Editor’s Note: This article marks the beginning of a new program in partnership with the Center for a New American Security called “Beyond Offset.” Watch this space for more information on this exciting program.
Today’s headlines are reinforcing the alarms sounded by defense policymakers and analysts warning of the perils of cuts to the defense budget, the blind meat-axe of sequestration, and the risks to America’s global position. From the cancerous spread of the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) to Iran’s intransigence on nuclear negotiations, to Russia’s invasion of Crimea and eastern Ukraine, to China’s slow but steady push into contested areas of the East and South China Seas, the United States seems to be on its heels.
But there is a deeper competition afoot, one that goes beyond the daily tactical game of foreign policy maneuvering and diplomatic talking points. It is a game played out over decades, and it’s one that the United States could very well lose. It is a competition that most national security figures and the broader mainstream media don’t seem to fully grasp. It’s a contest over military-technical superiority, and whether the United States can sustain its advantage deep into the 21st century or be overtaken by its competitors.
What does “military-technical superiority” mean and why does that matter? Simply put, America’s national security depends on our military being more technically advanced than any other. We require highly trained people to operate and coordinate advanced weaponry in order to secure America’s global interests. That much should be obvious. What is less obvious is why that is at risk today. The future of the American-sponsored international order could be at stake.
To understand why this competition is so important, one needs to focus on the core context in which military competitions have played out over history. As Bob Work and I explored in a CNAS report earlier this year, there have only been two basic warfighting paradigms (what we called “regimes”) in history: the “unguided weapons regime” and the “guided weapons regime.” It is critical to understand both.
First, the “unguided weapons regime:” This was the world of stones, arrows, machine guns, artillery, and bombs. The key characteristic of combat using unguided, ballistic munitions—even over relatively short ranges—was that most munitions that were thrown, shot, fired, launched, or dropped ultimately missed their targets. Therefore, in order to maximize success at the point of attack, commanders would often seek to aggregate their forces in order to achieve numerical superiority. As a result, unguided weapons warfare had an inherent bias toward mass.
The crucible of World War II and the early Cold War period drove the development of two alternative ways for the United States to compensate or offset the numerical advantages our adversaries often enjoyed.
The first and most obvious offset strategy centered on atomic weapons. The massive destructive power inherent in a nuclear blast obviated the need for much accuracy. One didn’t need to use more than one nuclear weapon to be assured of a devastating effect on the target. This was initially attractive to the United States as a means to compensate for insufficient land forces in Europe. But in the early Cold War, the difficulties of actually contemplating how to employ tactical nuclear weapons on the battlefield vexed military planners. And as the Soviets approached basic parity in the nuclear balance, the advantage the United States enjoyed faded quickly. As former Secretary of Defense William Perry has written: “…by the mid-1970s, NATO and the United States were looking at a Soviet Union with parity in nuclear weapons and about a 3-fold advantage in conventional weapons. Many in the United States began to fear that this development threatened deterrence.” This fear drove the search for a new way to offset Soviet military power.
The second offset strategy that reduced the need for mass on the battlefield came in the form of guided conventional weapons that actively corrected their trajectories after being fired, released, or launched. From their introduction late in World War II up through the end of the 20th century, the main driver of U.S. military-technical superiority has been the development and effective employment of guided munitions. Other transformative technologies like stealth, the global positioning system and the broader revolution in computer networking acted as critical means to an end—the employment of guided weapons. Put simply, guided weapons ushered in an entirely new era in warfare, one in which accuracy became independent of range. As Bob Work and I concluded in our report:
…when firing munitions blessed with accuracy independent of range, forces could now mass effects by fire from greater distances while operating from a dispersed posture, using far less ammunition… [I]n collisions between conventional forces, a smaller force employing guided weapons might be capable of defeating a much larger force that employed unguided ones.
This was the answer to the challenge posed by the Soviet Union, who enjoyed clear quantitative superiority in Europe. Soviet military leaders understood (sooner than their U.S. counterparts) that their entire operational concept of overwhelming NATO forces with sheer mass would no longer be effective given the American lead in fielding guided weapons. By the mid-1980s Soviet military theorists had concluded that the emerging U.S. “reconnaissance-strike complexes” would be able to achieve destructive effects similar to tactical nuclear weapons. Put another way, because the United States leveraged its broader technical prowess to develop a way to offset Soviet military advantage, the basic structure of the entire Cold War military competition was reset to our advantage. Checkmate.
What is the lesson here? Simply put, when technologies emerge that upend the dominant warfighting paradigm, or “regime,” they significantly alter the course of history. Eliminate the advent of guided conventional weapons and the history of the 20th century would look very different indeed. This is why defense analysts have such reverence for figures like William Perry: He played a critical role in the late 1970s (as Undersecretary of Defense for Research and Engineering), driving the Department of Defense toward increased investments in guided munitions and their associated battle networks. Had Perry and his colleagues not invested in these emerging and sometimes unproven technologies, the last decade of the Cold War might have unfolded in very different (and potentially violent) ways.
Since the end of the Cold War, the United States has continued to benefit from its initial first-mover advantages in what has become the “guided-munitions regime.” The United States made the first and largest investments in these technologies and has continued to reap those rewards to the benefit of America’s national interests and defense strategy. But there is good reason to think that the advantages accrued from the Cold War offset strategy have largely run their course.
Work’s first major speech as Deputy Secretary of Defense in August outlined why the offset strategy of the late Cold War – the move toward the guided weapons regime – is no longer a sound basis for defense strategy and force development. He explained:
While the United States fought two lengthy wars, the rest of the world did not sit idly by, they saw what our advantages were back in 1991s Desert Storm, they studied them, and they set about devising ways to compete. Today, many of those earlier innovations that were spurred by the intense military-technical competition with the Soviet Union – in missilery, space systems, guided munitions, stealth, and battle networking – have proliferated widely. Unsophisticated militaries and non-state actors are seeking and acquiring destructive technologies and weapons that were once the province of advanced militaries – and the price of acquiring these weapons is dropping.
In a speech to a defense industry audience in September, Secretary Hagel made a similar argument to Work’s, and went further:
…Meanwhile, China and Russia have been trying to close the technology gap by pursuing and funding long-term, comprehensive military modernization programs. They are also developing anti-ship, anti-air, counter-space, cyber, electronic warfare, and special operations capabilities that appear designed to counter traditional U.S. military advantages – in particular, our ability to project power to any region across the globe by surging aircraft, ships, troops, and supplies.
“All this suggests,” Hagel concluded, “that we are entering an era where American dominance on the seas, in the skies, and in space – not to mention cyberspace – can no longer be taken for granted.”
It is encouraging to see both Hagel and Work build the same strategic case for why the status quo is no longer sustainable. They are essentially arguing that our first-mover advantage in the shift to guided weapons has almost fully played itself out. We are approaching a world in which the guided munitions regime is fully mature, with a much broader range of players now fully invested. U.S. defense planners must now assume that future adversaries will employ sophisticated battle networks and advanced guided munitions to both deter and defeat U.S. military forces. We see this dynamic most clearly with respect to the military competition unfolding in Asia.
China’s military modernization is entirely focused on moving decisively, and asymmetrically, into the guided weapons regime. So while the United States faces many plausible defense challenges, to the degree that military planners worry about what war looks like in a world of guided munitions, China is most certainly a “pacing threat” – that is, an actor that is making the most progress toward plausibly contesting U.S. defense strategy in a particularly worrisome way. It is true that other actors—Russia, Iran, North Korea, and even non-state groups like Hezbollah—are also fielding guided munitions and could employ them in creative ways to undermine U.S. military operations, but China is leading the pack. Therefore it is reasonable for defense planners to focus on the kinds of operational challenges the People’s Liberation Army may pose, as the underlying technologies will rapidly proliferate to other actors.
If the emerging consensus is correct that the Cold War offset strategy—embracing the shift to guided weapons—is no longer a sufficient means to sustain U.S. military-technical advantage, what then can serve as a basis for prudent defense strategy and force development efforts?
This is clearly the question Hagel and Work have asked of Pentagon planners. “As we see [U.S. military-technical] advantages begin to erode,” Hagel said in his Newport speech, “I’ve asked Bob [Work] to move forward with an initiative to develop a third, game-changing offset strategy.” He identified Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics, Frank Kendall as the point person for “assuring our technological edge through the next several decades” and announced plans for a new Long-Range Research & Development Planning Program to work towards that goal.
To defense wonks this particular statement was encouraging and it marked the reintroduction of an important acronym into the defense lexicon. The name of this initiative—the Long-Range Research & Development Planning Program (LRRDPP)—is exactly the same as the task force William Perry stood up in the late 1970s that led to the United States moving decidedly into the guided weapons regime.
But how should the new LRRDPP proceed? In order to properly begin to develop a new offset strategy it is critical that the Pentagon resist the powerful temptation to think first about technologies and then about strategy. Officials must first be very clear about the military problem they are attempting to solve. To me, the basic question is something like the following: How will the U.S. military deter and defeat an adversary that has guided munitions parity?
Components of an answer would need to explore many issues, such as how to defend against long-range guided munitions at favorable cost-exchange ratios, ensure U.S. aircraft carriers can project strike power beyond adversary missile ranges, and maintain resilience in our own guided munitions and battle networks as plausible adversaries develop ways to contest and degrade U.S. command-and-control links. Dominance in emerging areas of competition will also be crucial, particularly those powered by information technology. Superiority in cyberspace is likely to be a prerequisite to successful military operations in other domains.
I suspect that a critical component of addressing the challenges our forces will face in an era of guided munitions parity will revolve around fully harnessing the possibilities inherent in an emerging age of robotic warfare. From a certain perspective, guided munitions are only very simple robots. Over time, as computing power increases, the “smarts” behind smart weapons will grow. We have only scratched the surface of what unmanned and increasingly autonomous systems will make possible. Robotics is also another area where commercial and industrial investment outpaces military spending, requiring a different model for staying ahead. Unlike microprocessor technology of the 1970s, the underlying technologies behind advanced robotics will be widely available, meaning the Department of Defense must have the ability to rapidly import commercial sector innovations and quickly develop new concepts of operation for employing robotic systems.
There are undoubtedly many issues that Pentagon planners — and the defense community more broadly — ought to tackle as part of developing a new offset strategy. Beyond fully exploiting unmanned and autonomous systems, we need to determine how to employ emerging technologies like directed energy (critical for sustainable defense against salvos of guided missiles) and improved power systems and storage (to harness the potential of robotic systems to stay in the air or under the ocean for long periods of time).
There are also critical strategy and policy questions that must be integrated into Pentagon efforts. As one example, officials must not forget that the offset strategy of the late 1970s had two key components: identifying and investing in emerging game-changing technologies; and ensuring these technologies did not fall in Soviet hands. Much of today’s military export-control regulations stem from a Cold War-era desire to prevent U.S. technologies from proliferating. Like the Cold War offset strategy, today’s effort needs to identify and invest in emerging technologies. But, unlike the offset strategy of the late 1970s, the Pentagon needs to focus on ensuring that more of our capabilities are accessible to key U.S. allies and partners. In a world where advanced technologies are widely available and proliferating rapidly, the United States requires a more liberal approach to exporting defense technologies.
Another strategy question to integrate into the LRRDPP effort is examining how the technologies under consideration might affect what analysts call “crisis stability.” For instance, one important implication of the guided weapons regime is that it favors offensive warfare, as defending against long-range precision strikes is extremely difficult. This makes the developing military tensions in the Asia-Pacific all the more concerning. As actors like China approach (or perceive themselves to be approaching) something like guided munitions parity with the United States, it may create a “use or lose” dynamic with respect to each actor’s precision munitions and battle networks. This dynamic will get worse as more actors in Asia invest in guided munitions and maintaining crisis stability becomes far more difficult. It will be critical to capture and plan for the strategic implications of the force development efforts that a “third offset strategy” will spur.
The challenges associated with developing a new strategy to secure U.S. military-technical superiority are many. Budgets are tight, resources scarce, and defenders of the status quo have strong constituencies. Given the top-cover established by Hagel and Work however, I am optimistic that Pentagon planners and the broader defense community are poised to articulate a vision of military-technical supremacy that will guide U.S. defense strategy and force development in the decades ahead.
Shawn Brimley is the Executive Vice President and Director of Studies at the Center for a New American Security. He co-authored, with Robert Work, the January 2014 report: Preparing for War in the Robotic Age, and co-directs the “Beyond Offset” initiative at CNAS.
Check our Beyond Offset page for more information!
Image: Official U.S. Navy Photograph, from the collections of the Naval Historical Center.
Raymond Farrell 
Martin 
hgaffney 
Internet Value Added 
Jon Czarnecki 
Chairborne 
I fear that in any competition involving long term strategizing the US will lose. I served in government for over 50 years, and the one thing I learned is that we in the US don’t do ‘long-term’ very well.
I think the second major component of your article — to which you gave relatively short shrift — is actually just a crucial as your argument for moving ahead into the age of robot war (with which I agree completely).
That is, the West in general, and the US in particular, needs a new and fully operative alliance structure to replace the moribund Cold War-era institutions with we’re presently still saddled. Those structures (as primarily represented by the UN and NATO) simply aren’t oriented to meet today’s threats.
That new alliance structure should have three major and openly stated goals: 1) prevent any one nation or alliance from gaining control of all of Eurasia; 2) keep open the world ocean and airways for unhindered transport and commerce; 3) stop the proliferation of all WMD.
Rather than making “democracy” a goal of the alliance, joining it should have as its fundamental requirement each applicant state already be a multi-party republic.
Membership would also cost a certain contribution (2.5 percent of GDP?) toward a common defense and R&D fund, along with certain manpower and military unit contributions to a jointly managed international military command.
In return for that, each member guarantees the territorial and political integrity of all the others.
I’m thinking initial membership would be relatively small, something like: the US, Canada, the UK, France, Germany, Poland, the Baltic Republics, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, India, Georgia, Kurdistan, Israel. Other states, having met the democracy requirement and showing themselves willing to pony up the dues, could petition for membership at any time.
We could call it the “Justice League.”
The US today faces the same grand-strategic challenge as did Britain starting late in the 19th century: either expand the empire (“imperium” in today’s American case) into a multi-party structure of equals or fall away into irrelevance. The Brits feared to become just one more province within an internationalized empire, so they made the wrong choice and only set up the Commonwealth when it was already 30 years too late to have any real meaning. The clock hasn’t run out that far for us in the US/West today.
“Simply put, America’s national security depends on our military being more technically advanced than any other.”
This highly questionable assertion needs to be supported. Clearly, it is possible to have national security without being more technically advanced than any other. Are Russia, or China, or even Chile, insecure because they are not? Was the USA insecure in the 19th century? To ask these questions is to answer them.
US national security is based on many elements of which the chief one – its two oceans – is unalterable. Military power is only a secondary component of american security and technology is only one sub-component of that.
In fact, so secure is America’s natural position that not only would the USA remain secure with a second-rate military, a good case can be made that if ever there was a state which could afford to be largely unarmed, it is the USA.
As a soldier, I personally believe in the utility of force and I am glad that Uncle Sam carries a big stick. But this article procedes from an incorrect assumption.
Raymond,
You present a very interesting observation that reminds us of the often undervalued study of GEO-politics. Geography’s importance in politics and security is regrettably and unwisely considered passé these days.
However, a broader definition of National Security embraces all aspects of global influence. Oceans might protect us in a geophysical sense – but security is a fungible concept. If Japan or Korea become Finlandized – CONUS may still remain “secure”, but our economy and “security” are degraded.
A historical example comes to mind: Athens enjoyed nearly comparable security in Pericles’ day behind impregnable walls and protected by a gigantic navy. These factors did not prevent her demise in the Peloponnesian war after Sparta slowly nibbled away her allies and strangled her economically.
Our two oceans will not obviate the need for global influence, allies, economic vitality and power projection capabilities. The question is how to fund it in a balanced, sustainable way.
Appreciated your comment – thank you.
Raymond: do you have some an alternative force structure you would propose to put in place of the high-tech approach?
Brimley either is rewriting a lot of NATO history here, or is ignorant of it — I suspect the latter. The improvements in technology, i.e., PGMs, was at least third-order in why the NATO members outlasted the Soviet Union and their Warsaw Pact members. I say this given my intense involvement in NATO matters from 1966 to 1979. First order was that, especially in the Center Region, NATO’s forces were much more robust that were ever declared (all SACEURs wanted only to match the Warsaw Pact one-for-one, otherwise it was “2 days to nukes” — it was all a push for more munny to be spent — but it was enough). Second order was extremely successful diplomacy with the Soviets from the mid-60s onward — the Soviets were really in deep trouble and needed it. Defense experts know nothing about diplomacy, and thus don’t believe in it or think it has any effect. By the way, do people know that the 8″ ER artillery round — the fabled neutron bomb — could kill only 6 tanks at a time?
hgaffney, I respectfully disagree.
1. Shawn was pointing out the West has generally employed technology (specifically PGMs) to overcome adversarial Mass. That always remained true in Europe – regardless of our varying force levels. Rereading the Rand series on force ratios in NORTHAG from the 1980s will confirm that point.
2. Although I agree that tactical nuclear weapons have always been a poor choice and a last resort – they can destroy more than 6 tanks. And their employment was not considered principally for tank plinking. This is why we bought the A-10, and later, the Apache. Rather, nuclear artillery, and the neutron bomb were envisioned to destroy logistical and transportation centers necessary to move Soviet Operational Maneuver Groups west.
3. NATO nations “outlasted” the Warsaw Pact countries for many reasons as you mentioned. However the deterrent effect of technologically superior weapon systems (as well as tactical nuclear weapons) ensured that the Soviet Union understood that NATO could adequately respond at all levels – despite being consistently outnumbered. And this offsetting strategy placed just enough doubt in the minds of the Soviet leadership to keep the 8th Guards Army on their side of the IGB.
4. Certainly diplomacy played a critical role in preventing another European conflagration. If you were part of that effort – Thank you for your service.
This story subtly elevates PGMs over the associated intelligence and electronic warfare enablers that make PGMs so successful. Also, the effectiveness of the PGM has never been tested in a full-on ECM/ECCM environment. Weapons systems like atropus/vircator have rarely or never been employed offensively or defensively.
America is not the only nation capable of asymmetry. While the United States works on autonomous killer robots China works on more effective humans. How many readers are aware of the Communist Party’s efforts to improve the Han through the work of the Cognitive Research Lab at the Beijing Genomics Institute?
Without piling on to the very insightful comments that precede mine, I must disagree most definitively from Mr Brimley’s style and substance.
First, Brimley represents the school of the Revolution in Military Affairs, a rather dead-end concept that died when the RMA in which the US was supposed to continue its primacy fell by the waysides of Iraq and Afghanistan. This school thinks technology first, then operations, then strategy, and finally policy – precisely the reverse necessary to ensure any long-term national security. It’s not that technology and the edge that the US currently has isn’t critical, it’s just that technology should be placed of the context of what the country wants or needs to do in the foreseeable future. And the future isn’t only technology.
Which leads to my second major objection, concerning Mr Brimley’s question concerning what we should do once the rest of the world reaches parity with us on PGMs. His question is wrongly posed. It’s not parity with PGMs that matters but parity with our information management/processing capabilities that should matter. And that’s where the PRC are going, not just PGMs. We in the US have taken our information dominance for granted – in technology, in doctrine, and in strategy. We are going to have to either face up to dealing with other nations matching or perhaps even overmatching our information capabilities, or we had better figure out how to defer such parity. Brimley’s solution is more technology: robotics, for example. Certainly, technology is one essential component for a solution, but I would strongly argue for (a) changes to our strategy and national security policy – considering either policy “shrinkage” along the lines of Rand Paul and related thinkers; (b) changes in our doctrine, education and training – e.g. more systemic efforts to implement the mission command concept that penetrate deep into the strategic, operational and tactical (it’s pretty much there now) cultures of each and all our military services; and (c) changes to our force structure – e.g. reflecting the liberation of force types from stovepipes, like always selecting a combat arms officer as a operations’ commander even when such operations may not have much to do with combat applications at all (this mostly affects land forces, I’ll admit.)
The idea of looking beyond the offset is necessary and vital to our national security, just don’t look through only one set of binoculars….
Perhaps the next step in the ongoing RMA won’t be technical, but sociological or ideological. An open, secular, democratic society can have its will to act stymied. We need to understand this, build a defence against it, and if possible, weaponize sociological / ideological trends. For example, our victory in the Cold War wasn’t purely technical – our ideology beat theirs.
For a modern application, could we weaponize feminism to deal with Islamists?