Parallel War: Promise & Problems

Air power like that applied in Desert Storm can reduce an industrialized state’s war­making capability rapidly, but it may be less useful in the more likely irregular-war­fare scenarios. These captured U.N. peace­keepers—used as human shields by the Bosnian Serbs—quickly upped the ante for using NATO air power.

Something happened in Desert Storm that never has been witnessed before. Air power—in thousands and thousands of Coalition sorties—appeared to have de­feated an enemy. Advocates of air power earnestly want others to accept what they believe Desert Storm proved: that air power can be or is dominant and decisive.

That want may be a weakness. Parallel war and hyperwar, principally as they apply to air campaigns, may have only limited utility in the emerging world.

What Is Parallel War?¹

The idea of parallel war arises from an understanding of the enemy as a system or organism with five key or­ganic components: (1) fielded military forces at the pe­riphery, (2) the masses of people who are not direct com­batants, (3) a transportation infrastructure providing or­ganic essentials, (4) the organic essentials themselves, and, residing at the center, (5) leadership or a controlling mech­anism for the entire system. Information is the “bolt” that holds the rings together. Advocates refer to these orbits or concentric rings as the five rings.² Like a fractal, each of the rings also has each of the five components within it. For example, the fielded forces have within them leadership or some internal controlling mechanism.

In this taxonomy, the entire system—and each ring has within it key centers of gravity. Leadership, the con­trolling mechanism, is the key node in each ring and throughout. The theory of parallel warfare holds that si­multaneous and coordinated operations against all the key nodes in the system and in each of the rings are the essence of a new kind of offensive military campaign—and air is the superior medium for prosecuting these operations. It is air power, the theorists argue, that allows attacks against internal rings and all the other rings without first collapsing the outer ones.³ (In contrast, serial warfare engages each ring and its categories of targets in turn, moving from the periphery inward.⁴)

The object of parallel war is to destroy or damage (or render dysfunctional) those targets that produce a strate­gic effect by causing loss of the enemy system’s organic capabilities. When these attacks occur with simultaneity or great speed, hyperwar results.

Parallel war and hyperwar aim at the sudden and si­multaneous reduction of the enemy system’s overall “en­ergy level,” so that the organic system goes into shock. The simultaneous engagement of centers of gravity pre­vents recovery because the energy available to the system is inadequate to restore it to full functioning.⁵ Thus, at­tacks must occur not only in parallel but also with hyper speed. Because ground forces cannot do this, because afloat forces cannot do this (except through their air power), air forces are the forces best suited for employing parallel war at hyperwar tempo. Or so the theory goes.

What Is New Here?

Military forces since Clausewitz have been enjoined to identify and engage the “center of gravity” of an enemy’s military capability. Simultaneous and integrated attacks long have been the goal of combined arms. At­tacks on the leader and leadership are not new goals of warfare. Nor is it novel that such a campaign theory would be advanced by air power advocates. Guilio Douhet, Billy Mitchell, and the faculty of the Air Corps Tactical School all promised the same thing: air power is or will be deci­sive. But we cannot ignore that the United States Strate­gic Bombing Survey and The Gulf War Air Power Sur­vey both show that some of the undertakings of air power fell short of this vision.⁶

Nor should we ignore the fact that parallel warfare, as distinguishable from serial warfare, is not a new strate­gic conception. As early as 1951, Captain (later Rear Ad­miral) J. C. Wylie asserted that there were two types of strategy: sequential and cumulative. He later wrote:

[TJhere are actually two very different kinds of strate­gies that may be used in war. One is the sequential, the series of visible, discrete steps, each dependent on the one that preceded it. The other is the cumulative, the less perceptible minute accumulation of little items pil­ing one on top of the other until at some unknown point the mass of accumulated actions may be large enough to be critical.⁷

In addition, the architects of the nuclear attack Single Integrated Operations Plan (SIOP) promoted and planned for instant cumulative war—or parallel war and hyper­war—long before current theorists articulated the five rings. They sought to strike decisive points, to checkmate enemy leadership, to execute simultaneously and with hyper speed, to drive down enemy “energy levels” dra­matically, to impose shock and paralysis on the enemy system, and to eliminate enemy post-attack recovery ca­pability.⁸ SIOP nuclear weapons were allocated against target sets in the former Soviet system characterized as “leadership,” “nuclear force,” “economic and industrial” (organic essentials and logistics infrastructure), and “other military” (other fielded forces).⁹ There is scant differ­ence between this targeting logic and that of the five-rings approach, save for the important distinction that one em­ployed nuclear weapons effects and the other did not, but might have.

Strengths and Shortcomings

The strength of cumulative strategies, both the SIOP and parallel war, is that they promise to reduce the war­making capacity of an industrialized enemy state more rapidly. The air campaign in Desert Storm demonstrated that the combat power of Iraq or a state like Iraq can be reduced by apparently simultaneous and coherent attacks against important targets. The SIOP, had it been executed, likely also would have proved the point against a more robust war-fighting system.

A cumulative strategy promises to be effective against any enemy, but a minor difficulty with the five-rings model is that it is ill-equipped to cope with organisms that are not industrialized or industrializing state systems. A ter­rorist or insurgent organization is a “system” that has sep­arate component parts, and theoretically it is possible to differentiate among them, but it is not always easy actu­ally to identify or to isolate these parts. As physical enti­ties, the component parts or five rings of these organiza­tions are exceedingly difficult for the air campaign planner to target. Thus, the model holds, but it becomes exquis­itely irrelevant for these types of organizations and for counterterrorism warfare and counterinsurgency warfare.

Air power cannot make the decisive and dominant con­tribution to these kinds of fights. The situation in the former Yugoslavia, the ill-starred intervention in Soma­lia, and our impotence in Rwanda are only the more re­cent examples of the limits of air power. Air power, it would seem, works best in massive doses applied against the strength of industrial or industrializing states, uni­formed armed forces, and identifiable leaders. If, as John Keegan, Carl Builder, Martin van Creveld, and others sug­gest, conventional war between industrial states is the less likely warfare form for the future, the five-rings model becomes illogical or at least impractical.¹⁰

Nontrinitarian warfare is only one of the challenges with which the theory cannot contend. Some of the character­istics of warfare on the eve of the “Third Wave” also con­found the theory: demassification, diversity, and ninjitsu.

Demassification is the fractioning of large conventional targets into smaller ones. For example, mainframe com­puters are an attractive and easy-to-target set of nodes. Distributed laptops are less attractive because they are more numerous, mobile, harder to locate, and harder to target. Information technology liberates leadership and leadership command centers from the requirement to re­side in fixed locations. It is not inconceivable that the lead­ers of warfare operations in the future will command these operations from their domiciles, from nonbelligerent states, or from offshore. As hierarchies yield to networks, lead­ership too will become demassified.

Miniaturization combines with demassification to com­plicate the challenge. A satellite dish receiver that mea­sures three to five meters in diameter is an easy target for precision-guided or area weapons. A satellite receiver that measures one-half meter in diameter is a more difficult target to strike, especially if thousands are employed in a distributed network. The model may be valid, but the targeting challenge is such that it has little utility.

Dual-use technologies and facilities also confound the five-rings campaign planner. Fermentation chambers, for example, are essential components of a system that brews beer. These same fermenters also are essential for the pro­duction of biological weapons. Dual-use systems do not fit easily into the targeting template. Information tech­nology is ubiquitous, and much of it serves multiple constituencies. The Global Positioning System (GPS) would be a lucrative target, but the constellation of these satellites is demassified and distributed. In addition, GPS users are both military and civilian. Thus, the consequences of attacking GPS must be borne by friendly forces, enemy forces, and neutrals.

Demassification, miniaturization, and dual-use also make ninjitsu—the “art of invisibility”—possible. By distribut­ing important elements of a system, reducing them dra­matically in size, and embedding them in other things (re­ligious facilities, civilian hospitals, university research centers), an enemy can make these elements effectively invisible to the campaign planner.

There are at least seven additional minor problems:

• The attacks may not actually occur simultaneously. The simultaneous attacks cele­brated by the five-rings theorists during the Gulf War actually oc­curred sequentially and over time. The opening salvos of the Desert Storm air campaign were directed—as air doctrine asserts they must be for air power to be effective—against the enemy air defense system." Sea-launched Tomahawk cruise mis­siles and Army Apache heli­copters were part of this first wave of air power attacks for air power’s benefit. How quickly other targets in the series fol­lowed becomes less relevant to the theory. A compressed serial attack is still serial warfare, even if it creates the appearance and the effect of simultaneity.
• The current model strives for the decisive battle. Because the five-rings model for air cam­paign planning asserts that the consequence of its attacks will he paralysis of the enemy sys­tem, it in effect asserts that the Napoleonic and Clausewitzian “decisive battle” is its aim. It seeks to annihilate enemy capa­bility.¹² If this aim is not achieved, then the fault must re­side, not in the air campaign, but somewhere else. Dogmatic ad­herence to the air campaign plan list of priority targets is necessary to “prove” the theory. If sorties have to be reapportioned because of some ground emergency, then the dogma has been violated and, of course, the opportunity to win a decisive battle may have been lost. Where the targeting list is followed religiously, failure to achieve a decisive battle can be attributed to in­adequate intelligence, to bad weather, or to an adaptive enemy.
• It neglects evolution in the attacked organism or sys­tem. Organisms are autopoietic; they will struggle to pre­serve themselves.¹³ If attacked, they will respond and adapt. An air campaign plan that specifies a series of parallel at­tacks in advance is designed against the initial organism, not the evolved one. It may adapt poorly to an organism that evolves in unexpected ways. Air power advocates ar­gued that the Iraqi Scuds were not militarily signifi­cant.¹⁴ Had they not been actively pursued and engaged, the missiles might have rent the Gulf War Coalition.
• It pays insufficient attention to war termination issues. The posited aim of the air campaign is strategic paraly­sis, with the expectation that this must somehow equate to surrender. The reality is somewhat different. Wars end because the losers sense that there is something they value more than the object of the war and that continu­ing the war imperils this more valuable preference set.¹⁵ The five-rings model attacks everything but population centers, perhaps encouraging the enemy to fight to the death. Even simple attacks can then have un­intended consequences. Attacks against communications de­signed to separate leadership from fielded forces, for example, also may deprive leadership of feedback regarding damage to the organism. Thus, the organ­ism may neither realize its paral­ysis nor behave as a paralytic. Certainly, if attacks annihilate a large part of the enemy’s capa­bility, defeat in detail is then possible—whether the enemy fights on or not—but only if public opinion on the winning side supports the bloodletting required.
• It ignores the challenges posed by the post-attack damage as­sessment architecture, the air tasking order (ATO) system, and the reality of combined-arms op­erations. Prewar intelligence, effective damage assessment, and close coordination are all re­quired to make the ATO system function effectively. The ATO takes a long time to produce. This fact alone ensures that it di­rects attacks against an organism that no longer exists. If damage assessment is imperfect, the problems are compounded.

We tight with combined arms and depend on their in­teraction, their combined effects, to defeat the enemy’s strategy. An enemy facing a 400,000-person allied army on its border will behave differently than one only fac­ing air attacks, no matter how great the pounding to which air subjects that enemy. It is short-sighted to resign forces in other media to the null set when attempting to use a fight with a third-rate opponent to illustrate or prove a theory. Air power—Army, Navy, Marine Corps, Air Force, and Coalition—was powerful in Desert Storm. But was it powerful because Iraq was so inferior? Was it pow­erful alone, or because of the well-armed, well-trained, hot-blooded human beings who were poised to take the fight to Baghdad on land and from the sea? Would not true parallel war have brought the interactive power of land warfare and amphibious assault to bear on Iraq even as the air campaign unfolded? Our fear of casualties may be leading us away from sound strategy.¹⁶ y The assertion that “information is the bolt that holds the rings together” seems to give the lie to the entire theory. If information is the bolt, then it is the decisive center of gravity and we should aim all our attacks at in­formation. But unlike power-production facilities, roads and rails, airfields, missile production installations, and government buildings, information is difficult to target.

• In the world that is emerging, there may be little room for this type of air campaign. Wars occur within a much broader context than the battlespace. Will the strategic context of the future—the social, political, economic, and military gamut of goals, interests, and behaviors—toler­ate the kind of Desert Storm air campaign advocated? Pre­paredness to execute the SIOP, for example, cost the United States trillions of dollars. Preparedness to execute a Desert Storm-type air campaign against any but smaller and weaker states might require an equivalent investment. Would such warfare even work against a large country?

Defeating Parallel War

Perhaps the more valuable contribution the five-rings model makes to the study of warfare is that it elucidates how to falsify or defeat the theory. There are at least five ways.

• Disguise, diversify, and demassify the system. To defeat parallel war even before it commences, a wise adversary will strive to disguise, diversify, and demassify key ele­ments of the system so that total war is necessary. Such a cunning adversary will have mobile systems wherever possible. Where mobility is not possible, he will embed military activities in civilian ones. An adversary might build tanks in automobile factories or ballistic missiles in refrigerator factories, might commingle military and civilian transport, and could build military garrisons in populous areas. Dual-use systems—telecommunications media, fiber optic, di­rect broadcast and very small aperture satel­lites—will be used for administrative military communications. The adversary also would be wise to move from mil­itary leadership hierar­chies to military lead­ership networks. Where possible, the enemy will put foreign contractors in all militarily signifi­cant facilities. He will encourage tourism and foreign investment. The objective is to up the ante for the attacker by forcing war among the innocents and against the investors.
• Acquire weapons of mass destruction on mobile systems. Wea­pons of mass destruc­tion so raise the risks and consequences of an attack that mere pos­session of these weapons and mobile delivery systems may impose prewar paralysis on the attacker. To defeat paral­lel war, the adversary will distribute weapons of mass de­struction among the innocents.
• Where immobile, be invisible. One of the best ways to create invisibility is to go underground; the deeper, the better. Lateral is better than merely vertical. A cunning adversary will realize that the key node in the underground facility also should reside beneath a civilian facility. Schools, orphanages, and “baby milk” factories have high utility for these kinds of basements. That which cannot be identified, cannot be targeted.
• When attacked, mutate. Defeating parallel war also re­quires planning how the organism will adapt, transform, and recover if attacked. Especially cunning adversaries will choose an asymmetrical and unpredictable response. If, for example, electrical power production comes under attack, the adversary might respond by shutting down all visible electrical power. This unexpected mutation makes damage assessment difficult. The air campaign planner may cope with this difficulty by forcing an extensive search for corroboration that attacks have achieved re­quired damage expectancies, may fall into the trap of wish­ful thinking and reallocate sorties to other roles, or may continue to adhere to the installation- or target-driven air campaign plan. Another useful mutation might be to with­draw uniformed fielded forces and employ terrorists or special operations forces in the attacker’s homeland.
• Attack information. If information is the bolt that holds the five rings together, an adversary will realize that at­tacks should begin in the pre-hostility phase. The object of these preliminary attacks will be to paralyze or destroy a target set called “any public opinion that does not support my aims.” Combining propaganda with more active mea­sures, such as terrorism, may prevent a weak-willed at­tacker from taking the offensive. (On the other hand, it might stimulate an uncharacteristically ferocious response.) Failing the success of propaganda and anticipating an at­tack, an adversary could resort to information sabotage. ‘For example, the most sophisticated system, such as that of the United States, could be totally disrupted by the pro­jection of a suitable virus that would automatically find their [sic] way back into the computers on which the systems are dependent.”¹⁷

It is only a matter of technique and time before these countermeasures to parallel war are employed. What are the counter-countermeasures? There may be none, although information technology may provide the homeopathy of future warfare.¹⁸ Even so, the quest for a revolution in mil­itary affairs searches for them.

Conclusion

A problem with contemporary air campaign theories may be their progressive detachment from the realities of warfare. The new theories seem to be less about war­fare than they are about the ways in which some believe battlespace ought to be apportioned and resources allo­cated. Warfare is about human beings, human aspirations, and human passions. No one should thoughtfully relegate the study of warfare to the investigation of sterile tech­nology and the targets that reside in precisely defined sys­tems or rings. Warfare between humans is a hot thing. It is more about blood, fear, surprise, and friction than it is about technology.

Air power in this current formulation seems to have be­come the power of detached, dispassionate technology.¹⁹ The science of the parallel war theorists is cold, deter­ministic, and—from the perspective of those who value jointness or integration—misapplied. “If this, then that is a supposition that warfare rarely substantiates. The hubris of contemporary air power theorists may be that they so badly want air power to be dominant or decisive that they have made the Desert Storm air campaign the mechanistic template for all future wars. This want is a Potentially dangerous weakness. Air power still lacks a theory. Even so, one must applaud those who search for one, even while cautioning them that they may not have found one yet.

1 The characteristics of parallel war and the air campaign primarily are those pro­vided by Colonel John A. Warden III, the principal architect of the Desert Storm air campaign. Like Colonel John R. Boyd before him, most of Warden s brilliant exposition of parallel air warfare is in the oral tradition: briefings and briefing slides. Where primary written works are available, they are cited.

2 John A. Warden III, “Air Theory for the Twenty-first Century,” in Challenge and Response: Anticipating U.S. Military Security Concerns, ed„ Karl P. Magyar (Maxwell AFB AL: Air University Press, 1994), pp. 311-318.

3 Warden, “Air Theory," pp. 326-331. See also John A. Warden III, “Employing Air Power in the Twenty-first Century,” in The Future of Air Power in the After­math of the Gulf War, eds., Richard H, Schultz, Jr., and Robert L. Pfaltzgraff. Jr. (Maxwell AFB AL: Air University Press, 1992), pp. 64-69; and John A. Warden III, “The Enemy as a System,” Airpower Journal, vol. IX, no. 1 (Spring 1995) pp. 40-55..      ’

4 John R. Pardo, Jr„ “Parallel Warfare: Its Nature and Application,” in Challenge and Response: Anticipating U.S. Military Security Concerns, ed„ Karl P. Magyar (Maxwell AFB AL: Air University Press, 1994), pp. 277-296.

5 John Warden uses the example of 150 tornadoes simultaneously striking the United States. Such a large number of tornadoes hitting at the same time would make re­covery difficult, because recovery resources could not be shared easily.

6 The United States Strategic Bombing Survey, Summary Report (European War), 1945, reprinted in The United States Strategic Bombing Surveys (European War) (Pacific War) (Maxwell AFB AL: Air University Press, 1987); and Thomas A. Kearney and Eliot A. Cohen, Gulf War Air Power Survey, Summary Report (Wash­ington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1993). The bomber does not “always get through (sometimes bombers have difficulty getting through the budget process) nor are precision weapons of much use unless supported by precise pre-strike in­formation on the target and post-strike damage to it.

7 J. C. Wylie, Military Strategy: A General Theory of Power Control, (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1967), p. 26. Italics added. Wylie in­troduced the differentiations of sequential and cumulative in “Reflections on the War in the Pacific,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, April 1952, pp. 351-361. See also J. C. Wylie, Military Strategy: A General Theory of Power Control, in Classics of Sea Power (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1989), p. 101.

8 Ballistic missile attack options evidenced extraordinary coherence and simultaneity. Theoretically it was possible, for example, to time sea- and land-based ballistic missile launches so that all attacking warheads arrived at the first possible point of enemy radar detection simultaneously. Discussion with LGen. Jay W. Kelley, USAF, Commander of the Air University, 1 December 1994.

9 Desmond Ball, “Development of the SIOP, 1960-1983,” in Strategic Nuclear Tar­geting, eds., Desmond Ball and Jeffrey Richelson (Ithaca, NY: Cornell Univer­sity Press, 1986), pp. 80-81.

10 “John Keegan, A History of Warfare (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994); Mar­tin van Creveld, The Transformation of War (New York: The Free Press, 1991)- and Carl Builder, “Guns or Butter: The Twilight of a Tradeoff?” (May 1994), pre­sentation to the USAF Air University National Security Forum, Maxwell AFB AL. Used with permission.

11 The demassification and dehumanization of attack systems could make the sup­pression of enemy air defenses a much lower priority. A strength of the SIOP was the land- and sea-launched ballistic missiles that preceded attacks by manned aircraft. Cruise missiles and stealth become the analog of intercontinental ballis­tic missiles and were employed—as we would expect them to be if the SIOP and parallel warfare theories are the same—in advance of manned systems during Desert Storm.

12 Advocates argue that the objective is not annihilation but “control.” The possi­bility that control actually is secured by annihilating military capability should not be overlooked.

13 Erich Jantsch, The Self-Organizing Universe (Oxford: Pergamon, 1980), P. 7, quoted in Margaret J. Wheatley, Leadership and the New Science: Learning about Organization from an Orderly Universe (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 1992), p. 18.

14 Alexander S. Cochran, et al„ Gulf War Air Power Survey, Volume 1: Planning (Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1993), pp. 103-104.

15 Joseph A. Englebrecht, “War Termination: Why Does A State Decide to Stop Fighting?” (doctoral dissertation, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences Colum­bia University, 1992).

16 “DoD plans to increase investment in nonlethal technologies. Will our unwilling­ness to kill the enemy or employ friendly ground forces in mortal combat render the United States weak to the point of impotence?

17 V. K. Nair, War in the Gulf: Lessons for the Third World (New Delhi, India:Lancer International, 1991), p. 196.

18 Eventually, and embellished by technology to intrude into acoustic, tactile ol­factory, and visual space, information technology may be the antidote for all warfare. See Marshall and Eric McLuhan, Laws of Media: The New Science (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988); Gregory L. Ulmer, Heuretics: The Logic of Invention (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994); and Diane Chotikul, “The Soviet Theory of Reflexive Control in Historical and Psy­chocultural Perspective: A Preliminary Study,” Technical Report NPS55-86-013, Monterey, CA: Naval Postgraduate School, 1986.

19 A senior Air Force officer speaking to the Air War College under the promise of nonattribution asserted that “without technology, there is no Air Force.” Tech­nology is a tool, a means to an end. When it becomes an end in itself, it may serve itself instead of warfare.