The uniformed heads of the Navy and Air Force recently placed a piece in Foreign Policy entitled "Breaking the Kill Chain--How to Keep America in the Game When Our Enemies are Trying to Shut Us Out." I recommend reading it to gain additional understanding about what the two services mean (and don't mean) when they talk ASB. I don't know what General Welsh's long term plan is, but I do think we navalists are particularly fortunate that Admiral Greenert seems to like to put his thoughts on paper. I don't know CNO except by reputation and the company he keeps (Submariner). But I would not have predicted he would be so publicly engaged--it is a good decision and he is doing it well.
A few things about the piece:
1. It continues to boggle my mind that ASB has created the anti-bodies that it has, though I should not be surprised. We are become an expeditionary military, meaning that the preponderance of our war fighting force is and will be CONUS-based. When we need to protect far-flung interests, that power must be employed far from home, against capabilities that seek to deny us entry and freedom of maneuver (A2AD). If you don't get there, and if you can't maneuver there, if you can't project power from there, you can't win there. It really is that simple.
2. The fact that Greenert and Welsh acknowledge that A2AD threats are not new is notable. We cannot forget that during the time of our Superpower status, A2AD was the order of the day. The Soviets fielded a powerful array of capability that sought to deny us the ability to project power. We did not then cower from preparing to meet that challenge, nor should we now. It should be remembered that the Maritime Strategy of the 1980's took as an entering assumption that war with the Soviets would remain conventional, and that conventional strikes on the Soviet homeland (especially in the NW Pacific) would be pursued. Those who take to their sedan chairs with fear of nuclear conflict with rising powers, if we pursue options that include conventional strikes, do not remember their history.
3. Although I admire the thinking behind the highly networked force advocated in the article--and believe it should be pursued--I continue to believe every single exercise of note should contain significant operations in a comms denied/satellite denied environment, and long periods of emission control (EMCON) operations. Additionally, we should continue to work to field robust networks that are comm path agnostic, in order to quickly reconfigure from one pipe to another.
4. The best thing about ASB (to me) is that it seems to signal a Navy on the offense. I'd like to see this continue, and I'd like to see budgets that reinforce this. Keep the narrative focused on offense.
5. China. There, I've said it. I was in a session recently with one of the Deans of Modern Seapower who tried to make the case that the US was being insensitive (my word) to Chinese sensitivities in the way we talk about ASB. Two thoughts here: first, the Chinese are wont to take offense where none exists, so metering our policies and approaches against their institutional paranoia seems unwise to me. Secondly, we shouldn't forget that ASB is at least in part a counter to a military strategy pursued by the Chinese designed to keep us from defending Taiwan or interfering with any other matter the Chinese deem their business. We need to keep pointing this out.
Update: This just in....
Bryan McGrath
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