As I said in the previous posting, it seems to me the US
faces two major military issues, one strategic and one tactical. This note
explores the tactical issue.
The tactical problem, it seems to me, is that technological
advances have made much of our current military equipment and facilities either
highly vulnerable, or obsolete, and we need to figure out how to respond to
that change.
In World War II Germany began the war with two massive
battleships, the Bismark and the Tirpitz. The Japanese invested in two state-of-the-art
battleships, the Yamato and the Musashi. These were major investments in their
fleets, and were considered at the time to be almost invulnerable because their massive guns could reach much further than other ships. Yet all were rendered ineffective, and eventually destroyed by air
power, the new transformative technology.
We seem to be repeating that mistake. We are still investing
in massive Ford class aircraft carriers, and large surface vessels like Ticonderoga
class cruisers and Arleigh Burke class destroyers, which may prove to be just
be large, juicy targets for swarms of anti-ship missiles. Similarly, our air
force is stocking up on F35 fighters, which may be wonderful but are supported
by slow, unarmed refueling tankers and slow, unarmed AWACs airborne radar
systems, both of which make easy targets for advanced missiles.
The advent of precision munitions, some capable of traveling
thousands of miles, with stealth configurations and advanced onboard AIs (and
soon perhaps hypersonic speeds), holds not just our ships and aircraft at risk,
but also the supporting infrastructure needed to keep those ships and aircraft
in combat – airfields, ports, fuel and
ammunition dumps, etc. Parenthetically, that is why the new Chinese island
bases built by reclaiming sand bars and rocks in the China Sea are not nearly
the threat that the media assumes. They are fixed sites, and will be rendered
inoperable by missile attacks in the first half hour of any conflict in the
China Sea.
It seems to me we need to make two fundamental moves to
counter these changes. First, we need to distribute our forces more – more smaller,
less expensive, expendable, widely distributed ships rather than fewer larger, massively expensive,
indispensable ships. With current missile technology, even very small ships can
pack a deadly punch, and with current computer and electronics technology even
very small ships can participate in networked command and control and sensor
sharing. The same with our aircraft – more smaller, less expensive, widely
distributed, perhaps unmanned, aircraft rather than fewer wildly expensive
aircraft.
The second move is to make our support facilities less vulnerable,
and to have more of them for redundancy. We cannot have a navy dependent on
just a few fixed location resupply ports – they are too easily put out of action,
even on the US mainland. We can’t have an air force dependent on slow, unarmed
refueling tankers and AWAC airborne radar systems – they are too vulnerable in
today’s battlespace.
A few military officers have begun to raise this issue, but
the military, like any bureaucracy, is very slow to change, and I fear will be
unable to make the shift without the humiliation of a major debacle – like the
elimination of an entire $40-50 billion carrier strike force by a single nuclear
torpedo or missile.
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