The USS Cole (DDG-67) was rolled onto Northrop Grumman’s floating drydock in Pascagoula, Mississippi. Structural replacements and repairs are complete, and the destroyer will be redelivered to the Navy next spring. The Navy relaunched the repaired destroyer on 14 September, at night and a day early, because of security concerns in the aftermath of the 11 September terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
What does the United States do about the brutal attacks executed against Americans on 11 September? There are three critical questions that need answers. Why were the attacks executed? Can they teach us anything about a new way of asymmetric warfare, with which we must now contend? What are we to do about the problem?
Many Americans associate the attacks with U.S. involvement abroad, especially in the Middle East. Had we opted for a more isolationist policy, would the thousands of victims of those grisly attacks still be alive? The answer is probably no. Some years ago, when Osama bin Laden said he hated the United States and wanted it destroyed, he was actually saying that, by its very existence, it threatened his most cherished values. In effect, the United States composes the core of the modern world—and he regards the modern world as a deadly enemy. No amount of conciliation or concessions ever can solve this problem. Osama and his allies in many countries simply want to reverse time. We stand in their way, not by detailed actions, but by our existence and way of life.
Because the United States is the leading modern country, it occupies center stage in its enemies’ fantasies. Were it destroyed, that mantle would pass to its European and Asian allies. This is not an abstract issue. In Iran, for example, the spectacle of numerous teenagers obsessed with Western fashions and music threatens religious primacy. An Iranian public clearly interested in modernization has given reformist—which means pro-modern—candidates majorities of 70% and more in recent elections. Those who reject the modern world still hold a veto over the winners in those elections; however, the trend seems clear. People such as Osama assume that the modern world causes severe societal and religious problems in their world. They cannot be persuaded otherwise.
The implication is that isolationism is not the answer for the United States. Since roughly 1889, our policy has been to defend U.S. territories and interests by threatening potential enemies with trouble if they try to attack—by forward engagement. The modern U.S. Navy is the product of that policy and it still makes sense. Even if the United States turned into a police state, clever terrorists could manage to attack it. Discovering plots using forward-based forces and destroying or disrupting them preemptively surely is preferable. Thus, we need more forward presence, not less.
Generally, terrorist actions are designed either to publicize the terrorist’s chosen cause or to cause governments to abandon policies that offend the terrorists. But it seems as if the recent attacks were conceived in hopes of collapsing U.S. society altogether. The perpetrators did not aim to pull down or change policies—they aimed to destroy the nation.
While these kind of tactics have been called asymmetric warfare, the fight of the weak against the strong, there is a more illuminating way to see them. Recent U.S. discussions of military transformation have focused on the idea of attacking the enemy’s center of gravity rather than his military forces. The hope is that a few precision weapons, striking certain key targets, can cause the enemy’s collapse. What was the 11 September attack if not an attempt to hit the U.S. center of gravity?
Clearly, the terrorists believed that destruction of a few key targets would be decisive. To date, that hope has proven altogether false. Americans can feel good about the strength of their society, but the real lesson is that the entire center-of-gravity concept appears to be fallacious. No society—not even a Third World country such as Iraq—has a center of gravity that we can strike. A dictator appears to be running the country, but his death will not shatter the state because his successors are likely to be of the same mold. It might not be time yet for us to abandon conventional concepts of warfare, however crude and brutal they may be.
What does the United States do now? Beside the perpetrators themselves, it should hit anyone who backed the attack on the theory that unless we make it thoroughly unpleasant to attack us, tragic outrages like this will continue.
Fleet Reorganization Promises Integration
In August, Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Vern Clark announced a major reorganization, integrating the Atlantic and Pacific Fleets more closely. The Atlantic Fleet command now will be responsible for overall resources. However, the
Pacific type commands, particularly those for surface ships and air (SurfPac and AirPac) will be responsible for resources in their own areas. Admiral Clark’s reorganization can be seen as a response to two developments. First, the overall size of the U.S. fleet has shrunk dramatically since the end of the Cold War. Second, U.S. policy is emphasizing Asia, which means both East Asia (the traditional area of Pacific Fleet emphasis) and the Gulf (served by both fleets). Because the fleet is now much smaller than in the past, it is no longer practical to keep some ships always in the Atlantic, some always in the Pacific. Thus, it makes sense to have a single authority for resources, including training and operating practices, at each level.
In a sense, this is a return to the past. Before World War II, it was U.S. policy to maintain a concentrated fleet on the theory that dispersing ships among numerous stations invited their wartime defeat in detail. The concentrated fleet might not be immediately present where needed, but it could steam to a distant venue and win by destroying a foreign navy. That was what the United States did to Japan in World War II. The small U.S. fleet present in the Far East at the outbreak of war was swiftly destroyed. After some setbacks, the much larger U.S. fleet initially concentrated at Pearl Harbor destroyed Japan.
Thus the fleet had a single commander (Commander-in-Chief, U.S. Fleet, with the unfortunate acronym CinCUS) with a single staff. On the other hand, before World War II most resources supporting the fleet were concentrated on the East Coast, far from that operating staff. That separation probably enhanced the power of the independent bureaus that ran the resources, and of the Office of the Chief of Naval Operations (OpNav) in Washington.
Because the fleet was concentrated, it had common operating practices and materiel and a shared understanding of tactics, honed in annual fleet exercises. The small scouting fleet operated mainly in the Atlantic, where it served as a training squadron. However, it maintained its connection with the main fleet by participating in the annual Fleet Problems.
After World War II, initial U.S. thinking was that the two fleets would be based in the United States, and that most ships would spend most of their time in home waters. Task forces would be sent abroad on a reactive basis. Then it turned out that the United States had permanent overseas interests that could be supported only by permanently deployed naval forces. This new practice began with the Sixth Fleet in 1948, and continued when the Seventh Fleet was maintained in the Far East after the end of the Korean War. Once the two fleets had to maintain large formations abroad, in very different conditions, it was probably inevitable that their operating practices would diverge.
One irony of post-World War II U.S. naval practice is that it mirrors that of the pre-World War II Royal Navy—then the global navy. Before World War II, the U.S. Navy benefited enormously from having a single concentrated fleet, partly because that fleet could easily split up for fleet-on-fleet exercises that mirrored actual combat situations. Accounts of the pre-1939 Royal Navy emphasized the desperate need to maintain sufficient strength on foreign stations, because British prestige often was determined by the presence of a fleet. Thus, it was necessary to maintain a powerful Mediterranean Fleet and also a China (i.e., East Asia) Fleet in addition to the Home or Atlantic Fleet. Massive fleet exercises sometimes were difficult to undertake because ships could not easily be withdrawn from foreign stations. The British did benefit from the ability to merge their Atlantic and Mediterranean forces as necessary, which the U.S. Navy could hardly do with its forward-deployed Sixth and Seventh Fleets (or, for that matter, with Atlantic and Pacific forces). To a limited extent, modern telecommunications makes possible virtual exercises combining ships from different fleets, but they are limited.
It is possible that the two fleets differ because conditions in their theaters of operation are radically different. Such realities rarely are expressed, but that does not make them any less significant. "One size fits all" may turn out to be "one size fits none." Admiral Clark certainly is right to try, but the experiment may fail on this basis. Atlantic distances are far shorter, but Atlantic seas are rougher. During the Cold War, the main naval task in the Atlantic was to gain sea control by destroying very powerful Soviet forces, many of them land based. The Atlantic also included the Mediterranean, where U.S. and Allied forces had very limited sea room. That experience probably translates directly to operations in the Gulf. In the Pacific, however, there was enormous sea room. The Pacific Fleet could strike Soviet land targets before cleaning out the Soviet fleet. Indeed, the great question in the late 1970s was whether, given the problems of the Atlantic, it would be worthwhile to maintain that sort of striking power in the Pacific.
In a nonnuclear world, the difference between Atlantic and Pacific may not be very important. Time will tell.
Stealth Faces New Challenge
At the August 2001 Moscow Air Show, the Russian Nizhni Novgorod Radiotechnological Research Institute (NNRRI) advertised 2- and 3-dimensional antistealth radars operating at metric wavelengths. In the 1950s, NNRRI was responsible for Soviet metric air-defense radars, and the new sets are modernized versions using solid-state electronics and automated displays. The company claims that its Nebo-SVU 2-D radar can detect a fighter flying at 10,000 meters (about 33,000 feet) at a range of 270 kilometers. The 3-D Nebo-UE can track this target at 320 kilometers. The company also markets Barier-E, which uses dipole antennas to form an electronic barrier across the possible path of a low-flying cruise missile. At the show, the company claimed some export success but did not list any customers.
None of this should have been surprising. Stealth technology relies heavily on shaping to reflect radar beams away from their transmitters. It is made possible by fast computers that can calculate angles of reflection for radar signals hitting an airplane from various directions; using such machines, an airplane or missile can be optimized to reflect radar away from almost all—but not all—directions. A radar observing a stealthy target sees it in flashes, but probably not enough flashes to track it consistently. However, if several radars are netted together to form a joint picture, their intermittent sightings can be combined into a consistent target track.
At long enough wavelengths, the radar sees the object but none of its details. Early radars all operated at metric wavelengths, but in most cases developers switched to short (centimetric) wavelengths to form beams narrow enough for precise tracking. Not only does such a radar have a narrower main beam, but it also has smaller sidelobes. It is more difficult to jam, since less of the jamming energy is likely to get into the radar through those sidelobes (and through the narrow main beam). In naval applications, longer-wavelength radars cannot see targets at the lowest altitudes because of the effects of reflection off the sea. Advertised stealth, then, most likely applies more to centimetric than to metric-wavelength radars, simply because the bulk of the world’s radars operate at those wavelengths.
The Russians remind us that not all of them do. The older metric-wavelength radars survive in some numbers, particularly in countries that bought Soviet equipment. If it is true that such radars respond not to shaping but only to the overall size of an object, then they may well be able to detect stealthy aircraft at about the same ranges as conventional ones; stealth shaping literally will not matter to them.
Much of the current discussion of military transformation is based on the expectation that stealthy air platforms will dominate future combat. If stealth can be defeated relatively easily by modernizing a well-known old radar technology, such faith will have been grossly misplaced.