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The British recently announced a more joint approach to Providing air support for amphibious operations. It may have something to teach the United States. When a government wants
reduce its armed forces, it must decide between across the °ard, relatively uniform cuts, and cutting entire elements to keeP others intact.
The first approach can produce hollow forces without any real power; the second preserves capable forces, but fewer of mem. The choice is not easy, since even a hollow force may Provide a basis for later revival, whereas reviving forces from scratch, in some cases, may be nearly impossible. The weak °rces that Great Britain preserved through the very ean years after World War I did grow into the powerful ones that fought World War II. On the other and, revival began almost too late. Also, the holiness of British forces (such as the Royal Navy)
Precluded effective intervention in the crises of the
30s, beginning with Japanese aggression in Asia and perhaps most strikingly in the case of the Italian e°nquest of Ethiopia.
, ';°r the British then, and for the United States now, ere can be no expectation of a peace so endless that armed forces are not needed. Interwar British governments argued that unless the British economy was rebuilt (partly as a result of reducing taxes through efense cuts), Britain could not hope to sustain the s°rt of strain it had endured during World War I. The Point of the now-notorious “Ten Year Rule” (the asSumption that the country would not be at war with a major power for a decade) was thus partly to promote economic revival. Matters became more desperate when the United States passed laws making it lmPossible for Britain to raise war loans in this country, as had been done during World War I. As a consequence, Britain very nearly ran out of hard currency early in 1941 before Lend-Lease came to
the
rescue. One question for the historian must be
whether the British could have rearmed (or fought) m°re efficiently, so that the choice between the economy and defense would not have been so stark.
The United States now faces a somewhat similar Problem—but with a major difference: defense does n°t account for a dominant slice of government pending—and did not even at the height of the Rea- 8an buildUp Thus cutting defense spending will not ^>lve our economic problems. In fact, as former Secretary of dense Caspar Weinberger often pointed out, when the United btates cuts defense spending, the deficit goes up. Even so, the basic question is whether we will opt for capable or for hol- °w forces as we strive to heal the economic wounds suffered Ur'ng nearly half a century of Cold War combat. Proponents
jointness sometimes argue that there is a third approach, that a more efficient use of the existing forces can maintain our capabilities at lower budget levels.
Jointness can mean two very different things. One is that because each armed force can generally contribute to any given
operation, each should always participate. Cynics argue that this is intended to preserve each service from the cuts it deserves as the post-Cold War world evolves, and that such jointness often precludes any attempt to maintain operational efficiency. On the other hand, it can reasonably be argued that the different services can contribute capabilities that, together, can make up a more powerful whole. That might be exemplified by the use of U.S. Army attack helicopters from U.S. Navy ships in the Persian Gulf; the Navy did not have any equivalent aircraft, and to have built up a naval attack helicopter force would have been quite expensive.
The other meaning of jointness involves eliminating duplication between the services to cut costs. This vision might be
APG-73 Radars Reach Fleet
VFA-146 and VFA-147’s new F/A-18Cs are arriving with the radars, which incorporate advanced countermeasures.
exemplified by a review of close air support forces for ground combat. The Army has built up a force of attack helicopters precisely because of doubts that U.S. Air Force aircraft nominally earmarked for this role would be available in combat. The Air Force considers close air support a marginal role; the Army places a much higher priority on it—hence the duplication. Under true jointness, it might be argued, the Air Force would be required to provide close air support as needed.
Like its U.S. counterpart, the British Government considers it important to be able to intervene abroad, as in Bosnia. Abroad will generally mean overseas, so intervention will often entail
Pr°ceedings / August 1994
91
something like an amphibious operation. That in turn requires air support, both to protect the operation from enemy aircraft, and to support troops ashore. Unfortunately, the Royal Navy has nowhere near enough Sea Harriers to do this. Also, even though the Sea Harrier was always conceived as a dual-purpose (fighter-attack) airplane, it tended to be used as an antiair asset as was done during the Falklands Conflict. Now the added weight of its new radar has reduced its bomb load; the modernization did not include installation of a new engine.
Royal Air Force ground-attack Harriers are assigned to support British troops but, as the British Army on the Rhine is cut, they are moving back to the United Kingdom. For the British, jointness in an amphibious operation will now mean flying the ground-attack Harriers from carriers alongside the Sea Harriers. (The British Army will contribute attack helicopters on board other ships in the amphibious force.) Reportedly two RAF Harrier GR.7 squadrons will be permanently assigned in this way, providing detachments for the carriers. The carriers will thus be able to draw on a larger pool of aircraft, providing the assault force with some insurance against losses.
The British actually did operate RAF Harriers from some ships (not the carriers) in the Falklands, and they have exercised RAF Harriers at sea for some years, but only now is this practice to be formalized. Whether it works in practice will depend on how well the GR.7s and their pilots adapt to the difficult conditions at sea, but the idea is certainly interesting. Certainly, U.S. Marine Corps squadrons have done well afloat, but they are equipped with AV-8Bs developed to the sea-going standards of the Naval Air Systems Command.
This arrangement appears to be a relatively easy solution because a short takeoff and vertical landing (STOVL) fighter like the Harrier need not, in theory, have a landing gear specially adapted to sea use. Moreover, they do not have to survive the stresses of catapult takeoffs and arrested landings. In practice, at least in the past, land-based Harriers sometimes had their undercarriages collapse after several hard landings on rolling and pitching decks.
In theory, the amphibious group can also enjoy the support of RAF aircraft flying from shore bases, such as Tornadoes (both fighter and strike) and, more importantly, maritime patrol and airborne early warning aircraft. They would become particularly important once a beachhead had been secured.
At the least, this exercise in jointness makes it possible for the British to retain an important capability, opposed amphibious assault, without buying new naval aircraft. Quite possibly the RAF squadrons on permanent assignment to the carriers will ultimately join the Royal Navy.
There is still an element of unreality here. To the extent that the assault force depends on relatively short-range land- based aircraft, the planner must hope that the assault will take place near friendly territory. That was certainly the case in the Persian Gulf, and it seems to be the case in the Adriatic. In the future, however, it seems likely that many of the crises in which Britain may want to intervene will occur far beyond range of available land bases. In that case, any reliance on shore-based Royal Air Force aircraft will be impossible
It would seem that the jointness argument requires some effort on the part of the Royal Air Force to make its assets more applicable to the most likely British scenario, an attempt to project power to a great distance. That might, for example, make the projected supersonic advanced STOVL (ASTOVL) fighter, being developed jointly with the United States, more attractive than the Eurofighter—formerly the European Fighter Aircraft (EFA) now probably about to enter production—since ASTOVL aircraft could fly from the British carriers.
The U.S. Navy certainly has far more carrier-based assets than the British, so at first blush the British example may seem irrelevant. For decades, however, U.S. budgeteers have refused
to buy forces sufficient to maintain the front-line carriers in the face of operational attrition. That made sense only if carrier • combat was unlikely to be sustained (e.g., if wars were very short because they soon escalated to atomic threats or to atomic attacks). In the case of Vietnam, sustained air combat was possible because only a fraction of the overall naval air force was engaged, so replacements could come from elsewhere within the naval air arm.
What happens now? The basis of the “bottom-up review was the ability to deal with two near-simultaneous major re- . gional contingencies—regional wars like the one in the Gulf- The hidden assumption was that neither would be very sustained, or so costly as to cripple any U.S. response to a third breaking out shortly thereafter. The success in the Gulf seemed to prove that was reasonable. But in fact the war in the Gulf was a very special case. Casualties were low and the war was very short because the Coalition forces were able quickly t° disable the Iraqi air defense system and because targets were relatively easy to find and then to destroy.
The two-regional contingency standard misses some of the most salient points of the post-Cold War world. First, crises in various parts of the world are unlikely to be correlated, since 1 they do not arise out of connections to a single central enemy entity, the old Soviet Union. Far more likely is the possibility that the United States will face numerous relatively small P0' tential crises; to avoid an endless series of crippling fights, the United States may be required to forward-deploy forces in many places nearly simultaneously. Presence is a very different prop0' sition from a major regional contingency. It requires that capable forces be maintained in a distant area over a very long period of time. If presence is threatening enough, it may Pre" elude the threat from escalating to a contingency.
One of these contingencies may not look quite like the war in the Gulf. A sustained air campaign against a competent enemy would probably be very costly in terms of aircraft. As airplanes become more expensive, we cannot buy very many each year- That need not cripple us: airplane lives are now quite long, often comparable to ship lives. If a fighter, for example, lasts 25 years, then buying 50 per year may sustain a force of 1,250. If, how- l ever, the same airplane lasts about a year in combat, the drawdown can be quite drastic. During World War II, the answer was to buy many more fighters than were needed to fill out operational units, and to maintain a reserve squadron or two for each squadron in combat, rotating them every six months.
Jointness and the British concept suggest some alternative , possibilities. We are losing most of our forward bases, so the , Army and Air Force are providing less presence abroad—and t ie burden is falling on a smaller fleet. Experience in the 1970s showed that the long deployments associated with the reduced fleet make for very poor retention, so there is now a public promise that no ship will be abroad for more than six months at a time. Since the voyages to and from the forward area may ta e a month or more, ships may not spend more than three or tour months actually deployed, and it may well prove difficult to maintain this sort of operational tempo. Unfortunately, the ongest voyages are associated with the two hottest spots (hence with the greatest need for presence), the Persian/Arabian Gulf and the Korean Peninsula.
The British seem to be saying that as the role of ground- based forces diminishes, for now and for the near future, at least some of those forces may best be used to back up the limited naval forces on which greater burdens are now failing. The GR.7s provide ground-support capability to supplement the Sea Harriers, but they also figure as partial back-ups against Sea Harrier losses (albeit with much less capability in air-to-air and naval combat). Could U.S. Air Force units similarly reduce the presence burden for naval forces? They might—if they flew carrier-capable aircraft.