Revisiting the First Salvo: The Importance of Getting the Narrative Out

The Defense Department did an excellent job embedding a CNN reporter and camera crew aboard the P-8 that challenged Chinese territorial claims in the South China Sea back in May. By doing so, the U.S. established an independent and credible record of the flight’s events that could stand up against Chinese propaganda efforts. More importantly, it created a precedent that the U.S. might embed international media aboard any such flight over contested international waters in the region. The Chinese would have every reason to assume that the reactions of their on-scene forces to these flights might be broadcast to the world within hours, and as such might be encouraged to practice the utmost restraint in those reactions.

Not every claims-challenging U.S. Navy flight or warship transit will have embedded media aboard, though. It might be even harder (or perhaps entirely undesirable from an Operational Security standpoint) to embed media in frontline forces during a precipice-of-war crisis. And the issue is hardly isolated to the Far East; there have been applicable incidents within recent memory in Europe and the Mid-East.

Recall, then, what I wrote when I touched on this topic last October:

“…defeating a first salvo also means defeating the attacker’s inevitable diplomatic-propaganda campaign. Attackers within range of their homeland cellular networks, or otherwise using satellite uplinks, can quickly post audiovisual content recorded and edited on smartphones or similar devices to websites such as YouTube. From there, propaganda specialists can work to push the material via social networks to critical audiences; it may not take more than a few hours to become ‘viral’ and make the jump to traditional global media outlets. The side that gets seemingly-credible evidence of what happened out first seizes the initiative, perhaps decisively, in the diplomatically and politically-critical battle for the international and domestic public narratives regarding culpability and justification.

In a first salvo’s immediate aftermath, the defender must be able to quickly collect, process, and disseminate unimpeachable audiovisual evidence of its victimization without harming Operational Security. This would be no small feat, especially aboard a warship that is severely damaged or steeling itself for follow-on attacks. Even harder is developing continuously updated, interagency-coordinated, ‘stock’ narrative outlines in advance of any operation that might expose units to direct first salvo risk, not to mention the doctrine and training necessary to swiftly get an initial narrative out into the global media. Contrary to current public affairs practice, in some scenarios this might require evidence processing and public dissemination by lower echelons to be followed thereafter with amplification and context by executive Navy and national leadership. This will be a vitally important area for exploration through war gaming and fleet experiments.”

Jerry Hendrix makes the same point in his commentary on the Su-24 flyby of the USS Ross in the Black Sea on May 30th:

“We're a bit like lawyers," Hendrix said. “Before we make a response we are going to go back, gather the facts, look at the tape and then issue our response. But by the time we do, 24 to 48 hours later, Russia has already established the narrative: The ship was going to penetrate Russia's sovereign waters and the Russian military gloriously forced it to alter course.”

This dovetails with my ongoing crusade in favor of decentralized command and control doctrine, mission command, and command by negation. We have to start training and equipping our crews at the ‘tip of the spear’ so that they can engage in the narrative battle as an incident unfolds or immediately after it occurs. At bare minimum, we must give our crews what they need so that the U.S. and its allies do not lose the “first narrative salvo.”

Although this requires considerable delegation of “media messaging” authority and is accordingly not without risk, it is not fundamentally different than delegating tactical decision-making authority to the lowest practicable level in accordance with a higher-level commander’s intent. If we trust our trained ship, submarine, and aircraft squadron Commanding Officers and crews with the proper use of weapons systems in a tense situation, then we should also be able to train them so we can trust them with wielding smartphones and internet connections as an incident unfolds.

We could develop specially trained public affairs detachments for embarkation in our forces headed into contested waters; they could serve as Commanding Officers’ dedicated specialists much like any other division or workcenter. Or we could develop training regimes to prepare ship and aircraft crews, themselves, to fill these roles. Either way, if we’re serious about winning narrative battles—or at least not losing them when they matter most—we will have to empower our frontline forces. Our broader strategy in a given crisis or conflict may depend greatly on it.

The views expressed herein are solely those of the author and are presented in his personal capacity. They do not reflect the official positions of Systems Planning and Analysis, and to the author’s knowledge do not reflect the policies or positions of the U.S. Department of Defense, any U.S. armed service, or any other U.S. Government agency.

An Observation on Unmanned Systems and Escalation Management

One of the issues I looked at in my Naval War College Review article on maritime deception and concealment concerned an opponent’s use of unmanned scout vehicles to search for and target a defender’s platforms during a crisis. Any scout that is able to locate and then support classification of one of the defender’s individual units such as a warship (or perhaps one of the defender’s larger formations such as a naval battleforce) can hypothetically provide the opponent’s long-range strike systems with targeting-quality track data. Depending on the circumstances and the opponent’s political objectives, this targeting data might create further incentives on the margins for the opponent to execute a first strike/salvo attack.

Unmanned scouts are ideal for performing the prewar ‘tattletale’ role that until now could only be accomplished by manned platforms. These vehicles might allow the opponent to persistently cover a wider area or track a particular contact longer than might be possible if only manned scouts were used. They would obviously also avoid exposing manned scouts to interception by the defender. 

It is highly likely that U.S. rules of engagement during a crisis would preclude destroying an opponent’s manned scout in the absence of high confidence indications and warning that the opponent intended an imminent attack. U.S. use of non-kinetic means to ‘neutralize’ a manned scout would likely be limited as well. It is far less clear, though, that neutralizing or destroying an unmanned scout would carry similar escalation risks or otherwise set unacceptable escalatory precedents. Consider how Russia shot down several Georgian unmanned aerial scouts prior to the 2008 war, or how Iran shot at (and possibly also commandeered) U.S. unmanned aerial scouts over the past few years. Crisis circumstances matter, but it is worth noting that none of these cases resulted in anything more than diplomatic protests by the victims. These cases actually establish a decent international precedent regarding the legitimate bounds of a country’s response to the loss of its unmanned scouts. Granted, neither Russia nor Iran nor any other potential U.S. adversary would necessarily react along the lines of how Georgia or the U.S. did. Nevertheless, far less stigma (and international scorn) attaches to killing robots than manned platforms.  

Therefore, as I noted in my article:

A defender might declare exclusion areas during a crisis within which any detected unmanned system would be neutralized; enforcement of these areas might well not precipitate drastic escalation by the other side...A potential adversary could overcome this threat by placing unmanned systems under close manned escort, but that would undercut the rationale for using unmanned, vice manned, reconnaissance systems to increase search volume and on-station time per sortie. Also, it is not clear how a potential adversary could respond without disproportionate escalation if a defender neutralized the unmanned system by close-in jamming or other nonkinetic means. The point is worth study through war gaming. (Pg. 99, 115)

Depending upon how an unmanned scout was neutralized, the opponent might not even know within an actionable period of time whether an onboard malfunction or ‘external causes’ resulted in the loss of communications with the vehicle. This could support a U.S. ability to assert plausible deniability if need be. There would be a risk, however, that the opponent might conclude U.S. forces were operating in or near the area the scout was passing through when communications with it were lost. This might entice the opponent to focus its surveillance and reconnaissance resources on that area. All the same, if the U.S. had in fact declared a sufficiently broad exclusion area for the opponent’s unmanned vehicles, an overall U.S. deception and concealment plan might allow for disruption or even destruction of the opponent’s unmanned scouts near a specific location to create an impression that ‘something of value’ was nearby even when the actual U.S. or allied units being concealed were somewhere else entirely. Of course, nothing would prevent the opponent from pursuing similar ends via similar tactics.

I would submit that if war gaming and historical case study analysis find that the crisis stability risks of attacks against unmanned scouts would be tolerable, and if the resulting legitimization of equivalent attacks against U.S. unmanned systems would be acceptable, then it might be worthwhile for American diplomacy to advance unmanned scout neutralization (or destruction if the scout is outside the opponent’s internationally-recognized sovereign boundaries) as an international norm. This would not mean that the U.S. would automatically take such steps during a particular crisis—only that U.S. political and military leaders would reserve the option of taking them. If the opponent raised his forces’ combat readiness postures in response, that would be still be a preferable—and most likely more manageable—consequence than allowing the opponent to retain a high-confidence targeting picture that could decisively tilt him towards a decision to strike first.

The irony in all this is that it may incentivize potential adversaries to go 'back to the future.' If a potential adversary expects that U.S. forces will neutralize unmanned scouts without hesitation, then he may opt to return the brink-of-war tattletale role to manned scouts under the assumptions about U.S. rules of engagement during a crisis that I mentioned earlier. So the moral of the story may very well be: don't operate high campaign-value platforms in locations during crises where they would not be able to evade contact with the opponent's manned scouts for long. Instead, preserve those platforms in locations where the opponent cannot scout effectively, or contact with any manned scouts can be quickly and enduringly broken. And remember that whatever the opponent's prewar escalation dominance advantages of using manned scouts may be, those advantages evaporate once U.S. rules of engagement are relaxed upon the outbreak of open hostilities.

The views expressed herein are solely those of the author and are presented in his personal capacity. They do not reflect the official positions of Systems Planning and Analysis, and to the author’s knowledge do not reflect the policies or positions of the U.S. Department of Defense, any U.S. armed service, or any other U.S. Government agency.

Air-Sea Battle and Offshore Control are not Mutually-Exclusive: Part 3

For previous installments, see Parts I and II

Scenario #3: Major War

Now, let’s continue up the spectrum of conflict to explore what might happen if Chinese leaders placed a high value on less limited political objectives. Domestic political pressures; perceptions of the regional geostrategic order’s trendlines; or misinterpretations of U.S. and allied interests, intentions, capabilities, or resolve could dramatically affect Chinese leaders’ calculations by encouraging opportunism, exacerbating desperation, or a mix of both. Consider how Chinese leaders’ political objectives might be affected in the coming years if the Taiwanese people continue to refuse taking formal steps towards political unification with the mainland, or if the Taiwanese government took bolder steps towards political independence. Consider Chinese leaders’ objectives in a Korean peninsula scenario if they concluded the Pyongyang regime’s survival was endangered by U.S. and South Korean retaliation against some major provocation. Likewise, consider what might occur if the Pyongyang regime collapsed completely under its own weight and Beijing was unwilling to tolerate U.S. and South Korean forces moving northward to fill the security vacuum, secure weapons of mass destruction sites, and render humanitarian aid. Consider the stakes if factional competitions within the Chinese Communist Party’s senior leadership, bureaucratic politics, surging Chinese popular nationalism, or domestic economic policy failures and their sociopolitical fallout incentivized seeking a tangible strategic ‘win’ at the expense of the Japanese Self-Defense Forces or the Philippine military. Consider the possibility that Chinese leaders might seek to improve their geostrategic position by taking opportunistic advantage of some lesser issue, for example using a clash over the Senkaku Islands as a casus belli for a “short, sharp war” to force Japan to demilitarize and politically Finlandize the Ryukyu Islands. In short, no matter the economic and diplomatic incentives China enjoys courtesy of the existing international order, there is a quite-conceivable range of circumstances that could drive Chinese leaders to seek political objectives obtainable only via major deliberate escalations or general conventional war.

Achievement of this class of political objectives would almost certainly demand PLA bombardment, invasion, or violent blockade of a U.S. ally’s homeland ‘core.’ While escalation to such a level hardly seems conceivable at present, one must accept that political and strategic circumstances are highly dynamic and that the underlying factor driving the risk of a major East Asian conflict is the fundamental disagreement between China and its neighbors regarding the nature of the regional security order. Miscalculation, misperception, or accidental confrontation can definitely ignite a conflagration, but this can only occur when an underlying clash of interests and at least one side’s unwillingness to establish or adhere to substantive confidence-building and reassurance measures have already primed the environment.

It follows that if Chinese leaders were to characterize and value their political objectives along the above lines, then it is difficult to imagine how the PLA would be able to accomplish the major tasks that flow from those objectives with a high degree of confidence and at an ‘acceptable’ cost in blood and treasure in the face of a highly-probable major U.S. intervention. The PLA would have to preemptively neutralize U.S. forces in the Pacific to provide Chinese leaders that level of confidence at such a cost, plain and simple. Chinese leaders would no doubt be gambling against the historical record that such an attack would induce the U.S. to quickly concede (though perhaps with some token resistance and retaliation) rather than result in mobilization for major war.

A Chinese first strike would be the culmination of a regional crisis that either incrementally escalated over time or surged quickly depending upon the circumstances; it would never be a ‘bolt from blue’ occurring outside this context. It does not practically matter whether a first strike would occur as part of a pre-planned war-opening PLA offensive campaign, a major PLA intra-conflict escalation once Chinese leaders concluded they would not be able to achieve their objectives otherwise, or the culmination of an inadvertent crisis in which Chinese leaders did not recognize the diplomatic ‘offramps’ provided them by the U.S. and its allies (or chose to disregard them).

Might a PLA first strike be limited to a cyber-electromagnetic offensive against U.S. forces? This might be attractive to Chinese leaders in terms of relative escalatory risks. Also, U.S. C³ and scouting effectiveness in any maritime operation, U.S. forces’ operational security, and U.S. and allied air and missile defenses’ viability would depend heavily upon U.S. military networks’ security and availability. Differing operating concepts might use these networks in dissimilar ways, and technological as well as doctrinal measures exist for reducing a concept’s network dependency as well as increasing its resiliency. Nevertheless, it is important to appreciate that neither Offshore Control nor any other strategic concept addressing maritime warfare could succeed without using some form of modern networking.

Given the exceptionally high degree of uncertainty in cyber-electromagnetic warfare, though, Chinese leaders would have minimal assurances that any such attacks would decisively prevent an effective U.S. intervention. This means the PLA would also likely have to execute some form of conventional first strike against relevant U.S. forces and their supporting infrastructure in East Asia (and perhaps elsewhere in the Pacific), as well as engage in trans-oceanic and intra-theater maritime lines of communication interdiction, in order for Chinese leaders to gain confidence in their chances of achieving their political objectives. Accordingly, it should not be surprising that preemptive strike concepts figure so prominently in publicly-available PLA doctrinal works, or that the PLA 2^nd Artillery Corps’ conventionally-armed medium range ballistic missile inventories appear sufficiently sized to execute a crippling war-opening offensive but not to attack targets of opportunity during a protracted conflict.

It is therefore curious why so many critiques of Air-Sea Battle implicitly assume China would either not engage in a conventional first strike, or if it did, that it would only do so if its leaders were threatened by certain ‘excessively provocative’ U.S. force doctrine, capabilities, forward positions and quantities, postures, or actions. Yes, in some situations U.S. forces’ configurations and employment might risk inducing Chinese leaders to attack first when they would have otherwise preferred not to escalate, and such extremes must be identified through war gaming and then avoided. It is equally true, however, that the U.S presence in East Asia and the Western Pacific would be geostrategically provocative to Beijing regardless of its specific characteristics if Chinese leaders’ political objectives were lofty enough. In other words, U.S. or allied military ‘behavior’ is not the solitary potential trigger of major Chinese escalation.

Any strategic concept for deterring Chinese aggression, and failing that for preventing a major Chinese offensive from achieving its main political objectives, must consequently explain how it can succeed if U.S. forces in the Pacific are subjected to a PLA multi-domain first strike that segues into a maritime lines of communication interdiction campaign. As the critiques of Offshore Control discussed in Monday's post pointed out, if U.S. and allied bases—particularly those in Japan—as well as U.S. intra-theater lines of communication are being effectively suppressed or neutralized by PLA forces operating from the mainland, it becomes difficult to envision how the U.S. could sustainably defend an embattled ally’s airspace, waters, or territory without returning the favor against those PLA forces’ support infrastructure and bases. The PLA’s advantages in operational tempo, intensity, and initiative by virtue of its quantities, positions, and effective striking reach would be too great otherwise. The obvious implication is that defensive forces’ sustainability in ‘frontline’ territories such as Taiwan or the central and southern Ryukyus, not to mention the flow of basic sustenance to these populations, might not be possible under such circumstances. In the case of the southern Ryukyus in particular, one must not overlook the intense political impact of Japanese citizens being held ‘hostage’ by a PLA maritime denial campaign even if Chinese troops never actually invaded those islands. These kinds of problems might even manifest in a Korean peninsula contingency.

If China drew first blood by unleashing a war-opening or war-escalating strike against targets on allied or U.S. sovereign territory, its leaders would have no legitimate standing to protest if the U.S. responded in kind against equivalent mainland Chinese targets. While striking first conveys significant operational-tactical advantages, it hands the victim an invaluable grand strategic trump card by establishing a precedent for conduct within the conflict as well as a legal and moral basis for retaliation. Notwithstanding the operational-strategic necessity of the U.S. responding tit-for-tat under these conditions, the popular passions aroused within the victimized allied nation(s) as well as within the U.S. following a PLA first strike would all but compel U.S. political leaders to hit back. Any U.S. counterstrikes against PLA targets on the mainland would therefore be primarily shaped by the PLA first strike’s precedent-setting characteristics.

Just as is the case with offshore operations against maritime surveillance/reconnaissance networks, there is a tremendous difference between physically striking air and naval bases being used by PLA maritime forces, 2nd Artillery Corps cruise and short range ballistic missile forces’ support infrastructure (as opposed to their launchers in the field, which would be very difficult to achieve), or theater-wide maritime surveillance sensors on one hand and physically striking 2^nd Artillery Corps nuclear forces and their supporting infrastructure or similarly-sensitive targets on the other. Certain PLA tactical and operational-level command posts might even be valid targets depending upon the circumstances, especially if the PLA struck U.S. or allied command posts first.

It must be reemphasized that offensive cyber-electromagnetic operations could play disproportionate roles in U.S. attacks against mainland PLA targets, as they might be more effective than conventional strikes against very specific target types while carrying fewer or more tolerable escalation risks. Cyber and electronic attack objectives would rarely be to destroy or disable targets, if that were even possible using such means, but rather to disrupt PLA operations or provide deception and concealment support to friendly forces.

Beyond these aspects, the U.S. war effort would look very much like what was outlined in the limited war scenario. U.S. and allied forces would strive to blunt the PLA offensive within the contested zone, and ultimately roll the PLA back from any occupied friendly territories through a combination of maneuver and attrition. In support of this main effort, U.S. leaders might opt to escalate horizontally by conducting economic warfare (distant blockade, special/irregular operations against Chinese economic interests elsewhere, use of the U.S. financial system against Chinese trading partners, etc.) as balanced against the provocation-of-neutrals issue and other escalation considerations. Chinese cessation of its offensive and (if applicable) restoration of the territorial status quo ante in exchange for nothing more than relatively symbolic gestures would be the central U.S. political objective.

This scenario is comparatively the ‘least likely’ of the three, but nonetheless is the ‘most dangerous’ case. While it is to be hoped that Chinese leaders never establish political objectives that drive them towards pursuing this or any other kind of war, hope is not a strategy. Deterrence of a Sino-American war consequently rests on convincing Chinese leaders that the U.S. would be clearly able and willing to protractedly reciprocate if a PLA onslaught “went big,” with all the costs, risks, and uncertainties that would entail. 

Tomorrow, some concluding thoughts on how the range of contingency circumstances and both sides' potential associated political objectives must inform strategic concept design.