AirSea Battle As Operational Scapegoat

The AirSea Battle (ASB) discourse is looking an awful lot like the counterinsurgency (COIN) debate was circa 2009. Is AirSea Battle a strategy? An operational concept? Is it an operational concept passing for a strategy? Does anyone really know or agree on what AirSeaBattle is? Of course there's also a few questions that have fairly little in common with COIN. Given China's contribution to anti-access/area denial (A2/AD) capabilities some question whether or not ASB is really about all about Beijing. There have been a few sound criticisms and many, many spurious criticisms of ASB. Few take on the central issue: ASB is purely a operational concept--or at at the very least an umbrella concept for a host of tactical efforts to synchronize air and naval operational and technical integration. So why is it being blamed for problems of strategy?

USN Captain Philip Dupree and USAF COL Jordan Thomas, the two service leads in the AirSea Battle office, wrote a sensible op-ed in Armed Forces Journal in an effort to clear the air about ASB. The piece argues that ASB is tied to a quest for a "pre-integrated" joint force whose closeness would facilitate greater rapport and capability-building. We get a clearer picture about the concept when they describe what a world without ASB would look like:

In such a future, attempts to use the familiar expeditionary model of massing combat power — the so-called “iron mountain” — at a handful of main operating bases to conduct extensive mission rehearsal and subsequently seize the initiative at a time and place of the Joint Force commander’s choosing, may not be feasible. Advanced adversaries could deny secure U.S. land basing at very long ranges, preventing air and naval forces from gaining local air superiority. Sea basing could also be challenged and attempts at ad hoc integration may be insufficient. Enemy capabilities could prevent surface action groups from operating at effective ranges and sea control may therefore be untenable. Space and cyberspace access would not be assured, and global communications and the exchange of information could be held hostage by any motivated aggressor. 

Sure, ASB may be about China in many ways but this paragraph demonstrates that the office has focused more on the capability in question. ASB could also be about Iran in the Persian Gulf and a host of other future scenarios in a world in which the barriers to operating a reconnaissance-strike complex seem to be rapidly falling. Good strategy is impossible without viable tactics, and ASB is simply a means of ensuring that a future strategist has tactical and operational options. The joint expeditionary model in all its facets--air, naval, ground, and the cyber elements that join all of the other domains together--is threatened. And ASB helps obviate that facet of the problem. So what's the beef, beyond the clumsy way it has been explained?

ASB is being criticized mostly because of what it supposedly implies about US strategy in the Pacific. But ASB has as little to do with the fundamental tenants of that strategy. Nor is it clear that it is entirely about the Pacific. Context would ultimately dictate the shape of a US-China confrontation, and ASB would be only one part of a larger military effort. Of course, it is not entirely free from a geopolitical context. The linked article discusses the idea of a global commons, something that may not exist in the way the authors imagine it. But the commons is not necessarily essential to the shape and form of ASB. The doctrine is about a specific set of weapons that can threaten American response to regional actors.

The problem--and this has little to do with the Pentagon and everything to do with American strategy as a whole--is the way that the doctrine is becoming seen as a stand-in for specific American policies and strategies in the Pacific and elsewhere. Such confusion is understandable. First, prior doctrines were based within specific scenarios and strategies. Second, the military's effort to prepare for crisis situations has outpaced domestic politics.  AirLand Battle (ALB), ASB's namesake, was couched within a specific threat scenario Americans had accepted for generations: Europe must be defended from the Soviet hordes. Every instrument of American national power--from official diplomacy and public diplomacy efforts to conventional and nuclear forces--had to hold the line in Europe.

ALB, though part of the Army's post-Vietnam internal shift, originated because prior operational concepts for accomplishing a set mission were judged invalid. There is nothing close to the level of consensus that existed over the need to hold the line in Europe when it comes to US policy in Asia or the Persian Gulf today. Is China an enemy, an competitor, or a state that can be cooperated with?  There is arguably a significant debate among the American foreign policy and national security community surrounding this question and as Robert Kelly has blogged Southeast Asia is also nearly invisible in US domestic politics. Our threat perception of Iran is far more clear, but this has not necessarily translated into a more long-term vision of what we will do beyond the immediate task of preventing them from acquiring nuclear weapons. Furthermore, if US strategy in those regions is also in flux, the states that will inevitably lie in the path of warfare also get a vote too.

As two analysts recently wrote about operational concepts, the military is really not in control of the most important strategic aspects of how ASB would be employed in a given theater scenario:

When you only control 25% of the mechanisms of national strategy, and that strategy itself is subject to rapid and radical change, this leads the military to develop operational concepts that must cover every conceivable enemy, in every conceivable circumstance, in any terrain or theater.

Let's take a look at a recent case study. As Sean Lawson argues, network-centric warfare was originally a fairly benign idea: who could argue with the proposition that military forces could take advantage of new technology and organizational concepts to network themselves better? NWC also fit well within the geopolitical context of the 1990s, dominated by what seemed to be endemic global uncertainty and confusion over the American military's role. NWC applied to both peace and war, increased American capabilities for regional intervention in brushfire wars, and telegraphed superior synchronization and offensive capabilities to potential adversaries. As befitting its naval origins, NWC built on a tradition of Cold War use of naval forces for crisis stability and federated command and control. Of course, as we now know, NWC also merged with an expansive theory of geopolitics after the September 11 attacks that stressed global intervention across the spectrum of war and peace. It seems that we've shed NWC 2.0's geopolitical ambitions and returned to its operational core. Or not. The point is that NWC, as an operational concept, had very little intrinsic flaws. Most mid-2000s critiques dealt with the way it had been applied as a driver of a geopolitical doctrine--a very different animal.

The military has been left holding the bag because of political uncertainty, a relationship that has been a constant since 1991. Doctrines like ASB and NWC are attempts to merely enable what seems to be the political consensus of the moment. If those politics shift, the doctrine does too. The most likely near-term use of ASB, in fact, will probably be in the Middle East if prevailing trends in the military balance continue.  It would be simply another addition to a long trend of "big war" capabilities migrating to middle-range and small wars. ASB is an operational chameleon, in short, because it must be.