Shortly thereafter, Marshall approved the general structure for the assessment. The outline argued that the process leading to an MTR can be initiated when militaries field new capabilities made possible by advanced technologies. But the sort of discontinuous leap in military effectiveness associated with a true MTR generally requires not only new capabilities but the development of new operational concepts (or ways of employing the new capabilities) as well as new organizational arrangements. Marshall thought this “formula” would work, and instructed Krepinevich to refine the outline with an eye toward having a detailed draft by the end of the year. He set late 1992 as the target date for a completed assessment.21
By late 1991 word was beginning to circulate around the Pentagon about Marshall’s MTR assessment, including his intention to involve a wide range of military officers and civilian defense experts to help with the analysis. Given Marshall’s reputation for challenging the conventional wisdom and his direct line to the defense secretary, he soon found himself approached by senior officials offering advice. One such official was Vic Reis, the Pentagon’s director of defense research and engineering (DDR&E). Reis had a broad background in both advanced technologies and government. Having earned his doctorate at Princeton, he had served at MIT’s prestigious Lincoln Laboratory, and in government as deputy director of the Defense Department’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
Reis met with Marshall and Krepinevich in mid-November. He described the rapid advances in information technology, referencing Moore’s law about the rate at which the power of microprocessors was growing.22 Advances in information-related technologies, Reis said, were almost certain to continue beyond the next decade. He went on to say that once use of the Internet reached critical mass around the world, it would bring about profound changes in the way people lived, with uncertain implications for America’s security. These developments in information technology, Reis concluded, were the military-technical revolution.
After some reflection, Marshall and Krepinevich disagreed with Reis’s perspective. Information technology per se was certainly important, they conceded, but the MTR was also about how those advances might be exploited by various nations to gain advantage in military competitions. They reiterated their view that to master the emerging precision-strike regime the US military services would need more than technological advances or their applications to hardware. They would also need to explore new operational concepts and associated changes in military organizations aimed at enabling them to execute new ways of fighting.
A related insight, which emerged from a DARPA brainstorming session on the MTR that Marshall had Krepinevich attend, was that the potential for dramatic growth in the ability to scout over great distances would enable precision munitions to be employed at longer and longer ranges, even against mobile targets. As a result, the new warfare regime would very much become a contest between “hiders” and “finders.” Wars involving rival reconnaissance-strike complexes would be waged not by individual systems but by networks linking systems together—by a “system of systems.”23 In such an environment anything that could be seen and targeted was at high risk of destruction—especially force elements that remained stationary.
After the DARPA session Marshall decided to convene a group of senior experts to solicit their views on the MTR. Invitations went out to some retired Army leaders such as General (Ret.) Edward “Shy” Meyer, General (Ret.) Paul Gorman, General (Ret.) Donn Starry, along with Admiral William Owens, and Colonel John Warden. Some members of St. Andrew’s Prep—Graham Allison, Eliot Cohen, Chip Pickett, Jim Roche, and Stephen Rosen—were also brought in, along with several distinguished senior defense civilians including Al Bernstein, Johnny Foster, and Frank Kendall.
Gorman, Meyer, and Starry had been regarded as among the Army’s brightest and most capable general officers during the turbulent period of the Vietnam War and the “hollow Army” that resulted. After the war Gorman established the Army’s National Training Center, which revolutionized training. Meyer became one of the Army’s youngest and brightest chiefs of staff, and Starry was the animating force behind the AirLand Battle doctrine that had proved so successful in the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Like his Army counterparts, Bill Owens was considered among his service’s brightest officers. Owens had commanded the Navy’s Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean during the 1991 Gulf War, and went on to serve as vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. As dean of the Naval War College’s Strategy Department, Al Bernstein had helped build it into the most respected higher educational institution in the US military. Also prominent among the attendees was Johnny Foster, a legend in defense science circles due in large part to his contributions as the director of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, director of the Pentagon’s DDR&E office, and chairman of the Defense Science Board, among other senior posts.
In the end this group supported Marshall’s conviction that an MTR assessment was needed and should be an ONA priority. It was becoming evident that in a mature precision-strike regime, achieving “information dominance” over the enemy would be critical. Achieving information dominance, in turn, would require fielding a “systems architecture” that could facilitate identifying targets over the breadth and depth of the theater and move that information quickly and reliably to those who needed it—especially to the “shooters.” Against mobile or moving targets the time between sensing a target and engaging it would have to be greatly compressed. Finally, information dominance could not be achieved until these capabilities were denied to the enemy.
In addition to meetings with senior military and civilian defense officials Marshall also used war gaming to advance the assessment. The idea was to explore how a NATO-Warsaw Pact conflict might be affected if US forces had more mature reconnaissance-strike capabilities than they had enjoyed in the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Even before Desert Storm began, Marshall asked Krepinevich to begin reorienting the P-186 effort in this direction. The BDM staff had been developing a detailed simulation for the Central Front. So Krepinevich directed them to incorporate the planned Soviet ground force withdrawals announced by Gorbachev as well as an enhanced version of the primitive US reconnaissance-strike complex that had made its debut in the First Gulf War.24
Krepinevich’s baseline scenario assumed that the Soviets had withdrawn their forces from Eastern Europe back into the USSR, and that NATO forces, per the reunification treaty, were prohibited from basing in the territory of the former East Germany.25 This created a large no-man’s-land between the NATO and Soviet forces. This was done to put a premium on the information dimension of warfare, enabling an examination of the “hider-finder” competition between two forces when they started the conflict hundreds of miles apart.
As with any war game, the results were not definitive but suggestive. Marshall and Krepinevich were not looking to predict the outcome of a future war in Europe in which one side or both had reconnaissance-strike complexes. Rather, they hoped to glean insights into a novel situation, and they were not disappointed.
Thanks to NATO’s clear advantage in extended-range precision-strike forces linked by battle networks, neither the Warsaw Pact’s long-standing “WUV advantage” in armored division equivalents nor its greater numbers of tactical aircraft translated into success on the battlefield, as it had in the Cold War–era games. In part this was due to the shift in how the two sides’ forces were positioned. Unlike the scenarios in which the forces started out toe-to-toe along the Central Front, now Soviet forces—tanks, armored troop carriers, and self-propelled artillery—that had been withdrawn to the western USSR had to cross hundreds of miles before they could effectively engage NATO forces at close range. While attempting to transit this distance the Soviet forces were subjected to repeated attacks by US extended-range precision-strike forces. These attacks so decimated the Soviet forces that only remnants of those that left the USSR were able to transit the no-man’s-land and engage NATO forces in close combat. The ability of US forces
to see deep and to strike deep, with precision, had a profound influence on the game’s results.
With WEI/WUVs and other Cold War metrics offering a poor explanation for the BDM simulation’s results, it was clear that precision strike required new measures of effectiveness. During the Cold War in Central Europe the primary measures of combat potential had been metrics, such as armored division and tactical fighter wing equivalents (ADEs and TFWEs). In the BDM simulation ADEs and TFWEs simply failed to reflect the devastating potential of one side possessing reconnaissance-strike complexes when the other did not. And if both sides had these advanced capabilities, and gaining information dominance would assume even greater importance and would require still more new metrics. The results seen in the BDM simulation suggested not only that some key military service programs should be accorded lower priority, but that the dominant service cultures would be challenged as well. Frank Kendall pointed out that when this happened the resistance to the idea of an MTR from the services would be intense. Thus even before ONA’s MTR assessment was finished, it seemed likely that the military services would be inclined to resist making the changes needed to master the new way of fighting.
Concern over service resistance to revolutionary change led Marshall to begin thinking about the problem of bringing about innovation in large organizations—in this case the US military. As Steve Rosen asked in 1988, “When and why do military organizations undergo major innovations in the way that they operate?”26 Convinced that a major shift in how future wars would be fought was in the offing, and recognizing that in the wake of Desert Storm the services would see little need for major innovation, Marshall began encouraging members of St. Andrew’s Prep and other scholars to explore past examples of successful innovation with an eye toward answering Rosen’s question.
Rosen’s initial research suggested that a military did not have to lose a war to embrace innovation.27 Subsequently, in his 1991 Winning the Next War, he explored twenty-one cases of successful and unsuccessful military innovation, ten of which he examined in detail, and six of which occurred in peacetime.28 The case that most intrigued Marshall was the US Navy’s development of carrier aviation during the interwar years 1918 to 1941.
This case study revolved around a simple question: Why during this period had the US Navy succeeded in developing carrier aviation while Great Britain’s Royal Navy, despite having developed an early, commanding lead in carrier aviation during World War I, fell behind not only the United States but Japan by the eve of World War II? Rosen’s answer was that “peacetime military innovation occurs when respected senior military officers formulate a strategy for innovation, which has both intellectual and organizational components.”29 Specifically, “Peacetime innovation has been possible when senior military officers with traditional credentials [i.e., members of the military service’s dominant culture] . . . reacting to a structural change in the security environment, have acted to create a new promotion pathway for junior officers practicing a new way of war.”30 He went on to argue that “Rather than money, talented military personnel, time, and information have been the key resources for innovation,”31 The talented people, time, and information were to be found in the military services. Civilian political leaders, he added, “do not appear to have had a major role in deciding which new military capabilities to develop.”32
Rosen’s conclusions were clear. The United States could not count on its huge advantage in resources to guarantee it would master reconnaissance-strike and be the first to transform its military to the new way of war. Since the services were the engines of innovation, it would be important to get them to buy in to the idea that a major shift in the character of war was not only possible but, indeed, likely. And ways would have to be found to gauge progress in this endeavor. This meant that new measures of effectiveness would need to be identified and adopted by the services if they were to make sound decisions regarding future capabilities. As Schlesinger had argued in the late 1960s, and Roche and Watts reiterated in 1991, choosing appropriate analytic measures is seldom easy, particularly for higher-level, strategic problems. This point was hardly news to Marshall in the early 1990s. He had known it since the 1950s. But the work of Rosen on innovation, and of Roche and Watts on MOEs, underscored the difficulties of getting the US services, fresh from their triumph in the 1991 Gulf War, to embrace the MTR.
In July 1992 Krepinevich completed the first version of the MTR assessment. Throughout the rest of the decade the paper would have an enduring influence on the post–Cold War defense debate, both within the United States and abroad. The assessment benefited greatly from Marshall’s mentoring of Krepinevich and the contributions of St. Andrew’s Prep and many others outside ONA. But it especially benefited from Marshall’s intellectual flexibility to approach a strategic question—Is an MTR in the offing?—in a way that was radically different from how ONA had assessed the key military competitions of the Cold War.
The first issue the MTR assessment tackled was explaining what constituted a military-technical revolution. As Krepinevich wrote,
A Military-Technical Revolution occurs when the application of new technologies into military systems combines with innovative operational concepts and organizational adaptations to alter fundamentally the character and conduct of military operations. Therefore, such revolutions are characterized by:
Technological Change
Military Systems Evolution
Operational Innovation
Organizational Adaptation
These elements combine to produce a dramatic improvement in military effectiveness and combat potential. The rate of transition into a new military-technical regime will also be influenced by the geopolitical environment, and the nature of the military-technical competition.33
The assessment went on to suggest that once the current MTR matured, armed forces that embraced the new way of war might see their “military capabilities increase as much as an order of magnitude or more” compared to pre-MTR forces that existed over the previous 10–20 years.34
In the early 1990s it was unclear to Marshall or Krepinevich how the military-technical revolution of the late twentieth century would play out although history offered some possibilities. Competitors might be slow to grasp and exploit the full potential of revolutionary technologies and systems, as occurred in the American Civil War. Then both sides persisted in trying to wage war in the open, Napoleonic-style, but ended up fighting in trenches around Petersburg, Virginia, in a manner not terribly dissimilar from the trench warfare along the Western Front in World War I. Or one side might recognize and exploit the potential of emerging technologies to gain a decisive military advantage, as happened with Germany’s use of blitzkrieg during the first few years of World War II. Or the leading military competitors might all exploit the power of an MTR, as happened with the development of nuclear weapons and ballistic missiles by the United States and the Soviet Union after 1945.
The MTR assessment suggested that in embracing transformation military organizations would experience the “progressive blurring of the distinction between—and the increasing fusion of—space air, land, and maritime operations, to the point where most operations become multidimensional in nature.”35 This would be facilitated in part by the “growing importance of space as a major medium for conducting and supporting military operations.” Leading militaries would benefit from the “emergence of aerospace operations; i.e., the linking of space systems with extended-range air systems (e.g., UAVs [unmanned aerial vehicles], cruise missiles) and a variety of sensors in an entirely new type of military operation.” These developments would lead to an “increase in non-LOS [line-of-sight] fires relative to LOS fires” because “direct contact will generally be avoided by those who have achieved information dominance and who possess the means to exploit it.”36
In these areas the 1992 assessment anticipated with remarkable accuracy many of the steps that US military would take over the next two decades to develop precision-strike
capabilities and information networks. But those steps by no means guaranteed that the United States would continue to lead the revolution. As Krepinevich assessed the situation in July 1993:
The revolution seems to have arrived operationally, at least in part, in the [1991] Gulf War. There various systems and networks began tentatively to realize the enormous potential of integrated operations to the point where deep-strike architectures (DSAs), or reconnaissance-strike complexes (to use the old Soviet parlance) made their first appearance. However, we have yet to integrate the information networks we have developed for reconnaissance, surveillance, . . . target acquisition (RSTA), and battle-damage assessment, with the network(s) of weapon systems (“shooters”).37
The last point was especially illuminating with regard to much of what transpired subsequently within the US military. Integrating sensors and precision-strike elements into battle networks that could respond in near-real time to strike relocatable, moving, emergent, or fleeting targets proved far more difficult than anyone imagined in the early 1990s. The US military is still working on this problem, however much success Special Forces and more traditional shooters, such as strike aircraft, have had against insurgents and terrorists in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere.
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