Trends in America's Post-Cold War Military Conflicts: The Implications for Sea Power

By ROBERT P. HAFFA JR. and ROBERT E. MULLINS

Fundamental shifts in the international security environment, and in the military capabilities of the United States and its adversaries, are among the forces that will change the conduct of warfare in the 21st century. Shifts in the application of key technologies also will play a part.

In future wars, the United States will rely far more on ad-hoc alliances than on the formal collective security organizations that once played a major role in the formulation and execution of international security policy. NATO and the United Nations did not have so much as a supporting role in Operation Iraqi Freedom, for example, leaving U.S. President George W. Bush to rely on his "coalition of the willing" that included a diverse array of allies.

The sharp shift in military prowess of the U.S. military is perhaps best illustrated by its substantive improvements in targeting speed. The targeting process that took weeks to complete in the 1991 Iraq war was reduced in some cases to minutes in the conflict of 2003. This factor, combined with a huge increase in the percentage of precision guided munitions that can be delivered in adverse weather, led to a compression of the military's "kill chain" and substantial improvements in the lethality of U.S. forces. However, there is a dangerous side effect to the improved performance of U.S. forces and the ever-widening gap in military capabilities between the United States and the rest of the world. Potential adversaries may accelerate their reliance on weapons of mass destruction as a means to counter U.S. dominance in conventional arms.

These are among the commonalities and associated trends derived from a recent study of the performance of U.S. forces in Iraq in 1991, Serbia in 1999, and Afghanistan in 2001 by the Northrop Grumman Analysis Center

The purpose of this article is to review those commonalities and trends and speculate on their implications for the future combat employment of sea power. To the extent possible, we include observations of Operation Iraqi Freedom to further underscore the overall salience of our conclusions.

Shifts in the Security Environment

The migration of conflict away from Europe and toward Asia. Connect the dots representing the geographic areas of armed conflicts in Iraq, Kosovo, and Afghanistan and the locus of those points suggests a shift from the European region that dominated U.S. Cold War military planning toward Asia, a region of vast economic import and diverse security challenges.

The primacy of ad hoc military coalitions. In the Cold War, the United States relied heavily on formal alliances, such as NATO, for collective security. In three of the four major post-Cold War conflicts, the coalitions formed to defeat aggression resulted from an ad hoc approach to securing international support for U.S.-led military operations.

A new political currency to measure the contributions of coalition partners. In contrast to the Cold War, allied contributions have, for the most part, come in the form of political support and access to facilities rather than combat firepower. Trends in coalition capabilities indicate that widening disparities in military capabilities will cause future allies to fall farther behind the United States, although specialized intelligence and military niche capabilities (such as special operations forces) will remain valuable.

An amplification of the anti-access/area-denial problem. Evidence from the conflicts underscores the potential for access constraints arising from political issues, the tyranny of distance, and infrastructure shortfalls. The need to conduct offensive operations could entangle efforts to obtain access to needed facilities (as most recently highlighted by Turkey's refusal to host U.S. ground forces preparing to invade Iraq in 2003), while the vast reaches of Asia feature a much lower base density and less developed infrastructure compared with Europe and the Middle East. Although military anti-access threats were minimal in these conflicts, improved adversary capabilities could further complicate future U.S. power projection.

The ability of adversaries to undermine the threat and use of force. In each of the conflicts, adversaries sought to deter attack with threats calculated to heighten perceived U.S. sensitivities to casualties, and to exploit instances of collateral damage to evoke international condemnation and weaken coalition resolve. Failing that, they sought to reduce their vulnerability to coalition military actions through a variety of means (air defenses, camouflage, concealment, deception, dispersal, mobility, and hardened and deeply buried facilities). Weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) also cast a shadow in each of these conflicts, and an acceleration of WMD proliferation may result as a reaction to U.S. conventional military dominance.

Military Capabilities Enabling New Ways of Warfare

An "order of magnitude" increase in battlefield situational awareness. Two consequences of increased situational awareness and their implications for time-critical strike operations in the future warrant particular mention. First, the rapidly improving speed at which targets can be generated and prosecuted by a combination of battle management, sensors, and strike platforms, has compressed the "kill chain." For example, the targeting process that took weeks to complete in operations against Iraq in 1991 by 2003 was reduced in some cases to double-digit minutes. Second, the availability of live imagery of the battlefield has prompted the intervention of senior leaders (both civilian and military) in issuing targeting guidance, resulting in the creeping centralization of both command and execution as echelons in the rear reach forward to the battlefield in near-real time.

A move from deliberate to adaptive planning, and the concomitant execution of dynamic military operations. A legacy of the Cold War, the deliberate planning process instills an institutional predilection for scripted as opposed to dynamic military operations. However, the nonlinear and fluid operating environments that will characterize future battlefields necessitate renewed emphasis on both adaptive planning and dynamic military operations. In the Gulf War, for example, 20 percent of targets were selected after aircraft launch, whereas over Kosovo 43 percent of the targets were selected once the aircraft were airborne. In Afghanistan, 80 percent of the carrier-based sorties were launched without designated targets. Operation Iraqi Freedom statistics are likely to be consistent with this trend.

A dramatic decline in U.S. casualties compared with previous conflicts. Throughout the conflicts, U.S. combat losses were statistically insignificant, despite adversary objectives to cause high casualty rates as a means to achieve conflict termination. The reasons for this lie in a combination of new operational capabilities, highly survivable combat platforms, and guidance to limit the vulnerability of U.S. forces.

An increasing emphasis on extended-range operations. This is an outgrowth of the access problem and the migration of conflict to distant and remote regions of the world. Throughout the Cold War, U.S. planners developed concepts of operation based on the premise that forward operating bases would be available to launch and sustain combat operations. From the Gulf War to Afghanistan to Iraq, trends suggest that premise to be increasingly risky. For example, problems regarding access to forward bases in 2001 and 2003 resulted in much greater emphasis on carrier-based aircraft and long-range bombers than in previous conflicts, as well as increased reliance on aerial refueling.

The diminishing role of heavy ground forces. Whereas rapidly deployable, highly maneuverable ground forces that can leverage the effects of modern precision weaponry are integral to dynamic military operations against elusive enemies--as witnessed most recently in Iraq--there is a mismatch between the capabilities of slow-moving and late-deploying heavy ground forces and the demands of the future operating environment. Clearly, the ways in which the United States delivers firepower to the battlefield have changed. The ground force employed in Operation Iraqi Freedom was lighter than, and half the size of, the Desert Storm army, yet it was assigned a far more ambitious mission.

Technologies Enhancing U.S. Military Advantages

The increasing dominance of precision weapons. The clear trend since the 1991 Desert Storm is that precision-guided munitions (PGMs) represent a steadily increasing percentage of munitions delivered: about 8 percent in Desert Storm, 30 percent in Allied Force, 60 percent in Enduring Freedom, and perhaps 70 percent in Iraqi Freedom. Other trends are the increasing number of PGMs delivered per sortie and the increasing percentage of PGMs that can be delivered in adverse weather (from 13 percent in the Gulf War to probably 90 percent in Afghanistan and Iraq). In Iraqi Freedom, a significantly smaller air component delivered roughly twice as many PGMs per day as were delivered in Desert Storm.

The increasing quantity and quality of sensors and their integration into systems and networks. The shift toward "network-centric warfare" is pushed by the promise of information dominance and battlefield situational awareness. Underpinning this promise are technologies to create network-centric architectures consisting of high-quality sensors and rapidly transmitted data streams that will be fused and integrated at command and control centers. Conflicts since the Gulf War witnessed increasing integration of command and control, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (C2ISR) assets.

The increasing importance of stealth aircraft and electronic countermeasures. From the Gulf to Kosovo, to a lesser degree in Afghanistan, but reinforced in Iraq, low-observable aircraft were employed with remarkable success and revolutionary impact. Low-observable technologies applied to combat aircraft have allowed them to operate with relative impunity against sophisticated air defense systems. The ability of stealth aircraft to operate independently has reduced the requirement for considerable resources to escort attacking aircraft. Electronic warfare assets were employed in support of stealth aircraft, but were more critical in enabling nonstealthy aircraft--the mainstay of the current force structure--to survive in nonpermissive threat environments.

The increasing types, use, and roles of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs). Throughout America's post-Cold War conflicts, UAVs increasingly demonstrated their operational utility over the battlefield, particularly as they became enabled by advances in satellite guidance and communications, computerized flight control systems, and sensor technologies. Indeed, in each of the conflicts examined, unmanned systems assumed new roles, due in large part to improvements in range, endurance, on-board sensors and data transmission. Although only one kind of UAV, the Pioneer, was deployed in the Gulf War, ten different types of unmanned air vehicles were employed in Iraq in 2003 to provide persistent situational awareness of the location, identity, and movement of hostile forces within a cluttered battlespace. They were used principally in ISR roles during earlier conflicts, but by 2001 UAVs had evolved into sophisticated, air-breathing, hunter-killer platforms.

Implications for Sea Power

What policy implications and investment streams are suggested by these trends? Our trend analysis suggests strongly that, in order to adequately prepare for an increasingly hostile security environment, the U.S. will need to invest in concepts, capabilities, and enabling technologies to sustain its competitive advantages on future battlefields, all of which were demonstrated to varying degrees in post-Cold War military conflicts. From this analysis, the most critical force attributes appear to be: access-insensitive and persistent; highly survivable; networked and situationally aware; precisely targeted and informed; and increasingly unmanned.

Sea power advocates should be heartened by these attributes, for they represent much of what has been proposed in the Navy transformation vision described by Adm. Vern Clark, chief of naval operations, in "Sea Power 21: Operational Concepts for a New Era," during a Naval War College forum on 12 June 2002. The offensive Sea Strike, defensive Sea Shield, facilitating Sea Basing, and integrating ForceNet described in that vision clearly are components of a naval strategy and force structure that reinforce the warfare trends enumerated here. Networked naval nodes, stealthy ships, submarines, and aircraft, and access-insensitive maritime forces planned for the future will incorporate the lessons identified from America's post-Cold War military conflicts. Conducting early 21st-century warfare will require an agile, access-insensitive military force that can project sustained, precise, and survivable military power across great distances with little preparation or reliance on external political or military support. Sea power assets clearly meet those requirements.

Dr. Robert P. Haffa Jr. is director of the Northrop Grumman Analysis Center and a former Chief of the Long Range Planning Division on the U.S. Air Force Air Staff. He served on combat tours in Southeast Asia in RF-4C aircraft and was a professor of political science at the Air Force Academy. Dr. Robert E. Mullins is a senior analyst at the Northrop Grumman Analysis Center. Previously he was a member of the permanent research staff at the RAND Corporation and, in 2001-2002, served as RAND's representative to the Air Staff operations community.