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McNair Paper 62, The Revenge of the
Melians: Asymmetric Threats and the next QDR, November 2000
Looking in the Mirror:
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.103 --Clarke's Third Law, Arthur C. Clarke, Profiles of the Future
The people who can destroy a thing, they control it.104 --Frank Herbert, Dune
The central thesis of this paper is that the Department of Defense's portion of U.S. national policy in the near to mid-term is based on the ability to maintain a clear and unambiguous conventional military superiority, coupled with the ability to defend the homeland in the face of potential asymmetric threats. This chapter will outline the conceptual structure of both U.S. military operations and the most important physical and psychological elements of our homeland. Potential vulnerabilities within these concepts and structures will be described and examined. At the end of the chapter, some conclusions will be offered that will establish the groundwork for chapter four, which will assess the danger of possible asymmetric attacks on the United States and its forces. Measuring Conventional Military Superiority
U.S. conventional superiority is embodied in the capability to rapidly achieve overwhelming
battlespace dominance against any opponent, and to prevail quickly and with acceptable loss. It draws
its doctrinal codification from the "big four" concepts of JV 2010, the Chairman's vision of
the future battlefield: dominant maneuver, precision engagement, full dimensional protection, and
focused logistics. These overarching concepts are useful at the macro level, but we need to look at
what they mean on the ground. Is it possible to establish some relative measures of What Are the Operational Expressions of JV 2010 Capabilities? Dominant maneuver achieves its goals through four enablers. First, information superiority creates a common picture of the battlespace while denying the same to the enemy. Second, highly capable and agile combat units are employed to use this degree of information superiority to strike enemy forces at the most advantageous time and place, in both a close and deep battle. Third, forces are deployed rapidly both inter- and intratheater, integrating rapidly with forward presence forces to fight. Fourth, objectives are achieved whenever possible through the manipulation of effects, not through the application of mass. The measures of effectiveness will be whether or not CINC objectives can be met through, first, rapid operations that yield decisive results; second, acceptable U.S. and allied casualties; and third, acceptable collateral damage. In Desert Storm, the great "left wheel" of the coalition is a good example of an effective application of dominant maneuver. Precision engagement achieves operational expression through three key enablers. First, information superiority is used to rapidly exchange targeting information among multiple sensor platforms, process information into actionable intelligence, and then convey it to the shooter in near-real-time. Second, multiple sensor systems, both manned and unmanned, surveil the battlespace. And third, effects-based targeting is applied. The measure of effectiveness will be whether we can conduct effective engagements that meet CINC targeting goals with acceptable collateral damage and U.S. and allied casualties. As with all measures of effectiveness, this remains a qualitative judgment, the most important component of which will be the CINC tolerance for error. Two counterpoised examples from history illustrate this. In preparing for the invasion of France in 1944, the decision was made to attack the transportation system that would be used to move German reinforcements to the lodgment area. This involved a conscious decision to target railyards and switching facilities inside French towns. Early civilian collateral casualty projections were quite high, but General Eisenhower considered the potential gain worth the risk. As it turned out, casualties were much lower than projected, and the "Transportation Plan" greatly slowed the movement of German units. More recently, though, in Operation Desert Storm, the bombing of the al Firdos command and control bunker in Baghdad, a legitimate military target that contained a number of Iraqi civilians, proved to be "too much for the traffic to bear," and subsequent strikes were modified and the force of the air campaign lessened.105 The difference in what degree of error a CINC was willing to accept (or allowed to accept because of pressing diplomatic realities) was vastly different in these two cases. This is ultimately an expression of whether the nation's vital interests are at stake. Full dimensional protection gains its operational expression through two key enablers: the use of information superiority to rapidly exchange information concerning the current threat to U.S. and allied forces, including the ability to protect our own information systems, and the ability to provide effective and timely force protection measures, active, passive, and preemptive, when required. The measures of effectiveness that will determine how well full dimensional protection is being executed are simple: the force deploys, fights, and redeploys with minimum U.S. and allied casualties. This is a qualitative measurement. The number of casualties that will be acceptable will of course be scaled against the nature of the threat and whether or not vital interests are at stake. Two extreme cases from history would be the invasion of Normandy in 1944, and the invasion of Grenada in 1983. Normandy involved the survival of the nation; Grenada did not. The relative price the United States was willing to pay was significantly different in each of these two scenarios. Focused logistics operates through three enablers. First, information superiority allows the broad-based sharing of a common picture of the force's logistics posture, while protecting this critical information from compromise. Second, smaller, highly responsive logistics elements will be tailored to provide timely support, with the added benefit of reducing the logistics footprint and the concomitant need for force protection. Third, logistics support will use highly mobile organizations capable of sustained operations at a very high tempo. The measure of effectiveness will remain the one against which logisticians have been measured for centuries: operational tempo does not degrade because of logistics bottlenecks or slow throughput. The key to all aspects of JV 2010 is the absolute requirement to dominate the information warfare spectrum. JV 2010 is ultimately nothing more than a form of what the Navy calls "network centric warfare," a broader concept that explicitly places the full spectrum management of information at the core of a vision of integrated air, space, land, and sea combat.106 Where Are the Vulnerabilities in JV 2010? There are vulnerabilities that an intelligent opponent can exploit. Table 6 outlines several measures that could be applied against each of the capabilities and their operational expressions. In general, though, potential effective asymmetric approaches seem to have the following common characteristics when arrayed against JV 2010: *Deny rapid and decisive action through battlespace selection and denial of timely access (including environmental manipulation if necessary) *Maximize opportunities for collateral damage *Fight a very aggressive IW campaign that aims directly at disproportionate effect *Use the civilian population to stress U.S. theater infrastructure *Avoid effective targeting through passive, active, and disruptive measures *Inflict mass casualties when possible *Complicate U.S. logistics by reducing usable infrastructure *Lengthen operations: time is the friend of the weak and the enemy of the strong; an adversary who just stays on his feet against the United States and a coalition will eventually gain credibility, regardless of the tactical/operational picture. The United States military is a fearsome force to be reckoned with. It possesses many strengths, not the least of which is the ability to adapt rapidly to new and demanding conditions. All of the asymmetric approaches above have been tried at one time or another against U.S. forces, and most of them have failed. However, we are not invulnerable.107 A student of our style of war who seeks to distill our vulnerabilities to a basic common denominator would seek to reduce our ability to dominate the information spectrum while increasing our casualties--all while stretching the engagement out over a long period of time. Examining the Homeland
The preceding section examined threats to the military forces of the United States. This section will
attempt to analyze the most fundamental responsibility of any state: the ability to protect its
citizens in their homes from attack. The United States has not suffered a serious conventional attack
on its homeland by another state since the War of 1812.108 On the other hand, the U.S.
homeland has been threatened several times. As has been previously discussed, in World War II, Japan
attempted, with little success, to float incendiary weapons on balloons into the Pacific Northwest,
and the end of the war cut short its plans to conduct biological weapons attacks on the United States.
Germany also had plans for long-range bombers and successors to the V2, but none were developed
before Germany fell. During the long decades of the Cold War, Soviet missiles were targeted against
both U.S. cities and military installations; in 1962, Nikita Khrushchev took the world to the brink of
nuclear war in Operation Anadyr by placing SS4 ballistic missiles in Cuba.
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There have been several nonstate attacks on the U.S. homeland since the end of the Cold War. The most spectacular from an external nonstate source was probably the January 1993 bungled attempt by Islamic extremists to blow up the World Trade Center in New York. The most deadly attack was the result of an internal nonstate actor: the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in April 1995 by a fragmented antigovernment group. Threats to the homeland are not new. Two new elements, however, are our preeminent position in the world today and the accelerating collapse of strategic depth that began with the development of the airplane and was further aided by the development of space as a medium of war, peace, and commerce. Most importantly, though, the explosion of information technologies has negated many of the physical concepts of security that have traditionally defined how states view themselves. Combined with this smaller and more volatile world is the dramatically increased availability of WMD and other technologies that can create mass disruption, if not destruction, of a society like America's that is heavily reliant upon information management systems. Quantifying the Homeland: What Are the Targets?
By building on the work done by the President's Commission on Critical Infrastructure Protection, ten
critical targets have been identified. The commission identified these eight: the transportation
infrastructure, the oil and gas production and storage infrastructure, the water supply
infrastructure, the emergency services infrastructure, the banking and finance infrastructure, the
electrical power infrastructure, the information and communications infrastructure, and the government
services infrastructure. For purposes of this study, the defense infrastructure was added to these
eight. Finally, to ensure a focus on the ultimate goal of our national infrastructure--to provide
services to the people of the United States--a separate category was added as the tenth potential
target: the population of the United States itself. These infrastructures provide the services
necessary for our well-being and way of life, ranging from the control of our civil airspace to the
coordination of local emergency services and the maintenance of our system of commerce and banking.
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Table 7 lists the ten categories of targets in the leftmost column. The second column identifies the critical components of each infrastructure--the nuts and bolts that must interact efficiently. The third column identifies broad measures of effectiveness that seek to establish how well the system must function in order to remain effective. While these measures of effectiveness are subjective judgments, they are conservative and reflect mainstream thinking on what a reasonable level of friction is within the infrastructure in question. When considering the population, it becomes a more difficult task, since there is little empirical evidence on how the American people would react to direct attacks. Ineffective governmental responses and sustained successful attacks over time may have a greater negative effect than a single spectacular attack.
The last column identifies some asymmetric approaches that an opponent might use to attack infrastructures and the civil population.
The table shows, first, that while all infrastructures are vulnerable to both traditional and WMD attack, the common theme is their vulnerability to information warfare attacks. Information technology in the United States (and everywhere else in the developed world, for that matter) is characterized by a profound and overarching interdependence between systems.
A second theme is that, when considering attacks on the homeland, certain forms and methods of attack will tend to produce enormous leverage in the public mind: the use of WMD and massive information disruption are the most obvious. Other forms of attack, while capable of great local lethality, will not enjoy the same leverage.
Ultimately, the most important resource that must be protected is the population itself. All of the
infrastructures directly contribute to this end, but the heart of the matter remains the requirement
to protect Americans from harm. It is likely that American citizens will understand and cope with
nonrepetitive attacks on our population and its supporting infrastructures. The most dangerous threat
may be that of repeated, sustained attacks against the population or an identifiable infrastructure
that the civil government is unable to stop. This is a tried and true recipe for terrorists through
the years. When coupled with the capacity to generate mass catastrophes, it may prove to be the threat
that we must guard against most strenuously.
Table of
Contents | Chapter 4 | Endnotes
