Thus the concept of Flush-and-FFE calls for deploying a ground force powerful enough to exercise control over land that an enemy cannot concede, yet far enough way that an enemy cannot simply turn around in its foxholes and fight, but must instead redeploy its forces. When an enemy comes out and begins advancing toward the ground force, it is intercepted and defeated in detail.
Limits and Limitations
It is worth mentioning what Flush-and-FFE is not. First, it is not a recipe for dumping ground forces into the midst of an enemy army. The concept calls for inserting a force into an area with light defenses, with a good killing zone between the ground element and enemy main body.
Like frigates in the age of sail, the Flush-and-FFE ground force is not put in place to fight major battles. And like frigates, its primary job is taking the objective in a swift operation. It must be equipped to conduct a seizure operation, but it cannot be expected to fight an extended pitched battle in the process. But unlike frigates, the Flush force is the equivalent of a ship-of-the-line in formation. With adequate communications, precision fires can be targeted at a numerically superior enemy during an unexpected encounter.
Second, Flush-and-FFE is not close air support operating under a different name. The latter provides air strikes on the battlefield to support ground forces engaged in a pitched battle.
The aim of the Flush-and-FFE tactic is to wipe out an enemy before it closes with the land force with sufficient forces to dislodge it. This is a distinction that may be reduced in practice. The ground commander may be best placed to direct fires, so the result may use a concept similar to close air support. However, it is more likely that a covering force will protect inserted troops while massive fire is directed by the joint force air component commander against the main enemy responses.
Third, Flush-and-FFE is not an interdiction tactic. Classical interdiction strategy calls for taking out bridges and other transportation chokepoints to isolate the battlefield and prevent an enemy from bringing up reinforcements. Flush-and-FFE may use interdiction to channel the foe onto the killing ground, but the intent is to cut the enemy down, not to cut an enemy off. With this approach, chokepoints are places to find targets rather than targets in themselves. However, interdiction could be achieved as a byproduct of the main operation.
Concepts and Criteria
One key to Flush-and-FFE is selecting the correct ground targets. Most nations have a handful of major cities, each of which is a high-value political and industrial target. Over the centuries laying siege to capitals has proved one of the best ways to compel an enemy to fight or yield. Other potential targets for seizure are moderate-value, low-population areas, especially areas disaffected from central governments. Seizing high-traffic chokepoints is also useful. Blocking key mountain passes, stretches of rivers, or road networks might lead to economic collapse. Finally, there is the potential for flushing an enemy out into the open not by seizing any particular objective, but simply through placing a presence in his rear. It has long been acknowledged that movement creates doubt for one’s enemies and opportunities for oneself.
No new operational art evolves without force structure implications. Several aspects of combined arms warfare for a Flush-and-FFE approach warrant consideration. The concept will not work without a ground element. A coalition approach offers one solution. Instead of using American troops, forces of local allies, or even an internal opposition movement can be employed to seize and hold ground while the United States provides the operational fires that destroy enemy combat forces, though for maximum flexibility the U.S. forces should maintain their own ground insertion capability.
Flush-and-FFE also has consequences for research, development, and procurement. Major requirements include:
Lighter ground forces. Some progress has been made in this arena over the last few years, but much of the focus has been on trying to equip rapidly deployed American troops to fight in urban environments. Opponents of lighter forces have noted that while light infantry equipped with light armored vehicles may be fine for peacekeeping or counterinsurgency, they will not last long against armored forces. The number one priority must be to find the right balance between organic firepower and mobility for ground forces.
All-weather operational fire capability. The United States can deliver operational fires at night or in poor weather. But the challenge is introducing this capability across the joint force.
Saturation reconnaissance capabilities. Flush-and-FFE requires that an enemy is detected and destroyed before it can engage friendly ground forces. This implies reconnaissance systems with a genuine saturation capability. Continuous support is essential. Systems like the RQ-4 Global Hawk UAV can provide such coverage and will be needed in future operations.
Fire management. Flush demands not only fast reconnaissance, but flexible operational firepower. And this depends on fire management, the ability to put ordnance on the right target at the precise moment that an attack will achieve maximum effect. The U.S. military has the capability to send mobile target locations to strike aircraft in flight, and tests show that imagery can be sent with target coordinates. Unmanned weapons such as Tactical Tomahawk will have a similar real-time update capability in the near future.
Target management. Solving this problem is the greatest need and hinges on eliminating intelligence stovepipes and ensuring real-time retasking of operational fire assets. Current procedures involve extensive imagery analysis to support strike planning cells for the joint force air component commander, which plugs targets into the air tasking order for the next day. Such a process is not sufficiently responsive for new operational concepts. A new system is needed in which imagery (by saturation reconnaissance) is fed to fire controllers, who can quickly call on ready operational fires. Future campaigns will demand artillery-like timelines for operational fire support.
High-speed logistics. Rapid insertion of a ground force will demand a lot of logistical support, preferably not shackled to airfields. This may require special transport. Perhaps the true answer is an amphibious transport aircraft, capable of exploiting rivers and lakes as runways to deliver equipment where it is most needed.
Overload suppression of enemy air defense and electronic warfare capability. Logistics are quite likely to be conducted over an air bridge. The supply effort must be resilient in the face of enemy air defenses. In Kosovo, the Serbs adopted a fleet-in-being strategy with an air defense net, never turning the whole thing on at one time and thus preserving their assets to fight another day. It worked, so the U.S. military is likely to see this approach again. As a counter, an air and electronic blockade capability is needed. Instead of launching a handful of planes to fly defense suppression and jamming missions for the few minutes of an air strike, a joint task force will need platforms that can loiter over the battlefield until enemy defenses either turn radars on or fire surface-to-air missiles—and then instantly reply with jamming, antiradiation weapons, and fire missions. Unmanned combat aerial vehicles are likely to be part of this solution.
Air supremacy. Logistic and firepower support must not be vulnerable to air intercept. The future airspace is going to be hostile with sensitive netted defenses and highly lethal fighters. Flush-and-FFE puts a premium on dominating the skies.
Non-lethal weapons. Various non-lethal capabilities will be required to minimize collateral damage and civilian casualties. This will allow commanders to focus on military forces and reduce concerns over the civilian populace.
Redundant secure communications. To the Flush-and-FFE force, physical encirclement is far less threatening than interdicting communication. Without communications, timings will be disrupted and operations will become extremely high-risk.
Extraction. The Flush-and-FFE force must be able to disengage and withdraw as effectively as it is inserted. Under no circumstances can the force be left behind and susceptible to enemy capture.
Joint concept of operations. Ground forces can come from the Army or Marine Corps, d
epending on the circumstances. Firepower can be delivered by any service. Communications, terminology, and fire procedures must be transparent. Jointness is essential. No single service can be expected to provide all the capabilities to ensure effective employment. Not only is a multiservice approach crucial, but the integration of systems will have to be fully operational from the opening moment of the campaign.
Precision warfare is an inadequate basis for the future. Simply dropping more bombs will not solve the problem. Flush-and-FFE provides a new operational dimension that can stymie potential asymmetric responses such as the adapted fleet-in-being strategy. But to realize this concept, the U.S. military must make investments to place a more agile and lethal force on the battlefield.
Editor’s Introduction to:
AMONG THIEVES
by Poul Anderson
I first read Poul Anderson in Astounding Science Fiction when I was in my last year of high school. I was, and still am, enormously impressed, and I continued to read him until, in 1962, the annual World Science Fiction Convention—WorldCon—was held in Seattle. I had never been to a WorldCon, but Poul Anderson and Robert Heinlein, my two favorite SF authors in all this world, were going to be there, and I might have a chance to meet them. I was then in an aerospace engineer/system analyst with the Boeing Company and I was involved with the space program, so I thought I might have something to say that one or both of them might be interested in. In those days, WorldCons were much smaller—there were about 300 attending that year—and Poul was not attending as Guest of Honor, so it was comparatively easy to meet him, and I ended up at a party with him stretching long into the night.
We became fast friends, and were until his death. We went sailing in the Straits of Juan de Fuca and the California Channel Islands together, went to conferences and AAAS meetings, and sang the old songs at numerous SF Conventions. He was one of the best friends I have ever had.
Poul’s stories hold up well despite the enormous changes in technology since they were written. The nature of war has not changed, and Poul understood its essence very well indeed. I first read Among Thieves when it came out in 1957, and I have remembered it ever since.
AMONG THIEVES
by Poul Anderson
His Excellency M’Katze Unduma, Ambassador of the Terrestrial Federation to the Double Kingdom, was not accustomed to being kept waiting. But as the minutes dragged into an hour, anger faded before a chill deduction.
In this bleakly clock-bound society a short delay was bad manners, even if it were unintentional. But if you kept a man of rank cooling his heels for an entire sixty minutes, you offered him an unforgivable insult. Rusch was a barbarian, but he was too canny to humiliate Earth’s representative without reason.
Which bore out everything that Terrestrial Intelligence had discovered. From a drunken junior officer, weeping in his cups because Old Earth, Civilization, was going to be attacked and the campus where he had once learned and loved would be scorched to ruin by his fire guns—to the battle plans and annotations thereon, which six men had died to smuggle out of the Royal War College—and now, this degradation of the ambassador himself—everything fitted.
The Margrave of Drakenstane had sold out Civilization.
Unduma shuddered, beneath the iridescent cloak, embroidered robe, and ostrich-plume headdress of his rank. He swept the antechamber with the eyes of a trapped animal.
This castle was ancient, dating back some eight hundred years to the first settlement of Norstad. The grim square massiveness of it, fused stone piled into a turreted mountain, was not much relieved by modern fittings. Tableservs, loungers, drapes, jewel mosaics, and biomurals only clashed with those fortress walls and ringing flagstones; fluorosheets did not light up all the dark corners, there was perpetual dusk up among the rafters where the old battle banners hung.
A dozen guards were posted around the room, in breastplate and plumed helmet but with very modern blast rifles. They were identical seven-foot blonds, and none of them moved at all, you couldn’t even see them breathe. It was an unnerving sight for a Civilized man.
Unduma snubbed out his cigar, swore miserably to himself, and wished he had at least brought along a book.
The inner door opened on noiseless hinges and a shavepate officer emerged. He clicked his heels and bowed at Unduma. “His Lordship will be honored to receive you now, Excellency.”
The ambassador throttled his anger, nodded, and stood up. He was a tall thin man, the relatively light skin and sharp features of Bantu stock predominant in him. Earth’s emissaries were normally chosen to approximate a local ideal of beauty—hard to do for some of those weird little cultures scattered through the galaxy—and Norstad-Ostarik had been settled by a rather extreme Caucasoid type which had almost entirely emigrated from the home planet.
The aide showed him through the door and disappeared. Hans von Thoma Rusch, Margrave of Drakenstane, Lawman of the Western Folkmote, Hereditary Guardian of the White River Gates, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, sat waiting behind a desk at the end of an enormous black-and-red tile floor. He had a book in his hands, and didn’t close it till Unduma, sandals whispering on the great chessboard squares, had come near. Then he stood up and made a short ironic bow.
“How do you do, your excellency,” he said. “I am sorry to be so late. Please sit.” Such curtness was no apology at all, and both of them knew it.
Unduma lowered himself to a chair in front of the desk. He would not show temper, he thought, he was here for a greater purpose. His teeth clamped together.
“Thank you, Your Lordship,” he said tonelessly. “I hope you will have time to talk with me in some detail. I have come on a matter of grave importance.”
Rusch’s right eyebrow tilted up, so that the archaic monocle he affected beneath it seemed in danger of falling out. He was a big man, stiffly and solidly built, yellow hair cropped to a wiry brush around the long skull, a scar puckering his left cheek. He wore Army uniform, the gray high-collared tunic and old-fashioned breeches and shiny boots of his planet; the trident and suns of a primary general; a sidearm, its handle worn smooth from much use. If ever the iron barbarian with the iron brain had an epitome, thought Unduma, here he sat!
“Well, your excellency,” murmured Rusch—though the harsh Norron language did not lend itself to murmurs—“of course I’ll be glad to hear you out. But after all, I’ve no standing in the Ministry, except as unofficial advisor, and–”
“Please.” Unduma lifted a hand. “Must we keep up the fable? You not only speak for all the landed warlords—and the Nor-Samurai are still the most powerful single class in the Double Kingdom—but you have the General Staff in your pouch and, ah, you are well thought of by the royal family. I think I can talk directly to you.”
Rusch did not smile, but neither did he trouble to deny what everyone knew, that he was the leader of the fighting aristocracy, lover of the widowed Queen Regent, virtual step-father of her eight-year-old son King Hjalmar—in a word, that he was the dictator. If he preferred to keep a small title and not have his name unnecessarily before the public, what difference did that make?
“I’ll be glad to pass on whatever you wish to say to the proper authorities,” he answered slowly. “Pipe.” That was an order to his chair, which produced a lit briar for him.
Unduma felt appalled. This series of informalities was like one savage blow after another. Till now, in the three-hundred-year history of relations between Earth and the Double Kingdom, the Terrestrial ambassador had ranked everyone but God and the royal family.
No human planet, no matter how long sundered from the mainstream, no matter what strange ways it had wandered, failed to remember that Earth was Earth, the home of man and the heart of Civilization. No human planet—had Norstad-Ostarik, then, gone the way of Kolresh?
Biologically, no, thought Unduma with an inward shudder. Nor culturally—yet. But it shrieked at him, from every insolent movement and twist of words, that Rusch had made a political deal.
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“Well?” said the Margrave.
Unduma cleared his throat, desperately, and leaned forward. “Your Lordship,” he said, “my embassy cannot help taking notice of certain public statements, as well as certain military preparations and other matters of common knowledge–”
“And items your spies have dug up,” drawled Rusch.
Unduma started. “My lord!”
“My good ambassador,” grinned Rusch, “it was you who suggested a straight-forward talk. I know Earth has spies here. In any event, it’s impossible to hide so large a business as the mobilization of two planets for war.”
Unduma felt sweat trickle down his ribs.
“There is…you…your Ministry has only announced it is a…a defense measure,” he stammered. “I had hoped…frankly, yes, till the last minute I hoped you…your people might see fit to join us against Kolresh.”
There was a moment’s quiet. So quiet, thought Unduma. A redness crept up Rusch’s cheeks, the scar stood livid and his pale eyes were the coldest thing Unduma had ever seen.
Then, slowly, the Margrave got it out through his teeth:
“For a number of centuries, your excellency, our people hoped Earth might join them.”
“What do you mean?” Unduma forgot all polished inanities. Rusch didn’t seem to notice. He stood up and went to the window.
“Come here,” he said. “Let me show you something.”
The window was a modern inset of clear, invisible plastic, a broad sheet high in the castle’s infamous Witch Tower. It looked out on a black sky, the sun was down and the glacial forty-hour darkness of northern Norstad was crawling toward midnight.
There Will Be War Volume X Page 31
