What will tomorrow's wars be like, and is the United States prepared to win them? PM canvassed experts to glimpse military trends to find answers.
By Joe Pappalardo
More than 1000 US and Philippine Navy participate during a mock beach assault as part of Cooperation Afloat Readiness and Training.
The next war will expose our gaps.
There is no doubt that the U.S. military is the best equipped and trained and most experienced force on the planet. Pundits like to point out that it’s better funded than any 10 other nations combined. But just because a nation spends more money than its adversaries doesn’t mean it will win a war, especially far from home.
As the U.S. cuts defense spending, other nations like China and Russia have increased theirs. Their focus is on areas such as air defense and ship-killing missiles—the exact places where they can blunt America’s ability to project power. That’s why, despite a half-trillion dollars in spending, the United States military might face gaps in its capabilities during the next war.
"The United States has relied on a Department of Defense that has had technological superiority for the better part of the post–World War II era," says Lan Shaffer, principal deputy for the assistant secretary of defense for defense research and engineering. "[That] technological superiority is now being challenged." The 2014 Quadrennial Defense Review, a review of Department of Defense strategy, acknowledges that a leaner U.S. military will see some of its advantages eroded. Maj. Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wrote in the document: "Our loss of depth across the force could reduce our ability to intimidate opponents from escalating conflict . . . Nearly any future conflict will occur on a much faster pace and on a more technically challenging battlefield."
Some gaps are already appearing. Adm. Samuel Locklear III, commander of U.S. Pacific Command, told Congress this year that he does not have enough landing craft to conduct amphibious operations. The Marine Corps will shrink to 175,000 if the law that mandates 2016 sequestration is kept in place. If not, that number will dip to 182,000, a loss of 8,000 Marines. The Army is shrinking its active-duty members by about 22 percent, shedding 125,000 soldiers. Gen. Ray Odierno, the Army chief of staff, told Congress that, by 2016, he "doubts that we could even execute one prolonged, multiphase operation that is extended over a period of time."
It will vindicate the Pentagon’s focus on tech over troops. Or not.
The trend is to replace manpower with automation. Fewer warplanes will fly, and many of those that do will be unmanned. There will be fewer warships in the Navy’s fleet, and new ships will carry fewer crew members. Proven aircraft like the A-10 close-air-support warplanes and F-16 fighters will be retired and replaced with fewer numbers of (untested) F-35 Lightning IIs.
Faced with mandatory spending cuts, the Pentagon is doubling down on the assumption that advanced weapons will enable fewer troops to win a war. "We chose further reductions in troop strength and force structure in every military service in order to sustain our readiness and technological superiority," Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel has said.
This direction introduces risk. "The Army’s initiative to reduce manpower and increase dependence on improving is a double-edged sword," says Cadet Brandon Swank, a senior at West Point. "It may show us how increased reliance on technology makes it more difficult to replace the highly trained individuals required for maintaining it." He adds that it will be harder to train forces on complex gear "when we choose to increase our Army’s size again."
It will highlight the weaknesses of our allies.
The U.S. military, for all its prowess, cannot police the world. Having capable allies is vital, especially in some of the world’s most volatile hot spots, where military might must deter aggressive moves. When there’s a severe imbalance, such as between Ukraine and Russia in Crimea, tensions can escalate into military action.
American allies around the world have slashed military spending to offset economic woes, to the point where they cannot face regional challenges. Taiwan’s Minister of National Defense Yen Ming told the national legislature last March that the heavily armed nation could hold out alone for only a month against an invasion by the rapidly rearming Chinese. In Europe things are even more grim. NATO nations have steadily underfunded militaries. Just four of 27 member nations dedicated defense spending above the treaty-mandated 2 percent of GDP.
These shortfalls become apparent during a crisis, as when the European-led campaign against Libya in 2011 quickly became dependent on U.S. hardware. In his autobiography Duty, then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates described the reality of fighting with ill-equipped partners: "Just three months into the campaign we had to resupply even our strongest allies with precision-guided bombs and missiles—they had exhausted their meager supply."
It will be the war we haven’t finished.
Washington, D.C., may have abandoned the name, but the global war on terror rages on. Osama bin Laden is dead, but al-Qaida has morphed into five franchises in 12 countries. Some, such as al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, have plans to launch attacks on the U.S. homeland. The most powerful of them, the Islamic State group, has captured major cities in Syria and Iraq, destabilizing the region and overshadowing al-Qaida as a major risk.
"What’s called the Long War, we don’t see that changing anytime soon," says Maj. Bryan Price, the director of the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point. "Counterterrorism and counterinsurgency were around long before September 11, but we found ourselves going back to earlier insurgencies in Southeast Asia and Vietnam to relearn them. Maybe we don’t make that mistake moving forward, even if we have to bring back conventional [military] training."
It will reach home in unexpected ways.
Technology has made the world a smaller, more interconnected place. As Dempsey wrote in his 2014 review: "In the case of U.S. involvement in conflicts overseas, the homeland will no longer be a sanctuary either for our forces or for our citizens.” Where will these threats come from?
Economic Weapons: Embargoes, blockades, frozen assets, and shipping harassment are potent tools in a globalized world. For example, Iran blockading or releasing mines in the Strait of Hormuz could raise the price of oil 50 percent in a week. Economic warfare could take the form of sell offs of U.S. Treasury notes that ruin the value of the dollar, intentional hedge-fund manipulation, or crippling cyberattacks aimed at trading floors.
Cyberattacks: U.S. infrastructure—including water-treatment facilities, refineries, pipelines, dams, and the electrical grid—relies on industrial control systems patched in to computer networks. These can be manipulated to shut down or even destroy key equipment, causing domestic havoc and delaying a military response during a crisis. The more experts look, the more evident the danger: In 2014 cyber researchers discovered widespread software vulnerabilities in Centum CS 3000 software, which is used worldwide to run oil refineries, rigs, and power plants.
Psych Ops: Feeding false information aimed at populations and political leaders has never been easier. Faked photos, deliberately altered phone conversations, and hacked social media sites—tactics used by both sides of the Syrian civil war, Russia during the Crimea annexation, and the U.S. in Cuba—can shape opinion faster than an official rebuttal. A generation raised with social media may find this battlespace easier to handle than experienced veterans do.
"The cadets are really attuned to social media, just as we find our [terrorist groups the] younger generation that’s joining terrorist groups," Price says.
It will use tech to augment human beings.
Robots may not replace people anytime soon, but enhanced soldiers are coming.
"I don’t think that it’s hard to imagine monitoring or surveying devices being implanted directly into a soldier’s vital systems," West Point Cadet Ryan Polston says. "Contact-lens video recording, in-ear communications, and heart-rate, hydration, and oxygen-saturation reporting will provide commanders with more information." However, he says, "all of these possible improvements are dangerous in the sense that they detract from the humanity of the soldier."
It will see robots that are a part of human teams.
Robots are finding a place in every branch of the military, but they provide little advantage if someone has to operate them directly. The solution is autonomy.
"Networked and autonomous systems allow for the Army to decentralize its formations, making its actions less predictable and less vulnerable to asymmetric efforts," says Lt. Col. John Burpo, an advisor at West Point’s Department of Chemistry and Life Science. For example, a unit on a long-range patrol could be resupplied by an unmanned helicopter, rather than by a truck that follows predictable routes.
It will put carrier groups at greater risk from submarines.
Diesel–electric submarines can lurk in shallow water where sonar is less effective and attack American aircraft carriers using high-speed antiship missiles. The U.S. Navy can hunt them, but it’s a fatiguing effort for these helicopter crews, who often must give up tracking their targets to refuel.
To combat the threat, the Pentagon commissioned the Anti-Submarine Warfare Continuous Trail Unmanned Vessel, or ACTUV. The idea is to have the unmanned vessels search for submarines with powerful sonar and then follow them relentlessly once located. Construction of the 130-foot prototype vessel has just begun.
It will be fought against enemies who can jam or eavesdrop on military radios.
"We know potential adversaries are developing cyberspace and electronic warfare capabilities to neutralize, disrupt, and degrade our communications systems," Deputy Secretary of Defense Christine Fox says. Radios, which operate over wide bandwidth, are especially vulnerable to interception or jamming. In response, the Navy is testing a system called Tactical Line-of-Sight Optical Network, which uses a high-frequency laser to carry voice and video more than 30 miles. Engineers at Exelis, the system’s designer, say future versions could bounce beams off unmanned aircraft or satellites to increase range beyond line of sight.
It will put new, tougher satellites to the test.
Global positioning satellites guide soldiers, point missiles to targets, and maintain the courses of ships and unmanned vehicles. But they are at increasing risk for interference, jamming, and spoofing, according to a 2013 Defense Sciences Board report.
The Air Force is fielding new sats, called GPS III, that are designed to be more secure. Since the most common form of jamming is to overwhelm a signal with a similar signal, GPS III will transmit signals eight times as powerful as the current ones. Launch is expected in 2015, but the ground control system is delayed by up to two years, according to the chief of the Air Force’s space operations.
It will require stealth aircraft that rely on more than just their shape.
"Ground-based radars and surface-to-air missiles are making leaps in technology, enabling aircraft to be detected and targeted at increased range. Plus, recent advancements in radar technology have diminished our traditional stealth capability," Gen. Mark A. Welsh III, chief of staff of the Air Force, tells PM. "We must continue to blend stealth technologies and new technologies like hypersonic propulsion systems, autonomous sensors and weapons systems, and directed energy weapons."
The problem is that these technologies are not cheap. One solution is to prioritize speed over stealth. Welsh says hypersonic aircraft have the potential to exceed speeds of 5,000 mph, making them untouchable for weapons systems to track and shoot down. "This is all part of our new guiding concept, this idea of strategic agility," he says. "The ability to adapt and respond faster than our potential adversaries."
It will be fought with pilots and their robot wingmen.
Robotic systems are a key way to maximize capabilities and spend less money. "Unmanned aircraft not only allow us to reduce the size, cost, and complexity of operations—they also increase range, endurance, and performance," Welsh says. To get these benefits, robots need to be smarter. It makes no sense to have a human pilot on a joystick flying just one drone from a remote base, but it makes a ton of sense to have one pilot monitoring the flights of a dozen unmanned aircraft that need little supervision. Future drones need to be able to see other aircraft, avoid them, track targets, and navigate without using GPS waypoints. They'll do everything but shoot weapons—for that, expect humans to remain in the loop.
It will be waged in population centers that are increasingly located in megacities near a coastline.
Fighting in cities is the ultimate equalizer. Even the most effective militaries can be ground down by street-by-street fighting. With urban sprawl spreading across the globe, this terrain will be hotly contested in future wars.
"Urban environments present very complex terrain with dense populations of noncombatants," says Lt. Col. Bruce Floersheim, a professor with West Point’s Department of Civil and Mechanical Engineering. The solution is to know where you are, who you are shooting at, and be careful when you fire. "Precision munitions, nonlethal munitions, and temporary physical blockades could play an increasingly large role," Floersheim says.
It will see the risk of modern sea mines.
The U.N. estimates that more than 90 percent of world trade moves by sea, with the World Trade Organization putting the value of maritime commerce at more than $8 trillion annually. A campaign to place sea mines in these waterways could be brutally effective.
Right now the U.S. Navy has two ways of finding mines: by towing detection equipment from an aging MH-53 helicopter or sending in dolphins or sea lions to find them. Neither system will last much longer: the MH-53, which was supposed to retire in 2012, may face a service life extension to 2020; the Marine Mammal program will end in 2017.
There’s a better way to hunt mines—robots. Scheduled to deploy in 2017, the Knifefish torpedo-shaped maritime drone will carry side-scan sonar that can find objects underwater while operators happily sit outside the at-risk zone.
It will force the U.S. Navy to fight from afar.
Land- and air-fired missiles threaten Navy ships, forcing them farther from shorelines where the fights will be. But this new tech will help the U.S. Navy win the fight at a distance:
P-8A: The $220 million P-8A is a reconnaissance and surveillance airplane based on a 747. The airplane’s size means it can launch from long distances and cover wide swaths of terrain. It can track small targets such as surfaced submarines and small, fast-moving vessels. The P-8A carries 126 sonobuoys—sensor devices dropped by a rotary launcher into the water to generate sonar pulses that show what’s below. It made its first deployment to look for the missing Malaysian airliner in the Pacific.
Long Range Anti-Ship Missile: The LRASM is an autonomous, precision-guided antiship missile that can be fired from longer distances and is equipped with a multimodal radio-frequency sensor suite for detecting targets, as well as a weapon datalink for better communication. B-1 bombers and new combat ships will receive these weapons.
New Destroyers: The Navy christened a new kind of warship in 2014: the 610-foot Zumwalt-class destroyer. Its automated interior requires a crew half the size of that of existing destroyers. Its stealthy design makes the warship appear on radar to be the size of a fishing ship. Future versions may use the Navy’s now-experimental electromagnetic rail gun, which shoots projectiles more than 100 miles at Mach 7. The Navy plans to shoot from the deck of a ship in 2016.
Top-Gun Drones: Carrier drones can increase the eyes and teeth of an aircraft carrier. Aircraft range using unmanned aircraft will extend from 400 nautical miles to 1,500, keeping the ship out of range of enemy missiles. The Navy landed the unmanned X-47B jet on a carrier at sea, proving the concept and prompting the Navy to create a development program. The Navy may choose a design from competing vendors in 2015.
People may have lampooned Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld when he famously said that a nation goes to war with the army it's got—not necessarily the one it wants—but he was right. Choices made today will determine the outcome of America’s future conflicts. In that way, the next war is already being waged.
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