Document created: 15 October 01
Air & Space Power Journal - Chronicles Online Journal

Lt Col John N.T. Shanahan

Introduction

It is only a slight exaggeration to say that hardly a day goes by without the introduction of some remarkable development in the fields of information technology or bioenvironmental science. Such advances have had extraordinary consequences not only for industry, academia, medicine, and the social sciences, but also for warfare. In fact, while it is reasonable to suggest that many previous military-inspired scientific breakthroughs paved the way for a wide variety of spin-off societal improvements, the standard model has been turned on its head in the information age. In the military we now often find ourselves at a comparative disadvantage as we try to grasp how to take advantage of breathtaking changes in other fields. Indeed, at times it is as if we "are surfing the ever-higher waves of information power more than [we] are in any practical sense controlling the heights or frequency of those waves."¹

The rapid pace of technological change demands equally frenetic efforts by our military to find more effective ways to deter and defeat our potential competitors and battlefield opponents. Over the past decade or so, we have been moving at an impressive pace in our attempts to advance military doctrine and improve joint military operations. Nevertheless, for the most part our changes to warfighting doctrine have been largely evolutionary. It is time to cross a new threshold. Apart from gaining a better understanding of technology’s effects on our ability to fight and win wars, we need to implement revolutionary changes in both targeting and combat assessment doctrine at the strategic, operational, and tactical levels of war.

We need a warfighting doctrine that places more emphasis on the ability to overwhelm our adversaries both physically and mentally. Specifically, the objective must be to induce mental and physical paralysis in our opponents — paralysis that will inject a false orientation, prevent our adversaries from adapting to their ever-changing surroundings, and cripple their ability to react to U.S. or coalition actions. I call this a doctrine of "shock-based operations." Following a more detailed investigation of this doctrine I propose a new method of battlespace assessment, itself one of the most important aspects of shock-based operations.

Shock-based warfare offers a new way of carrying out the Clausewitzian clash of wills, albeit one that relies as much (or more) on the mental and moral aspects of conflict as it does the physical. In addition to helping us take advantage of information-age advances without becoming subservient to new technology, shock-based warfare will improve the risk-reward ratio that is an essential consideration of any political-military strategy. Moreover, it allows for opponents whose behavior as complex adaptive systems negates existing American doctrine that assumes linear mechanistic opponents.² To reflect more accurately the complex and chaotic world in which we live, shock-based operations require sweeping changes in not only our military mindset, but also in organizational structure; modeling and simulation; intelligence gathering; joint, service, and interagency exercises; targeting; and battlespace assessment.³

Exactly what are shock-based operations, and what must we do differently than we are doing already — seemingly quite successfully — in today’s military operations?

From Political Objectives to Military Action

Military combat operations begin as politics or diplomacy fails. As described in Joint Publication 1, the military’s responsibility then becomes to "employ rapid and decisive military power to achieve U.S. objectives.…"⁴ Joint commanders use the principles of war, joint warfare fundamentals, enduring concepts and enablers, and elements of joint operational art to craft a strategic estimate and to prepare analyses of various courses of action. The ultimate objective is to produce a wartime campaign plan that, as stated in typically sterile military terms, will "seek to destroy or neutralize the adversary’s capability for organized resistance and to facilitate post-combat termination objectives."⁵ While Joint Publication 1 does not offer much more than broad statements as to the actual methods by which political leaders or military commanders use military forces to achieve political objectives, Joint Publication 3-0 is a little more fruitful.

The latest draft of Joint Publication 3-0 (Doctrine for Joint Operations) labels the campaign as "a series of related major operations that arrange tactical, operational, and strategic actions to accomplish strategic and operational objectives."⁶ This publication focuses on the terms "simultaneity" and "depth" in describing how shock-like conditions are created on the battlefield, highlighting both as necessary to "overwhelm and cripple adversary capabilities and adversary will to resist."⁷ Joint Publication 1 is peppered with frequent reminders of the benefits of staying inside an opponent’s decision cycle — a critical concept that is explored in more detail below. Nevertheless, despite laudable analyses of military campaigns, operational art, and the joint battlespace targeting process, both Joint Publication 1 and 3-0 lack a more detailed discussion of how it is exactly that U.S. forces can "overwhelm" and "cripple" its opponents.⁸

The OODA Loop and Our Opponent’s Orientation

The late strategist Colonel John Boyd (USAF, retired) stressed relentlessly the importance of getting inside an opponent’s "decision cycle" through a continuous process he called observe-orient-decide-act or, in abbreviated form, the OODA loop.⁹ Observation precedes orientation in this continuous cycle, but I will postpone examination of the former to focus first on what I consider to be the critical phase — the orientation stage of the OODA loop.

The orientation phase of any decision cycle is the linchpin of battlespace decision- making. It involves collecting, integrating, and processing all available information and data to ascertain "ground truth." In establishing our orientation in any life environment the time it takes to gather and process information is as important as the manner in which that information is gathered. A large part of the challenge is trying to separate fact from fiction, certainties from assumptions. (Assumptions are often as important as facts, if for no other reason that you may not really know the difference between the two.) We have to process information, determine our orientation, make decisions, and act before our opponents go through the same four-step cycle. Additionally, we cannot be satisfied if we do this one or two times — staying ahead of our opponents requires strenuous, constant effort to achieve faster and more effective OODA loops.

Theoretically, if we observe, orient, decide, and act faster than our opponent, he becomes unable to keep up with us. He will find it difficult or, even more desirable from our perspective, impossible to orient himself properly to his mental and physical surroundings and will become bewildered and shattered psychologically. If we get through these four OODA stages faster than our opponent we say we are remaining inside our opponent’s decision cycle. On the other hand, if our opponent orients himself and acts faster than us, he can preempt our planned actions, upset our orientation, and decrease even further our ability to make timely and effective decisions.

If we can keep inside our opponent’s decision cycle our opponent is overloaded beyond his ability to respond, react, or adapt. As described by Boyd, the goal is to "collapse [the] adversary’s system into confusion and disorder by causing him to over and under react to activity that appears simultaneously menacing as well as ambiguous, chaotic, or misleading [emphasis in original]."¹⁰ Our opponent will experience "various combinations of uncertainty, doubt, confusion, self-deception, indecision, fear, panic, discouragement, and despair.…"¹¹ Ultimately, our opponent will become incapable of fighting effectively.

The OODA loop or decision cycle depends completely upon tactical, operational, and strategic agility. We must not only think faster than our opponent; we must also move faster than him. Movement by itself can be fruitless or even counterproductive. If Newtonian momentum is defined as mass multiplied by velocity, we best define agility in the information age as movement multiplied by intelligence.¹² To take full advantage of rapid technological change requires mental and physical agility in both the planning room and in battlespace. Shock-based warfare relies heavily upon such agility and must be used to disorient our opponents so thoroughly that they either decide not to fight or, once the fighting has begun, to capitulate with low relative U.S. or coalition losses.

Shock at Home

As a very basic illustration of this effect, consider what happens as I come home from work one day to find my key does not fit in the front door of my house. At first the problem seems simple: I have the wrong key. But as I struggle more and more I find none of my keys work. I knock on the door; surprisingly, the person who meets me is not my wife. While more confused than ever, my initial reaction is to assume I somehow picked the wrong house. But I am on the right street, the number and name on the front door are correct, and the same old welcome mat sits under my feet. Bewilderment and a little panic sets in. As I walk in the house I recognize nothing: the furniture, pictures, carpet are all completely different. My confusion mounts. Just when I think I can find a way to adapt to this ever-increasing shock to my orientation, the person who greeted me pulls out a gun, points it at me, and fires…. Whether the gun has blanks or live bullets is immaterial: what matters is that I am now completely unable to react to the unfolding situation. What started as a mild and maybe even amusing disorientation ended with utter confusion and an inability to comprehend the situation; my world turned upside down in a matter of minutes.¹³ Shock-based operations have the potential to produce on a grand scale such shock and disorientation in our opponents.

Implementing a Shock-Based Strategy

In general, we have succeeded in linking military strategy to political objectives by relying upon superior intelligence agencies and military forces to achieve desired battlefield effects through conventional, physical attack against our opponent’s military infrastructure, his weapons systems, and his fielded forces (this order has changed through the years and depends somewhat on service doctrine, but these common categories have not really changed much).

In the traditional way of attacking the enemy through air, ground, or sea, typically we have selected those sets of physical targets that our enemy needs to keep fighting. In broad terms, we have gone after our opponent’s military forces and his industrial base (comprising in the main telecommunications and transportation networks, war production facilities, command and control nodes, and petroleum-oil-lubrication storage areas). Additionally, starting in World War II and continuing through the present, the Air Force has emphasized destroying an enemy’s desire to keep fighting. According to Air Force doctrine, destruction of many of the targets listed above will not only reduce the enemy’s physical capacity to fight the war, it also reduces — and some airpower zealots would say can destroy — the enemy’s national will to fight. Within the last fifteen years, the enemy’s leadership has also gained new acceptance as a lucrative target, under the assumption that removal of our opponent’s political-military leadership offers the shortest route to eliminating this will to fight.

The best example of a leadership-centric approach to targeting is Colonel John Warden’s (USAF, retired) "Five Rings" theory of aerospace warfare. While innovative and commendable for its bold approach to changing long-standing targeting doctrine, Warden’s theory (and most other leadership-centric or counter-army-centric doctrines) fails in that it relies on largely linear mechanisms for success. In his essay The Enemy as a System, Warden begins with an equation in which the outcome of a war strategy depends upon the product (Physical x Morale). Since the physical side of the enemy is theoretically "perfectly knowable and predictable," and the human side "beyond the realm of predictability," Warden contends that the war effort should thus be directed "primarily at the [enemy’s] physical side."¹⁴ In seeking a best way to attack this facet, Warden develops his five-rings model of an opponent. He compares it to an astronomical or molecular model in which the outer "orbiting subsystems" surround a critical core. In Warden’s model the critical core is the enemy leadership; the orbiting subsystems are organic essentials, infrastructure, population, and the opponent’s fielded military forces.¹⁵

While the perfect attack would be one in which only the critical core — the enemy’s leadership — would have to be defeated to achieve ultimate success, Warden acknowledges the difficulty of getting at this lucrative target and expands his discussion of "parallel attack" to describe how an attack against all five rings at once may be necessary to bring about the desired strategic effect (in effect, attacks against the component rings can collapse the enemy’s system or affect the enemy’s leaders’ will, much in the same manner as Air Force attacks against Germany’s economic and industrial targets in World War II were designed to affect the German national will to fight).¹⁶

My primary objection to Warden’s Five Rings theory rests on its neglect of the morale side of his equation of war. While it may be nigh impossible to predict human behavior with high accuracy, that is no reason to neglect it in execution of a grand strategy. Moreover, the use of astronomical or atomic ring and shell models to describe an enemy’s system suggests an excessive dependence on linearity and mechanistic systems.¹⁷

Since it has been notoriously difficult to attack leadership targets directly, we have usually focused on the hardware, command and control networks, and people that help keep our opponent’s leadership in power. Consequently, the most effective way to defeat our opponents and achieve political objectives has been to drop bombs on things they value, to capture territory and equipment, and to kill people. With Desert Storm we started seeing the concerted introduction of what now typically falls under the rubric of "information warfare." In the war against Iraq, information operations included attacking Iraq’s computer, communications, and command and control networks with electrons instead of high explosives.

This method of assailing our enemy, moderately successful in 1991, was even more useful in Operation Allied Force as we employed remarkably wide-ranging information networks to gather reams of data on how the Serb leaders ran their country. Some very smart people in our military and civilian agencies made great headway in finding out what the Serb leadership valued most — in other words, what they could least afford to lose if they hoped to remain in power. Yet we simply did not yet have the capacity to put together the best of both physical and information attacks to shatter the Serb leaders’ orientation, induce paralysis, and stay inside the Serb decision cycle.¹⁸ As a result, we could not bring down the Serb power base before the war began or during the first few days of actual combat operations.¹⁹

Most current targeting doctrines neglect the powerful effects of interaction, complexity, and the chaos of warfare.²⁰ It is not that such concepts are not discussed; rather, it is the very difficulty of dealing with such complex effects that cause them to be largely ignored or discarded. Moreover, today’s doctrines essentially ignore the existence of opponents who behave as complex adaptive systems. Our opponents are usually much smarter than we assume initially. They learn not only from the experiences of other states or groups who have been on the receiving end of American military might, they adapt remarkably well even while under direct attack from U.S. forces.²¹ After the conflict ends these opponents endure and persist.

If Desert Storm and, to a lesser extent, Allied Force were examples of a mostly direct approach to combined warfare, the recent phenomenal growth of information, bio-, and nano- technologies now provide a way to focus once more on the indirect method of attack. We need to perfect an approach that combines physical attack and information operations to get and stay inside our enemy’s decision cycle; to confuse, shock, and frighten their leadership and (or) populace to the point they make inappropriate responses or collapse into inaction. The information age has given us the tools to accomplish such attacks. The challenge is to figure out exactly how we use the precepts of shock-based warfare to defeat our enemies.

As always, the first and critical step is to establish a well-defined link between political objectives and military strategy. This process establishes the intensity and breadth of the military campaign and places limits on the amount of power military commanders are allowed to use to achieve political objectives.²² The next — but scarcely less important — task is to analyze completely our potential opponent’s ideology and his political, economic, military, and cultural systems — the only way to truly shatter our enemy’s orientation is to begin with a complete grasp of what allows him to survive from day to day. This understanding leads naturally to development of the type and sequence of battlespace attacks and the proper placement of mental, moral, and physical pressure that will yield the greatest likelihood of paralysis and capitulation.²³

Shock-based operations thus demand an excruciatingly detailed analysis of an opponent’s centers of gravity, nodes, and critical vulnerabilities; only such a holistic method will allow military commanders at all levels to understand how the combination of physical attack and information operations will achieve strategic objectives. The "two levels up, two levels down" philosophy associated with industrial-age "commander’s intent" will not suffice in shock-based warfare. It is critical that everyone from front-line warriors to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff have the same understanding of the campaign’s grand strategy and, in particular, a sense of how shock-based operations will be used to achieve campaign objectives.²⁴

This analysis must force together often-distinct worlds for both planning and execution of shock-based operations. At the strategic level we need to forge an unbreakable bond between warriors of the five services and intelligence agencies, and the ‘best and the brightest’ of the interagency world. During this process the steely-eyed advanced tactics school graduate who can pick the best weapons and tactics for any target in the world is no more or less important than the intelligence specialist who knows exactly what physical targets to hit to reduce the enemy’s ability to wage war. He is also no more or less important than the select group of recognized experts culled from both government and the corporate world that are versed in the intricacies of international finance, transportation, power, water, industry, and worldwide crime syndicates. He is no more or less important than the diplomat who served ten years in country and knows the culture, geography, and language better than anyone but a native. Our steely-eyed warrior is no more or less important than the disgruntled defector who, after serving a decade as the enemy leader’s right-hand man, knows exactly what keeps that leader in power. Finally, while the steely-eyed warrior may find it hard to swallow, in shock-based operations he is no more or less important than the psychologist, psychiatrist, sociologist, or religious expert.²⁵

The use of strategic-level "nodal analysis" has recently gained more currency as our military staff officers and governmental interagency groups search for new and inventive ways to degrade or destroy portions of an opponent’s civil-military system. The intent is to achieve military objectives through a combination of overwhelming precision firepower and information operations against critical nodes of our adversary’s leadership, fielded forces, and military and civil infrastructure. The doctrine associated with this well-intentioned concept still relies, however, on a largely linear or reductionist combination of technology and physical destruction to achieve military objectives.

Over the past ten years U.S. military leaders have done reasonably well taking data and advice from most of the above-named groups of specialists to build a campaign that pits American strengths against opponent weaknesses, establishing the necessary links between political objectives and military strategy. Rarely, however, have we put all of the groups together at one time to coordinate such efforts: there has never been a "central clearing house" at one classification level to lay out the targeting plan to military commanders.²⁶ Such efforts have remained largely at the strategic level of war for three principal reasons: above all, they remained at the higher level because they were not particularly relevant to the operational and tactical levels. Also, security concerns have confined the complete targeting plan to the strategic level. Finally, the overarching targeting plan stayed largely at the strategic level due to the fact that rapidly changing events throughout the lower levels of war have made it almost impossible to adapt on the spot. Such adaptation, however, is absolutely central to shock-based warfare.

Operational- and tactical-level commanders will not have the luxury of time granted strategic-level planners who conceive and build a holistic shock-based campaign plan. The fog and friction of the battlespace, adaptive opponents, and ever-changing political exigencies will dilute almost immediately the value resident in the original strategic plan. To stay inside the opponent’s decision cycle and avoid being placed into a reactive mode of operations, our commanders who fight the day-to-day war must rely upon innovation to adapt to continuous change. These commanders must have an ever-present link (physical if able, virtual otherwise; on-site if possible, in-theater without fail) to the same organizations and individuals who helped plan the original campaign to ensure that the opponent’s orientation is attacked properly and shattered. At the same time, commanders will rely upon the same links to ensure the orientation of U.S. and coalition forces remains intact during events in battlespace that will change almost by the minute, often in ways never anticipated.

The key to shock-based warfare is to unleash the gamut of physical and information tools of warfare to attack our opponent’s critical nodes, overwhelm his ability to adapt to change, and make him think he is under constant attack from every conceivable direction. Nothing can appear safe from attack. Every time our enemy attempts to reorient himself to the new environment, the U.S. shifts its weight of effort to attack something else equally important to the opponent’s survival — our opponent’s orientation is distorted and shattered before he knows what hit him. The process continues until paralysis sets in. If the Patton-esque adage of industrial-age maneuver warfare was to "hold ‘em by the nose and kick ‘em in the ass," in shock-based warfare the idea is to hold the enemy by the nose and kick him in the ass, the shins, the spine, and the chest — all while assaulting his brain, heart, and central nervous and immunity systems. The enemy’s "body" collapses and implodes.²⁷

As an example, our Joint Force Air Component Commander (JFACC) may find that the typical 72-hour Air Tasking Order process that was so useful in the original strategic plan becomes at best unwieldy when trying to keep up with a rapidly changing battlespace. Faced with limited resources and competing objectives, our JFACC will have to make tough on-the-spot decisions about resource reallocation. The value of shock-based targeting, however, is that our JFACC can modify significantly his original resource allocation plan but still achieve the desired military objectives.

Such resource reallocation might mean, for instance, sacrificing direct and seemingly lucrative attacks against a dozen MiG aircraft in the open on an enemy airfield to hit a time-critical target somewhere else in theater (a target which, according to his group of on-site or virtual experts, would play a more important part in warping the opponent’s orientation than an attack against the MiGs). The sacrifice would be permissible thanks to our JFACC’s coordination with his group of experts who, through shocked-based operations analysis, were able to find other means of assuring those same MiG aircraft would never leave the ground (for example, by contaminating the airfield fuel supply, information attacks against the base command and control system or the aircraft’s avionics and weapons systems, or use of special operations forces to take out the enemy’s pilots and mechanics).

While I use the JFACC example to illustrate the idea of rapidly changing operational-level conditions, the argument applies throughout the battlespace. This ability to forgo one or more lucrative targets in favor of a time-critical one will itself require something of a revolution in organizational thinking: not many air, land, sea, or space component commanders will give up "hard kills" against lucrative targets with mere promises that those targets will be neutralized through other means. It is clear the proof will have to be in the pudding before battlespace commanders consistently adopt such thinking.

The demands of a fluid battlespace environment and presence of adaptive opponents make flexibility, agility, and innovation central features of shock-based warfare at the operational and tactical levels. The only way for U.S. and coalition commanders to destroy the opponent’s orientation is to remain inside our enemy’s decision cycle. To stay inside our opponent’s decision cycle means changing the weight of effort as the tactical and operational battlespace changes; it also means relying on the advice of shock-based warfare experts to remain a step ahead of our adversary.

As important as flexibility, agility, and innovation in shock-based warfare is the ability to receive timely and accurate information from a constantly shifting battlespace, since this helps establish our correct orientation within each decision cycle. How do we get such timely and accurate information? How do our political leaders and tactical-, operational-, and strategic-level military commanders assess progress in meeting campaign objectives and thus continue with a plan that preserves our own orientation while destroying our opponent’s ability to adapt?

Combat Assessment, or Back to the OODA Loop

If the initial strategic plan focuses almost exclusively on the orientation phase of the OODA loop, subsequent iterations of the decision cycle are contingent upon the observation stage (which for the purposes of this discussion may be called by the more familiar term, the combat or battle damage assessment phase). Observation is an integral part of the decision cycle. In our OODA loop, the output of the observation stage feeds directly into the orientation phase, where our leaders and commanders then form the decisions that lead to actions both in the battlespace and at the bargaining table. Not surprisingly, the observation phase has been only as complex as our existing collection systems and cognitive factors have allowed. In industrial-era combat, combat assessment consisted — and consists — mainly of direct battle damage assessment (‘eyes on target’ and weapon system video tape), intelligence analysis of military capability (collection assets and human intelligence), and commanders’ personal observations as to remaining enemy capability (Figure 1).

As we move to shock-based operations, the complexity of information-age warfare demands more than so-called ‘conventional’ indicators of battlefield success.²⁸ Information-age conflict requires an increasingly sophisticated means of assessing progress. If we accept that our opponents behave as complex adaptive systems, we need a combat assessment system to match. In essence, what we need is a "complex adaptive intelligence system" (Figure 2). Put in simpler terms, we need a combat assessment capability that is capable of self-learning. As farfetched as it might sound at first, there have been remarkable advances in information systems that suggest such a self-learning system is possible, if not highly likely, within the next several years.²⁹ Such a system will accept continuous battlespace inputs as shown in Figure 2, apply them against a cultural-military-economic model produced by shock-based warfare experts and against what it has already ‘learned’ by comparing the opponent’s expected and actual actions to date, and provide a constantly updated measure of effectiveness for commanders.³⁰

The output of such a system is not linear. There can never be a numerical grade cutoff, above which our commander can tell the politicians that success is assured; below which, our commander assumes he is losing the war (introducing frightening comparisons with the worst of Vietnam-era "systems analysis," to say the least). Moreover, the output will only be as good as the inputs — that aphorism remains immutable, if somewhat unfortunate. We need to think of the product more in terms of "green, yellow, and red light" indicators.³¹ Given these clear limitations, it may seem that building these highly sophisticated databases for each theater of war is more effort than it is worth. What is important, however, is not only that a new observation method is needed to handle the exploding demands of information-age conflict. What also matters is that our ability to shatter our opponent’s orientation — the central feature of shock-based operations — depends to a large extent on how well we can monitor our progress towards that goal. We need a complex adaptive intelligence system to give us the most timely and highest fidelity combat assessment possible, even if such a system has to take second place to the most effective centuries-old complex adaptive system, the commander and his coup d’oeil.

A New Definition for Joint Doctrine

Much as implementation of a shock-based warfare doctrine will improve the capacity to link U.S. political objectives to a military strategy, inclusion of a definition and expanded discussion of shock-based operations will enhance joint doctrine. Joint publications — and Joint Publications 1 and 3-0 in particular — need a definition and description of shock-based operations. I propose the following, to be included in joint doctrine glossaries and within discussions of how military operations will accomplish NCA-directed political objectives: