By John F. Schmitt
Saturday, April 02, 2022
The defining feature of the development of U.S.
military policy is the tension that exists between the lessons of history and
the promises of technology, a contest between those who see the past as
prologue and those who view it as irrelevant. For centuries, history was
considered the only laboratory of warfare. One studied history to glean
insights about the nature and conduct of war. To be sure, there have been
technological advances through the ages, and some of them have brought dramatic
changes to the battlefield, but they were always understood within the
continuum of history. It is only within the last 70 years that we have seen the
growing belief that technology has the power to make everything that came
before obsolete. Among the armed services, that creed is strongest in the Navy
and Air Force, although it is also present in the Army.
This is more than simply an argument over which weapons
to buy. It goes to the heart of competing views about the nature of war. For
decades, the Marines stood resolutely against the techno-centric view, and it
is fortunate for the nation that they did. The technophiles have consistently
touted one emerging technology after another as the thing guaranteed to
revolutionize warfare, especially since the turn of the millennium. Yet they
never seem to deliver the revolutionary impact expected. The latest technology
elixir — guaranteed to change everything, we are told — is the combination of
unmanned systems, precision-guided munitions, and artificial intelligence. The
vision is of warfare facilitated by near-perfect information and waged
clinically at long range by keyboard and mouse.
The Marine Corps view, however, has always been more
visceral. They expected war to be brutal, dirty, chaotic, bloody, often at
close range — and deeply human. Had they not, they could not have prevailed in
hellish places such as Belleau Wood, Iwo Jima, Hue City, or Fallujah.
But, apparently, no longer. Marine Corps leadership
anticipates a war with China in the Western Pacific. With Force Design
2030, a force-planning document published in March 2020, the Marine Corps
seems to have adopted the techno-centric view of push-button warfare at long
range. The foundation of that view is a belief in the invincibility of the
Chinese anti-access capability, a network of advanced sensors and lethal
precision weapons supposedly able to detect and kill anything that moves.
Faced with that obstacle, the Marines will not even try
to fight their way into the theater. Rather, they will deploy small detachments
on islands, in the East and South China Seas, already within the Chinese
anti-access envelope before the conflict starts — tying up combat forces
indefinitely and putting the United States at the mercy of regional partners
who will come under intense economic pressure from China to deny U.S. basing
rights. Armed with missiles the Marines do not yet possess — but the Army does,
in abundance — these isolated detachments are expected to engage the Chinese
anti-access barrier from the inside out. They also are expected to remain,
somehow, undetected and survivable in the process, while also being largely self-sustaining.
To foot the bill for this new vision, the Marine Corps has already eliminated
all its tanks and plans to cut its cannon artillery batteries by 76 percent,
reduce the number of Marines serving in infantry battalions by 41 percent, and
decrease its aviation by roughly a third.
The Marine Corps leadership clearly believes in the power
of new weaponry but fails to appreciate the dynamic of war whereby every
innovation inspires a countermeasure — and that countermeasure then inspires a
counter-countermeasure, in a cycle of continuous coevolution. The result is
that neither side gains the decisive advantage it sought but warfare becomes
more complicated for both, as the innovation and its countermeasures must now
be integrated with all the other battlefield activities.
These countermeasures may themselves be technological, or
they may be tactics developed in response to a specific operational challenge.
One such tactic is combined arms, a foundational concept that the technophiles
do not seem to appreciate. Combined arms is the employment of two or more arms
together in complementary ways. This allows each arm to exploit the strengths
and protect the weaknesses of the others with which it is combined. The three
main components of combined arms are infantry, tanks, and artillery, to which
the Marine Corps adds aviation and other capabilities.
By eliminating tanks and gutting infantry, artillery, and
aviation, Force Design 2030 severely degrades the Marine
Corps’s ability to conduct combined-arms warfare.
The Chinese anti-access barrier is formidable, without a
doubt, but to assume it cannot be overcome is defeatist. U.S. forces will
develop tactics to defeat the anti-access system, just as they developed the
tactics necessary to seize fortified islands in the Pacific in the Second World
War, penetrate integrated air defense systems (IADS) in the 1980s, and counter
networked Islamist insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Technology will march on, but — for many reasons, but not
least as a counterbalance to unbridled faith in the latest gadget — the nation
desperately needs somebody to approach war as the Marines traditionally have.
That is, the nation needs somebody to see war for what it is — brutal, bloody,
dirty, and chaotic — rather than for what we would like it to be.
The Marines should kill Force Design 2030 and
return to what the nation needs them to be — a combined-arms force in
readiness, primed for any fight.
No comments:
Post a Comment