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By Norman Friedman, Author, Naval Institute Guide to World Naval Weapons Systems
Lessons of the Gulf Crisis
. The ongoing U.S. build-up in the Persian Gulf seems a good illustration of the strengths and weaknesses of the various U.S. services for the Post-Cold War presence and intervention mission. Although the Gulf Cr>sis will presumably stop the current defense budget cuts, the issue of relative capabilities must inevitably be raised again, probably quite soon.
The first and most fundamental lesson of the Gulf crisis is that the hardware and logistics backing up the U.S. effort must come by sea, military equipment is just too heavy and voluminous for airlift. In the l970s the U.S. approach to this sealift problem was to stockpile material and than airlift reinforcement troops to join with their equipment, a capability demonstrated in annual exercises.
The post-Cold War situation is very different, because it is impossible predict where and how crises will arise in the Third World. In the 1960s, then-Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara saw a compromise solution, stockpiling equipment on board special fast deployment logistics ships that would be homeported abroad. His critics considered such stockpiling just too obvious an invitation to further U.S. involvement in foreign wars, and balked; the project died. It was revived in the late 1970s to support the Rapid Deployment Force in Southwest Asia. Ships operating at or near Diego Garcia carry stockpiled equipment for 'he force; as in the case of NATO Europe, it takes just too long for ships come all the way from the United States. The Diego Garcia ships Provided the initial equipment for the force now landing in Saudi Arabia, hut the bulk of the supplies will come by sea from the United States.
Logistics, far more than sand or heat, is probably the greatest limitation on military operations abroad. Men can be flown in very rapidly as evidenced by U.S. military cargo aircralt landing in Saudi Arabia at the rate of one every ten minutes. However, even the largest airplane (the C-5 Galaxy) cannot carry more than one or two tanks at a time. Nor can aircraft fly in the enormous volumes of fuel that vehicles and combat aircraft consume. Even though much of the world’s oil comes lrom Saudi Arabia, the only refinery in the region that can produce jet fuel is in Iraqi-occupied Kuwait. Aircraft fuel will have to come by sea, perhaps from as far away as Singapore, or through the Suez Canal.
Logistics also shapes capabilities. Initially, the bulk of the U.S. aircraft in the area were aboard the carriers Independence (CV-62) and Dwight D. Eisenhower (CVN-69). Combat aircraft soon began to arrive in large numbers, down directly from the United States so that the numbers tilted towards land-based aircraft by about the second week of the crisis. What was less obvious was that the balance of combat power still lay with the carriers. The land-based aircraft sortie rate may initially be restricted by the need to conserve fuel. Their build-up is still proceeding, and it will still take some time to complete. In some cases, the Saudis operate the same type of airplane (F-15 and E-3) and thus have much of the necessary support structure in place. In others, aircraft such as the A-10 require a wholly new support structure to be put in place.
The carriers, in contrast, take their support structure with them. They can sustain operations for several days without any outside support; and their operating endurance on station will increase if their tempo of operation is reduced. Early reports of carrier air operations in the crisis area mentioned deliberately reduced air operations, which are intended to conserve operating capability against the possibility that war would break out before the land-based aircraft support base had been built up. The carriers provided the bulk of the combat air support in the theater for the first few weeks and may continue to do so for as much as a month or two.
These considerations apply even though the carriers in the area operate under some unusual limitations. The sea areas close to the potential battle zone in Iraq are very limited, and may make it difficult for ships to maneuver to launch and recover heavily-laden aircraft. If they have to fight, the carriers may well have to launch their aircraft from outside the Persian Gulf or the Red Sea. A compromise solution might improve matters. The Saudi bases can provide some fuel and function as divert bases for carrier-based aircraft.
Another point emerged early in the crisis. There are few well-defined point targets in Iraq whose destruction would, bring down the Hussein regime or win the war. Yet, the destruction of very high-value point targets is the main justification for such aircraft as the F-l 17 and, probably, the B-2. It seems much more likely that the greatest contributions of air warfare in a conflict with Iraq would be the neutralization of enemy offensive forces, the neutralization of the Iraqi Air Force, and the destruction of Iraqi tanks. Such a war might justify recent arguments that the U.S. Air Force has been too interested in the glamorous and overpriced forms of air-to-air combat, and less interested in direct support of ground forces (the mission of the A-10). A few years ago just such criticisms led to a Defense Authorization Act demand that the Air Force to be prepared to hand over the close air support mission to the Army. This led to some renewed interest in the appropriate division of roles.
Operations in Saudi Arabia depend on a series of very long sea lanes. At present, the only limit on that logistical chain is a shortage of fast merchant ships. Even if hostilities begin, Iraq is unable to interdict shipping very far from its borders, since it has no submarines (at most Iraq might hope to use aircraft or perhaps merchant ships to lay mines in the Gulf). That raises the question of potential Iraqi allies, most probably Libya. Libya does possess submarines, and she might conceivably transfer some of them to nominal Iraqi ownership, or else operate them covertly in the Gulf area. (Italian and German operations in the Spanish Civil War would be a precedent.) In that case, the United States might have to conduct antisubmarine warfare under very restricted rules of engagement and without using many of its more important sensors.
The pattern of this crisis is not too different from that of the Korean and Vietnam Wars. The initial contribution is provided by one or more carriers in the area. The land infrastructure is built up under their cover. The current build-up is proceeding much faster than in Korea or Vietnam because the United States is using standing forces, rather than building up new ones. In the case of Korea, the forces did not exist, because ol the Post-1945 demobilization and the cuts in conventional forces because of *he emphasis on massive retaliation. In Vietnam, large standing conventional forces existed, but they could not be fully used because of the need |° maintain strength in Europe facing the Soviets. If the Cold War is indeed over, the rate of build-up in Saudi Arabia may be more characteristic of future crises than the slower build-ups of the past, with the important caveat that a large, well-adapted, infrastructure was already in place in Saudi Arabia.
There is another possibility. The Middle East is both notoriously unstable and the major source of world oil for the near future. Some have suggested that a sustained U.S. presence of commitment there will, in effect, replace the current U.S. military presence in NATO Europe as the latter runs down in the wake of the Cold War. In that case, just like the NATO concentration of forces, this new concentration will limit U.S. mom for maneuver elsewhere.
In the past, U.S. forces have been concentrated abroad in roughly the Pattern required to fight the Soviets, with emphasis on Western Europe and the Soviet Union. The pattern of geographically designated joint commands largely matches this pattern. Forces are assigned more or less Permanently to particular commanders-in-chief. The build-up in Saudi Arabia follows much the same pattern, but only because the Central Command—formerly the Rapid Deployment Joint Task Force was set UP to deal with the supposed threat of a Soviet thrust into Southwest Asia. In fact, the problem is not the Soviets, and future Third World crises probably will not be located in conformity with U.S. expectations of the shape of World War III. Even in this crisis there must be some difficulty in transferring and merging a combination of Pacific and Atlantic naval forces. Many of the Army units were preassigned emergency deployment forces, but that will not be the case for long.
The question is whether the postwar pattern of geographical commands and rigidly assigned naval forces ought to continue much longer. Clearly there are areas of great interest to the United States, but equally dearly, naval effectiveness in a crisis requires forces much more powerful than can be maintained permanently on foreign stations. As this is Written, four carriers are assigned to the Gulf crisis. They represent Nearly the entire forward-deployable carrier force. If the crisis continues, '''hat happens to the carriers in the Western Pacific and in the Mediterranean? (See “Always There—Always Ready,” by Vice Admiral R. F. Dunn, in this issue, p. 12.)
Even if the current alliance structure survives and takes responsibility f°r Third-World problems, our allies are ill-equipped to provide this kind Nf naval power. In the entire NATO alliance, the only two other conventional carriers are in the French Navy, and they are much less capable *han U.S. ships. The Royal Navy has three small carriers, but they cannot provide even the level of firepower available to the French. Spain and Italy are a step below the British. These limitations mean that only the United States can provide sufficient air cover at the outset of a crisis.
In the past, the United States has had to deal with only one major crisis at a time. As long as the Soviet Union was the main engine of crisis, it ntight be argued that overall U.S. and allied pressure on the Soviets ^ould limit Soviet willingness to sponsor more than one major crisis at a time. However, the Iraqi crisis has little or nothing to do with the Sovi- e*s- Other crises can occur independently. Just as the Iraqi situation was becoming critical, Pakistan was suffering a governmental crisis and there "'us serious talk of war with India over Kashmir. Given the size of the Iraqi problem, the United States has very little surplus force to spare for anything else. It might well be argued that the current naval force level tias already proved insufficient for quite reasonable levels of world crisis. As in the past, the Gulf crisis has shown that naval forces, especially curriers, are the only quick U.S. response to crisis lar from the United States.
Air-to-Air Stealth Missile
In July, the Air Force released a description of an experimental stealthy air-to-air missile, "Have Dash 2” (HD-2), which is probably Intended as the long-term replacement for the AIM-120 advanced medium-range air-to-air missile (AMRAAM) and the AIM-7 Sparrow.
HD-2 is shaped so that it can blend into the exterior of a properly shaped stealthy fighter, presumably without adding significantly to its radar cross section. Rumors of the existence of such missiles have been circulating for some time. It was widely reported that the United States withdrew from the multi-national advanced short-range air-to-air missile (ASRAAM)—to replace the AIM-9 Sidewinder—partly because it had a black program for a presumably stealthy Sidewinder replacement. The alternative explanation was that existing advanced Sidewinders could exceed the projected performance of ASRAAM.
For an air-to-air missile, stealth has two important virtues. First, il the missile can be carried externally without greatly increasing the crosssection of the aircraft, it can help the airplane designers conserve valuable internal volume. Second, airplanes are beginning to rely on short- range Doppler radars to warn of approaching missiles. In the past, they used radar warning receivers. If the approaching missile was guided by infrared (IR) sensors, the potential target had to rely on infrared detectors, which could pick up the hot plume of the missile motor. In the future, missiles may well rely on high-impulse short-bum motors, coasting some considerable distance to their targets (thus frustrating infrared detectors on the target) while being guided passively. An active radar wamer would not necessarily violate the stealth of its own platform, because its signal waveforms might be made quite difficult to detect at any distance.
There are still problems; the skin of a really fast missile heats up, making the missile itself detectable by its IR emission even after its motor has cut out. The modified version of the rolling airframe surlace- to-air missile now under development, and many forward-aspect IR missiles, operate on this premise. Full stealthiness, then, ought to include some means of avoiding or minimizing aerodynamic heating, an issue not yet publicly addressed.
As in the new generation of stealthy cruise and ground attack missiles, HD-2 achieves its antiradar performance by a combination of its shape and its radar-absorbent structure. HD-2 has a flat underside—it is to be carried above, rather than below, the fuselage—that also provides some lift. For most of the missile’s length its two upper sides are also flat (giving it a triangular cross-section). Given its greater body lilt, HD-2 dispenses with the mid-body wings of Sparrow and AMRAAM, and is limited to four folding tail fins. The combination of body lilt, fin configuration and a new bank-to-turn autopilot, should permit HD-2 to maneuver at 50 gs, compared to 35 gs for current weapons. The goals ol the current program are to test these estimates and the radar-absorbing graphite polymide airframe material of the missile, which has to withstand the heat of Mach 4 flight. HD-2 will probably be the first non-metallic supersonic missile.
The missile has a pointed nose similar to that of the existing AMRAAM. This shape is inherently stealthy, in that it reflects radar signals away from broadside. If it houses a conventional planar antenna, however, the shape the incoming radar signal (passing through the transparent radome) is likely to see will be the flat shape of that antenna. A conformal array might encounter fewer problems, but would be more difficult to use.
Missile length is limited to 12 feet, as in AMRAAM to avoid interference with trailing edge control surfaces and access doors on the F-15s and F-16s that may ultimately carry it. The test flights will be made from an F-l 1 IE. The missile’s total weight is 400 pounds.
The new missile will incorporate an inertial reference system and a new navigation-intercept computer. An operational missile derived from HD-2 would use a combination active passive radar and IR seeker. Plans originally called for the HD-2 to be powered by a ducted or a pulsed rocket, in either case stealthier than the current boost-sustain engine because its IR signature is greatly reduced, in the case ol the duct mixing air with the exhaust. In the interest of economy, however, flight tests will be made with A1M-7E Sparrow motors.
Ford Aerospace is the prime contractor; the 38-month program, which will employ three recoverable missiles, will culminate in six flight tests in 1992.
Although it is an Air Force program, like the current AMRAAM missile, HD-2 would surely be a candidate for future naval application. 1 hat would be particularly the case if a variant ol the Air Force s advanced tactical fighter is chosen as the F-14 successor, since HD-2 is surely intended as the weapon of the next Air Force lighter. (In lact, the Navy and Air Force increasingly are working together to coordinate air-to-air missile development.)