AirSea Battle is gaining public notoriety, even as an official description is yet to exist. AirSea Battle is now part of general answers and specific questions in Congressional hearings suggesting there is some anticipation on Capitol Hill what exactly this widely touted but never officially discussed series of ideas might be.
The focus of AirSea Battle appears to be to counter the growing challenges to US military power projection in the western Pacific and Persian Gulf, although in public use AirSea Battle is now used almost exclusively in the context of China.
CSBA described
AirSea Battle as A Point-of-Departure Operational Concept. The use of the term "operational" implied AirSea Battle is intended to be developed as a battle doctrine for air and sea forces.
Milan Vego recently took this one step further in Proceedings and recommended AirSea Battle be developed as one of several operational concepts for littoral warfare, although I think there is room to develop AirSea Battle doctrine for joint operations in several different geographic conditions.
All we really know about AirSea Battle is that we don't know a lot more about it than we do know, so every time someone writes about AirSea Battle from a position of some authority as to what AirSea Battle actually is - it's worth noting. In the latest example, we learn a lot.
A new
Armed Forces Journal article by J. Noel Williams titled
Air-Sea Battle is perhaps the most important contribution to the AirSea Battle discussion to date, because it starts a valid public discussion with criticisms of AirSea Battle - criticisms that cannot be ignored or dismissed. The article should be read in total - it's worth it. Because the article is
very long difficult to cover in a single blogpost, I'm going to focus on only a few specific aspects of the article that stick out to me; a few of the criticisms and the implied competing doctrines.
Criticisms of AirSea BattleThis paragraph contains a lot of room for more discussion. The author's argument is that AirSea Battle doctrine appears to be a symmetrical approach to Chinese military capabilities. It should be noted that AirSea Battle doctrine is specifically being developed as an asymmetrical approach to Chinese area and access denial capabilities.
AirLand Battle posited an asymmetric approach in relation to the Soviet Union. AirLand would attack all echelons of the Soviet force with aviation and long-range fires because NATO was badly outnumbered on the ground. In contrast, ASB is symmetrical, pitting U.S. precision strike against Chinese precision strike. Since ASB is by definition an away game, how can we build sufficient expeditionary naval and air forces to counter Chinese forces that possess a home-court advantage? Is it prudent to expect the weapon magazines of an entire industrial nation to be smaller than those of our Navy and Air Force deployed more than 3,000 miles from home? What happens when the vertical launch systems of our ships and the bomb bays of our aircraft are empty?
Logistics is going to be a challenge in any military campaign where an enemy has the capacity to strike at our lines-of-communication, so in that sense the logistics points are not really a compelling argument for me against AirSea Battle. Logistics is a challenge in any military endeavor that can be applied to any doctrine. It is fair to note logistics is a huge challenge for the US today in Afghanistan, and hardly a major challenge specific to any single theater of war. I do like the last question though, because it is a question Congress needs to be asking all the time as budget pressures force difficult choices on Navy force structure.
The bigger question here is whether AirSea Battle doctrine represents a symmetrical apprach of "pitting U.S. precision strike against Chinese precision strike." I think the authors statement represents a fair question, but I am hesitant to agree with the author that this conclusion is accurate. Any battle doctrine between the US Air Force and US Navy should build towards a precision fires regime, so I am unclear as to why that is implied a problem with AirSea Battle. Furthermore, because AirSea Battle is supposed to be a battle doctrine - a joint US Navy and USAF operational concept - the authors strategic level argument fails because it compares tactical methods as symmetrical comparisons. Just because Taliban forces and US Army forces in Afghanistan might both employ accurate, precision fires, that doesn't mean both sides are engaged in symmetrical warfare on the battlefield. How forces are used on a battlefield is often much more important to measuring the symmetrical or asymmetrical nature of combat than the weapons forces utilize on a battlefield, and I have yet to see much discussed on that aspect of AirSea Battle doctrine development.
A military confrontation with China would be the biggest national security challenge since World War II, yet ASB advocates suggest it can be handled by just two of the four services. To the outside observer, this is astonishing; to the insider skeptic, it is absurd. Many ASB advocates I have talked with or have heard speak on the subject follow the logic that we will never conduct a land war in China, therefore long-range precision strike is the only practical alternative. What is missed in this line of thinking is that there are other, more fundamental choices that also don’t require a land war in China. It would appear there is an unstated assumption by many that conflict with China must include a race across the Pacific to defend Taiwan; many war games over the past decades have solidified this point of view. Unfortunately, this assumption is outdated. Chinese capabilities now, but especially 10 years from now, simply preclude a rush to Taiwan and would require a very deliberate campaign similar to that described in the aforementioned CSBA report to gain access. Without ground forces and with limited magazine capacities, what happens once we get there? What now, lieutenant?
I have heard everything mentioned in that paragraph discussed myself in person by those who are developing AirSea Battle doctrine, and I myself found what was said by AirSea advocates both "astonishing" and "absurd." The parochial, shortsighted nature of AirSea Battle that fails to include ground forces as a capability in major war is so thoroughly shortsighted that even as a hard Navy partisan I have a hard time believing AirSea Battle doctrine development has as much support as it does. The parochial nature of the AirSea Battle discussion informs me, an observer, that AirSea Battle is nothing more than an idea to advance a political agenda for the Navy and Air Force, and by political I am speaking specifically about justification of budgetary investments.
Competing DoctrinesArmy Col. Gian Gentile, writing in Infinity Journal, expresses similar concerns about the impact of optimizing the Defense Department for counterinsurgency operations — in other words, optimizing for the opposite end of the spectrum recommended by ASB. The logic of the criticism is the same, nonetheless, since optimizing forces for an uncertain future is a prescription for getting it badly wrong. Gentile argues that counterinsurgency has become a “strategy of tactics.” He explains that when nations “allow the actual doing of war — its tactics — to bury strategy or blinker strategic thinking,” it leads to disaster, such as in Nazi Germany, where the German Army’s tactical excellence in Blitzkrieg could not rescue the regime from its fundamentally flawed strategy.
It is possible that, like Blitzkrieg, the U.S. could prevail in the tactics and operational art of ASB and still suffer strategic defeat.
So what’s the rub specifically? ASB initially was conceived as a way to increase interoperability between the Air Force and Navy through increased training and improved technical interoperability. Given the overlaps in their strike capabilities, especially in aircraft, it makes perfect sense for the two most technical services to work closely to ensure interoperability. But like its progenitor, AirLand Battle, ASB has progressed to an operational concept to address a specific military problem. While AirLand Battle was conceived to counter the Soviet Union, Air-Sea Battle is billed as the answer to growing anti-access/area-denial capabilities generically, but as everyone knows, specifically China.
CSBA described AirSea Battle as "A Point-of-Departure Operational Concept," so I am unclear how ASB progressed into an operational concept when ASB was actually introduced as an operational concept. Operational concepts are what drive doctrinal development, so if a service was going to develop battle doctrine the logical starting place would be to develop an operational concept. Am I missing something here?
I agree with Col. Gian Gentile that counterinsurgency has become a "strategy of tactics," kind of. It is more accurate to say that the US military developed a population centric operational concept intended to address a specific battlefield problem in Iraq, and the operational concept drove development of counterinsurgency doctrine. That operational concept and subsequent doctrine became tactics employed by troops on the battlefield that through trial and error, led to a wealth of lessons learned on the battlefield and ultimately, a political victory by means of military power that our national leaders could live with.
What followed the successful execution of a population centric operational concept, often generically described as "COIN" although it is much more than just counterinsurgency, was an intellectual Enterprise consisting of a politically diverse group military and policy intellectuals, and it was that intellectual Enterprise (or industry) - through open source intellectual rigor and debate - that began a process of broadly articulating strategic and policy ideas and recommendations based on the experiences and lessons learned from the successfully employed battlefield tactics.
Whether intentionally or unintentionally, the author frames AirSea Battle as akin to being a competing doctrine to COIN, pitting a high end warfare AirSea Battle doctrine represented by the US Air Force/US Navy against a small wars COIN doctrine represented by the US Army/US Marine Corps. This competition is political, which is another way of saying it is almost entirely intended to influence budget decisions. I tend to think that would explain why US Army leaders see a future where intervention is required in small states that are more likely to be unstable as a result of the rise of regional powers; and why US Navy leaders see a future where rising regional powers leads to instability throughout the world suggesting the focus should be on deterring hostilities and maintaining escalation control between major powers.
There is not a national security policy that settles this debate, or said another way, the
National Security Strategy of the United States (PDF) is so broad, generic, and ultimately useless that almost any version of the future use of military forces is accurate, and the the DoD can do just about everything and anything and meet the strategic guidance.
Which leads me back to reminding folks that since we enacted Goldwater-Nichols, the military services don't actually do strategy. The military services are responsible for the development of tactics and doctrines for forces that get pushed up to the strategic level - which is the COCOMs, who develop and execute strategies from the political policies of US civilian leaders. Because the military services are not effectively engaged in strategic development as a result of Goldwater-Nichols, and all they really develop themselves anymore is doctrine and tactics, the services attempt to leverage the doctrines they develop to influence politically up to strategy and policy. The services manage budget and tactics/doctrine, so for them it is only logical to match budget to doctrine/tactics, not budget to strategy/policy.
COIN and now AirSea Battle are representative of how doctrine becomes advocated in political form for purposes of justifying the budgets of the services. Goldwater-Nichols has built a wall that separates strategy (COCOMs) and budget (Services), and the results are that 25 years later the nation has yet to develop a coherent national security policy or strategy that meets the challenges of the 21st century.
Budgets controlled by the services get aligned with doctrine/tactics resulting in the US military being remarkably brilliant tactically but unquestionably adrift strategically. My concern is, and I think the article by J. Noel Williams suggests, that while AirSea Battle may be a smart development for the US Air Force and US Navy towards a joint battle doctrine; AirSea Battle will also be the next military operational concept forwarded as a political idea that acts as a substitute for the absence of a coherent 21st century national security policy.
You know that strategic process Secretary Panetta discusses that will guide budget decisions? We are going to look globally incompetent if that "strategy" reads like it was informed by a doctrine rather than a policy.
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