The New American Security Force

Never mistake motion for action.

--Ernest Hemingway

Edtior's Note: The following article by John Warden is the christening piece for APJ's new "Vortices" section. As indicated in this issue's editorial, Vortices is an area for opinion pieces that may be controversial and will hopefully spur further dialogue. In order to promote beneficial critical thinking yet protect its neutral position, APJ reminds readers with a clear disclaimer that ideas put forth in Vortices and elsewhere in the journal are authors' work/opinions only and are not "endorsed" by APJ. Warden's argument about a new security force is designed to make readers think and hopefully respond. Very well known as an author and strategist, most specifically for his role in Desert Storm planning, Warden here launches into new strategic concepts intended to leverage acquisition lessons and information technology in fielding and fighting a future aerospace force. We look forward to the winter issue of APJ, in which another noted expert will provide Vortices a response to this article. Along that same line, the other Vortices piece in the current issue is a response to our thought-provoking lead article by Col Rob Owen.

THE WORLD IS radically different today than it was 10 years ago: we live in an ultra-fast-time world where the geopolitical environment is without precedent in human history and powerful new technologies are appearing at an accelerating rate. Great new companies are born daily, and old-line companies that want to survive are re-creating themselves to realize the opportunities of the next century. It is now time for the United States to make similar changes in its military forces.

Over the next few decades, the United States will need to solve a number of security problems with significant military content that are not predictable in time, place, or specifics. Their unpredictability means that the nation must develop the ability to solve security problems (including peacekeeping and humanitarian relief) without knowing exactly what they will be. Fortunately, we know what some of the characteristics of the solution ought to be: solutions must be very fast in order to reduce to the minimum the damage that an aggressor might inflict or reduce to the minimum the human suffering associated with a war or a disaster; solutions must be precise in concept and execution; and the cost in money and lives must be acceptable. If the United States wants to protect itself and its interests, it must forge a military force specifically designed for a fast-time world and one that can give very high probabilities of success in defense and offense.

Revolutionary changes in the geopolitical and technological environment alone should drive revolutionary changes to the American military. On top of these changes, however, are two additional factors that dictate the need for new thinking: (1) domestic political pressure for superb military capability at a reasonable cost and (2) an expanding economy that will make it very difficult to man American military forces at current manpower levels. The combination of all four factors makes radical change imperative.

Rarely, if ever, in human history has a nation had such an opportunity to give itself substantially more security at an affordable price. The United States today can build a security force with the following characteristics:

The prescription is not an evolutionary approach to security; rather, it is the logical outgrowth of the information age and the military technological revolution. It is a prescription for the first military force in history designed specifically to impose systemwide shock on an opponent in a time period measured in hours, while making very low loss and casualty rates a primary design feature of the force and its components. It also will be the first force in history that will have an opportunity to conduct a technological offensive which will define the future of warfare--and thereby reduce its likelihood.

An important aspect of the consulting services my company provides is to help corporations and organizations rethink their basic strategy. The process we use is very straightforward. We ask them to paint a compelling, measurable picture of the future they intend to create, find the key centers of gravity in the systems (their company, their market) they need to change, develop the campaigns to alter the centers of gravity, and decide how they intend to terminate phases and products. What follows is a "future picture" for that part of American security which involves military forces. A future picture is like a beacon; it tells you where you want to end up, but it doesn't tell you the details of how you are going to get there. The focus of what follows is a security future picture and some ideas as to some of the campaigns that may be necessary to achieve it. I fully expect vigorous debate on these ideas. The debate will be most useful if it follows the construct outlined above. Is the future picture a good one? If not, what should it look like? After these crucial questions are addressed, then we can debate the validity of the campaign ideas. What we must avoid, however, is starting from the assumption that what we have is ipso facto ideal and requires only marginal change to adapt to a new world. The biggest single error that countries and organizations make in crafting strategy is failure to define the future picture. Let's not make that error.

A Revolutionary World

We are in what is almost certainly the most revolutionary period in the history of mankind. Success in this revolutionary world requires a revolutionary approach to problems, revolutionary thinking, revolutionary agility, and revolutionary velocity (table 1). These are the characteristics of today's best companies--those that have created extraordinary value and wealth in remarkably little time. Unfortunately, these are not the characteristics of today's American military forces. Indeed, it wasn't necessary--in yesterday's world. In tomorrow's it is, for if the United States doesn't choose to use the technological high ground, someone else will. Guaranteed. Several aspects of this revolutionary period are worth examining in a little more depth, for they are at once the drivers of change and the vehicles to do it.

Table 1
Success in the Revolutionary World

Revolutionary Period
Revolutionary Thinking
Revolutionary Agility
Revolutionary Velocity

In the age of the information revolution, ideas and information move quickly--so quickly that information and ideas lose their value and impact rapidly as large numbers of people and organizations attempt to counter or transform the ideas for their own ends. In this kind of environment, hoarding information is counterproductive--success goes to the people who can exploit ideas with rapidity. The speed of information dissemination is directly linked to collapsing cycle times of products (fig. 1). Illustrative of the trend is Michael Dell's comment that his company (Dell Computer Corporation) keeps a maximum of eight and one-half days of parts inventory; to keep more would be to risk technological obsolescence. The information revolution also makes it easy for new entrants in any field of competition. For example, Amazon.com entered the bookselling world without any of the normal accouterments of the trade and did so with paralyzing speed and economy. Old skills and assets no longer provide the defense against penetration they once did. Of great interest, the duration of competitions--whether military, political, or commercial--is falling. The time available to win is shockingly short.

In the old days, a new technology normally took a long time to be employed on a sufficient scale to have a general impact, and by the time it was having a general impact, the likelihood that any given country or company would enjoy exclusive benefits was quite small. In today's world, the situation is different: a new technology can have a huge general impact in a short period, and one company--or country--can reap the rewards (fig. 2). In the military sphere, the F-117 stealth fighter is an excellent example. It went from concept to fielded squadron in about five years at a remarkably low cost. When it made its first major public combat debut in the Gulf War, it not only shocked Iraq but also made every air defense system in the world obsolete.

The Acquisition and Employment Concept Challenge

War is likely to be a much different thing in the future--especially for the United States--than it has ever been. The world almost certainly learned a lesson from Iraq's disastrous encounter with the United States (a lesson reinforced by the Serbia experience in the spring of 1999): whatever you do, don't put a big, expensive, slow-moving army in the field. Instead, bring strategic pressure on your enemies with ambiguous threats or actions that complicate the decision of the United States to intervene. If you must act overtly, do it very quickly to present a fait accompli and then ask for negotiations. By definition, you cannot execute a coup de main and achieve a fait accompli with a land invasion. The invasion itself is too slow, cumbersome, and obvious; and even if successful in itself, it leaves the invader hopelessly vulnerable to a power like the United States that is able and willing to seize air supremacy and attack the invader strategically. If you do decide to take on the United States, you simply cannot hope to beat it in the field militarily; instead, you must figure out a way to attack one of its centers of gravity--perhaps an indirect attack on the people or an attack that causes lots of financial loss. In short, the Newtonian, Clausewitzian concept of the battlefield itself has become an anachronism.

The United States, then, must find ways to attack the enemy's core systems in order to produce very rapid direct-system effects. Of course, these attacks will necessarily aim for near-total avoidance of civilian--and maybe military--casualties and even much in the way of unintended property damage. To carry out system attack with impunity, the United States will need a panoply of weapons guaranteed to thwart any attempt at defense. Likewise, it will need a great variety of weapons if some of them are to be appropriate for attacking an enemy tomorrow about whom we know nothing today. To the extent that some agreement exists that the world in front of us is different, we need to see if our force structure and thus our means of acquiring it are consonant with the times.

In the long years of the cold war, we tried to engineer our force structure so that it was just sufficient--just sufficient to deter nuclear war, just sufficient to create enough uncertainty on the part of the Soviets that they would hesitate to begin a conventional war, and just sufficient to avoid losing territory in Central Europe but not sufficient to go on the offensive. We were able to adopt this historically unique approach because we had but one enemy to concern us and we believed we had measured that enemy adequately.

But now we are in the midst of the information revolution and in a world dominated by the superiority of the offense--and we can project this revolutionary period well into the next century. In this world, relying on a policy of reacting only to an identified threat as the basis for our force structure may be disastrous. We no longer have the luxury of depending on a rather sluggish Soviet Union to give us a measured threat. Instead, we have to consider any of a variety of almost two hundred nations and perhaps an equal number of powerful nonstate groups--which have four hundred or more agendas and four hundred or more ideas about how to fight. How could we conceivably be ready either offensively or defensively if we rely on reaction in this kind of environment? The United States must simply abandon its old threat-driven force-structuring system.

Let's remind ourselves of a couple of threat-driven systems currently in some stage of acquisition. The C-17 program, begun in the early 1980s, was in large part driven by the perceived necessity to get 10 army divisions in 10 days to Europe in order to counter a Soviet ground attack in Central Europe. Delivery of the C-17 to the Air Force started in the mid-1990s, nearly two decades after planning for it first began and at least a half decade after its raison d'être had disappeared. Although we are certainly finding good uses for the C-17, it is highly unlikely that it is the plane we would have requested and developed in 1995 for first delivery in 1999. In other words, long acquisition cycles guarantee technological and concept obsolescence in a fast-time world.

To cite another example, in the early 1980s, US intelligence organizations postulated a follow-on to the Soviet Flanker and Foxhound fighters. Our response, initiated in the mid-1980s, was to start work on the Advanced Tactical Fighter program--now known as the F-22. This aircraft, specifically designed to fit North Atlantic Treaty Organization shelters and operate over Central Europe, may become operational 20 years after the program started--and will be a weapon system designed to counter the kind of technology and warfare we could envision 15 years ago that the relatively slow-moving Soviets might have developed by the turn of the century. As a contrast, Boeing made a corporate decision in 1990 to build an innovative large transport. The result? In 1995 the Boeing 777 flew successfully and entered service with major airlines the following year.

The United States is dominant militarily in the world today--and the primary reason it is dominant is that it has precision weapons, the ability to find targets for them, and the wherewithal to deliver them cheaply and rapidly. Without these attributes, the United States has no decisive advantage over most opponents. Although we need to improve precision in a variety of ways, including all-weather capability and precision of effect, the improvements we make are likely to be modest as opposed to the four-order-of-magnitude change since the B-17s of World War II. In the area of weapons delivery, we are likewise far ahead of the rest of the world, largely because of our stealth capability. Clearly, though, we cannot assume continued ability to penetrate defenses with impunity. (Witness the loss of an F-117 in the Serbian war.) Barring substantial improvements of our delivery capability, we will soon find ourselves unable to use our precision weapons as effectively and cheaply as will be required. Should this happen, we will lose our offensive superiority and be unable to further our interests proactively. What then?

The New American Security Force--Details

The answer is simple: there should not be a "what then?" Our objective should be to expand the lead we have over the rest of the world throughout the next century. By doing so, we will do more for world peace than any nation has ever been able to do. We must develop and field new systems rapidly--but in numbers just sufficient to force potential enemies to devote impossible efforts to defense or simply abandon military provocation. In other words, we become the threat. Instead of following our old practice of developing a new offense or defense in response to someone else's developments--a concept institutionalized in the acquisition milestone process--we become the threat and force everyone else to reactto us. We should define and create the future we want--not wait to become the victim of someone else's future. So the question is not how technology will shape the US military but how the US military will use technology to shape the future we have chosen.

Central to the new approach is rapid development and fielding of small numbers of highly productive, revolutionary platforms, techniques, and weapons. The goal is to see at least one new system fielded each year at the end of a one-to-three-year development cycle. With a new air, space, land, or sea system appearing every year, potential enemies will find it nearly impossible to develop workable defenses. More particularly, defense against the New American Security Force in operation will be stunningly difficult because many different types of systems coming from a variety of directions, altitudes, speeds, and spectral characteristics overwhelm the defense. Because the force is built around weapons with precision of impact and precision of effect, within 10 years of the time the New American Security Force is adopted, American security forces will be able to impose strategic, operational, and tactical paralysis on an Iraq-sized enemy in less than 30 hours from a cold start in the United States with little or no unintended, irreversible destruction. The largest conceivable enemies would suffer the same consequences in two to three days.

The New American Security Force needs little in the way of overseas basing and has no requirements for forward logistics depots. It puts very few people at risk while carrying out its operations because it is a highly capital-intensive force that has done away with platforms and organizations dependent on masses of people for success.

By the time the new program has been under way for 10 years, US capability will have increased by an order of magnitude--and the security budget can fall by about 20 percent in constant dollars. Some people may think that this is an impossible strategy in a low-budget world. But is it? It is impossibly expensive only if we are stuck with cold war ideas on quantities. For example, we have just over 60 F-117s, but the world must react to those F-117s just as much as if we had many hundreds; in the new age, remember, effect on the opponent comes from precision, not numbers. Our problem, though, is that the world has had over 10 years to evaluate the F-117; it is (was) only a matter of time until someone learns (learned) how to deal with an aircraft born in the infancy of the computer age. Our answer must be an "F-118," maybe a little more stealthy but, more importantly, something that operates in a significantly different speed and altitude regime--in a regime where the defenses developed against the F-117 are unlikely to be effective. How many F-118s do we need? Not many--maybe a squadron or two--because the world must react more to a couple of these squadrons than it reacted to thousands of F-4s or F-16s, which depended on numbers for their success. How many different types should we have in the inventory? A lot and all radically different--maybe 10 to 15 substantially different air/space/information-war platforms in the Air Force, for example, each occupying a unique niche. The other services should have a comparable mix of platforms. Imagine trying to defend against this kind of force!

This new strategy is a technological offensive. We should plan to develop and field a squadron equivalent of a new weapon system every one to three years for most systems. Small numbers are relatively cheap--if we start out with the idea of producing only small numbers and then throwing the jigs away or converting them to something else. Think about how cheap the very fast, low-number F-117 program was. Fast means huge savings in program costs. Small quantities mean we don't need the huge infrastructure requisite for long production runs that almost always demand the potential for unrealistic surge rates. Small and fast mean lower program costs, which in turn mean less congressional concern with excesses and profiteering. Finally, a new system every three years or so means that lots of companies, perhaps somewhat more agile and leaner than today's behemoth defense contractors, will have frequent opportunities to win an F-117-sized contract. Of great importance, under the new approach, many companies that will provide revolutionary systems will have never previously sold a thing to the government!

A quick review of the F-117 program is illustrative--in part because just 60 airplanes have had an impact beyond anything in our experience. In November 1978, the Air Force asked the Lockheed Skunkworks (subsequent to a proposal from the Skunkworks itself) to build five full-scale development and 15 production aircraft. The first flight was in June 1981, and the first unit was ready to fight in October 1983. The flyaway cost was $43 million each, compared to the $50 million for the F-15E a few years later. The latter was just a variant of the F-15 air superiority fighter and was a linear improvement to the F-111, which first saw service in the Vietnam War. The F-117 was a killer application (in today's high-tech parlance) that would make everybody's air defense system obsolete. Where do you want to put tomorrow's dollar?

We really can do things quickly and cheaply, and we have done it many times in the past even before the F-117--well before we had available to us the powerful tools of computer-aided design and manufacture, which in turn allow the paperless planning that is key to fast cycle times. Examples include the U-2 program that was eight months from inception to first flight and the very high-tech SR-71 program that went from a Central Intelligence Agency idea in 1957, to manufacturing go-ahead in January 1960, to first flight in April 1962. Initial operational capability (IOC) was in November 1965--in other words, five years from the time the Skunkworks got the order to IOC. The cost was $100 million (then-year dollars) for the first five and for a capability still unmatched almost 40 years later! A final example is the Minuteman I, our first solid-propellant intercontinental ballistic missile, which went from a request for project funding in January 1959 to IOC in December 1962.

Short-cycle programs are really inexpensive when measured against their impact; every one of the Lockheed projects was cheap--and they were also quite cheap when compared with most other major traditional programs. In today's world, time is what costs money. The history of short-cycle programs in military and commercial spheres indicates that it is possible to field a very effective new weapon system--if the numbers are kept small--for $2 to $15 billion. Keep in mind that these dollars buy a fielded military capability!

By having small contracts ($2 to $15 billion) with a maximum duration of five years, many nontraditional firms will enter the security business. This will increase competition, innovation, and the quality of products, as well as provide significantly more opportunity than the once-a-generation big contracts that have recently become a way of life.

It is imperative to realize that we are in an era of rapid change; if a semiconductor company were to buy a chip-fabrication machine and claim it was going to use it for the next 30 years, everyone would laugh and short the company's stock. Yet, that is exactly what the US government is proposing for virtually every one of its planes, ships, and tanks.

Some readers will take issue with the idea that we need new platforms. They will argue that new weapons and software are quite adequate and that we can continue to use existing platforms for decades to come. In my view, there are disqualifying objections to this approach. First, an aircraft like the F-22 will fly at exactly the same speed and have close to the same range and cargo capacity 30 years from now. That means that all potential opponents will have years to develop defenses against a relatively fixed physical platform. It means that 30 years from now, we will still have to find bases within the F-22's refueled radius, that it will still take x hours to get to a target area--after deployment to a forward base--and so on. It means that we won't build anything new because we have so much money "sunk" into the old system. It means we become prisoners of the past. If there were a compelling reason to freeze ourselves, or if we didn't have the capability to achieve regular order-of-magnitude increases in capability, and if we knew what the future was going to be, then a 30-year airplane might make sense. In reality, it doesn't, and the cost--in dollars, opportunity, and risk--to make large numbers of 30-year airplanes is simply prohibitive. Let's create the future, not adapt to it defensively.

It seems hard to argue that there are technical barriers to building new systems every one to three years. Some people might think that supportability is an issue, but, in fact, if we apply the kind of Six Sigma quality process that Motorola and Texas Instruments use, there is no reason to assume that things will break very much.¹ High breakage rates were really a function of an attrition-war approach to maintainability--build a lot, buy a bunch of spares, and overwhelm the problem with numbers. Look at the in-commission rates for the F-117s during with numbers. Look at the in-commission rates for the F-117s during the war--well over 80 percent.

How about training and employment? Won't that be a nightmare? Not really--because we will build new systems using the hardware equivalent of the Windows computer-operating system; if you know how to do Windows, you can manage the basics of almost any program, even if you have never seen it before. In other words, the what and how of a new system become transparent to the operator. Now think about it from the standpoint of the operational-level commander. Would you not like to have available to you 10 or 15 radically different systems with which to attack or defend an opponent about whom you may know nothing until days or hours before hostilities erupt? Or would you rather be stuck with just one or two types of systems for which you know the enemy has had years to plan a defense?

All of this is doable--from a technical and operating standpoint. But is it politically feasible? Yes--if it becomes a national strategy orchestrated from the White House and supported by the American people. We make it national policy by convincing the president and the Congress that it not only makes eminent sense for the country but also is politically attractive. The administration frees itself from the need to defend a program that may have started four or five presidents back for reasons which have become obscure. Congress sees lots of smaller contracts going to companies in many areas of the country instead of one or two big contracts a generation going to one or two states. And projects get finished while the majority of congressmen who originally voted for them are still in office; at least a third of the Senate would not have run for reelection. Consider how much stability this adds to funding! Business people are thrilled by it because it reopens the game to those who have not been traditional big-production-run defense contractors. The American people like it because they see results--spectacular results--frequently. Everybody is a winner, as contrasted to the present system in which very few win and in which excitement is notably absent.

Opposition to the New American Security Force will be fierce--just as the opposition has been to every new military concept and idea. The Army resisted the repeating rifle and machine gun; the Navy fought the move away from sailing ships; the last combat horse-cavalry regiment survived in the United States until 1943; the Air Force resisted the change from propeller to jet propulsion; and every service and command fights desperately to prevent reductions in personnel or budgets. Many people will argue that a conservative approach to security affairs is necessary. They are right--except in today's world, the conservative approach is the high- velocity approach, not the slow-change methodology of yesterday. The New American Security Force will also certainly require radical restructuring of the acquisition community--including wholesale elimination of those parts created to manage cold war affairs.

Our technological offensive strategy allows us to exploit the technology and integration with which we excel. It means that potential enemies will face multifaceted problems that make defense next to impossible. It means that we will always have a system in operation which is near state-of-the-art--not exactly the case with 20-year programs today. Finally, we can have an affordable program even in an era when defense budgets may revert to their historical levels in the United States of 1.5 to 2 percent of the gross domestic product. Very simply, high tech, done right, is cheap--far cheaper than the low-tech attrition-war equipment that is now such a large part of our inventory. Thus, we can have a very large standing Air Force, even today, if we measure size in output terms--effect on the enemy--rather than measure size from inputs like numbers of aircraft, tons of bombs, and so on.

Military Services in the New American Security Force

In the New American Security Force, most of the services will be radically different. They will be much smaller in terms of personnel and much more powerful in their ability to affect an opponent or succor the afflicted in a disaster. The following points illustrate what each might look like if the next administration aggressively pursues this strategy:

In addition to hardware, significant organizational change will be necessary to allow the United States to operate in a fast-moving, information-age world. These changes will extend well beyond the Defense Department (whose name itself should change), but let us confine ourselves at this point to addressing military organization. First, the president is appointed by the Constitution as the commander in chief. For most of our nation's history, at least two military officers--experts in the business of force--have had direct access to the president. In World War II, four officers had easy and regular access. With direct advice from the experts, the president had the information he needed to make decisions about alternate courses of action. In today's world, one officer has access, but it is constrained. Thus, the president is dependent on filtered advice and has essentially delegated responsibility--something he is not permitted to do. Second, the military establishment is organized much as it was when World War II ended. Our forces are parceled into geographic "CINCdoms," where the local commander has responsibility for today's battle but neither responsibility nor resources to prepare for tomorrow's global threats. An organizational system developed when communications and air travel were in their infancy has little relevance to today's world. Radical restructuring is essential to allow concentration of resources in the center, from where they can be dispatched to achieve quick results and returned quickly to prepare for the next operation. Organizational change in itself will help significantly in allowing us to rethink the multiple simultaneous-contingency problem.

These are but two examples of organizational dysfunction; many more exist within the services themselves, which have a structure that Frederick the Great would have recognized immediately. It is not the right answer.

The New American Security Force is about the hardware, people, and structure necessary to ensure that America can further its interests successfully for an extended time into the future. It is not about jealously guarding ancient prerogatives or resisting change. The rest of the world is making rapid and wrenching adjustments to the most exciting era in human history; the US military should be in the vanguard--not the rear guard.

Conclusions

We hope we don't have to go to war again anytime soon. If we do, however, it is imperative that the United States win--quickly and cheaply and on its terms. The United States should be able to dictate the outcome of any war at least as cleanly as it dictated the outcome of the war to the Iraqis. The object is not a fair “mano a mano” fight but one that will overcome the enemy in minutes without spilling a drop of unintended blood on either side. Likewise, when human lives are at stake following a disaster, we ought to be able to do something about it immediately. We can do this, and we can ensure long and prosperous peace for the United States and for the whole world only if we press our technology and intellectual advantages aggressively. Our goal must be to dominate the military technological revolution for the next century. We can do it—if we adopt a new strategy and new ideas consonant with the information revolution, not one mired in the first industrial age. We are in a genuinely new period of history with unprecedented opportunities to advance peace and prosperity. In this new era, however, we cannot afford to use yesterday’s ideas and measurements. We must move to a New American Security Force.

1. "Motorola's Six Sigma asks that processes operate such that the nearest engineering requirement is at least plus or minus six sigma [six standard deviations] from the process mean." Thomas Pyzdek, "Motorola's Six Sigma Program," 1997; on-line, Internet, 7 July 1999, available from "http://www.qualitydigest.com/dec97/html/motsix.html" .

2. As an example, the Air Force has developed a concept called the "small smart bomb" that has the potential to multiply the effectiveness of bomb-dropping aircraft by a factor of about three. Unfortunately, there will be difficulties incorporating it on aircraft like the new F-22 because that aircraft program is so massive that changing it to accommodate new technologies is expensive and difficult.

You have to be careful if you don't know where you are going because you might not get there.

Yogi Berra

Understanding Peace Operations:
A Reply to Col Robert C. Owen

IN "AEROSPACE POWER and Land Power in Peace Operations: Toward a New Basis for Synergy," which appears in this issue, Col Robert C. Owen makes some important points about peace operations, but I take exception to some of his views. Let me begin by defending the United States against Colonel Owen's accusation that all of our interventions are "imperialistic," "hegemonic," and "self-interested." (He starts out by accurately stating that foreign and domestic opponents of a US intervention will claim that such interventions are hegemonic, but then he seems to come around to this view himself.) The United States has been the world's leading economic power since at least 1918 and the leading military power since at least 1945. As a result, for more than half a century (and arguably for 80 years), every US interaction with another country has involved the substantial power advantage of the United States over the other party and could be portrayed as a US effort to dominate others. Peace operations could not possibly be different, and we should be used to this by now. This, however, does not mean that every US peace operation is in fact hegemonic or perpetrated against the will of "the locals." To take an obvious example, the United States has stationed troops in the Sinai for decades to monitor the Camp David peace agreement between Egypt and Israel. The peace they have been keeping is in the best interest of both Israel and Egypt; both nations welcome the US presence; and neither side regards the peacekeeping force as evidence of US imperialism. Contrary to Colonel Owen's claim, Egypt and Israel do not feel that the peacekeepers represent a "reduction of their sovereignty." The US troops do not "mak[e] the locals behave"; instead, they help the Egyptians and Israelis do what they already want to do--remain at peace.

The locals on both sides of a conflict sometimes welcome peace operations. Even more importantly, the policy makers of rich, powerful countries respond to claims that they are being hegemonic and imperialistic. Colonel Owen dismisses the fact that many of the troops conducting peace operations come from Pakistan, Botswana, and other clearly nonhegemonic and nonimperialist nations by noting that they could operate only with the assistance of richer, more powerful countries. But he misses the point. The key question is not, Could small, poor, weak countries project forces around the world without the help of big, rich, powerful countries? Rather, the question is, Why do big, rich, powerful countries want to include the forces of small, poor, weak countries in their peace operations? To take the example with which Colonel Owen is most familiar, why should the 32,000 troops of the Bosnia Stabilization Force be drawn from about 40 different countries? Including contingents from so many nations increases the expense of these operations and vastly decreases their military effectiveness by causing enormous command, control, communication, linguistic, and logistics problems. These problems are compounded by the fact that different nations often give their troops rules of engagement (ROE) that are different from those promulgated by the nominal combined-force commander. The richer countries put up with this added expense and decreased military effectiveness precisely because doing so makes it harder to demonize these operations as hegemonic and imperialistic. If the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and Russia and several Asian countries and several African countries and so forth, are all willing to send troops to enforce the peace somewhere, then that peace is more than just the imperialism of the United States or the West or even the rich and powerful. It is something like a global consensus. In order to achieve such a consensus, rich and powerful nations have to negotiate with the less rich and less powerful to gain their cooperation, and, in so doing, the rich and powerful sacrifice money, military effectiveness, some of their self-interest, and their hegemony.¹ For example, bringing Russian troops into the Bosnia and Kosovo peacekeeping operations has made both operations more difficult but less hegemonic and imperialistic (and hopefully more politically effective in the long run).

Oddly, Colonel Owen then goes on to claim that nations should intervene only in situations that "truly involve significant national interests and can be accomplished with a net improvement in the national conditions of the intervening and perhaps even the intervened states." This is a classic statement of self-interest, but if all interventions were actually as self-interested as he claimed earlier, then nations would already be following this criterion and he needn't waste a paragraph lecturing them on the point. Of course, for all Colonel Owen's wishes that nations might follow only their enlightened self-interest, they in fact often behave less "rationally" or at least less self-interestedly, as he acknowledges by reminding us that self-interest should be a prime consideration.

More damaging to Colonel Owen's case is that his criterion for choosing peace operations clearly does not apply to the United States. He claims that nations should intervene only when "the intervention truly is necessary and [when the nation] likely will come out of the intervention stronger than when it went in. Any less disciplined approach is the first step to strategic overreach." But clearly, US intervention in some failed state (Bosnia, Rwanda, Haiti, Somalia, etc.) is not "necessary" to the United States, and, whether successful or not, its impact on US "strength" will be so small as to be immeasurable. For the sake of argument, let's assume that the US intervention in Haiti succeeded and that the intervention in Somalia failed. The impact on Haiti and Somalia is enormous, but in a US strategic sense, so what? Surely Colonel Owen does not think that intervention in Haiti has appreciably increased the strength of the United States or that failure in Somalia appreciably weakened us. And note the extravagant US apologies for not intervening in Rwanda. For the United States, there are not only costs of intervening but also high costs for not intervening. The choice for the United States is not, as Colonel Owen suggests, between the possible gains from intervening and risk-free nonintervention; instead, the choice usually comes down to the cost of intervening versus the cost of not intervening, with both options leaving the United States weaker or unchanged.

Colonel Owen is very concerned about the costs of peace operations, but by taking them out of context, he tends to exaggerate these costs. Although every life lost is a tragedy, US military fatalities in peace operations have been tiny compared to what the US Department of Defense (DOD) suffers in accidents. If the current rate of accidents will not destroy the force, then losses from peace operations are no threat at all. The financial, training, and morale burdens imposed by peace operations appear large because we have not adjusted our budgeting, training, and organization to make such operations routine. When we do (through initiatives like the Air Expeditionary Force), these burdens will not seem so great. For example, think of our current forces in South Korea. At about 37,000 personnel with all the appropriate planes, trucks, tanks, and guns, they amount to less than 3 percent of our total active force, and no one suggests that maintaining them for the foreseeable future will burst the budget or destroy the services. However, if Korea were a brand-new commitment for which none of the services had made any plans or budget requests, it would seem like a crushing burden and severely disrupt the entire DOD. As peace operations become institutionalized, I think they will become less burdensome--as has our commitment to Korea.

Colonel Owen's unwillingness to acknowledge cases like the US Army's Sinai Battalion and other nonhegemonic peace operations leads him to ridicule the possibility of peacekeepers' being neutral and to speak in terms of "enemies" in peace operations. It seems clear that the US troops have maintained their neutrality in the Sinai and have no enemies there, even though the peace between Israel and Egypt may have helped one country more than it helped the other. The Sinai is a peacekeeping operation, and, depending on how one defines neutrality, one may find it very hard to achieve neutrality in peace-enforcement operations; but declaring enemies and abandoning all efforts at neutrality is likely to be counterproductive. The goals of peacekeeping and peace enforcement are (to repeat Colonel Owen's quotations from Joint Publication 3-07, Military Operations other than War) "to monitor and facilitate implementation of an agreement," "support diplomatic efforts to reach a long-term political settlement," and "maintain or restore peace and order." Some of the locals will be more inclined to oppose these goals than others are, but that does not make them our enemies or some other side our allies. War is the effort to help our allies triumph over our enemies, and peace operations are different precisely because we do not seek victory for one side. Occupation operations after a victorious war (e.g., in Panama after Operation Just Cause) may resemble peace operations, but profound differences exist. I assume that when Colonel Owen speaks of peace operations, he does not include occupation and reeducation of defeated enemies.

Colonel Owen claims that the key difference between airpower and ground power is presence: the former is generally "not there" while the latter is generally "there." This difference can be overstated. Even air forces have to be based somewhere, and Khobar Towers reminded all of us that the "somewhere" we use as a base can be vulnerable to attack. But the fact remains that during peace operations, manned fixed-wing aircraft will often not get within two miles (10,000 feet) of a potential target and rarely move slower than several hundred miles per hour. Ground forces, on the other hand, typically get within handshaking, passport-checking (eye-gouging?) range of potential targets and are often stationary. Oddly, Colonel Owen ignores the obvious fact that this means that, by ground standards, air systems are hopelessly inaccurate and imprecise. Every sensor that can be mounted in space or on an aircraft can be ground-mounted less expensively and is less accurate than a physical "hands-on" inspection. (When I want to buy a car, I do not try to find a satellite photo of it. Instead, I look at pictures taken by someone on or near the ground or, better yet, go look at the actual car.) The same Global Positioning System and laser designators that have revolutionized the accuracy of bombs dropped from several miles away work just as well for guiding artillery shells and ground-launched missiles. Besides, the best precision-guided munition performance to date is no better than that achieved by the half-trained fanatic who drove his truck-bomb into the US Marine Corps barracks in Beirut. We can talk about "surgical" air strikes all we want, but the fact is that when I have had real surgery, the surgeon was inches--not miles--from his "target," and I wanted it that way.

The surgeon example leads us to the next major weakness of airpower: severely limited choice of weapons and effects. Aircraft can drop bombs as large as the one that demolished Khobar Towers, but they can't wield scalpels. At the low end of the spectrum, aircraft run out of munitions and options, resulting in either inaction or severe collateral damage. Ground forces do not face such tight limits. For example, not only the armed forces but also thousands of police SWAT teams across the United States have snipers capable of killing (or even deliberately wounding but not killing) a single man in a crowd, without harming anyone else around him. They can even kill him without harming a hostage he is physically touching. Currently, aircraft can't deliver a munition as small as a rifle bullet within inches of its aiming point. As a result, aircraft are not very good at freeing hostages. In addition, the inability of aircraft to interpose themselves between people on the ground makes it very difficult to prevent people from being taken hostage. (In fact, in Bosnia, hostages were taken because of air attacks.) Further, ground forces can use nonlethal weapons (nightsticks, stun guns, handcuffs, etc.) and even bare hands to control people's behavior and take them into custody without killing them. The ability to arrest and detain suspicious people without killing them or endangering those around them is critical to reestablishing peace and order. Aircraft currently can't take prisoners for trial later, so the aircraft faces the choice of killing everything (guilty or innocent) within the blast radius of the smallest weapon on board--or doing nothing. Until we have air weapons that can kill the targeted man but not wound the hostage next to him, we will need ground power to free hostages. Until we can "set phasers on stun" and "beam up" the stunned suspect (or otherwise make arrests from the air or space), we will be stuck with ground power as our method of making arrests.

Airpower's inaccuracy and limited mix of weapons are, of course, relative. Every day, our ability to see and hit things from long range at high speed gets closer to our ability to see and hit them from a range of two feet and zero relative motion; eventually, the gap will close entirely. Similarly, the range of weapons available to aircraft continues to expand daily. (The US Marine Corps in particular is working hard at reducing the collateral damage of air weapons and expanding the number of nonlethal weapons available to airpower.) As a result, we should not be surprised to see more tasks move from the ground to air and space, as they always have. But we must not get so excited about our recent technological progress that we forget how accurate, flexible, cheap, and effective ground systems are.

The real advantage of air and space is that it gives us an overhead angle of vision (from which sensors and targeting systems may be more effective than at ground level) and the ability to observe and target places the ground troops can't get to. In Colonel Owen's "there/not there" phrasing, ground systems "there" are typically more effective than air and space systems "not there," but ground systems "not there" (i.e., in denied areas) are virtually useless, while aerospace systems "not there" may be very effective indeed. Since peace operations are generally conducted under conditions that allow us greater ground access than we typically enjoy during wartime, airpower's and space power's ability to fly over denied areas will normally be less important in peace operations than during wartime.

Of course, with capabilities come tasks and risks. The ability to make arrests encourages decision makers to demand arrests, and that is what got Task Force Ranger in trouble in Somalia. The seven missions they ran trying to capture Gen Mohammed Farah Aidid and his chief lieutenants were successful "snatch" operations (although they never captured Aidid himself). Unfortunately, on the seventh mission, one of the helicopter pilots violated his ROE and got shot down by an RPG-7 in the middle of a hostile city. Showing more valor than perhaps they should have, the task force attempted to conduct combat-search-and-rescue operations in what may have been the most dangerous and heavily armed city in the world. Support from AC-130s (or US armored vehicles) would have cut down on US casualties and increased Somali losses, but the critical choice was deciding to try to capture Aidid and his henchmen. Colonel Owen's view that "reliance on airpower as the 'killing' force in the hunt for General Aidid" could have led to a dramatically different result ignores the fact that capturing, rather than killing, was the aim. When things went bad, the ground forces tasked with capturing Aidid wished they had close air support (and artillery support, US armored forces, naval gunfire, more troops, etc.), but the tanks, ships, troops, and AC-130s had been sent home. Colonel Owen's claim that the dead rangers demonstrate the "vulnerability" of ground power seems excessive. The heavy Somali losses indicate that ground forces are hardly the helpless creatures Colonel Owen would have us believe them to be, and if the helicopter pilot had stayed within his ROE or the force had been backed up by US armor and close air support, things would have gone a lot better. Remember that until October 1993, the US Air Force had suffered more fatalities in Somalia than the US Army and Marine Corps combined. (An AC-130 went down on a mission over Somalia, killing eight members of the aircrew.) The loss of an AC-130 with most of its crew was a tragedy, but, like Task Force Ranger's difficulties trying to rescue downed aircrews, we should be careful about what lessons we learn from singular events.

Colonel Owen is certainly correct in recognizing that, just as ground forces increase the number and types of weapons our troops can use on hostile locals, decreasing engagement ranges also increases the number of weapons the locals can use on our troops. But this does not necessarily make them vulnerable to those weapons or mean that they will suffer significant losses. At last count, exactly one US soldier was killed in Haiti (shot by an armed Haitian trying to run a roadblock), and one US soldier was killed in Bosnia (by a land mine). These casualty figures (after years of peace operations in both countries) indicate that the concerns raised by Task Force Ranger may be excessive.

Colonel Owen makes much of the troubles suffered by the peacekeepers in Bosnia before US troops arrived, but this points to a more serious problem than the relative strengths and weaknesses of airpower and ground power--the difference between peacekeeping and peace enforcement. Colonel Owen recognizes this difference but is so anxious to move on to a broad discussion of the two combined (peace operations) that he neglects the critical difference between them at the operational level of war. On the one hand, peacekeeping (for example, in the Sinai) is done in support of an agreement with which both parties are satisfied. In such a situation, the peacekeeping force need not have as much combat power as either of the sides in the dispute. In peace-enforcement operations, on the other hand, one or more of the disputants believes he can benefit from continued fighting, so the peace enforcers must have overwhelming combat power--enough to rapidly and completely defeat any or all of the disputants. This overwhelming force must also be deployed and equipped not only to respond to threats but also to decisively defeat any armed opposition; and the ROE must boil down to "shoot first and then call the boss"--not the other way around. Ideally, this overwhelming force will deter all sides from continuing the fighting (as the Dayton Implementation Force has).

Trouble starts when a force designed and deployed for peacekeeping tries to conduct peace enforcement. For example, European nations sent peacekeeping forces to Bosnia, but it became a peace-enforcement operation. When NATO attempted to use air strikes to conduct peace enforcement, the targets of the air strikes simply took the peacekeepers hostage. Subsequently, the much larger and more heavily armed forces in Bosnia since the signing of the Dayton accords have suffered no comparable humiliations, even though it is generally agreed that the various sides are as ready as ever to resume the killing. Unfortunately, Colonel Owen's notion of using ground troops as the "good cops" and air forces as the "bad cops" repeats this mistake. If ground troops are equipped, deployed, and ordered to be nonthreatening good cops, they will once again be easy pickings for anyone who feels threatened by the aerospace bad cops. Airpower should provide some of the added combat power that transforms a weak peacekeeping force into an overwhelming peace-enforcement force, but the troops on the ground must be strong enough and have the mind-set and ROE that will enable them to hold their own until help (from the air or ground) arrives. If they are too busy being good cops, they are structured for failure.²

Colonel Owen claims that ground power is more susceptible than airpower to mission "creep" (incremental expansion of the original mission) and mission "plunge" (abandonment of the mission). What he means to say is that governments find it easier to conceal mission creep and plunge in air operations than in ground operations. As Colonel Owen recognizes, the episodic nature of air strikes means that in a sense, participation plunges to zero as the aircraft return to base. By the same token, each successful air strike tempts us to "creep" to another target. Let me provide examples of airpower mission plunge and mission creep for those who remain unconvinced. In 1983 two US Navy planes were shot down by the Syrians over Lebanon's Bekaa Valley. As a result, US air strikes in the Bekaa Valley rapidly "plunged" to zero. Operation Southern Watch, on the other hand, has been fairly successful in its original mission to enforce a no-fly zone, but, in response to the vulnerability of air and naval forces, it has "crept" to include routine attacks on Iraqi missile sites. In the form of Operation Desert Fox, Southern Watch has even expanded to include attacks on sites housing Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. As these examples attest, air missions creep and plunge as much as ground missions do. The only difference is that it is easier to conceal the creeping and plunging of air missions from the public.

In place of Colonel Owen's notion that airpower should "lead" in peace enforcement and ground power should "lead" in peacekeeping, I would like to suggest a different approach--one that takes local conditions into account and actually conforms to the way we fight wars. The strategic air campaigns in two recent and highly successful US wars, Operations Just Cause and Desert Storm, illustrate this alternate approach. As readers of this journal will recall, Desert Storm opened with a strategic air campaign that used air-delivered bombs and missiles to demolish Iraq's centers of gravity and paralyze its government, economy, population, and, ultimately, its military forces. On the whole, Col John Warden's theories of parallel attack and inside-out warfare seemed to work well against Iraq. Readers may be less familiar with Just Cause, but, once again, parallel attacks on Panamanian centers of gravity and inside-out warfare led to rapid, decisive success without massive, force-on-force battles. The difference was that in Panama, airpower (both fixed wing and rotary wing) delivered US ground troops rather than bombs and missiles to the centers of gravity.³ The fact that ground troops played such a prominent role in Just Cause does not mean that it was a classic ground campaign designed to push a clearly defined front line across the enemy's country and focused on taking and holding ground. Instead, air-delivered US troops simultaneously assaulted a wide variety of different Panamanian centers of gravity scattered throughout the country (and often abandoned the ground they captured after they had incapacitated the center of gravity located there).

Why did airpower deliver bombs against Iraq and troops against Panama, and what does this tell us about the roles of troops and bombs in peace operations? In Panama, the goals were to capture Manuel Noriega and his henchmen and free several hostages held by Noriega (Kurt Muse is the best known of these). The critical US vulnerability in Panama was the large number of US citizens scattered throughout the country who could be taken hostage or attacked by Noriega loyalists. A further consideration was that, having removed the Noriega government and replaced it with the elected Panamanians whom Noriega had ousted, the United States would be responsible for repairing damaged infrastructure in Panama. Finally, Panamanian air defenses were rudimentary, and Panamanian military forces were brutal but not particularly combat effective. These factors combined to make a bombing campaign unattractive. Bombs would cause too much collateral property damage (that the United States would wind up paying for); the legality of killing Noriega with a bomb while making no effort to arrest him was debatable; and there was too great a probability that large numbers of US civilians would be killed or taken hostage. On the other hand, this situation made air delivery of ground troops more attractive. Rapidly and properly deployed by airpower, troops could capture Noriega and his cronies, take down the centers of gravity with little collateral damage, protect US citizens from being taken hostage, and rescue any who were taken hostage. Given the weakness of Panamanian defenses, ground forces could accomplish all this without suffering heavy casualties.

In Iraq the situation was quite different. The United States had no desire to capture Saddam Hussein; all the potential hostages had already left Iraq; repair of damaged infrastructure would be paid for by Iraqi oil revenues; and Iraqi defense forces were strong enough to inflict unacceptable losses on ground troops air-delivered to the Iraqi centers of gravity. For these reasons, the United States chose (correctly) to use air-delivered bombs and missiles against the Iraqi centers of gravity rather than the air-delivered ground troops that worked so well in Panama.

Just as the United States can conduct strategic air campaigns using either air-delivered bombs or air-delivered ground forces as the primary "killing" force, so can it use either bombs or ground forces in peace operations. The way to choose the correct force mix for a given situation is not (as Colonel Owen claims) to rely on a crude and theoretical choice between peacekeeping (using ground forces) and peace enforcement (using air-delivered bombs). Instead, we must make a much subtler and more nuanced study of our tasks and potential foes, as was done in assessing Panama and Iraq. Colonel Owen is quick to note that air-delivered bombs were the right choice for peace enforcement in Bosnia, but he ne-glects to note that air-delivered ground forces were the right choice for peace enforcement in Haiti. The conditions in Bosnia and Haiti were different enough to require different solutions. To its credit, the US leadership was flexible enough to tailor solutions to fit the different needs of the two situations. We must build on the flexibility and agility of mind that has enabled us to conduct both strategic air campaigns and peace enforcement using either air-delivered bombs or air-delivered ground forces. We must not insist on meeting future challenges with narrow notions of what airpower is or oversimplified rules about what force “leads” in peacekeeping and peace enforcement.

1. People who like to use self-interest as a pejorative have a tendency to claim that everything anyone does is in his or her self-interest and is therefore reprehensible. For example, if I give nothing to charity, I am “greedy and without feelings for those less fortunate” (i.e., “bad”), but if I give everything to charity, I am “desperate for the approval of others and feel guilty for my success” (i.e., “bad”). This heads-you-lose, tails-you-lose reasoning is frequently used against US foreign policy. For example, every time the United States fails to intervene forcefully in a region racked by slaughter and human misery, it is criticized as uncaring, ungenerous, and failing in its role as a world leader. But if the United States does intervene forcefully, then it is hegemonic and imperialistic. Since the US response to most world events will appear too intrusive to some and not active enough to others, any given US policy will routinely be criticized as both a demonstration of US indifference to the suffering of others and a hegemonic effort to make everyone live by US standards of behavior.

2. In actual peace operations, the large number of different national forces involved and the wide variety of national, international, and nongovernmental aid agencies on the ground combine to produce an almost infinite array of good cops and bad cops without any need to devise separate roles for ground and air elements.

3. I realize that some readers will not care for my notion that helicopters are part of airpower, but for purposes of this discussion, it seems reasonable to put troop-carrying helicopters and paratroop-carrying C-130s into the same category. I can only hope that the same readers who vehemently deny that helicopters are part of airpower will fight equally hard to keep the helicopters off the air tasking order in all future conflicts.

Men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all the other alternatives.

Abba Eban

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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