The air-sea battle (ASB) concept is misunderstood and remains problematic for the U.S. military and allied audiences because of its long list of disclaimers and its kill-chain (i.e., technical) approach to war. The unfortunate paradox is that the more military officials attempt to clarify a kill-chain approach, the more they muddle the operational and strategic way ahead for the joint force.1 The use of disclaimers tangled with kill-chain effects—looking at weapon links and attacking the vulnerable parts—reflects an exceedingly tactical approach. In the process, as strategist Colin Gray has observed, war with all of its inherent complexities is reduced to warfare (fighting).2 History is replete with examples where conceptions of warfare promised much but delivered little, because of a failure to consider all operational variables:
• 1812: Napoleon’s invasion of Russia was disastrous because of a failure to consider time/space and logistical variables.
• 1914: The “decisive” Schlieffen Plan resulted in movement-and-maneuver culmination due in large part to political and logistical oversights.
• 1941: In Operation MATADOR, British Malaya forces failed to adequately address land sustainment and naval maneuver, and they assumed that air- and sea-strike forces alone could disrupt the attacking Japanese long enough for the arrival of Allied reinforcements.
• 1967: The Israelis’ maneuver-and-fires “victory disease” strategically plagued their intelligence assumptions leading up to the 1973 Yom Kippur War.
• 1991: In Operation Desert Storm, U.S. maneuver forces and Air Force Colonel John Warden’s “Five Rings” air-attack plan delivered military victory but failed to translate into war termination.
• 2001: The “Afghan model” of precision fires/special forces promised quick and decisive warfare, only to morph into America’s longest war.
• 2003: The “shock-and-awe” model of technology and accomplishing the mission with fewer ground troops worked until it collided with the realities of war.
• 2006: Israeli effects-based operations (EBO) ironically had negative strategic effects in the Second Lebanon War.
These examples demonstrate that a military should not define “war” on its own technical or tactical-level terms, and cannot create strategic context in which it hopes to operate militarily. Despite its tactical relevance, the ASB concept is increasingly becoming a mosaic representation of past strategic misfortunes waiting to be recycled.
Disclaimers Abound
First, ASB is problematic because it applies various disclaimers while simultaneously using unbounded strategic language to bolster its bureaucratic influence. Generally, a disclaimer is defined as any statement intended to deny the obligations a party may have in a dispute. Legal disclaimers, for instance, are common in everyday life, but their presence does not guarantee that the terms of the disclaimer will be recognized in a legal dispute. In war, the ultimate human dispute, disclaimers will certainly not be recognized by determined adversaries, or by each war, which has its own unique character. ASB disclaimers merely serve a bureaucratic process of system-of-systems analysis and to advance the notion that networked-weapon superiority will be decisive in future war. Simply, the utility of ASB disclaimers end at the Pentagon’s edge. Therefore, the common disclaimers cited below along with expansive language and assumptions should be revisited:
ASB is “not an air-sea battle plan, operational plan, or strategy.” Clearly, the concept title belies the first disclaimer, and the unbounded language employed in ASB documents and articles contradicts the latter two.3 For instance, the concept declares it is an “institutional driver” for all of the services. The concept is also a self-referenced “significant component of DOD strategy,” and its proponents assert that “no operational concept or plan is tenable without ASB,” in all military domains. ASB is promoted as being critical in all military phases in humanitarian assistance to high-end conflict, in peace and war, and without ASB’s ways and means, the joint force cannot serve vital national interests. This covers a broad range of defense actions from force development to war. These things are strategy in general, military strategy in particular, and operational plans—all things that ASB states it is not, while also stating that it is. All should agree that ASB is not a strategy. However, various interpretations of assorted disclaimers tangled with unbounded language only create confusion in the joint force and among U.S. allies.
ASB is “not about at a particular adversary, country, and not about China.” If not, then a revision is needed in the concept’s baseline assumptions, which state: An adversary with ballistic and cruise missiles will attack U.S. and allied territories and defended overseas bases. This includes attacks on American aircraft, ships, space assets, networks, people, and homeland. These assumptions clearly point to a particular region (Asia-Pacific), a particular country (China), a primary military threat (long-range strike), and infer a technical approach to war (kill-chain). Now, if future wars could be devoid of social and cultural aspects, economic factors, determined non-state actors, and competitors (China) achieving political objectives “without fighting,” then a kill-chain approach might be consistent with the strategic challenges we face. To be sure, a kill-chain approach to target “closed systems” for military access is required in warfare. However, an overreliance on it and as an “institutional driver” for how all of the services should organize, train, and equip is a sure way to recycle past military misfortunes in war.
ASB is “just not only about aircraft, ships, or weapons. It is far larger than these platforms; it is about connectivity and networks and being able to understand each other when it comes time to fight.”4 The ASB operational view (see illustration) is really a technical view of preferred warfare, which illustrates a neatly risk-binned, sequential employment of aircraft, ships, and weapons, including the larger issue of connectivity. Essentially, a strategic “consciousness of victory” for friendly forces is suggested with seamless and resilient networks without which ground forces “cannot get to the fight, maneuver or be sustained.”5
What type of fight does ASB foresee? Noticeably, it depicts a dominant U.S. military with “technical tentacles” ensnaring a helpless prey. It reveals a mirror-imaged view of networked battle against a peer adversary that is devoid of messy ground war. Also, it is devoid of politically complex events, social-cultural factors, and proxy wars that will likely interfere with the execution of decisive warfare. It fails to depict icons of determined opponents with crude weapons that will exploit the seams of U.S. technological superiority. This type of thinking led to the 2001 “Afghan model,” the 2003 “shock-and-awe” solution to Iraq, and the 2006 Israeli EBO idea. Each posited that precision attacks against weapons and leadership targets could get the defeat job done quickly—until the realities of war trumped ideal conceptions of warfare. More recently, the 2011 NATO/U.S. operation in Libya was hailed as the “new model of intervention [really war] of unparalleled precision, minimal collateral damage, and zero allied casualties.”6 But events from Afghanistan (2001) to Syria and Egypt (present) remind us that war is more about a political battle of wills entangled with chaotic military factors on the ground than it is about a preferred pattern of warfare.
Kill-Chain Effects
Second, ASB is problematic for the U.S. military and allied audiences because it rests on an exceedingly tactical approach to force development and war. Tactical actions to disrupt electronic links, destroy weapon launchers, and defeat weapons (D3) are valid, but it is certainly not a new approach to warfare. D3 is simply an acronym for “closed-system” targeting to achieve kill-chain effects. Similar to General James N. Mattis’ concerns expressed in a 2008 Joint Force assessment of effects-based operations, the ASB concept has been “misapplied and overextended to the point that it actually hinders rather than helps the development of joint operations.”7 For instance, the Joint Operational Access Concept (JOAC) is a “big C” overarching concept, and it should be more of an institutional driver for force development. Unfortunately, the perception and reality is that JOAC is persistently overshadowed by a “small c” ASB concept that focuses primarily on one phase of a notional military campaign.8 More important, our nation’s most likely challenges in the current security environment and in war are selectively ignored in favor of ideal technical advantages.
There is also the notion that by “breaking the kill-chain” the U.S. military will be able to negate anti-access strategies and adversary resolve.9 This is a prime example of “target fixation” on tactics and orders-of-battle, which diminishes awareness of the most likely strategic challenges and military missions. For example, China’s coercive diplomacy, offensive deterrence, and power projection (with civilian ships) regularly challenge regional actors and test U.S. treaty commitments. And there is very little historical or current evidence that shows how U.S. civilian leaders can apply a kill-chain template for political effect short of all-out war. Conversely, naval forward presence, partner engagement, and crisis response have been employed by every U.S. President since World War II precisely because these military tools underwrite enduring U.S. interests in the Asia-Pacific region.
Syria is another example of selective inattention to the most likely strategic challenges and military missions. This is a scenario in which the real “costs of outside intervention” are much more than “anti-air missile systems,” as declared in Admiral Jonathan Greenert’s and General Mark Welsh’s May 2013 Foreign Policy article “Breaking the Kill Chain.” The most likely U.S. military missions in the unfolding era are:
• Forward naval forces to provide a stabilizing presence in the Mediterranean and Persian Gulf regions
• Forward naval forces to conduct military engagement with regional partners
• Forward-deployed naval forces to respond to unforeseen crises
• Securing chemical weapons with U.S. ground forces
• Limited combined arms operations
• Complex stability operations among various actors (militia groups, terrorists, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and Turkey) that are engulfed in a regional proxy war
• Irregular warfare against Iranian-Hezbollah informational and proxy campaigns.
Unfortunately, these seven military missions are now obscured by one military mission—projecting power despite anti-access challenges—focused primarily on technology and kill-chain effects. The U.S. military has been here before. In 2002, then–Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Paul Wolfowitz highlighted the “access-denial problem,” and directed the military to exploit cutting-edge technologies to wage decisive warfare with standoff strike, precision weapons, and fewer forces.10 This was a transformative warfare idea until it failed in war. In spite of this, aggressive ASB advocacy continues to promote kill-chain effects for access as the primary way to “build a truly joint force.” The strategic warning is clear: We must not ignore the most likely military missions in favor of a preferred model of U.S. warfare.
The ASB concept does posit that it enables conceptual alignment, programmatic collaboration, and institutional commitment to develop forces that can provide access through kill-chain effects. As the logic goes, it is in the best interests of all the services to figure out how they can best contribute to the concept. Essentially, ASB has become an end in itself. This “limited concept” was initially intended to force the integration of primarily the U.S. Air Force and Navy. Now, it is an “everything concept” directed by a duplicative “joint” office. By the ASB Office’s construct, defense officials should also create redundant offices for the draft joint concept for entry operations and all other concepts, each with its own public-affairs agenda, congressional engagement, and implementation plans. While the U.S. joint-capabilities integration and development process is not perfect, adding duplicative joint bureaucracies circumvents department oversight and creates even more confusion.
The Way Ahead
ASB and associated anti-access narratives muddle the way ahead because they selectively ignore the political-military realities of war and attempt to redefine it in technical battle terms. Precision-standoff effects and seamless networks are again the proposed solutions in future warfare. We must return clarity to the ASB concept, especially if we want any semblance of strategic context for the most likely challenges that lie ahead. Clarity will also help to reassure U.S. allies wary of ASB plans that are inconsistent with their political ends. As an Australian defense analyst noted, ASB’s potential “to enhance regional stability is largely lost amid the lack of clarity of how it links military strategy to U.S. political objectives in Asia.”11 Here are some ways to ensure operational clarity and to emphasize strategic context:
Remove ‘Battle’ from the ASB concept title. A simple title change will reduce misunderstanding surrounding disclaimers that state it is not about battle against China when the title, along with assumptions, clearly infer that it is. Moreover, “battle” and “kill-chain” language by senior military officials is incoherent with enduring U.S. policies of forward engagement and stability around the globe. In the Asia-Pacific, for instance, ASB language and assumptions present allies a false choice. They either fight a major war alongside the U.S. military or accept virtual presence and U.S. abandonment in the face of Chinese dominance, which only alienates the various actors that U.S. strategy and policy seek to influence. The reality is that forward (that is, actual) presence and partner engagement are the military missions that have the best political effect.
The ASB Office should be subsumed by the Joint Staff. ASB Office personnel should return to their respective services full-time to support well-established Title X roles and responsibilities. This will reduce duplicative offices that continue to grow within the Pentagon, while resources continue to decline. Moreover, this move will help to reduce various resourcing interpretations and processes that potentially unbalance the joint force through a narrow focus primarily on tactical effects.
Naval officers should recognize the ASB concept for what it is. In the context of war, it is essentially an initial phase of a notional military operation. As such, concept language that declares ASB—a phase—is an “institutional driver” for U.S. joint-force development should be deleted. The naval services would be better served to reference the Cooperative Strategy for 21st Century Seapower (CS21), Naval Operational Concepts 2010, the CS21 revision, and respective service doctrines for how to organize, train, and equip. Each has it flaws and critics, but the collective themes of forward presence, crisis response, and conventional deterrence are the strategic ways that will continue to support political ends.
The Navy and Marine Corps should develop a logistical operational concept. Naval forces are constantly redefining where they can go and operate from. Logistics, along with its many variables, is critical in supporting our unique naval capabilities. Lift, supply, sustainment, austere site distribution, and expeditionary maintenance are the key components of any operational design from disaster relief to major combat operations. A naval logistical concept would nest ongoing initiatives and emphasize opportunities such as:
• Naval aviation–distributed operations that will redefine where we can go and from where we can operate
• More multi-use commercial ship designs modified for supply, personnel, and aviation staging
• Improved surface connectors for bulk fuel and ordnance transfer
• Enhanced partner capacities through Phase 0 engagement, which will help make possible distributed operations and timely force aggregation
• Strike and cargo-resupply unmanned aerial systems from sea and austere land sites
• Multiple offshore supply ships for petroleum distribution
• Maritime prepositioning ships for selective resupply.
A naval logistical operational concept would connect the operational factors of time, space, and force. In turn, this would bolster ongoing naval forward presence, crisis response, and force-aggregation initiatives. Additionally, it will help make distributed fifth-generation aviation truly actionable. Students of history would certainly be reassured to see such a concept, and professional military officers would be reassured to hear senior military leaders place more emphasis on logistics, rather than a myopic focus on kill-chain effects.
Naval officers must codify the political-military lessons of the past 12 years of war. This will be a central part of our naval officer legacy. Now is the right time for select groups from Navy–Marine Corps schoolhouses and Headquarters Marine Corps to capture the lessons from U.S. experiences in Iraq and Afghanistan in one or two foundational publications.12 The depth of intellectual undertaking to understand protracted and proxy wars will determine our level of success in the complex political-military challenges that lie ahead. This may be a broad and complex task, but so is war, which demands more than ideal visions of quick and decisive warfare.
In the end, all military officers would be better served to look well beyond ASB blinding campaigns for kill-chain effects and read How Wars End and The Endgame.13 These books underscore that war is much more than managing ideal concepts of warfare. They also highlight that despite promising warfare plans and initial military salvos, there will always be a messy admixture of complex policy, dynamic strategy, and various cultures in war. The suggestion herein is not that we should plan to fight the last war, but for military officials to stop promoting the very ideas (shock troops, technological awe, and fewer forces) that led to political and military misfortunes in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The U.S. military is at a critical juncture as our nation seeks a political settlement in Afghanistan while implementing force reductions in a fiscally constrained environment. Meanwhile, well-intentioned defense analysts and military officers ignore the political-military realities of war as they advance nearsighted concepts. The blitzkriegs of the past did not win wars; the proposed blinding campaigns of the future will fare no better.
As U.S.-Afghan security agreements and peace talks unfold in America’s longest war, there are extravagant hopes in ambiguous phrases such as “game-changing” long-range strike and networked battle. The flawed inference is that the U.S. military is transitioning away from the most likely political-military challenges in war, toward a military cultural change in 21st-century warfare. We should proceed with extreme caution, as such thinking is the height of reducing war to warfare. And this points to a deep-rooted organizational culture within the U.S. defense establishment that has a predisposition for clean, quick, and decisive warfare. History suggests that such things can prove to be strategic liabilities in understanding the conditions in which wars are conducted and concluded.
1. Air-Sea Battle Office, Air-Sea Battle: Service Collaboration to Address Anti-Access & Area Denial Challenges, May 2013. GEN Norton A. Schwartz (USAF) and ADM Jonathan W. Greenert (USN), “Air-Sea Battle,” The American Interest, 20 February 2012. CAPT Philip Dupree (USN) and COL Jordan Thomas (USAF), “Air-Sea Battle: Clearing the Fog,” Armed Forces Journal, May 2012. Marc V. Schanz, “Air-Sea Battle’s Battle,” AIR FORCE Magazine, April 2013. “Kill Chain Approach,” official blog of the Chief of Naval Operations, 23 April 2013, http://cno.navylive.dodlive.mil/2013/04/23/kill-chain-approach-4/.
2. Colin S. Gray, Fighting Talk: Forty Maxims on War, Peace, and Strategy (Westport, CT: Praeger Security International, 2007), 32.
3. See sources cited in endnote 1.
4. Schanz, “Air-Sea Battle’s Battle,” quoting LT GEN Burton M. Field (USAF) and RADM Bruce E. Grooms (USN) at the February 2013 Air Force Association’s Air Warfare Symposium.
5. GEN James N. Mattis (USJFCOM), “Commander’s Guidance for Effects-based Operations,” Joint Force Quarterly, no. 51 (fourth quarter 2008), 105–08. Dupree and Thomas, “Air-Sea Battle: Clearing the Fog.”
6. Ivo H. Daalder and ADM James Stavridis (USN), “NATO’s Victory in Libya: The Right Way to Run an Intervention,” Foreign Affairs, March/April 2012. RADM James G. Foggo (USN), testimony on ASB concept to House Armed Services Sub-Committee, 10 October 2013, http://navylive.dodlive.mil/2013/10/10/rear-adm-foggo-discusses-air-sea-battle-concept.
7. Mattis, “Commander’s Guidance,” 105–08.
8. Joint Operational Access Concept (JOAC), 17 January 2012, 4. Department of Defense, Sustaining U.S. Global Leadership: Priorities for 21st Century Defense, January 2012, 4, where “projecting power despite anti-access challenges” is one of ten defense military missions, of which ASB is only one military aspect of a broader operation.
9. ADM Jonathan W. Greenert (USN) and GEN Mark Welsh (USAF), “Breaking the Kill Chain,” Foreign Policy.com, 16 May 2013.
10. Andrew Krepinevich, Barry Watts, and Robert Work quoting Secretary Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz in Meeting the A2AD Challenge, Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, 2003, 6, 12.
11. Benjamin Schreer, Planning the Unthinkable War: AirSea Battle and its Implications for Australia (Australian Strategic Policy Institute, April, 2013).
12. The Small Wars Manual (1940), BGEN Samuel B. Griffith’s (USMC) analysis of Mao’s On Guerrilla Warfare, FMFRP 12-18 (1961) and of Sun Tzu’s The Art of War (1963), RADM J. C. Wylie’s (USN) Military Strategy: A General Theory of Power Control (1967), Headquarters MCDPs (1990s), and the comprehensive political-military lessons from Michael R. Gordon and General Bernard E. Trainor, The Endgame (New York: Vintage Books, 2012) are examples that inspire such an effort.
13. Gideon Rose, How Wars End (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2010). Gordon and Trainor, The Endgame.