The Chinese DF-21 Arsenal: An Open-Source Assessment of What its Fielded Composition Says About its Likely Doctrinal Roles

Note: I was originally planning on publishing a series of articles this week on the large-deck aircraft carrier's doctrinal roles, but I'm shifting that to next week as I need a little more time to make final edits. As a result, I'm moving up my series analyzing the DF-21 arsenal. Both series touch on my theme for the first part of this month: the implications of guided munitions inventory management and producibility.

The Chinese People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) Medium Range Ballistic Missile (MRBM) arsenal’s traditional primary role is supporting theater nuclear deterrence.[i] China’s first generation DF-3 series (NATO Designation CSS-2) MRBMs were tasked with holding Indian and Russian targets, as well as major U.S. military forward deployed force concentrations within East Asia, at nuclear risk. As such, they were neither produced in great numbers nor required the terminal accuracy necessary for conventional long-range strike tasks.[ii]

Although some DF-3s remain in service, roughly twenty years ago the PLA began replacing them with the DF-21 (NATO Designation CSS-5) missile series. Unlike its liquid-fueled predecessor, the solid-fueled DF-21 series can be rapidly readied for launch and are therefore harder to interdict when deployed in the field on their Transporter Erector Launchers (TEL).  More significantly, while the ‘original’ DF-21 (CSS-5 MOD 1) and its longer-range DF-21A (CSS-5 MOD 2) variant assumed the historical theater nuclear deterrence role, the more recent DF-21C (CSS-5 MOD 3) and DF-21D (CSS-5 MOD 5) variants were designed specifically to deliver conventional munitions against point targets on land and large ships at sea respectively.[iii]

There are two hypothesized roles for conventionally-armed DF-21s. First, there is a general scholarly consensus that PLA doctrine allows for if not embraces the use of conventionally-armed theater-range ballistic missiles in war-opening/escalating strikes aimed at decisively neutralizing a superior adversary’s forward forces and military infrastructure. This doctrinal tenet is almost certainly independent of the military strategy, doctrine, or force structure and posture options the U.S. might employ for defending its East Asian allies and interests. Beijing’s paramount declared military-strategic objective—the prevention of effective American military intervention on the behalf of an embattled ally in a major East Asian contingency—simply cannot be accomplished with a high degree of confidence absent a PLA first strike. It is resultantly noteworthy (and generally overlooked) that the PLA doctrinal works and professional journal articles advocating conventional first strikes predated the U.S. Air-Sea Battle operational concept’s 2010 introduction.[iv]

Within this context, the conventionally-armed DF-21C’s and -21D’s advantages in range, speed, field-deployed survivability, and defense penetration capabilities relative to PLA strike aircraft make them ideal for maximizing the damage that can be inflicted upon an opponent’s in-theater Command and Control (C²) nodes, military bases’ critical infrastructure and logistical stores, and highest campaign-value forces while minimizing tactical warning of attack.[v] Further, these missiles’ abilities to distract, suppress, or damage the opponent’s most important theater air and missile defense nodes could help support other elements of a PLA first strike, as well as bash down the door for follow-on strikes by PLA assets that would otherwise be quite vulnerable to those defenses. If it is solely configured to perform these war-opening/escalating missions, the peacetime conventional-capable DF-21 inventory only needs to be as large as what would be necessary to create a high probability of successfully neutralizing the relatively small set of high-priority targets assigned to a first strike’s opening waves. This sizing would be possible because surviving and lower-priority targets would likely be assigned to other combat arms for follow-on attacks. DF-21C and 21D inventory sizing along these lines would be consistent with the PLA’s apparent sizing of its SRBM inventories for Taiwan contingencies.[vi] Additional margin might be built into the inventory to provide backup rounds in case some missiles were unavailable for maintenance reasons when a crisis erupted, failed to launch when ordered, or failed to successfully strike the highest priority targets. The operative force-sizing question would be whether the inventory would be earmarked specifically for Sino-American/Japanese contingencies, or whether Sino-Indian or Sino-Russian contingencies would also need to be covered.

The second possible conventionally-armed DF-21 role is performing long range strikes throughout a protracted conflict. These could include preemptive or suppressive strikes against major force groupings as they assemble for an operation, opportunistic strikes against fleeting high campaign-value targets, or direct/indirect fires—including possible feint attacks—in support of PLA Joint combined arms operations. It has been suggested, in fact, that the DF-21D might be used in war for land-based ‘artillery support’ of PLA maritime operations.[vii]  Much like shore-based heavy artillery prior to the mid-20^th Century, this kind of fire support would be exceptionally difficult for an opposing Navy to counter directly. Whereas coastal guns could only cover localized waters, however, the DF-21D possesses a theater-wide coverage area that not only includes China’s immediate periphery but also the maritime approaches to East Asia—and U.S. treaty allies’ homelands.

A conventional-capable DF-21 inventory sized for the campaign-waging role would need to be rather large given the modern historical evidence advanced ordnance expenditure rates would be quite high in a conflict.[viii] This would be accentuated if Chinese leaders believed any notional conventional war would be intense but short, and resultantly opted not to take the extremely cost-inefficient and expensive step of structuring the DF-21C and -21D industrial production and test infrastructures such that they could readily replenish the PLA’s arsenal under combat conditions. Additionally, the more effective the defender’s surviving active and passive missile defenses might be in combat—especially after the first strike’s shock and surprise fades—the more missiles the attacker must launch per salvo to achieve a desired probability of target neutralization. Not only would this probabilistic effect push the PLA’s peacetime inventory size requirements even further upward, but it would also influence PLA combined arms campaign-level contingency planning enormously.[ix]

Tomorrow, unpacking the DF-21 inventory.

---

[i] In this article, a MRBM is defined as possessing a range between 1000-3000km. This conforms to the range niche presently filled by the DF-21 series within the PLA’s arsenal. PLA theater ballistic missiles roles beyond 3000km are filled by Intermediate Range Ballistic Missiles, and those beneath 1000km are performed by Short Range Ballistic Missiles.

[ii] “DongFeng 3 (CSS-2) Intermediate-Range Ballistic Missile.” Sinodefense.com, 27 February 2009, accessed 8/21/14,  http://www.sinodefence.com/strategic/missile/df3.asp

[iii] See 1. “Ballistic and Cruise Missile Threat.” (National Air and Space Intelligence Center, 2013), 14, 17; 2. Mark Stokes. “China’s Evolving Conventional Strategic Strike Capability.” (Washington, D.C.: Project 2049 Institute, September 2009); 3. “DongFeng 21 (CSS-5) Medium-Range Ballistic Missile.” Sinodefense.com, 04 June 2010, accessed 8/21/14, http://sinodefence.com/strategic/missile/df21.asp  4. “DongFeng 21C (CSS-5 Mod-3) Medium-Range Ballistic Missile.” Sinodefense.com, 03 October 2009, accessed 8/21/14, http://www.sinodefence.com/strategic/missile/df21c.asp.

Of note, authoritative publicly-released reports, Congressional testimony, and the like from the U.S. Department of Defense as well as the U.S. Intelligence Community do not call out a CSS-5 MOD 4 variant. This contrasts with the bulk of English-language open source materials on the DF-21 series, which associate DF-21D with CSS-5 MOD 4. This essay will defer to the authoritative U.S. Government products in associating DF-21D with CSS-5 MOD 5. That said, Western observers of the Chinese ballistic missile arsenal should take note of the apparent U.S. Government reporting jump from MOD 3 to a MOD 5 in terms of operational deployments of DF-21 variants.

[iv] For detailed explanations of publicly-available PLA doctrine’s apparent advocacy of first strikes, see 1. Dean Cheng. “Chinese Views on Deterrence.” Joint Forces Quarterly, No. 60 (1st Quarter 2011), 92-101; 2. Ron Christman. “Conventional Missions for China’s Second Artillery Corps.” Comparative Strategy, Vol. 30, No. 3, 198-228; 3. Roger Cliff, et al. Entering the Dragon’s Lair: Chinese Antiaccess Strategies and Their Implications for the United States. (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2007), 13-15, 23, 28-43, 47-50; 4. James C. Mulvenon, et. al. “Chinese Responses to U.S. Military Transformation and Implications for the Department of Defense.” (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2006), 46-47; and 5. Larry Wortzel. China’s Nuclear Forces: Operations, Training, Doctrine, Command, Control, and Campaign Planning. (Carlisle, PA: U.S. Army Strategic Studies Institute, May 2007), 8-14, 36. For a compelling description of reasons why Chinese leaders might be willing to accept the escalatory risks inherent in unleashing conventional first strikes against core U.S. bases in Japan and Guam, see 1. David Shlapak. “Projecting Power in a China-Taiwan Contingency: Implications for USAF and USN Collaboration.” in “Coping with the Dragon: Essays on PLA Transformation and the U.S. Military.” (Washington D.C.: Center for Technology and National Security Policy, National Defense University, December 2007), 91-92; 2. Toshi Yoshihara. “Chinese Missile Strategy and the U.S. Naval Presence in Japan: The Operational View from Beijing.” Naval War College Review 63, No. 3 (Summer 2010): 52-57.

[v] The term “campaign-value” is defined in Jonathan F. Solomon. “Maritime Deception and Concealment: Concepts for Defeating Wide-Area Oceanic Surveillance-Reconnaissance-Strike Networks.” Naval War College Review 66, No. 4 (Autumn 2013): 109.

[vi] David A. Shlapak, et al. “A Question of Balance: Political Context and Military Aspects of the China-Taiwan Dispute.” (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2009), 127-128.

[vii] See James R. Holmes and Toshi Yoshihara. “Mao’s Active Defense is Turning Offensive.”  U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings 137, No. 4 (April 2011): 24-29.

[viii] See for example 1. “Lessons of the Falklands.” (Washington, D.C.: Office of Program Appraisal, Department of the Navy, February 1983), 3, 11, 34, 36; 2. Barry Watts. “The Evolution of Precision Strike.” (Washington, D.C.: Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, 2013), 14-17, 20-23. Note Watts’s observation of the dramatic tradeoff between a precision-guided munition’s combat range and procurement affordability, with obvious implications for inventory sizes.

[ix] Solomon, “Maritime Deception and Concealment,” 94-95.

Some Thoughts on the Use of Land-Based Missiles for Maritime Denial

Eric Lindsey of CSBA published an excellent monograph last month examining how the U.S. Army might field land-based anti-ship missiles and rockets, not to mention air and missile defense systems, to defend forward U.S. allies from aggression. I strongly agree with the concept in principle. Such capabilities would be extremely useful for constraining an adversary’s wartime use of the waters and airspace adjacent to a U.S. ally’s territory. They would definitely increase the adversary’s potential costs and risks of hazarding transits through maritime chokepoints controlled by the ally, conducting close blockades against the ally, or executing amphibious/airborne assaults against the ally. They would provide valuable layers for defense-in-depth against an adversary’s attempts to strike forces and infrastructure located on the ally’s territory or in nearby areas at sea. They could certainly help with carving out temporary ‘pockets’ that support friendly air and naval operations within a contested zone.

There are a few key details, however, that I think require more analytical attention. First, the use of anti-ship missiles for over-the-horizon engagements depends upon scouting. Surveillance could be performed using land-based radiofrequency direction-finding systems or over-the-horizon radars, but neither can positively and confidently verify that a given contact is in fact something worth expending scarce missiles. Reconnaissance assets such as fishing boats, submarines, aircraft, or unmanned vehicles are better suited for the tasks of classifying contacts and cueing missile attacks, but this raises the question of whether their information would be processed through a fusion center that generates a shared situational picture for the entire defense or whether it would be provided directly to the missile units. There are advantages and drawbacks for each that ought to be weighed; my own preference is that missile units would be supported by dedicated scouts (example: light UAVs that are organic to those units) that can also provide their information to a shareable situational picture. All this says nothing of the challenges of preventing the adversary from detecting, interpreting, and exploiting the communications between scout and shooter. The bottom line is that looking at maximum missile ranges alone is insufficient; one must also consider maximum effective scouting range and networking architecture.

Second, while land-based missile systems do have some on-station endurance advantages over warships and aircraft, they are entirely dependent upon the security of the sea and air lines of communication that provide sustenance for their crews, repair parts, and replacement rounds. Hardened, peacetime-prepositioned stockpiles of materiel near these units’ operating areas can help with this, but during wartime these supplies will likely be consumed at a fast rate and certainly will not hold out any longer than they were sized to.

The lines of communications problem is less pressing for continental allies who, by virtue of territorial depth (or friendly neighbors), can access airfields and ports far from the adversary’s effective reach. However, this is a campaign-critical issue for defending allies who are not blessed with that strategic gift. As archipelagoes, Japanese and Filipino lines of communication are solely maritime. Given that they lie within a few hundred miles of continental Asia, their sea lines are inherently vulnerable to interdiction by submarines, and their airfields and ports are inherently vulnerable to aerospace bombardment. The situation is much the same with South Korea, a peninsular country whose hostile northern sibling denies it overland lines of communication. Taiwan’s circumstances should be self-explanatory.

Whereas China’s military clout is not yet sufficient to heavily degrade logistical flows to and then amongst the main Japanese and Philippine islands, there should be no illusions that these flows will be unpressured in a major war. The imposed degree of pressure would likely be greater on the margins for flows from Japan to South Korea. Flows from Japan (or from across the Pacific) to and amongst the central and southern Ryukyus could conceivably be at grave risk. I strongly support emplacing land-based defensive missiles in the Ryukyus as a means of reinforcing conventional deterrence, but unless these weapons are intended to be a wasting asset much more thought needs to be dedicated towards how they would be sustained throughout a protracted conflict. Lines of communication protection would be a central role for naval and land-based air forces; in a Western Pacific contingency it might be their most strategically important task in the aftermath of war initiation. I’ll be writing about this issue again in a few weeks.

Third, some thought needs to be dedicated towards when and how these missile forces would be deployed to the field. Using the Japanese example, let’s say the bulk of such forces were maintained in garrison in the main Japanese islands (or further to the rear in U.S. territories) for deployment to the Ryukyus only in a crisis. This would raise questions of whether crisis deployments could be done quickly and how the Chinese might interpret and react to such movements once they were detected. I would prefer permanent forward garrisoning of missile units on the islands they would be defending, but this would be not be inexpensive and would require significant political capital and resolve. Indeed, as is already evident with our existing forces in Okinawa, it might mean basing U.S. units in localities that may not be thrilled about serving as indefinite hosts.

None of this should be interpreted as hits against what I believe to be a very important tool for strengthening our extended conventional deterrence, and if necessary for defending embattled allies. I do believe, though, that if Army maritime missile force concepts are to gain the traction they deserve the issues above will need to be addressed.

DEPSECDEF Work on the Increasingly Severe Tradeoffs Between Forward Presence and Forcewide Readiness

Back on 30 September, Deputy Secretary of Defense Bob Work gave a speech at the Council on Foreign Relations. His discussion of the way-forward for the U.S. military’s Asia-Pacific rebalance and the status of operations against ISIL is what garnered the most press attention. I wasn’t even aware of the speech until late last week when a colleague cued me to the fact that Work's main topic was actually about how the present U.S. global force posture model is no longer sustainable given the country’s fiscal policies. Suffice to say that this issue is well known to Information Dissemination’s readers. What makes the DEPSECDEF’s speech so noteworthy, however, is that it represents some of the most detailed disclosures I’ve seen thus far regarding the strategic policy changes being explored at the Defense Department’s highest levels.

Below are excerpts from some of the speech's key passages.

On the difficult balance between maintaining sizable forward presence forces (e.g., those that are either permanently forward-stationed in a host country or rotationally forward deployed from the U.S.) and the combat readiness (with particular emphasis on training and material condition) of the between-deployment forces that would be surged forward from the U.S. in the event of a war:

“And the important goal that we're trying to wrestle with right now under intense budget pressure is to get the proper mix between the forces that are forward presence forces and those based in the United States and our U.S. territories, which are our surge forces. That's what we're trying to do…

…So simply put, something has to give. Maintaining our military at such high tempo in this resource-constrained environment is simply no longer sustainable. Period. End of story. It prevents us from properly preparing for future contingencies across the full spectrum of conflict. Now, that is what wakes me up at night, because ultimately preparing the joint force to win wars is what the department does. It is what we are charged to do.

And as we come out more than a decade of fighting irregular warfare campaigns and our potential adversaries across the world continue to advance their inventories of advanced weapons and capabilities, our commanders are saying, hey, I need to have more fight tonight forces, so I need to have more forces forward in theater.

But that just can't happen without us balancing the readiness of the surge forces. It really, really is a tough problem, because we have to take time and money to reset, repair worn-out war equipment, upgrade our weaponry, and train for some very demanding scenarios.

So as we adopt our post-Afghanistan and post-sequestration global posture, we now have to keep an eye focused much more on the surge forces. We've always kept an eye focused on the forward-deployed, ready -- high-ready forces, but now we have to really take a look at it the other way…

…Now, let me be very clear here. We are still going to maintain a robust forward-deployed forces where the strategic rationale is compelling and where our priorities tell us we must do, but our forces won't be large enough to give our combatant commanders all the forces they would want to have in theater at every single moment to be prepared for any regional contingency, because for far too long, as I've said, we've chosen to sacrifice readiness of the surge force or of the base force, instead of reallocating forces that were already out in theaters across combatant commander areas of responsibility.

Now, in the past, we've had sufficient slack in funding and force structure and flexibility to do this. But I have to tell you, based on the fiscal turbulence we face today, our forces are shrinking without question and our flexibility is under pressure, so we can't continue the way we've been doing things for the last twenty years.

So one of the key principles moving forward is that we're going to reprioritize our limited assets and develop innovative ways of maintaining forward presence as we rebuild our readiness. We think we're in a readiness crisis, a readiness trough for two or three or four years, as we try to build out. All of our program says we try to get back to full spectrum readiness at the end of the five-year defense plan. In the meantime, we have to think creatively of how and when to utilize our precious force availability to maximize our strategic imbalance.”

Work then lists several deployment policies such as increasing the forward basing of key presence-maintaining units as practicable, as well as rotational forward deployments of tailored, disaggregated force packages. However, he follows this by indicating a potentially major shift in how U.S. forces will be globally deployed and how conventional deterrence postures in critical regions will be maintained:

“Another way of innovating is what Chairman Dempsey calls dynamic presence. Now, what would happen is normally what we'd do is we'd push all of our forces forward, every single bit of ready forces that we'd have, we'd push forward. And once they got into a COCOM's -- a combatant commander's area of responsibility, you could shift them across borders -- excuse me, the lines of responsibility -- but it was difficult. It took time. We had to go through laborious discussion processes.

What we're trying to do is to try to figure out what is the minimum deterrent force that you might need in a theater and then have the rest of the force being more dynamically used across the world. This is a tough, tough problem, because it's a different way of doing.

If I could say it this way, we are going from a demand side model, where the COCOMs demand forces and we provide them everything that we possibly can, to a supply side model in which we are setting forces out that keeps the balance between readiness and the surge and forward presence and then dynamically tasking it across the world.”

This is remarkable in that it suggests a completely different paradigm for how the COCOMs will be apportioned deployable forces, with the implication that fewer forces on the margins will be deployed at any one time. This touches directly upon the issues regarding sizing and positioning of a conventional deterrent I recently wrote about. There is no way to do what the DEPSECDEF is outlining without taking on greater deterrence risk. The challenge will be in developing new force architectures (e.g capabilities, quantities, positioning, and posture) as well as doctrine for employing such forces that are sufficiently credible to maintain deterrence effectiveness. I will be exploring this in more detail with respect to East Asia in a few weeks.

For now, I urge you to read and think about his prepared remarks in their entirety.

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.

Guided Munitions Inventory Management, Producibility, and their Effects on Strategy (Part 1 of 2)

I’d like to follow up on Bryan’s post from this part March about how the Navy’s intention to end Tomahawk Land Attack Missile (TLAM) procurement in FY15—several years earlier than previously planned, and nearly a decade before the TLAM’s successor reaches Initial Operational Capability—is inescapably fraught with risk. As Bryan correctly observed, should the U.S. be drawn into one or more conflicts during this gap period, it would be impossible to replace TLAMs expended in combat. Nor could the U.S. grow the TLAM inventory during peacetime if strategically necessary; other combat arms would have to assume a greater share of the land-attack load. The resultant risks would be evident to allied and potential adversary leaders alike, perhaps with concomitant effects on American conventional deterrence credibility.

Bryan’s most important points, however, regarded guided munitions-age warfare in general:

“It is not 1939.  We do not have endless untapped industrial capacity that will build 50,000 airplanes and 6000 ships and boats.  We have limited production lines in incredibly high-tech factories that rely on a precious supply of skilled workers who are not reproducible overnight.  Any war with another major power will expend PGM’s at a rate our industrial base will strain to replace.”

His observations were also recently echoed in an outstanding National Interest article by Chris Dougherty, as well as in subsequent commentary by CDR Salamander. My own commentary flows from Bryan’s, Chris’s, and the CDR’s arguments.

The challenges of conventional munitions production in war are hardly new. As Chris noted in his article, Britain’s lack of munitions production infrastructure and its limited access to certain materials necessary to produce the cordite propellants for artillery shells had major battlefield effects—and thus dramatic strategic as well as domestic political effects—during the First World War’s initial twelve months. Nevertheless, munitions production prior to the mid-20^th Century was manpower-intensive and not knowledge-intensive. In other words, workers in munitions factories did not require a great deal of technical knowledge about what they were producing. All that they generally needed to know was how to operate their tools, and teaching this could be done quickly in many cases. If a country possessed a sufficient supply of raw materials, then increasing the number of workers and (readily manufacturable) tools would under most circumstances result in increased munitions production within a given period of time.

This relationship no longer exists. Production of finely-manufactured components such as field-programmable gate arrays, microelectromechanical systems, and monolithic microwave integrated circuits used in modern conventional guided munitions is very time-consuming and often requires workers with months (and sometimes several years) of specialized technical education. The tools required to produce such components require a great deal of time and worker knowledge to manufacture as well. The same holds true for any high-performance alloys or composites used to manufacture the weapon’s body. Furthermore, the resultant weapon’s complexity will generally demand time-consuming factory acceptance testing to ensure it is fully functional and thus ready for field deployment. Production timelines are therefore quite lengthy. TLAM represents this well: it takes two years to produce a round once ordered, and some of its key components have 20-month lead times (many of which are likely subcontracted out to small niche manufacturers). Bryan was quite right, then, when he noted that guided munition production could never be as rapidly expanded as was the case with ‘dumb’ munitions up through the Second World War. One could even argue that today’s situation has more in common with the pre-industrial era, in which a prime limiting factor on armaments production leaned was the availability of tradesmen who had gained their skills through years of apprenticeship.

It also stands to reason that as a guided weapon’s capability increases, so does its unit procurement cost. A weapon’s range is a very good proxy for its unit cost, and as the price tag increases relative inventory size decreases. Barry Watts’s excellent 2011 monograph, “The Evolution of Precision Strike,” hammers this home. Watts contrasted the Department of Defense’s (DOD) FY12 Programs of Record (PoR) for two precision-guided air-launched munitions: the roughly 500 nautical mile-range Joint Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile-Extended Range (JASSM-ER) and the roughly 15 nautical mile-range Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM). According to his source, DOD’s publically-available December 2011 Selected Acquisition Report (SAR) to Congress, FY12 program plans called for inventories of 2,531 JASSM-ERs at roughly $1.5 million a copy and 232,875 JDAMs at roughly $27,000 a copy.[i] Watts noted that this translated into a nearly 50x JASSM-ER average unit cost premium over JDAM, with obvious implications for the inventory sizes of both. For comparative purposes, per the December 2013 SAR the TLAM Block IV PoR appears to carry an average unit cost of roughly $1.38 million.

Now let’s look at the demand-side of guided munitions economics. As Chris Dougherty observed, ever since the First Gulf War the defining popular assumption about modern conventional combat has been that guided munitions employment results in short but intense conflicts. The rationale for this is straightforward: if only a few guided munitions must be fired in a single salvo to gain a high probability that at least one will successfully neutralize or destroy a given target, and if platform production is even more time-intensive than was the case during the Second World War, then once one of the belligerents loses enough campaign-critical platforms or endured enough damage to its military infrastructure (bases, command and control architecture, logistical support, etc.) the conflict should wrap up fairly quickly.

Such a view is overly simplistic. Bryan, Chris, and the CDR were quite correct in noting that guided munitions expenditure rates are likely to be quite high in a major conventional conflict—perhaps significantly higher than prewar planners’ assumptions. This is not mere conjecture; it is a historically recurring fact. In conflicts ranging from the 1982 Falklands War to NATO’s 2011 strike operations against Libya, forces’ operational tempos became pressured and their ability to attain campaign objectives faced steeper risks when they expended certain advanced ordnance types faster than they had anticipated.

Sometimes these consumption rates were driven up on the margins by malfunctioning munitions. It stands to reason that the more complex a system is, the higher the latent risk that an undiscovered design shortcoming or subtle manufacturing flaw (sometimes unique to very specific operating environments or tactical circumstances) will reveal itself at a very inconvenient moment. Robust testing and evaluation throughout a weapon program’s entire lifecycle can reduce but never completely eliminate this risk. While highly effective mitigations can be employed to operationally and tactical hedge against malfunctions during combat, the overall inventory still declines with each munition fired.

Guided munitions expenditures were also affected by targeting ‘quality.’ Despite their use of advanced intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance systems, modern belligerents have unilaterally wasted weapons against naturally-occurring phenomena (example: ambiguous or misinterpreted sensor contacts); civilian vehicles, vessels, and aircraft mistaken for military platforms; and invalid sites (example: structures that the attacker incorrectly believes to contain adversary forces or resources). Similarly, on several occasions wily belligerents have been able to entice their opponents into wasting advanced munitions against decoy forces or lowly-valued infrastructure. The fog and friction of combat makes it impossible to completely eliminate munitions wastage due to forced or unforced errors; the only question is how well one’s targeting methods and firing discipline holds down the frequency of mistakes. Soviet submarines’ anti-surface warfare tactics provide an excellent example of this in practice, as their commanders were indoctrinated to fire torpedoes from extraordinarily close ranges to targeted ships in order to avoid wastage of these difficult-to-replace weapons.[ii]

A belligerent’s guided munitions consumption rates would be additionally affected by its opponent’s technological, tactical, and doctrinal countermeasures. If the only thing active and passive defenses did was drive up the salvo size an attacker needed to use in order to achieve a desired ‘kill probability,’ the attacker could compensate by manufacturing more munitions as possible. However, this assumes the attacker was able to base its peacetime munitions procurement decisions upon a thorough and accurate understanding of its opponent’s holistic defensive effectiveness. This may not be attainable with high confidence outside of wartime experience, with the result being that more weapons may need to be expended per defended target to achieve a ‘hit.’

A final wrinkle occurs if a war becomes protracted. Even if a belligerent exhausts its opponent’s ability to wage peer-level warfare, the latter may be unwilling to immediately concede strategic defeat. As Japan demonstrated with its kamikaze operations of 1944-45, it is quite likely that a weakened but still resolute opponent would embrace unconventional operating concepts in hopes of driving the stronger side’s costs of war continuation up to politically intolerable levels. Ending the opponent’s ability to fight on in this way might require many more guided munitions than what was necessary to neutralize his mainline forces. As Clausewitz reminds us, a nation’s will to fight is driven by its leaders’ political objectives and its people’s passions. Unless both of these factors are either brought to heel (if such a thing is possible in a given conflict) or otherwise satisfied through some sort of political settlement, a conflict can continue on in ways and forms that prevent the stronger side from merely pocketing its gains and walking away.

The aforementioned considerations highlight the very real possibility that a country might find out the hard way that its prewar stockpile of one or more advanced munitions types was inadequate for achieving its strategic objectives. As I’ve noted previously:

“A firing decision can therefore represent a hefty opportunity cost to the attacker, as the weapons inventory must be managed against requirements needed for the duration of the campaign and as coercive “bargaining chips” for the political-diplomatic endgame. It follows that the more complex a weapon or the more limited the resources the attacker can allocate to its production, the longer its users must wait for replacements. In a prolonged conflict, the effect is magnified if the defender can restore damaged units’ most operationally important capabilities faster than the attacker can replenish weapons. All of this means that it may not matter whether cost differentials allow the attacker to procure several times as many offensive weapons as the defender has ships, aircraft, or land-based sites. It also may not matter that the number of offensive weapons available significantly exceeds the number of targets in track. As with all decisions involving a scarcity, the central metric would seem to be the prospective attacker’s self-estimated campaign-level opportunity cost of striking at a given point in time.” (Pg. 95)

The nature of this opportunity cost varies: the employment of relatively expensive standoff-range weapons draws down arsenals that are difficult to replenish during war, while the employment of relatively inexpensive and therefore numerous short-range weapons exposes firing platforms (and skilled personnel) that may be even more difficult to replace. It is also important to note that this logic applies just as much for defensive guided munitions such as surface to air missiles and ballistic missile defense interceptors as it does for offensive guided munitions.  

Tomorrow, a concluding look at how munitions inventory sizes and producibility will not only affect a strategic concept's viability, but also may shape the characteristics of a given war.

---

[i] Of interest, the December 2013 SAR indicates a planned inventory of 2,877 JASSM-ERs and 272,648 JDAMs at roughly the same unit costs reported in December 2011.

[ii] Norman Friedman. Network-centric Warfare: How Navies Learned to Fight Smarter through Three World Wars. (Annapolis, Md.: Naval Institute Press, 2009), 341.