JOINT AEROSPACE
POWER:
A NEW NATIONAL STRATEGY
by
Gene Myers
September 16, 1998
A Changing World | Bombs
or Boots | The National Aerospace
Strategy
Recommendations and Conclusion | The
Author | Notes
PART I: A Changing World
- “The way we make war reflects the way we make
wealth—and the way we make anti-war must reflect the way we
make war.”
Alvin and Heidi Toffler1
Our world and how we operate in it
are changing. Advanced nations are rapidly evolving from
reliance on mechanized, labor intensive means of accomplishing
tasks and producing wealth to means that emphasize technology
and information—skill and knowledge over brawn and blood. The
same is true of the military dimension. Brute force strategies
in the past have been reliant on the brawn, blood, and suffering
of soldiers and sailors. But the bloody juggernaut of 20th
century war has not consumed only its uniformed participants. It
has hungrily included the agony and dislocation of millions of
unfortunate civilians who happen to be in the path of its often
arbitrary destruction. In the 21st century we will
finally have the tools to make this ancient form of brutality
based on the blood of massed armies pass from the realm of an
unavoidable by-product of achieving national goals through
military means to an option that is exercised only with
reluctance and caution. We will focus more on anti-war—on ways
of avoiding the historic carnage of armed conflict and, when
necessary, of more humane ways of forcefully attaining national
objectives.
At the same time, we still have
dangerous adversaries that oppose our national interests. But
they are not the same as in the recent past. Our old Soviet
nemesis has crumbled and been collected in history’s dustbin,
replaced by a host of potential enemies, both state and
non-state. Some are in ways more dangerous than the Soviet Union
used to be; they may not be answerable to any sort of higher
political power or constituency beyond greed or blood debts or
may believe their cause has lost all international constituency
and thus all need for caution, is lost.2
Iran, Iraq, North Korea, the Russian Mafia, numerous drug
cartels, and various ideological, cultural, or ethnic
single-purpose, non-state groups are becoming ominous fixtures
on the international landscape. While we advise caution and urge
respect for human life and property our opponents may be
planning for unrestricted bloody conflict.
The President’s National Security
Strategy divides the threat into three categories: 1) Regional
or state centered—states like Iraq, Iran, or North Korea with
regionally focused ambitions and military forces; 2)
Transnational threats by state or non-state groups—terrorism,
illegal drugs, organized crime, uncontrolled refugee migrations;
and 3) Threats from weapons of mass destruction (WMD)—posed by
rapidly proliferating nuclear, biological, and chemical (NBC)
weapons.3
On a more practical, military
strategic note, the December 1997 report of the National Defense
Panel concluded:
- “We must anticipate that future adversaries will learn
from the past and confront us in very different ways. Thus we
must be willing to change as well or risk having forces
ill-suited to protect our security twenty years in the future.
Only one thing is certain: the greatest danger lies in an
unwillingness or an inability to change our security posture
in time to meet the challenges of the next century.”
Despite this ominous and uncertain
politico-military landscape, the protestations of die-hard
attrition warfare traditionalists, the nation’s public and
political leadership increasingly demand a new way of doing our
still vital military business. The lives of our young men and
women are not worth risking unless it is for the most noble and
dire of causes. Otherwise, if our nation cannot find new more
effective and less destructive ways to make its military point,
and cope with those that would wish us harm, it simply may not
be allowed to—isolationism may replace internationalism to the
detriment of US interests and well being. The Chairman of the
Joint Chief’s of Staff vision statement, Joint Vision 2010,
acknowledges this requirement:
- “The American people will continue to expect us to win
in any engagement, but they will also expect us to be more
efficient in protecting lives and resources while
accomplishing the mission successfully. . . . [This includes]
collateral damage in combat.”5
The titanic clash of mighty armies
is becoming an obsolete paradigm in the western world’s
compendium of acceptable military options. Ground forces
themselves will not become obsolete; but they will have to
evolve. They must become lighter and more mobile. While
retaining true warfighting capability, they should concentrate
more on operations at the lower end of the range of military
operations where interests every bit as vital to the nation as
those protected by classic attrition warfare reside. And as
distasteful as it might be to a land force centric command
structure used to being at the center of major joint force
operations, they will often be required to play an unaccustomed,
but vital supporting role to national aerospace power.
Air, Space, and Information
Aerospace power, as used here, is
defined as the synergistic application of air, space, and
information systems to project global strategic military power.
Dominance in the information environment—possessing more and
better information than your adversary and reacting to it more
quickly--has always provided strategic and tactical advantages
to the force possessing it. Again, as pointed out in Joint
Vision 2010, today, superiority in the processing and use of
the vast quantities of available information is critical to
military success.6 And
the combined air and space environments provide the wise user
with unlimited mobility, versatility, and visibility
(“presence”). Operations in each of these three realms—air,
space, and information—can be synergistic and overlapping and
can achieve strategic, operational, or tactical level effects.
It is the purpose of this monograph
to advance the cause of change in our military doctrine and
strategy and explore alternatives to the traditional ground
force, attrition warfare centered way of doing our military
business. It will focus on three basic propositions:
That through the considered
application of aerospace power we can lessen our emphasis on
attrition-based surface warfare as the raison d’être of military
forces and replace it with the dual concepts of strategic
control and national war;
That joint service doctrine should
not stress jointness at the expense of effectiveness. National
military objectives are best achieved through skillful
application of each Service’s unique contribution to total
national military capability;
That in the 21st
century, an aerospace based strategy is the single most
effective way for our nation to take maximum advantage of its
technological strengths as the globe’s premier air and space
faring nation.
Breaking With Tradition
There are two traditional views of
US military employment doctrine that are demonstrated by the
following figure. The first is labeled the “equal shares” model.
It is staunchly advocated by such organizations as the Joint
Warfighting Center (JWFC) and the Joint Staff. This model
maintains that all the Services should be equal partners in the
nation’s military operations—and in strategic investment
decisions. Proponents cling tightly to the Goldwater-Nichols Act
as the grail of legitimacy. It is seen as codifying the notion
of “everybody plays;” and jointness just for jointness sake.
This directive of politically correct joint force application
has attained such a theological aura as to defy attempts by
Service representatives to suggest a more service specialized
focus on joint force doctrine.
The second view, held by surface
warfare attrition traditionalists, maintains that land warfare
is the irreplaceable centerpiece of military operations even in
the politically correct era. It holds that to defeat an enemy
you must first destroy or disable his army. Only then is the
road to the nation’s strategic objectives open. Air and sea
forces will join in this endeavor and often play major roles,
but ultimately they are supporting forces in the climactic
combined arms operation that is necessary to dislodge the enemy
from ill gotten gains and destroy him. Advocates tip their hats
to Goldwater-Nichols by acknowledging their need for air and sea
"support," but rarely acknowledge the potential for decisive
application of air and sea forces.
In fact, as far as aerospace forces
are concerned, joint Service doctrine does relegate the
aerospace component to essentially supporting roles. The Joint
Force Air Component Commander (JFACC) is described as
essentially an optional position that is severely constrained by
joint force staff and land component commander options—in
striking contrast to the lack of doctrinal restrictions on land
and sea component commanders.7
The fact that there is no joint
doctrine publication for strategic attack is in itself very
telling. With reams of published doctrine on everything from
forcible entry and amphibious operations to close air support
and riverine operations, the mission described by Air Force
doctrine as “the most efficient means of employing air and space
power,” is only tangentially addressed in joint doctrine
publications under other titles.8
Another indictment is the fact that there are no Air Force
geographical commanders-in chief (CINCs)—commanders responsible
for particular regions (Europe, the Pacific, etc.). They are
all, and with only one exception always have been, surface
officers—Army, Navy, Marines—with surface force perspectives,
despite aerospace power’s proven effectiveness in both war and
operations other than war.
But there is another approach—one
that eschews the notion of enforced equality and the
inevitability of bloody surface attrition war. It does not
discount “joint” warfare, but asserts that it is not an equal
opportunity employer. It strives to emphasize recognized
national strengths in the aerospace environment—the United
States is the most powerful aerospace power on earth. As the
following discussion will point out, it is this fact that will
have the single greatest impact on the way the nation conducts
its military business in the next century. This paper will
advocate an approach to military operations that emphasizes
the employment of aerospace power to the maximum extent in
achieving national military objectives--as the sole military
component when possible, but, as is most likely, as a member of
a joint force team when necessary. It argues, as does a recent
comprehensive study of aerospace power in the 21st
century that:
- “. . . air and space power has reached a state of
technological and operational maturation that enables it to
form the basic building block of a new strategic paradigm.
That paradigm would see warfare conducted increasingly from a
base of operations located in the third dimension.”9
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