The Navy in an Antiaccess World

Clark A. Murdock

Early in this volume, the proliferation of antiaccess (or area-denial) systems and strategies was identified as a key military feature of globalization. The Quadrennial Defense Review Report (QDR Report) identifies the antiaccess challenge—“Projecting and sustaining U.S. forces in distant anti-access or area-denial environments, and defeat anti-access threats”—as one of the six critical “emerging strategic and operational challenges” that will focus and drive the transformation of the U.S. military:¹

In the past, the Department of Defense (DOD) has been somewhat in denial about the antiaccess challenge. Many of these capabilities are, in fact, already part of the current threat environment. But the QDR Report’s full embrace of the imperative to change is a significant step forward.

After first analyzing the general nature of the U.S. power projection versus antiaccess competition, this chapter addresses how the U.S. Navy should meet the antiaccess challenge.

Projecting Power and Presence into Antiaccess Environments³

How the United States projects power and presence into an antiaccess environment will be central to the global security dynamic for at least 2 decades. All grand strategies—such as balance of power, containment, and deterrence—depend both on capability and will. That the United States has the capability to project power into any regional theater is beyond question. What is at issue is America’s willingness to do so. The question of what constitutes unacceptable losses to Americans in the pursuit of what kinds of interests has been tested by regional aggressors and would-be hegemons.

Americans clearly will support high-intensity, military operations (such as Operations Desert Storm and Allied Force) of important regional interests as long as casualties are minimal and the campaign is successful. In the immediate wake of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, 83 percent of those polled by The Washington Post backed military action against the perpetrators, even if it led to war, and two-thirds of the respondents favored going to war even if it should prove a long one with large numbers of U.S. military casualties—including 45 percent who “strongly supported” it.⁴ However, just as clearly (consider Somalia), Americans will not support an inconclusive or ineffective military operation involving casualties “disproportionate” to minor U.S. interests.

In both Desert Storm and Allied Force, U.S. opponents tried to inflict casualties on American forces but failed, largely because the United States refused to engage in a manner that exposed U.S. and allied forces to significant losses. In the Gulf War, ground forces were not committed until Iraqi forces were decimated by the air campaign. In Allied Force, the air campaign was conducted beyond the effective range of Serbian air defenses. The results were minimal or no allied military casualties, even at the cost of longer campaigns (no one envisioned a 78-day air campaign against Serbia) or at the expense of more ambitious political objectives (such as the removal of Saddam Husayn from power).

In light of American (and coalition) successes, the offense-defense competition between the United States and its potential regional opponents has turned asymmetric. The United States can now project power and employ force at politically acceptable costs to the President. Unable to directly defend against superior U.S. conventional forces, potential opponents are acquiring antiaccess capabilities (in the case of China, advanced conventional capabilities; in other cases, biological and chemical weapons and their means of delivery) to increase their ability to inflict higher casualties on U.S. power projection forces. The United States, in turn, must increase the survivability of its forces in the face of increasing antiaccess threats. Reducing the vulnerability of U.S. power projection forces is not only intrinsically worthy—after all, the lives of young American men and women are at stake—but is also critical to America’s global role. Although many (including myself) believe the American aversion to casualties has been overstated, why test it? Once an adversary discovers what the actual American tolerance is (that is, what kinds of costs Americans will accept for what kinds of interests), the limits of U.S. power will have been defined. From a strategic perspective, it is sensible to maintain strategic ambiguity about the real limits to U.S. power.

The U.S. ability to ensure that U.S. power projection forces remain highly survivable even as antiaccess capabilities grow and proliferate will ultimately dissuade potential opponents from further efforts. The vulnerability of U.S. forces to antiaccess attacks increases as they come in closer to engage the enemy. The U.S. capability to defeat large-scale aggression should reside largely in forces capable of operating initially from beyond adversary killing zones. If U.S. power projection forces have to come deep into the theater to engage, the United States, in effect, is putting its center of gravity (American casualties) into the adversary’s wheelhouse. For the next couple of decades, highly survivable means standoff and (good) stealth.

Future large-scale military campaigns will be phased campaigns; the United States will fight at a distance until it is safe to close. Improving standoff, force protection, and forcible entry capabilities will shorten the time required before land forces can close, but large forces deployed deep in the theater during peacetime will remain too vulnerable to surprise attacks. U.S. power projection forces must work patiently from the outside in, as they first punish aggression and take down adversary antiaccess capability before closing with the enemy.

Deploying some forces forward in critical areas, however, is essential as an expression of U.S. commitment and willingness to protect its regional interests. “Trip-wires” helped contain the Soviet Union during the Cold War and will constrain would-be hegemons in the 21st century. Forward-deployed forces also can serve as a casus belli; Americans will support fighting anyone who kills many Americans, regardless of how important U.S. interests in the region are. Deter forward is not the same thing as defend forward.

The presence of U.S. forces in a region (unless they are just passing through) sends a message to everyone in the region that U.S. interests are of such importance that it may use military force to defend or advance them. The act of deploying forces forward during peacetime also signals an awareness (on the part of the United States) that its interests in the region are being threatened. If there is no threat, why send military forces? This message, if credible, should reassure friends and allies and deter potential threats to those interests. U.S. forward presence makes the United States a global power. It reassures allies and friends; it sends a message to potential aggressors; and it positions the United States for rapid response to smaller-scale contingencies and humanitarian relief missions. U.S. presence forces are there to be seen and deal with lesser contingencies. They address the will side of the U.S. deterrent against large-scale aggression.

U.S. presence forces should not be shaped for defending forward against large-scale aggression. Requiring forward stationed and deployed forces to defeat large-scale aggression with minimum reinforcement ensures that a regional aggressor will have many lucrative “antiaccess” targets to hit at the outset of the conflict. The potential payoff (to the aggressor) would be twofold. First, it would send a message to the American people: “Are U.S. interests here worth these kinds of costs?” Second, it could disable U.S. forces to defeat the aggressor’s subsequent attack. Much in the same way that Saddam Husayn was criticized (in rogue state circles) for giving the United States 5 months to build up its forces in Southwest Asia, Slobodan Milosevic was criticized for not attacking the 20-plus bases from which the coalition mounted Allied Force. The next regional aggressor is likely to attack U.S. assets in theater early in the conflict in order to test the will of the United States to intervene. Since large forward-deployed forces in peacetime will always be vulnerable to surprise attacks, the United States should not have its ability to defeat large-scale aggression within range of the enemy. U.S. presence forces should raise the bar for large-scale aggression but not tempt potential aggressors into believing that it could disable through preemption the main portion of America’s capability for defeating large-scale aggression.

U.S. power projection forces, on the other hand, must be highly lethal and highly survivable, capable of frustrating an aggressor’s plans and inflicting great pain. These forces address the capability side of the deterrent against large-scale aggression. Conducting rapid global strike strictly from the continental United States (CONUS), however, makes it too difficult to mass the fires needed to halt aggression. U.S. power projection capabilities would be greatly enhanced if the United States could operate from robust, heavily defended, assured access bases on the periphery of a regional theater. The United States would initially wage standoff war from these periphery bases and then use them as staging areas for follow-on forces. For example, bombers operating from Guam, western Australia, and Diego Garcia could cover the vast Asian theater. Defending these periphery bases from missile attacks would be critical but much easier than defending closer-in bases from heavier antiaccess attacks.

Neither presence nor power projection in an antiaccess world should be viewed as lesser-included cases of each other. Moving more Air Force firepower into standoff systems could begin a division of labor among the military services across the spectrum of conflict. Although naval standoff systems (missile-carrying ships and submarines) are an important global strike asset, the Navy-Marine team is critical to global presence and more than capable of handling challenging smaller-scale contingencies. Air Force standoff forces and strategically mobile, CONUS-based Army maneuver forces should be optimized for the high end of the spectrum, although lighter Army-Air Force forces provide an important land-based element of global presence. In the midterm, space provides the global surveillance that enables all U.S. forces, but in the long term will provide silver bullet global strike assets. Greater role specialization from the services will be necessary to ensure that the U.S. military as a whole can project power and presence effectively and affordably in the 21st century.

The Emerging QDR Construct

At first blush, the QDR construct for forward presence seems inconsistent with the argument made here that U.S. presence forces should be shaped for handling lesser contingencies, not for defending forward against large-scale aggression. In describing how the U.S. military global posture would be reoriented to meet new challenges (including the antiaccess one), the QDR said that one of its goals is “to render forward forces capable of defeating an adversary’s military and political objectives with only modest reinforcement.”⁵ The QDR Report, however, envisions new forms of forward presence that would include “immediately employable supplement[s]” to forward deployed and stationed forces:⁶

An earlier draft version of the QDR Report expressed the need for new forms of forward presence in even stronger terms. Although the stronger verbiage was excised from the final report and does not necessarily reflect official DOD policy, it does indicate that significant segments of DOD are sympathetic toward the argument that new forms of forward presence are indeed needed. According to the earlier draft, “in an information age that enables rapid, networked operations,” forward forces can be augmented by immediately employable supplemental forces (that are either globally distributed or CONUS-based) and are capable of creating strategic and operational effects “almost instantly both from within as well as from beyond a theater.”⁸ The draft continued by implying that no longer would DOD measure “forward presence in terms of the troops, naval tonnage, and the number of aircraft visible to the eye in any given theater” but that new measures of effectiveness were needed for these “new forms of forward presence.”⁹

The final QDR Report clearly recognizes that the ability of the U.S. military to project firepower rapidly, massively, and precisely into a theater is growing. In its effort to increase the deterrent impact of its forward forces, it has effectively broadened the definition of forward presence (what I call presence forces) to include rapidly deployable forces. Broadening the definition of presence forces is exactly right; potential aggressors must understand that the United States has an immediately employable force to frustrate their aggression. U.S. forward forces should be capable of handling conflicts short of major aggression—a carrier battlegroup or amphibious ready group represents a substantial capability—but the capability to defeat large-scale aggression is increasingly resident in U.S. rapidly deployable power projection forces, of which naval forward presence forces are but one part.

The U.S. Navy in an Antiaccess World

In its April 2000 Strategic Planning Guidance, the Navy identified “combat-credible forward presence” as its “enduring contribution” to the Nation.¹⁰ According to this document, “sea-based, self-contained and self-sustaining” naval expeditionary forces project power and influence through the means of “Knowledge Superiority and Forward Presence,” defined as follows:

The issue, as I have often debated with Navy officers, is “combat credible” to do what? Even though the Navy often says that it is the Army and the Air Force that win the Nation’s war, the Navy clearly wants a part of the action:

The Navy enables its war-winning sister services by providing them “assured access” to the forward bases and ports they require. This is a commitment that even the Navy recognizes as flying into the face of the antiaccess threat:

“Knocking down the antiaccess door” (as one Navy briefing expressed it) in order to give the Air Force and Navy access to close-in bases and ports early in the conflict makes little strategic sense. After noting the widespread proliferation of antiaccess capabilities, driven by the need of lesser powers to focus military investments, Owen Cote states flatly, “Fixed targets on the surface will be indefensible if within range of an opponent’s likely arsenal of precision TBMs [tactical ballistic missiles] and cruise missiles, for as long as the supply of those weapons last.”¹⁴ Gaining access to indefensible bases is not how to fight large-scale aggression.

This is bad news for the Army and Air Force. The news for the Navy is not much better. Cote continues, “Even mobile targets will be at much greater risk of prompt destruction if the opponent retains access to wide-area battlefield surveillance assets.”¹⁵ As Steven Kosiak, Andrew Krepinevich, and Michael Vickers observed, today’s antiaccess threat to naval forces—“a mix of diesel submarines, sophisticated anti-ship mines, land- and sea-based high-speed anti-ship cruise missiles, and land-based aircraft and ballistic missiles”—is tough, but the future threat is even worse:

This is far from a benign threat environment.

The Navy excelled at defending itself when it was a blue-water navy, but it must now fight in the littorals, where it is not only easier for adversaries to acquire surface ships as targets but they are within range of greater array of land- and sea-based capabilities as well. The proliferating threats to naval surface vessels—from SS–N–22 Sunburn antiship cruise missiles to sophisticated naval mines—is rapidly reducing the survivability delta between bases that move at zero knots per hour to those that move at 25 knots per hour. Everything forward is becoming a biological and chemical weapons magnet. Although the Navy is investing in active and passive defenses, increasing global transparency and the proliferation of antiaccess capabilities is outpacing the force protection capabilities of U.S. power projection forces, including naval surface vessels. The Navy needs a new paradigm for projecting presence and power in an antiaccess world.

Projecting Naval Presence

The growing vulnerability of naval presence does not mean that virtual presence is the answer. One cannot do gunboat diplomacy without a gunboat. From a purely military perspective, the United States can see who is doing what to whom and hurt them badly without being there. But drawing a line in the sand and threatening to wreak havoc from the skies if a regional rogue crosses that line invites failure; it passes the initiative to the aggressor and stresses our will or resolve to carry out threats. Being there does not always solve the will problem—consider U.S. “air occupations” of Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1992 and of northern Iraq in 1996—but it can help. The United States has global interests, but it is hard to advance these interests without a global presence.

The primary purpose for deploying U.S. forces in a region during peacetime is political: their very presence signals that the United States is a power in that region and intends to remain so. The more continuous the presence in a particular region is, the stronger the message. For example, U.S. forces stationed permanently in Japan and Korea leave no room for ambiguity: the United States will defend Japan and Korea if attacked. Less permanent forms of presence, rotational deployments, and temporary deployments for exercises and training leave more room for miscalculation, which can be offset by the continuity of the deployments.

The QDR Report notes that Asia, which “contains a volatile mix of both rising and declining regional powers,” is “gradually emerging as a region susceptible to large-scale military competition.”¹⁷ The vast distances of the Asian theater put a premium on naval forward presence, in part because the U.S. Navy budget includes funds for its presence operations. The Air Force and Army, on the other hand, not only must fund the extra resources required for rotational or temporary deployments but also must suffer the vagaries of the military airlift system. But even the Navy finds it difficult to “show the flag” anywhere (except in Japan) in the huge Asian theater on a continuous basis. Naval forward presence forces spend far too much time crossing oceans that no one covets. The carrier is widely viewed as the flagship of U.S. forward presence, and its presence in Asia should be increased.

Homeporting a second carrier in Asia, perhaps in northern or western Australia, would greatly enhance the U.S. presence in Asia.¹⁸ Not only would homeporting a second carrier significantly enhance carrier time forward,¹⁹ establishing a new permanent installation in Asia, but it also would signal clearly and loudly that the United States was in Asia to stay. As an alternative, the United States should consider ending the requirement for a continuous presence of a carrier in the Mediterranean. Europe is both a small theater and hosts several U.S. Army and Air Force units. The U.S. commitment to European security is not in doubt; the U.S. commitment to Asian security is. The QDR Report calls for the Navy to “increase its aircraft carrier battlegroup presence in the Western Pacific and...explore options for homeporting an additional three to four surface combatants, and guided cruise missile submarines (SSGNs), near that area.”²⁰ That is a good start. As Asia’s importance rises, U.S interests will grow, as should the U.S. naval presence.

As argued previously, U.S. naval presence forces should be shaped largely for smaller-scale contingencies and humanitarian relief missions, not for defeating large-scale aggressions. This does not mean that the Navy will need less force protection. As symbols of American military might, U.S. Navy assets will always be a favorite target for terrorist attacks, as seen most recently in the 2000 attack on the USS Cole. U.S. involvement in smaller-scale contingencies will always carry the risk of reprisal attacks. The Navy’s improving force protection capabilities should be increasingly capable of defense against small-scale attacks.

Although the QDR Report eschews shaping and engagement, terms favored by the previous administration, there is no downgrading of the importance of U.S. forward presence that plays a key role in three of the four Defense Policy Goals—assuring allies and friends, deterring threats to U.S. interests, and defeating aggression if deterrence fails (dissuading future military competition is the fourth goal).²¹ The QDR Report, however, maintains that

DOD will focus its peacetime overseas activities on security cooperation to help create favorable balances of military power in critical areas of the world and to deter aggression and coercion. A particular aim of DOD security cooperation efforts will be to ensure access, interoperability, and intelligence cooperation, while expanding the range of preconflict options available to counter coercive threats, deter aggression, or favorably prosecute war on U.S. terms.²³

Being there still matters immensely, but Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld prefers a focus on “security cooperation,” not engagement for engagement’s sake.

In addition to being prepared for a wide variety of potential missions short of large-scale aggression, U.S. naval forces deployed forward will contribute significantly in several important areas.

Prewar Situational Awareness. In line with its embrace of “Knowledge Superiority” as one of its two “means” (the other is forward presence), the Navy is investing heavily in the command, control, communications, computers, and intelligence (C4I) capabilities that enable network-centric warfare. While the Navy focuses on how the knowledge gained from its forward presence will help it conduct its missions, the Navy recognizes, as it stated in the 2000 Strategic Planning Guidance, that the “U.S. Armed Forces...will benefit from a regional knowledge base that is built and enhanced by day-to-day naval presence, familiarity with forward operating environments, and foreign-area expertise.”²⁴ Previously acquired “close-in” knowledge is, in fact, more valuable when the fight against large-scale aggression begins at standoff ranges.

Sea-Based Theater Missile Defense. U.S. power projection forces should operate initially from robust, heavily defended bases on the periphery of contested theaters. Defending these periphery bases will be much easier than defending close-in bases and ports from much thicker antiaccess attacks. But in some instances, the United States will want to defend an ally or friend against missile attack, even if the scale of attack threatens to overwhelm U.S. defenses. Sea-based TMD will play a critical role in these scenarios.

Antiterrorist Operations. In the wake of the horrific attacks of September 11, 2001, the United States has committed itself to a war against global terrorism that will probably have no end. New concepts of operations for attacking terrorists will require new mixes of capabilities—special operations forces, UAVs, distributed sensor networks, and so on—that can be hosted on forward-deployed naval assets that can operate autonomously from international waters. The U.S. Marine Corps announced within 2 weeks of the attack that it would reactivate the 4th Marine Expeditionary Brigade as a specialized counterterrorism unit of 4,800 personnel, which would include the existing Chemical/Biological Incident Response Force Marines.²⁵ The urgency of the campaign against terrorism will undoubtedly fuel a major growth in sea-based antiterrorist capabilities.

In short, there is no lack of critical missions for U.S. naval presence forces. In fact, what the United States needs is more naval forward presence in more places. This is what a global power needs to stay a global power.

Naval Power Projection

In confronting large-scale aggression, U.S. power projection forces must initially fight from a distance, as they first punish aggression and take down an adversary’s antiaccess capability before closing with the enemy. The Navy, of course, already has substantial standoff capability in its conventional missile-carrying submarines and surface ships. The Navy’s Tomahawk cruise missile has been prominently featured in several campaigns and retaliatory raids. The Navy is also planning to convert four Trident ballistic missiles submarines to conventional missile carriers, which will greatly augment the Navy’s standoff capabilities (particularly if the nuclear-powered cruise missile attack submarines retain the same crew rotation policy they did as nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines). Naval standoff capabilities have proven particularly useful early in a conflict in attacks on the enemy’s integrated air defenses. The Navy, however, should accelerate its acquisition of a land-attack missile to give it a prompt target kill capability.

Navy carriers and amphibious ready groups also project power, but they have to deploy deep into the theater in order to apply force against land targets. Modernizing with the planned Joint Strike Fighter helps somewhat, but its range (at 900 miles, 200 more than the Air Force) is too short for severe antiaccess environments, and it is not stealthy enough for advanced surface-to-air missile environments. In future large-scale campaigns, naval surface vessels are simply too valuable and too vulnerable to risk forward early in the conflict. That is probably true even for the notion of a Streetfighter warship, which would be a smaller, faster, presumably more expendable ship. For a casualty-adverse America, however, there is no such thing as an expendable ship, and in the event of an actual large-scale war, the United States, in the same manner it rejected an amphibious attack in the Persian Gulf War, will be reluctant to bring naval surface ships forward into the teeth of an adversary’s still functioning antiaccess capability.

Navy carriers and amphibious vehicles, however, will be in the force for decades. The introduction of new technologies—intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance UAVs, particularly a stealthy variant; combat UAVs; unmanned underwater vehicles; and smaller and cheaper land-attack missiles—could significantly increase their standoff capability, although it would come at the expense of shorter-range capabilities. The Navy’s introduction of its Cooperative Engagement Capability will greatly increase the ability of its fleet to fight as a distributed network, making it much easier to integrate new longer-range assets.

Final Thought

The U.S. Navy will have to change to meet the challenges of an antiaccess environment, but less profoundly than its sister services. It does not need forward bases and ports from which to operate. The Navy, which embraced the presence role in the 1993 Bottom-Up Review (BUR), will remain the Nation’s premier presence force. Its role in high-intensity conflict has been declining, but most of the demand for the Nation’s military forces has been in areas where the Navy and Marines excel—peacetime overseas activities (now focused on security cooperation), smaller-scale contingencies, and humanitarian relief missions. In 1993, the BUR used presence as a force structure justifier for the first time. But in 2001, the QDR Report said that DOD will now use smaller-scale contingencies as a force-planning tool, not as lesser-included cases of its warfighting capabilities.

The antiaccess world provides serious challenges to the Navy at the high end of the spectrum of conflict, even as the demand for its capabilities on the lower end seems to be growing.²⁶ Conducting the forward presence mission as if it were our primary response to high-intensity conflict is a recipe for disaster, both for the naval forces involved and our Nation.

Notes

¹ U.S. Department of Defense, Quadrennial Defense Review Report (Washington, DC: Department of Defense, September 30, 2001) (hereafter referred to as QDR Report), 30. The other critical challenges include protecting the U.S. homeland, forces abroad, allies, and friends from nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons and their means of delivery; assuring information security and conducting effective information operations; providing persistent surveillance and rapid engagement with high-volume precision strike against all targets under all conditions; enhancing the capability and survivability of space assets; and developing an interoperable, joint C4ISR architecture. [BACK]

² Ibid., 31. Emphasis added. [BACK]

³ Many of the ideas in this section were first explored in Clark A. Murdock, Projecting Power and Presence into 21^st Century Asia (Washington, DC: DFI-International Paper, 2001). Office of the Secretary of Defense, Office of Net Assessment, supported the project for which that paper was written. [BACK]

⁴ The Washington Post, September 29, 2001, A14. [BACK]

⁵ QDR Report, 25. In a much earlier draft, the force planning paradigm for “deterring forward” used the phrase “with minimum reinforcement” instead of “only modest reinforcement,” a requirement sufficiently stringent that one Office of the Secretary of Defense office maintained that the U.S. Navy would need 36 carriers to meet it. [BACK]

⁶ Ibid., 26. [BACK]

⁷ Unreleased earlier draft of QDR Report (early September 2001), 38. Emphasis added. [BACK]

⁸ Ibid., 39. [BACK]

⁹ Ibid. [BACK]

¹⁰ U.S. Navy Chief of Naval Operations, Navy Strategic Planning Guidance with Long Range Planning Objectives, April 2000, 36. [BACK]

¹¹ Ibid., 19–21. [BACK]

¹² Ibid., 20. [BACK]

¹³ Ibid., 27. [BACK]

¹⁴ Owen R. Cote, Jr., “Buying ‘. . . From the Sea’: A Defense Budget for a Maritime Strategy,” in Holding the Line: U.S. Defense Alternatives for the Early 21^st Century, ed. Cindy Williams (Cambridge, MA: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 2001), 156. [BACK]

¹⁵ Ibid. [BACK]

¹⁶ Steven Kosiak, Andrew Krepinevich, and Michael Vickers, A Strategy for a Long Peace (Washington, DC: Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, January 2001), 36. [BACK]

¹⁷ QDR Report, 4. [BACK]

¹⁸ Homeporting a second carrier in Guam would also increase naval presence in Asia, but not quite as much as a port in Australia (Guam is still over 1,000 miles from theater). Moreover, the political statement made by basing a carrier in Australia would be much stronger for both the United States and Australia. [BACK]

¹⁹ Cote observes that today’s 12-carrier force with 1 homeport abroad provides 2.5 carrier battlegroups (CVBGs) forward at any one time, while an 11-carrier force with 2 homeports abroad would provide between 3.5 and 4 CVBGs forward at any one time. See Cote, 177. [BACK]

²⁰ QDR Report, 27. The U.S. Marine Corps was also told to “develop plans to shift some of its afloat prepositioned equipment from the Mediterranean toward the Indian Ocean and Persian Gulf” and to “explore the feasibility of conducting training for littoral warfare in the Western Pacific.” [BACK]

²¹ Ibid., iii–iv. [BACK]

²² Ibid., 11. [BACK]

²³ Ibid., 20. [BACK]

²⁴ U.S. Navy Chief of Naval Operations, 22. [BACK]

²⁵ Joshua S. Higgins, “Anti-Terrorism Unit Set For Activation,” October 17, 2001, accessed at <www.usmc.mil/marinelink/mcn2000.nsf/>. Article reference number 200110221060. [BACK]

²⁶ For a discussion and redefinition of the concept of the spectrum of conflict, see Sam J. Tangredi, “Assessing New Missions” in Transforming America’s Military, ed. Hans Binnendijk (Washington, DC: National Defense University Press, 2002).