Excellence in Historical Research and Analysis
Excellence in Historical Research and Analysis
The joint U.S. Army/U.S. Marine Corps white paper, “Multi-Domain Battle: Combined Arms for the 21st Century,” dated 24 February 2017, outlining their initial thoughts on the concept is available online at the U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) website.
TRADOC also has a page devoted specifically to Multi-Domain Battle.
The recent commitment by the U.S. Army and Marine Corps to developing the concept of multi-domain battle led me to wonder: is this going to re-ignite the currently-dormant-but-unresolved debate over maneuver vs. attrition in American land warfare thinking? Will long-range precision fires and cross-domain targeting change the relationship between fire and maneuver in modern combat tactics? With an emphasis on fires of the kinetic and non-kinetic variety as the remedy to the challenge of anti-access/area denial capabilities and strategies, are multi-domain warfare theorists swinging the pendulum to the side of attrition?
What Is The Role of Maneuver In Multi-Domain Battle?
Consider this description of the Army’s conception of multi-domain battle offered by General David G. Perkins, Commander, United States Army Training and Doctrine Command:
[F]uture multifunctional Army fires units will provide the joint task force with a single unit combining surface-to-surface (land and maritime), surface-to-air, electromagnetic, and cyberspace cross-domain fires. These fires formations integrate with emerging Navy, Air Force, Marine and special operations forces capabilities to provide the commander multiple resilient options for striking the enemy and covering joint force maneuver.
At the same time, ground forces with improved maneuver and close combat capabilities allow the joint force to overwhelm or infiltrate dispersed enemy formations concealed from joint targeting and fires. A joint force containing effective ground forces requires the enemy to expose their dispersed forces to defeat in ground combat, face destruction from joint fires if they concentrate, or the loss of key terrain if they displace.
Future Army and Marine tactical ground maneuver units will combine sufficient cross-domain fires capability to enable decentralized ground maneuver and the creation of durable domain windows for the joint force with the mobility, lethality and protection to close with and destroy enemy ground forces in close combat. With combined arms pushed to the lowest practical level, these units will be flexible and resilient with the ability to operate in degraded conditions and with sufficient endurance to sustain losses and continue operations for extended periods and across wide areas.
The Army clearly sees maneuver to be an integral part of multi-domain battle, with an emphasis on closing with enemy forces to engage in close combat. However, it seems to me that the same technological changes that are prompting consideration of the new concept raise some questions:
The Maneuver Warfare Debate
Such questions seem sure to renew debates regarding the relationship between fire and maneuver in U.S. land warfare doctrine. The contemporary concept of maneuver warfare emerged in the early 1980s, as military and civilian practitioners and thinkers in the U.S. and the NATO countries came to grips with the challenges posed by Soviet military power in Europe. Inspired by the tactical and operational successes of the German Army during World War II, William Lind, John Boyd, Robert Leonhard, and Richard Simpkin, among others, drew upon a variety of American, British, German, and even Soviet sources to fashion a concept that established maneuver and attrition as distinct forms of warfare. In this telling, the First World War had been dominated by an overemphasis on the attritional effects of firepower, which yielded only bloody positional stalemate. In response, the Germans innovated new tactics to restore maneuver to the battlefield, which when combined with tanks and aircraft, led to their spectacular “blitzkrieg” victories in World War II. Their adversaries learned and adapted in turn, and developed maneuver doctrines of their own that helped defeat the Germans.
Maneuver warfare theories informed development of the U.S. Army’s AirLand Battle concept and operational doctrine of the late 1980s. The U.S. Marine Corps also integrated maneuver warfare into its doctrine in the 1997 edition of its capstone manual, MCDP-1 Warfighting. The idea of a maneuver style of warfare had plenty of critics, however. By the early 1990s, the Army had settled for a balance between maneuver and firepower in its combat doctrine. Debates and discussions about deep operations persisted into the late 1990s, but were preempted in large measure by the shift to irregular warfare and counterinsurgency after September 11, 2001. U.S. land warfare doctrine did get a brief test during the invasion of Iraq in 2003, but the woefully outclassed Iraq Army was quickly and decisively overwhelmed by American combat power, yielding few insights into future warfare against peer or near-peer opponents.
The last notable public exchange on this topic occurred in 2008 in Small Wars Journal. British defense writer and analyst William F. Owen, argued that a distinction between maneuver and attrition “styles” of warfare was artificial and lacked intellectual rigor and historical support. Eric Walter, a contributor to U.S. Marine Corps doctrinal publications, conceded that existing maneuver warfare theorizing was “fuzzy” in some respects, but countered that the intellectual thinking behind it nevertheless stimulated the U.S. military to sharpen its conception and conduct of warfare. The ensuing discussion thread fleshed out the respective perspectives and the debate continues.
Despite the official enthusiasm of the Army and Marine Corps, there are many aspects of the concept of multi-domain warfare that will need to be worked out if it is to become a viable combat doctrine and not simply justification for development of new weapons. One task will be to overcome the suspicions of the sister services that it is merely a gambit in the ongoing interservice budget battles. (Similar skepticism dogs the associated Third Offset Strategy.) Developing a better sense of exactly how long-range precision fires, cyber and information operations, and other innovative technologies might affect ground combat would be a good place to start.
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.”
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 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.
This is a fascinating short advertising video from British Aerospace Engineering Systems (BAE Systems) teasing the potential of laser beam weapons. It addresses the concept of using airborne lasers to create atmospheric lenses by temporarily heating and ionizing the atmosphere to enable long-range aerial surveillance and targeting. The same concept can also be used to counter anti-aircraft laser fire from ground platforms.
BAE Systems has been working on the military applications of lasers for a while, from laser tracking systems, aerial laser-guided rockets, and high energy lasers for shipborne point defense. The U.S. Army is working with General Dynamic to add lasers to its vehicles for point defense as well. Lasers have been used for military purposes for a long time and there is great anticipation for their potential. While the current state of laser technology may have its limitations, the future of warfare may well go pew-pew.
Over, at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), Ian Williams, Kathleen Weinberger, and Colonel John O’Grady have assembled data on NATO and Russian anti-access/area denial (known as A2/AD, love it or hate it) capabilities, which has been turned into a fascinating interactive graphic. The capabilities depicted include “air defenses, counter-maritime forces, and theater offensive strike weapons, such as short- or medium-range ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and other precision guided munitions.”
Information on the map is divided into six categories:
Russia – Air Defense: Includes deployments of long-range Russian anti-air missile systems. Specific systems represented are the S-300 and S-400. Not included in map are Russia’s shorter ranged, highly mobile air defense assets, such as the Buk family of surface to air missile systems. These “shoot and scoot” launchers are embedded with Russian ground forces, and thus do not have fixed locations.
Russia – Land-based Strike: Includes deployments of short-range offensive ballistic missile systems, such as the SS-26 or Iskander short-range ballistic missiles, as well as deployments of Russian Oniks anti-ship missiles to Kaliningrad.
Russia – Naval strike: This category reflects the range (from notional locations) of Russia’s sea-based SS-N-30A Kalibr-type cruise missiles, and its SS-N-27 Sizzler anti-ship missiles.
NATO – Air Defense: Shows the estimated coverage areas and home-base disposition of NATO PATRIOT missile units, separately showing ballistic missile and air defense coverage areas. Although not reflected in this map, NATO is heavily reliant on fighter aircraft for air defense.
NATO – Naval Strike: Reflects the estimated range of U.S. Tomahawk Block IV (TLAM-E) sea-based cruise missiles.
NATO – Ports of Debarkation/Embarkations (PODs): These points show key logistical infrastructure, such as airports and seaports (APODs / SPODs), that could be used by NATO forces.
Figuring out how to fight effectively in this environment is what is keeping American and Western national security thinkers and planners up at night these days. The Third Offset Strategy was the first crack at doing so. Whether it will survive into the incoming Trump administration remains to be seen, though some signs indicate that it will. Stay tuned, folks.
The Defense Department announced yesterday a successful test of the world’s largest micro-drone swarm. Conducted at China Lake, California in October 2016 by the DOD’s Strategic Capabilities Office, in partnership with Naval Air Systems Command, three F/A-18 Super Hornets launched 103 Perdix micro-drones. According to the DOD press release, “the micro-drones demonstrated advanced swarm behaviors such as collective decision-making, adaptive formation flying, and self-healing.”
The micro-drone swarm comprises an autonomous system.
“Due to the complex nature of combat, Perdix are not pre-programmed synchronized individuals, they are a collective organism, sharing one distributed brain for decision-making and adapting to each other like swarms in nature,” said [Strategic Capabilities Office] Director William Roper. “Because every Perdix communicates and collaborates with every other Perdix, the swarm has no leader and can gracefully adapt to drones entering or exiting the team.”
The Perdix micro-drones were originally designed by Massachusetts Institute of Technology engineering students, and modified for military use by the MIT Lincoln Laboratory in 2013.
To get an idea of the military potential of this technology, watch the demo video tracking the simulated mission.
In related news, the U.S. Army Research Laboratory and Georgia Technical Institute is developing the capability for soldiers in the field to 3D-print swarms of mini-drones to specific specifications within 24 hours. As reported by Defense One,
“A soldier with a mission need uses a computer terminal to rapidly design a suitable [drone],” says a poster by project chief engineer Zacarhy Fisher. “That design is then manufactured using automated processes such as laser cutting and 3D printing. The solution is sent back to the soldier and is deployed.”
Inspired by the modular adaptability of Legos, Fisher says the each drone could be fabricated in less than a day, with total turnaround time of less than three days.
In a somewhat surprising move, The Washington Post is reporting that the transition team for the incoming administration of Donald J. Trump is considering keeping the current Deputy Secretary of Defense Robert Work in office for three to six months. Work would help maintain continuity for the incoming Secretary of Defense-designate James Mattis and assist in preparing the Trump administration’s first defense budget proposal. He also quietly rallied support for Mattis’s selection as Defense Secretary, vouching for bipartisan confidence in the former USCENTCOM commander.
Holding Work over could be seen as a sign that Mattis and the administration may intend to keep elements of the Third Offset Strategy, which Work developed under current Defense Secretary Ashton Carter.
A few days ago, The Post reported that Mattis had clashed with senior Trump transition team officials over Defense Department appointments. Mattis allegedly first learned of the appointment of Vincent Viola as Secretary of the Army from the media, leaving him “furious.” Several senior Defense Department office remain to be staffed and Mattis has been said to have rejected several individuals proposed by Trump’s transition staff.
In a previous post, I questioned the wisdom of a defense procurement strategy of buying expensive, technologically advanced weapons systems while they are still being developed and before they have been proven combat effective. One of the examples I cited was the U.S. Navy’s Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) program.
(The LCS should not be confused with the Navy’s new guided-missile destroyer U.S.S. Zumwalt, which recently suffered an embarrassing propulsion system failure at sea, necessitating a tow back to port for repairs).
The incoming Trump administration is going to have a decision to make with regard to the LCS. Congress approved procurement of 40 total LCSs in the recent National Defense Authorization Act of 2017. The Navy has already built, purchased, or ordered 28. It intends eventually to build up to a fleet of 52 small surface combatant ships, either LCSs or a modified version it has classified as a frigate. As part of its 2018 budget request, the Navy wants $14 billion for the final 12 authorized vessels and their associated weapons systems to fund a “block” purchase.
However, at a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on 1 December, the General Accounting Office, a Defense Department representative, and various senators criticized the LCS program for “for cost overruns, engineering failures, and more.” They called for reduced, rather than increased, spending on it.
On the campaign trail, President-elect Donald Trump promised to expand the Navy to 350 ships as part of his proposals to “upgrade America’s military.” The Congressional Research Service has predicted the Navy would increase its total request to 56 small surface combatants.
The outcome remains to be seen, but a potential spanner in the works to Trump’s plans may be the recent revelation in the Washington Post of a Defense Department internal report that alleged that it was wasting up to $125 billion annually on poor business administration. Congress is expected to pass a continuing resolution this month to allow for negotiation of a new budget in early 2017.
Over 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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
The 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.
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.
Although 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)