Champion of "A New American Way of War"

Arthur K. Cebrowski is known in Washington as the Pentagon's transformation czar, the individual tapped by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to lead the conversion of the U.S. military from the heavy forces of the Cold War era to lighter, more mobile, highly lethal units able to defeat the wide variety of threats likely in the 21st century. Cebrowski views his mission as much broader than that, however. He envisions "a new American way of war" made possible by information technologies that vastly improve battle area awareness. He believes that will, in turn, generate a tectonic shift of the U.S. military establishment "from focusing on things to focusing on behavior or action" to produce new sources of combat power.

To achieve that end, Cebrowski challenges the system, not for the first time. As president of the Naval War College, he became known as the creator of network centric warfare, now a byword of the U.S. military. It is a concept that envisions the use of new technologies to move the Pentagon from the industrial age to the information age. A principal tenet of network centric warfare is the fielding of a robustly networked force to improve information sharing among units.

Before his tenure at the Naval War College, Cebrowski, a retired vice admiral, was commanding officer of the aircraft carrier USS Midway and the USS America carrier battle group, and Director of Command, Control, Communications, and Computers for the Joint Staff. As the Director of Force Transformation for the Department of Defense, he says he is less interested in the definition of military transformation than in its goal: creating a sustained American competitive advantage in the conduct of war. He recently discussed these and other issues with Editor in Chief Rick Barnard.

You recently said that "a new American way of war is emerging" based in part on the substitution of information technology for mass. One example is that the Air Force once used 1,000 bombs on a target that can now be destroyed with just one bomb. Targeting technology made the difference. What are some other examples from the Iraq war?

Cebrowski: High-speed forces. You cannot be dragging around a giant supply dump if you have that kind of speed. That means you have to be looking at very good battlefield transparency. One of the things that we see broadly is that information technology is running well ahead of the physical domain. We aren't looking at a giant bandwidth shortage, something that everyone predicted would happen. We aren't seeing that. We would like to be on the fully non-contiguous battlefield, but that means you have to have very good battlefield mobility, and that's in the physical domain.

The fully non-contiguous battlefield?

Cebrowski: The complete disappearance of the front--or the notion of a front--so the forces can be wherever they need to be. Forces should be able to disperse when they need to and come together when they must. We have the information systems that allow that to happen. But it still takes time just to move the physical elements and make it come true. So that means you're going to want to increase this substitution of information for mass so that you can reduce the drag of the physical domain.

Sea basing is one of the key concepts in the Navy's Sea Power 21 strategy, and there are lots of ideas floating around about how it would work. Some people think Sea Basing is an actual base. What is your view of Sea Basing?

Cebrowski: There is a compelling reason to pursue operational maneuver from the sea and operational maneuver from strategic distances. In a word, it's Turkey. We're dealing with matters of strategic geography. You want to bypass some of the political, geographic, and military obstacles blocking your way to your operational objective. Sea basing is a way to do that.

In my mind, sea basing is not a ship. It is not crafting some kind of big new vessel with a supply dump on it and then have forces fall in on this supply dump. Although you may have some of that. The sea base may be, it seems to me, quite dispersed. It could consist of a great variety of facilities and ships. Forces that would come to that sea base--air, sea, or land forces--need to come in one smooth motion and then maneuver operationally from it. So there is no intermediate staging base.

Tactical units are moving at higher speeds, but what about logistics?

Cebrowski: If mobility matters to you, then speed must matter. [He holds up a photo of the experimental ship HSV-X1 Joint Venture, a catamaran with a wave-piercing design capable of sustained speeds in excess of 40 knots.] Great picture, huh? It was in Kuwait two weeks ago. And I guess the Westpac Express [a fast catamaran used to move troops and equipment from Okinawa, Japan, to training sites in the Pacific] is still running. And the Navy takes delivery of another high-speed vessel this month and it will go directly to theater, I've been told.

We're going to see that inter-theater lift merges with intra-theater lift and the speed of both increase, and the distinction between logistics and operations goes away. We're talking about logistics as part of your operational maneuver scheme, as are intelligence and force protection. So you have a blurring of the lines.

If you have a blurring of lines, how would the forces today be supported differently?

Cebrowski: That's one of the things we're researching right now with a project called Sense and Respond to Logistics. The objective is to more clearly determine the impact of the demand function--that is the customer, the warfighter--and the characteristics of his environment. The stateside focus on logistics is toward efficiency, stability, and predictability: Just the right thing, in just the right place, at just the right time. And this gives one a sense of optimization and efficiency.

On the warfighting side, there is a battlefield which is agile, adaptive, chaotic, unpredictable. The focus is not on efficiency, it is on effectiveness. It's not on optimization, it's being dynamically fit so you can shift things. And the demand function is operating according to completely different rules from the supply function. We want to get a better understanding of this relationship and find ways to create, if you will, a gearing structure between these two views.

There's been some sniping in the current [Iraq] campaign about some problems with supply. Actually, there haven't been that many problems with supply that one can see. You've got an occasional unit that might run a little bit short on rations, but it doesn't seem to last very long. As one officer said, "This is like you're doing distribution for Wal-Mart and everyday you wake up and you find the stores have moved and the customers want something different." That represents a limit of the Wal-Mart model. So we have to take the Wal-Mart model forward into this dynamic environment.

One change in the Navy's current processes is spiral acquisition, or the insertion of technology as new things are built.

Cebrowski: We need to recognize that, for some things, it may in fact be more costly to study something than to actually build it and get it out there. Studying ship designs for endless years is a lot less valuable than to go ahead and build a few and build different designs.

I think it was before World War II that we built three classes of cruisers in succession. If you did that according to today's system, we never would have built the first two classes because they were woefully inadequate ships. And we would have waited and gone to the third one. But we learned a lot from the first two classes in going after the third one. The third class, which was absolutely marvelous, didn't appear until well after the war was started. But it was really the first two classes that won the naval battle for Guadalcanal. Yes, they paid a dear price for it, but the battle would have been lost had we used the current system.

You have said that one of the next steps toward achieving "a new American way" of warfare is speed-of-light weapons. Why?

Cebrowski: Speed of light is 186,000 miles per second. Weapons that can achieve those kinds of speeds generally are in the light spectrum, and we normally think of those as lasers. Or they are in the radio-frequency range, such as high-energy micro pulse. Or, possibly, particle-beam weapons. So it seems to me that speed-of-light weapons have the potential to add a different dynamic to the battlefield.
A couple of centuries ago, Lord Nelson said, "a ship's a fool that fights a fort." Why? Naval gunpowder is very, very good and accurate. And the ship has the initiative. But the ship has a limited magazine. It's a depth-of-magazine problem. One of the things navies have always feared is having their defenses overwhelmed. As we shifted to the missile age, missiles that attack ships were very expensive. There weren't all that many of them. Coming through the 1980s, we felt reasonably comfortable that our magazine depth was appropriate to the level of the threat that we were facing. But with the advent of cruise missiles, and the advanced technologies that could be applied to them, the cost of the attacking missile is plummeting.

The cost of the interceptor missile is going in the other direction. It's a big number that's getting bigger. So large numbers of attacking missiles are a real possibility for the future. Therefore, you want to address this depth-of-magazine issue. And one of the ways to do that is with speed-of-light weapons. You can reduce your cost per shot and sharply increase the number of shots.

What else lies in the future?

Cebrowski: From the Navy's perspective, I can see a whole collection of interesting things happening. The most obvious one is that there is going to be tremendous pressure to improve high-speed lift. That will come in the form of very-high-speed ships and in work on airships--probably, but not necessarily, hybrid airships.

I can see alternative approaches to large multirole ships that don't look anything like current ship designs but that rival aircraft carriers in size. They probably would have high multirole capability and, almost certainly, lower cost. The ships would be reconfigured or would reconfigure themselves. The general approach is that you have a chassis or platform and then you can roll through different capabilities. The excitement isn't in the platform. The excitement is in what it carries.

Are you optimistic about the possibilities for change?

Cebrowski: Oh, yes. How could I not be? Five years ago, people told me that network centric warfare was silly. And now everybody is doing network centric warfare. Two or three years ago, nobody wanted to talk about high-speed transport. Now we are operating two high-speed transports and taking delivery of a third. People were actually somewhat vitriolic in telling me we aren't going to do a Streetfighter [a concept for smaller, faster warships for brown-water battles], and now we have a robust program [the Littoral Combat Ship] that has elements of that. And all this in just a matter of a few years. So I'm ready for somebody to start insulting me about airships, because that will be an early indicator that we are going to succeed. *