Colin L. Powell Joint Warfighting Essay Contest Winner
The U.S. armed services usually prefer to work side by side—each doing independently what it does best—instead of intermingling for seamless joint operations. But rather than trying to attain jointness by undercutting service-specific specialization—or even parochialism—we should focus more intently on a truly universal vision, and let the unified Commanders-in-Chief decide who will do what in which sequence.
In concept, the exercise was a classic joint campaign. The Army conducted a stout ground defense against a powerful enemy. The Air Force attacked enemy targets from the air, inflicting tremendous damage. The Navy cleared the seas of the hostile fleet and attacked the enemy homeland with its carrier aviation assets. The Marine Corps landed behind enemy lines. The services conducted the campaign seamlessly with coalition partners.
But the reality was not as impressive. Instead of a truly joint campaign, each service, in fact, followed its own traditional strategy under a joint umbrella. The Army focused on the close battle. The Air Force immediately attacked strategic targets to the detriment of the tactical, and decisive, close battle. The Navy focused on the enemy fleet and, having vanquished it, could not figure out what else to do. The Marine Corps conducted a long-rehearsed, “classic” amphibious assault with no surprises or variations.
The exercise in question was conducted by a unified Commander-in-Chief. It tested a real-world defense plan against a hostile neighbor who had large ground forces combined with significant air forces and, for a Third World country, considerable naval forces. The exercise is interesting for the insights it provides into the current state of joint operational planning.
With “. . . From the Sea” and “Forward . . . From the Sea,” the Navy moved from a traditional Cold War orientation on blue-water operations against rival navies to a littoral orientation against regional opponents. In theory, naval programs and practice are driven by the new concept; however, in practice the revolution is incomplete. The Navy still is focused on enemy fleets and has not fully devised the operational means of converting naval power into littoral impact. In the aforementioned exercise, the maritime campaign unfolded classically. First, the coalition naval forces endeavored to sweep the enemy submarines and surface ships from the sea. Coalition forces hunted down the enemy units one by one. This took several weeks, but the last few units were difficult to find and engage. The enemy also launched an offensive mine operation, and clearing these mines took a long time. Meanwhile, carrier aviation made strikes against naval and land targets. With the enemy fleet eliminated, the surface Navy assisted with the amphibious landing and reverted to protection of the carriers. The Navy lost three ships in the operations.
What seems to be a naval success story is not so convincing from a theater perspective. First, one could argue that the enemy conducted a classic operation in reverse leverage. For a modest investment in mines and naval forces, it neutralized a large part of the most powerful Navy in the world during the critical period of the campaign. Second, when the decisive action will be on land (as it often will be), it is not enough to “clear the seas”—a secondary, supporting operation. “. . . From the Sea” is right: Influence on the littorals is the key. But the only way the U.S. Navy has found to influence the land campaign is through air attacks and amphibious assaults. These are both excellent and do have real impact on the land campaign—but they are not enough. To justify their immense cost, naval forces need more impact.
What else could be done? One possibility arises from an anomaly later in the campaign. When the enemy air force and navy, both surface and subsurface, were destroyed, 16 surface escorts remained around the carriers. When asked what these escorts were for, the naval component replied, “to protect the carriers.” Against what? Well, it was clear that escorting carriers was what surface combatants “did.” Perhaps we have lost sight of why. At least some of these escorts could have attacked the enemy’s long and exposed coastline and its coastal road. Maybe amphibious raids would have had an impact. The point is that more was needed.
Why was the Air Force bombing surface-to-air missile sites and strategic targets hundreds of miles in the enemy’s rear when enemy ground forces were within striking distance of the coalition’s vital areas? The success or failure of the campaign—judged both by the Commander-in-Chief’s guidance and long-standing political consensus—turned on friendly forces holding the vital areas near the border. At best it was an “iffy” proposition, given the nature of forces and terrain. The enemy forces were very powerful and did not have very far to go. The ground fighting in the critical areas was intense; coalition forces took about 400 casualties an hour during the most intense periods. So why attack any strategic targets at all until the ground situation had stabilized, something expected to take only a few days? Because attacking strategic targets is what the Air Force does.
There exists a long-standing duality in Air Force thinking. One school of thought sees air power in the context of joint operations, one element of joint combat power, which sometimes may have the lead but at other times will be in support. In Operation Desert Storm, General Charles Horner, the Air Force Component Commander and the Joint Force Air Component Commander, articulated this. All of his statements both during the war and after, even into retirement, stressed air power as a member of a joint team. For instance, even in the Air Force Association’s book on the Gulf War, General Horner’s preface says only that air power played a “significant” role and, after praising the Air Force, goes on to say. “I want to add quickly that I am also proud of the airmen from the Navy, Marine Corps, the Army and the coalition forces.” In print, this opinion is often expressed by Air Force officers seeking to counteract suspicion from other services that the Air Force would fight wars alone and relegate others to secondary or tertiary roles.' It also is expressed in official statements from Air Force officials, since jointness is the politically correct mode of expression.
However, as expressed by the air power advocates of the 1930s, the idea that strategic bombing can win wars relatively quickly, cheaply, and alone still has a prominent place in Air Force thinking. This theory received a strong impetus in recent years through Air Force Colonel John Warden’s writings on strategic attack.2 He argues that modern technology has allowed air power to achieve the results that had been promised long ago by the air power advocates but had never been delivered. He further argues that there is a hierarchy of target systems from the enemy’s military forces to the command structure (the “Five Ring” model) and that attacks on the enemy’s vital centers of gravity can be decisive. Taught to many students and imbued into the Checkmate planning cell in Operation Desert Storm (which he trained), these concepts have permeated the Air Force. In Operation Desert Storm, this perspective was expressed by then-Brigadier General Glossen, Joint Forces Air Component Commander Director of Campaign Plans, whose many statements since the war, in contrast to General Horner’s, have tended to express the decisive effects of air power, not the contribution of air power to a joint operation. Therefore, it is not surprising that this same duality is expressed in air operations. On the one hand, the Air Force wants to be part of the joint team and operate according to the Joint Force Commander’s concept. On the other hand, the Air Force suspects that it could win the conflict essentially on its own if given enough latitude.
During the exercise, Marine Corps forces made a “standard” amphibious landing as part of a coalition counteroffensive. As an operation, it fit the general concept. Marines moved around the enemy’s heavily defended front line to attack the vulnerable rear. They capitalized on coalition maritime and air strengths and had major operational impact. The problem is not with the concept of an amphibious operation but with its planning and execution. First, the amphibious operation was “too” standard. It occurred at the “classic” location, just where analysis of coastline, beaches, sea approaches, etc., would recommend. The enemy can read our manuals as easily as we can and can predict where U.S. Marines like to land—particularly when there are few good beaches. It is useful to remember that in 1945 the Japanese predicted the planned landing sites on Kyushu and Honshu, because the United States followed a very clear pattern.3 In this connection, Major Jon Hoffman has argued that surprise in amphibious operations arises from doing the unexpected, not from secrecy.4 Yet, not withstanding the Corps’ talk about how technology has expanded the coastline vulnerable to amphibious attack and how it can land in austere sites where landings are unexpected, when it is actually time to execute, the Corps loses its boldness and lands in the traditional locations. Second, Inchon was such a success that the Marine Corps has been trying to replicate it ever since. It is a valid goal, but the Corps cannot expect or demand every future amphibious operation to have the same decisive impact. It would be better to plan an operation with merely a significant impact than to risk idleness or failure.
Interestingly, during the exercise the Marine Corps commander tried to vary the location of the landing, only to encounter considerable resistance from both the theater staff and his own staff, who regarded his ideas as something of an annoyance. The Commander-in-Chief’s staff was not enthusiastic, because the Marine commander was fooling around with “the script.” Even his own staff regarded alternate sites as purely hypothetical, even theoretical, work for overburdened people. They already had a perfectly good operational plan; why fool with it?
The Army gets off easily in this analysis, because the decisive element of this campaign was the ground component. This is not to say that the Army lacks some of the narrow focus of the other services. In fact, the Army tends to believe that ground action is always the decisive element and that other environments—air and sea—should have important but ultimately supporting roles. However, this will not always be true. One easily can imagine future operations, even major combat operations, in which air or naval forces will have the decisive impact.
One of the problems with testing our operational concepts is that exercises such as this are not tests of plans; they are choreography, events in which participants see if they can perform the part given to them and smoothly execute the complex motions that the script, the operations order, has prescribed. It is not designed to test whether the organizing concepts are good ones or whether the campaign would succeed against a real opponent. As a result, year after year, the coalition wins easily and on schedule. This weakness is mostly a political problem. Our coalition partners are defending their homes, so for them the campaign is not an interesting military problem, it is life or death. In addition, the coalition military hierarchy, having assured civilian leaders they can win a war, cannot admit to the possibility of failure, even in an exercise. But it is partly a military problem, because the military system reinforces, instead of compensating for, the rigidity in the political situation. First, the process of producing formal Commander-in-Chief plans is so long and onerous that changes cannot be made easily. Each plan is an interlocking series of negotiations, agreements, and compromises. Second, the planning system cannot handle ambiguity. Time-phased force development lists are very specific documents that require massive amounts of detailed information. They cannot handle a “maybe this,” “maybe that” option. They demand certainty not just on a few points but on thousands of interconnected assumptions. Changes, while possible, are difficult. For these reasons, once a plan is established there are both a tremendous inertia against change and a strong incentive to execute it exactly as written.
This is the point at which most articles about weakness in joint operations propose more jointness—more joint authorities, more power to Commanders-in-Chief, more joint education, and more consolidation of service functions under joint control. That is not needed. There already is an abundance of so-called jointness:
- Commanders-in-Chief have great power already. The concept of Combatant Command essentially gives them total operational control of the forces in their areas of responsibility.
- The Joint Doctrine Command has authority to establish joint doctrine that supersedes service doctrine.
- The Joint Wargaming Center has the capability to test different operational concepts.
- The U.S. Atlantic Command directs and conducts joint training.
- All officers going through professional military education receive a large dose of joint training, and the joint staff certifies that the joint curriculum in all the service schools meets joint requirements.
The problem is not in stamping out service parochialism. The services should be parochial. It is a reflection of their pride, technical skill, and can-do attitude. The problem is in joint force commanders and their staffs actually using the powers and capabilities that exist. This realization puts a lot of pressure on joint staffs, because they become the ones who have to make the tough calls about what fits the joint force commander’s concept and what does not. And then the joint force commander will have to act on it. That means joint force commanders and their staffs might have to tell the Air Force to focus on tactical targets and forgo strategic targets; the Army that it will have a minor role, because air power will have the lead; the Navy that it will have to find something for its surface Beet to do; or the Marine Corps that a campaign-winning amphibious operation is too risky. The Commission on Roles and Missions described this as operating as a “unified” staff, not as a “joint” staff. That is, operating as a unified whole with a common vision, not as a collection of liaison officers.5 It will not be easy.
Some observers may argue that these observations and recommendations impute too much significance to one Commander-in-Chief exercise. However, because the exercise reflected real-world problems and the observations have been noted repeatedly, this single exercise is a strong indicator. Consider the following from the lessons learned chapter of The Generals’ War, an analysis of Desert Storm: “Doctrinal differences among the services still exist and are often papered over. . . .While the differences among the services are often an asset, it is not enough to let the services fight as they see fit. An effort must be made to harmonize their plans and operations.”7
Borrowing General Colin Powell’s image, the services provide Joint Force Commanders with a toolbox full of a good tools, each designed to do a particular job. The problem is not in designing better tools but rather in the selection of particular tools for a particular task. The services all have their favorite tools, but that does not mean that each favorite tool is appropriate in each circumstance.
There is not a crisis in joint operations. In fact, the U.S. armed forces have probably taken joint operations further than any other military in recent history. The problem is that the revolution is incomplete.
1 See “Parallel War: Promise and Problems,” Proceedings, August 1995.
2 See Col. John A. Warden 111, USAF, The Air Campaign: Planning for Combat, “The Enemy as a System,” Airpower Journal, Spring 1995.
3 The Japanese intelligence officer tasked with making these predictions was called “MacArthur’s staff officer” because of his ability to see these patterns.
4 See Maj. Jon Hoffman, USMCR, “The Legacy and Lessons of Operational Downfall,” Marine Corps Gazette, August 1995.
5 Directions for Defense, Report of the Commission on Roles and Missions of the Armed Services, pp. 2-2 to 2-4.
6 Michael R. Gordon and Lt.Gen. Bernard E. Trainor, USMC (Ret.), The Generals' War: The Inside Story of the Conflict in the Gulf, (Little, Brown, and Co., 1995), p. 473.
Colonel Cancian is a reserve infantry officer who has served in a wide variety of billets from company to Marine expeditionary force level. He also has served several tours at Marine Corps Headquarters and Marine Corps Combat Development Center where he worked extensively on joint issues. As a civilian, he works in the Office of the Secretary of Defense.