The Pentagon’s Fight Over Fighting China
The Joint Chiefs keep ordering up ambitious new war plans. But their biggest battle might be with each other.
By MARK PERRY
July/August 2015
At first, it’s hard to see Operation Desert Storm as anything less than an unparalleled American military victory. The battleship U.S.S. Missouri began the campaign to forcibly remove Iraqi forces from Kuwait by firing four Tomahawk cruise missiles at military command and control centers in Baghdad in the early morning hours of January 17, 1991. “I’ll never forget the day we launched these,” a Missouri crew member who witnessed the Tomahawk attack later wrote. “We listened to CNN radio from Baghdad after we had launched our birds. For an hour, everything was calm, but we knew sorties were on the way. Then all hell broke loose.”
In all, the United States fired 297 Tomahawk missiles from ships and submarines during the Gulf War, of which 282 reached and destroyed their targets. Nine of the missiles failed to fire, six fell into the water after their launch, and two were shot down. The Tomahawks’ carefully tabulated success rate of 94.94 percent was revolutionary, the most precise delivery of munitions on target in the history of warfare. And the Tomahawks were just one of an array of air assets used in the war’s earliest days to destroy Iraq’s military and leadership infrastructure.
The Iraqi military never recovered. Retired Air Force Lt. Gen. David Deptula, who was Desert Storm’s principal air campaign planner, says the air attacks were decisive. While Americans later focused their attention on Army Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf’s famous 100-hour “left hook” against the Iraqi army in Kuwait, Deptula says, the 900-hour air campaign that preceded it made the success of the ground war inevitable. He calls Schwarzkopf’s left hook “the great Iraqi prisoner roundup.”
Yet even as the military was celebrating Desert Storm, a small group of defense intellectuals—those Washington denizens who think about how to organize, train and equip U.S. forces—began to raise a series of uncomfortable questions about the campaign. They pointed out that U.S. naval and air deployments in the Persian Gulf were unchallenged—what if they hadn’t been? What if Iraq had been able to mount a sustained anti-naval and anti-air campaign that denied the U.S. Navy and Air Force access to the waters of the Gulf and the use of air bases in nearby countries? Would we have been able to counter their weapons? Would the operation have been as successful? The difficult questions weren’t aimed so much at Iraq or even its Persian Gulf neighbor, Iran, as at a potential conflict in the Asia-Pacific with China. If the United States were to fight a war with China at some point, it wouldn’t be the pushover that the Iraqi military was in 1991 and in 2003.
The attempt to answer these questions, particularly with regard to a future challenge from China in the Asia-Pacific region, launched a new military doctrine called AirSea Battle (ASB for short) that became official Pentagon policy in 2010. ASB was meant to be a revolution in the U.S. military: The new plan updated the AirLand Battle doctrine that had guided the military’s Cold War thinking about how the United States and NATO would fight in Europe against the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact. AirSea Battle intended to create a unified war plan that would help the Navy and the Air Force dominate the “battle space” of a war in an environment like, say, the Pacific against, say, an enemy like China.
When the ASB doctrine was announced as part of the 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review, the Pentagon explained, “The concept will address how air and naval forces will integrate capabilities across all operational domains—air, sea, land, space and cyberspace—to counter growing challenges to U.S. freedom of action. As it matures, the concept will also help guide the development of future capabilities needed for effective power projection operations.”
It didn’t go unnoticed, however, that the new doctrine removed the Army from its central role in America’s future war-fighting equation; pride of place was suddenly given to “air and naval forces” that will be responsible for countering the “growing challenges to U.S. freedom of action.” That realization ignited a titanic battle in the Pentagon, little noticed outside defense circles, that still reverberates today.
As the Navy and Air Force joined up to demand more funding under the evolving ASB idea, the U.S. Army—knowing this meant less money for its troops—did everything it could to shoot down the idea. That effort started at the top with Army Chief of Staff Gen. Ray Odierno. According to a senior retired Army officer who knows Odierno well, the Navy-Air Force AirSea Battle announcement “sent him into a tizzy,” “chilled relations” between him and his Joint Chiefs of Staff colleagues and sparked “real resentments towards the Air Force and Navy among Odierno’s staff.”
The resentments gave rise to Odierno’s view that his service was actually fighting a three-front war—one in Afghanistan against the Taliban, another in Iraq against the insurgency there and the third in Washington against the Air Force and the Navy. “There’s always tension between the service heads,” a currently serving JCS officer says, “but this was on an entirely different level. Odierno looked at his Navy and Air Force colleagues as plotting against him—and the Army.”
Ike’s Arsenal Eisenhower poured money into the Air Force to develop its Cold War triad of nuclear threats—land-based and sea-based missiles, ICBMs and bombers. The heavy spending didn’t let up under JFK. | Reagan’s Build-Up Claiming that the United States had “unilaterally disarmed” before he took office, Reagan oversaw a massive defense build-up. Some say the the Soviet Union’s struggle to keep up brought on its demise. | Bush’s Surge The historic peak of Army spending authority came during two land wars—in Afghanistan and in Iraq, where the military was in the midst of a 30,000-strong troop surge. | Source: Department Of Defense, Budget Authority by Branch
Asked for comment, Odierno said he disagrees with the idea that future threats are most likely to be naval and air skirmishes in places like the Persian Gulf or the South China Sea, but he took issue with the claim that the Army is upset with the new concept. The United States “does not need to invent a scenario, or an adversary, or formulate a new problem than those being presented around the world today,” Odierno wrote in an email. “In my opinion, we must avoid framing a single problem and then presenting a single and inflexible solution to it.”
But other sources in the Pentagon say the Army—the military branch excluded by the doctrine’s very name—confronted the now years-long battle over ASB as a near-existential fight for its very future. With the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq winding down, with the Pentagon’s counterinsurgency advocates in retreat and with forced budget cuts paring Army end-strength—from 570,000 in 2011 to 450,000 in 2017—the Army may well be facing a future in which large-scale deployments of U.S. troops are viewed as passé. The infantry, the so-called queen of battle, is no longer thought of as the most versatile and powerful factor in determining victory.
What role, if any, would the Army—and the famous American GI of wars past—play in an Asian war with China? The United States has never fought a major war without the Army being at the center of the battle. What would it mean if the United States settled on a doctrine that held no place for the largest branch of the military?
Read more:
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/06/pentagon-air-force-navy-fight-china-119112.html#ixzz3eRQz2rwK
