Friday, October 11, 2024
Thursday, October 10, 2024
Who's Afraid of the DF-21D
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| USS Lake Eire fires SM-3 Block 1B |
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| USS Boston fires Terrier SAM |
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| DF-21D |
The naval mine first
appeared in western warfare as the weapon of revolutionaries conducting
littoral warfare against the world’s maritime hegemon. American revolutionary David Bushnell’s naval mines, employed
both from his submarine Turtle and as drift weapons briefly scattered a
British naval blockade of the Delaware River in 1776 and prompted fearful
British soldiers and sailors to fire on random floating pieces of wood. In the
American Civil War mines claimed 27 U.S. Navy warships including relatively
“capital” ships like the river ironclad USS Cairo and the monitor USS
Tecumseh.
Naval mines have gone on to be a highly successful weapon system and have
caused more actual damage to U.S. ships since the end of the Second World War
than any other system. Naval mines remain a serious threat. Future digital
minefields in the littorals may have the ability to automatically re-position themselves in
response to specific threats or minesweeping efforts. Despite these dangers, no one has suggested the U.S. Navy refrain from littoral operations.
The most anticipated module for the new Littoral Combat Ship (LCS) is in fact
the mine warfare variant.
Finally there
is the cruise missile threat to U.S. Navy surface ships. Beginning at the end
of the Second World War and continuing to the present day, the U.S. Navy has
expended considerable money and brain power combating the various incarnations
of the cruise missile from the Japanese kamikaze aircraft to the Russian Moskit
(SSN-22 Sunburn)
cruise missile. When the carrier battle group as a weapon system was threatened
by a potential triad Soviet strike of air, surface, and subsurface-launched
antiship cruise missiles, the U.S.
Navy aggressively responded with technological, operational and tactical
measures to protect the flattop and what historian Michael Isenberg called its
“Praetorian guard” of surface ship escorts. These efforts drove the creation of
entire classes of warships (the Ticonderoga class cruiser and the Arleigh
Burke
class destroyer) and a host of weapon systems from the late 1950’s Terrier
missile, to the signature AEGIS weapon system of the 1970s and the various
close-in weapon systems (CIWS) designed to shoot down cruise missiles just
before impact. This game of technological “leap frog” continues as cruise
missiles and those systems created to shoot them down improve in capability.
The underwater threat is
further complicated by the torpedo. Since the spar version of this weapon
mounted on the Confederate submarine Hunley claimed the USS
Housatonic
as its first victim and the Turkish steamer Intibah was sunk by Russian
torpedo boats employing motorized torpedoes in 1878, both submarine and
surfaced-launched torpedoes have been a threat to capital ships.
Navies countered the surface launched torpedo with a variety of technical and
operational countermeasures including the torpedo boat destroyer (ancestor of
today’s multi-mission warship), small caliber rapid fire guns to destroy
torpedo boats before they could launch their weapons and the torpedo net that
would ensnare and detonate a torpedo before it reached its target. These
remedies achieved a mixed record of success. Improved weapon range and accuracy eventually rendered the surface torpedo attack more dangerous for any attacker without complete surprise on their side. The antidote to submarine-launched
torpedoes proved to be more elusive, but a combination of sensory advances
(sonar) and various weapons delivered from air, surface, and even other
subsurface platforms has provided fleets with a suitable response. This
battle between offense and defensive weapons continues today. Navies seek to
develop and field “anti-torpedo” systems such as the Russian Paket E/NK system
and the U.S. Navy’s Surface Ship Torpedo Defense (SSTD) program while
underwater weapons sport improved sensors, greater maneuverability or high
speeds in the case of the Russian-built Shkval supercavitating torpedo, also
sometimes referred to as a “carrier killer.” Undersea weapons remain a
significant threat to warships. The South Korean corvette Cheonan was blown in half and
sunk by a probable North Korean torpedo in March 2010. A Chinese submarine surfaced amidst a
U.S. Carrier battle group in 2007. Despite these events there are not a
plethora of articles on the undersea threat as there are on the DF-21D.
Warships will
continue to face new and challenging threats. If the past 125 years is a guide,
naval weapon designers, and operational and tactical theorists will be ready to
develop systems and operational and tactical measures to counter them. The
DF-21D is a new threat, but it is not likely to be an operational and tactical
surprise as were the Japanese A6M Zero fighter and the 24 cm Type 93 Long Lance
surface torpedo to the U.S. Navy at the outset of World War 2. Open source reporting to
date indicate the DF-21D has been tested against fixed land targets but not
against a large moving target at sea. The U.S. Navy on the other hand has been working to counter the ballistic missile threat for over 20 years. There is certainly time to develop an effective counter to the DF-21D.
When first told by
intelligence officers that the Soviets had a land-based cruise missile that
could strike U.S. ships at sea with impunity, President John F. Kennedy asked
if the U.S. had something like it or a countermeasure. When told
the U.S. had no such weapon or response system Kennedy said, “Why in hell don’t
we? How long have we known about this weapon?” When Defense Secretary Robert S.
McNamara answered “several years” and indicated it was an interim report,
Kennedy responded, “I don’t want half-assed information, go back and do your
homework,” and later told aides the lack of usable information in the brief
left him, “pissed off.” The U.S. response to the DF-21D should be the same as
Kennedy’s was to the cruise missile. Ask why we don’t have a similar weapon on
a countermeasure and instead of being fearful of its effects, take action to
protect our naval assets that we want to use in operations we desire to
undertake. An April article in The Diplomat by J. Michael Cole
mentioned the famous quote by Japanese samurai master Miyamoto Musashi who
said, “In battle, if you make your opponent flinch you have already won.” The
U.S. must stop flinching before the threat of the DF-21D and get on with the
time-honored business of countering its capability.
Tuesday, October 8, 2024
USAF, Army Air and Missile Defense, and AirSea Battle
David Axe has a blog post up describing what I consider to be some seriously good thinking on the part of the Air Force when it comes to how to deploy Airpower in the Pacific. In a nutshell, here's what the USAF is up to:
"By splitting its 40 F-22s into elusive, four-apiece “Rapid Raptor Packages,” the 3rd Wing at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Alaska apparently hopes to sidestep one of the biggest threats to American air power in the Pacific: China’s arsenal of long-range ballistic missiles, primed to hammer American airfields in the event of a major war."
The entire concept of dispersal has at its heart, the objective of creating doubt. Doubt about where are forces are, doubt about how they are defended, doubt about where they will strike.
"By splitting its 40 F-22s into elusive, four-apiece “Rapid Raptor Packages,” the 3rd Wing at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Alaska apparently hopes to sidestep one of the biggest threats to American air power in the Pacific: China’s arsenal of long-range ballistic missiles, primed to hammer American airfields in the event of a major war."
I assure you, it isn't just the Air Force that is thinking like this--the USMC, soon to be armed with the F-35B--is likely to deploy its Airpower in similarly dispersed fashion in a Pacific campaign. One need go no further than the stated military objectives of the Joint Operational
Access Concept (JOAC), and other concepts nested within it, including Air-Sea
Battle and the USMC/USA Concept for Gaining and Maintaining Access to find the intellectual underpinnings of this approach. Chief among these objectives appears to be a
desire to operate in a dispersed fashion, stated directly here (JOAC p. 31) as “A
joint force will lessen its exposure by a combination of dispersion, multiple
lines of operations, speed of movement, agile maneuver that reroutes around
threats, deception, masking or other concealment techniques, and disruption of
enemy intelligence collection through counter-reconnaissance,
counter-surveillance, and other methods. Once arrived in the objective area,
joint force elements can no longer use some techniques to avoid detection and
will therefore rely on active and passive defense measures to defeat actual
enemy attack.” The
JOAC reinforces the importance of robust Phase 0 operations thusly: “…the
challenge presented by opposed access will be determined largely by conditions
created prior to combat…Preparing the operational area will be a continuous
priority effort for combatant commanders, commencing well in advance of combat
and continuing after combat begins…” (p.18).
Sixty plus years of hunkering down in the Pacific has led to a situation in which a considerable amount of U.S. firepower is concentrated in only a few locations. The defense of these locations is largely the responsibility of Army Air and Missile Defense (AMD), using the PATRIOT and THAAD systems. Army
AMD forces are currently postured in the Pacific providing protection to
critical U.S. and allied assets in Japan and South Korea. As with any military capability, decisions
must be made about how those assets are employed and to what degree. With respect to AMD, this process is known as
the “CAL/DAL” process, which identifies a range of critical targets (the
critical asset list, or CAL) representing assets/or locations that the defended
force would wish to defend. The defended
asset list (DAL) represents that portion of the CAL to which available assets
are ultimately apportioned after a process of prioritization. This process takes into consideration threat
capability and likely raid size, target characteristics, and available
defending assets. Ultimately, defended
assets receive protection to a mathematical confidence factor based on the
foregoing attributes. Because ADA is not
limitless, some CAL assets are not protected, and DAL asset confidence factors
are not 100%. Virtually all
AMD assets in the Asia-Pacific are operationally employed in Japan and South
Korea; that is, they are in place and “on mission”, providing air and missile
defense to assets that the United States or its allies consider important.
Japan
and South Korea receive this priority for several reasons. Mutual defense treaties top the list, as does
the presence of considerable U.S. force structure in both countries. Additionally, the lion’s share of AMD related
exercises and theater engagement opportunities are focused on these two
Northeast Asian countries, which is understandable given AMD’s theater posture
and lay-down.
Yet
China’s attention is increasingly drawn South and Southeast, to the nations
ringing the South China Sea. Conflicting
historical territorial claims mix with growing evidence of resource wealth on
the sea-bottom to lay the predicate for future conflict, conflict which could
threaten U.S. interests and those of friends and allies in the region. And while these nations are not (in some
cases) as close to Chinese missile batteries as Japan and South Korea, China’s
ever-increasing missile bombardment envelope now includes most of East Asia,
excluding Australia, nations such as the
Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, Singapore, Vietnam and Thailand. Both Thailand and the Philippines are also
treaty partners with the United States, and Singapore has begun hosting a group
of U.S. Navy ships at its Sembawang Harbor.
So the mismatch emerges; we are proliferating locations and assets to be defended (as the USAF initiative demonstrates), while the primary means to defend them (ADA) remain fixed and largely immobile. Some Airpower enthusiasts would suggest that the stealth inherent in the F-22 (and the F-35B for that matter) mean that dedicated ADA for dispersed operations would be unnecessary or if some were needed, Navy destroyers and cruisers would provide it. I would suggest 1) that is an unhealthy sense of confidence in stealth and 2) that the Pacific Fleet Commander has other jobs for those cruisers and destroyers than fixed base BMD. The Army needs to quickly work with the Air Force to add some level of ADA to this package that could plug into a larger IAMD architecture and provide some level of protection to the Airpower there assembled. One villager with a cellphone/radio is all it takes to target these airfields.
The entire concept of dispersal has at its heart, the objective of creating doubt. Doubt about where are forces are, doubt about how they are defended, doubt about where they will strike.
The
creation of doubt—and its by-product, assurance to allies and partners—begins
in peacetime through the development of innovative increased capabilities and
concepts (such as the Air Force is considering here), and through increased and targeted engagement with traditional and
non-traditional partners essential to obtaining the operational objectives
cited in the Joint Operational Access Concept, not the least of which is force
dispersal. The creation of doubt
continues with active engagement and exercises that stress Joint Force mobility and
unpredictability while gaining operational experience and creating professional
relationships throughout the region.
Should deterrence fail, years of engagement and exercises would have
created a multiplicity of potential sites for Joint Force employment—greatly
complicating the targeting problem of the Chinese. To be honest, the PLA does not have a targeting problem when it comes to US forces; it has a math problem (i.e.--how many missiles are required to overcome the defense).
Put another way, while the current
operational employment of Joint Forces Pacific offers a measure of
protection to critical U.S. and allied interests, it is a known commodity which
can be planned against and around. China’s
ability to produce (relatively cheap) projectiles cannot be matched by U.S.
production of (more expensive) interceptors alone, at least under foreseeable
budgetary environments. The entire Joint Force--and especially Army ADA--must
become more proficient at “thinning the quiver” of the PLA through mobility, deception, integration with other aspects of
military power (i.e. cyber), and weapons diversity, all of which would increase
the odds that in any given missile bombardment, holistic U.S. defenses are not
automatically disadvantaged due to raid size.
I am heartened by USAF thinking here, and I hope that they exercise this capability often and in many places. I would like to see the newly muscular US Army Pacific commander (now a 4 Star) step up and begin to advocate for additional, mobile, networked ADA in the Pacific to exercise with and be employed alongside these USAF Rapid Raptor Packages--EVEN if when the shooting starts, the Rapid Raptor Packages deploy without the ADA. What will have developed over the years would be an operational pattern that would complicate PLA planning. All of this happens in peacetime; all the time. This is an example of how Phase 0 employment of the force can act as a deterrent--which is something that critics of AirSea Battle rarely acknowledge as an attribute of the concept.
In Somalia, We Have a Problem
By now everyone has likely heard a story regarding events Friday evening local time in Somalia, but because the story has been told many different ways and the media has been running a stealth auto-correct campaign to virtually every news article posted as new facts become known, allow me to tell the story as I know it to have happened so you are keen on the details as of October 8, 2013.
In the late evening of Friday October 4, 2024 local time Navy SEALs belonging to the now famous DEVGRU, or SEAL Team 6 depending upon your preference, inserted into Somalia by small boat near the coastal village of Barawe, Somalia. The objective of the SEAL team was to capture, alive, a Kenyan insurgent named Abdukadir Mohamed Abdukadir, known by the nickname “Ikrima.” As the SEALs approached a seaside villa, the target house, they came under fire from security posted near the villa. A firefight broke out almost immediately and the SEAL team came under heavy fire. Rather than fighting a frontal assault, the team withdrew under cover of helicopter gunships back to their boats and returned to a US Navy ship offshore.
Intelligence
One of the most interesting aspects of the action in Somalia on Friday is that the intelligence appears to have been very good. First we have the target, Abdukadir Mohamed Abdukadir (Ikrima), who appears to be a very smart target for the US in the context of a 'capture alive' operation. Ikrima is a foreign militant in Somalia with ties to al Shabaab Central leadership including Ahmed Godane, ties to al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), and ties to al-Hijra - a terrorist organization in Kenya with ties to al Shabaab that is believed to have executed the recent Westgate mall attack. As a central figure he represents an intersection between foreign fighters in al Qaeda, local Somali insurgents, and al-Hijra operating in Kenya. His escape from capture Friday night means he is basically a walking dead man.
The intelligence of the location was also very good, because it turns out the reason for high security was because not only was Abdukadir Mohamed Abdukadir at the villa, but Mahad Mohamed Ali, known as “Karate,” was also there. Mahad Mohamed Ali (Karate) is the leader of Al Shabab’s Amniyat division, the intelligence wing of al Shabaab. According to the Toronto Star, there was a third leader there as well, but the name is not given. The journalist only describes the 3rd individual as Abu Hamza, which is not a name and simply means kunya or "father of," which is not helpful in identification.
Regardless, the presence of three major figures - one of which was the head of al Shabaab's intelligence wing - suggests the intelligence regarding the target villa was good. It is worth pointing out that presence of both Abdukadir Mohamed Abdukadir (Ikrima) and Mahad Mohamed Ali (Karate) in the same place would appear to validate suspicions that the Westgate attack was not only well financed, well planned, and well executed but also demonstrates some coordination between al Shabaab Central leadership and expertise across other organizations in the al Qaeda network. It certainly should trouble folks that multiple large, well resourced al Qaeda organizations were potentially coordinated in the attack at a detailed level, even if the details themselves weren't disseminated widely prior to the attack. Combining expertise and resources from across the various al Qaeda associated groups not only increases the likelihood of attacks, but increases the lethal potential of those attacks.
Environment and Geography
When Kenyan military forces invaded Somalia from the south in October 2011, the offensive was a disaster. Invading during the wet season, the Kenyan Army soon found themselves, literally, stuck in the mud. After slogging their way through the mud for eight months, Kenyan forces were formally integrated into the UN sanctioned AMISOM force in Somalia. That's another discussion for another time, but basically Kenya was granted political cover by the rest of the world for invading Somalia. Finally, in September of 2012 the Kenyan force under the AMISOM flag liberated Kismayo from al Shabaab control. The loss of Kismayo represented the recapture of the last major city stronghold al Shabaab had in Somalia.
The AMISOM military leadership projected expectations that with the loss of control of major cities by al Shabaab, Somalia was at a turning point. The reality is, over the past year AMISOM has done little outside of skirmishes near the towns of Burkakaba, Dinsoor, and Tieyglow - small inland towns north and west of Mogadishu. The lack of offensive military activity by AMISOM since the fall of Kismayo has been matched by a lack of offensive action by al Shabaab, which has spent the last few months in an internal power struggle that appears to have been resolved with Ahmad Godane consolidating his power over al Shabaab in Somalia.
Somalia in October 2013 looks very different than Somalia in 2011, before the Kenyan Army invaded Somalia with the objective of seizing Kismayo. The most important feature change from a military perspective is how the posture of al Shabaab's forces has changed from one of a mobile force roaming the rural country in the exercise of establishing local control to one of consolidated control in a more garrison posture. When US special forces went to Barawe, they basically ran into a garrisoned force that had fortified the city, and it is important to understand that nearly every town under the control of al Shabaab is likewise a fortified town with a garrison force.
It is very important to understand what Somalia is today compared to what Somalia was prior to the AMISOM success of liberating Mogadishu and Kismayo. Westerners often describe Somalia as an ungoverned, lawless territory with an insurgency, but on the ground in southern Somalia it is more akin to a dispersed collection of independent city states loosely affiliated with the Federal Government of Somalia in Mogadishu or a collection of smaller, independent villages under local tribal control under a very strict al Shabaab rule.
In the north with Somaliland and Puntland - both territories are officially unrecognized but self-declared sovereign, autonomous but not yet officially independent states, and are not the focus of this discussion.
Obviously Somalia is much more complicated than I can summarize in a few paragraphs, but I feel this background is necessary for discussing the broader points below that are more relevant to this audience.
US Military and Somalia
In the last week of September, USS Kearsarge (LHD 3) was sent to Djibouti to offload all elements of the 26 MEU and take on board special operations forces including the SEAL team that executed the raid this previous weekend. When a US Navy ship has it's command authority switched over to SOCOM, there are a number of details involved, particularly when it involves an amphibious ship. First, all Marine Corps equipment is offloaded - air, sea, land - everything Marine Corps is taken off the ship. Special operations forces bring it's own everything - including aviation, and there is no such thing as "Joint" in the context of terminology used elsewhere when discussing the US military. There is no such thing as a traditional COCOM command structure for these type of military operations either. Basically, when SOCOM needs something from a COCOM for assistance in situations like Somalia, they tell the COCOM what to give them. It is a one way street, and the COCOM that is supposed to run military operations is often just lucky to get a memo after the fact regarding what happened. It shouldn't be this way, but this is the way counter terrorism policy under the Obama administration works when it comes to special operations forces, some drone activities, and Cyber warfare sourced from DC.
Command authority for special operations off Somalia are directed by the Joint Staff in DC and the National Security Council, with SOCOM integrated throughout. The COCOM is a sideshow when it comes to command authority of these kind of operations.
SOCOM is bringing the tactical and operational lessons learned from Afghanistan, Iraq, and beyond to Somalia, with step one being grab some bad guys for intelligence purposes. It would be a mistake to call the events of last Friday evening a failure, because failing a primary objective is not the same as a failure. The reaction by al Shabaab since the Friday night raid suggests the impacts have, in fact, been anything but a failure.
In response to the raid by US special forces it is noteworthy al Shabaab Central leadership has been remarkably quiet, despite some in western media describing the US Navy SEAL action as a failure. You would think if they saw the events of Friday night as a victory they would be out shouting as much as loud as possible. Not so, none of the major players are doing any such thing. When US special forces hit the villa with some of al Shabaab's top people inside, considerable fear and doubt was injected into the organization. The population in Barawe, through Tuesday morning in Somalia, remains in lockdown with a curfew being enforced. Reinforcements have been sent to increase the garrison there. US intelligence was ultimately too good for al Shabaab's comfort level, and it is a good bet they have spent the last few days turning their own organization inside-out trying to plug security leaks.
Putting doubt into the enemy force is a feature of US special operations.
But the core problem still exists, and someone in the DoD needs to speak up. Somalia under al Shabaab in October of 2013 is a distributed garrison. In the history of special operations in Somalia, I am unaware of a single special operations incident in any area controlled by al Shabaab that took place in a populated town or city that didn't result in a major battle. Jessica Buchanan was in a secluded rural area nowhere near a town. Warsame was taken offshore. Indeed, every reported special operations action by every country that has been reported in the last several years took place outside a populated town or city. There should be no expectation that US special forces will successfully conduct any major operation without a major battle inside an al Shabaab controlled population center, because it has never happened.
And yet, that's apparently the new policy of the Obama administration. The US is apparently going to attempt to conduct low level military operations inside Somalia against al Shabaab forces that are postured like traditional Army forces with an expectation of success and a low profile. To protect SOCOM rice bowls, we are not going to use military forces in the region that operate under COCOM control, because SOCOM is not a joint force and in this case, insists it should not operate with the joint force. There will be no heavy forces provided by the Marine Corps available to help SOCOM if things go bad, and that is an intentional choice that the Command authority for Somalia operations - the Joint Staff in DC and the National Security Council - endorses.
It is policy to discard lessons from 1993 learned in blood in Somalia, but good luck trying to get an explanation from Susan Rice why this policy makes sense, because she is probably completely clueless smiling and nodding to her SOCOM handler oblivious to the details. The lack of experience on the President's National Security Council really does matter, and this is yet another example. Maybe General Dempsey should be asked that question, although given his leadership record, expect him to simply punt the answer to someone not picking up the phone at SOCOM.
I have long believed US special operations forces are incredible, intelligent, and always make good choices, but I have to admit I'm struggling with the policy that has been developed and is being executed by the Obama administration in Somalia in October 2013. From the outside looking in, this looks like SOCOM defending rice bowls for no reason other than defending rice bowls, and while I understand the political reluctance to use Marines in Somalia, it is very hard for me to believe the US is making the best use of Special Forces in Somalia when all of the targets of value are postured in military garrisons.
That isn't going to work.
Looking Ahead
It is going to be interesting to watch Somalia unfold over the next few weeks. I do not see a scenario where special forces find much success trying to grab useful intelligence sources from the fortified town areas al Shabaab controls, because al Shabaab knows we are coming and will have a huge numerical advantage in every fight. Does that mean President Obama will do nothing? Unlikely. The question is, how far is the President willing to go to achieve a meaningful strategic victory against al Shabaab?
Let's be honest, a drone strike on that villa Friday night would have been a huge victory for the US. It is unclear if we would have known how effective the drone strike would have been, but had the US killed Abdukadir Mohamed Abdukadir (Ikrima) and Mahad Mohamed Ali (Karate) that would have been a huge counter terrorism win for the US against al Shabaab.
Some of the instant analysis following this past weekends events suggest the President is moving away from a drone centric counter-terrorism strategy. Not so fast, because in Somalia his preferred alternative of using special operations forces on the ground isn't likely to work out well against garrisoned military forces. That is going to force a decision by the President:
- Increase the use of Drones in Somalia.
- Use the rest of the Joint Force as designed to augment special operations on the ground.
- Nibble ineffectively around the edges of towns and in rural areas with SOF.
The use of Marines and assets of the Joint Force has the potential to significantly increase civilian casualties and the likelihood of US casualties, although used in hit and run operations also give the US a much higher potential for success in significantly damaging al Shabaab. That option may not be politically possible or desirable though.
Which takes us back to contemplating the use of drones, whose demise in recent days has been widely overstated.
Friday, October 4, 2024
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