How would U.S. military operations be affected if we enjoyed DBK in an area associated with a major regional contingency? This question is addressed in several parts:
The usual caveat applies. Specific analytic results will depend on the identity of the foe (e.g., wealth, size, sophistication, and extant information infrastructure), whether our allies or enemies own the turf at the outset, the terrain of the battlespace (e.g., relative ratios of blue water, brown water, desert, plains, forest, cities, and jungle), the strategies of both sides of the conflict, and the rules of engagement that they, but particularly we, operate under. None of this captures fully the effect of technological surprise, operational innovation, and dumb luck on actual outcomes.
As computer, communications, and associated sensor technologies improve in power, speed, and acuity, the ability to see everything within a given area continues to improve, in some cases, at very fast rates. If it improves enough, even perfect situational awareness may understate what U.S. forces can see. Situational awareness is knowing the disposition, location, and orientation of all hostile forces -- e.g., seeing the tank columns. Such knowledge permits more effective mission planning, prevents being surprised, and permits imposing surprise on others. What militaries really want is the ability to see a target precisely enough to ascertain its location within the lethal radius of whatever munitions best kills it -- seeing each tank precisely enough to order its destruction by coordinates. Implicit in this definition is information dominance, so that U.S. forces can see deeply without themselves being at high risk.
A good sense of the possible comes from analyzing four factors:
A discussion of how U.S. forces achieve DBK serves a few purposes: it helps explain why the limits of visibility are where they are, how the architecture of a system that would ensure visibility has to evolve, and what opportunities lie for the other side to evade our sight. Collection, itself, is only the start of visibility (synthesis (e.g., data fusion) and analysis are equally necessary), but it does set the limits of our capabilities and the requirements for integration software.
U.S. forces will be able to exploit a great number of sensors. Stand-off sensors can detect electro-optical, infrared, passive microwave, and reflected real or synthetic aperture radar. Close- in sensors can detect pressure, magnetic fields, gravity differentials, sounds, and certain chemicals.
Stand-off Sensors: Space sensors on heavy low-earth orbit (LEO) craft are likely to improve in resolution but still face tradeoffs with field of view, timeliness, and data transfer rates. Alternatively, today's technology permits real-time coverage via staring sensors down to two meter resolution (e.g., via four Hubble-caliber spacecraft in middle-earth orbits). If sensor packages can be sufficiently reduced, a far larger fleet of very small satellites (e.g., the size of the $50 million MSTI or the $80 million Clementine satellite) can provide comparable coverage and much wider synoptic range. Fleets of small stealthy satellites are more robust against peer and near-peer threats with laser-blinding capability and other antisatellite techniques.
If the locus of interest can be pinpointed finely enough, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), despite their weight limitations, can provide even better coverage and can be flown under clouds. A UAV with a relatively light and inexpensive package (e.g., a 1000mm mirror-lens camera feeding a 2000 x 3000 charge-coupled device on a 35mm frame) can resolve down to 1cm from a kilometer away; a second camera placed 2m away from the first (e.g., on either wing, or one at the front and one at the back) can provide depth perception down to 1 meter (infrared sensors can work at night and detect heat signatures and synthetic aperture radar is useful but resolving power is usually only half as good). The UAV's problem is supporting real-time communications without revealing itself. Even without real-time communications, turning lidar (light detection and ranging) on, which cuts through most stealth, can reveal its location to a sufficiently sophisticated enemy.
Active radar-based sensors can cut through foliage and under the right soil conditions can see into the ground. They do so, however, at greater cost, somewhat lower resolution, and being active, at the expense of platform stealth.
Passive sensors can also detect radio emitters and thus geolocate their source. A technologically competent foe can nullify such information by using focussed transmissions (e.g., line-of-sight or at least microwave), generating electro-magnetic clutter, operating in a dense environment (one that produces echoes), or designing systems such that emitters are separated from more valuable targets (e.g., bistatic radars and relays to higher- power transmitters). Sooner rather than later the use of public- key encryption and digital signatures will limit our ability to exploit (other than detect) such radio-frequency or any other communications.
Close-In Sensors: These are good for supplementary information, making fine distinctions, defeating certain forms of stealth, and cuing long-range sensors. Any sensor that can fly can also be put on the ground; coverage is less, but resolution is better, and a collection of cheap devices can collectively produce powerful data.
Vibration sensors such as acoustic, seismic or pressure, particularly when placed in incompressible media such as ground or water, can sense reports of artillery or gunfire and detect the movement of large machines. Antinoise devices (those that generate an acoustic signal equal and opposite of the original signal) may limit their future effectiveness.
Gravimetric and magnetic sensors are good for distinguishing otherwise identical vehicles by their weight or steel content. They are relatively hard to spoof (although magnetic fields can be cluttered), but their coverage is relatively small and they have to be placed near their quarry.
Chemical sensors, despite their limited range, are good for distinguishing among similar industrial activities, and for detecting the presence and movement of humans.
The value of DBK depends on who we are trying to see. Visibility is easier against likely enemies over the next 10 years, such as Iraq or North Korea, who are deeply schooled in the Soviet way of war but less so in the information revolution. Visibility is harder against possible enemies beyond 10 years if they appreciate what our systems can do and develop new forms of warfare to counter them. Industrial war can be beaten by informational tools; post-industrial war (which acquires many of its techniques from pre-industrial conflicts) is a far different challenge, as a discussion of the following limitations -- bandwidth, intent, and denial -- suggests.
Bandwidth: The raw data required to resolve down to even 0.1 meter over such a large terrain are daunting, even with tomorrow's computers. A single eight-band multispectral eight-bit deep image of a 200nm by 200nm box at 0.1 meter resolution requires almost a hundred trillion bytes of information (e.g., 20,000 CD- ROMs worth even with low-loss 10:1 image compression or as much as NASA's Earth Observation System takes 2 days to produce). Real- time updates requires retransmission anytime something moves. Advances in processing speed and storage notwithstanding, the communications bandwidth necessary to transmit these data for analysis runs into fundamental limits on radio spectrum (laser- based communications without the optical fiber may have to be developed for such purposes).
U.S. forces will have to rely on cue-filter-pinpoint systems aboard sensors to report back on the battlespace selectively. Indeed, several laboratories are working on techniques that can pre-filter imagery by several criteria: e.g., industrial-age weaponry presents contours (e.g., straight lines) of the sort that are unlikely to occur in nature. Artificial intelligence will replace many human functions in recognizing objects and patterns, but a good system will have to be very large and the fate of large software projects is always difficult to predict.
Intent: To what extent does seeing constitute knowledge? In a high or mid-intensity conflict against an adversary such as Iraq or North Korea, this is not a serious problem. The presence of a tank where it is not supposed to be is sufficient to infer intent. In this case, detection of the target, coupled with the appropriate strike systems, is all we need to destroy the target. Detection is only part of the challenge in dealing with guerrillas and terrorists, however. Being able to detect a pickup truck from a stand-off distance is no mean feat; knowing that its occupants might be armed and hostile, however, is prerequisite to forming a military response. Some data, such as the identity of individuals (useful in distinguishing threats from bystanders), or their facial expressions and body language (which might determine their intent) cannot be discerned by any remotely plausible sensor scaled for wide area coverage.
Broader data on the intentions of threats are likely to require humint. Such collection will be made easier by the information revolution (e.g., more detailed data bases on individuals, encrypted untraceable communications from behind-the- lines sources). Still, the fundamental determinants of such information flow (e.g., agent recruitment) are unlikely to change much over time.
Denial: Information collection capabilities are likely to outpace the parallel rise in the amount of clutter and the sophistication of stealth, but the latter will retard the onset of perfect visibility.
As the other side begins to see better (and shoot farther), the use of some of our sensors may be constrained. AWACS and JSTARS are wonderful tools, but they radiate like Christmas trees and will be at increased risk as the consequences of their visibility are made actionable.
How visibility is sought also matters. If we have the cooperation of those who occupy the battlespace, we can use infrastructure sensors. If we lack cooperation but our engagement is overt, we can dispense sensors into the environment. If our engagement is covert (e.g., we are not yet at war, or we wish to hide our fingerprints while helping one side of a conflict), U.S. forces cannot easily use sensors that can be captured and traced back us.
Because no military information system can see everything to required detail at once, it has to rely on cuing, filtering, and pinpointing. Such systems are vulnerable to surprise because certain scanning possibilities are pre-excluded (the Inchon landing, the Nazis in Ardennes) or given short shrift (so that unexpected detail is treated as an anomalous artifact and ignored). Techniques can be developed to use systems of in-place sensors that can communicate among themselves, sift through their bitstreams, report only interesting data, and thus get around the bandwidth problem and limit the need for heavy manning of cue-filter-pinpoint loops. In practice, DBK will vary by target:
Finer gradations depend on the rules of engagement that U.S. forces (or their allies) can take advantage of. For instance, distinguishing a hostile infantryman from a civilian (friends can carry personal IFF devices) is not likely to be something a sensor can do. In a free-fire zone (or an environment where human activity is normally absent) it suffices to distinguish humans or civilian vehicles from their background; further distinctions are less important.
If military and commercial systems must be differentiated from each other before targeting, certain pieces of evidence can be used: weight, magnetic flux, radio frequency or chemical emissions, or even habits and tracks. However, a competent well-commanded enemy can be expected to mask all these features as best as possible. Forcing them to mask their signatures, however, has certain benefits; it further complicates their military operations whose normal coordination problems are already the source of much of war's fog.
How much better vision can U.S. forces expect one or two decades compared to what it could do in the Gulf War? In many ways this is an unfair question. U.S. forces then benefitted not only from 6 months of preparation and a terrain with little natural cover, but also faced an enemy with little capability to use movement in its defense. Just prior to ground combat, U.S. forces were able to identify, locate, and destroy almost all relevant conventional infrastructure targets, including major emitters, roughly half of the tanks and artillery pieces, a disappointing percentage of nuclear facilities, and precious few SCUD launchers. Better tactical intelligence (particularly if ARPA's War Breaker proves out) would probably have raised real-time sightings of SCUDS greatly, moving targets considerably, and passive stationary targets modestly. Plausible advances in target detection between 1991 and 2008 are likely to make a larger difference in a Korean scenario (where the enemy is moving forward, preparation time nonexistent, and cover somewhat greater).
Over 20 years we will see more, but we will also be seen more frequently. The latter may in fact, have a greater impact on how we conduct military operations. Our vision will permit more stand- off operations; their vision may well make it necessary.
Most middle- and upper-income countries should be able to pick up navigational signals from multiple sources (and map them into fine-grain digital cartographic data-bases), obtain satellite imagery at the 4- to 20-meter resolution level (from third-party purveyors or even their own small satellites), send signals on communications satellites (in low, geosynchronous, and even middle earth orbits), acquire sophisticated turn-key traffic management systems, operate UAVs with digital sensors and downlinks, and own police networks armed with networked minicameras. They could do this through buying or renting capacity from commercial markets or friendly governments.
Compared to likely opponents in a major regional contingency, U.S. forces are likely to have better information systems, a greater ability to degrade opposing information systems and conduct counter-space operations, and more access to stealth.
If the U.S. were to operate under more restrictive rules of engagement than our enemy, we could face a tough decision when it came to degrading enemy information systems or the enemy's access to third party information systems if doing so affects the assets of neutral or allied countries. For instance, we might suspect that our opponents are getting valuable data from ostensibly environmental satellites (which can resolve down to 20 meters) but unless we have proof that the owners are knowingly complicit in that transfer, it could take a hard decision from senior levels of our national command authority to take action against such assets. Similarly, the other side may be using a low-earth communications system like Iridium, but it may be difficult to design a jamming footprint without leaking interference into adjacent but uninvolved countries.
Troops given perfect visibility, or anything close, need no longer expend the effort and risk necessary to acquire it themselves. True, some of the effort is offset by work required to achieve DBK in the first place but to the extent that DBK can be provided by stand-off weapons or unmanned sensors, the savings in risk will be quite large.
This is no small change in how militaries, particularly armies operate. Consider for example, what a large fraction of the Army's efforts and casualties during the Vietnam conflict stemmed from its search-and-destroy missions. The key word in that phrase is search; in many cases air power or artillery did the destroying. This reflected the reality that finding the enemy without troops on the ground in that environment was extremely difficult. Even in the Gulf War, one of the primary purposes of land forces was to smoke out the other side; air power had destroyed as many tanks as it could cost-effectively and in a timely way. It took rolling metal to bring the Army's eyes to where they could see the rest of the enemy's tanks, forcing them to fire or run. With DBK, only psychological reasons (i.e., the visibility of awesome power to make others stop hiding and start running) remain to justify most classical ground operations except for territorial occupation. More generally, patrol operations of all sorts (from combat air patrol to frigate-based picket duty) and their attendant risks can be sharply cut back. Direct cost and casualty savings are supplemented by the indirect benefits of not having to support a large in-theater logistics and command apparatus.
The savings in logistics is more than money; our long logistics tail is our Achilles' heel. If Saddam Hussein had possessed more accurate missiles, his sallies would have created enormous havoc to our port operations. The next foe is unlikely to permit U.S. forces to build up without contest. The instruments of logistics -- ships, ports, aircraft, airfields, and supply dumps -- are far too visible to escape notice in a coming era of visibility. Thus, with the exception of the stealthy equipment and doctrine attendant to the supply of special operations force elements, any logistics infrastructure will invite the attention of foes who cannot pass up an opportunity to extract cost and casualties.
DBK may also affect the order in which targets are attacked. To understand why requires first realizing that PGMs mean that what can be seen can reliably be killed. To the extent that the name of the game in future conventional warfare is to avoid being seen, successful militaries will base their strategies on operations that generate the least signature. Increasingly (especially in quick- reaction environments), movement is more likely to generate signature than standing still. Movement expends energy, creates noise, disturbs the background, and shows up on moving-target indicators. Standing still has fewer signature disadvantages (evidence of human occupation in one place tends to accumulate, but such data take longer to collect). Needless to add, offense in pursuit of territorial occupation is difficult to do without a great deal of movement. Thus offensive operations capture the initiative at the expense of greater visibility.
In such a world, targets appear as a deliberate result of the other side's actions; in the absence of active reconnaissance, the initiative is on the other side. As visibility increases, however, the initiative shifts. Mobile targets become more visible and the side with DBK has a richer menu from which to choose. Thus the pattern of engagement can favor the DBK-rich side; initiative need not rest with the side with the greater firepower.
As the visibility continues to increase, how targets are attacked assumes greater importance as well. The combination of our ability to see without being there and of the risks to our being there suggests three modes of engaging threat forces: via stand- off, using vertical coalitions, and with information warfare.!!
Weapons can be delivered from stand-off range via stealth attack aircraft, cruise missiles, and ballistic missiles, or, speculatively, laser (or other directed energy sources) from space. All are expensive in ways that advances in information technology cannot do much to reduce. For instance, the F-117A is a $50 million aircraft that, even if flown twice a day (and preserving stealth requires heavy maintenance after each mission), can deliver only four bombs on target in that time period. Unless they are loitering, aircraft cannot prosecute targets that disappear a half hour after they appear (e.g., most aircraft, shoot-and-scoot systems), and stealth is designed for night operations.
Cruise missiles have a somewhat faster turnaround, but they, too, are expensive, using today's guidance systems ( future GPS/INS guidance could be cheaper) and are vulnerable to look-down, shoot- down systems. Current versions require the shooters be within 1,000 or 2,000 km of the target; this puts the shooters at some risk (submarines are stealthy but expensive cruise missile platforms). A $2 million cruise missile can deliver only a 200-kg warhead.
Ballistic missiles permit the fastest turnaround between sightings and prosecution (an extended ATACMS could cover 200 km in 3 minutes). They can be fired from indefinite stand-off distances,and, in some versions, have the highest likelihood of hitting the target. They, too, will be expensive ($10,000/kg at least) until and unless reusable launch vehicles prove out. One variant on ballistic missiles is very long-range artillery delivered from electromagnetic rail guns (provided that guidance and control elements are engineered to withstand the initial G- forces generated on firing). Another variant is to use a large and very heavily armored sea-based platform as a host for long-range artillery or missiles.
Remotely controlled ground-based missiles offer the advantage of rapid delivery from short distances and can thus service short- term targets. Their use, however, requires either initial control of the terrain or some surreptitious method of delivering and emplacing these weapons.
A speculative way of engaging ground systems is through lasers from space (possibly space-based but more likely ground-based reflected off space-based mirrors). Lasers have the advantage of near-instant response, but they may infringe on treaties, and several tricky engineering problems remain to be solved. The location of ground-based lasers would be impossible to hide. Enemy targets, for their part, can be protected with obscurants and mirrors of their own.
Essentially, stand-off systems are worthwhile for large, fixed targets and expensive platforms that, once exposed, stay exposed for long periods of time. They are less than satisfactory for inexpensive targets, those generating short-lived signatures, or those that are exposed briefly (e.g., between hiding).
In general, the United States has already gone about as far as it ought to in replacing dumb rounds with smart ones wherever the latter are more expensive to use. For some targets, such as sprawling logistics sites or advancing dismounted forces, dumb rounds remain the appropriate choice of munitions. Prosecuting them with PGMs or long-range dumb rockets is costly and largely ineffective. Instead, U.S. forces need to maintain survivable in- theater systems capable of delivering dumb ordnance efficiently. A reasonable guess is that keeping our bombers hidden will require the ability to target enemy radars coupled with the other side's slowness in engineering bistatic radars and alternative sensing devices (e.g., acoustic detection). Keeping our own artillery hidden will be a contest between our operational stealth and their sensors, to include UAVs.
More often than not U.S. forces will fight in coalitions; historically, the most common types have linked U.S. expeditionary forces and the forces of a beleaguered ally. These coalitions have had both horizontal components ( two brigades in combined operations) and vertical components (United States providing the predominant amount of air power, while local forces provide more ground troops).
Our eyesight will permit future coalitions to be far more vertical, which is more than just as well in the absence of future great power conflict that would otherwise justify putting large U.S. forces at risk. The essence of a vertical coalition is that local allies would supply the forces and the firepower; the U.S. military would supply the information that would permit their $10,000 to $100,000 rounds to approach near-perfect kill probabilities. One possibility is to outfit our allies with seeker heads with software designed to home in on targets based on encrypted signals generated from information that we supply externally (thus, unlike the Stinger missiles we provided to the Afghan rebels, such instruments would be near useless when turned against us or an ally if we no longer feed them). We would supply overall intelligence on the whereabouts and movements of distant echelons. Our overhead systems (both space and air breathing) would permit pinpointing of enemy platforms. Our distributed sensor systems would be put in place to operate, analyze, and convert data into fire-control solutions. This would permit friendly forces to take precise measure of the enemy, providing them with real-time one-shot, one-kill capability. We might even control the targeting once they have fielded the weapon.
Vertical coalitions provide many advantages over horizontal ones. By reducing the number of U.S. forces at risk (special operators, significantly, aside), we would have far more flexibility to intervene at lower thresholds before little problems become big ones (not to mention to test our information-based warfare systems more frequently and against a wider range of opposition). By removing our forces from the theater, we deprive smaller opponents of rallying points, and larger opponents of targets against which they might use weapons of mass destruction. Reducing the need to move forces long distances economizes our requirement for scarce and expensive power projection forces. In some cases, the United States might be able to tilt the contest to one side without unambiguous proof that we had intervened at all. The use of stand-off sensors as a substitute for forces also frees us from the necessity of overseas bases; they permit more operations to be planned and conducted from international waters.
That said, vertical coalitions are no panacea. In operations where we lack allies (Just Cause), multiplying zero force still equals zero. In Desert Storm a very high level of multiplication would have been required to permit Kuwait and Saudi Arabia alone to equal Iraq. Vertical coalitions require more intensive information exchange than horizontal coalitions and thus more difficult C4I (as well as operational security) problems. Fuzing data from our stand-off systems, for instance, and any local sensors they might have would present a large systems integration problem that we and they might not have a chance to practice beforehand.
The more we know about the other side, the more economical our strikes against it can be; if we can paralyze the head -- a strategy that entails command-and-control warfare -- we need not take on the arms. Alternatively, if our forces knew exactly where enemy electronics sat, we could disable them through a variety of soft kill methods (ignoring, however, the difficulties of battle damage assessment). The result is less bloodshed all around and, presumably, an easier time persuading the other side to come to terms.
Unfortunately, a large share of the information necessary for such warfare is not available from the usual sensors -- it takes humint, a commodity with a supply not likely to grow at rates that characterize information technologies in general. True, analyses of radio-electronic emissions, or network traffic statistics might shed light on how the other side's information systems work, but technology also provides ways for the other side to disperse command centers, encrypt communications, and otherwise confuse electronic collection by propagating electronic clutter.
Tomorrow's communications environment, however, offers a novel means by which information warfare could disarm foes with far less bloodshed. In the Gulf War's latter stages we were able to persuade Iraqis to flee their tanks by convincing them they all were targets. Using this template, suppose U.S. forces broadcast the identity and location of platforms and then destroyed them. After the correlation between having one's coordinates show up on the screen and being destroyed has been sufficiently demonstrated, it may be enough simply to broadcast the identity and location of every found target; those who read their death warrant on the tube could be persuaded to abandon their vehicles, saving their blood and our weaponry.
There is little doubt that technology can substitute for human intervention in enforcing peace particularly in demilitarized zones otherwise used for invasion corridors. In the 1970s, a U.S. defense contractor used a sequence of sensors to monitor the Egyptian-Israeli frontier.
Visibility gives peace operations a new dimension beyond indications and warnings (that is, beyond situational awareness). Visibility allows the near instantaneous conversion of platforms to targets. Hitherto, violators across an observed zone lost a few minutes, or at most, hours of surprise. Visibility strips them of cover and leaves them vulnerable to precision-guided munitions; it links presence to certain visibility as the PGM revolution linked visibility to certain death.
More generally, such data permit both sides to speak from a single core image of the zone (even if one or both sides supplements it with their own sensors). If disputes arise, they at least do so from a common base of evidence and are that much more resolvable. Making imagery sufficiently detailed and providing all of it as collected deflects criticism that the provider (the United States) is presenting an outdated or even selective view of the zone to make a point.
One drawback is that our fielding our best stuff shows everyone the acuity of our systems. Conversely, by then, our edge may no longer be in sensors, but in pattern recognition and data fusion. We can show people what we can make out, but leave unsaid what we can in fact see.
Most of the above analysis is robust against changes in two assumptions -- the size of the battlespace and a defensive orientation -- but a sophisticated enemy that alters its strategy by assuming that we can see everything can limit what our DBK buys us.
Technically speaking, a larger box increases the bandwidth and assets required to achieve the same level of visibility. If the other side's visibility increases correspondingly, it lengthens the stand-off distance.
The most frequent critique of the 200-nm limitation is that, while it covers the tactical theater (e.g., the KTO, the central Korean peninsula, Bosnia), it tends to leave out the center of gravity for the other side (e.g., Baghdad, Pyongyang, and Belgrade). Yet the kind of visibility that technology (as opposed to better humint and analysis) affords over the next 20 years is unlikely to affect the strategic bombing campaign very much. The targets we could not find (e.g., nuclear facilities) were those we could see but not identify. Everything else (e.g., headquarters buildings, power infrastructure, power grids and factories) is already visible.
The more interesting question is an expansion of a virtual visibility unlimited by distance, or the ability to understand the other side's information architecture and the enemy's ability to target ours. This issue breeds optimists and pessimists. On the one hand, increased networking allows remote mischief makers to play havoc with U.S. systems. On the other, technology permits such systems to be made invulnerable in ways that, for instance, a tank cannot be made invulnerable. Today's gaps in U.S. systems stem from complacency, not technology. For instance, the 1994 hacker attack on Rome Air Development Center exploited a design flaw in the same Unix program that hosted the 1988 Internet Worm incident. As for attacking overseas systems, the United States has many people capable of understanding how computers are wired and few people who understand how societies are wired into computers -- as an example, who can explain why Japan has few internets? Knowing the value, to the enemy, of what we can destroy goes beyond identification of the target system.
Visibility alters many of the differences between being on the offensive and being on the defensive. Traditionally, the offense could better concentrate firepower at a time and place of its own choosing. Visibility plus stand-off systems, however, largely nullifies that capability; force concentration is no longer a prerequisite to fire concentration. Usually the offense has the power of surprise and shock, but again, DBK should minimize the confusion (if not the fear) that gives surprise and shock its power.
Correspondingly, however, vision gives the defense two strong advantages. Whoever owns the terrain at the outset of conflict is in a better position to have the terrain wired for sensors, local positioning systems, and communications. Also, as noted, movement creates signature.
What if U.S. forces started with troops already in theater and forced to defend themselves? The oft-cited problems of confusing our forces and those of the other side in close engagements can be countered by IFF systems that rely on continuous and automatic positional reporting. Since troops in place mean some supplies in place, the problem of running supplies into theater is at least partially solved. The real problem is more likely to be political; our forces might be inhibited from shifting from close-in combat to stand-off combat (much less to vertical coalitions) by the fear that our allies might be demoralized by the process.
It remains quite plausible that U.S. forces could detect, track, identify, and target every specifically military hostile platform (and/or vehicle) in the box fast enough to destroy it with precision-guided munitions. Demonstration of that capability would logically make nations abjure the use of industrial-era methods to coerce or occupy other nations. This is not tantamount to the end of military aggression, although, in itself, it is a significant achievement.
The largest gap in awareness would be the persistent difficulty of distinguishing military from their civilian counterparts in commercial practice. A pickup or jeep, for instance, might be far less effective than a tank, but if the Bushmaster or portable missile system inside it can be sufficiently obscured, such vehicles can still be potent against police or lightly armed military forces. Urban warfare would still be extremely difficult to sort out cleanly. With work, passenger airliners can be modified to carry weapons, and cargo ships can carry torpedo and vertical launch systems without a great signature.
Thus even foes who would resort to war for conventional ends (the control of peoples and territories not theirs) might seek unconventional methods of doing so. The trick in employing such substitutions is to mask indicators of military activity. Such a shift requires both different operations as well as different equipment. A pickup truck may appear to be a civilian item but a coordinated charge of pickups across a desert toward a fortified point tends to resemble a charge of tanks more than it resembles normal commerce (or even summer weekends in the California deserts). A fleet of 18-wheelers overwhelming a border guard would be assumed to be a military attack despite its bizarre guise.
A nation wishing to bring military force to bear on another would therefore be forced to adopt methods associated with low- intensity warfare:
Carefully placed, such actions may induce tensions but not call for physical retaliation. At some propitious political point, the aggressor may burst forth using weapons of war that act militarily but until used, look civilian. Such methods may succeed without triggering the response that ostensibly military actions might take.
Military operations, in general, would gravitate to high- density environments despite their ability to slow forces of all kinds. Operations would be a constant search for cover and thus would favor forests, jungles, and cities. War would seek commerce as its visual shield -- an attack of jeeps otherwise hidden in everyday village trade, arriving at the proper point in time for an offensive operation, could be effective, although a high degree of skill in coordinating the attack may be required. River commerce can turn ugly quickly. Airports can be attacked by the precise discharge of armed troops emerging from the everyday chaos of air transport.
These actions make the pessimistic assumption that a target's immune system can normally and clearly distinguish invading antigens from its own cells. More frequently, the aggressor's task is eased by the continuous presence of elements in a friendly country, which for political or ethnic reasons might tolerate the political aims of another. Short of declaring large portions of itself a free fire zone, the defenses against such invasion are below the threshold that omniscience implies.
Nevertheless, if U.S. forces intervene in such chaos, its ability to see will be of value, but only in limited spheres. We may be able to detect and defeat local concentrations of force -- as long as these points can be defined in time. However, forestalling smaller scale applications of force requires humint.
Nevertheless, if U.S. forces can blunt conventional military attacks, thereby forcing an aggressor to fall back on unconventional attacks, this is in itself a significant achievement. The force structure that is particularly efficient at coercing and conquering neighbors can be eaten whole by a U.S. military with dominant battlespace knowledge. This leaves a force structure that must operate through subtle but deadly means may be insufficient to exercise regional power and seize and occupy territory. More generally, light forces that can evade U.S. systems are insufficient to outgun forces on the other side. The more that our ability to see forces a difficult choice between these two force structures, the better the chances for regional stability. A high-low punch makes it difficult for either light or heavy forces to survive. More generally, a nation might not be able to afford both types of forces; more tellingly, the command- control-and-culture necessary to support one method of warfighting may be completely incompatible with command-control-and-culture appropriate to the other.
A second great advantage, which follows from the first, is that unconventional aggression is more difficult to couple with coercion -- which, in many cases, is the real goal. An Iraqi tank force, which had just taken Kuwait for lunch, may have the ostensible capability of coercing Saudi Arabia to conduct its oil marketing to Iraq's liking. If, however, Iraq had to rely on unconventional aggression to make the same point, its coercion would lose much of its psychological power. Since war is often used to give credibility to coercion, a capability resident in U.S. forces that removed coercion would reduce the incidence of conflict.
The third great advantage, of particular importance as Asia replaces Europe as the cockpit of great power confrontation, is that the infiltration of forces across seas is far more visible than its infiltration across land. Simply put, in an increasingly transparent world, a seaborne threat is far less credible than a land-borne threat. Its best expression, a naval blockade, is never quick, resembles a siege in its visible side-effects, and requires a large and thus expensive blue-water submarine force (or very long-range rocket and missile bombardment) to carry off. Asian countries may be ripe for rivalry, but without the physical means to convert this rivalry into successful warfare, such tensions are unlikely to be converted into crises that call forth a U.S. response.
U.S. forces can expect to enjoy dominant battlespace knowledge in major regional contingencies for the foreseeable future. The extent of such dominance will be limited by the persistence of clutter and stealth in tomorrow's environments, the vulnerability of information systems to semantic deception, and the enormous data-flow requirements (coupled with limited radio-electronic bandwidth) needed by synoptic systems. Cue-filter-pinpoint discrimination systems will ease this last problem, however.
U.S. possession of DBK would not by itself translate into assured victory under all circumstances. Our society is generally more sensitive to casualties, and our forces have to go farther to engage in battle; for example, We need to reduce our sizable logistics chain.
Investments that permit U.S. forces to approach full battlefield awareness reduce the effectiveness of (and thus deter) certain kinds of threats. The ability to combine stand-off and intrusive sensors to see most military platforms can force potential bullies to abandon the easiest paths to dominating their neighbors. Although second-best methods of causing havoc are certainly threats, they are harder and more expensive to employ and tend to work with far less certainty and speed. Thus, forcing others to resort to second-best methods can, to a large extent, decouple the deadly synergy between coercion and aggression.
U.S. forces are also becoming more visible; a fact that affects both how perfect visibility is achieved and exploited. Replacing large visible sensors by networks of smaller, less visible sensors permits omniscience to be preserved without our sensors being targets. Yet, the problem of getting steel on briefly visible targets from far away remains. Vertical coalitions, in which the U.S. supplies the eyes, and local allies the arms may be one solution to the riddle.
Does the criticality of DBK necessarily require we shift more of our defense resources to achieving it? In one sense, the tide of the information revolution is stronger than any swimming we do relative to it (even the cheapest desktop computer on the market outperforms the top-of-the-line desktop of 1990). Otherwise, investment remains an issue of which rather than whether. The incremental value of some information investments (notably dispersed sensors, agile C3, and data fusion) is still high while comparable investments in other technologies (e.g., fighter aircraft) may not offer the same advantages. However, some information investments may no longer be all that cost effective either (e.g., multimedia C2 systems, and large complex sensors whether airborne, seaborne, or spaceborne).
As a broader issue, the military-technical revolution taking place within U.S. could also take place among those overseas. Its transformation into a revolution in military affairs with all that implies for operations, doctrine, and organization has yet to transpire, but the payoff is substantial.