Guided Munitions Inventory Management, Producibility, and their Effects on Strategy (Part 2 of 2)

Part I available here

Based on our discussion yesterday, it should be evident that a military’s strategic concept’s viability leans heavily on guided conventional munitions’ peacetime inventory sizes and wartime producibility. For instance, if a military’s force structure and operating concepts overwhelmingly depended upon employment of state-of-the-art standoff-range guided munitions, then there are two basic strategic paths it might pursue.

The first is that it might ‘go for broke,’ as those munitions’ inventory and producibility limitations would incentivize seeking a quick and decisive strategic victory. Should the resultant campaign(s) fail to achieve this, however, there might not be enough munitions left in the inventory to achieve desired political objectives—let alone thwart a resilient and intelligent opponent’s countermoves.

The second is that it might employ a strategy of ‘pulsed’ campaigns. In other words, it would go on the operational offensive whenever it was able to sufficiently replenish its most operationally-significant weapons inventories, and then switch back to the operational defensive to preserve its gains (or limit losses) while awaiting the next increment of replacement rounds. The ability to wage this kind of war would likely depend upon whether the opponent obliged with a similar strategy. It would also demand that a belligerent take on the attendant risks of being able to cede and then later reclaim the operational initiative. It is therefore hard to imagine a military would pursue this strategy by choice, though one that tried and failed with a ‘go for broke’ strategy might be forced into it by default. The Western Front in the First World War provides a rough example of this strategy. Like the Western Front, a belligerent on the operational defensive would rely upon dense ‘kill zones’ in which shorter-range and relatively numerous/producible munitions could be employed against an opponent who penetrated deep enough within a contested zone. Unlike the Western Front analogy, though, both sides could take advantage of dispersal and maneuver, deception and concealment, flexible/resilient logistical and communications architectures, and similar attributes to shield their forces. The main question regarding this strategy is whether a belligerent would be able to produce enough standoff-range guided munitions while on the operational defensive so that it could make tangible and sustainable gains at an acceptable cost when the opportunity came to take the operational offensive. If this was not possible for either side, a protracted conflict featuring ‘pulsed’ campaigns would likely follow the First World War example’s descent into a tremendously destructive war of national (and global) exhaustion.

Now, let’s say that a military’s force structure and operational concepts were overwhelmingly designed around employment of shorter-range or less complicated guided munitions. Compared to the previous cases centering on standoff-range advanced munitions, this military would likely face fewer constraints stemming from inventory size, and perhaps also from producibility. Nonetheless, there would be a tradeoff in the form of dependence upon operations from protected bases. Forces involved might be long-range platforms operating from bases located far beyond the opponent’s effective reach, though the payload, reactiveness, and on-station time limitations for such platforms would suppress the friendly force’s operational tempo. Or they might be shorter-range platforms operating from bases located closer to the opponent, which in turn would demand dedication of significant resources and operational effort for base defense. Note that a base need not be large and geographically fixed. A base could be large and mobile like an aircraft carrier, austere and fixed like an auxiliary airfield used by aircraft dispersed from a main airbase, or austere and mobile like a naval underway replenishment ship or an ad hoc forward operating airbase. All of these base types nevertheless depend upon logistical sustenance from rear areas, so it must be stressed that failure to adequately protect their associated lines of communication would lead to operational setbacks and quite possibly strategic defeat. No operating concept or force structure can remain viable if underlying logistical support cannot be assuredly conveyed in time and mass to forward areas. It is important to observe, however, that the problems of protecting one's own bases and lines of communication might be comparatively more manageable for a continental power with strategic territorial depth than for a maritime power with strategic trans-oceanic breadth.

A better approach would be one that balances between munitions types’ strategic tradeoffs. For example, a military following this kind of “high-low” mix might use its relatively-scarce long-range guided munitions solely for “kicking down the door” when operationally necessary, or rather to destroy or suppress only the most operationally-significant enemy targets. It might then try to take advantage of the resultant gains by using far more plentiful shorter-range guided munitions during sequential (as well as parallel) operations and campaigns that build upon each other to achieve desired strategic objectives. Given the relative sizes of its long-range and short-range guided munitions inventories, this approach appears to be closest to how the U.S. would (or should) conduct a major war. I’ll be pulling the thread on this a bit more in a post next week within my series on large-deck aircraft carriers’ doctrinal roles. As an aside, the “high-low” approach also appears to guide the how the Chinese People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) Second Artillery Corps’ envisions using its conventionally-armed medium-range ballistic missiles. I will also be exploring that theme in a future series of posts.

It bears noting, though, that shorter-range munitions must also be highly producible for a strategy leveraging the “high-low” mix to be sustainable during a protracted peer-level conflict. Production of even the least expensive advanced guided munitions simply might not be expandable enough to keep up with consumption rates. One possible solution might be to retain the ability to fall back upon massive reserve stockpiles of unguided weapons. Another might be to develop a reserve of inexpensive and relatively uncomplicated guided munitions whose components are already mass-produced for commercial applications, therefore making it possible to quickly manufacture replacement rounds. This might be where wartime “3D printing” of such components as practicable could prove most useful. Granted, the above reserves would be dramatically lacking in capabilities as compared to more advanced munitions. It nonetheless is worth exploring how “high-low” mix strategic concepts should transition from peacetime-procured high-capability guided munitions to wartime-procured lower-capability guided (or unguided) munitions in the event of a protracted peer-level conflict. Given the increasing maturity of directed energy weapons technologies, it is also worth exploring how they might affect and be affected by guided munitions usage. These are all important questions that deserve war gaming and operations research attention.

The bottom line is that when we think about guided munitions inventory management, we must consider more than just the logistics of reloading launchers under combat conditions—and that’s a pretty critical challenge in and of itself. Munitions’ peacetime inventory sizes and wartime producibility directly impact a strategy’s viability, and therefore must be thoroughly considered when assessing candidate operating concepts and alternative force structures.