Published Airpower Journal -
Winter 1993
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THIS ARTICLE is about annulling marriages, but not the marriages that bind people to people. Rather, it focuses on the "marriages" that bind the military departments, the services, to their declared need for specific weapons for combat. Even so, both types of marriages have some similarities. The observer can see the similarities by viewing human marriage from afar--objectively and in the abstract. Viewing it from within, the observer interacts with the thing observed to the degree that perceptions are often inaccurate.1
In the abstract, the function of secular human marriage is to promote social order by facilitating the orderly transfer of property, and it has nothing to do with love, passion, or procreation--all of which are not essential to marriage because all can exist without marriage. We do not, however, experience marriage in the abstract. On a more personal and less abstract plane, marriages function to formally and legally bind human beings in relationships with other human beings. At a very personal and concrete level, marriage recognizes, seals, and sanctions the intimacy that, for example, "Pat" shares with "Chris."2 Pat and Chris may not recognize that their intimate bond fulfills the social need for the more orderly conveyance of property. They may not realize this unless their circumstances change, forcing them to contemplate the dissolution of their personal marriage. Only then may they see and admit that abstract marriage is and was about the ownership and conveyance of concrete property.
Like human beings in relationships with one another, the services enter into relationships--"marriages"--with the instruments of warfare. At the higher levels of abstraction, these instruments exist to provide the capability to fulfill specific functions. There is, for example, a perceived need for the capability to strike an enemy from long range with a large number of weapons arriving at one time. This requirement for warfare is detached in the abstract from any service. Yet, sometimes through good sense, romance, tradition, habit, or negotiation, the services personalize their relationships with both requirements and capabilities. When they do, the requirement or capability takes a very specific and intimate form. The requirement for a long-range, high-volume weapon delivery system transforms itself into the intimate relationship between the Air Force and the B-2, between the Navy and the carrier battle group, or between the Army and the attack helicoper. Unless the environment changes or their circumstances change, the services can remain happily wed to their personal, intimate, and concrete forms for satisfying abstract needs.
Things have changed. The environment has changed. The changes continue. This article argues that dramatic changes demand equally and appropriately dramatic responses. To respond to the changes in ways that preserve our capacity to serve our country, we must go through a mental process, using John Boyd's words, of "destructive deduction" in order to allow "creative induction."3 By mentally dismantling the relationships and structures that exist today, we can be led to discover the new relationships that a changed environment demands. With this aim in mind, this article proposes ways to reframe the roles, missions, and functions debate that can guide us toward making positive changes. It argues that we now need to annul some old "marriages" to form new and better relationships between the services and their instruments for future warfare. These new relationships affect each of the services as the operational media of air and space become more important to present and future war fighting. A commitment to answer the still-unanswered question What is best for our country? underpins these arguments.4
For over four decades, our country and most of us accepted the fact that we were engaged in a cold war with the Soviet Union. Adopting George Kennan's proposed strategy of containment, we contained the Soviet Union and it collapsed.5 Yet, our victory surprised us, as many of our victories do. We apparently did not presume we would succeed in this "war." As a consequence, the heralded "new world order" is, as Secretary of Defense Les Aspin observed, more new than it is orderly.6 The changes unleashed by the disintegration of the Soviet Union will reverberate for decades. If we lacked a vision or a plan to capitalize on our victory in 1990, we should not wait until 1995 or 1996 to acquire or to craft one. If we wait much longer, we are more likely to be victims of chaotic change than agents controlling, moderating, and reordering its effects.
When dramatic changes occur in the environment, the organic systems within it--human beings, armed forces, nations--must adjust. According to Ilya Prigogine's theories regarding order and chaos, living systems can respond to major changes in the environment in one of two ways: they can escape to a "higher order" by reorganizing or transforming themselves, or they can collapse.7 Some kind of order emerges from chaos, but absent our initiative, it may not be the kind or order we expect or want.
When the United States emerged as the sole victor of the cold war, it became the planet's only superpower. We are now in "first place" with the next closest competitor many places behind. Our cold war victory led to a strategic pause, an interval during which our country has no clear and present military threats to its vital interests.8 Like any war, the cold war fatigued the nation. Our citizens crave rest, domestic improvements, and changes in their economic condition. These popular goals do not translate into increasing military appropriations. Yet, the uniformed leaders of our armed forces are only slowly and painfully realizing the unwillingness or inability of our citizens to sustain large forces, or the wrong forces, just because we have them, plan to build them, or have begun to build them. To most of our citizens, "right sizing" clearly means "downsizing." We will have fewer and smaller forces. How can we fulfill the obligations of a democratic superpower with smaller forces?
We can fulfill our obligations with smaller forces if form follows function and reason and logic dominate the process of reordering and reconstituting our armed forces. Toward that end, our civilian leaders have issued a mandate to our nation's military leadership: define and evaluate the fundamental functions the armed forces must fulfill in the future and organize and arm these forces in the ways that best and most thoughtfully and economically fulfill those functions.9 Explicit in this mandate is the call to eliminate costly duplication and unnecessary redundancy. Management reforms--including such things as centralization, regionalization, and streamlining--resonate (if not in harmony, at least in chorus) with the mandate. The edict to reorganize and reform the armed forces promises continual and cascading changes for the services. How have our military leaders responded?
The Air Force proclaimed its post-cold-war role first and commenced reorganization well ahead of the other services. Each of the other services then answered the call to reform by producing its own new and revised statement of purpose. Each service's statement asserts the unique and continuing contributions that only that service, preserved in its present form, can make to our nation's security.10 All of these documents also assert the ascendancy of and the critical need for specific technological solutions--programs, hardware, and organizational forms--required to meet the expected demands that future enemies are likely to place on what today are our Army, our Navy, and our Air Force. Viewed from afar--objectively and in the abstract--each of these documents contains more advocacy than analysis, more declaration than proof. Shortly thereafter and in compliance with the law, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff submitted the required biennial review of the roles, missions, and functions of the armed forces. It proposed some changes but stimulated the secretary of defense to order a more thorough review.11 In the tumult of changes in the environment, the services at least provided one element of continuity--the apparent unwillingness to make major changes.
We will change if only because we cannot avoid changing. Change is difficult but not impossible. There are only two impediments to change within the armed forces: romance and tradition. A third impediment exists outside of the armed forces: selfishness. That roadblock, erected by those who control and profit from controlling the means of weapon production, is not present if they are sworn to always put the country first. Each of these three impediments can be overcome if we are willing to understand them in the abstract and to grapple with them in the concrete. Logic and the commitment to do what is best for our country provide countermeasures to romance and tradition. Even so, romance and tradition are powerful. We need to understand the influence that romance and tradition exert. Romance sparked the marriages that exist between the services and their instruments of warfare today. Should logic threaten romance, tradition may intervene to sustain these marriages.
To begin with, we have romanticized the profession of arms. By "romanticized," I mean that in living the military profession, in immersing ourselves in our personal responses to the call to arms, we may have lost sight of the objective characteristics of armed force. In the abstract, our profession requires organized and more-or-less controlled killing and destruction to serve political objectives. Akin to hunting, it formerly required the physical strength and stamina necessary for stalking and killing.12 Technology now allows much killing and destruction for a very small investment of strength. In some force elements, killing and destruction also require very little stamina. Air forces provide an example. The limits of technology originally demanded the human sensory abilities, muscle, computational capability, and the stamina to drive and operate aircraft effectively. Romantic notions of warfare originally stipulated that males must do this work. That has changed. Romance and tradition now argue that humans should do it. That can change. Air forces today may suffer from the same myopia that afflicted their cavalry forebears: technology altering warfare more quickly than warriors can see the need to outgrow romance.
The services have also romanticized their roles, enshrining them in tradition. In the past, distinctive operational environments imposed different demands on the armed forces, and differentiation occurred. Armies, navies, marine forces, and air forces are one way of organizing forces. Over time, effectiveness demanded and technology allowed commonalities in capabilities among the differentiated force elements. Only romance and tradition argue that we preserve the differentiation among our forces in those areas where technology has illuminated the fact that we are preserving distinctions without a difference. Again, air forces provide an example. Each force element found its effectiveness enhanced by control and exploitation of the air or space. Hence, each force element created its own air force, then its own space force. Each service realizes that the air and the space media are to present and future war fighting what the carbon molecule is to life itself. Armies cannot operate effectively without freedom from observation and attacks by air. Naval forces cannot operate without freedom from observation and attacks by air. Someone, something, some capability, or set of capabilities must exist to control the air and the space media so as to see, hear, target, and touch the enemy. Tradition would seem to require that Air Force pilots, flying aircraft, do most of this work. Logic suggests that this is but one alternative. Even so, the traditions of our separate armed forces, the decades and decades that they operated autonomously even while building systems and acquiring capabilities that mimicked one another, are now a powerful roadblock to change.
The shackles of tradition will be difficult to break, especially where the resource allocation process has institutionalized tradition. Tradition begot a process wherein each service could count on its fair share of the defense appropriation and was relatively free to spend it to pursue its own force structure, readiness, and modernization programs. Analysis of needs at the service level often took the form of advocacy. The quest for "jointness," for the more thoughtful integration of capabilities, had to be resisted, and was, because it imperiled the autonomy of the services. The pace of the resource allocation cycle, the existence of analytical-advocacy agencies within each service and among its hired consultants, and--until recently--the stimulus provided by the Soviet Union all worked together to keep service budgets large and relatively constant. On occasion, some people may even have employed foot-dragging, slow-rolling, and staff guerrilla warfare.
This process also enshrined numbers: the 600-ship Navy, 15 carrier battle groups, 100 B-1B aircraft, and the long-lost 70-bomb-wing Air Force. These numbers could be compared to the numbers required or consumed in World War II to demonstrate that World War II could not be refought in the same way without the same numbers. During the heyday of the cold war, planners could array Soviet, Chinese, North Korean, and Warsaw Treaty Organization numbers and, where ours were fewer, could argue the need for "more" for our side. That the numbers were somewhat meaningless benchmarks was lost on all but a few. Even today, force structure numbers are the basis of arguments that dominate service polemics. Although numbers are not a reliable indicator of capability, they pervade the sometimes tautological arguments involved in assessing capability and may be little more compelling than such things as the number of oceans, the miles of coastline, or the numbers we had three years ago. What does an esoteric "fighter wing equivalent," for example, communicate about sorties-per-day, targets-per-sortie, functional effectiveness, or systemic capability? Perhaps it was for these and other reasons that even the celebrated "base force" has been relegated to the dustbin.13
Romance and tradition are powerful motivators to those of us fighting from the trenches. They help ordinary people accomplish extraordinary feats. Even so, we must see romance and tradition as a form of bias. They should have little influence in the force-structuring and resource-allocation process. In these arenas, we must give logic and reason the dominant place. We must also respectfully distance ourselves from any inclination to put a service or a system ahead of our country's best interests. And we should not feel guilty or behave as if we were guilty because we reached this point in history and are struggling to cope with the changes we helped unleash. We also would do well to keep in mind that romance and tradition afflict political parties and the critics of the military as much as they afflict the military. The debates over upgrading the B-1B provide one example. There is, for example, neither guilt nor blame accruing to those who advocated the B-1B bomber and brought it into the operational inventory. We built it exclusively to penetrate the multiple rings of defenses that protected the "evil empire" and to strike it with devastating nuclear force. The B-1B can be adapted at some cost to fulfill other functions, of course. Yet, objectivity demands that it compete as one technological solution to the problems posed by the target sets of the future. It should not be discarded as the "Republican bomber" or the "Reagan bomber," nor should it even be modernized if 30 or 50 more B-2 aircraft or some other capability provides a better and more economical form of technological solution.
The same is true for new carrier-based and land-based strike aircraft. We have not avoided the influence of romance and tradition nor reached the appropriate level of abstraction or analysis if we only ask How many? or What characteristics do these aircraft require? Rather, we must use "deductive destruction" to ask Why carriers? and Why not unmanned or remotely piloted vehicles? The functions demanded must determine the form, not the familiar numbers advocated or the traditional modernization expected. Do we really need aircraft for the "defensive counterair" or the "offensive counterair" functions? Can we protect ground forces with better and more economically organic and ground-based area and point defense technologies? Do solutions to the defensive problems posed by battlefield ballistic missiles pave the way for defense against intercontinental land- or sea-launched ballistic missiles? Are we advocating solutions even before we define or understand the problem?
Continuing in this vein, must "fire-and-forget" antiaircraft missiles be fired by an aircraft? Why must the aircraft that fire them have a human being on board? For example, what essential future functions will the F-22 or the later series of B-2 aircraft fulfill that absolutely require human beings on their flight decks? Which of the technological solutions to the problems posed by space operations have utility for solving the problems posed by atmospheric or terrestrial warfare? Might we already have enough platforms for "things" even though we lack smarter and better weapons for the platforms to carry?
One of the areas overripe for review is "close" air support. The function of close air support can and will continue to be fulfilled by forces formed within and organic to the force elements that employ them. The battlefield must be viewed through a panoramic macroscope--not as we are used to looking at it, through the lenses of separate service microscopes. What are the logical and essential differences between an A-10 and a Blackhawk? Propulsion? Ownership? The bonds of matrimony? A series of integral bottom-to-top reviews likely will illuminate other traditional air and aerospace functions that may, over time, have become or been misplaced or malassigned. One can thus expect the heretical questions posed about to be asked and answered in the continuous processes of review and rationalization. One can also expect the services, even though affected by romance and tradition, to answer the questions posed honestly. Can one also expect the weapons-producing industries to do the same?
World War II was good for business. The weapon producers garnered large profits during the Vietnam era. The whole cold war was profitable for them.14 Can they now participate as unselfish partners in a series of functional reviews and studies conducted every summer? Can they help with analysis that is divorced from advocacy? As long as there is a military-industrial marriage to the old notion of "surge" and "the prolonged war," we will be inadequate unless we have continuously operating military shipyards and aircraft production lines, a surplus of depots, and huge inventories of the stores necessary to refight and rewin World War II. The notion of the "defense-industrial base" goes hand in glove with extant but antiquated notions of brute force warfare.15 The future demands more attention to the "defense technology base." Can industrialists annul their marriage to the advocacy for brute force warfare? Can they divorce themselves from the support of unchanging or unchanged services and the arcane tools of a bygone era? Yes, they can, and for three reasons.
First, they are patriots too. Second, functional reviews focusing on the generation of the best technology to solve the problem sets of the future ultimately will require them to build this technology. There is money to be made there. Third, these solutions can spawn ever-increasing technological sophistication, better commercial competitiveness, and even more production. In the "high-low" mixes that are likely to emerge as the candidate force structures of the future, the "low" is profitable because it will be procured and produced in mass. The "high" is profitable because it is usually wonderfully complex, sophisticated, and costly. And, of course, we undoubtedly will preserve the essentially brute-force forces necessary to take and hold the land. A costly tail of beans, bullets, bandages, and bottled water inevitably follows these forces.
As romance, tradition, and selfishness are set aside, tremendous opportunities emerge for our country and for our friends and allies. It would be unwise to make changes for the sake of change, to eliminate or add functions without compelling reasons, or to craft architectures or forms that only result in providing aid or comfort to future enemies. Nonetheless, if the best organizational forms require radical alteration of existing, traditional forms, so be it. It is clear that our armed forces must and will change. This is a consequence of a new paradigm. That these changes be made intelligently and sensitively is the challenge before us. We are required to meet the challenge.
One agenda we may wish to consider has five steps: (1) deduce the essential functions and capabilities required by armed forces, (2) generate candidate technological solutions that fulfill those functions, (3) jointly select the best solutions, (4) commit the resources necessary or available to field the best solutions, and (5) embrace the organizational forms that use the best technological solutions to best fulfill the functions.
An analysis of our national security needs defines the functions of armed force. The functions determine the best form/forms that our forces should take. It will be difficult for us to define the objective functions of force in the abstract. It will be even more difficult for us to make the courageous decisions necessary to select the right forms.
We must rely on our civilian leadership, the Joint Chiefs of Staff (keeping in mind that each chief is also the head of a separate and sometimes parochial military department), the Joint Staff, and the commanders in chief (CINC) of the unified commands to be our honest brokers as we redefine essential functions and appropriate forms. Since we can expect that honest brokerage will occur, the agenda proposed will satisfy the call to reform and re-form our armed forces. If it cannot or does not occur, change will continue, but it will be full of unnecessary surprises. At some point, someone or something will compel us to stop insisting that we can put the same familiar square pegs into new round holes.
Analysis of the campaign plans of the CINCs provides the key to meeting the agenda. The campaign plans describe the operational geography of each area of responsibility in rich detail, stipulate the capabilities of potential enemies and enemy coalitions within the region, and describe what is required to incapacitate adversary systems--and, most importantly, the adversary as an organic system--within the area of responsibility.16 Campaign planning capitalizes on the "total quality" revolution by allowing us to see the generation of offensive or defensive force as the "process" of a "system." As we come to better understand total quality and better describe and improve our own processes, we learn much about adversary processes and vulnerability. Key nodes--essential interdependencies between "customers" and "suppliers" and the vulnerability created by transportation, information acquisition and distribution, capacity, inventory, and throughput--all reveal themselves. This process-oriented approach can allow us to improve our own national combat capability--our own campaign plans--if we can see that capability as the holistic product of more effectively integrated, organized, and networked activities. Analyses of the enemy and enemy processes can also allow us to discern the functions of force within a geographical area of responsibility.
Yet, we should anticipate problems if we discover that our organizational structure for commands is flawed. The land is the seat of purpose, so most commands are organized for operations within a geographic area. Analysis of needs may suggest that future commands be organized to operate in time, not in geographic space. In this review process, we will also have to confront the problem posed by extraterrestrial space. If "space" is not a mission but is instead a place, then it too will be an area of responsibility, a strategic zone, or part of a very large extraterrestrial area contiguous to the areas of responsibility assigned to the CINCs. As air power and space power shrink the globe, geographic areas of responsibility logically will become larger in size and fewer in number.17 However we organize, we must be prepared for threats and dangers from enemy systems.
Understanding enemies as organisms or systems illuminates the essential functions of force and the capabilities required by force elements. It also helps us better understand our own force-production and force-employment schemes. For example, if an enemy possesses an air arm with 400 MiG-29 aircraft, we might believe we need 400 F-15 or F-14 aircraft to defeat it. Yet, if we learn that there is a significant mismatch in operational capabilities because of logistics factors (mean time between maintenance, sortie-generation rate, time to rearm and relaunch, dependence on avionics systems with high failure rates, and so on) or because of operations factors (vulnerability of communications systems, shortage of trained pilots, insufficient training experience in night flying, lack of current intelligence, limitations in airborne warning or control capabilities, and so on), the mismatch in numerical strengths can be to our advantage with only 100 F-14 aircraft or perhaps even 25 F-15 aircraft. That we made much of the fact that Iraq, for example, had the world's fourth largest land army and sixth largest air force may say less about comparative capabilities than it does about our fondness for numbers and our unwillingness to discover or appreciate authentic measures of merit.18
Moreover, in the rigorous analysis of enemy capability and the authentic search for the functions we must execute to defeat it, we will learn that there are other possible technological solutions that defeat the utility or function of enemy capability than merely opposing symmetrical capabilities.19 In the case of the MiG-29 above, perhaps F-15 or F-14 aircraft are not the best solution. Perhaps long-range, precision guided ground- or sea- or space-launched runway-cratering munitions in sufficient numbers to destroy all the enemy's runways simultaneously might be a better solution. Another solution might be an aerial umbrella created by ground-launched antiaircraft missiles. There are, in short, more alternatives to defeating the effectiveness of 400 aircraft than merely opposing them with 400 of our own. Yet, if the ownership or operation of F-15 or F-14 aircraft is seen by the aviators in the separate services as more valuable than alternative ground-based systems that have the same or greater effectiveness against a specific threat, we will continue to generate "air" solutions to what we will continue to insist are--by tradition, doctrine, and budget--air force problems.
As the combined CINCs analyze their campaign plans and "black world" capabilities are shared, we will learn that numbers count less than the nearly perfect employment of the right technological solution to the systemic challenges posed by an enemy. Moreover, some breakthrough and breakaway technologies--the best solution to some problems--may provide the foundation, the important first step, in solving other--more complex--problems. The nonnuclear cruise missile was one of these breakaway technologies. There are others. If, for example, we develop the capability to solve the defensive counterair problem in a relatively small area of responsibility without manned airborne systems, will we not be better prepared to solve the analogous problem when the area to be protected is our larger homeland? In so doing, would we not have or preserve authentic technological "super" power?
Technological solutions that pivot on our aerospace superiority and its preservation ensure that we will retain super power. Aviation, air power, and aerospace operations are at the heart of the present roles, missions, and functions debate. Aerospace operations are the nexus of war fighting today and will be in the future. Command of the electromagnetic spectrum, knowledge of the enemy, global synchronization in time and space, the coup d'oeil, and effective decision making are not possible without the control and exploitation of air and space. Even so, one must be suspicious of air-alone solutions to the problems posed by enemy forces. The land is and will continue to be the seat of purpose. "No-fly" zones can sweep the skies, but control of the skies is merely a prerequisite to a solution and should not be viewed as the military solution for most problems.
Whose responsibility it ought to be to control the aerospace and who is to possess and operate aerospace instruments of force are the central issues in the present debate. Technology provides an evergrowing range of candidate solutions to the problems posed by enemy capabilities. Any service can press the buttons of the weapons of the future. Who ought to possess these weapons and press these buttons is the question that must be answered. The Air Force asserts that it ought to be the air force. Others assert that "air" and "space" are "places" in which all force elements need to operate. There is no "aerospace," they argue, no compelling reason that the Air Force should be given the lead and the resources to dominate it. The truth is that the Air Force has organized, trained, and equipped itself to be the leading force in both air and space. The truth is that the Air Force intends that leadership to continue. What is best for our country?
We must reframe the debate in terms of what is best for our country with an authentic willingness to annul the marriages that are no longer appropriate. It is good that we continue to engage in the process of review, that we strive to understand the capabilities of potential future enemies. It is good that we generate possible solutions to the problems posed by enemy capabilities. It is wise to recall that in the heyday of their respective technologies--their solutions--the horse-mounted fighter, the gunsmith-artillerist, the entrenchment-wise engineer, and the human pilot first dominated, then became just another contributor to the science and art of warfare.20
As technologies became assimilated into warfare, warfare became less linear, asymmetrical, and a multimedia activity. Combined arms logically evolved into joint arms. Joint arms evolve into integrated arms. Integrated arms can beget unified arms. Today we "unify" arms, or think we unify them, within an area of responsibility or around a function assigned to a CINC. Keep in mind that, although this is one way and our traditional way to unify arms, it may not be the best way. A different way may be to have an air force and a surface force providing forces to the CINCs of a rapid response force and a sustainment force. Different, however, is not necessarily better. It may be that a kind of natural selection governs the process of evolutionary changes in organizational forms. If the environment is changing and our armed forces are adapting inadequately, they will pass from history along with the Red Army that long defined them. It may be that the failure to envision and imagine is the most serious threat we face.21 There are other threats or "dangers," of course. Super power can keep these irritants manageable.
The post-cold-war world is an unstable world. It is a world of sovereign nations competing for scarce resources. Strangely, in the world that is emerging, one nation's enemy will inevitably be another nation's valued customer, supplier, or market. Treaties, agreements, and an awareness of interdependency may provide increasing constraints on the use of force for conflict resolution. Even so, renegades may emerge in the lesser-developed nations. On balance, however, the armed forces of the lesser-developed nations lack the military capabilities that the great powers and the recently great powers possess. They also lack the intellectual and doctrinal architecture necessary to employ these capabilities to greatest effectiveness. As organisms, their nations and their armed forces, lethal and technologically sophisticated though these forces may be, are primitive and simple when compared to ours. Exploitable vulnerabilities exist in their warfare-supporting transportation infrastructures, production, communications, logistics movement and resupply systems, training, and sustainability. Even though their numbers may be large and their hostile will powerful, many lack the total capability required to pose a real threat where coalitions oppose them. Diplomacy can effectively hold many of these potentially renegade nations in check, but others may have to be smashed. Among the first to be smashed might be those insistent upon enslaving atomic energy for warfare and those given to disruptive opportunism and adventurism beyond their borders.
Many of these nations have immature military architectures even though they possess modern weapons. Their capabilities are "lopsided," and we have the wherewithal to unbalance them and defeat their centers of gravity. Their armed forces are well behind ours in the evolution from combined arms to joint arms and on toward unified arms. We should neither regress in our own evolution--in our progress to better integrate the capability of our own ground, air, and maritime forces--nor surrender the capability to achieve military objectives by failing to use any of the war-fighting media effectively.
Even so, it is also possible that a review will determine that the future requires more of one kind of force than another kind. In their days, Rome, Carthage, and France were land powers, and Portugal and England were naval powers, as befitted their national objectives.22 Oceans and coastlines neither make a nation a "maritime power" nor require that a nation fancy itself one. On the other hand, cannot one argue that any nation that regards itself as an authentic air and space power is automatically a maritime power? Air and space enshroud the planet. The oceans only surround the continents. The question of "power" must focus on the kind of power and the functions of the force required to meet the nation's objectives. The characteristics of opposing power are no less important. Consider the potential national security consequences if some nation organized as a corporation developed an affordable pollution-free vehicle and the means to produce it in large numbers. Would we threaten this nation/corporation with our F-22s and B-2s to prevent the collapse of our own automobile manufacturers? By reframing the debate as a broad search to define the functions that should determine our forms, we may come to agreement on what is best for our country.
None of this is possible if we remain wed to the past. None of this is possible if we continue to be married to the processes, structures, and forms of a bygone era. Our country and our country's leadership call us to change, to undertake the process of re-forming and reforming our armed forces. It is time to annul some marriages, and the time is running out. This strategic pause will not last forever. These are, in the worse and likely case, merely the new interwar years. We can prolong them by reforming our armed forces. We have everything it takes to emerge victorious from whatever future fights our capability cannot deter. The essential first step is the willingness to annul the marriages of the past.
Notes
1. Gary Zukav, The Dancing Wu Li Masters: An Overview of the New Physics (New York: Bantam Books, 1980), 111-14.
2. These androgynous nicknames were chosen to suggest the complexity of relationships in the last decade of the twentieth century. If relationships characterized by affection are complicated, imagine the complexities in relations affected by competition.
3. John R. Boyd, "Destruction and Creation," August 1976.
4. Sen Sam Nunn, "The Defense Department Must Thoroughly Overhaul the Services' Roles and Missions," Vital Speeches 20 (1 August 1992): 717-24. This speech was given in the US Senate on 2 July 1992. See also Barton Gellman, "Senator Nunn Questions Military Duplication," Washington Post, 3 July 1993.
5. "X" [George Kennan], "The Sources of Soviet Conduct," Foreign Affairs 4 (July 1947): 575-81.
6. Secretary of Defense Les Aspin, "Four Challenges to the New World Order," Defense Issues 8 (1 February 1993): 2.
7. Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, Order Out of Chaos: Man's New Dialogue with Nature (Boulder, Colo.: New Science Library, 1984), 171-76, 297-313.
8. Les Aspin, The Bottom-Up Review: Forces for a New Era (Washington, D.C.: Department of Defense, 1 September 1993). "Threats" to national security have been replaced by "dangers."
9. Nunn, 623.
10. Respectively, these are Land Warfare in the 21st Century for the Army, From the Sea for the Navy, and Global Reach--Global Power for the Air Force. See Tom Donnelly, "Services Outline Their Futures in High-Stakes Era," Army Times, 26 April 1993, 25.
11. Barton Gellman, "Aspin Gently Criticizes Powell Report," Washington Post, 30 March 1993, 6.
12. Rick Fields, The Code of the Warrior: In History, Myth, and Everyday Life (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1991), 5-17. See also Robert L. O'Connell, Of Arms and Men: A History of War, Weapons, and Aggression (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 20-29.
13. A comparison of the forces emerging from the "Bottom-Up Review" and those formerly judged to be the "base case" show that we now have a new floor or base. The 1999 "Bottom-Up" force structure, cited above, establishes the requirement for 11 active Navy carriers and 13 active Air Force fighter wings. Unlike Air Force wings, every carrier wing is a small "composite" wing. The number of fixed- and rotary-wing aircraft in the armed forces probably led to the assertions by Senator Nunn and others that our country has several "air forces." Secretary of Defense Aspin asserts that the suggestion that our country has more than one air force "makes a wonderful sound bite but distorts the facts." See Secretary of Defense Les Aspin, "Chairman's Report: A First Step," Defense 93, issue 2 (July 1993), 24-25. The Defense 93 article was derived in part from a letter Secretary Aspin sent to the chairs of the Senate and House Armed Services Committee on 29 March 1993. See also "Navy Wins Out in Bottom-Up Review," Navy News & Undersea Technology, 6 September 1993, 1.
14. William W. Kaufmann and Lawrence J. Korb, The 1990 Defense Budget (Washington, D.C.: The Brookings Institution, 1989), 9-13. Although difficult to calculate with precision, over $8 trillion (in 1989 defense dollars) were spent between 1951 and 1991.
15. John Ellis, Brute Force: Allied Strategy and Tactics in the Second World War (New York: Viking Penguin, 1990). Ellis suggests that the Allies, led by the production giants of the US and the USSR, inelegantly bludgeoned the enemy to defeat. Brute force warfare requires a commitment to prolonged wars and a defense industrial base to support them. It is arguable that the Congress or the people will support a large, prolonged war or even a "major regional contingency." See also John D. Morrocco and David A. Fulghum, "Saving Industrial Base Key in Bottom-Up Review," Aviation Week & Space Technology, 6 September 1993, 24.
16. John A. Warden III, The Air Campaign: Planning for Combat (Washington, D.C.: National Defense University Press, 1988).
17. Ronald J. Wright, Kevin D. Stubbs, and Joseph J. Muniz, "The Soviet Concept of a Theater of Military Operations: Implications for Outer Space," in Jacob W. Kipp et al., Soviet Views on Military Operations in Space (College Station, Tex.: Center for Strategic Technology, 1986), 221-43.
18. Department of the Air Force, "Reaching Globally, Reaching Powerfully: The United States Air Force in the Gulf War," a report (September 1991), 3-5.
19. O'Connell, 296, 301-7.
20. Ibid.
21. Gen Merrill A. McPeak, "Flexibility and Airpower," an address presented at the Air Mobility Command dining in, 12 June 1993, in Department of the Air Force, "Air Force Update," June 1993, 4.
22. Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 (New York: Random House, 1987). Col John Warden, the commandant of the Air Command and Staff College, suggests that air and space forces will occupy an increasingly important role in the conflicts of the future.
Contributor
Col Richard Szafranski (BA, Florida State University; MA, Central Michigan University) is a professor of national security studies at Air War College, Maxwell AFB, Alabama, as well as research director for SPACECASET 2020, a study of future military space requirements. He previously commanded the 7th Bomb Wing, Carswell AFB, Fort Worth, Texas. A command pilot and distinguished graduate of Squadron Officer School and graduate of Air Command and Staff College and Air War College, Colonel Szafranski has also been published in Strategic Review, Air University Review, Combat Crew, and Parameters.
Disclaimer
The conclusions and opinions expressed in this document are those of the author cultivated in the freedom of expression, academic environment of Air University. They do not reflect the official position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, the United States Air Force or the Air University.
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