Survivability and What It Means to Risk It
Wargaming and conflict assessments are so en vogue that some in the Department of Defense call them the “new black.” The most recent Marine Corps commandant, Gen. David Berger, called for an aggressive use of these games in the Commandant’s Planning Guidance. Revitalizing wargaming has been hailed in these virtual pages as a must for preparing for the next conflict, as well as giving team red (the enemy player) a robust characterization of capability against team blue (the term used for U.S. and allied forces) within the last decade. The Department of Defense component services frequently wargame and conduct studies to understand what winning a major combat operation requires and, as a corollary, what military platforms systems are survivable in conflict. Today, however, assumptions about the enemy threat risk giving the adversary an unfair advantage over the United States and its allies, which are portrayed as too fragile in a conflict ecosystem that is too risk intolerant.
Whether in wargames or military conflict scenario analyses, the term “survivable” is not standardized, and often is not fully understood by wargame designers and game players. The lack of a widely accepted definition has negative consequences for wargaming, war planning, and ultimately for military budgets. The Department of Defense component services are at risk of mischaracterizing their high-value assets as “straw men,” too easily defeated by adversary capability. With the misperception that a given military asset is not survivable in conflict, the next logical assumption is that a particular platform is not relevant in a conflict. These assumptions could then lead to a program death spiral: If a platform is deemed too fragile, it then loses funding, and without funding the platform becomes further antiquated (and thus, further lacking in survivability). The wargame risks becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy.
The Department of Defense and its services should reevaluate what survivability means when planning (both operationally and financially), as well as the definition of operational risk and what it should mean in the envisioned high-end fight. It is important for policymakers and budget programmers to better understand these concepts because this will improve planning for the next war and lessen the occurrence of misinformed financial investments (or divestments). With a re-grounding on these concepts, the Department of Defense can not only rethink how it approaches fighting the next war, but also may consider a re-pivot regarding what it funds to fight it.
The General Usage of Survivability: A Navy Example
In today’s wargaming, survivability is often a major currency through which a platform displays its value (expressed as relevancy) for future investments and growth within the defense budget. All military platforms have noteworthy capabilities. However, if an asset (such as a high-value plane) cannot get into an area without being destroyed, it is not seen as survivable. The concept of risk can offset the latent threat posed by a lack of survivability. The potential shootdown of a U.S. aircraft may, in general, be seen as unacceptable. Yet, if the commander is willing to accept risk, the threat of the shootdown may become tolerable. In that sense, risk can be a mitigator in the commander’s decision calculus when hedging against the question of survivability. Both concepts today feed an over-conservative characterization of the battlespace that has potential financial consequences.
The Navy’s survivability policy defines survivability with two measures: the capability of a naval platform, its mission critical systems, and its crew; and the protection provided to prevent serious injury or death. Determinants of survivability include susceptibility (avoiding or defeating an attack), vulnerability (ability to withstand damage from an attack), and recoverability (damage control and restoration of capability). The modern concept of survivability needs to be fluid and factor in new threats as they emerge. The required speed needed to pace the threat is such that what the military believes is survivable can quickly become obsolete due to threat technology and development. What was survivable against torpedoes may not be survivable against hypersonic missiles.
The problem with how some wargaming analysts treat the survivability of high-value platforms today is twofold. First, analysts focus on vulnerability and recoverability, often shortchanging how the Navy defines susceptibility. Susceptibility is a “function of operational tactics, signature reduction, countermeasures, and self-defense system effectiveness.” An adversary missile may have the ability to shoot a friendly plane down. However, if the aircrew use optimum defensive tactics, reduce their plane’s exploitable signatures, and employ countermeasures, then the plane very well may be survivable. This nuance is often overlooked, but it is important.
The second way in which platform survivability may be mischaracterized is through the analysts’ modeling of a particular wargame’s engagement rules. For example: In characterizing a given wargame’s engagements, suppose U.S. military intelligence suggests that a friendly plane has a 20 percent survival rate against an adversary missile. In the wargame, this percentage could be modeled as: “for a given adversary missile launch against a friendly aircraft with all necessary conditions met, the friendly aircraft has a 20 percent chance to survive the engagement.” The 80 percent shootdown statistic is applied to the engagement on an individual basis. However, this same scenario could be simplified and modeled as: “80 percent of the time when adversary aircraft are in firing range of the friendly aircraft in question, the friendly aircraft is shot down with 100 percent success.” In the first instance, the individual survival chance of an asset is 20 percent. In the second though, the chance of surviving the missile shot is 0 percent for each engagement. Modeling conflict scenarios is hard and tedious, and when analysis teams are undermanned, their computational bandwidth may be limited. However, painting the notion of survivability as overly black and white risks portraying inaccurate results such as this — and those results can be very different.
The General Usage of Risk
The definition of risk should incorporate how to address a perceived lack of survivability. Risk may be characterized as the potential for unfavorable/hazardous outcomes for a given mission (at the operational level), or for the military force executing the mission (usually more tactical or unit-focused). As joint armed forces doctrine suggests, the tactical level risk informs higher-level operational level risks. Services like the Navy point out that operational commanders weigh these risks and make judgements based on “intuition, past experiences, and personal judgment.” The Air Force uses acceptable levels of risk to describe an inverse relationship between the two risk types. An acceptable level of risk for a mission may be deemed “low” if mission completion is extremely important for a campaign. That ostensibly would bring a corresponding acceptable level of risk of “high” to the force. In other words, a commander may decide it is worth sacrificing units to get the mission done. In the scenario where mission completion takes the highest priority, the force’s lack of optimal survivability is acknowledged and weighed, but the risk is taken nevertheless.
The issue with how wargaming and conflict assessment analysts may approach risk today is remarkable in three ways. First, analysts who are currently in a “phase 0” (shaping; peacetime) mindset may apply a similar level of conservativeness to how the assets should behave in the wargame. For instance, in peacetime, an aircraft or ship would not allow itself to be put into harm’s way to execute its mission. Analysts may carry over that maxim of self-preservation over all else when determining what high-value assets can go where during the conflict scenario. Second, the analyst’s metric of unit loss and qualitative descriptor of survivable/not-survivable describe risk mainly at the tactical level — however, that description does not further contextualize the risk through an operational lens. In a conflict scenario, it may be the case that a friendly plane is going to be shot down by an adversary missile. However, if the commander is confident that the friendly plane will complete the mission (enter intuition and personal judgment), she may be comfortable with the all-but-certain grim outcome for the friendly plane on the back end of the mission. The mission may be that important to winning a battle during the conflict. Third, along a similar line, the bias towards conservativeness constrains the notional commander in the wargame. If the modeling rules within a wargame or conflict analysis do not allow for personal judgement and a leader’s risk decisions, then friendly forces are not utilizing their prime advantage — people. Rather, it is an oversimplified U.S. and allied materiel capability versus adversary materiel capability that Monte Carlo simulations play out.
The Danger of Misalignment: The Survivability Death Spiral
There are many military wargames and conflict scenario simulations that are robust enough to circumnavigate these mentioned pitfalls. However, the inherent danger in the Department of Defense is that these wargaming-based studies can inform investment (or theoretically, divestment) decisions. In general, this is a good thing. U.S. taxpayers should want military business decisions to be sound ones, based on studies and modeled scenarios. However, when a lack of robustness in these studies manifests (perhaps due to accidental oversights, or a shortage of manning or time, or an absence of sophisticated modeling tools), a component service of the Department of Defense may make a misinformed business decision — albeit with good intentions of doing right by the taxpayer.
To return again to the aircraft versus missile example: If wargaming analysts retain their conservative bias towards unit-level risk and believe that the friendly aircraft is not survivable against the adversary missile, the analysts may find that the aircraft is not able to enter or adequately maneuver through the battlespace. If that is assumed to be true, then for a given anticipated conflict, the friendly aircraft may not be relevant. Now comes the survivability death spiral: If the friendly aircraft is not relevant in the next anticipated conflict, then why continue to invest in it by way of weapons, additional sensors, and other technology that may be outfitted on the platform? Alternative investment decisions then are made for other friendly platforms at the cost of the allegedly non-survivable aircraft.
It is, of course, just a business decision — but it is business that directly impacts operational commanders anywhere from three to five years in the future. The Marine Corps, for example, has moved to make similar divestment and force structuring decisions based on arguments of survivability. The M1 Abrams tank requires a better line of protection against threats that exist in the modern battlefield (precision strike weapons and drones). Pursuing the requisite level of protection needed would be too costly (both financially and logistically given weight constraints). Thus, the Marine Corps is looking to develop unmanned air and ground systems as well as long-range fires. This does not downplay the military power that tanks can still project in the military (such as in the Army), but it does show the calculus that is in play as decision-makers ponder these options. The topic of survivability also has the ability to complicate procurement strategies, such as the differing opinions between the Navy and the Marine Corps on the Light Amphibious Warship (now dubbed Landing Ship Medium). Conservatively adding a good deal more defensive capabilities onto a platform from the onset comes with more cost. Operationally though, a higher quantity of assets with slightly less capability (and less survivability) might be what is operationally best from a strategic perspective.
The Way Forward
Advancing the discussion and understanding of survivability above, it is perhaps not as much a question of how we define survivability, but how to best model survivability for assets in a given wargame or conflict analysis. To borrow from Air Force Gen. Paul Selva, the Department of Defense would benefit from investing in a more robust modeling enterprise and training approach vis-à-vis wargaming. Investing in the tools that recommend where to make investments is a sound business practice. And though Navy Capt. Dale Rielage was correct in admonishing U.S. wargaming analysis in not strawmanning red forces, defense services also should not strawman blue forces by way of taking too narrow an approach for what it means to overcome susceptibility (and thus, what it ultimately means to be survivable).
As now retired General Berger and Vice Adm. Scott Conn both wisely remarked at Sea Air Space 2023, the U.S. military’s greatest asymmetric advantage is its people. Servicewomen and men, on the ground and sea and in the air alike, are extremely well trained, cunning, and adept at commanding their warfighting systems. The Department of Defense would benefit from focusing on how to capture that in the quantitative assessments that are done at the Pentagon when deciding what it takes to win in a given notional study scenario. Not factoring that aspect into survivability is to not fully describe that particular modeling variable.
All this is not to say that technological superiority does not count for anything — and indeed, technological disadvantages should drive an impetus to invest in respective capability gaps. Sometimes the stick’s reach matters, and out-sticking the opponent (in a capability sense) will help determine the victor in a fight. The point is that getting to yes with respect to battlespace relevancy then opens doors for more capability investments that would otherwise go unnoticed (and unfunded) with the handwave of “not survivable.”
Regarding risk, incorporating acceptable levels of risk would bring another level of sophistication to conflict modeling. The desired end-state is winning in a conflict. Though it is desirable to minimize losses while doing so, incurring little-to-no loss should not be a necessary condition in achieving the ultimate objective. Acceptable levels of risk would better negotiate this nuance in wargaming and conflict scenario analysis. It is also helpful to briefly contextualize risk through the lens of conflict (both in past and contemporary thought). In the Normandy Operation during World War II, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower accepted heightened risk by way of collateral damage, which prevented Germany from launching a satisfactory counterattack. However, by not accepting a greater potential risk to U.S. forces (vis-à-vis the propensity of friendly fire by heavy bombing operations), there were areas such as Omaha Beach that suffered at the hands of the German army. As Maj. Joseph Yursich writes, “Success on the modern battlefield requires commanders to expand their current level of risk tolerance. Eighteen years of counter insurgency and counter terrorism operations, within a zero-defect environment, have firmly established a culture of risk aversion … The increased lethality of modern weapons systems virtually guarantees failure for the commander that does not act boldly or accept risk from day one.”
Looking at further contemporary discourse, the adversary may have bigger guns in some circumstances, but they have to roll the dice in wargaming just as the United States and its allies and partners do. In that dice roll, friendly forces have the chance to seize the initiative, flex to contingency plans, and generally outmaneuver the adversary player from an operational standpoint. It may not always be successful (and indeed, in some cases often may not be), but the answer is much more complex than “red shoots blue 80 percent of the time when in range.”
Conclusion: Lest One Tilt at Windmills
Survivability and risk will forever be bedfellows of wargaming and conflict scenario analysis — as they should be. Conflict will inevitably bring with it losses, and no country should accept loss of life or materiel with reckless abandon. Making sound strategic operational and financial decisions means rigorously studying one’s own capabilities as well as the adversary’s. At risk of invoking a timeless cliché: “Know thyself. Know thy enemy. A thousand battles, a thousand victories.” Yet as a corollary of caution, another literary work comes to mind: Miguel de Cervantes’ Don Quixote. On a quest for knighthood and in pursuit of chivalry, a comical Don Quixote fights imaginary enemies, notably making giants out of windmills. The phrase has become cemented idiomatically to represent waging conflict against exaggerated foes. It applies when one paints an enemy as 10 feet tall, but arguably, also when one paints oneself as 10 inches high. If viewing survivability through a peacetime lens of risk acceptance remains the status quo, the defense services run risk of tilting at windmills in several wargaming instances, some of which may induce the survivability death spiral for certain military assets.
By pursuing wargaming and modeling improvements that capture a more complete definition of survivability, and recalibrating how risk is defined therein, study conclusions will be more robust, accurate, and therefore more reliable. Moreover, those conclusions will optimize the investment decisions that the Department of Defense and component services make. In doing so, the chance of tilting at windmills is lessened. Conversely, the U.S. military may better investin the pursuit of becoming giants.
Lt. Cdr. Josh “Minkus” Portzer is a P-8A weapons and tactics instructor in the U.S. Navy. The views expressed here are his own.
Image: U.S. Air Force photo by Senior Airman Jose Miguel T. Tamondong
