The U.S. military currently has four de facto "sanctuaries" that create significant asymmetric advantages over any opponent. As demonstrated during Operation Iraqi Freedom and elsewhere, U.S. forces can operate in the following realms with nearly total impunity:
* High altitudes. Dating from Operation Desert Storm, the U.S. military has operated freely at altitudes above 15,000 feet, notwithstanding several periods of intense combat and almost constant operations to enforce no-fly zones.
* High seas. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, the U.S. Navy's uncontested dominance at sea has ensured the access needed for a multitude of crises and conflicts.
* Long ranges. Regardless of limited access to land bases in any theater, long-range and sea-based aircraft operate without the same "mother, may I?" requirements of short-range aircraft.
* Cyberspace. U.S. staffs and field forces are becoming increasingly network-centric; they can rapidly move essential information in every major warfighting area.
Each operational sanctuary is a key element of what can be termed access-insensitive capabilities. They help the United States counter the political, geographic, and military challenges to unimpeded worldwide military access that were identified in the 2001 Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR). In addition, the Department of Defense (DoD) faces two interconnected problems: how to protect these sanctuaries and how to expand them to further constrain the operating areas of potential adversaries. While these problems are not foreign to defense decision makers, they normally are not conceived in this fashion.
Each U.S. sanctuary faces possible dangers that ongoing programs seek to counter. For example, increased application of stealth technology to combat aircraft will lessen the effect of large-scale employment of surface-to-air missiles (SAMs), such as the SA-10. And defense planners strive constantly to protect critical information networks from cyber intrusions and attacks. Thus, although the requirement to protect sanctuaries is part of current DoD plans, their expansion should merit equal billing in future plans.
In the air, extending the high-altitude sanctuary could mean lowering safe operating altitudes by suppressing (if not destroying) the many air defense systems that can engage aircraft at lower altitudes. Perhaps more acquisition funds should be devoted to infrared countermeasures to handheld SAMs.
At sea, the drive might be to expand sea basing to reduce footprints ashore. It could highlight the need for more littoral warfare capabilities to deny our opponents access to the sea. Critical to these tasks would be increased application of stealth technology to Navy surface ships.
The importance of mine warfare was underscored again in Operation Iraqi Freedom, when a few sea mines delayed use of Umm Qasr for days. The U.S. and U.K. naval forces went on to neutralize enemy mines and prevent various Iraqi elements from further mine laying. Nonetheless, a more aggressive effort to procure and deploy new mine warfare systems would deny future adversaries the option to lay mines and thereby strengthen our ability to use the sea as an operational sanctuary.
In many cases, capabilities offered by these four sanctuaries overlap and highlight opportunities. Consider the possibility of exploiting all four of them in one concept: a long-range, high-altitude, unmanned aerial vehicle with long loiter time that operates from aircraft carriers and carries ordnance for on-call, short-notice strikes against time-sensitive targets.
In addition to the four sanctuaries emphasized here, others demand the attention of defense planners:
* The 2001 QDR identified the U.S. homeland as a key area that requires protection.
* Outer space is a critical operating sanctuary, as is the undersea world.
* The electromagnetic spectrum-and our dominance of it-might qualify as well.
The U.S. armed forces must retain and expand the decided advantage of operating with near impunity from established sanctuaries. At the same time, they must aggressively search out and establish new sanctuaries to expand asymmetric advantages over potential adversaries.
Mr. Siegel is a senior analyst at (he Northrop Grumman Analysis Center in Rosslyn, Virginia.