FUTURE WARFARE Anthology Revised Edition Major General Robert H. Scales, Jr. U.S. Army War College Carlisle barracks, pennsylvania ***** The views expressed within this publication are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Department of the Army, the Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government. This report is cleared for public release; distribution is unlimited. ***** ISBN 1-58487-026-5 ii CONTENTS Foreword General Donn A. Starry U.S. Army, Retired ............................. v Prologue Major General Robert H. Scales, Jr . .............. ix Revised Acknowledgements ........................ xi Introduction to the First Edition Dr. Williamson Murray ....................... xiii Preface to the First Edition Major General Robert H. Scales, Jr. ............. xix 1. Speed and Power: Primal Forces in the New American Style of War .......................... 1 2. Cycles of War ................................. 9 3. Preparing For War in the 21st Century with Lieutenant General Paul K. Van Riper, USMC, Retired ............................... 23 4. Adaptive Enemies: Dealing with the Strategic Threat after 2010 ............................. 41 5. A Sword with Two Edges: Maneuver in 21st Century Warfare .............. 65 6. From Korea to Kosovo : How America’s Army Has Learned to Fight Limited Wars in the Precision Age: ......................... 89 7. Clashes of Visions: Sizing and Shaping Our Forces in a Fiscally Constrained Environment .......... 111 8. America’s Army: Preparing For Tomorrow’s Security Challenges ......................... 125 9. The Dawn of a New Age of Warfare: And the Clarion Call for Enhanced Maneuver Capabilities ........................ 145 iii 10. The Annual Report for The Army After Next Project to the Chief of Staff of the Army ......... 153 11. The Army After Next: Intertwining Military Art, Science, and Technology Out to the Year 2025 with Dr. John A. Parmentola .................. 191 12. The Indirect Approach: How U.S. Military Forces Can Avoid the Pitfalls of Future Urban Warfare ............................. 203 13. Russia’s Clash in Chechnya : Implications For Future War .................. 217 14. Trust, Not Technology, Sustains Coalitions ...... 233 15. Trust, More Than Technology, Ensures Interoperability ............................ 247 16. In War, The U.S. Can’t Go It Alone ............ 255 17. Europe as a Strategic Staging Base for 21st Century Stabilization Operations ....... 261 18. Adaptive Enemies: Achieving Victory by Avoiding Defeat .......................... 269 Index of Selected Terms ......................... 291 About the Author ............................... 301 iv FOREWORD This Revised Anthology is about the future of military operations in the opening decades of the 21st Century. Its purpose is not to predict the future, but to speculate on the conduct of military operations as an instrument of national policy in a world absent massive thermonuclear and conventional superpower confrontation characteristic of the Cold War. Also absent are indirect constraints imposed by that confrontation on virtually all political-military relationships, not solely those between superpower principals. It is likely not possible to predict the future. Its uncertainties increase the number of assumptions that need to be made and taken as fact in order to think ahead. So, all futures investigations are really speculation. Further, looking ahead, it is necessary to accommodate the past. For the present is the leading edge of the past, as well as the line of departure to the future. With us are legacies of the past; we struggle with them daily in problems of the present. Dialectically, accommodating the past inhibits free thinking about the future; but ignoring, or assuming away the past, foredooms thinking about the future to the trash bin of non-credibility. This foreword is not to critique General Bob Scales’ essays. It is rather to illuminate perceptions about past and present to help evaluate the intellectual strength and relevance of speculations about the future. What’s in the baggage? What legacies need be accommodated? Our military heritage reflects three first order legacies: Napoleon, the Industrial Revolution, and Modern Technology. Our Napoleonic heritage, observations from Jomini and Clausewitz, amended by our own unique post-Napoleonic experience, provided a set of military concepts embracing mass conscript military forces in time of emergency. Forces whose primary modus would be v destruction of enemy armed forces and infrastructures, largely by overwhelming numbers—of soldiers, of units, of weapons systems. Secondly, the systemic processes of the Industrial Revolution have reinforced and facilitated our convictions about mass armies and the nation in arms, and provided the material means for the ultimate battle—annihilation and unconditional surrender. Thirdly, Modern Technology enabled these concepts, beginning with rifled shoulder weapons in the 19th Century, advancing to thermo-nuclear weapons aboard intercontinental ballistic missiles in the 20th Century. Realities of post-World War II Soviet conventional power, overlain with thermo-nuclear weapons, made apparent that no longer could we plan to win by mass forces and fire power—numbers alone, even with the aid of allies, were insufficient. Then thermo-nuclear weapons aboard intercontinental ballistic missiles extended the battle of annihilation to a potential Armageddon, from which there would be few survivors, and no winners. Thus the concept of Limited War ¾something short of Armageddon ¾emerged during Korea and Vietnam. Limited War raised inevitable questions: what political goals are sought by the use of arms; what does it mean to win; how is winning to be accomplished; what price are we willing to pay? Political collapse of the Soviet Union, an end to the Cold War, ensuing uncertainties about Russian political and military futures, and the growth of militarization of conflict (with modern weapons) in the Third World, especially in the Middle East—all made the suite of Limited War questions more acute. For, absent Cold War superpower confrontation, there were far fewer political constraints bearing on Limited War confrontations. This was a clear call to revisit primary national political-military policies in a vastly changed world. It was Secretary of War John C. Calhoun who, circa 1818, laid down the basic underpinnings of a military policy whose implementing processes and structures provide most vi of the inhibiting legacies confronting us as we speculate about the future from the vantage point of the present. Secretary Calhoun’s policy saw the Navy as our first line of defense. There would be a very small regular Army, expanded by volunteer militia when required. Conscripts replaced volunteer militia in the Root reforms of the early 20th Century; and structurally, forces were denominated into regulars, National Guard and Reserves; nonetheless the Calhoun “Expansible Army” idea, now the Mobilization System, survives. Present and recent past experience suggests that most processes of the Calhoun system are anachronisms—Second Wave systems in a Third Wave World. In particular: the individual replacement system; Service and Joint logistics systems; the Defense Depart- ment materiel research, development and acquisition system; command and control systems that are now over- whelmed by burgeoning information technology; and the continuing search for relevant strategic and operational level doctrine . Meantime the national security policy of the United States has changed. Required by the National Defense Reform Act of 1986, there is now an annual published statement of national security policy by the incumbent administration. The current statement, circa 1999, sets forth an interventionist policy. Secretary Calhoun’s policy was one of protection of the United States from foreign aggression. The 1999 policy statement sees the United States as the keeper of world order, peace, health, stability, and a host of other conditions whose relationship to U.S. national security interests, vital or not, is in most cases obscure, and in too many cases nonexistent. Most of General Bob Scales’ essays are attempts to define military operational concepts that might be employed to execute such an engagement strategy. All the Limited War questions cited above are obviously relevant: what are the political goals, what does it mean to win; how is winning to be accomplished; what price are we willing to pay? These are tough questions; there are others. For unless we are willing to address ourselves to fundamental changes vii required in obviously dysfunctional processes of the old mobilization system, is anything like what General Scales suggests even possible? Among many examples, just one: if we are unwilling to look for effective alternatives to the individual replacement system, alternatives which will field effective units, then is it even possible to consider the operational concepts suggested within these essays? The effectiveness of units is driven largely by budget. Combat- ant forces are ever overstructured and understrength. If we are unwilling to provide enough end-strength (budget) to fill all the structure, then is it even reasonable to speculate on full-up units, well-trained, ready to deploy quickly, without providing fill-up personnel and equipment, and adequate time for training units to effectiveness? Finally, one ultimate tough question. Is it an appropriate policy for the United