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U.S. Armed Forces Vision For Future Air Warfare

[Source: Naval Air Vision 2014-2025]

I’ve been reviewing the U.S. armed forces vision for how to fight and win with the F-35. It plays a pretty central role in each services’ vision documents, meaning that they have all adapted to the “top-down” strategic guidance given by the Department of Defense (DOD). But the interesting part is the differences between the services’ documents and statements.

How The Services View Their F-35s

Below are the U.S. armed forces I’ve focused on, and their current and future plans for the F-35. The table is from the FlightGlobal World Air Forces 2017 report.

Given the large numbers of aircraft going to training units, we can see that all forces are building their new pilot numbers, and according to Lt Col Berke (via an Aviation Week interview), they will put new pilots into F-35s, so they simply learn a fifth generation mindset from scratch, rather than having to “un-learn” the fourth generation mindset.

We can also see the U.S. Marine Corps building active combat units, in their relative haste to declare Initial Operational Capability (IOC) in July 2015, and in support of their first F-35B overseas deployment to Iwakuni Airbase, Japan in January 2017. This deployment location is a good way to support both possible confrontation sites in Korea and the East China Sea.

[Source: Forbes]

Another viewpoint exists on the U.S. military force posture in Asia that is essentially militaristic. The map image above is from a Forbes article, calling other US media “blind to the militarism of its own mentality and approach, as well as to the essential militarism of the U.S. alliance system in Asia, with its “cornerstone” of U.S. bases, including the headquarters and the Seventh Fleet, and some 100,000 force personnel in Japan and South Korea.” The Marine Corps is apparently quite keen to replace their ageing AV-8B and early model F/A-18A/B/C/D aircraft (as they have skipped out on the Super Hornet F/A-18E/F).

Meanwhile the U.S. Navy has articulated their vision in a document from Naval Air Systems Command (NAVAIR) entitled Naval Aviation Vision 2016-2025. They state:

The supersonic, multi-role, multi-service F-35 Lightning II represents a quantum leap in air superiority capability. Combining the next-generation fighter characteristics of radar-evading stealth, supersonic speed and fighter agility with the most powerful and comprehensive integrated sensor package of any fighter aircraft in history, the F-35 delivers unprecedented lethality and survivability to Naval Aviation [emphasis added].

Their characterization of the F-35 as an instrument of air superiority is perhaps a bit too optimistic, or stretches the F-35 capability a bit too much. In an assessment from the U.S. Naval War College of “Chinese Air Superiority in the Near Seas”, the F-35 does not stand out from the pack of Chinese and American fourth generation fighters, in the same way that the F-22 clearly does:

Indeed, while the U.S. Air Force has big plans for the F-35, it also offers some cautionary words about the force design and balance that the F-22 brings to the fight. According to Chief of U.S. Air Force Air Combat Command Gen. Michael Hostage in a February 2014 interview:

Dealing with the Joint Strike Fighter, Hostage says he is ‘going to fight to the death to protect the F-35’ since the only way to keep up with the adversaries, which ‘are building fleets that will overmatch our legacy fleet’, is by employing a sufficient fleet of 1,763 (‘not one less’) F-35s. You can update and upgrade the F-15 and F-16 fleets, but they would still become obsolete in the next decade.  But, the F-22 Raptor will have to support the F-35. And here comes another problem. When the Raptor was produced it was flying ‘with computers that were already so out of date you would not find them in a kid’s game console in somebody’s home gaming system.’ Still, the U.S. Air Force was forced to use the stealth fighter plane as it was, because that was the way the spec was written. But now, the F-22 must be upgraded through a costly service life extension plan and modernization program because, ‘If I do not keep that F-22 fleet viable, the F-35 fleet frankly will be irrelevant. The F-35 is not built as an air superiority platform. It needs the F-22,” says Hostage to Air Force Times.’ [emphasis added].

F-22 + F-35 = Air Superiority

[Source: 5th Generation Fighters, Lt Gen Hawk Carlisle, USAF ACC]

So, is the F-35 a capable air superiority platform, or not? General Hodges in 2014:

[E]xamine [the] Raptor versus the Lightning. A Raptor at 50-plus thousand feet at Mach 2 with its RCS has a different level of invulnerability than a Lightning at 35,000 at Mach .9 and it’s RCS.  The altitude, speed, and stealth combined in the two platforms, they give the airplanes two completely different levels of capability. The plan is to normalize the Lightning’s capability relative to the Raptor by marrying it up with six, or seven or eight other Lightening’s. The advanced fusion of the F-35 versus the F-22 means those airplanes have an equal level or better level of invulnerability than the Raptors have, but it takes multiple airplanes to do it because of the synergistic fused attacks of their weapon systems.  That’s the magic of the fifth-gen F-35, but it takes numbers of F-35s to get that effect. That’s why I’ve been so strident on getting the full buy. Because if they whittle it down to a little tiny fleet like the Raptor, it’s not going to be compelling.

In a separate interview in 2015, “Re-norming of Airpower in Practice: An F-22 enabled Air Combat Force,” General Hawk Carlisle made the point that

[T]he F-22 was a key enabler for the air combat force currently, and had led to a re-norming of airpower in practice … It’s not just that the F-22s are so good, it’s that they make every other plane better. They change the dynamic with respect to what the other airplanes are able to do because of what they can do with regard to speed, range, and flexibility. It’s their stealth quality. It’s their sensor fusion. It’s their deep penetration capability. It is the situational awareness they provide for the entire fleet which raises the level of the entire combat fleet to make everybody better.  The F-22s make the Eagles better, and the A-10s better, and the F-16s better. They make the bombers better. They provide information. They enable the entire fight. And its information dominance, its sensor fusion capability, it’s a situational awareness that they can provide to the entire package which raises the level of our capabilities in the entire fight. This is not about some distant future; it is about the current fight.

This point is nicely illustrated with the kind of cross domain information-sharing capability which embodies “joint-ness” and is demonstrated by F-22’s providing targeting data to submarines (SSGN) for land-attack cruise missiles.

General Carlisle also announced that “[t]he exercise coming up at Langley in December 2015 will feature the F-22 flying with the Typhoon (XI Squadron from the RAF) and the Rafales from the French Air Force. What these three aircraft have in come is that they all are about 10 years old in terms of combat experience and life.”

Perhaps these exercises were engineered to test improvements to the F-22’s combat capabilities, especially Within-Visual-Range (WVR), aptly named since the Mark 1 human eyeball becomes a sensor that stealth cannot fool. In May of 2015, the Raptor fired its first AIM-9X sidewinder, latest generation dogfight missiles. Along with a helmet-mounted sight, this capability was fielded by the Soviet Union in 1984, when the R-73 (AA-11 “Archer”) was mated to the MiG-29 Fulcrum. According to Lt. Col. Fred “Spanky” Clifton, who is one of the most experienced aggressor pilots ever, having flown the F-15, F-5, F-16 and the notorious MiG-29,  “[i]n the WVR (within visual range) arena, a skilled MiG-29 pilot can give and Eagle or Viper driver all he/she wants.”

The experience at Red Flag Alaska in 2012, a training exercise which saw the F-22 go up against Typhoons of the German Luftwaffe, was perhaps humbling for the Air Force to some degree, as the German pilots reported they had “Raptor salad for lunch,” and subsequently painted F-22 kills on their aircraft. This may have provided some impetus to deploy better capabilities; this year, Raptor pilots were happy to see the incremental update 3.2, which fielded the AIM-9X capability.

The 9X Block 1 version of the dual-use, infrared missile is “a dramatic leap within visual range missile capabilities,” said Lt. Col. Daniel, an F-22 pilot of the 95th Fighter Squadron at Tyndall Air Force Base in Florida. … with the AIM-9M ‘Mike’ we kind of went out there going, ‘We have six missiles,” Daniel joked, referring to the increased effort required to make the weapon effective in modern combat operations. ‘With AIM-9X, we step out the door going, ‘We got eight missiles on the jet.’

The helmet-mounted sight is due by 2020 for the F-22.

The Future of Air Superiority: BVR or WVR?

This seems clear, the F-22 dominates the fight from Beyond Visual Range (BVR), where its stealth and radar provide it the initiative and the ability to use the element of surprise in its favor. An analysis by Aviation Week, using publicly available data from system manufacturers, illustrates this quantitatively and graphically.

Large ‘fourth-generation’ fighters such as the F-15, Su-27 and Tornado have radar cross-sections (RCS) of 10-15 m2. The F-16 and “Gen-4.5” fighters—Typhoon, Rafale, Su-35 and Super Hornet—are believed to be in the 1-3-m2 range. The F-35 and F-22 RCSs are said to equal a golf ball and marble, respectively. Based on Sukhoi’s claims that its Su-35 can detect 3-m2 targets at 400 km in a narrow-angle, maximum-power search, Aviation Week estimated how far away it can detect these fighters. Note the detection range in a standard search is half as much. [Credit: Colin Throm/AW&ST]
Almaz-Antey says the S-400’s 92N6E “Gravestone” fire-control radar can detect a 4-m2 radar-cross-section target at 250 km. Based on this figure, Aviation Week estimated its detection range against modern fighter aircraft. [Credit: Colin Throm/AW&ST]

The F-35 should be able to use these same tactics, as it has those capabilities as well.  Once the fight devolves into WVR, even the Raptor, designed as an air superiority platform, finds challenges with capable fourth generation opponents. Should we expect the F-35 to fare better or worse than the F-22 in the same situation?

It seems this is one of the key questions in air-to-air combat modeling or war-gaming: how often are engagements taking place at BVR, and how often are they WVR? This is all the more challenging since “visual range” is a highly dynamic and situational.

The F-35 Is Not A Fighter

I’ve been listening to Deputy Defense Secretary Robert Work speak on the Third Offset Strategy.  He spoke at Defense One Production forum (2015-09-30), and again to Air Command and Staff College students, (2016-05-27).  What follows are some rough notes and paraphrasing, aimed at understanding the strategy, and connecting the F-35 platform and its capabilities to the strategy.

Work gives an interesting description of his job as Chief Operating Officer (COO) of the Department of Defense (DOD), which is “one of the biggest corporations on the planet,” and having a “simple” mission, “to organize, train and equip a joint force that is ready for war and that is operated forward to preserve the peace.”

The Roots of the Third Offset Strategy

Why do we care about Third Offset?  “We have to deal with the resurgence of great power competition.”  What is a great power? Work credits John Mearsheimer’s definition, but in his own words, it is “a large state that can take on the dominant global state (the United States) and really give them a run for their money, and have a nuclear deterrent force that can survive a first strike. Don’t really care about economic power, or soft power, the focus is only on military capabilities.”

This is quite interesting, since economic power begets military capabilities.  A poor China and a rich China are worlds’ apart in terms of the military power that they can field.  Also, the stop and start nature of basing agreements with the Philippines under Duterte might remove key bases close to the South China Sea battlefield, having a huge impact on the ability of the US military to project power, as the RAND briefing from yesterday’s post illustrated in rather stark terms.

What has changed to require the Third Offset?  Great power rivals have duplicated our Second Offset strategy, of precision guided munitions, stealth and operational (campaign) level battle networks.  This strategy gave the US and allies an advantage for forty years.  “We’ve lived in a unique time in post-Wesphalian era, where one state is so dominant relative to its peers.”  He sees a dividing line in 2014, when two events occur:

  1. China starts to reclaim islands in the South China Sea
  2. Russia annexes Crimea and destabilizes Ukraine

Also, the nature of technology development has changed as well.  In the Cold War, technological innovation happens in government labs:

  • 1950’s – nuclear weapon miniaturization
  • 1960’s – space and rocket technology
  • 1970’s – precision guided munitions, stealth, information technology
  • 1980’s – large scale system of systems

From 2012, militarily-relevant technologies are happening in the commercial sphere:

  • Artificial Intelligence (AI)
  • Autonomous Weapons Systems
  • Robotics
  • Digitization
  • Fight from Range
  • Operate from inside their battle network
  • Cyber and EW, how to take down their network?

“This means we know where to start, but we don’t know where it ends.”  Of this list of technologies, he calls out AI and Autonomy as at the forefront.  He defines Autonomy as “the delegation of decision authority to some entity in the battle network. Manned or unmanned system … what you are looking for is human-machine symbiosis.“

What do you need to do this?  First, deep-learning systems.  “Up until 2015, a human analyst was consistently more accurate at identifying an object in an image than a machine. In 2015, this changed. …  when a machine makes a mistake, it makes a big one.”  He then tells the story of a baby holding a baseball bat, “which the machine identified as an enemy armed combatant. … machines looked for patterns, and then provide them to humans who can use their intitive and strategic acuity to determine what’s going on.“

The F-35 and Strategy

As an example of how this might play out, a machine can generate the Air Tasking Order (ATO – which is a large document that lists all of the sorties and targets to be prosecuted by joint air forces in a 24-hour period, per Wikipedia) … in minutes or hours, instead of many analysts working for hours or days. “We are after human-computer collaborative decision-making.” In 1997, super computer “Deep Blue” beat Gary Kasparov in chess, which was a big deal at the time. In 2005, however, two amateur chess players using three computers beat a field of grand masters and field of super computers. “It was the human strategic guidance combined with the tactical acuity of the computer that we believe will be the most important thing.”  He then goes on to highlight an example of this human-machine collaboration:

The F-35 is not a fighter plane. It shouldn’t even be called the F-35. It should be called the BN-35, the “Battle Network”-35. It is a human-machine collaboration machine that is unbelievable. The Distributed Aperture System (DAS), and all the sensors, and the network which pours into the plane; the plane processes it and displays it to the pilot, so that the pilot can make accurate, relevant and quick decisions. That’s why that airplane is going to be so good.

Work also covers another topic near and dear to me, wargaming.  Perhaps a war game is a great opportunity for humans and machines to practice collaboration?

We are reinvigorating wargaming, which has really gone down over the past years. We’re looking at more at the service level, more at the OSD level, and these are very, very helpful for us to develop innovative leaders, and also helpful for us to go after new and innovative concepts.

He mentions the Schriever Wargame. “[O]nce you start to move forces, your great power rival will start to use cyber to try to slow down those forces … the distinction between away games and home games is no longer relevant to us.”

Next, I’ll look at the perspectives of the services as they adopt the F-35 in different ways.

 

Army And Marine Corps Join Forces To Define Multi-Domain Battle Concept

U.S. Army Chief of Staff General Mark Milley and U.S. Marine General Robert Neller recently signed a joint white paper to be sent for review by Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Joseph Dunford Jr.,outlining the collective views of their services on what has been termed “multi-domain battle.” The Army and Marine Corps have also established a joint task force to develop tactics applicable to the concept.

Multi-domain battle is a concept that has evolved as a response to challenges posed by anti-access/area-denial capabilities fielded by potential U.S. military rivals, such as Russia, China, and Iran. Its proponents argue that in it’s broadest application, the concept seeks to expand the principles of combined arms tactics beyond the traditional air/sea/land service boundaries and apply them to joint operations and newly emerging domains such as cyber warfare and information operations. Trevor Dupuy postulated that the employment of combined arms on the battlefield was one solution armies have historically adopted to adapt to increases in weapon lethality over time.

When the Army officially introduced the concept last year, General Milley said “This is pretty much the beginning of a new way of thinking.” General Neller echoed Milley’s comments. “We’ve been shoulder-and-shoulder on multi-domain battle and land concepts. We can’t afford to waste any resources on duplication when it’s not necessary. We see the problem the same way; we have the same conclusions.” U.S. Pacific Command (USPACOM) commander, U.S. Navy Admiral Harry B. Harris commented last fall that

We need a degree of jointness, in my opinion, in which no one military service dominates and no domain has a fixed boundary. A combatant commander must be able to create effects from any single domain to target in every domain in order to fight tonight and win. [I need] a true land-based cross-domain capability [that] offers us an integrated joint force capable of deterring rising powers by denying them the domains in which they seek to operate.

U.S. Army, Pacific (USARPC) is currently working with USPACOM to finalize exercises scheduled for this spring to test multi-domain battle warfighting concepts. Similar exercises are being planned for Europe in 2018.

There is a sense of urgency regarding multi-domain battle in the Pacific, given ongoing tensions with North Korea and recent comments by Trump Administration officials regarding the South China Sea. USARPC commander General Robert Brown recently stated “This isn’t something 10 years from now. If Kim Jong-un goes south tomorrow, I will need some of this tomorrow.'”

Even as the Army and Marine Corps move forward with integrating multi-domain battle into their combat doctrines, the concept is not without its discontents. Aside from Admiral Harris, the Navy has had little to say about multi-domain battle. The U.S. Air Force has also expressed skepticism that U.S. land combat forces will reduce their dependence on air power anytime soon. When the Army raised concerns last year about capabilities Russian forces had demonstrated in the Ukraine, some in its sisters services and the national security community accused it of alarmism in support of its lobbying for an increased share of the defense budget.

Whether mutli-domain battle survives as an organic concept, it seems to be spurring useful thinking about warfare in the near future. In addition to stimulating new technological research and development (Third Offset Strategy), it is leading to new ways at looking at command and control, planning, and notions of “jointness.”

Hybrid Warfare At Sea

“Who are you calling junk?”

During his Senate confirmation hearing on January 11th, Secretary of State-designate Rex Tillerson stated that the Trump administration is “going to have to send China a clear signal that, first, the island-building [in the South China Sea] stops and, second, your access to those islands also is not going to be allowed.” Chinese state-run media outlets responded with vows to counter any attempts by the United States to block access to the artificial islands China is constructing in the South China Sea.

The possibility of a clash between the U.S. and China in the Western Pacific has been the subject of discussion and analysis for several years now. In the current issue of the U.S. Naval Institute’s journal, Proceedings, Admiral James Stavridis (ret.) takes a look at the potential challenges posed by maritime “hybrid warfare” capabilities. Noting that current assessments of hybrid war focus overwhelmingly on land warfare, he points out that both China and Iran have demonstrated the ability to apply asymmetrical approaches to sea warfare as well.

Stavridis outlines what a hybrid war at sea might look like.

Given its need to appear somewhat ambiguous to outside observers, maritime hybrid warfare generally will be conducted in the coastal waters of the littorals. Instead of using force directly from identifiable “gray hull” navy platforms, hybrid warfare will feature the use of both civilian vessels (tramp steamers, large fishing vessels, light coastal tankers, small fast craft, and even “low slow” skiffs with outboard engines). It also will be conducted and likely command-and-controlled from so-called white hulls assigned to the coast guards of given nations. Both the Chinese and the Iranians are using their coast guards (and revolutionary guards in the case of Iran) in this fashion in the South China Sea and Arabian Gulf, respectively.

Extrapolating from this, Stavridis argues that

The United States must start to consider its responses to hybrid warfare at sea, which may require developing new tactics and technologies, working closely with allies and partners, and building U.S. hybrid capability to counter its deployment by other nations and eventually transnational actors.

In addition, the United States should be considering the role of naval forces—Navy, Marine Corps, Coast Guard, and even Merchant Marine—in helping counter hybrid attacks ashore. Many of the capabilities developed to conduct and counter hybrid warfare at sea could be employed in the littoral, coastal regions, and eventually deep inland. This might be called “hybrid warfare from the sea,” and certainly is a potential part of maritime hybrid warfare.

He makes several specific recommendations:

  • “The most important thing we can do today is to study, analyze, and fully understand how the ideas of hybrid warfare as practiced today will both translate to the maritime sphere and develop there in lethal ways.”
  • Work with Coalition Partners and “encourage cross talk, exchange best practices, and share intelligence on this emerging concern.”
  • Train and exercise against maritime hybrid warfare. “The ambiguity of these scenarios will require education and training in rules of engagement, operating our conventional systems against unconventional forces at sea, and learning to act more like a network at sea in the littoral.”
  • Leverage the U.S. Coast Guard. “Involving it in a leadership role in combating maritime hybrid warfare is crucial. Many of its systems and platforms already contain the technologies to counter maritime hybrid warfare techniques, and its ethos and fighting spirit applied in this tactical arena would be powerful.”

The article goes into much more depth on these points. It is a good starting point for considering what a another potential area of future global competition may look like.

Lives Of The Russian (And Ex-Russian) Aircraft Carriers

Goofus and Gallant at Sea, or the Russian aircraft carrier Admiral Kuznetsov (l) and the Chinese aircraft carrier Liaoning (r). [The Telegraph and China Stringer Network, via Reuters]

When we left the Russian aircraft carrier Admiral Flota Sovetskogo Soyuza Kuznetsov last autumn, it was steaming (and by steaming, we mean smoking) through the English Channel with its screen toward the Mediterranean Sea to support combined Syrian-Russian military operations against rebel forces in the city of Aleppo. After being denied permission en route to refuel in Spain and Malta, the Kuznetsov arrived on station off Syria in early November.

The Kuznetsov began military operations on 8 November, but just six days later one of it’s brand-new MiG-29KR multi-role fighters crashed. The Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) stated that the accident was the result of an unspecified fault in one of the Kuznetsov‘s four landing arrestor cables, but the Russian newspaper Gazeta claimed the aircraft crashed when it’s engines failed while waiting to land. IHS Jane’s has speculated that the aircraft likely ran out of fuel. The MoD called attention to airstrikes launched from the Kuznetsov against Syrian targets the next day, 15 November. MoD video showed Su-33 fighter-bombers loaded with unguided bombs but no MiG-29KR’s, leading some to conclude that the latter had been grounded due to the crash.

Satellite photographs subsequently taken on 20 November of Humaymim Air Base in Syria’s Latakia province showed eight Russian Navy Su-33 and one MiG-29KR jets alongside Russian Aerospace Forces (VKS) aircraft, suggesting that the Kuznetsov‘s air wing had been temporarily transferred to land to continue flight operations.

On 5 December, the MoD announced that “while landing after completing a combat task over Syria, an Su-33 fighter jet skidded off the [Kuznetsov‘s] deck because the arresting cable gear broke.” The announcement did not specify a date for the crash, but it was believed to have occurred on 3 December, less than three weeks after the first incident.

Last week, Russia announced that it would begin withdrawing its combat forces in Syria, beginning with the Kuznetsov task force. The Russian military commander in Syria, Colonel General Andrei Kartapolov, asserted that in two months, the Kuznetsov had launched 420 air combat sorties against 1,252 “terrorist targets.” No announcement has yet been made for when the long return voyage to the Kuznetsov‘s Barents Sea home port of Severomorsk, Russia, will begin, nor whether any country along the route will allow the flotilla to refuel.

Meanwhile, in early January 2017, the Chinese Defense Ministry announced that it’s only (current) aircraft carrier, the Liaoning (the Kuznetsov‘s sister ship, née Riga, then Varyag) and five escorts would conduct a “‘cross-sea area’ training exercise, involved J-15 fighter jets, as well as several ship-borne helicopters” in the South China Sea. The Chinese then proceeded to rattle cages in the region by unexpectedly sailing the Liaoning carrier group through the volatile Taiwan Straits yesterday, prompting Taiwan to scramble F-16 fighters and to divert a frigate in response. Just two days earlier, Japan and South Korea had launched fighter jets in response to an incursion by Chinese aircraft into the East China Sea and the Sea of Japan. This follows the seizure of a U.S. Navy underwater drone by a Chinese warship off the coast of the Philippines last month.

While the actual military capabilities of the Kuznetsov and Liaoning may be modest in comparison with U.S. aircraft carriers, the political and military reactions they have elicited indicate the value of sea-going air power. The diplomatic utility of power projection should not be underestimated. Imagine the results if the Russians or Chinese possessed aircraft carriers comparable to the U.S.S. Nimitz, which conducted its own politically-charged transit of the Taiwan Strait in 1996.

A2/D2 and Jam Gee-Cee in the Western Pacific

western-pacific-oceanOne of the primary scenarios the Third Offset Strategy is intended to address is a potential military conflict between the United States and the People’s Republic of China over the sovereignty of the Republic of China (Taiwan) and territorial control of the South and East China Seas. As surveyed by James Holmes in a wonderful Mahanian geopolitical analysis, the South China Sea is a semi-enclosed sea at the intersection between East Asia and the Indian Ocean region, bounded by strategic gaps and choke points between island chains, atolls, and reefs, and riven by competing territorial claims among rising and established regional powers.

China’s current policy appears to be to develop the ability to assert military control over the Western Pacific and deny U.S. armed forces access to the area in case of overt conflict. The strategic dimension is framed by China’s pursuit of anti-access/area denial (A2/D2) capabilities enabled by development of sophisticated long-range strike, sensor, guidance, and other military technologies, and the use of asymmetrical warfare operational concepts such as psychological and information operations, and “lawfare” (the so-called “three warfares.”) China is also advancing its interests in decidedly low-tech ways as well, such as creating artificial islands on disputed reefs through dredging.

The current U.S. approach to thwarting China’s A2/D2 strategy is the Joint Concept for Access and Maneuver in the Global Commons (JAM-GC, aka “Jam Gee Cee”), or the concept formerly known as AirSea Battle. As described by Stephen Biddle and Ivan Oelrich, the current iteration of JAM-GC

…is designed to preserve U.S. access to the Western Pacific by combining passive defenses against Chinese missile attack with an emphasis on offensive action to destroy or disable the forces that China would use to establish A2/AD. This offensive action would use “cross-domain synergy” among U.S. space, cyber, air, and maritime forces (hence the moniker “AirSea”) to blind or suppress Chinese sensors. The heart of the concept, however, lies in physically destroying the Chinese weapons and infrastructure that underpin A2/AD.

The brute, counterforce character of JAM-GC provides the logic behind proposals for new long-range precision strike weapons such as the Air Force’s stealthy Long Range Strike-Bomber (LRS-B) program, recently designated the B-21 Raider.

The JAM-GC concept has not yet been officially set and continues to evolve. Both the A2/D2 construct and the premises behind JAM-GC are being challenged. As Biddle and Oelrich conclude in their detailed analysis of the strategic and military trends in the region, it is not at all clear that China’s A2/D2 approach will actually achieve its goal.

[W]e find that by 2040 China will not achieve military hegemony over the Western Pacific or anything close to it—even without ASB. A2/AD is giving air and maritime defenders increasing advantages, but those advantages are strongest over controlled landmasses and weaken over distance. As both sides deploy A2/AD, these capabilities will increasingly replace today’s U.S. command of the global commons not with Chinese hegemony but with a more differentiated pattern of control, with a U.S. sphere of influence around allied landmasses, a Chinese sphere of influence over the Chinese mainland, and contested battlespace covering much of the South and East China Seas, wherein neither power enjoys wartime freedom of surface or air movement.

They also raise deeper concerns about JAM-GC’s emphasis on an aggressive counterforce posture. In an era of constrained defense spending, developing and acquiring the military capability to execute it could be costly. Also, long-range air and missile strikes against the Chinese mainland runs the distinct risk of escalating a regional conflict into a general war between nuclear armed opponents.

A recent RAND analysis echoed these conclusions. The adoption of counterforce strategies by both the U.S. and China would result in heavy military losses by both sides that would make it difficult to constrain a longer, broader conflict. Although the RAND analysts foresee the U.S. prevailing in such a conflict, it would not be quick and the ramifications to both sides would be severe.

Dissatisfaction with these options and potential outcomes is partly what motivated the development of the Third Offset Strategy in the first place. It is not clear whether leveraging technological innovation can provide new operational capabilities that will enable successful solutions to these strategic dilemmas. What does seem apparent is that fresh thinking is needed.

 

Quantum Radar: Should We Be Putting All Our Eggs In The Technology Basket?

Corporal Walter "Radar" O'Reilly (Gary Burghoff) | M*A*S*H
Corporal Walter “Radar” O’Reilly (Gary Burghoff) | M*A*S*H

As reported in Popular Mechanics last week, Chinese state media recently announced that a Chinese defense contractor has developed the world’s first quantum radar system. Derived from the principles of quantum mechanics, quantum radar would be capable of detecting vehicles equipped with so-called “stealth” technology for defeating conventional radio-wave based radar systems.

The Chinese claim should be taken with a large grain of salt. It is not clear that a functional quantum radar can be made to work outside a laboratory, much less adapted into a functional surveillance system. Lockheed Martin patented a quantum radar design in 2008, but nothing more has been heard about it publicly.

However, the history of military innovation has demonstrated that every technological advance has eventually resulted in a counter, either through competing weapons development or by the adoption of strategies or tactics to minimize the impact of the new capabilities. The United States has invested hundreds of billions of dollars in air and naval stealth capabilities and built its current and future strategies and tactics around its effectiveness. Much of the value of this investment could be wiped out with a single technological breakthrough by its potential adversaries.

The basic assumption behind the Third Offset Strategy is that the U.S. can innovate and adopt technological capabilities fast enough to maintain or even expand its current military superiority. Does the U.S. really have enough of a scientific and technological development advantage over its rivals to validate this assumption?

Betting On The Future: The Third Offset Strategy

Image by Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA).
Image by Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments (CSBA).

In several recent posts, I have alluded to something called the Third Offset Strategy without going into any detail as to what it is. Fortunately for us all, Timothy A. Walton, a Fellow in the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, wrote an excellent summary and primer on what it as all about in the current edition of Joint Forces Quarterly.

The Third Offset Strategy emerged from Defense Strategic Guidance issued by the President and Secretary of Defense in 2012 and from the results of the 2014 Quadrennial Defense Review. As Walton outlined,

The Defense Strategic Guidance (DSG) articulated 10 missions the [U.S.] joint force must accomplish in the future. These missions include the ability to:

– deter and defeat aggression

– project power despite antiaccess/area-denial (A2/AD) challenges

– operate effectively in cyberspace and space.

The follow-on 2014 Quadrennial Defense Review confirmed the importance of these missions and called for the joint force to “project power and win decisively” in spite of “increasingly sophisticated adversaries who could employ advanced warfighting capabilities.”

In these documents, U.S. policy-makers identified that the primary strategic challenge to securing the goals is that “capable adversaries are adopting potent A2/AD strategies that are challenging U.S. ability to ensure operational access.” These adversaries include China, Russia, and Iran.

The Third Offset Strategy was devised to address this primary strategic challenge.

In November 2014, then–Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel announced a new Defense Innovation Initiative, which included the Third Offset Strategy. The initiative seeks to maintain U.S. military superiority over capable adversaries through the development of novel capabilities and concepts. Secretary Hagel modeled his approach on the First Offset Strategy of the 1950s, in which President Dwight D. Eisenhower countered the Soviet Union’s conventional numerical superiority through the buildup of America’s nuclear deterrent, and on the Second Offset Strategy of the 1970s, in which Secretary of Defense Harold Brown shepherded the development of precision-guided munitions, stealth, and intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) systems to counter the numerical superiority and improving technical capability of Warsaw Pact forces along the Central Front in Europe.

Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter has built on Hagel’s vision of the Third Offset Strategy, and the proposed fiscal year 2017 budget is the first major public manifestation of the strategy: approximately $3.6 billion in research and development funding dedicated to Third Offset Strategy pursuits. As explained by Deputy Secretary of Defense Bob Work, the budget seeks to conduct numerous small bets on advanced capability research and demonstrations, and to work with Congress and the Services to craft new operational concepts so that the next administration can determine “what are the key bets we’re going to make.”

As Walton puts it, “the next Secretary of Defense will have the opportunity to make those big bets.” The keys to making the correct bets will be selecting the most appropriate scenarios to plan around, accurately assessing the performance of the U.S. joint force that will be programmed and budgeted for, and identifying the right priorities for new investment.

It is in this context that Walton recommended reviving campaign-level combat modeling at the Defense Department level, as part an overall reform of analytical processes informing force planning decisions.

Walton concludes by identifying the major obstacles in carrying out the Third Offset Strategy, some of which will be institutional and political in nature. However, he quickly passes over what might perhaps be the biggest problem with the Third Offset strategy, which is that it might be based on the wrong premises.

Lastly, the next Secretary of Defense will face numerous other, important defense challenges that will threaten to engross his or her attention, ranging from leading U.S. forces in Afghanistan, to countering Chinese, Russian, and Islamic State aggression, to reforming Goldwater-Nichols, military compensation, and base structure.

The ongoing conflicts in Afghanistan, Syria, and Iraq show no sign of abating anytime soon, yet they constitute “lesser includeds” in the Third Offset Strategy. Are we sure enough to bet that the A2/AD threat is the most important strategic challenge the U.S. will face in the near future?

Walton’s piece is worth reading and thinking about.

 

Chinese Carriers II

The Type 001A Class carrier:

China’s First Homebuilt Aircraft Carrier

  1. Won’t be operational until 2020 “at the earliest”
  2. Had a ski ramp in the bow (like the Liaoning)
  3. Displacement is 60,000 to 70,000 tons
  4. Estimate to carry around 48 aircraft
    1. 36 J-15 multirole fighters
    2. 12 Z-9 or Z-18 helicopters

Not sure I believe the article in the previous post about China having four more of these ready-for-action by 2025.

The video in the article of the Liaoning landing and launching J-15s is worth watching.

Chinese Carriers

Chinese Carriers

There seems to be some buzz out there about Chinese aircraft carriers:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/asiatoday/china-likely-to-become-ai_b_11164324.html

http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/01/21/will-china-become-an-aircraft-carrier-superpower/

We usually don’t talk about seapower on this blog but doing a simple count of carriers in the world is useful:

  • Total Carriers (100,000+ tons): 10 (all U.S.)
  • Total Carriers (42,000 – 59,100 tons): 5 (China, Russia, India, U.S., France)
  • Total Carriers (40,000 – 41,649 tons): 8 (all U.S.)
  • Total Carriers (26,000 – 32,800 tons): 7 (Brazil, India, 2 Australian, Italy, Japan, Spain)
  • Total Carriers (11,486 – 21,500 tons): 10 (UK, 3 French, Egypt, 2 Japanese, South Korean, Italy, Thailand)

Summarizing the count (and there is a big difference between a 100,000+ Nimitz class carrier the Thailand’s 11,486 ton Charki Naruebet):

  • U.S. 19 carriers
  • U.S. Allies: 14 carriers
  • Neutrals: 5 carriers (India, Brazil, Egypt, Thailand)
  • Potentially hostile: 2 carriers (China, Russia)
  • Total: 40 carriers

China and Russian both have one carrier of over 55,000 tons. These Kuznetsov class carriers can carry around 36 – 41 aircraft. Each of our ten Nimitz class carriers carry around 80-90 aircraft. Our amphibious assault ships can carry 36 or more aircraft. In all reality, these carriers are their equivalent.

To be commissioned in the future:

  1. 2016    U.S.                 100,000 tons (CVN-78)
  2. 2016    Egypt                 21,300 tons
  3. 2017    Japan                27,000 tons
  4. 2017    UK                     70,600 tons !!!
  5. 2018    India                  40,000 tons
  6. 2018    U.S.                   45,000 tons
  7. 2019    Russian             14,000 tons
  8. 2019    South Korea      18,800 tons
  9. 2020    UK                     70,600 tons   !!!
  10. 2020    China                 65,000 tons   !!!
  11. 2020    U.S.                 100,000 tons (CVN-79)
  12. 2021    Turkey               26,000 tons
  13. 2022    Italy                 TBD
  14. 2025    India                  65,000 tons
  15. 2025    Russia             100,000 tons !!!
  16. 2025    U.S.                 100,000 tons (CVN-80)
  17. 2028    South Korea      30,000 tons
  18. 2029    Brazil               TBD
  19. 2036    South Korea      30,000 tons
  20. TBD    India                   4 carriers at 30,000 tons
  21. TBD    Singapore        TBD
  22. TBD    U.S.                   7 carriers at 100,000 tons  (CVN 81-87)
  23. TBD    U.S.                   9 carriers at 45,693 tons (LHA 8-16)

Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_aircraft_carriers_in_service

Now, the first article states that the Chinese plan to have six carriers deployed by 2025. There are only two shown in these listings, the active Liaoning (CV-16) and the newly build CV-001A to be commissioned in 2020. So maybe four more 65,000-ton carriers by 2025?

Needless to say, we are probably not looking at a “carrier gap” anytime in the near or mid-term future.