Modern Military Strategy

by Elinor C Sloan

  The earliest formulation of NCW was associated with the US Navy, both conceptually and in practice. Technological advances in C4I proceeded most rapidly in the US Navy and, prompted by requirements to be technologically interoperable with their American counterpart, within other NATO navies. But the notion of NCW as conceived by Cebrowksi is relevant to all services. In a land force environment, for example, it points to linking together the combat power of tanks, armoured personnel carriers and artillery howitzers; in an air environment it might link UAV sensor information with the combat potential of a fighter jet. Most notably, truly revolutionary change could not arrive until NCW made the transition to the joint world. The requirement was for sea, land and air platforms to be able to transfer information among one another – for example, for reconnaissance vehicles on the ground to be able to receive images from fighter jet targeting pods or UAVs. This was a formidable Military Transformation challenge, and one that Rumsfeld tapped Cebrowski to address.

  In 2001, shortly before the 9/11 attacks, Rumsfeld appointed Cebrowksi as director of a newly created Office of Force Transformation in the Pentagon. With a mandate to promote the transformation of the US military services, the office issued Transformation Planning Guidance, designed to facilitate the services’ efforts to frame their transformation roadmaps, as well as a broader statement of America’s strategic approach to Military Transformation. Transformation was defined as ‘a process that shapes the changing nature of competition and cooperation through new combinations of concepts, capabilities, people and organizations that exploit our nation’s advantages and protect against our asymmetric vulnerabilities’.31 The common theme pervading both documents, which did not appear until 2003, was the imperative of pursuing and implementing technologies and doctrines that would facilitate and ultimately bring to fruition a situation of true jointness in operations. Interoperability – the ability to transfer information – was the first key step, and a difficult one considering early communications systems were developed along service lines, with little or no common architecture. Once technological interoperability was achieved, a military could be ‘networked’ but for Cebrowksi, as expressed by the Office of Force Transformation, NCW demanded additional steps. ‘NCW’, it argued, ‘is the military expression of the information age … [it] refers to the combination of emerging tactics, techniques, and technologies that a networked force employs to create decisive warfighting advantage’.32 Protocols and common means of acting in certain situations still had to be established, i.e. joint doctrine; as a result, the services were also asked to develop joint operating concepts. Jointness enabled by interoperable technology and joint doctrine would ultimately allow for new attributes in the conduct of war that were originally associated with the RMA, such as dispersed and de-massed forces.

  Cebrowski, as stated in an eloquent post-mortem discussion of his career and strategic thought, was convinced that the American military ‘stood on the threshold of an explosion of information, knowledge and understanding of warfare, as well as, most importantly, greater precision in waging it’.33 In his view, advances in military technologies had a moral quality about them because greater precision could enable the achievement of objectives with less loss of life. Others were less sanguine. Colleagues agreed that advanced technologies were useful in warfare, but they were not so convinced of an effective trade-off between military mass and networked forces. Nonetheless, a number of concepts linked to NCW, the earlier system of systems and indeed the whole RMA dialogue and the characteristics of war it encompassed – particularly the non-linear, synchronized nature of war – flourished in the early 2000s.

  EBO and related concepts

  By the turn of the millennium, strategic thinking related to joint theory was beginning to involve more refined concepts under the overall NCW umbrella, including that of EBO and RDO. But whereas NCW had its intellectual home in the US Navy, EBO and RDO were more comfortably located in the US Air Force. The fact that NCW, EBO and RDO must be examined together, and yet originated in different services, indicates their underlying ‘joint’ nature. So too does the reality that extensive discussions and promulgations of EBO and RDO – and later refutations of these concepts’ validity – came from US Joint Forces Command.

  John Warden and David Deptula

  The roots of EBO lie in the strategic thought of John Warden. The retired US Air Force Colonel is best known for drawing up the 1991 Gulf War air campaign and for enunciating a Five Rings Model of enemy centres of gravity – command and leadership, critical war industry, infrastructure, population and fielded military – that should be subjected to a ‘parallel warfare’ strategy of simultaneous (vice serial) precision strikes (see Chapter 3). But Warden’s strategic thought also went beyond the use of force. A strong proponent of psychological effects in war, the ‘indirect’ approach of Sun Tzu and Liddell Hart, Warden advocated planners focus less on destroying and killing and more on how to create chaos, confusion and paralysis. In addition, he emphasized the importance of integrating military instruments with those in the economic and political dimensions.

  David Deptula, Warden’s subordinate during the Gulf War and later Lieutenant General, elaborated on the ideas originally planted by Warden, framing them in terms of the EBO concept. ‘The construct of warfare employed during the Gulf War air campaign has become known as parallel warfare’, he noted in a 2001 monograph, ‘and was based upon achieving specific effects, not absolute destruction of targets lists’.34 He stressed the distinction between destruction-based and effects-based warfare, arguing that the objective of striking the specific centres of gravity identified by Warden was not to annihilate the enemy or wear him out through attrition but rather to have a desired effect on adversary behaviour.

  Deptula’s vision of EBO took as its starting point the view that rendering the enemy force useless is just as effective as eliminating that enemy force, and that a viable alternative to a destruction concept of war is one based on controlling the enemy’s ability to operate. Whereas early airpower theorists advocated the destruction of industrial and population centres, EBO went further, ‘aiming not just to impede the means of the enemy to conduct war or the will of the people to continue war, but the very ability of the enemy to control its vital functions’.35 He gave as an example the targeting of Iraqi power plants in the opening stages of the Gulf War, where the effect was to induce other power plant managers to shut down their plants in advance to avoid being targeted – an example of the achievement of warfare objectives without the destructive use of force. In this sense Deptula, and Warden before him, shared with Cebrowski the desire to achieve a more bloodless form of war. The logical endgame of EBO, Deptula later stressed, was to attain security objectives without resorting to destruction or visible disruption.36 An advocate of Sun Tzu’s perspective that the acme of skill in warfare is to subdue the enemy without battle, he highlighted EBO as a springboard for better linking military, economic and diplomatic instruments of national power.

  Deptula also placed EBO squarely in a joint force framework. In the old attrition or annihilation way of thinking about war, he argued, ground forces were at the centre of the ‘universe’, with air and maritime forces orbiting around land forces in support; by contrast, in the new, effects-based war planning approach the Joint Forces Commander stood at the centre of the universe, with joint land, air and maritime forces all making contributions. Finally, he linked EBO to another term in the defence lexicon, RDO, arguing that such operations seek to achieve an effects-based result with greater rapidity and less mass.

  Harlan Ullman and ‘shock and awe’

  The RDO concept originated with Harlan Ullman, a former US Naval officer and a scholar with the Center for Strategic and International Studies. In a slim volume published in 1996, Shock and Awe: Achieving Rapid Dominance, Ullman and his colleague James Wade argued that the aim of Rapid Dominance was ‘to affect the will, perception, and understanding of the adversary … [by] imposing a regime of
Shock and Awe’. In the term Rapid Dominance, ‘rapid’ meant the ability to move quickly before the enemy could react, while ‘dominance’ referred to affecting and dominating the enemy’s will, both physically and psychologically. The strategy would be effective, Ullman argued, if, by acting on a sufficiently timely basis, friendly forces could so overload an adversary’s perceptions and understanding of events that they rendered him incapable of resistance at the tactical and strategic levels, paralyzing his will to carry on.37

  US Joint Forces Command

  RDO, ‘shock and awe’, and even EBO originated as airpower concepts but were subsequently stretched to fill a joint box. A clear indication of this trend was the substantial amount of strategic thinking about EBO and RDO carried out by US Joint Forces Command. In a 2001 doctrine document it defined EBO as a ‘philosophy that focuses on obtaining a desired strategic outcome or “effect” on the enemy, through the application of a full range of military and non-military capabilities’.38 The ‘effect’, in turn, could be either a physical or psychological/behavioural outcome. The command stressed the concept’s applicability or value added to joint operations, arguing EBO was a joint command and staff thinking process designed to improve unified action. Moreover, its objective (echoing Warden’s original observation) was to harmonize and synchronize military actions with those of other instruments of national power, including political and economic, so as to achieve unity of effort in joint operation planning and execution. The command further linked EBO to the earlier NCW concept, arguing joint operations of the future would be knowledge-centric, effects-based and networked. EBO was seen by other US military joint organizations as a supporting concept to NCW, and a focus on the effects of military operations came to be defined as the nature of the objective of NCW.39 But, ‘[a]t its core’, the Joint Warfighting Center argued in 2007, ‘an effects-based approach [remains] a refinement of how we think about joint operations’.40

  Joint Forces Command defined RDO as those that integrate knowledge, command and control, and EBO to achieve the desired political/military effect. While EBO refers more to the purpose of an operation (to achieve an effect), RDO referred more to how operations were conducted, i.e. a concept of operations, much like NCW. The command characterized current operations as sequential, progressive, linear, attrition-based and demanding ‘de-conflicted’ service operations, as compared to RDO which would be simultaneous, parallel, distributed, effects-based and have fully ‘integrated’ (joint) service capabilities. In this latter regard, RDO would require the integrated application of dominant manoeuvre (a predominantly landpower concept) and precision engagement (a predominantly airpower concept), as called for in Joint Vision 2010. In military parlance, the idea behind RDO was to get inside the enemy’s decision cycle so as to cause the opposing forces to lose coherence. For Joint Forces Command, in the early 2000s, RDO constituted the essence of Military Transformation whereby the US and its allies would assault the adversary from directions and in dimensions against which he had no counter, creating confusion, loss of coherence and ultimately a change in behaviour such that the adversary was no longer acting counter to US interests.41

  In the years leading up to the 2003 Iraq War ‘shock and awe’ came to be seen as requiring a series of unrelenting waves of strikes across many targets, combining sea, air, land and space forces. The idea was to rely on precision force and agile units – two components of the original RMA concept – to defeat opposing forces, while avoiding wholesale destruction and civilian casualties. The war itself was a concrete manifestation of the strategy; precision strikes were conducted on hundreds of targets in parallel with the deployment of manoeuvre forces on the ground. While some interpreted Operation Iraqi Freedom as vindicating ‘shock and awe’ others saw a degree of failure. An unrealized component of the strategy was to decapitate the Iraqi leadership in the opening stages of the war, with the aim of creating a psychological blow that would paralyze the Iraqi war effort from the outset.

  In any case, the humbling experience of the years of Iraqi insurgency that followed had an impact on future strategic thinking. By the second half of the 2000s Joint Forces Command had dropped the RDO construct, perhaps because no convincing explanation could be found as to why it would necessarily always be better for operations to be rapid. As some critics pointed out the political leadership may find a graduated response desirable or necessary for any number of reasons, such as to avoid escalation to the use of nuclear weapons, or to keep allies on board. EBO lasted somewhat longer than RDO as a concept in vogue, but it, too, invited many critiques which, by the decade’s end, had all but buried it.

  Critiques

  At its core EBO was a planning tool that encouraged identifying the desired strategic outcome or objective in a campaign, and then deriving the means required to achieve the objective. This was presented as a change from an historical tendency to focus in the first instance on the means, which in turn were usually destructive. Do you want to destroy a bridge, or do you want to cut off the flow of enemy supplies across it? Do you want to cut off the supplies, or do you want to prevent enemy resupply altogether?42 But critics argued that this new way of thinking was not so new, and that planners had always thought in terms of strategic outcomes and objectives.

  More troubling was the concern, expressed by General James Mattis, Commander of Joint Forces Command in the latter part of the 2000s, and several others, that the effects-based approach could lead to a dangerous self-delusion about the capacity to control outcomes. EBO was premised on the assumption that one can predict how an enemy will react to a given situation. The concept lay claim not just to first-order effects, but also to second- and even third-order effects. Its tenets implied that war was a science rather than an art and a science, and that war and strategic outcomes could somehow be controlled. Like NCW before it, EBO was criticized as being contrary to all historical experience, and certainly to the Clausewitzian dictum that war, more than any other human activity, most closely resembles a game of cards.

  By 2008 Mattis found it necessary to issue his own guidance on EBO. ‘I am convinced that the various interpretations of EBO have caused confusion throughout the joint force’, he stated. ‘EBO has been misapplied and overextended to the point that it actually hinders rather than helps joint operations.’43 Specific concerns from the US Army and Marine Corps and other observers included that EBO assumed a level of unachievable predictability; called for an unobtainable level of knowledge of the enemy; was too prescriptive and over-engineered; and discounted the human dimension in war. EBO was seen as setting up an intellectual ‘Maginot Line’ around which the enemy could manoeuvre, and as overemphasizing precision air strikes to the detriment of ground force operations. But EBO did not disappear entirely. From its various tenets, Mattis and Joint Forces Command retained as useful the attention the concept gave to the interaction of military and non-military instruments, promoting unity of action, and conducting periodic assessments of operations to determine progress toward achieving objectives.

  Broader aspects of Transformation

  Even as strategic thinking related to joint theory was developing along the more narrow military lines of EBO and the like, so too was the overall concept of Transformation becoming broader in nature over the course of the 2000s. Driven by the post-9/11 security environment and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, Transformation came to encompass much more than the basket of ideas identified with the RMA (see Box 7.2). Transformation had to accommodate the newly predominant stabilization, reconstruction and COIN operations, while still continuing the earlier Transformation programme of incorporating advanced technologies, and ‘de-massifying’ heavy Cold War armies.

  Box 7.2 MTR, RMA, Military Transformation: how the concepts relate

  • When thinking about the MTR, the RMA and Military Transformation, it is useful to conceive of them as a series of concentric circles, each progressively more expansive but each continuing to encompass the earlier core or cores.
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  • The MTR referred to new technologies in the areas of command, control and communications, intelligence and surveillance sensors, and precision-guided munitions that changed the conduct of war as demonstrated in the 1991 Gulf War.

  • The concept of an RMA broadened the perspective to involve three aspects: advanced military technologies (the MTR), organizational changes and doctrinal change. It was not enough, for example, to have advanced precision-guided munitions. Rather, this new technology had to be married with a doctrine of stand-off precision force and organizational changes within air forces to enable such strikes. Similarly, armies became smaller, more modular and mobile using precision artillery and advanced communications to carry out dispersed, non-linear operations. Technology was the enabler – but there was no revolution without the accompanying organizational and doctrinal changes.

  • The idea of Military Transformation broadened this still further. From about the mid-2000s onward it continued to encompass all of the RMA components but, in addition, it encompassed military efforts to accommodate stabilization and reconstruction missions, counterinsurgency operations and SOF, among other things – all under a general rubric of ‘transforming transformation’.

  See: Elinor Sloan, Military Transformation and Modern Warfare (Westport, CT: Praeger Security International, 2008), Chapter 1.

  Military innovation

  In parallel with post-Cold War strategic thought on jointness, the RMA and Military Transformation there has been significant thinking about military innovation and change. Today’s Western militaries, especially armies, are very different in structure, organization, doctrine and technology from what they were at the end of the Cold War. The change has been no less dramatic than the incorporation of the tank during and after World War One, or the move from battleships to aircraft carriers in this same time period. The question is how and why such innovation has taken place, and the answers are not as obvious – being forced to adapt after losing a war, for example – as one might think.