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To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]: Geopolitical Weekly : Geopolitical Weekly: The U.S. Air
Force and the Next WarDate: Wed, 11 Jun 2008 17:24:21 -0500From: [EMAIL
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Geopolitical Weekly: The U.S. Air Force and the Next War
June 11, 2008
By George Friedman
Related Special Topic Page
Military
U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has fired the secretary of the Air Force
and the Air Force chief of staff. The official reason given for the firings was
the mishandling of nuclear weapons and equipment related to nuclear weapons,
which included allowing an aircraft to fly within the United States with six
armed nuclear weapons on board and accidentally shipping nuclear triggers to
Taiwan. An investigation conducted by a Navy admiral concluded that Air Force
expertise in handling nuclear weapons had declined.
Focusing on Present Conflicts
While Gates insisted that this was the immediate reason for the firings, he has
sharply criticized the Air Force for failing to reorient itself to the types of
conflict in which the United States is currently engaged. Where the Air Force
leadership wanted to focus on deploying a new generation of fighter aircraft,
Gates wanted them deploying additional unmanned aircraft able to provide
reconnaissance and carry out airstrikes in Iraq and Afghanistan.
These are not trivial issues, but they are the tip of the iceberg in a much
more fundamental strategic debate going on in the U.S. defense community. Gates
put the issue succinctly when he recently said that “I have noticed too much of
a tendency toward what might be called ‘next-war-itis’ — the propensity of much
of the defense establishment to be in favor of what might be needed in a future
conflict.” This is what the firings were about.
Naturally, as soon as the firings were announced, there were people who assumed
they occurred because these two were unwilling to go along with plans to bomb
Iran. At this point, the urban legend of an imminent war with Iran has
permeated the culture. But the Air Force is the one place where calls for an
air attack would find little resistance, particularly at the top, because it
would give the Air Force the kind of mission it really knows how to do and is
good at. The whole issue in these firings is whether what the Air Force is good
at is what the United States needs.
There is a neat alignment of the issues involved in the firings. Nuclear arms
were the quintessential weapons of the Cold War, the last generation. Predators
and similar unmanned aircraft are part of this generation’s warfare. The Air
Force sees F-22s and other conventional technology as the key weapons of the
next generation. The Air Force leadership, facing decades-long timelines in
fielding new weapons systems, feels it must focus on the next war now. Gates,
responsible for fighting this generation’s war, sees the Air Force as
neglecting current requirements. He also views it as essentially having lost
interest and expertise in the last generation’s weapons, which are still
important — not to mention extremely dangerous.
Fighting the Last War
The classic charge against generals is that they always want to fight the last
war again. In charging the Air Force with wanting to fight the next war now,
Gates is saying the Air Force has replaced the old problem with a new one. The
Air Force’s view of the situation is that if all resources are poured into
fighting this war, the United States will emerge from it unprepared to fight
the next war. Underneath this discussion of past and future wars is a more
important and defining set of questions. First, can the United States afford to
fight this war while simultaneously preparing for the next one? Second, what
will the next war look like; will it be different from this one?
There is a school of thought in the military that argues that we have now
entered the fourth generation of warfare. The first generation of war,
according to this theory, involved columns and lines of troops firing
muzzle-loaded weapons in volleys. The second generation consisted of warfare
involving indirect fire (artillery) and massed movement, as seen in World War
I. Third-generation warfare comprised mobile warfare, focused on outmaneuvering
the enemy, penetrating enemy lines and encircling them, as was done with armor
during World War II. The first three generations of warfare involved large
numbers of troops, equipment and logistics. Large territorial organizations —
namely, nation-states — were required to carry them out.
Fourth-generation warfare is warfare carried out by nonstate actors using
small, decentralized units and individuals to strike at enemy forces and, more
important, create political support among the population. The classic example
of fourth-generation warfare would be the intifadas carried out by Palestinians
against Israel. They involved everything from rioters throwing rocks to
kidnappings to suicide bombings. The Palestinians could not defeat the Israel
Defense Forces (IDF), a classic third-generation force, in any conventional
sense — but neither could the IDF vanquish the intifadas, since the battlefield
was the Palestinians themselves. So long as the Palestinians were prepared to
support their fourth-generation warriors, they could extract an ongoing price
against Israeli civilians and soldiers. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict thus
became one of morale rather than materiel. This was the model, of course, the
United States encountered in Iraq.
Fourth-generation warfare has always existed. Imperial Britain faced it in
Afghanistan. The United States faced it at the turn of the last century in the
Philippines. King David waged fourth-generation warfare in Galilee. It has been
a constant mode of warfare. The theorists of fourth-generational warfare are
not arguing that the United States will face this type of war along with
others, but that going forward, this type of warfare will dominate — that the
wars of the future will be fourth-generation wars.
Nation-States and Fourth-Generation Warfare
Implicit in this argument is the view that the nation-state, which has
dominated warfare since the invention of firearms, is no longer the primary
agent of wars. Each of the previous three generations of warfare required
manpower and resources on a very large scale that only a nation-state could
provide. Fidel Castro in the Cuban mountains, for example, could not field an
armored division, an infantry brigade or a rifle regiment; it took a nation to
fight the first three generations of warfare.
The argument now is that nations are not the agents of wars but its victims.
Wars will not be fought between nations, but between nations and subnational
groups that are decentralized, sparse, dispersed and primarily conducting war
to attack their target’s morale. The very size of the forces dispersed by a
nation-state makes them vulnerable to subnational groups by providing a
target-rich environment. Being sparse and politically capable, the insurgent
groups blend into the population and are difficult to ferret out and defeat.
In such a war, the nation-state’s primary mission is to identify the enemy,
separate him from the population and destroy him. It is critical to be surgical
in attacking the enemy, since the enemy wins whenever an attack by the
nation-state hits the noncombatant population, even if its own forces are
destroyed — this is political warfare. Therefore, the key to success — if
success is possible — is intelligence. It is necessary to know the enemy’s
whereabouts, and strike him when he is not near the noncombatant population.
The Air Force and UAVs
In fourth-generation warfare, therefore, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) are
one of the keys to defeating the substate actor. They gather intelligence, wait
until the target is not surrounded by noncombatants and strike suddenly and
without warning. It is the quintessential warfare for a technologically
advanced nation fighting a subnational insurgent group embedded in the
population. It is not surprising that Gates, charged with prosecuting a
fourth-generation war, is furious at the Air Force for focusing on fighter
planes when what it needs are more and better UAVs.
The Air Force, which was built around the concept of air superiority and
strategic bombing, has a visceral objection to unmanned aircraft. From its
inception, the Air Force (and the Army Air Corps before it) argued that modern
warfare would be fought between nation-states, and that the defining weapon in
this kind of war would be the manned bomber attacking targets with precision.
When it became apparent that the manned bomber was highly vulnerable to enemy
fighters and anti-aircraft systems, the doctrine was modified with the argument
that the Air Force’s task was to establish air superiority using fighter
aircraft to sweep the skies of the enemy and strike aircraft to take out
anti-aircraft systems — clearing the way for bombers or, later, the attack
aircraft.
The response to the Air Force position is that the United States is no longer
fighting the first three types of war, and that the only wars the United States
will fight now will be fourth-generation wars where command of the air is both
a given and irrelevant. The Air Force’s mission would thus be obsolete. Only
nation-states have the resources to resist U.S. airpower, and the United States
isn’t going to be fighting one of them again.
This should be the key point of contention for the Air Force, which should
argue that there is no such thing as fourth-generation warfare. There have
always been guerrillas, assassins and other forms of politico-military
operatives. With the invention of explosives, they have been able to kill more
people than before, but there is nothing new in this. What is called
fourth-generation warfare is simply a type of war faced by everyone from
Alexander to Hitler. It is just resistance. This has not superseded
third-generation warfare; it merely happens to be the type of warfare the
United States has faced recently.
Wars between nation-states, such as World War I and World War II, are rare in
the sense that the United States fought many more wars like the Huk rising in
the Philippines or the Vietnam War in its guerrilla phase than it did world
wars. Nevertheless, it was the two world wars that determined the future of the
world and threatened fundamental U.S. interests. The United States can lose a
dozen Vietnams or Iraqs and not have its interests harmed. But losing a war
with a nation-state could be catastrophic.
The Next War vs. the War That Matters
The response to Gates, therefore, is that the Air Force is not preparing for
the next war. It is preparing for the war that really matters rather than
focusing on an insurgency that ultimately cannot threaten fundamental U.S.
interests. Gates, of course, would answer that the Air Force is cavalier with
the lives of troops who are fighting the current war as it prepares to fight
some notional war. The Air Force would counter that the notional war it is
preparing to fight could decide the survival of the United States, while the
war being fought by Gates won’t. At this point, the argument would deadlock,
and the president and Congress would decide where to place their bets.
But the argument is not quite over at this point. The Air Force’s point about
preparing for the decisive wars is, in our mind, well-taken. It is hard for us
to accept the idea that the nation-state is helpless in front of determined
subnational groups. More important, it is hard for us to accept the idea that
international warfare is at an end. There have been long periods in the past of
relative tranquility between nation-states — such as, for example, the period
between the fall of Napoleon and World War I. Wars between nations were sparse,
and the European powers focused on fourth-generational resistance in their
colonies. But when war came in 1914, it came with a vengeance.
Our question regards the weapons the Air Force wants to procure. It wants to
build the F-22 fighter at enormous cost, which is designed to penetrate enemy
airspace, defeat enemy fighter aircraft and deliver ordnance with precision to
a particular point on the map. Why would one use a manned aircraft for that
mission? The evolution of cruise missiles with greater range and speed permits
the delivery of the same ordnance to the same target without having a pilot in
the cockpit. Indeed, cruise missiles can engage in evasive maneuvers at
g-forces that would kill a pilot. And cruise missiles exist that could serve as
unmanned aircraft, flying to the target, releasing submunitions and returning
home. The combination of space-based reconnaissance and the unmanned cruise
missile — in particular, next-generation systems able to move at hypersonic
speeds (in excess of five times the speed of sound) — would appear a much more
efficient and effective solution to the problem of the next generation of
warfare.
We could argue that both Gates and the Air Force are missing the point. Gates
is right that the Air Force should focus on unmanned aircraft; technology has
simply moved beyond the piloted aircraft as a model. But this does not mean the
Air Force should not be preparing for the next war. Just as the military should
have been preparing for the U.S.-jihadist war while also waging the Cold War,
so too, the military should be preparing for the next conflict while fighting
this war. For a country that spends as much time in wars as the United States
(about 17 percent of the 20th century in major wars, almost all of the 21st
century), Gates’ wish to focus so narrowly on this war seems reckless.
At the same time, building a new and fiendishly expensive version of the last
generation’s weapons does not necessarily constitute preparing for the next
war. The Air Force was built around the piloted combat aircraft. The Navy was
built around sailing ships. Those who flew and those who sailed were necessary
and courageous. But sailing ships don’t fit into the modern fleet, and it is
not clear to us that manned aircraft will fit into high-intensity peer conflict
in the future.
We do not agree that preparing for the next war is pathological. We should
always be fighting this war and preparing for the next. But we don’t believe
the Air Force is preparing for the next war. There will be wars between
nations, fought with all the chips on the table. Gates is right that the Air
Force should focus on unmanned aircraft. But not because of this war alone.
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