Tag conventional warfare

Tanks and Russian Hybrid Warfare

tanks-russian-hybrid-warfareU.S. Army Major Amos Fox, currently a student at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College, has produced an insightful analysis of the role of tanks in Russian hybrid warfare tactics and operations. His recent article in Armor, the journal of the U.S. Army Maneuver Center of Excellence at Ft. Benning, Georgia, offers a sense of the challenges of high-intensity combat on the near-future hybrid warfare battlefield.

Fox assesses current Russia Army tactical and operational capabilities as quite capable.

Russia’s contemporary operations embody the characteristic of surprise. Russian operations in Georgia and Ukraine demonstrate a rapid, decentralized attack seeking to temporally dislocate the enemy, triggering the opposing forces’ defeat. These methods stand in stark contrast to the old Soviet doctrine of methodical, timetable-and echelon-driven employment of ground forces that sought to outmass the opposing army. Current Russian land-warfare tactics are something which most armies, including the U.S. Army, are largely unprepared to address.

Conversely, after achieving limited objectives, Russia quickly transitions to the defense using ground forces, drones and air-defense capabilities to build a tough, integrated position from which extrication would be difficult, to be sure. Russia’s defensive operations do not serve as a simple shield, but rather, as a shield capable of also delivering well-directed, concentrated punches on the opposition army. Russia’s paradoxical use of offensive operations to set up the defense might indicate an ascendency of the defense as the preferred method of war in forthcoming conflicts.

These capabilities will pose enormous challenges to U.S. and allied forces in any potential land combat scenario.

Russia’s focus on limited objectives, often in close proximity to its own border, indicates that U.S. Army combined-arms battalions and cavalry squadrons will likely find themselves on the wrong end of the “quality of firsts” (Figure 4). The U.S. Army’s physical distance from those likely battlefields sets the Army at a great disadvantage because it will have to hastily deploy forces to the region, meaning the Army will arrive late; the arrival will also be known (location, time and force composition). The Army will have great difficulty seizing the initiative due to its arrival and movement being known, which weakens the Army’s ability to fight and win decisively. This dynamic provides time, space and understanding for the enemy to further prepare for combat operations and strengthen its integrated defensive positions. Therefore, U.S. Army combined-arms battalions and cavalry squadrons must be prepared to fight through a rugged enemy defense while maintaining the capability for continued offensive operations.

Fox’s entire analysis is well worth reading and pondering. He also published another excellent analysis of Russian hybrid warfare with a General Staff College colleague, Captain (P) Andrew J. Rossow, in Small Wars Journal.

Urban Combat in Mosul

battle-of-mosul-11-nov-2016The Iraqi Interior Ministry announced on Tuesday that Daesh fighters have been cleared from a third of the city of Mosul east of the Tigris River. Pre-battle estimates by the Iraqis credited Daesh with 5,000-6,000 fighters in the city. The Iraqi government has deployed a polyglot force of 100,000 Defense and Interior Ministry troops, Kurdish peshmerga militia, and Shi’ite paramilitary fighters, supported by Western ground and air support, which have mostly surrounded the city. While official casualty estimates have not been announced, the Iraqis claimed to have killed 955 Daesh fighters and captured 108 on the southern front alone.

Despite the months of preparation and a clear objective, The Washington Post‘s Loveday Morris recently reported that Iraqi Army commanders were still “shaken” by the character of the fighting in Mosul’s urban environs. Although confident they will ultimately prevail, they doubt they will meet the objective set by Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi to bring the city under control by the end of the year.

Although the Iraqi military leaders profess surprise at the complexity of urban combat, their descriptions of do not reveal anything unprecedented in historical experience. Many comments reflect recurring problems the Iraqi Army has faced in its recent operations to clear Daesh from central and western Iraq.

  • It is a bitter fight: street to street, house to house, with the presence of civilians slowing the advancing forces. Car bombs — the militants’ main weapon — speed out of garages and straight into advancing military convoys.
  • “If there were no civilians, we’d just burn it all,” said Maj. Gen. Sami al-Aridhi, a counterterrorism commander. He was forced to temporarily pause operations in his sector Monday because too many families were clogging the street. “I couldn’t bomb with artillery or tanks, or heavy weapons. I said, ‘We can’t do anything.’ ”
  • Militants wait to move between fighting positions until people fill the streets, using their presence as protection from airstrikes.
  • Col. Arkan Fadhil calls in airstrikes from the U.S.-led coalition, but they are less forthcoming than in previous battles because of the presence of families, and are used only to defend Iraqi forces rather than backing them when they attack.
  • Just a few Islamic State militants hidden in populated areas can cause tremendous chaos. [E]lite units stormed [six neighborhoods on] Nov. 4, on a day that was initially trumpeted as a success before it became clear that their early gains were not sustainable. After pushing forward with relatively little resistance, the forces were ambushed and cut off.
  • Low-ranking officers in the field made some mistakes…such as pushing forward without waiting for other units or without properly clearing and securing areas, later getting ambushed and becoming surrounded and trapped. Since the pitched battles of Nov. 4, the [Iraqi] counterterrorism troops have adjusted their pace.
  • [Iraqi counterterrorism forces] said they have had to slow down as they wait for other fronts to advance on the city. Whether they can fight inside when they reach it also remains to be seen. In the battle for the city of Ramadi, the elite counterterrorism troops ended up leading the entire fight after police and army forces struggled to move forward in their sectors.
  • Restrictions in the use of airstrikes also slow their advance. But on Tuesday morning, more than half a dozen rockets roared overhead into the Mosul neighborhood of Tahrir. Officers identified them as TOS-1 short-range missiles, which unleash a blast of pressure over an area of several hundred square meters, devastating anything in their wake. The officers said they had been informed that there were no civilians in the target area. “We only use these missiles in empty areas,” Aridhi said. “We don’t use them in places with families in it.” They sometimes are used when Iraqi forces are under heavy direct fire, he said, because it is faster than sending coordinates to the coalition.

The Iraqi government has not yet released casualty figures for the fighting, but losses are perceived to be heavy by the combatants themselves.

Given the extreme ratio of forces involved, it would seem that Iraqi military leaders are on firm ground in their confidence of ultimate success. It also seems likely they are correct about the amount of time that will be needed to secure Mosul. The defending Daesh fighters are unlikely to be reinforced and cannot replace their combat losses. Simple arithmetic will do them in sooner or later. It also appears clear that the Iraqis are holding open an avenue of retreat to the west, in the hopes that surviving Daesh forces will simply withdraw rather than fight to the last.

It is somewhat unexpected that the Iraqi Army would be surprised by the character of urban fighting in Mosul, given that they have a good deal of recent experience with it. Although they did not lead the fights, Iraqi Army elements participated in the battles for Fallujah in 2004 and Sadr City in 2008. Iraqi government forces cleared Basra with Coalition assistance in 2008, and recaptured Tikrit, Ramadi, and Fallujah (again) over the last year.

There exists a significant body of conventional wisdom that holds that urban combat is bloodier than non-urban combat, requires a higher ratio of attackers to defenders to be successful, and will be prevalent in the future. None of these conclusions is borne out by historical evidence. TDI has done a significant amount of analysis challenging the basis and conclusions of this conventional wisdom. War by Numbers, the forthcoming book by TDI President Chris Lawrence, goes into this research in great detail.

What Is The Relationship Between Rate of Fire and Military Effectiveness?

marine-firing-m240Over at his Best Defense blog, Tom Ricks recently posed an interesting question: Is rate of fire no longer a key metric in assessing military effectiveness?

Rate of fire doesn’t seem to be important in today’s militaries. I mean, everyone can go “full auto.” Rather, the problem seems to me firing too much and running out of ammunition.

I wonder if this affects how contemporary military historians look at the tactical level of war. Throughout most of history, the problem, it seems to me, was how many rocks, spears, arrows or bullets you could get off. Hence the importance of drill, which was designed to increase the volume of infantry fire (and to reduce people walking off the battlefield when they moved back to reload).

There are several ways to address this question from a historical perspective, but one place to start is to look at how rate of fire relates historically to combat.

Rate of fire is one of several measures of a weapon’s ability to inflict damage, i.e. its lethality. In the early 1960s, Trevor Dupuy and his associates at the Historical Evaluation Research Organization (HERO) assessed whether historical trends in increasing weapon lethality were changing the nature of combat. To measure this, they developed a methodology for scoring the inherent lethality of a given weapon, the Theoretical Lethality Index (TLI). TLI is the product of five factors:

  • rate of fire
  • targets per strike
  • range factor
  • accuracy
  • reliability

In the TLI methodology, rate of fire is defined as the number of effective strikes a weapon can deliver under ideal conditions in increments of one hour, and assumes no logistical limitation.

As measured by TLI, increased rates of fire do indeed increase weapon lethality. The TLI of an early 20th century semi-automatic rifle is nearly five times higher than a mid-19th century muzzle-loaded rifle due to its higher rate of fire. Despite having lower accuracy and reliability, a World War II-era machine gun has 10 times the TLI of a semi-automatic rifle due to its rate of fire. The rate of fire of small arms has not increased since the early-to-mid 20th century, and the assault rifle, adopted by modern armies following World War II, remains that standard infantry weapon in the early 21st century.

attrition-fig-11

Rate of fire is just but one of many factors that can influence a weapon’s lethality, however. Artillery has much higher TLI values than small arms despite lower rates of fire. This is for the obvious reasons that artillery has far greater range than small arms and because each round of ammunition can hit multiple targets per strike.

There are other methods for scoring weapon lethality but the TLI provides a logical and consistent methodology for comparing weapons to each other. Through the TLI, Dupuy substantiated the observation that indeed, weapons have become more lethal over time, particularly in the last century.

But if weapons have become more lethal, has combat become bloodier? No. Dupuy and his colleagues also discovered that, counterintuitively, the average casualty rates in land combat have been declining since the 17th century. Combat casualty rates did climb in the early and mid-19th century, but fell again precipitously from the later 19th century through the end of the 20th.

attrition-fig-13

The reason, Dupuy determined, was because armies have historically adapted to increases in weapon lethality by dispersing in greater depth on the battlefield, decentralizing tactical decision-making and enhancing mobility, and placing a greater emphasis on combined arms tactics. The area occupied by 100,000 soldiers increased 4,000 times between antiquity and the late 20th century. Average ground force dispersion increased by a third between World War II and the 1973 Yom Kippur War, and he estimated it had increased by another quarter by 1990.

attrition-fig-14

Simply put, even as weapons become more deadly, there are fewer targets on the battlefield for them to hit. Through the mid-19th century, the combination of low rates of fire and relatively shorter range required the massing of infantry fires in order to achieve lethal effect. Before 1850, artillery caused more battlefield casualties than infantry small arms. This ratio changed due to the increased rates of fire and range of rifled and breach loading weapons introduced in the 1850s and 1860s. The majority of combat casualties in  conflicts of the mid-to-late 19th century were inflicted by infantry small arms.

attrition-fig-19The lethality of modern small arms combined with machine guns led to further dispersion and the decentralization of tactical decision-making in early 20th century warfare. The increased destructiveness of artillery, due to improved range and more powerful ammunition, coupled with the invention of the field telephone and indirect fire techniques during World War I, restored the long arm to its role as king of the battlefield.

attrition-fig-35

Dupuy represented this historical relationship between lethality and dispersion on the battlefield by applying a dispersion factor to TLI values to obtain what he termed the Operational Lethality Index (OLI). By accounting for these effects, OLI values are a good theoretical approximation of relative weapon effectiveness.

npw-fig-2-5Although little empirical research has been done on this question, it seems logical that the trend toward greater use of precision-guided weapons is at least a partial response to the so-called “empty battlefield.” The developers of the Third Offset Strategy postulated that the emphasis on developing precision weaponry by the U.S. in the 1970s was a calculated response to offset the Soviet emphasis on mass firepower (i.e. the “second offset”). The goal of modern precision weapons is “one shot, one kill,” where a reduced rate of fire is compensated for by greater range and accuracy. Such weapons have become sufficiently lethal that the best way to survive on a modern battlefield is to not be seen.

At least, that was the conventional wisdom until recently. The U.S. Army in particular is watching how the Ukrainian separatist forces and their Russian enablers are making use of new artillery weapons, drone and information technology, and tactics to engage targets with mass fires. Some critics have alleged that the U.S. artillery arm has atrophied during the Global War on Terror and may no longer be capable of overmatching potential adversaries. It is not yet clear whether there will be a real competition between mass and precision fires on the battlefields of the near future, but it is possible that it signals yet another shift in the historical relationship between lethality, mobility, and dispersion in combat.

SOURCES

Trevor N. Dupuy, Attrition: Forecasting Battle Casualties and Equipment Losses in Modern War (Falls Church, VA: NOVA Publications, 1995)

_____., Understanding War: History and Theory of Combat (New York: Paragon House, 1987)

_____. The Evolution of Weapons and Warfare (Indianapolis, IN: The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., 1980)

_____. Numbers, Predictions and War: Using History to Evaluate Combat Factors and Predict the Outcome of Battles (Indianapolis; New York: The Bobbs-Merrill Co., 1979)

Tank Loss Rates in Combat: Then and Now

wwii-tank-battlefieldAs the U.S. Army and the national security community seek a sense of what potential conflicts in the near future might be like, they see the distinct potential for large tank battles. Will technological advances change the character of armored warfare? Perhaps, but it seems more likely that the next big tank battles – if they occur – will likely resemble those from the past.

One aspect of future battle of great interest to military planners is probably going to tank loss rates in combat. In a previous post, I looked at the analysis done by Trevor Dupuy on the relationship between tank and personnel losses in the U.S. experience during World War II. Today, I will take a look at his analysis of historical tank loss rates.

In general, Dupuy identified that a proportional relationship exists between personnel casualty rates in combat and losses in tanks, guns, trucks, and other equipment. (His combat attrition verities are discussed here.) Looking at World War II division and corps-level combat engagement data in 1943-1944 between U.S., British and German forces in the west, and German and Soviet forces in the east, Dupuy found similar patterns in tank loss rates.

attrition-fig-58

In combat between two division/corps-sized, armor-heavy forces, Dupuy found that the tank loss rates were likely to be between five to seven times the personnel casualty rate for the winning side, and seven to 10 for the losing side. Additionally, defending units suffered lower loss rates than attackers; if an attacking force suffered a tank losses seven times the personnel rate, the defending forces tank losses would be around five times.

Dupuy also discovered the ratio of tank to personnel losses appeared to be a function of the proportion of tanks to infantry in a combat force. Units with fewer than six tanks per 1,000 troops could be considered armor supporting, while those with a density of more than six tanks per 1,000 troops were armor-heavy. Armor supporting units suffered lower tank casualty rates than armor heavy units.

attrition-fig-59

Dupuy looked at tank loss rates in the 1973 Arab-Israeli War and found that they were consistent with World War II experience.

What does this tell us about possible tank losses in future combat? That is a very good question. One guess that is reasonably certain is that future tank battles will probably not involve forces of World War II division or corps size. The opposing forces will be brigade combat teams, or more likely, battalion-sized elements.

Dupuy did not have as much data on tank combat at this level, and what he did have indicated a great deal more variability in loss rates. Examples of this can be found in the tables below.

attrition-fig-53attrition-fig-54

These data points showed some consistency, with a mean of 6.96 and a standard deviation of 6.10, which is comparable to that for division/corps loss rates. Personnel casualty rates are higher and much more variable than those at the division level, however. Dupuy stated that more research was necessary to establish a higher degree of confidence and relevance of the apparent battalion tank loss ratio. So one potentially fruitful area of research with regard to near future combat could very well be a renewed focus on historical experience.

NOTES

Trevor N. Dupuy, Attrition: Forecasting Battle Casualties and Equipment Losses in Modern War (Falls Church, VA: NOVA Publications, 1995), pp. 41-43; 81-90; 102-103

Back To The Future: The Mobile Protected Firepower (MPF) Program

The MPF's historical antecedent: the German Army's 7.5 cm leichtes Infanteriegeschütz.
The MPF’s historical antecedent: the German Army’s 7.5 cm leichtes Infanteriegeschütz.

Historically, one of the challenges of modern combat has been in providing responsive, on-call, direct fire support for infantry. The U.S. armed forces have traditionally excelled in providing fire support for their ground combat maneuver elements, but recent changes have apparently caused concern that this will continue to be the case in the future.

Case in point is the U.S. Army’s Mobile Protected Firepower (MPF) program. The MPF seems to reflect concern by the U.S. Army that future combat environments will inhibit the capabilities of heavy artillery and air support systems tasked with providing fire support for infantry units. As Breaking Defense describes it,

“Our near-peers have sought to catch up with us,” said Fort Benning commander Maj. Gen. Eric Wesley, using Pentagon code for China and Russia. These sophisticated nation-states — and countries buying their hardware, like Iran — are developing so-called Anti-Access/Area Denial (A2/AD): layered defenses of long-range sensors and missiles to keep US airpower and ships at a distance (anti-access), plus anti-tank weapons, mines, and roadside bombs to decimate ground troops who get close (area denial).

The Army’s Maneuver Center of Excellence at Ft. Benning, Georgia is the proponent for development of a new lightly-armored, tracked vehicle mounting a 105mm or 120mm gun. According to the National Interest, the goal of the MPF program is

… to provide a company of vehicles—which the Army adamantly does not want to refer to as light tanks—to brigades from the 82nd Airborne Division or 10th Mountain Division that can provide heavy fire support to those infantry units. The new vehicle, which is scheduled to enter into full-scale engineering and manufacturing development in 2019—with fielding tentatively scheduled for around 2022—would be similar in concept to the M551 Sheridan light tank. The Sheridan used to be operated the Army’s airborne units unit until 1996, but was retired without replacement. (Emphasis added)

As Chris recently pointed out, General Dynamics Land Systems has developed a prototype it calls the Griffin. BAE Systems has also pitched its XM8 Armored Gun System, developed in the 1990s.

The development of a dedicated, direct fire support weapon for line infantry can be seen as something of an anachronism. During World War I, German infantrymen sought alternatives to relying on heavy artillery support that was under the control of higher headquarters and often slow or unresponsive to tactical situations on the battlefield. They developed an expedient called the “infantry gun” (Infanteriegeschütz) by stripping down captured Russian 76.2mm field guns for direct use against enemy infantry, fortifications, and machine guns. Other armies imitated the Germans, but between the wars, the German Army was only one to develop 75mm and 150mm wheeled guns of its own dedicated specifically to infantry combat support.

The Germans were also the first to develop versions mounted on tracked, armored chassis, called “assault guns” (Sturmgeschütz). During World War II, the Germans often pressed their lightly armored assault guns into duty as ersatz tanks to compensate for insufficient numbers of actual tanks. (The apparently irresistible lure to use anything that looks like a tank as a tank also afflicted the World War II U.S. tank destroyer as well, yielding results that dissatisfied all concerned.)

Other armies again copied the Germans during the war, but the assault gun concept was largely abandoned afterward. Both the U.S. and the Soviet Union developed vehicles intended to provide gunfire support for airborne infantry, but these were more aptly described as light tanks. The U.S. Army’s last light tank, the M551 Sheridan, was retired in 1996 and not replaced.

It appears that the development of new technology is leading the U.S. Army back to old ideas. Just don’t call them light tanks.

Are Long-Range Fires Changing The Character of Land Warfare?

Raytheon’s new Long-Range Precision Fires missile is deployed from a mobile launcher in this artist’s rendering. The new missile will allow the Army to fire two munitions from a single weapons pod, making it cost-effective and doubling the existing capacity. (Ratheon)
Raytheon’s new Long-Range Precision Fires missile is deployed from a mobile launcher in this artist’s rendering. The new missile will allow the Army to fire two munitions from a single weapons pod, making it cost-effective and doubling the existing capacity. (Ratheon)

Has U.S. land warfighting capability been compromised by advances by potential adversaries in long-range artillery capabilities? Michael Jacobson and Robert H. Scales argue that this is the case in an article on War on the Rocks.

While the U.S. Army has made major advances by incorporating precision into artillery, the ability and opportunity to employ precision are premised on a world of low-intensity conflict. In high-intensity conflict defined by combined-arms maneuver, the employment of artillery based on a precise point on the ground becomes a much more difficult proposition, especially when the enemy commands large formations of moving, armored vehicles, as Russia does. The U.S. joint force has recognized this dilemma and compensates for it by employing superior air forces and deep-strike fires. But Russia has undertaken a comprehensive upgrade of not just its military technology but its doctrine. We should not be surprised that Russia’s goal in this endeavor is to offset U.S. advantages in air superiority and double-down on its traditional advantages in artillery and rocket mass, range, and destructive power.

Jacobson and Scales provide a list of relatively quick fixes they assert would restore U.S. superiority in long-range fires: change policy on the use of cluster munitions; upgrade the U.S. self-propelled howitzer inventory from short-barreled 39 caliber guns to long-barreled 52 calibers and incorporate improved propellants and rocket assistance to double their existing range; reevaluate restrictions on the forthcoming Long Range Precision Fires rocket system in light of Russian attitudes toward the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces treaty; and rebuild divisional and field artillery units atrophied by a decade of counterinsurgency warfare.

Their assessment echoes similar comments made earlier this year by Lieutenant General H. R. McMaster, director of the U.S. Army’s Capabilities Integration Center. Another option for countering enemy fire artillery capabilities, McMaster suggested, was the employment of “cross-domain fires.” As he explained, “When an Army fires unit arrives somewhere, it should be able to do surface-to-air, surface-to-surface, and shore-to-ship capabilities.

The notion of land-based fire elements engaging more than just other land or counter-air targets has given rise to a concept being called “multi-domain battle.” It’s proponents, Dr. Albert Palazzo of the Australian Army’s War Research Centre, and Lieutenant Colonel David P. McLain III, Chief, Integration and Operations Branch in the Joint and Army Concepts Division of the Army Capabilities Integration Center, argue (also at War on the Rocks) that

While Western forces have embraced jointness, traditional boundaries between land, sea, and air have still defined which service and which capability is tasked with a given mission. Multi-domain battle breaks down the traditional environmental boundaries between domains that have previously limited who does what where. The theater of operations, in this view, is a unitary whole. The most useful capability needs to get the mission no matter what domain it technically comes from. Newly emerging technologies will enable the land force to operate in ways that, in the past, have been limited by the boundaries of its domain. These technologies will give the land force the ability to dominate not just the land but also project power into and across the other domains.

Palazzo and McClain contend that future land warfare forces

…must be designed, equipped, and trained to gain and maintain advantage across all domains and to understand and respond to the requirements of the future operating environment… Multi-domain battle will create options and opportunities for the joint force, while imposing multiple dilemmas on the adversary. Through land-to-sea, land-to-air, land-to-land, land-to-space, and land-to-cyberspace fires and effects, land forces can deter, deny, and defeat the adversary. This will allow the joint commander to seize, retain, and exploit the initiative.

As an example of their concept, Palazzo and McClain cite a combined, joint operation from the Pacific Theater in World War II:

Just after dawn on September 4, 1943, Australian soldiers of the 9th Division came ashore near Lae, Papua in the Australian Army’s first major amphibious operation since Gallipoli. Supporting them were U.S. naval forces from VII Amphibious Force. The next day, the 503rd U.S. Parachute Regiment seized the airfield at Nadzab to the West of Lae, which allowed the follow-on landing of the 7th Australian Division.  The Japanese defenders offered some resistance on the land, token resistance in the air, and no resistance at sea. Terrain was the main obstacle to Lae’s capture.

From the beginning, the allied plan for Lae was a joint one. The allies were able to get their forces across the approaches to the enemy’s position, establish secure points of entry, build up strength, and defeat the enemy because they dominated the three domains of war relevant at the time — land, sea, and air.

The concept of multi-domain warfare seems like a logical conceptualization for integrating land-based weapons of increased range and effect into the sorts of near-term future conflicts envisioned by U.S. policy-makers and defense analysts. It comports fairly seamlessly with the precepts of the Third Offset Strategy.

However, as has been observed with the Third Offset Strategy, this raises questions about the role of long-range fires in conflicts that do not involve near-peer adversaries, such as counterinsurgencies. Is an emphasis on technological determinism reducing the capabilities of land combat units to just what they shoot? Is the ability to take and hold ground an anachronism in anti-access/area-denial environments? Do long-range fires obviate the relationship between fire and maneuver in modern combat tactics? If even infantry squads are equipped with stand-off weapons, what is the future of close quarters combat?

Unmanned Ground Vehicles: Drones Are Not Just For Flying Anymore

The Remote Controlled Abrams Tank [Hammacher Schlemmer]
The Remote Controlled Abrams Tank [Hammacher Schlemmer]

Over at Defense One, Patrick Tucker reports that General Dynamics Land Systems has teamed up with Kairos Autonomi to develop kits that “can turn virtually anything with wheels or tracks into a remote-controlled car.” It is part of a business strategy “to meet the U.S. Army’s expanding demand for unmanned ground vehicles”

Kairos kits costing less than $30,000 each have been installed on disposable vehicles to create moving targets for shooting practice. According to a spokesman, General Dynamics has also adapted them to LAV-25 Light Armored Vehicles and M1126 Strykers.

Tucker quotes Lt. Gen. H.R. McMaster (who else?), director of the U.S. Army’s Capabilities Integration Center, as saying that,

[G]etting remotely piloted and unmanned fighting vehicles out into the field is “something we really want to move forward on. What we want to do is get that kind of capability into soldiers’ hands early so we can refine the tactics, techniques and procedures, and then also consider enemy countermeasures and then build into the design of units that are autonomy enabled, build in the counter to those counters.”

According to General Dynamics Land Systems, the capability to turn any vehicle into a drone would give the U.S. an advantage over Russia, which has signaled its intent to automate versions of its T-14 Armata tank.

Russia’s Strategy in Ukraine

"Russian Build-Up In and Around Ukraine: August 12, 2016," Institute for the Study of WarOver at Foreign Policy, Michael Kofman, a research scientist at CNA Corp. and fellow at the Wilson Center’s Kennan Institute, has analyzed recent Russian troop deployments on Ukraine’s border peripheries and what they imply about the strategic goals of the Russian government in the mid-term. He concludes that the Russians are not massing for a possible invasion in the short-term. Instead, the shifting of forces suggests sustainable, long-term deployments at strategically important locations along the border. The mid-term objective of this is to secure the current status-quo.

The Russian General Staff is not only repositioning these units back where they were before 2009, it’s also rebuilding a capable combat grouping on Crimea — albeit one that’s largely defensive in nature… It also secures the Russian vision for how this conflict ends: In a hypothetical future where the Minsk agreement is actually implemented, Russian forces may withdraw from the separatist enclaves in the Donbass. If the deal fails to hold or Kiev reneges on the terms, Russian divisions ringing the country from its north to very southeast (not including Crimea) would be poised to counter any Ukrainian moves by striking from several directions.

Kofman also sees this strategy as seeking to maintain Russia’s political dominance over Ukraine in the longer term.

The string of divisions, airbases, and brigades will be able to effect conventional deterrence or compellence for years to come… Russia will retain escalation dominance over Ukraine for the foreseeable future. By the end of 2017, its forces will be better positioned to conduct an incursion or threaten regime change in Kiev than they ever were in 2014.

Kofman recommends that the U.S. and its allies carefully think through the implications of this strategy. He believes it will take Ukraine five to 10 years to rebuild an effective military, but even if successful, the future correlation of forces and the aggressive positioning of Russian forces could make the situation more unstable rather than less so.

U.S. policymakers should think about the medium to long term — a timeline that is admittedly not our strong suit. If this conflict is not placed on stable footing by the time both countries feel themselves capable of engaging in a larger fight, it may well result in a conventional war that would dwarf the small set-piece battles we’ve seen so far. Beyond imposing a ceasefire on the current fighting, the West should think about what a rematch might look like several years from now.

Studying The Conduct of War: “We Surely Must Do Better”

"The Ultimate Sand Castle" [Flickr, Jon]
“The Ultimate Sand Castle” [Flickr, Jon]

Chris and I both have discussed previously the apparent waning interest on the part of the Department of Defense to sponsor empirical research studying the basic phenomena of modern warfare. The U.S. government’s boom-or-bust approach to this is long standing, extending back at least to the Vietnam War. Recent criticism of the Department of Defense’s Office of Net Assessment (OSD/NA) is unlikely to help. Established in 1973 and led by the legendary Andrew “Yoda” Marshall until 2015, OSD/NA plays an important role in funding basic research on topics of crucial importance to the art of net assessment. Critics of the office appear to be unaware of just how thin the actual base of empirical knowledge is on the conduct of war. Marshall understood that the net result of a net assessment based mostly on guesswork was likely to be useless, or worse, misleadingly wrong.

This lack of attention to the actual conduct of war extends beyond government sponsored research. In 2004, Stephen Biddle, a professor of political science at George Washington University and a well-regarded defense and foreign policy analyst, published Military Power: Explaining Victory and Defeat in Modern Battle. The book focused on a very basic question: what causes victory and defeat in battle? Using a comparative approach that incorporated quantitative and qualitative methods, he effectively argued that success in contemporary combat was due to the mastery of what he called the “modern system.” (I won’t go into detail here, but I heartily recommend the book to anyone interested in the topic.)

Military Power was critically acclaimed and received multiple awards from academic, foreign policy, military, operations research, and strategic studies organizations. For all the accolades, however, Biddle was quite aware just how neglected the study of war has become in U.S. academic and professional communities. He concluded the book with a very straightforward assessment:

[F]or at least a generation, the study of war’s conduct has fallen between the stools of the institutional structure of modern academia and government. Political scientists often treat war itself as outside their subject matter; while its causes are seen as political and hence legitimate subjects of study, its conduct and outcomes are more often excluded. Since the 1970s, historians have turned away from the conduct of operations to focus on war’s effects on social, economic, and political structures. Military officers have deep subject matter knowledge but are rarely trained as theoreticians and have pressing operational demands on their professional attention. Policy analysts and operations researchers focus so tightly on short-deadline decision analysis (should the government buy the F22 or cancel it? Should the Army have 10 divisions or 8?) that underlying issues of cause and effect are often overlooked—even when the decisions under analysis turn on embedded assumptions about the causes of military outcomes. Operations research has also gradually lost much of its original empirical focus; modeling is now a chiefly deductive undertaking, with little systematic effort to test deductive claims against real world evidence. Over forty years ago, Thomas Schelling and Bernard Brodie argued that without an academic discipline of military science, the study of the conduct of war had languished; the passage of time has done little to overturn their assessment. Yet the subject is simply too important to treat by proxy and assumption on the margins of other questions In the absence of an institutional home for the study of warfare, it is all the more essential that analysts in existing disciplines recognize its importance and take up the business of investigating capability and its causes directly and rigorously. Few subjects are more important—or less studied by theoretical social scientists. With so much at stake, we surely must do better. [pp. 207-208]

Biddle published Military Power 12 years ago, in 2004. Has anything changed substantially? Have we done better?

The Military Budget Wars Are Headed Back to the Future

When I mused over how much new strategic debates are sounding like old Cold War strategic debates, I really had no idea. The U.S. national security debate really is going Back to the Future.  Mark Perry has an article in POLITICO exploring arguments being advanced by some U.S. Army leaders in support of requests for increased defense budget funding, and the criticism they have drawn.

In early April, a panel comprised of several senior Army officer testified before a Senate Armed Service subcommittee on modernization.

[They] delivered a grim warning about the future of the U.S. armed forces: Unless the Army budget was increased, allowing both for more men and more materiel, members of the panel said, the United States was in danger of being “outranged and outgunned” in the next war and, in particular, in a confrontation with Russia. Vladimir Putin’s military, the panel averred, had outstripped the U.S. in modern weapons capabilities. And the Army’s shrinking size meant that “the Army of the future will be too small to secure the nation.”

These assertions are, predictably, being questioned by, also predictably, some in the other armed services. Perry cites the response of an unnamed “senior Pentagon officer.”

“This is the ‘Chicken-Little, sky-is-falling’ set in the Army,” the senior Pentagon officer said. “These guys want us to believe the Russians are 10 feet tall. There’s a simpler explanation: The Army is looking for a purpose, and a bigger chunk of the budget. And the best way to get that is to paint the Russians as being able to land in our rear and on both of our flanks at the same time. What a crock.”

Perry boils the debate down to what it is really about.

The fight over the Army panel’s testimony is the latest example of a deepening feud in the military community over how to respond to shrinking budget numbers. At issue is the military’s strategic future: Facing cuts, will the Army opt to modernize its weapons’ arsenal, or defer modernization in favor of increased numbers of soldiers? On April 5, the Army’s top brass made its choice clear: It wants to do both, and Russia’s the reason.

Perry’s walk through the various arguments is worth reading in full, but he accurately characterizes the debate as something more than an ecumenical disagreement among the usual Pentagon suspects.

The argument over numbers and capabilities might strike some Americans as exotic, but the debate is much more fundamental—with enormous political implications. “You know, which would you rather have—a high-speed rail system, or another brigade in Poland? Because that’s what this is really all about. The debate is about money, and there simply isn’t enough to go around,” the Pentagon officer told me. “Which is not to mention the other question, which is even more important: How many British soldiers do you think want to die for Estonia? And if they don’t want to, why should we?”

Those looking for a sober, factual debate over the facts and the implications of these issues are likely to be disappointed in the current election year atmosphere. It will also be interesting to see if strategic analysts will offer more than chum for the waters and warmed over versions of old arguments.