Power Projection and Military Innovation

Introduction

Many factors have shaped the character and intensity of the involvement of the United States in the Middle East.  These include efforts by regional powers to establish hegemony, American perceptions of the legitimacy of Israeli policies, the need for Middle East oil, and rivalries with other great powers. I wish to focus on one factor that is also important: the ability of the United States to project military power into the Middle East and engage in combat that has decisive effects. The argument I wish to make is that beginning in the late 1980s, the United States achieved a new and unusual ability to engage in combat in the Middle East, some 10,000 kilometers from the US, and defeat all Middle Eastern regional powers. This ability was the result of an asymmetry favorable to the United States in utilizing information technology for the conduct of military operations. This new ability is often referred to as a Revolution in Military Affairs or RMA. It complemented an asymmetry in nuclear weapons capabilities, also favorable to the United States, since the United States had nuclear weapons while the regional challengers facing the United States did not. During the last 30 years, the United States continued to enjoy the benefits of these two asymmetries but the first is ending and the second may end within ten to fifteen years. The result may be a Middle East in which regional military capabilities will be greater than they are now, such that the United States may find it more difficult to play a direct military role. The United States may therefore have to make major changes in how it projects power if it wishes to retain its current levels of military influence in the Middle East. Israel and the United States may therefore have incentives to rethink their military relationship.

This essay will develop this argument by sketching the history of previous historical asymmetries in military capabilities created by the asymmetric distribution of past RMAs, to show how past RMAs affected the ability of nations to project power. It will then turn to the changing conditions in the Middle East, and discuss the consequences of those changes. It will finish by trying to think about the possible policy responses to those changes.

It will be helpful first to define two terms.  What is an RMA, and what is power projection?

An RMA can be thought of as change in military concepts of operations often but not always accompanied by the introduction of new military technology, that increases the combat power of a given number of soldiers and given expenditure of money by an order of magnitude, a factor of ten.  We see, for example, the armies of the Dutch Republic in the 17^th century, employing the infantry concepts of operation of the first modern RMA against the troops of the Spanish Hapsburg empire. The Dutch were able to defeat Hapsburg armies ten times their size that did not employ that RMA.  British armies in south Asia in the 17^th century employing the same concepts of operations were similarly able to defeat Mughal armies ten times their size that did not employ that RMA.

Power projection is another important term that needs to be defined. Power projection is the ability to conduct military operations at long distances from bases of operations or conduct them within a much shorter time span.  What is a “long distance?”  We can use as a benchmark ordinary military operations, and employ the same factor of ten as our discriminator.  We can then assert that operations that take place an order of magnitude more distant and more quickly than ordinary operations constitute power projection. If ordinary operations are conducted 100 kilometers from a base, power projection involves operations 1000 kilometers or more from a base.  If moving forces long distances ordinarily takes ten days, power projection involves operations over the same distance in one day.

Over the last 25 years we saw a shift in the character of warfare about as large as that caused by the two revolutions in military affairs that took place in Europe in the 17^th and 19^th centuries. This RMA was the result of the application of digital information processing technology technologies to military affairs, and so can be referred to as the IT RMA. This has produced the revolution in accuracy that is associated precision strike weapons using targeting information from sophisticated Intelligence-Surveillance-Reconnaissance (ISR) systems. The weapons combined with the supporting ISR systems are referred to as reconnaissance-strike complexes. This IT RMA has diffused slowly and unevenly, but this diffusion is making power projection, as it is currently conducted, from the United States to Eurasia or the reverse, more difficult.  This will happen regardless of which political party controls the American government.

As a result, the United States will face some choices. It could relinquish the mission of intercontinental power projection and concentrate on homeland defense or perhaps Western hemispheric defense, or it could develop radically new ways of projecting military power.  These will not be either/or choices, but decisions about how to pursue these alternatives separately or in parallel will need to be made.

Background

Although the term, Revolution in Military Affairs, is familiar to us, the implications of RMAs for power projection are not so widely appreciated.

The revolution of the 17^th century associated with Maurice of Nassau and Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden is well known as a result of the Geoffrey Parker’s book, The Military Revolution.  Before that revolution, European armies were large, poorly trained and undisciplined mobs of armed peasants.  The soldiers were pushed forward in loose formations and conducted uncoordinated single combat.  This was the form of warfare that was dominant in China and India as well as in west Europe. The 17^th century RMA reintroduced Roman imperial legionary discipline and organized maneuver on the battlefield so that defensive pike-men and musketeers could present interlocked groups of soldiers whose lines could not be broken by uncoordinated infantry assault or by cavalry charges.  These interlocked groups of soldiers could maneuver on the battlefield while not breaking formation, to advance and shift directions.  The power of this revolution was to increase the military power of units employing these methods by an order of magnitude, that is, they could successfully prevail against unorganized armies ten times their size.  What is now the Netherlands could defend itself against the much larger army of the most powerful European state of the time, the Spanish Hapsburg armies, and when British and French armies deployed to India to fight against the much larger Mughal armies.  Once this RMA was demonstrated, it spread across all of Europe within 100 years, and to Asia over a period of 200 years.  This much is well known.

What is not so widely appreciated, but what was documented by David Kaiser in his book, the Politics of War, is that this revolution also revolutionized power projection.  Before the professionalization of armies, there was little point and much difficulty in sending armies long distances to fight alongside allies.  There was not much point because sending out a mob of untrained soldiers did not give you much advantage against enemies who could recruit mobs of soldiers locally.  It made more sense to send money, with which you could enlist and feed locally recruited mobs. It was difficult because undisciplined mobs sent long distances would necessarily run away in search of food and loot because they had no professional logisticians to keep them supplied.  Once all countries had professional soldiers, sending an army long distances to fight another professional army also did not make sense, since the power projection force would operate at a disadvantage relative to local forces. Man for man, the power projection force did not have an advantage in combat power, and it had to supply its army over a much longer distance than the local army.

But if the power projection force used the first RMA against an adversary that did not have it, it could defeat a much larger local army.  It could then fight on land and win against much larger local forces.  The asymmetry in the adoption of the first RMAs by European versus south Asian armies made European long-distance power projection, and imperialism, possible.

The second RMA occurred in the 19^th century, when railroads and rifles increased the power of compact armies by introducing repeating, breach loading smokeless powder infantry rifles, and made possible the deployment and supply of those armies overland long distances by railroad. This also made it possible to mobilize and concentrate soldiers spread out over great distances within large nations, and possible to deploy them long distances strategically to different fronts.  In the American Civil War, after the Battle of Chickamauga in the fall of 1863, 20,000 Union troops shifted 1,200 miles from Virginia to Tennessee in 12 days.  The two revolutions made possible modern power projection against military powers that had not adopted them, because the mobilization bases and the railroad and sea lines of communication were not easily attacked. If opposing sides both adopted them, however, a stalemate would arise, as was seen in Europe in 1914.

It took a third, asymmetric RMA, the blitzkrieg revolution, to make power projection again possible. Instead of the advances of 50-60 kilometers in a few days, which the Germans achieved in the spring 1918 offensives, blitzkrieg offensives could advance ten times that distance in the same time.  Aviation compressed the amount of time needed to conduct attacks over a distance of 600 kilometers to a few hours, but only after an asymmetric advantage known as air superiority was achieved.

The Information Technology RMA

The IT RMA, was initially asymmetric, and initially facilitated American power projection, but the diffusion of digital information based, long distance precision strike technology is now changing conditions to make power projection more difficult.

Before digital information was widely introduced into military sensors, communications, and data processing systems, effective long-distance attacks were very difficult. Inaccurate bombers did little damage to industrial and railroad transportation systems, and took heavy losses, unless the attacker had complete air superiority and could send hundreds of bombers in each raid to compensate for their inaccuracy.

Digital information technology using silicon and wireless communication made possible the reliable utilization of data about enemy target systems to facilitate attacks on them. The point about reliability is crucial, as is shown by the research done by Barry Watts, but is often overlooked.  Analogue vacuum tube based precision strike technology was first employed in war in 1944 and 1945, and thousands of such weapons were employed by the United States in the first years of the Vietnam War. Their reliability rates, measured in terms of the percent of the weapons that would operate as designed in battle, was in the high single digits. Solid state digital electronics based on chips and micro-chips had reliability rates that were approximately ten times better. Silicon based integrated circuits made possible reliable precision strikes at long distances, hundreds or thousands of miles, against targets that were undefended, not hidden, and fixed targets or with limited mobility. Precision strikes reduced logistical requirements as well, since fewer numbers of precise weapons were required relative to “dumb” weapons to achieve the same levels of damage inflicted. Less fuel was necessary to transport them.  This combined to facilitate US power projection against Iraq in 1991 and 2003.

But what happens when this asymmetry is removed, when both sides in a war can employ the digital RMA to conduct precision at long distances?  It is likely that removing this asymmetry will remove the advantage enjoyed the nation projecting power, and will give the local defenses the advantage relative to conventional power projection forces.  Why? Local defense employs shorter range, and therefore smaller, precision reconnaissance strike complexes that can more easily be hidden in complex urban or non-urban terrain. They can be put underground more easily, and can maneuver more easily, again because they are smaller.  Because they are shorter range, they depend on shorter range communications which can be line of sight and so harder to disrupt.  Finally, others things equal, it is easier to conceal a military system on the surface of the ocean than in the air, easier to hide it underwater than on the water, and easier still to hide it in complex terrain on land. Think of Hezbollah missile forces in Lebanon.  In addition, existing power projection forces must use large transportation systems.  They are coming long distances, and so need a lot of fuel and food. They are harder to hide once they land because right now they must use big ports and airfields. They have less intra-theater mobility because intra-theater mobility assets themselves are big and hard to transport and need a lot of fuel to operate.  Both the local forces and the power projection forces can have active defenses, but the active local defenses are leveraged by the mobility, concealment, and hardening measures they can more easily take. As a result, land based local defenses are likely to have advantages over power projection forces that advance to the battle area in the air or on the sea.

Although cyber war is beyond the scope of this essay, it should be noted that cyber-attacks, as well as other forms of sabotage, could also be used to disrupt civilian transportation systems that support power projection.  PLA writings such as the 2002 publication, Studies of Island Warfare/Operations have been discussing this issue for almost 15 years, criticizing Argentina for attacking the British forces only in the vicinity of the islands, not back in the United Kingdom or the North Atlantic.

Precision strike and cyber capabilities have diffused world-wide in the years after their dramatic demonstration in the 1991 Gulf War. The government of Iran, for example, claims it has Fateh SRBMS with accuracies of 10 meters and Zolfaquar/Zulfiqar MRBMs with claimed accuracies of 50-150 meters or better. If, or more realistically, when this claimed capability becomes real, this will mean that military bases within 600-700 kilometers that are not mobile, heavily defended, dispersed, hardened or all four will be vulnerable.

The Nuclear Revolution

There was also the biggest revolution of military affairs of them all, the nuclear weapons RMA. Nuclear weapons are often thought of as being distinct from power projection forces, though in fact they may be used to project power themselves, or as deterrents to the employment of non-nuclear power projection forces.

Asymmetric nuclear weapons capabilities, which could also be called “strategic superiority,” were thought by the United States and the Soviet Union to be useful as substitutes for forward deployed non-nuclear forces. Eisenhower’s “massive retaliation” and “New Look” were based on overwhelming American nuclear superiority.  American nuclear superiority may have re-emerged in the late Cold War, though we do not yet have the information needed to understand fully that interaction.  Soviet leaders claimed that their nuclear threats against a United Kingdom armed with small numbers of nuclear weapons forced the withdrawal of British forces from the Suez Canal zone in the 1956 Suez crisis, even though Americans firmly believe that it was Eisenhower’s financial threats that forced the British to withdraw.

Whatever the reality about the political utility of nuclear asymmetries, what happens to power projection when both sides have nuclear weapons?

We must consider the two possible, but contradictory, effects of the stability-instability paradox.   A stable nuclear deterrent, in which nuclear weapons deter the use of nuclear weapons, may enable provocative military actions at the level below that of nuclear weapons use. On the other hand, countries might be deterred from provocative actions such as non-nuclear military attacks on a nuclear armed state because of the risk of escalation to nuclear war.

Further, nuclear weapons might create homeland sanctuaries.  The observable record is that the acquisition of nuclear weapons has not deterred attacks on the homeland of nuclear armed states, but attacks on nuclear armed states have been limited to shallow penetrations. Consider the otherwise disparate cases of the Sino-Soviet border clashes of 1969, the attacks on Israel in 1973 and after, and the India-Pakistan Kargil War of 1999. In all these cases, military incursions into these countries were kept limited in depth in ways that were clear to the invaded country, and were limited in duration.

That is not to say that deeper or more provocative penetrations of nuclear armed states did not occur. But they were not penetrations for the purpose of conducting kinetic military attacks. Recently declassified information shows that the United States was willing and able to conduct clandestine penetrations of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union, with bombers, submarines, and other clandestine forces, in deterrence operations in crises. There was also the forward positioning of maritime nuclear weapons systems: the Polaris submarine bases in Spain and Scotland, as well as the Maritime Strategy utilizing nuclear-armed attack submarines and aircraft carriers. 

Nuclear weapons power projection, in the form of forward deployed nuclear weapons on allied soil, also took place.  In the late 1950s, the United States became more willing to place nuclear weapons in hands of its NATO allies. Marc Trachtenberg in his book, A Constructed Peace, documented the virtual transfer of American nuclear weapons to Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) or West Germany in late 1950s, when American nuclear weapons under the nominal control of the United States were deployed on FRG fighter-bombers. Similar arrangements may have been made with other NATO allies.  In addition, Richard Ullman has documented how President Nixon provided assistance to French nuclear weapons program beginning 1970.

The Soviet Union, of course, deployed nuclear weapons to Cuba. For both the United States and the Soviet Union, forward deployment of nuclear weapons was associated with an increase in risk: systems closer to the enemy were placed in a “use them or lose them” position. On the other hand, this forward positioning confronted the Soviet Union with an increase in the American pre-emptive attack capabilities by reducing time of flight, reaction times, and the indicators of impending attack. The vulnerability of forward deployed weapons could today be reduced, if desired, by taking measures further to disperse, protect, hide, or move them.

The acquisition of nuclear weapons increased the risks of power projection but the forward positioning of nuclear weapons was also used to create additional threats to and impose costs on nuclear armed states. The adversary may have been forced to divert more of his forces to strategic defenses or to counter-force missions. The attacker or defender might have improved his position, depending on the circumstances.

What is to be done today

The IT RMA has already shaped and constrained American power projection in the western Pacific, and has increased the American incentives to allow or enable its allies to acquire additional capabilities to defend themselves. This is rough summary of the impact of the deployment of Chinese long-range precision strike weapons such as the DF-21D for the Chinese anti-access/area denial mission in the western Pacific.  One course of action for the United States would be to do less power projection while increasing the military capabilities of its allies positioned closer to the common adversary.

Alternatively, the United States might abandon the power projection mission altogether and take advantage of the new IT RMA technologies to defend the US and the western hemisphere more effectively and efficiently, with perhaps the use of some advanced locations from which we could defend the western hemisphere.

Or the United States could begin to think about power projection differently.  If the United States could not in time of war project forces into areas where they could be detected and attacked by the enemy, the United States might forward deploy, disperse, bury, and otherwise hide them in peacetime.  The United States could think about creating new units that could be hidden more easily by making them looking like civilian operators. This has already been done by the Russians and Chinese, who have employed ambiguous military forces, “little green men” by the Russians and a “drunken fishing boat captain” by the Chinese. The United States might think about how it might take analogous actions, though doing so would raise issues of compliance with the laws of war.

The United States could also think about concepts of operations for power projection that made more use of mobility, dispersal, and complex terrain, both physical and social. This probably would mean smaller units, manned unmanned, or mixed, which, other things being equal, would carry less firepower with them compared to existing power projection forces such as carrier battle groups or amphibious warfare formations. This reduction in organic firepower per platform might be redressed by using a larger number of smaller, less capable systems and by increasing the use of longer range stand-off weapons to support them.  Unmanned systems may emerge as a way to project power against precision strike defenses, with well defended, stealthy, large manned systems staying back to launch flocks of smaller, more numerous, partially stealthy unmanned “mother ships” on sea or in the air, which in turn launch swarms of smaller unmanned systems.

What about the issue of projecting power against states that acquire nuclear weapons? What might be, for example, the implications of the further Iranian acquisition of IT RMA systems and the possible acquisition nuclear weapons for the United States? It may be asked for the purposes of discussion what would happen if the Iranians resumed their pursuit of nuclear weapons, continued their pursuit of longer range precision guided strike systems, and continued their current expansionist foreign policies.  Alternatively, what would happen if Russia forward deployed nuclear weapons to the Middle East?

If so, American power projection capabilities might well shift focus to concentrate on the neutralization of Iranian or Russian nuclear weapons as the priority target of US ISR and precision strike.  It is likely that the Iranian RMA would be used to constrain the exercise of US surface ship naval operations in Persian Gulf/Arabian Sea region, and air operations from large fixed bases in region. If the United States wanted to continue to be able to deploy major weapons systems to the Middle East in this new environment, it might wish to explore the new concepts for power projection discussed above, possibly including the use of multiple, low signature, well defended bases owned by its allies in the region.

Choices for Israel

It is not appropriate for a foreigner to say what Israel should do in this new environment. Without making inappropriate suggestions, it is possible to observe that it would appear that Israel will face some choices. Israel could seek to draw the United States closer by developing the kind of base structure just discussed in conjunction with the United States.

What role might American power projection forces play if Russia or Iran threatened American interests in the region?  In a crisis in which Russia or Iran threatened attacks on Israeli and American interests, the United States could temporarily suppress enemy ISR and use that interval to flow existing American power projection forces—combat aircraft, for example--to Israel where they could be deployed in dispersed, concealed and defended bases. American surface warfare naval groups could be deployed in the eastern Mediterranean where they could benefit from the air defense umbrella provided by Israeli air defenses on shore. 

Israel was willing to engage in strategic cooperation with the United States in the late 1970s and 1980s, but even countries as friendly as the United States and Israel can have different understandings of how to respond to challenges. Israel has not been comfortable with a defense posture in which its security depends on the actions of others. Israel might therefore continue its current policies to enhance its own capabilities. The IT RMA has been used to make Israeli integrated air and missile defenses (IAMD) more robust, and to use precision strikes to neutralize clandestine efforts to change the balance of forces on the borders of Israel. Even without any new defense agreement, these programs would also have the effect of creating a de facto bastion area into which American forces could flow.

A very different challenge would come from the introduction of hostile nuclear weapons into the areas around Israel. The danger would not come not so much from a nuclear attack on Israel, which would be deterred by the fear of Israeli nuclear retaliation. The danger more likely would come from the way in which the real or suspected presence of nuclear weapons around Israel could inhibit Israel from conducting the kind of non-nuclear precision strikes on targets on the border of Israel. Attacking nuclear weapons sites, deliberately or inadvertently, could lead to the use of those weapons and escalation to nuclear conflict. The real or suspected presence of nuclear weapons could create a zone of ambiguity within which enemy forces could more easily conduct non-nuclear operations against Israel. This would appear to be not inconsistent with the current Russian doctrine of cross domain coercion so ably described by Dima Adamsky. We may better understand how this problem might be handled by studying the history of nuclear deterrence operations during the Cold War. That, however, would necessarily be the subject of a separate discussion.