rational defense

Global reach has always been important for the American military. Situated securely between the world’s two largest oceans and at peace with its neighbors, any potential challenger is an ocean and half a world away. This is not just a late-breaking dynamic, either. The U.S. Navy began conducting long-range expeditionary operations with its first frigates and has since consolidated control of the world’s oceans, creating a foundational element of its profound geographic security.

The last military conflict to take place on the soil of the continental United States was the Civil War. And even before the bombs fell on Pearl Harbor in 1941, American engineers were designing an aircraft with the range to strike across oceanic distances.

This is a formative and fixed reality for American military power: the objective has consistently historically been at intercontinental distances from the United States. This has made air and naval bases around the world (from Guam to Diego Garcia) — like coaling stations before them — essential to the projection and sustainment of American military force far afield.

In the case of Iraq (both in 1991 and in 2003), allied airfields within the region could host fighter jets for the opening gambit of the air campaign — the ‘first-day-of-the-war.’[1] In the case of Afghanistan, however, the situation has been more challenging. Initial airstrikes were conducted by cruise missiles and the American long-range bomber fleet operating from bases like Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. For strike fighters, the mission was initially solely reliant on carrier-based aircraft. In November 2001, the Marines and sailors of Task Force 58 flew nearly 450 miles inland (over Pakistan) from the sea to secure an airstrip in Afghanistan’s Rigestan Desert that would become known as Forward Operating Base Rhino. Even today, Manas Air Base in Kyrgyzstan — the base of operations for the principal aerial refueling mission for all of Afghanistan — is at risk.

While the quick availability of appropriate airbases in any potential conflict will inevitably be situationally dependent, the problem is not going away — and indeed has been a fairly consistent challenge for the U.S. Air Force in the 21st century. And while local airbases will inevitably need to be established in theater to sustain operations, having a base close enough for fighter aircraft to participate in the first-day-of-the-war is particularly time-sensitive. In addition, the proliferation of ballistic missile technology also potentially endangers nearby airbases, which are fixed and easy to target.[2]

When this problem cannot be resolved, the U.S. is left with two options: long-range strike aircraft and naval assets (both of which can launch salvos of cruise missiles). The latter is being pushed further and further offshore.

The modern American Nimitz-class aircraft carrier displaces 100,000 tons. There is little that can be done to hide it. And though it is protected by some of the best defensive systems in the world, it is increasingly vulnerable as more capable supersonic anti-ship missiles proliferate. Indeed, China has begun to work on anti-ship ballistic missiles, presenting yet another defensive challenge. Part of China’s naval strategy has long focused on delaying the approach of U.S. aircraft carriers to its coast in a potential conflict by making the surrounding waters sufficiently treacherous with anti-ship missiles as well as patrol and attack submarines that its escorts are forced to conduct painstaking clearing operations to protect their charge.

In short, the long-range bomber fleet is a precious commodity and – especially in the case of the twenty B-2A Spirit and sixty B-1 “Bone” bombers, which are survivable in a more dangerous threat environment – offer a unique option for global strike capability. It is a capability that is inherently necessary for the American geographic situation if Washington intends to be able to project military force anywhere in the world. And it is a capability and a force structure that is too-little discussed when ‘first-day-of-the-war’ discussions attempt to argue over the distinction between the range of the F-22 and the F-35.

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1 A term used to describe — essentially — the dynamic of being able to participate in air operations the day the shooting starts and often used to emphasize the increased demands of operating in a high threat environment before enemy air defenses have been suppressed or destroyed and air superiority effectively established.
2 The Pentagon is fielding both the Patriot Advanced Capability-3 and Theater High Altitude Area Defense systems to provide protection against this threat.

The U.S. Air Force (USAF) alone operates some 2,500 front-line fighter jets. The U.S. Navy and Marine Corps combined bring more than 1,200 additional combat fighters to the table. (Indeed, counting its hundreds of helicopters, Marine aviation by itself is counted among the ten largest air forces in the world.)

With only about 160 heavy bombers, the long-range bomber fleet is a tiny fraction of that size, and just over half are B-52H Stratofortresses. Though a venerable aircraft that has been heavily upgraded, the B-52 design is the product of 1950s aerospace engineering, and even the youngest airframes are approaching fifty years of service. On the other end of the spectrum are the twenty remaining B-2A Spirit stealth bombers. A crash on Guam last year, which resulted in the loss of a single airframe, reduced the operational fleet by nearly five percent.

This was not always the balance. After World War II, it was the bomber community that was ascendant. Hundreds of airframes of each new bomber design were built (nearly 750 B-52 airframes were built before construction ended in the early 1960s). From 1961 when General Curtis LeMay (the mastermind behind the incidiary bombing of Imperial Japan) became Air Force Chief of Staff until 1982, only a single fighter pilot held the top post (in the late 1960s). An uninterrupted chain of bomber pilots held that top job for more than a decade.

But after that, it was the fighter community that ran the show until 2008, when a reform-minded special ops pilot was given the job by Defense Secretary Robert Gates specifically in order to break the fighter community’s grip on the service. Air combat losses in Vietnam were a formative experience for that community and raised concerns about the importance of close-in dogfighting in establishing and maintaining air superiority and air supremacy. The ultimate outgrowth of this concern is the new F-22 Raptor, by most reports an exceptional fifth generation air superiority fighter capable of both long-range engagement and close-in dogfighting. Indeed, with the Joint Strike Fighter program underway as well, the USAF has two separate fighter jet development and procurement programs running at the same time. In comparison, what is known as the ‘next-generation bomber’ is not only potentially on the chopping block but (even if all goes well) is not scheduled to have a testbed airborne for nearly a decade.

However, the current balance of fighters and bombers is not simply a matter of institutionalized proclivities. The original intention was to procure more than 130 B-2 airframes. The B-2 program has not been efficient or cheap, but it produced a high-end capability unmatched in the world, and offers the U.S. the capability to hold nearly any target on earth at risk. The USAF knew it wanted to invest in and build the transformational B-2 before it could actually do it (leading President Ronald Reagan to kickstart the B-1 program and aggressively produce the B-1B as an interim capability).

But the Soviet Union collapsed just as the first airframes were taking flight. The combination of 1990s defense spending cuts and the fundamental shift in the global military balance doomed the ambitious program to 21 (now 20) airframes with no replacement program on the horizon, and contributing directly to the current composition of the USAF bomber fleet.

In short, that fleet is essentially a fixed reality for the next decade. But one of the key points missing from the ongoing debate over the right balance of aircraft for the USAF is that range matters — and not just within the narrow band of distance between the reach of the F-22 and estimates of F-35 capabilities.

Few nations on earth have the luxury of applying a such a generous budget to such forward thinking and innovative projects as the American Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Indeed, one of the central factors of global American military dominance is technological superiority. Advanced weapon systems and technological innovation have been at the heart of U.S. military successes like Desert Storm in 1991 and the (initial) success of the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

Yet even the United States, which has recently been spending more than the rest of the world combined on defense, has its limitations. Even with massive increases in the defense budget since September 11, 2001, the cost — not to mention the wear and tear — of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan combined with failures in major acquisition programs in every branch of the military has driven the entire American defense budget into crisis. What’s more, defense spending is set to decline by the time the 2010 and 2011 defense budgets begin to take shape.

This means choices. There are indeed very real justifications for expensive, high-end weapon systems and technologies that offer American fighting forces a generational lead over adversaries. But cost-effective innovation and acceptance of the realities and budgetary limitations of even U.S. coffers will be absolutely essential to a cost-effective and flexible defense establishment in the coming years.

RD is hardly the first to make this point. Submissions to the U.S. Naval Institute’s Proceedings have been lamenting the infeasibility of the U.S. Navy’s shipbuilding plan for years — just to name one example. There is now wide agreement that the defense budget process and (especially) the procurement process are badly broken.

But this is not just a matter of cutting costs due to budgetary reality. RD was founded in part on the dangers of institutional inertia in defense establishments. Innovation and intellectual agility are a challenge in any organization the size of the U.S. Department of Defense.

One of the most clear instances of this is the F-35 Lightning II, the product of the Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) program. Even mentioning the F-35 in the blogosphere these days can bring down a storm of debate — often more of a post-by-post shouting match.

For RD, the problem begins with the genesis of the JSF program. Merged after the collapse of the Soviet Union from a number of U.S. Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps development programs, JSF sought to replace nearly all the strike fighters in the U.S. inventory with three variants of a single design.

There are two interrelated problems. The first is that the consolidation of such a broad spectrum of design requirements — from the austere, forward operations and short take-off and vertical landing requirements of the Marine Corps to the complex electronic warfare and delicate stealth requirements of the Air Force — would necessarily require compromises in almost every mission area and subsystem. This is the nature of the multi-mission platform. To be tailored for a variety of missions, that platform cannot be optimized for any one mission.

Consolidation is absolutely worthwhile, and reducing the variety of aircraft types in the inventory has very real benefits when it comes to manufacture, maintenance and training — benefits that can translate to lower life-cycle costs and the all-important bottom line of the budget. But just as specialization can go to far and lead to too many mission-specific platforms with too little wider utility, so too can consolidation go too far. When consolidation begins to build excessive cost and capability into each platform to the point where most of the expense and high-end capability will not be required for the bulk of its missions, the underlying rational of consolidation begins to crumble.

The counterpoint to the JSF is the A-10 Thunderbolt II ground attack aircraft, which is at least a generation older and flew three decades before the production F-35 testbed. Purpose-built from the ground up for close air support, it is slow (but with exceptional handling characteristics at low altitude and low speeds) and low-tech (but durable and capable of absorbing damage from low-level ‘trash fire’) — and has been unpopular with some U.S. Air Force brass almost since its inception.

Continually refining and improving weapon systems is an important part of maintaining an edge over adversaries. But there are cases, like the Browning .50 caliber heavy machine gun. In continuous service for nearly ninety years with the U.S. military, it continues to be issued to U.S. troops with only minor modifications to the original design, currently fielded as the M2 HB (for ‘Heavy Barrel’).

This is not to say that the very real subtleties of close air support (CAS) are akin to the basic requirement for a heavy machine gun. CAS in dense urban environments in Iraq has led to important refinements in the process, and live video feeds have become an important addition to the kill chain. But while the F-35 does undeniably promise some significant improved capabilities, it is essentially trying to improve upon the CAS version of the M2 HB.

In addition, the stealth characteristics and survivability in a high-threat environment of the F-35 come at a high cost when most U.S. CAS has been historically carried out in a relatively low or completely non-existent threat environment. What the mission often calls for is an aircraft that can loiter for long periods, carry a lot of ordnance and approach the target more slowly in order to have extra seconds to acquire a target in difficult or clustered terrain — be it an urban fight or a rural one where the potential for civilian collateral damage can be high.

The second problem is that two decades have elapsed since the predecessors to the JSF program were conceived. The adversary and the mission that the JSF’s underlying requirements were geared towards — World War III against the Soviet Union — has evaporated.

But more importantly, the years since its inception have seen the dawn of a new era in unmanned systems. The potential for applications to many aspects of the fight are only just now being explored.

Obviously, these systems may never completely replace human pilots. They certainly are not ready to do so today. But the distinction is that the F-22 Raptor is already in service, while the F-35 will in all likelihood still be ramping up production in a decade. While they are not the same aircraft, nor are they capable of all the same missions.

The problem is that one of the mission areas where unmanned systems are more aggressively employed is high-risk profiles. Robots have long played a role in explosive ordnance disposal. One of the areas in which unmanned aerial systems (UAS) may soon be playing an increasingly prominent role is in the early phases of an air campaign in a high threat environment, and particularly in the suppression of enemy air defenses. A computer may not be as adaptable as a human pilot, but in more dangerous mission profiles, the reduced flexibility may be deemed acceptable to avoid risking the life of the pilot, especially as unmanned capabilities improve. (And there are also cases in which software can react faster than humans and better compensate for battle damage, as DARPA demonstrated last year by blowing sixty percent of a wing off of a model airplane flying with damage tolerance software).

The point here is not to enter into a debate about the relative merits of manned versus unmanned flight, but rather to highlight the inexorable trajectory of increased usage of UAS, particularly in some of the high-threat environments that much of the F-35 design has been dedicated to working in.

In addition, new information management technologies are having to be developed in order for the sole pilot in an F-35 to cope with an unprecedented amount of information (and in all likelihood, the information management challenge is only going to continue to rise in the future). In other words, the F-35 is straining the mental and sensory bandwidth of its pilot essentially from day one. There is little room for growth in information management, or the ability to monitor and task potential combat UAS that will one day inexorably be flying and fighting alongside manned aircraft.

Taken as a whole, the F-35 is a multi-mission aircraft that has made too many compromises in too many mission areas and yet harbors aspirations of next-generation capability. The design attempts to be everything, and in the process stumbles badly. While there may be some place for it, the U.S. Air Force’s comprehensive acquisition of the F-35 is not striking a balance between high-end, technologically advanced weaponry and low-end capabilities like UAS.

In 1987, Tom Stefanick published Strategic Antisubmarine Warfare and Naval Strategy. In it, he attempted to question a tenet of American naval strategy during the Cold War: the targeting of Soviet ballistic missile submarines and, more importantly, the implications of that doctrinal choice. During the Cold War especially, the tools of naval strategy — everything from sonar capabilities to the shape of a submarine’s propeller (known as the screw) — were deeply classified. Nevertheless, through research and analysis, certain parameters of a problem can be defined and intelligent questions can be asked. Based on those parameters, Stefanick was bold enough to ask whether, in the outbreak of war between the United States/NATO and the Soviet Union/Warsaw Pact, would the loss of some of the Soviet strategic fleet (especially a precipitous loss) actually serve to further escalate the situation and thus increase the likelihood of a full-blown nuclear exchange, in part because Soviet second-strike capability had been degraded.

There are, of course, a mountain of suppositions in any World War III scenario during the Cold War. There was — and is — no way to answer that question for certain. Weighting heavily on the other hand are very compelling military imperatives that argue for the targeting of ballistic missile submarines — one of the most survivable platforms for a country’s nuclear arsenal. The comparative advantage of American submarine technology allowed the U.S. Navy to target Soviet boomers while American missile boats were comparatively safe from Soviet attack submarines. But it was a fair question for Stefanick to ask, even if his work at the Federation of American Scientists and the Institute for Defense Disarmament Studies may have brought certain ideological presuppositions to the table — and even if defining the parameters of his question was daunting and produced a book that is more than half appendices (appendices that make for particularly good open-source resources, it so happens). Indeed, my copy of his book was first owned and read by someone in the office of the U.S. Commander of Naval Forces, Japan.

It is this very sort of debate that RD considers essential and upon which it has been founded.

When it comes to debate about the F-35 Lightning II Joint Strike Fighter (JSF) these days, discussions tend to quickly descend into heated debates about performance parameters that are mostly classified.

Air Power Australia (APA) has attempted to provide the same sort of reasoned parameters for this debate that Stefanick did for his. Through its extensive website and broad analysis, APA has given some much-needed definition to the recent debate in Australia over whether the JSF program in which Canberra has long been a partner is really the right choice for Australia’s strategic needs. While it has established a reputation of hostility towards the F-35 (one grounded in its own analysis), it has attempted to take what information is publicly available and used it to model and make estimates about operational capabilities and performance envelopes in order to compare them to the missions that the new aircraft will be expected to perform (in this case, one of the major concerns for Australia has been the proliferation of late-model Su-30MK “Flanker” series fighter jets to not only China, but Malaysia and Indonesia).

Indeed, in what originated with a comment to a post about one of APA’s recent analyses on Ares, Bill Sweetman composed a rather exceptional post today that highlighted the deep need for debate. He pointed out that the “JSF business plan, if fulfilled, results in a virtual fighter monopoly in the West and its allies.” This gets to the root of the problem. Lockheed Martin stands to make over a trillion dollars on U.S. Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps orders alone — not to mention what promise to be extensive overseas sales. The program itself will essentially lock foreign buyers into a long-term service and support arrangement with Lockheed Martin. Very real and deeply entrenched interests have a great deal at stake. So does the American taxpayer. Compounding this, Sweetman points out, is that there has been no track record of success since the F-117 Nighthawk (he points out the prohibitive cost overruns of the B-2A Spirit stealth bomber and concerns about maintenance, sustainability and life cycle costs with the F-22 Raptor.)

RD does not argue that every performance parameter and capability of a weapon system be unclassified. That is neither necessary nor prudent. But given the delays and problems with realizing the JSF program so far and legitimate and widespread questions and concerns from expert cicrles about the viability, applicability and necessity of the production-version of the aircraft, Sweetman parts with exactly the right sentiment:

If your track record is Ishtar and Howard the Duck, and you tell me that you’ve got something that beats Gone With The Wind and Star Wars, you are going to have to prove it with more than a PowerPoint, or “trust me, but it’s secret.”