The Air Sea Battle (ASB) debate continues to simmer in a variety of forums. Over at the National Interest Sean Miski expounds on his theory of how a war with China might be won via blockading. Young Marine officers challenge the need for the concept at the U.S. Naval Institute’s blog. RAND has issued an interesting counter that emphasizes “far blockades” with land-based anti-ship missiles. Our friends at the Small Wars Journal have recently posted an interview with an ASB proponent, Elbridge Colby of the Center for Naval Analyses. I recently attended a lively debate between Mr. Colby and Dr. T.X. Hammes of the National Defense University, a critic of ASB. Both sides gave as good as they got.
I would like to frame the debate with a few propositions that I’d like to throw into the soup kettle of the conceptual “pottage” surrounding this issue. I think these have particular relevance for the Quadrennial Defense Review, which is wrapping up this month. Hopefully, these details will also be relevant to the National Defense Panel, which has the responsibility of taking an independent view of our security posture and defense budget. These points may also be relevant to members of Congress who will have to allocate increasingly scarce resources to competing demands.
- Air Sea Battle is designed to address a valid, well-defined and real operational challenge with huge strategic implications. Like most concepts, it will be tested and refined over time.
- Air Sea Battle, if successful in creating the requisite operational capabilities, will be a necessary precondition for sustained U.S. forward presence and expeditionary power projection where advanced anti-access networks exist. Conversely, if ASB does not gain adequate traction and advance our capabilities, U.S. influence and ability to maintain our presence will be reduced in Asia, or perhaps in the Persian Gulf. For this reason, the Joint community—especially the Army and the Marine Corps—should support the Air Sea Battle concept. More specifically, they should support development of cost-effective solutions to reducing adversary anti-access challenges. Policymakers should explore how tactical aviation and strike elements of iterations of the concept contribute to this end.
- ASB is not a strategy nor was it designed to be an uber solution to all of our pending operational challenges. The perceived primacy in U.S. defense policy is related to its formal tasking in the 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review, as well as the obvious risk posed to U.S. interests and allies in critical regions. That tasking was made to ensure that two departments—the Navy and Air Force—were officially required to integrate their efforts to achieve necessary cross-domain synergies. It should not be misinterpreted as simply a reflexive embrace of technology-centric solutions or the reincarnation of dubious ideas like “shock and awe.”
- ASB is largely relevant to the regional anti-access problem of the often-conflated anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) challenge. These should be disaggregated. Anti-access generally covers adversary capabilities to keep us out of their region or country, while area denial strategies seek to accelerate attrition and deny freedom of action within one’s defensive area. Oversimplified, anti-ship ballistic and cruise missiles are A2 threats, while guided rocket attacks on lodgments, chemical shells, and explosively formed projectiles would be examples of AD threats. While it has conducted a guerrilla campaign against ASB, the ground community has been largely deficient in coming to grips with the other half of the operational challenge—the area denial solution. In the last two conflicts, it took concerted efforts by a secretary of defense and a major new organization to enhance our maneuver forces while they were taking substantial losses in contact. That problem has not gone away, but the land power community flails on legacy programs like the Ground Combat Vehicle and the Marine amphibious tractor quest now titled the Amphibious Combat Vehicle. Rather than snipe at ASB, the ground forces should be clamoring for capabilities they require to overcome AD threats and exploit freedom of maneuver in contested areas. These capabilities will have increased relevance across the spectrum of conflict in the coming years.
- ASB can be best thought of as an operational concept for force development, including power projection, tactical aviation, ISR, cyber, and defensive technologies. Many of these capabilities represent technological developments that would be pursued less efficiently and with less success in the absence of a concerted effort by the Pentagon to solve. ASB also includes the development of capabilities that would be very desirable in support of alternative constructs including Offshore Control (OSC) or in more defensive concepts like the Hedgehog concept, developed by the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments.
- There are many capabilities associated with ASB that will be applicable across the conflict spectrum, and there are other capabilities associated with OSC that might be equally useful in both (i.e., attack submarines). In the forthcoming Quadrennial Defense Review, the investments needed to overcome the access challenge will have to be balanced against potential investments required to exploit, access, and deny the enemy the ability to successfully counter our freedom of maneuver ashore. At present, the land power community has not made its own conceptual arguments for how it exploits access and what it requires to degrade or deflect an adversary’s AD capability. Thus, the Army and Marines will lose out in the 2014 Quadrennial Defense Review unless the policy community or Congress recognizes more holistic solutions to the larger problem.
- What is useful in the debate raised by OSC is a better use of history and an understanding of the opponent’s vulnerabilities. It also posits an alternative method that might help us prioritize investments during the coming era of austerity. We can’t insist on taking a rich man’s approach to every problem, and investments that contribute to both ASB and OSC—again particularly cyber tools and attack submarines—should be prioritized accordingly. We need to identify a sustainable competitive advantage, and invest in areas where we might be on the right side of the cost curve. We’re presently committing a “strategy sin” if we invest in an operational approach that burdens us with investments in areas where the Chinese could obtain parity (or easy low-cost counters) and where we are overspending potential opponents by one or two orders of magnitude.
In sum, we should be pursuing operational concepts like ASB, and exploiting opportunities as ruthlessly as possible. The A2 challenge is real and must be considered as part of an effort to degrade U.S. influence and access to critical regions. More indirect methods can also be explored as we test and refine concepts. We should ensure that our methods generate sustained competitive advantage against complex and advanced A2 threats, not merely perpetuate legacy investments in a new wine bottle.
In this QDR or the National Defense Panel, we should hear more from the Joint community on its efforts to explore solutions to the more likely and growing area denial threat. Wherever we deploy forces we will encounter the next generation of this insidious problem. The Joint Operational Access Concept is promising, but one hears little about how urgently or rigorously progress is being pursued. What’s the status on capability development there? Overlooking the AD problem, or assuming that ASB will solve this for the Army and Marines, is shortsighted and problematic. That’s a mistake that the QDR or National Defense Panel need to watch for. The A2/AD problem is a coin with two heads, and we can lose no matter which side turns up.
F. G. Hoffman is a national security analyst now serving as a Senior Research Fellow at the Center for Strategic Research at the National Defense University and a contributing editor at War on the Rocks. These comments are his own and do not reflect the policies of the Department of Defense.
Art Corbett 
Fully accepting Frank Hoffman’s argument that our current preoccupation with the new acronym A2AD requires a joint solution–such as JOAC, I would like to quibble with his assertions that ASB is the right forum. As a friend, frequent reader and admirer of his insights, I know he enjoys nothing more than a good joust, but I believe the current status of this particular debate requires more than platitudes to joint cooperation. His usual intellectual rigor is particularly needed now to place the crux issues of how to achieve a competitively advantaged joint force in proper context. ASB is not the right context.
First, I challenge him to find the ‘operational concept’ in ASB. The document’s self-declared ‘Central Idea’ is NIAD3–Networked Integrated Attack in Depth to Disrupt, Destroy and Defeat. No kidding–this list of trite platitudes is the core of the concept. Kind of like a Marine declaring his new operational concept is MSC “Move, Shoot and Communicate.” Under what conditions would a JFC not do the elementary actions of NIAD3 described as the ASB central idea?? This is only one of the many fundamental conceptual deficiencies that continue to make ASB so controversial. No one really knows what it is—surely it is more than the words on paper—or it wouldn’t be so often saluted by the thread merchants. Since it is so clearly not an operational concept as it purports, some speculate it represents a strategy. . . and so the controversy continues.
How do you market such drivel? Label the ‘concept’ secret until you have so many courtiers as naked as the emperor that NO ONE wants to mention the subtle fact that the ‘concept’ is an un-executable list of military aspirations. ASB is a vacuous concept designed to support a very real list of expensive acquisition priorities–and to give them trump in the JCIDs process. However, ASB does bring needed attention to the growing mismatch between enemy capacity and our capability that has resulted in a very brittle joint force.
Clearly our adversaries are developing long range and lethal capabilities in large numbers, but our anxiety about these capabilities results from the brittle nature of our current joint force. I would assert that the crux issue of A2AD is our self-generated brittleness. Our capabilities continue to exceed those of our adversaries, but we have placed far too many capabilities on far too few platforms. We now have a slender number of exquisite capabilities purchased at great cost. Consequently, we are risk adverse and fundamentally brittle. In contrast, our potential adversaries have taken our measure and are fielding a large number of comparatively cheaper and more resilient capabilities of adequate lethality in large numbers. The resulting capability / capacity mismatch leaves us disadvantaged and risk adverse. This brittleness and lack of resiliency at the service and joint level is the root cause of our discontent.
I know that Frank understands all this, but he has chosen to cast his very apt criticisms and insights in an ASB context. Kind of like trying to teach chess on a ouija board. A better Maginot Line won’t get us out of our fix—we need a fundamentally better joint campaign vice an ASB systems based approach.
Few are better prepared than Frank to help lead us out of the dilemma we have created for ourselves. However, ASB is another systems approach that will deepen our capabilities without expanding capacity unless we understand the crux issue at hand. ASB is a distraction, not a viable concept. Let’s put some genuinely conceptual clothes on the emperor and try again.
Art Corbett…Art Corbett…Art Corbett…where have I heard that name before? Oh yeah…I remember! Art Corbett, Lead, Marine and Naval Concepts Branch , Combat Development and Integration Division G-3/5 Marine Corps Combat Development Command (MCCDC)! I knew I had heard that name before.
So, one of the most influential men in the development of USMC Concepts at the USMC’s most influential concept development shop (MCCDC) decides to pass on Frank’s challenge:
“While it has conducted a guerrilla campaign against ASB, the ground community has been largely deficient in coming to grips with the other half of the operational challenge—the area denial solution. In the last two conflicts, it took concerted efforts by a secretary of defense and a major new organization to enhance our maneuver forces while they were taking substantial losses in contact. That problem has not gone away, but the land power community flails on legacy programs like the Ground Combat Vehicle and the Marine amphibious tractor quest now titled the Amphibious Combat Vehicle. Rather than snipe at ASB, the ground forces should be clamoring for capabilities they require to overcome AD threats and exploit freedom of maneuver in contested areas.”
Not only does Mr. Corbett fail to rise to Frank’s challenge or even address it, he appears to be passing up even the pretense of what Frank refers to as the “guerrilla campaign against ASB”, preferring instead to mount this fairly straightforward attack on it.
I have done more than my fair share of defending ASB against the likes of Mr.Corbett, yet they are like a tough weed and keep popping back up to repeat their straw man charges. Instead of doing that, I will instead point readers of this comment to a bit of work–a “Concept”–produced presumably under the leadership of Mr. Corbett and his team at MCCDC. I speak of course of the US Army/USMC “Concept for Gaining and Maintaining Access” (www.defenseinnovationmarketplace.mil/resources/Army%20Marine%20Corp%20Gaining%20and%20Maintaining%20Access.pdf), the land services’ 2012 “we too” document released to stake out territory within the JOAC and to bureaucratically assert themselves vis-a-vis the Navy, Air Force and ASB.
Please take the time and read this document. Read statements like:
“Recognizing that total domain dominance will rarely be obtainable, the joint force will fight for domain superiority, an advantage in time and place that need not be permanent or widespread, at critical times and places to achieve the degree of freedom of action required to accomplish objectives.” (GMA, p. 3)
“The U.S. Army and Marine Corps will contribute to the joint effort to gain and maintain operational access by entering hostile territory without benefit of domain dominance and by using littoral and ground maneuver to locate and defeat area-denial challenges.” (GMA, p. 7)
“U.S. Army and Marine Corps forces must be capable of conducting simultaneous force projection and sustainment of numerous maneuver units via multiple, distributed, austere and unexpected penetration points and landing zones in order to avoid established defenses, natural obstacles, and the presentation of a concentrated, lucrative target.” (GMA, p.7)
Ask yourself–does this kind of thinking strain credulity? Do the land forces of the U.S. really believe that they are going to operate along multiple lines inside the “area denial” envelope of a competent adversary? Just who is going to provide these ground maneuver formations with protection–especially integrated air and missile defense (IAMD)? Air and Missile defense considerations are so thoroughly hand-waved in this document as to render it somewhat laughable. Do they believe Navy Destroyers are going to do the job? Do they believe Army land based IAMD will do it? There is no real discussion, just an ASSUMPTION that the capability will be there.
If “trite platitudes” is something that gets Mr. Corbett’s goat, he should re-read the document that his General co-signed….it is full of them. So many assumptions are left unstated here….the most important of which is THAT CONDITIONS EXISTED THAT FACILITATED THE INTRODUCTION OF GROUND TROOPS IN THE FIRST PLACE. Just how did these Marines and Soldiers find themselves within the adversary’s AD envelope? Well, they were transported there by the Navy and the Air Force through the adversary’s A2 envelope–conditions which are EXACTLY what ASB seeks to create.
Bryan,
Touché’. A bit gratuitously ad hominem, but I think I can respond with sufficient grace that we might find common ground. I’ll begin with a salute to your address at the Heritage Journalist Awards—well said.
First, my waning influence on USMC conceptual development is aptly reflected in the passages you selected for quotation. You missed wide on the authorship, and I can assure you that no recommendation for signature on that bit of prose came from our shop. But then we didn’t recommend a signature on ASB either—after working on it for some time without conceptual profit. Perhaps my propensity for more clothed emperors has led to self-marginalization.
We both seem to have an aversion to sloppy thinking and service parochial approaches to warfighting. Your examples are apt expressions of this shared aversion. However the elegant truth of your words does not diminish the Spartan truth of mine, —we each can readily cite supposed concepts that highlight joint conceptual drift. No umbrage taken, from the standpoint of argumentation, I would have chosen the same tactic were ASB somehow tied to my equities, as it is far easier to attack and distract by citing a similar flaw in those who oppose those equities than to find the operational concept in ASB. However, we both know that debating points do not adjudicate war, so we need to get to the heart of the matter.
I fully appreciated Frank’s recommendations—save placing those recommendations in the context of ASB. I’ll reveal a certain smug conceit on my marksmanship, since if I missed the mark I doubt I would have drawn your warm attention. You are quite correct that my response did not answer the A2AD issue with a suitable operational concept. That remains a work in progress and we hope for a close working relationship with the Navy to make our still incipient ideas relevant to JFMCC requirements.
As we have worked these emergent issues folks have said “That concept will fit well into ASB.” Well of course it will. What won’t? Seriously, is there a bit of kit or any hairy idea that can’t be dropped into ASB? ASB is a document designed to append a shopping list –you can place anything on it.
Frank’s article notes the controversy over ASB. It is controversial because it has the clarity of a Delphic oracle. As a concept developer I know to be embarrassed. That others don’t should concern us all. Pick a concept, Blitzkrieg, Maginot Line, defense in depth (1917), OFMTS, STOM, Seabasing, Air Land Battle, etc. You can describe its gist in a comparatively short cogent paragraph. ASB? Good luck. Worse still, ASB fails to address the fundamental problem it seeks to address with any clarity. The operational problem ASB seeks to address–A2AD is what any competent enemy will attempt to do, and has done since man first picked up a rock to throw—extend range and lethality. The more fundamental issue is the growing and unaddressed capability / capacity mismatch. ASB not only does not address this issue, but is likely to compound it. The joint force is brittle—how we regain resilience and address the capability / capacity mismatch is crux. Re-work ASB to be an operational concept that addresses this issue and I’ll be proud to salute it.
Till then, be cautious how you engage critics. As you kindly note, we “weeds” are resilient, but the less hearty and more easily intimidated naval officer will withhold apt criticism in a spirit of self-preservation. Perhaps the Space Shuttle could have used more critics of the O-rings, and the Maginot Line a few more admonitions on open flanks—not to mention the bare assed emperor. Those who love our Navy most will be the first to want it to think clearly—and be willing to risk criticism in that effort.