organizations and doctrine [JV 2020, page 12].
Although technical interoperability is essential, it is not sufficient to ensure effective operations [JV 2020, page 21].
Our thinking about command and control must be conceptually based, rather than focused on technology and material [JV 2020, page 40].
JV 2020's marginalization of information superiority goes hand in hand with its treatment of technology. Where Joint Vision 2010 held up information superiority as an essential force multiplier, Joint Vision 2020 subsumes it within the concept of "decision dominance"--an overarching concept that includes nontechnology based elements. Information superiority is only one part, and not the most important, of "decision dominance."
The creation of information superiority is not an end in itself [JV 2020, page 11].
While changes in the information environment have led some to focus solely [JV 2010] on the contribution of information superiority to command and control, it is equally necessary to understand the complete realm of command and control decision making, the nature of organizational collaboration, and especially, the human in the loop [JV 2020, page 38].
The last marginal concept of JV 2020 is that of multinational and interagency operations. Joint Vision 2010 treats multinational operations as insignificant and barely mentions interagency operations. Joint Vision 2020 discusses both concepts at length, but always as secondary to the central idea of unilateral joint military action. There is no expectation that either will be routine.
To coordinate military operations, as necessary, with government agencies and international organizations [JV 2020, page 5].
The joint force of 2020 will integrate protective capabilities from multinational and interagency partners when available and will respond to their requirements when possible [JV 2020, page 33].
What has been left out of the doctrinal papers? With one exception, the same major possibilities are absent from both Joint Vision 2010 and 2020: that of a major change in U.S. national goals and interests, that of the emergence of a single "peer competitor," and that of the primary focus of the military shifting from warfighting to operations other than war. The exception is the idea of human considerations, such as doctrine and organization, driving technology in the development of future forces. Joint Vision 2010 does not mention the possibility, but JV 2020 makes it a central theme. The "absences" of a change to national interests and of a new peer competitor are perceived by reversing central ideas of the joint visions--the continuity of U.S. national interests, and a multiplicity of state and nonstate adversaries. That any shift to operations other than war has been omitted is revealed by considering the implications of converting MOOTW, actually a marginal concept, into a primary one.
Are any of these three "left-out" possibilities of analytical value? A change to U.S. national interests, as defined by the joint vision documents, is very unlikely. JV 2010 defines U.S. national interests so broadly--ensuring security of the nation's people and possessions, ensuring domestic prosperity, and promoting worldwide democracy--that it is hard to imagine other interests that would take their place (JV 2010, page 3). Different emphases might arise, but there are no reasonable opposites. However, the prospects of a peer competitor emerging or of military operations other than war becoming primary are less improbable; neither is out of the realm of possibility. Inclusion of these ideas would substantially change the central themes of both joint vision papers.
Does deconstruction of Joint Vision 2010 and 2020 produce any insights worth pondering? There seem to be three. First, there is a shift in emphasis--from technology over human factors in JV2010, to the reverse in JV2020. Joint Vision 2020 otherwise binds itself so closely to JV 2010 that this difference is obscured. It is not true, however, as many might assume, that neither text says anything very different from the other. This shift in philosophy, whether intended or not, is an important one that should be clearly acknowledged.
Both joint visions make military operations other than war a secondary priority to warfighting--although, aside from Operation ENDURING FREEDOM, at least, U.S. forces currently spend most of their time executing them. As a consequence, large formations are not envisioned in the small, mobile force of the future, yet they are required for many of the "human intensive" other-than-wa missions, such as peacekeeping. Perhaps this implies the idea of creating within the services a force specialized for operations other than war, with proportionately more personnel but fewer assets for agility and precision strike.
Joint Visions 2010 and 2020 forecast a force able to go anywhere and fight anyone, as opposed to a specific foe in a particular theater. For practical purposes, there are problems with such an all-encompassing approach. Deconstruction suggests there might be value in competing joint visions, each focused on a different potential adversary. These visions would be more than operational plans, based on forces already in place; rather, they would redesign the entire joint force as necessary to meet and defeat most effectively the given foe. These "hedge" visions would still be secondary to JV 2020 or its successors, but they could be wellsprings of ideas.
"THE VISION STATEMENT OF THE U.S. MARINE CORPS" AND MARINE CORPS STRATEGY 21
The current Marine Corps "vision" documents are "The Vision Statement of the U.S. Marine Corps" (for short, the "USMC Vision Statement"), originally released as a naval message, and Marine Corps Strategy 21 (or MC Strategy 21). The Marine documents explicitly claim to support Joint Vision 2010 and 2020. (4) The USMC Vision Statement is incorporated verbatim in MC Strategy 21, on the first page; nonetheless, it should be treated as a separate text, because its explanatory notes shed significant light on both documents.
What can deconstruction of the Marine visions tell us with respect to the joint texts? We begin as before, examining each of the three main parts of the two documents. The foundation is the single largest section of MC Strategy 21 (four of nine pages). The emphasis there points to the central idea in the Marine texts: that the Marine Corps already embodies the correct model for the future.
The [General Officers Futures Group] concluded that the Corps requires only marginal adjustments to successfully adapt [for the future]. We do, in fact, have it right. (5)
The Marine texts' foundation reflects a national security environment that interestingly contrasts with that of the joint visions, an environment in which the United States is likely to face both state and nonstate actors in conflicts across the spectrum. In a chaotic setting, large-scale conventional warfare will be the exception, and a variety of lesser contingencies the rule (MC Strategy 21, pages 4-5). Although the point is not explicitly made, it is safe to assume that the Marines would recognize the same national interests as does Joint Vision 2010: ensuring domestic security and prosperity, and promoting worldwide democracy. The USMC Vision Statement, however, adds a more detailed assumption:
Opportunities and challenges in the world's littoral regions will increase America's reliance on the continuous forward presence and sustainable maritime power projection of naval expeditionary forces [USMC Vision Statement].
While this statement is not at odds with anything in Joint Vision 2010 and 2020, neither is it supported by any passages in the joint texts. The declaration reflects a predictable maritime bias, but also a distinct political and strategic assumption.
The current status of the Marine Corps, in the view of the documents, is that, with its highly trained personnel, it can provide combatant commanders with mission-tailored Marine air-ground task forces (MAGTFs). These task forces are able to deal with a large range of crises and contingencies across the spectrum of conflict, including forward presence and quick strategic response (MC Strategy 21, pages 2, 3, 5).
The end state outlined in the foundations of the Marine vision texts is, significantly, strikingly similar to their current-status statements:
The Marine Corps will enhance its strategic agility, operational reach, and tactical flexibility to enable joint, allied, and coalition operations and interagency coordination. These capabilities will provide combatant commanders with scalable, interoperable, combined-arms Marine Air-Ground Task Forces (MAGTFs) to shape the international environment, respond quickly to the complex spectrum of crises and conflicts, and gain access or prosecute forcible entry operations [USMC Vision Statement; MC Strategy 21, page 1].
This envisioned end state is further confirmation that the Marine Corps' central idea is improvement of the current force, not transformation to a new type of force. The Marine end-state force is simply an amphibious version of the joint end-state force. The Joint Vision 2010 and 2020 end state was to be a smaller force, protected, mobile, and sustainable, able to react rapidly throughout the globe and to mass the effects of its precise, lethal strikes without physically massing its own elements. The Marine vision documents do not directly address precise lethality or the massing of effects, but the passages related to improving operational reach and tactical flexibility can be interpreted as covering those two joint concepts. The Marine papers support no views that would be contrary to any stated joint concept; the Marine texts may not match the joint texts adjective for adjective, but the improved Marine air-ground task forces fit well within the Joint Vision 2010 and 2020 parameters.
The method espoused in the Marine vision texts is one of evolution and improvement; the most frequently used verbs in the Marine vision texts are "enhance," "evolve," and "expand" (MC Strategy 21, pages 6-8). This approach emphasizes the recruitment and retention of high-quality personnel by promoting traditional core values and a "warrior ethic," as well as the improvement of operational capabilities by "optimizing" current structure and "capitalizing" on innovation (MC Strategy 21, pages 6-8). Joint Vision 2010 and 2020 revolve around the concepts of technology and "human elements" (such as doctrine and organization); the Marine vision texts are not explicit in this area but seem to match more closely Joint Vision 2020, with its emphasis on concepts and organizations rather than the impact of new technologies (MC Strategy 21, pages 6-8). (6)
Having established the central ideas of the Marine texts, the deconstructionist reader can pull out from them the significant marginal points. There is only one--that sustained conventional combat operations are secondary in likelihood, and thus importance, to other deterrence and contingency operations at the lower end of the conflict spectrum. The technique of the Marine texts is to arrange potential employment options and capabilities in lists; the fighting of battles always appears at the end of these lists, sometimes with a qualifier, sometimes without.
These forces will promote national interests, influence vital regions, and fight and win the nation's battles [USMC Vision Statement; MC Strategy 21, page 1].
Every Marine and Marine unit is ready to rapidly task organize, deploy, and employ from [the continental United States] or while forward deployed to respond and contain crises or, if necessary, to immediately engage in sustained combat operations [MC Strategy 21, page 2].
Throughout our Nation's history, Marines have responded to national and international brushfires and crises and, when necessary, war [MC Strategy 21, page 3].
As an expeditionary, task-organized, combined arms force with superb small-unit leaders, we are prepared to promote peace and stability or, if required, defeat our Nation's adversaries [MC Strategy 21, page 5].
Multiple belligerents and a blurring of distinctions and national affiliations among terrorist groups, subnational factions, insurgent groups, and international criminals will complicate an environment where a direct attack is often the least likely course of action [MC Strategy 21, page 5].
The Marine vision texts do not exclude the possibility of major combat operations; their marginalization concerns only their likelihood. Nonetheless, in this respect the Marine documents diverge significantly from Joint Vision 2010 and Joint Vision 2020. Both joint texts presume the opposite, emphasizing warfighting over other operations.
The Marine texts do not directly address the "fog and friction" of combat or the role of large physical-presence forces, which were mentioned in the joint documents as secondary issues. The Marine warfighting doctrine of maneuver warfare, which is restated in MC Strategy 21, agrees with JV 2020 that fog and friction are inherent parts of conflict and cannot be marginalized. (7) The Marine emphasis on maritime forces could be understood as discounting the need for large physical-presence ground forces, but it begs the question of the size of the maritime forces required instead. The relative marginalization of major theater war in favor of operations other than war and such lesser crises is the only distinct secondary idea.
Three "possibilities left out" suggest themselves. The first would be a reversal of the marginalization of major combat operations. Such a shift would emphasize the Marine Corps role in warfighting at the possible expense of its ability to maintain forward presence or respond to small-scale contingencies. The second major possibility left out of the Marine vision texts is that of an end-state force radically different from the present Marine air-ground task force concept. Such a reversal would go against the grain of the Marine texts, which postulate that evolution, not revolution, is the appropriate path. The last possibility left out of the Marine texts mirrors one from Joint Vision 2010 and 2020: that of designing the Marine Corps to meet the threat of a specific future peer competitor.
This deconstruction of the two recent Marine Corps vision documents offers three ideas for consideration. First, the U.S. military might want to develop a "hedge" capability to address operations other than war. The Marine Corps seems to be offering itself as that capability and may want to commit to develop itself further in this direction. Such a choice could reduce the Marines' contribution to major-theater-warfare situations, but it would increase their utility in what is apparently going to be the most prevalent form of military employment. (8)
Second, the Marine Corps should look to doctrinal revolution as well as evolution. The present direction may be correct, but that assumption should not stifle development and experimentation of concepts that do not involve the Marine air-ground task force as now known. Such concepts could involve the elimination or severe curtailment of various elements of the task force in order to allocate more resources to the others. The Marine air-ground task force should not be dogma.
Finally, the Marine Corps may want to develop along lines devised to fight a specific adversary. (9) Such visions, if carried far enough, may lead to the development of new ideas and capabilities that could also be useful in a broader sense.
None of the considerations arising from these two case studies are fully developed and usable as they stand; perhaps they are not feasible at all. What is important for present purposes, however, is that they were not self-evident at the outset. They emerged from the process of deconstruction; this demonstrates the usefulness of that method for closely analyzing texts and generating ideas for further study.
Military officers are continually encouraged to "think out of the box." It is difficult, however, to break out of established and habitual perspectives. Deconstruction helps a reader do this by offering a method to perform a new kind of analysis. With some adaptation, the deconstruction technique can also be used on other military texts, such as more concrete doctrinal publications. Although doctrine manuals are not organized like "white papers" and vision documents, their central ideas can still be made to reveal themselves in unfamiliar and unexpected lights. Their secondary points can be extracted and explored in useful critiques; like vision statements, doctrine is sometimes expressed in weak and vague terms. In those and other kinds of texts, deconstruction reveals ideas and themes that are present or implicit but do not become apparent in a conventional reading. This analytical technique can be helpful to military readers, as well as the scholars for whom it was developed, in forcing them to see beyond what a text seems to say, to apply critical and creative thought to understanding what it means.
NOTES
(1.) U.S. Joint Staff, Joint Vision 2010 [hereafter JV 2010] (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Govt. Print. Office [hereafter GPO], July 1996), pp. 2-34; and U.S. Joint Staff, Joint Vision 2020 [hereafter JV 2020] (Washington, D.C.: GPO, June 2000), pp. 2-45.
(2.) Glenn Ward, Teach Yourself Postmodernism (Chicago: NTC/Contemporary Publishing, 1997). pp. 94-101. Deconstruction is credited to the French philosopher, Jacques Derrida. The primary texts on deconstruction are difficult reading. For our purposes an introductory text is suitable.
(3.) The textual sources for the summarized central themes are indicated throughout each of the texts.
(4.) U.S. Navy Dept., Marine Corps Strategy 21 [hereafter MC Strategy 21] (Washington D.C.: Headquarters U.S. Marine Corps, 2001), p.5.
(5.) Commandant of the Marine Corps Message to All Marines [hereafter CMC ALMAR] 42/00, "The Vision Statement of the United States Marine Corps," message date-time group 152000Z November [15 November, 8 P.M. Greenwich time] 2000.
(6.) Of the thirty "aims" deployed, ten could be considered primarily human based, seven are technology based, and thirteen are a combination of technology and human elements.
(7.) U.S. Navy Dept., Warfighting, Marine Corps Doctrinal Publication 1 (Washington, D.C.: Headquarters U.S. Marine Corps, June 1997), pp. 5-9; and MC Strategy 21, p. 9.
(8.) This "MTW/MOOTW" argument bears some similarities to the Marine Corps struggle in the 1920s and 1930s whether amphibious warfare should replace its traditional role as colonial infantry.
(9.) Marine Corps development of amphibious warfare owed much to planning for a war with Japan.
Lieutenant Colonel Ridderhof is currently assigned to Headquarters Marine Corps. An infantry officer, he is a graduate of the Marine Corps Command and Staff College and the School of Advanced Warfighting.
COPYRIGHT 2002 U.S. Naval War College
Citation: Phillip J. Ridderhof. "Reading military texts from a different perspective - Thinking out of the Box," Naval War College Review, Autumn 2002.
Original URL: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0JIW/is_4_55/ai_95259478
Naval War College Review, Autumn 2002.
Persuasive in peace, decisive in war, preeminent in any form of combat--with these goals in mind, and constantly using such terms as "full-dimensional," "full spectrum' "dominant," and "dominance," the Joint Staff white paper Joint Vision 2010 and its extension Joint Vision 2020 paint a picture of where U.S. military forces should head as they move into the twenty-first century. (1) "Vision" papers of individual services, such as Marine Corps Strategy 21, follow the lead of the joint documents in their proclamations of capabilities within specific competencies. The claims are bold indeed; these vision documents declare that the U.S. military will be able to go everywhere and do everything. Realistically, that is not possible, but a reader is hard pressed to discern from the language of the texts that hard choices have been made, significant alternatives rejected. There seems to be a sentence or phrase to cover every eventuality of future conflict. This, of course, gives the sense that the vision statements ar e pablum, saying nothing by saying everything.
That, however, is an unfortunate and inaccurate impression. The vision documents are in fact more nuanced than they appear. But how can we get at their full meaning? One way to explicate vision documents is to adapt "deconstruction," a technique of reading that arose as a postmodernist philosophical school. To "deconstruct" a text is to use perspectives, and viewpoints that are, ideally, useful for understanding. Through this approach, attentive readers can examine even U.S. military "vision documents," clarify their content, and develop implicit alternatives to their central themes. After briefly outlining the technique, we will apply it to two current case studies.
DECONSTRUCTION AND THE VISION TEXT
Broadly defined, deconstruction is a postmodern philosophy that denies the existence of objectively true meaning of texts. A "text" in this connection is anything that can be intellectually analyzed--a book, a film, even an activity. Deconstructionists argue that a given text has no single, independent "true" meaning established by the author but a variety of meanings that are totally dependent on the reader's perspective and that continually interact in different ways.
To "deconstruct" a text is to analyze it so as to discern not its putative central themes but those that are marginalized and left unsaid. A philosophical, literary, or academic deconstructionist goes farther, declaring these marginal and unspoken themes to be in fact the text's central meanings. By thus turning the text on its head, this method, taken to its logical conclusion, destroys the distinction between central and marginal meanings; for a deconstructionist there are merely different meanings, with arbitrary prioritization. (2) While useful analysis of military vision documents by this method requires a retreat from deconstruction's nihilistic extremes, much can be learned through this form of "thinking out of the box."
To get at marginal and "unsaid" themes, the first step is to identify clearly the central ones. In this connection, how something is said is as important as what is said. Military vision documents are written in the active voice, with strong verbs and modifiers. Central ideas can be identified by the repetition of words or phrases, especially as section titles, displayed quotations, graphics, or topic sentences of paragraphs. The organization of the text also points to central ideas. Vision documents tend to be put together in two ways: addressing the main point first and following with supporting material, and building up the supporting material into an argument that climaxes with the main point. Both patterns can be used simultaneously at different levels. For example, the overall structure of the text may be that of an argument building to a conclusion, while individual subsections are structured as main ideas followed by discussion. The central themes can be picked out fairly easily, by noting the repetit ion of certain phrases, examining the patterns of the writing, and discerning the placement of ideas within the patterns.
The central ideas of military vision texts can be divided into three conceptual parts: foundation, end state, and method. A foundation, the starting point for a vision statement, has two parts. One is an articulation of assumptions about the future security environment. These assumptions can have inwardly focused aspects (such as future U.S. national goals, interests, and policies) and outwardly oriented ones (directions of technological development, potential adversaries of the future). The second part of the foundation is a depiction of the present state of the organization. This description can consist of capabilities or current employment concepts, but it usually focuses on character traits--the heritage and "enduring values" that represent the spirit of the organization. The end state sets forth the ultimate goal--in a sense, the "vision "it self. The end-state discussion describes the specific organizations, capabilities, and operational concepts that the military will need in order to cope with the fut ure that has been portrayed. The end state, usually somewhat vague, focuses on concepts and capabilities rather than actual unit structures or hardware systems. The method is the "how" portion of the document--the path the service will take to proceed from the present force (described in the foundation) to that envisioned by the end state. The method is usually couched in terms of attitudes toward change and the relative importance of various aspects of expected change.
Central ideas may be repeated throughout the foundation, end-state, and method sections of the text. For instance, certain portions of the foundation discussion might be reiterated in the end-state portion in order to highlight the end state's logic by reconnecting it to its premises. Likewise, the end state will probably be addressed in the method portion in order to emphasize the linkage between the two. This repetition makes the central ideas mutually supportive and readily identifiable.
Marginal ideas are secondary to the central ones, but they appear in the text and may even be repeated. Sometimes the only noticeable differences between main and subsidiary points are slight shades of meaning or emphasis. Close examination of the structure of the text and alertness to the use of certain grammatical devices are crucial in determining which themes are subsidiary. For instance, secondary points are usually referred to in caveats, or qualifiers, to central points; phrases such as "While X can never be discounted" and "Also important is X" are clues that X is a marginal idea. The sequence in which ideas are discussed and the relative strength of the modifiers (adjectives or adverbs) applied to them are also indicative of what is primary and what is not. Points referred to in a long list of disparate items, seemingly "tacked on" at the end of a section of text, are likely to be of lesser priority.
If marginal ideas are those that the author considered barely important enough to mention, the "unsaid" points, the "possibilities left out," are those either thought not important enough to mention, or important not to mention, or not even thought of by the author. In any case--that which "goes without saying," that which is "better left unsaid," or that which was not recognized--this is an awkward concept to explain. Two techniques will help discern the possibilities that are implicit but left out: inferring the opposite of certain central ideas (especially in the foundation section) and elevating marginal ideas to central importance. The development of possibilities left out, however, is inevitably fraught with risk. For example, a discussion of central ideas dependent on new technology is likely to omit mention of the possibility that technological progress may stop; to identify it (simply because it is theoretically possible) as an unsaid idea, however, is not realistic or analytically very useful. Nonet heless, this deconstruction technique can reveal possibilities that, if not probable or congenial, are worth consideration.
The last step of deconstruction is synthesis. A text has by now been broken into three categories: the central, marginal, and unsaid themes. While the central themes embody the main thrust of what the text actually said, a study of the marginal and omitted ideas may be more fruitful and enlightening. All three categories, however, should be examined together, to see what synthesis they inspire--ideas that will represent the payoff from the labor of deconstruction.
JV 2010 AND JV 2020
Of the U.S. military vision documents now published, Joint Vision 2010 and 2020 are the most appropriate for a first demonstration of deconstruction-based analysis, because they address U.S. military power as a whole. Service-level visions, in contrast, intentionally marginalize and leave out important possibilities in order to observe the boundaries of service roles. Further, service visions should also fit under the conceptual umbrella of JV 2010 and JV 2020; deconstructing the joint texts first should lay the necessary groundwork for examination of the service visions.
Joint Vision 2010 and 2020 must be considered not as two documents but as one, divided into two parts. JV 2020 is the more current, but it is an addendum or extension of JV 2010 rather than a stand-alone document. It relies on JV 2010's foundation; in fact, the end-state section of JV 2010--a vision of the force in 2010-is part of the foundation of JV 2020. Analyzing the two texts as a single whole allows a more complete listing of marginal ideas and left-out possibilities. As will be seen, though, some of the more interesting points to be gleaned arise from the doctrinal changes that appear in JV 2020.
The foundation of Joint Vision 2010 postulates a future of evolutionary change, wherein U.S. interests and strategy do not significantly change. Military technology will be decisive and will continue to advance along its present lines, producing more precision and mobility, and also, most importantly, a vast increase in information available to forces, about both themselves and the enemy. The international environment also will present, in the JV 2010 vision, a continuation of current trends; there will accordingly be uncertainty, and the United States will have to be prepared to deal simultaneously with a wide range of state and nonstate adversaries. Joint Vision 2010 assumes that the United States will hold to its present policies of ensuring security for its people and possessions and of promoting domestic prosperity and worldwide democracy. The U.S. military will continue to be primarily a warfighting organization, characterized by highly professional personnel and technological superiority; it will not, however, see a large increase in resources made available to it (JV 2010, pages 1-34). (3)
The JV 2020 foundation is the same, with one important exception--that due to the rapid pace of worldwide change, U.S. forces cannot assume that they will enjoy technological superiority in all conflicts. In particular, asymmetrical options maybe available to foes that could neutralize technological advantages (JV 2020, pages 1-45).
The end states envisaged by JV 2010 and JV 2020 are basically the same. In both documents the U.S. military of the future will be a warfighting force that is small, protected, mobile, sustainable, and lethal. It will be able to react rapidly and throughout the world. It will mass its effects (that is, its "fires," the collective impact of its long-range attacks) and deliver them precisely, rather than massing physically the weapons themselves. JV 2020 differs from JV 2010 only by increasing the "degree" of its adjectives: smaller, more protected, more mobile, etc. The overarching concept of both JV 2010 and JV 2020 forces is to manifest "full spectrum dominance"--the ability to fight anywhere with sufficient superiority to defeat any foe with minimal loss to themselves (JV 2010, pages 1-34; JV 2020, pages 1-45).
The method sections of JV 2010 and JV 2020 are different, but they share two themes--the progress of technology and the development of the human element (organization, tactics, leadership). JV 2010's method is to exploit the American combined advantage of technology and highly professional personnel (JV 2010, pages 1-34). For its part, JV 2020, in line with its shift in foundation, emphasizes innovations in human factors in order to offset the potential loss of technological superiority. This shift in method is subtle but continuously repeated throughout JV 2020. In fact, the emphasis given this point in the text suggests that it may be the primary reason that JV 2020 was published (JV 2020, pages 1-45).
With the central themes thus developed, our next step is to identify the marginal themes. There are three significant marginal themes in JV 2010: the impact of the "fog" (uncertainty, imperfectness of information) and "friction" (delay, interference, inertia) of war on operations; the role of massed forces; and the conduct of "military operations other than war" (MOOTW).
Joint Vision 2010 mentions fog and friction only to deprecate them, to predict that their effects will be minimized by anticipated advances in technology:
While friction and fog of war can never be eliminated, new technology promises to mitigate their impact [JV 2010, page 16; emphasis supplied, here and throughout].
Although this will not eliminate the fog of war, dominant battlespace awareness will improve situational awareness, decrease response time and make the battlespace considerably more transparent to those who achieve it [JV 2010, page 13].
JV 2020, however, refutes the idea that fog and friction can be marginalized:
Information Superiority neither equates to perfect information nor does it mean the elimination of the fog of war [JV 2020, page 12].
Joint Vision 2020's recognition of the inevitability of fog and friction--declared positively, without the qualifications used in JV 2010--is representative of the shift in emphasis of the later document from technology to the human element in conflict.
Joint Vision 2010 always refers to the secondary concept of the physical assembling of large forces (as opposed to the concentration of their effects) only in the context of exceptions to the expected norm of future operations:
In the past, our capabilities often required us to physically mass forces to neutralize enemy power [JV 2010, page 17].
Extensive physical presence may later be necessary to accomplish the assigned mission [JV 2010, page 27].
Joint Vision 2020 does not mention massing of actual forces even as a secondary concern, but neither does it refute Joint Vision 2010 on this point. The clear implication is that for the smaller, mobile military foreseen by JV 2010 the ability to mass large forces for a campaign is not of primary importance.
The third secondary concept of JV 2010 is that of military operations other than war. Although MOOTW considerations are mentioned throughout the text, they are always presented as subsidiary to warfighting:
In addition we should expect to participate in a broad range of deterrent, conflict prevention and peacetime activities [JV 2010, page 4].
Other operations, from humanitarian assistance in peacetime through peace operations in a near hostile environment, have proved to be possible using forces optimized for wartime effectiveness [JV 2010, page 17].
Joint Vision 2020 follows the lead of its predecessor in treating military operations other than war as of less than vital importance:
It also includes those ambiguous situations presiding between peace and war [JV 2020, page 8].
Achieving full-spectrum dominance means that the joint force will fulfill its primary purpose--victory in war, as well as achieving success across the range of operations [JV 2020, page 9].
Joint Vision 2020 adds three new marginal ideas, points that are not present at all in Joint Vision 2010: technological innovation, information superiority, and multinational and interagency operations. The marginalization of technology in JV 2020 (though the white paper assumes that the technological improvements foreseen by the earlier document will occur) is in line with the paper's central idea, expressed in its foundation section, that the United States cannot assume it will enjoy technological superiority in the future. Joint Vision 2020 seeks to redress the imbalance in favor of technology of JV 2010:
Realization of the full potential of these changes requires not only technological improvement, but the continued evolution of organizations and doctrine [JV 2020, page 12].
Although technical interoperability is essential, it is not sufficient to ensure effective operations [JV 2020, page 21].
Our thinking about command and control must be conceptually based, rather than focused on technology and material [JV 2020, page 40].
JV 2020's marginalization of information superiority goes hand in hand with its treatment of technology. Where Joint Vision 2010 held up information superiority as an essential force multiplier, Joint Vision 2020 subsumes it within the concept of "decision dominance"--an overarching concept that includes nontechnology based elements. Information superiority is only one part, and not the most important, of "decision dominance."
The creation of information superiority is not an end in itself [JV 2020, page 11].
While changes in the information environment have led some to focus solely [JV 2010] on the contribution of information superiority to command and control, it is equally necessary to understand the complete realm of command and control decision making, the nature of organizational collaboration, and especially, the human in the loop [JV 2020, page 38].
The last marginal concept of JV 2020 is that of multinational and interagency operations. Joint Vision 2010 treats multinational operations as insignificant and barely mentions interagency operations. Joint Vision 2020 discusses both concepts at length, but always as secondary to the central idea of unilateral joint military action. There is no expectation that either will be routine.
To coordinate military operations, as necessary, with government agencies and international organizations [JV 2020, page 5].
The joint force of 2020 will integrate protective capabilities from multinational and interagency partners when available and will respond to their requirements when possible [JV 2020, page 33].
What has been left out of the doctrinal papers? With one exception, the same major possibilities are absent from both Joint Vision 2010 and 2020: that of a major change in U.S. national goals and interests, that of the emergence of a single "peer competitor," and that of the primary focus of the military shifting from warfighting to operations other than war. The exception is the idea of human considerations, such as doctrine and organization, driving technology in the development of future forces. Joint Vision 2010 does not mention the possibility, but JV 2020 makes it a central theme. The "absences" of a change to national interests and of a new peer competitor are perceived by reversing central ideas of the joint visions--the continuity of U.S. national interests, and a multiplicity of state and nonstate adversaries. That any shift to operations other than war has been omitted is revealed by considering the implications of converting MOOTW, actually a marginal concept, into a primary one.
Are any of these three "left-out" possibilities of analytical value? A change to U.S. national interests, as defined by the joint vision documents, is very unlikely. JV 2010 defines U.S. national interests so broadly--ensuring security of the nation's people and possessions, ensuring domestic prosperity, and promoting worldwide democracy--that it is hard to imagine other interests that would take their place (JV 2010, page 3). Different emphases might arise, but there are no reasonable opposites. However, the prospects of a peer competitor emerging or of military operations other than war becoming primary are less improbable; neither is out of the realm of possibility. Inclusion of these ideas would substantially change the central themes of both joint vision papers.
Does deconstruction of Joint Vision 2010 and 2020 produce any insights worth pondering? There seem to be three. First, there is a shift in emphasis--from technology over human factors in JV2010, to the reverse in JV2020. Joint Vision 2020 otherwise binds itself so closely to JV 2010 that this difference is obscured. It is not true, however, as many might assume, that neither text says anything very different from the other. This shift in philosophy, whether intended or not, is an important one that should be clearly acknowledged.
Both joint visions make military operations other than war a secondary priority to warfighting--although, aside from Operation ENDURING FREEDOM, at least, U.S. forces currently spend most of their time executing them. As a consequence, large formations are not envisioned in the small, mobile force of the future, yet they are required for many of the "human intensive" other-than-wa missions, such as peacekeeping. Perhaps this implies the idea of creating within the services a force specialized for operations other than war, with proportionately more personnel but fewer assets for agility and precision strike.
Joint Visions 2010 and 2020 forecast a force able to go anywhere and fight anyone, as opposed to a specific foe in a particular theater. For practical purposes, there are problems with such an all-encompassing approach. Deconstruction suggests there might be value in competing joint visions, each focused on a different potential adversary. These visions would be more than operational plans, based on forces already in place; rather, they would redesign the entire joint force as necessary to meet and defeat most effectively the given foe. These "hedge" visions would still be secondary to JV 2020 or its successors, but they could be wellsprings of ideas.
"THE VISION STATEMENT OF THE U.S. MARINE CORPS" AND MARINE CORPS STRATEGY 21
The current Marine Corps "vision" documents are "The Vision Statement of the U.S. Marine Corps" (for short, the "USMC Vision Statement"), originally released as a naval message, and Marine Corps Strategy 21 (or MC Strategy 21). The Marine documents explicitly claim to support Joint Vision 2010 and 2020. (4) The USMC Vision Statement is incorporated verbatim in MC Strategy 21, on the first page; nonetheless, it should be treated as a separate text, because its explanatory notes shed significant light on both documents.
What can deconstruction of the Marine visions tell us with respect to the joint texts? We begin as before, examining each of the three main parts of the two documents. The foundation is the single largest section of MC Strategy 21 (four of nine pages). The emphasis there points to the central idea in the Marine texts: that the Marine Corps already embodies the correct model for the future.
The [General Officers Futures Group] concluded that the Corps requires only marginal adjustments to successfully adapt [for the future]. We do, in fact, have it right. (5)
The Marine texts' foundation reflects a national security environment that interestingly contrasts with that of the joint visions, an environment in which the United States is likely to face both state and nonstate actors in conflicts across the spectrum. In a chaotic setting, large-scale conventional warfare will be the exception, and a variety of lesser contingencies the rule (MC Strategy 21, pages 4-5). Although the point is not explicitly made, it is safe to assume that the Marines would recognize the same national interests as does Joint Vision 2010: ensuring domestic security and prosperity, and promoting worldwide democracy. The USMC Vision Statement, however, adds a more detailed assumption:
Opportunities and challenges in the world's littoral regions will increase America's reliance on the continuous forward presence and sustainable maritime power projection of naval expeditionary forces [USMC Vision Statement].
While this statement is not at odds with anything in Joint Vision 2010 and 2020, neither is it supported by any passages in the joint texts. The declaration reflects a predictable maritime bias, but also a distinct political and strategic assumption.
The current status of the Marine Corps, in the view of the documents, is that, with its highly trained personnel, it can provide combatant commanders with mission-tailored Marine air-ground task forces (MAGTFs). These task forces are able to deal with a large range of crises and contingencies across the spectrum of conflict, including forward presence and quick strategic response (MC Strategy 21, pages 2, 3, 5).
The end state outlined in the foundations of the Marine vision texts is, significantly, strikingly similar to their current-status statements:
The Marine Corps will enhance its strategic agility, operational reach, and tactical flexibility to enable joint, allied, and coalition operations and interagency coordination. These capabilities will provide combatant commanders with scalable, interoperable, combined-arms Marine Air-Ground Task Forces (MAGTFs) to shape the international environment, respond quickly to the complex spectrum of crises and conflicts, and gain access or prosecute forcible entry operations [USMC Vision Statement; MC Strategy 21, page 1].
This envisioned end state is further confirmation that the Marine Corps' central idea is improvement of the current force, not transformation to a new type of force. The Marine end-state force is simply an amphibious version of the joint end-state force. The Joint Vision 2010 and 2020 end state was to be a smaller force, protected, mobile, and sustainable, able to react rapidly throughout the globe and to mass the effects of its precise, lethal strikes without physically massing its own elements. The Marine vision documents do not directly address precise lethality or the massing of effects, but the passages related to improving operational reach and tactical flexibility can be interpreted as covering those two joint concepts. The Marine papers support no views that would be contrary to any stated joint concept; the Marine texts may not match the joint texts adjective for adjective, but the improved Marine air-ground task forces fit well within the Joint Vision 2010 and 2020 parameters.
The method espoused in the Marine vision texts is one of evolution and improvement; the most frequently used verbs in the Marine vision texts are "enhance," "evolve," and "expand" (MC Strategy 21, pages 6-8). This approach emphasizes the recruitment and retention of high-quality personnel by promoting traditional core values and a "warrior ethic," as well as the improvement of operational capabilities by "optimizing" current structure and "capitalizing" on innovation (MC Strategy 21, pages 6-8). Joint Vision 2010 and 2020 revolve around the concepts of technology and "human elements" (such as doctrine and organization); the Marine vision texts are not explicit in this area but seem to match more closely Joint Vision 2020, with its emphasis on concepts and organizations rather than the impact of new technologies (MC Strategy 21, pages 6-8). (6)
Having established the central ideas of the Marine texts, the deconstructionist reader can pull out from them the significant marginal points. There is only one--that sustained conventional combat operations are secondary in likelihood, and thus importance, to other deterrence and contingency operations at the lower end of the conflict spectrum. The technique of the Marine texts is to arrange potential employment options and capabilities in lists; the fighting of battles always appears at the end of these lists, sometimes with a qualifier, sometimes without.
These forces will promote national interests, influence vital regions, and fight and win the nation's battles [USMC Vision Statement; MC Strategy 21, page 1].
Every Marine and Marine unit is ready to rapidly task organize, deploy, and employ from [the continental United States] or while forward deployed to respond and contain crises or, if necessary, to immediately engage in sustained combat operations [MC Strategy 21, page 2].
Throughout our Nation's history, Marines have responded to national and international brushfires and crises and, when necessary, war [MC Strategy 21, page 3].
As an expeditionary, task-organized, combined arms force with superb small-unit leaders, we are prepared to promote peace and stability or, if required, defeat our Nation's adversaries [MC Strategy 21, page 5].
Multiple belligerents and a blurring of distinctions and national affiliations among terrorist groups, subnational factions, insurgent groups, and international criminals will complicate an environment where a direct attack is often the least likely course of action [MC Strategy 21, page 5].
The Marine vision texts do not exclude the possibility of major combat operations; their marginalization concerns only their likelihood. Nonetheless, in this respect the Marine documents diverge significantly from Joint Vision 2010 and Joint Vision 2020. Both joint texts presume the opposite, emphasizing warfighting over other operations.
The Marine texts do not directly address the "fog and friction" of combat or the role of large physical-presence forces, which were mentioned in the joint documents as secondary issues. The Marine warfighting doctrine of maneuver warfare, which is restated in MC Strategy 21, agrees with JV 2020 that fog and friction are inherent parts of conflict and cannot be marginalized. (7) The Marine emphasis on maritime forces could be understood as discounting the need for large physical-presence ground forces, but it begs the question of the size of the maritime forces required instead. The relative marginalization of major theater war in favor of operations other than war and such lesser crises is the only distinct secondary idea.
Three "possibilities left out" suggest themselves. The first would be a reversal of the marginalization of major combat operations. Such a shift would emphasize the Marine Corps role in warfighting at the possible expense of its ability to maintain forward presence or respond to small-scale contingencies. The second major possibility left out of the Marine vision texts is that of an end-state force radically different from the present Marine air-ground task force concept. Such a reversal would go against the grain of the Marine texts, which postulate that evolution, not revolution, is the appropriate path. The last possibility left out of the Marine texts mirrors one from Joint Vision 2010 and 2020: that of designing the Marine Corps to meet the threat of a specific future peer competitor.
This deconstruction of the two recent Marine Corps vision documents offers three ideas for consideration. First, the U.S. military might want to develop a "hedge" capability to address operations other than war. The Marine Corps seems to be offering itself as that capability and may want to commit to develop itself further in this direction. Such a choice could reduce the Marines' contribution to major-theater-warfare situations, but it would increase their utility in what is apparently going to be the most prevalent form of military employment. (8)
Second, the Marine Corps should look to doctrinal revolution as well as evolution. The present direction may be correct, but that assumption should not stifle development and experimentation of concepts that do not involve the Marine air-ground task force as now known. Such concepts could involve the elimination or severe curtailment of various elements of the task force in order to allocate more resources to the others. The Marine air-ground task force should not be dogma.
Finally, the Marine Corps may want to develop along lines devised to fight a specific adversary. (9) Such visions, if carried far enough, may lead to the development of new ideas and capabilities that could also be useful in a broader sense.
None of the considerations arising from these two case studies are fully developed and usable as they stand; perhaps they are not feasible at all. What is important for present purposes, however, is that they were not self-evident at the outset. They emerged from the process of deconstruction; this demonstrates the usefulness of that method for closely analyzing texts and generating ideas for further study.
Military officers are continually encouraged to "think out of the box." It is difficult, however, to break out of established and habitual perspectives. Deconstruction helps a reader do this by offering a method to perform a new kind of analysis. With some adaptation, the deconstruction technique can also be used on other military texts, such as more concrete doctrinal publications. Although doctrine manuals are not organized like "white papers" and vision documents, their central ideas can still be made to reveal themselves in unfamiliar and unexpected lights. Their secondary points can be extracted and explored in useful critiques; like vision statements, doctrine is sometimes expressed in weak and vague terms. In those and other kinds of texts, deconstruction reveals ideas and themes that are present or implicit but do not become apparent in a conventional reading. This analytical technique can be helpful to military readers, as well as the scholars for whom it was developed, in forcing them to see beyond what a text seems to say, to apply critical and creative thought to understanding what it means.
NOTES
(1.) U.S. Joint Staff, Joint Vision 2010 [hereafter JV 2010] (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Govt. Print. Office [hereafter GPO], July 1996), pp. 2-34; and U.S. Joint Staff, Joint Vision 2020 [hereafter JV 2020] (Washington, D.C.: GPO, June 2000), pp. 2-45.
(2.) Glenn Ward, Teach Yourself Postmodernism (Chicago: NTC/Contemporary Publishing, 1997). pp. 94-101. Deconstruction is credited to the French philosopher, Jacques Derrida. The primary texts on deconstruction are difficult reading. For our purposes an introductory text is suitable.
(3.) The textual sources for the summarized central themes are indicated throughout each of the texts.
(4.) U.S. Navy Dept., Marine Corps Strategy 21 [hereafter MC Strategy 21] (Washington D.C.: Headquarters U.S. Marine Corps, 2001), p.5.
(5.) Commandant of the Marine Corps Message to All Marines [hereafter CMC ALMAR] 42/00, "The Vision Statement of the United States Marine Corps," message date-time group 152000Z November [15 November, 8 P.M. Greenwich time] 2000.
(6.) Of the thirty "aims" deployed, ten could be considered primarily human based, seven are technology based, and thirteen are a combination of technology and human elements.
(7.) U.S. Navy Dept., Warfighting, Marine Corps Doctrinal Publication 1 (Washington, D.C.: Headquarters U.S. Marine Corps, June 1997), pp. 5-9; and MC Strategy 21, p. 9.
(8.) This "MTW/MOOTW" argument bears some similarities to the Marine Corps struggle in the 1920s and 1930s whether amphibious warfare should replace its traditional role as colonial infantry.
(9.) Marine Corps development of amphibious warfare owed much to planning for a war with Japan.
Lieutenant Colonel Ridderhof is currently assigned to Headquarters Marine Corps. An infantry officer, he is a graduate of the Marine Corps Command and Staff College and the School of Advanced Warfighting.
COPYRIGHT 2002 U.S. Naval War College
Citation: Phillip J. Ridderhof. "Reading military texts from a different perspective - Thinking out of the Box," Naval War College Review, Autumn 2002.
Original URL: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0JIW/is_4_55/ai_95259478