GIVEN THAT NO PRESIDENT COULD AFFORD THE CASUALTIES CONVENTIONAL WAR MIGHT INFLICT...:

Air-Sea Battle: Our defense intellectuals, seeking a new Big Idea, need to seek farther. (Jim Lacey, 12/14/11, National Review)

For the Air Force and Navy, Gates's request was massive. As far as they were concerned, the Army and Marine Corps had been allowed to play the "We're fighting two wars" card for too long. It was just too hard to claim a bigger portion of the budget when you had to justify taking it from the guys actually doing most of the fighting. To make sure they were not the big losers in any future budget cuts, the Air Force and Navy needed a big idea -- a concept or strategy that would place them at the center of any future military effort. Gates's request was the answer to their dreams. Almost immediately the two services (along with the Marines) established the Air-Sea Battle Office (ASBO), to start coming up with new war-fighting concepts that would catch the imagination of Congress for the next ten or twenty budget cycles. They did not even invite the Army to send a representative to the meeting.

In truth, the Air-Sea Battle concept addresses a very real problem: How does the U.S. military operate in a world where many potential foes can afford missiles and other weapons that could deny it entry to or use of an area. Problems arose, however, when this search for a technical fix to a tactical problem began to morph into a strategy, one that was widely perceived as being aimed at containing or if necessary militarily defeating China. As China is the one country that can afford a substantial amount of "area-denial" weapons, it was only natural that the planners should first consider how they would match the strongest potential force they may one day have to face. Unfortunately, a lot of the early commentary on Air-Sea Battle made it look like a modern redo of the pre-World War II Plan Orange, which envisioned the Pacific Fleet rushing headlong across the ocean to destroy the Japanese Imperial Navy. Only this time around, Japan was replaced by China as the enemy of choice.

Of course, given today's political concerns and current diplomatic niceties, having the Pentagon work on plans for how to defeat China was beyond the pale. So, for the past several months, the Department of Defense has been busily walking back the idea that Air-Sea Battle is a "strategy" aimed at militarily defeating China. Rather, it is once again firmly in the "concepts" corral, where it is available to assist U.S. military commanders in any region where they might encounter an enemy with substantial "anti-access" or "area-denial" capabilities. To make sure it stays corralled, the Joint Staff last week issued the Joint Operational Access Concept (JOAC), which subsumes Air-Sea Battle into a larger war-fighting context applicable anywhere in the world.

As far as "joint operational concepts" go, this one is as good as any. It even has something to cheer up all those defense intellectuals who were concerned that our political phobia about saying anything that might annoy China might stop them from publishing a tome on Air-Sea Battle. You see, according to the JOAC, the only way to defeat the anti-access threat is through "cross-domain synergy." What is that? In short, it appears to mean combining every available resource so as to create a lot more bang for the buck (1 + 1 + 1 = 24). Of course no one, least of all the military, will know what the heck it truly means until the defense intellectuals have finished explaining it to us, an endeavor sure to wipe out at least one more forest.

So what is wrong with the new concept? Plenty. Although this is a "joint" concept and therefore supposed to include all the services, the Army still seems to be odd man out.

...and that the American people would broadly support nuking the PRC, all such planning is really just based around procurement budgets.

Posted by Orrin Judd at December 17, 2011 4:24 PM
Tweet   

Follow @brothersjudd