The United States military has achieved a great deal of success in the post-Cold War era:
Other factors are working in our favor in the short run. The Iraq of today is not the Iraq of 1990, North Korea's conventional forces equipment is deteriorating, and our own forces have been improved in the meantime. We have some breathing space during which we can think about the capabilities we will need in our armed forces a decade or two from today.
Still, there is little room for complacency. Regional aggressors, midsized powers such as Iraq and North Korea, while no match for the militaries of the United States and its allies overall, can mount a serious challenge to our interests in their own backyards. We must cope with this threat with diminishing resources. The defense budget has been dropping steadily since the mid-1980s and is 35 percent smaller than a decade ago. The cuts have been deepest in the procurement account, which exceeded $120 billion in 1986 but dropped steadily to below $50 billion in 1995. This has led to a sharp drop in the number of weapon systems coming into the force structure in recent years, a trend that will continue for the immediate future. The capital stock of the U.S. military is beginning to age and the rate at which new weapon systems are being procured is well below the replacement rate for every major category of weapon system. In 10 to 15 years, our Armed Forces will be facing widespread obsolescence of a number of traditional military equipment items, most notably attack helicopters, bombers, submarines, and transport aircraft.
Force structure has been cut as well. Our forces are about 40 percent smaller today than when we drove Iraq out of Kuwait. Active ground and air forces are only slightly larger today than the forces actually deployed in Desert Storm. Indeed, were we to send a force the size of our Desert Storm deployment, it would require 80 percent of the active army and air force.
The new majority on Capitol Hill has expressed strong support for defense, but the actual increases proposed in the defense budget are modest. Moreover, as pressure to balance the federal budget continues, these increases are in peril.
We cannot ignore the multiplicity of demands being put on the military to support operations other than war and conflict at the low end of the spectrum. Since 1991, the U.S. military has been engaged in 14 operations involving forces of a company size or greater. While many of these have involved only modest-sized combat units, heavy demands have been placed on support forces, in particular transport and logistical supply units. These forces, critical to the successful prosecution of a major regional conflict, have been stretched thin.
Choices must be made today. We cannot continue to live off the stocks of weapon systems acquired in the 1980s and replacing them one-for-one. Maintaining our forces in a high state of readiness and the full force structure is expensive and may not be sustainable. We have to think about doing business differently.
This study examines an approach to how we might fight a high intensity conflict -- a major regional conflict -- more effectively and more efficiently. The approach takes advantage of rapid advances in automatic data processing, sensor technology, and telecommunications to develop a system that provides our forces with DBK. The implications of this capability are far reaching and span the spectrum, from providing a broad operational level view of the battlefield to the possibility of targeting and striking targets within minutes of detection. This concept of warfighting allows us to address a number of problems that we face:
To explore DBK in its many perspectives and ramifications, this volume hosts a series of essays. The first, "DBK and its Consequences," asks where the United States can get such a capability, what it can be used for, and how others might respond to it, and then concludes that the U.S. is approaching the ability to see everything of unambiguous military relevance on the battlefield, even if this capability will vary greatly by circumstance. With it, the U.S. can probably stop most cross- border blitzkrieg-style attacks, no small achievement. Others, however, may react in different ways. Apart from altering the battlefield (e.g., terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, information warfare), a canny adversary would reconfigure its forces to distribute its assets thinly, making it cost ineffective to attack it through stand-off precision weaponry. The United States in turn could respond by building vertical coalitions with allies at risk; out information flows would multiply the effectiveness of their organic defenses.
The second essay, "The Significance of DBK," is a detailed excursion of what DBK may provide to the two canonical Major Regional Contingencies: a war in the Gulf, and an invasion across the Korean DMZ. The analysis is that the United States has a reasonable expectation of stopping an invasion in its track in the first scenario, and a good chance of prevailing, although not as quickly, in the second. It concludes that DBK permits shifting warfighting assets from strategic to more immediately effective tactical targeting; flattening hierarchies; and changing the planner's role from strategic allocator to resource assembler. The argument is also presented that there is need for a broad reexamination of how information is used in the war, one that starts from the bottom up rather than the top down.
"The Future of Command and Control with DBK" begins with the assumption that by the year 2005 we could obtain Dominant Battlefield Awareness and explores opportunities that this capability affords to design new command concepts and organizational structures. The ability to manange Command and Control effectively as well as manage our sensors, communications, and weapons systems to achieve a true System-of-Systems will be the key to leveraging the capabilities provided by emerging technologies to give us a winning edge.
"DBK: Implications for the Future Conduct of Warfare" argues that these technologies put the commander back in command. The ability to manage complex operations in near real-time permits expanded operational synergies, from the merely integrated to the truly coherent. They permit the reemergence of decisive combat in lieu of differential attrition. Commanders so armed will be able to maneuver inside the cycle times of their opponents, take advantage of more rapid learning, and achieve phase-change dominance -- the ability to, by striking, force the enemy to undertake a debilitating change of phase from one mode of operations to another. Exploiting DBK however, means that it be applied across the entire cognitive hierarchy -- from data, to information, knowledge, and finally, understanding.
To "do the math", as a popular electronic game manufacturer urges, "DBK and Autonomous Weapons" replays Operation Vigilant Warrior but with advanced weaponry such as brilliant anti-tank munitions, sensor-fuzed weapons, and wide-area mines. Using a canonical force mix and weapons load-out, this study concludes that autonomous weapons may be the key force multipliers in such scenarios permitting very high rates of attrition within the first few days of combat.
By contrast, "Just-in-Time Warfare" sees the potential of DBK in precisely the opposite way, when information on the battlefield is available, but difficult choices must be made about engagements (in part because of resource limitations). DBK permits forces to mass at the point of contact, coming together to engage the point of the enemy spear, and disengaging with equal rapidity. To support such a capability requires a sea change in the organization of military force: concepts such as virtual organizations, command- by-negation, automated rules of engagement and cooperation, and just-in-time logistics play a leading role.