Chapter 26

Globalization of Antiaccess Strategies?

Norman Friedman

Great powers such as the United States buy navies in order to assure global access, despite whatever countermeasures other countries may take. In the aftermath of the Cold War, globalization seems to have made sophisticated weaponry much more available to many potential opponents than in the past. Does this mean we are losing our ability to enforce access? What trends can we discern in the world arms market? There is certainly a great amount of new technology that, if implemented, might cause us considerable problems. However, in projecting ahead, we have a choice. We can look at the most likely future, or we can concentrate on potential enemy access to technology. If we choose the former, the future is at least mildly encouraging, if not more so. If we choose to respond to the latter, we may be unable to afford anything resembling our current capabilities. Which should it be?

Moreover, if we overemphasize the wrong categories of antiaccess weapons—perhaps by underestimating the problems of our prospective enemies—then we risk overspending on the wrong kinds of countermeasures and neglecting those weapons that we are more likely to face. There is also a dangerous potential to ignore system aspects of enemy capabilities. We naturally concentrate on the terminal engagement, in which the missile pops up over a ship’s horizon and runs in, or in which a submarine fires a torpedo, or in which a ship triggers a mine. In several such cases, it can be argued that terminal countermeasures are lacking.

Yet the battle is not between a missile and a ship, or a submarine and a ship, or a mine and a ship. It is between our fleet and an enemy. The missile or mine or submarine has to come into proximity with the ship, and to do that effectively the attacker has to detect the ship and arrange an engagement. In some very important cases, prospective enemies seem not to have appreciated the extent to which other capabilities are needed to make their missiles or mines or torpedoes effective against us. Conversely, our own countermeasures may be most effective against elements of enemy force other than the actual weapons.

Much of the current debate on military transformation is animated by the argument that U.S. forces are not sufficiently network centric. In fact, all warfare can be described in network terms, the real issue being to what extent investment is concentrated at different points in the network. That is, some sort of network connects the long-range sensors that detect, for example, a carrier and the launcher that fires a missile at her. Just as investment may be concentrated in the long-range sensors, the command and control system that makes sense of their product (that is, decides what has been seen really is a carrier and also where it is going and what it is doing), the communications network, or the antiship missiles, our countermeasures to the enemy’s capability can strike at various points in his network. Evaluation of antiaccess capability, then, must take into account both how well the enemy can negate the existing sanctuary enjoyed by ships well out beyond the enemy’s horizon and how well those ships can engage enemy land targets without losing the protection of that sanctuary.

These are not trivial issues. It seems that our potential enemies have spent very little to negate the sea sanctuary; they seem to imagine that we have to come inshore to deal with them. They may not be alone. Discussions of a new littoral warfare combatant ship carry similar assumptions. Reality, however, is that remote sensing makes standoff attack both possible and attractive. It is difficult to avoid a comparison with the Taliban in Afghanistan. Commenting on the bombing—much of it directed against critical Taliban capabilities—Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader, said that he could not stop such attacks but that the Americans would suffer “when the real ground war” began—that is, when the Americans were forced to move in masses of troops in a “real man’s” war. But by that time the coalition partners—the Northern Alliance and rebels in the Pushtun south—had already begun to move, exploiting the standoff attacks carried out by the Americans. The ground war was almost over. It seems most unlikely that massed American troops will ever be involved in Afghanistan. Perhaps the Mullah’s overall defense system lacked something. (Incidentally, much of the standoff attack had been mounted from the sea, bypassing important political defenses erected by the Taliban in nearby places like Pakistan.)

There is a strong temptation to ensure against surprise by assuming the most of enemy capabilities. Certainly past underestimates have sometimes been extremely embarrassing, as in the case of Japan in 1941. However, overestimates may well deter us from actions that are clearly in our interests. For example, overestimates of Iraqi capability probably explain why the United States took so long to act in 1990 and 1991. Although our action was ultimately successful, the image of vast U.S. forces not quite crushing Iraq gave Saddam Husayn considerable political capital within the Third World. In retrospect, scratch forces assembled in the fall of 1990 probably would have sufficed, and ending the war as early as possible might have been well worth our while. In a truly post-Cold War situation, the mass forces used in 1990 and 1991 are no longer available. Meanwhile, crises are likely to be both more frequent and more widely distributed. For example, U.S. strategy and tactics in Afghanistan have almost certainly been dictated by the absence of nearby bases and distance from the sea. In this particular case, a realistic view of the adversary made it possible for the U.S. Government to take the political decision to attack. Admittedly, given the scale of the September 11 attack, the Government could not have waited much longer, but it could have chosen a lengthy build-up with more limited attacks.

Realism matters because we cannot possibly match resources to every perceived scale of threat. It is easy to assemble threats that make current and projected forces useless, but unless those threats are plausible, they merely serve to discourage us and to distort our force structure. That applies particularly to future threats that seem, in retrospect, to have been designed to affect only particular kinds of forces.

Globalization and Defense Economics

Indeed, one key question is just how much technology, in quantitative and qualitative terms, our prospective opponents will have. In the past, the Soviets were the primary source of weapons directed against us. Presumably, globalization means both that our opponents have access to more varied sources of weaponry and that Russian- and Chinese-made equipment may incorporate Western technology, to our cost.

During the Cold War, we faced a highly militarized Soviet Union whose economy was drastically different from ours. The Soviets could and did afford to develop a very wide range of exotic military technologies, at least some of which entered production. In some important cases, we failed to understand what the Soviets were building, at considerable potential danger to us.¹ The character of the Soviet economy favored massive production runs, creating considerable surpluses of weapons and their associated platforms. These surpluses were often made available gratis to Soviet client states. Since it was the client states to which we needed naval access on a year-to-year basis, the sheer size of the Soviet military production machine was a problem for us.

On the other hand, the Soviets were apparently unable to produce computers or microchips in great quantities, to the point that it was widely claimed that one of their intercontinental ballistic missiles used chips from Western hand-held calculators, bought in quantity for just that application. Indeed, it seems in retrospect that Mikhail Gorbachev was driven into a suicidal loosening of the Soviet system largely to grow his economy enough to produce military computers on a Western scale.² Clearly, our opponents now enjoy fairly free access to computer technology, at least at the level of personal computers. There are still technology embargoes, but they cannot stop the diffusion of quite powerful chips embedded in devices such as the Sony PlayStation. Of course, whether these devices can be exploited for military purposes is another question.

So one side of globalization is access to raw technology. If there is some way in which a particular chip radically improves the performance of a given Soviet-era missile, then that improvement seems likely. The Russians themselves have been advertising upgraded versions of their missiles, using new (presumably Western) electronics. The chips involved may be quite inexpensive, but that does not make the overall upgrade inexpensive—as the cost is mainly in the software and integration (including adaptation of existing hardware). In the case of an antiship missile, there seems to be a considerable difference between first-generation hardwired weapons, which must be rebuilt completely to accommodate any major modification, and second-generation weapons incorporating internal data buses, which buffer components from each other. The Russian Styx (P–15/NATO SS–N–2) is a first-generation weapon, hence probably almost impossible to modify cheaply. So is the Exocet MM 38. However, Harpoon and Exocet MM 40 are quite clearly second-generation weapons. Both have enjoyed substantial upgrades, which are available as modifications to existing missiles (Exocet Block II, with its evasive terminal maneuvers, is a case in point). Presumably, the new Russian missiles currently on sale also incorporate data buses and, hence, can be modified.³

This aspect of globalization can cause us considerable problems because we will probably face hybrid weapons incorporating Western electronics and emitting signals that we have not previously encountered. To the extent that countermeasures are tailored to particular missile seekers, we may find that emissions may often be unrecognizable and that soft countermeasures often fail. In a larger sense, identification of friend or foe will become more and more difficult—simply because friends may turn out to be using ex-Soviet weaponry, whereas enemies may often be armed with Western equipment. In fact, these issues are part of a larger trend in which software-controlled electronic emissions are more difficult to recognize automatically.⁴

At least as important is the economic aspect of globalization. A great deal of flashy technology is on offer, but how much actually sells? It is striking how, from year to year, attractive projects for new weapons slide from the sketch stage to the no-longer-marketed stage. Much depends on the balance between internal and external investment on the part of the prospective producer. Currently, the United States represents the single largest defense market in the world. Although U.S. investment is far below the Cold War level, it is high enough to support the development and production of many weapons without any kind of reference to the foreign market (although many of these same weapons do eventually find foreign buyers). The other major suppliers are a different story. Some European countries still try to develop weapons entirely for the home (or European) market, but the number of such weapons, particularly major ones, is declining. Of course, this situation may reverse if the Europeans truly develop a pan-European Union (EU) defense market and if the current consolidation of defense producers continues. At present, although the European missile builders have largely merged into the Matra-BAe-Dynamics-SAS (MBDS) conglomerate, the resulting entity still finds itself supporting numerous legacy systems bought in limited numbers by different European users. Moreover, many navies have already invested in these legacy weapons and are unlikely to dispose of them in favor of some single future weapon.

At the very least, any observer of the European defense scene must be struck by the drastic decline in funding, which in turn has curtailed major new developments. Those systems that seem not to promise major exports appear to be the principal victims, exemplified by the French supersonic Anti-Navire Nouvelle Generation (ANNG) antiship missile. European politicians still seem to subscribe to the view that a national (or EU-wide) combat aircraft industry is vital, so airplane projects such as the Eurofighter have survived.⁵

Then there are the two major Third World mass suppliers, Russia and China. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union accounted for mass sales of weapons such as antiship missiles; Western missiles and aircraft tended to be exported in much smaller numbers. At least in the case of aircraft, the argument was that the West supplied maintenance support and spares to keep the number supplied flying whereas the Soviet system supplied numbers because there were few spares, and only a fraction of the total number supplied was expected to be usable at any one time. This distinction matters because if economics change, the sheer number of weapons involved will fall drastically, as buyers are forced to confront the high unit costs of weapons produced in limited quantities. From the point of view of the defender, there is a world of difference between the flood of missiles with which the Soviets were credited and the small numbers that a Third World navy may be able to field, particularly after Cold War supplies run out.

As the Soviet Union dissolved, a cash economy gradually arose. That took time. For some years, Soviet-era enterprises could still assemble weapons from parts accumulated under the Soviet regime. In effect their only costs were payrolls and associated expenses; they could then sell almost-new weapons fairly cheaply. Some of those weapons were still within reach of impoverished ex-client states. However, the supply of spares was always finite. There had to come a day when something approaching Western defense economics began to apply. At that point buyers were pulled up embarrassingly short. Indeed, the situation was even worse than for Western suppliers because the Russian state lacked the cash resources to subsidize arms sales.⁶ As a consequence, whatever the magnitude of Cold War transfers, post-Cold War sales of Russian weaponry seem to involve small numbers of weapons, comparable in magnitude to Western sales.⁷

Economics has a stronger effect on new development. In the past, new developments were financed internally, and Soviet developers produced some very exotic weapons, sometimes with details unsuspected by the West.⁸ Now internal financing has largely evaporated, along with the Russian budget. There is considerable talk of new-generation weapons, but what is offered for sale now is largely what might have been offered a decade ago, had security restrictions not applied. Thus, Russia seems not to be a major source of new designs or design concepts. Moreover, the more sophisticated Russian weapons seem not to have sold very well.

Somewhat similar questions apply to China. At one time, China maintained a command economy, which could be ordered, at least in theory, to produce floods of missiles, aircraft, and ships. The production side is still government-owned. However, China has a mixed economy, which must at least sometimes pay attention to questions of cash. For example, urban workers are fed by the products of a peasantry who expect to be paid in real cash. If the government cannot take in enough cash because its own enterprises are effectively bankrupt and because it cannot efficiently collect taxes, then it will soon find maintenance of the big enterprises impossible. Similar to other communist bureaucracies, the Chinese government presumably does not produce realistic statistics. However, there is anecdotal evidence that tax collection is ineffective because the ruling Communist Party in effect skims most of what would otherwise go for taxes. Repeated demands that the Chinese armed forces withdraw from the civil economy indicate that the central government has failed to control the economy and that it has failed to pay the military enough to turn it from what is seen as corruption. This is a very serious issue because, given its economic desires, the military can fix overall policy in ways inimical to continued communist rule.⁹

These considerations are crucial because the antiaccess threat is, in part, a combination of numbers of antiaccess weapons and the technologies that they incorporate. If weapons are made in large numbers and are easy to obtain, we face a serious saturation threat, as we certainly did from the Soviet armed services. If not, then the threat is much less severe. Similarly, if some weapons producer is encouraged to insert ever more advanced technology in its weapons, then we may well find our own countersystems obsolescing rapidly. Conversely, if potential enemies (or their suppliers) find such investment difficult or unimportant, then access itself is likely not to be a serious problem.

Antiship Missiles: Case in Point

A survey of current defense development suggests that, apart from a very few producers such as the United States and perhaps the United Kingdom, development is financed mainly by exports. That is, the global defense market literally defines what is and is not developed. Russia is a case in point. The first major release of defense information came at the 1991 Moscow Air Show. Weapons for sale were those already in Russian service. Then there was a second category: weapons available for cooperative development (that is, for development financed by the prospective buyer). Some of them were quite impressive, many in antiaccess roles. For example, the Russians already had a short-range air-launched ballistic missile, Kh-15, comparable to the old U.S. SRAM (AGM–69). What they offered at the show—for cooperative development—was a version guided by an active millimeter-wave radar to attack ships. Arriving at Mach 5, such a missile would have been nearly impossible to shoot down. If it was characteristic of future threats, then the future of large surface ships such as carriers was decidedly bleak. However, the antiship Kh-15S would have been quite expensive to develop. After some years, it apparently became clear that no prospective buyer had anything like sufficient resources, and no more was heard of it.

This experience might have been set down to Russian poverty, but it is hardly unique. During the 1960s, the French government discovered that it could not continue to develop the full range of weapon systems it associated with French national independence and grandeur. The solution was largely to tailor future French weapons to the Third World export market. Examples were the Mirage fighter, the AMX 30 tank, and the Exocet antiship missile.¹⁰ One consequence was that, through at least the early 1980s, French forces were considered ill suited for a future European war. In the 1980s, as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) revived, French development strategy turned to more sophisticated weapons suited for high-end NATO adoption. Ironically, these weapons matured as the Soviet threat collapsed, and, based on the motivation, the French investment strategy failed. One delayed victim of this failure was probably the supersonic ANNG antiship missile (which was not, however, canceled until 2000).

More generally, the Western antiship missile market is largely an export market, as Western navies have not recently invested heavily in such weapons. Since these missiles are major elements of any antiaccess threat, failures in marketing suggest that the likely customers, who are also likely victims of Western naval access, have little interest in antiaccess investment. Major recent failures have been the French supersonic ANNG, initially a Franco-German project for next-generation frigates; and Teseo Mk 3, a stealthy Otomat follow-on.¹¹ The German Daimler-Benz Aerospace (DASA) conglomerate was unable to convince the German government to finance a ship-launched version of its Taurus missile; the new German K130 corvettes are to be armed instead with an existing weapon, either the Swedish RBS 15 Mk 3 or the new Norwegian Naval Strike Missile (NSM)—assuming the latter ever enters service.

It may be argued that any such comments are disingenuous, since the most likely victims of U.S. naval access are rogue states dependent on Russian and Chinese arms suppliers. But that makes the failure of many Russian missile programs particularly striking. There are four current Russian antiaccess programs: Kh-35 (SS–N–25, similar in outline to the U.S. Harpoon), Moskit (3M80), Alfa (3M54), and Yakhont. Of these, Kh-35 seems to sell mainly as a direct replacement for the Cold War-era Styx (P–15), a very dangerous (to its operators) missile that at least one navy, the Finnish, was happy to discard. But Kh-35 offers much the same performance as Harpoon, so it can hardly be considered a major change in the antiaccess threat. The other three missiles all offer supersonic performance, which can be considered a major advance in the threat. Yet they have sold quite poorly. Thus far, the only customer for Moskit has been China, and the Chinese bought the missile because they bought its platform, the Sovremenny-class destroyer. They seem to have bought no more than two missiles per launch tube, which suggests a pessimistic view of ship survivability. The only customer for Alfa has been India. Yakhont enjoyed no sales at all but has been the subject of a cooperative development effort with India. Indian press reports suggest that the main projected role of the missile is as a nuclear delivery vehicle aimed at Pakistan. More generally, it is difficult to see why India is buying Yakhont when the Indian Navy already has a broadly equivalent missile in hand in the form of Alfa.¹² Reports of sales of Moskit or other advanced Russian antiship missiles to Iran seem to have been erroneous.

The other potential supplier of missiles to roguish states is China; the usual export weapons are the subsonic rocket-powered C–801 (apparently a somewhat larger illicit cousin to Exocet) and a turbojet derivative, C–802. Like the Russians, the Chinese have developed supersonic antiship missiles, C–101 and C–301. They were announced in 1985 and 1988, but they seem not to have entered service—even though the Chinese Navy announced that it wanted to equip all its fast missile attack boats with C–101 during the Ninth Five-Year Plan, which ended in 2000 (a single boat armed with a test canister for C–101 has been seen). The implication seems to be that fully indigenous missile programs have generally failed. The sole new weapon displayed in recent years is C–701, a small missile designed to attack missile boats rather than substantial warships (it is broadly comparable with such Western weapons as Sea Skua). It might indeed be difficult to shoot down, but its 29-kilogram (64-pound) warhead is unlikely to do enormous damage. The only Chinese antiship missiles currently in production are two apparently unlicensed Exocet derivatives, C–801 and C–802; a C–803 may also exist.¹³ In 2001, the Chinese announced that they were buying the Russian Kh-59MEK, a turbojet antiship missile (in this case, air-launched, though there may be a ship-launched version) roughly equivalent to C–802. This purchase suggests that C–802 may be inadequate.¹⁴

The other major non-Western state trying to develop indigenous tactical missiles is India. It began a very ambitious program in the 1980s, but the only successful products have been strategic weapons. Even the short-range Prithvi surface-to-surface missile, using an engine copied from the Soviet SA–2 surface-to-air missile, has not been particularly successful (the naval version, Dhanush, failed spectacularly in its first test). The Indian press has complained about the ocean of money wasted on failed programs, and India has repeatedly had to buy foreign weapons, such as the Israeli Barak defensive missile. The Indian experience does not make for confidence that other lesser-developed countries can or will develop their own tactical weapons. For that matter, widespread reports that countries such as Iran and Pakistan are totally dependent on China and North Korea for ballistic missile design and components lead to much the same conclusion: there are very few independent missile developers, and cash is thus a key issue in any national missile program.

None of this is to deny that many countries have antiship missiles, though usually in rather smaller numbers than might be imagined. Limited purchases are borne out by reported sales figures for the three leading Western antiship missiles; about 6,000 Harpoons, about 3,800 Exocets, and about 1,000 Otomats have been sold. If one subtracts the major buyers, such as the United States and Britain, one ends up with one or two missiles per existing launcher. That is, the typical surface ship fit is 8 tubes, so 3,800 Exocets, less 600 (worldwide!) for aircraft, submarines, and coastal batteries, comes to a total of all of 400 ship-loads, which on average is about 20 ship-loads per country using the missile. However, the British and the Germans bought heavily, about 600 missiles each, which would leave only about 2,000 for everyone else—about 250 ship-loads, or roughly 10 per using country on average—and countries often have more than 10 Exocet-shooting ships (not to mention submarines and aircraft). These are crude figures, but they do suggest that anything that decoys small numbers of antiship missiles will typically exhaust a national war reserve.

Elements of Antiaccess Power

Ultimately, access to a foreign country involves either landing troops or landing weapons, or both. Just how effective antiaccess measures can be depends on our own technology and tactics. For example, for years the Marine Corps concept for deploying troops required that heavy matériel, such as organic artillery, be landed over a beach, regardless of how the troops themselves arrived (possibly by long-range air transports). Thus, minefields were an effective barrier to Marine operations ashore. However, current Marine Corps ship-to-objective maneuver tactics emphasize the infiltration of relatively small units, whose heavy firepower would be primarily provided by ships and aircraft based well offshore. These small units may well be air-landed. Coastal minefields have only a limited effect on this type of operation. The main anti-infiltration weapon would probably be antiaircraft fire designed to deal with the troop carriers, and even it might not be capable of handling dispersed assaults. The infiltration concept was a tactical riposte to the mine (and, incidentally, the coast defense) threat, and it required the new technology making real-time deep fire support possible.

The Marines may still want to land heavy equipment over selected beaches, and it can still be argued that small missile-armed attack boats can be a serious threat to Corps landing craft. That raises the question of effective counters. For example, during the Gulf War, British helicopters quite successfully destroyed a large force of Iraqi missile-armed attack boats. Antiaircraft missiles on board such boats could potentially deal with helicopters, but in that case the cost per boat would rise dramatically, and the numbers of affordable boats would fall drastically. The resulting small force would find it difficult to deal with dispersed landings and would have to rely more and more on some external source of cueing—in other words, on a substantial investment in expensive over-the-horizon sensing.

Then there are submarines, which certainly can attack ships well offshore. Moreover, Russian-supplied submarines, including some fairly old ones, are armed with wake-following weapons, which are particularly difficult to counter. It can certainly be argued that the U.S. Navy has failed to devise sufficient countermeasures. However, virtually all the submarines involved are diesel powered. They cannot easily transit covertly at high speed submerged. The usual tactical countermeasure against diesel submarines is sustained high speed and random maneuver on the part of potential targets. Moreover, the further offshore the submarine target, the less likely that the submarine can be coached into attack position. Much depends on just how far offshore access forces can lie, which, in turn, depends not on the quality of torpedo countermeasures but on the ranges of guns, aircraft, and missiles of the access forces themselves.¹⁵

As in any other form of warfare, antiaccess warfare requires the defender first to detect the attacker far enough away to react, then to make sense of what the detection implies, and then to react with weaponry. Any evaluation of future antiaccess warfare would have to take all three of these elements into account. For example, current U.S. thinking entails attacks mounted by ships well beyond a defender’s physical horizon. A defender possessing the appropriate missiles but no sensors with sufficient range might well find engagement impossible. Conversely, given the right sensors but only short-range missiles, success would depend on whether the platforms carrying those missiles could get to the ships. Another aspect of antiaccess warfare would simply be to defend against the offshore force at the point of contact ashore. Antiaircraft defenses fall into this latter category.

The use of decoys makes the defender’s job much more difficult. The main antidote to decoying is good surveillance feeding good command and control. Sophisticated navies tasked with defensive antiaccess operations certainly understand as much. It is clear that the Nordic countries invested heavily in coastal radars and in computer command centers that they feed. Even so, these are short-range sensors. They would do no good against an enemy standing more than about 20 miles offshore, except under ducting conditions (which are by no means always present).¹⁶ As it happens, three alternative surveillance schemes, independent of the seasonal conditions that permit ducting, have been advertised. One is high frequency (HF) surface-wave radar, offered by several companies and by the Russians. A second is passive underwater acoustics, offered by U.S., German, and Russian developers. A third is intense surveillance by maritime patrol aircraft. It seems striking that few, if any, commercial successes have been reported. Only Canada seems to have bought HF radar to detect poachers in fishing grounds. Advertising for underwater surveillance systems has virtually ceased, suggesting a total lack of interest. As for aircraft, no one seems to be buying them in sufficient numbers to achieve solid coverage. Readers may recall that the large U.S. fleet of P–3s depended heavily on fixed (in effect, staring) surveillance assets, mainly the sound surveillance system (SOSUS), for Cold War coverage of the North Atlantic and North Pacific.

Many navies probably do have HF/Direction Finder (DF) networks, but with the rise of satellite communications these surveillance systems are less and less valuable. The Soviets did enjoy some important early successes in exploiting U.S. satellite communications, but once those were known, countermeasures were deployed. As for other Cold War naval surveillance techniques, it seems most unlikely that any potential target country will field an equivalent to the very specialized satellite systems deployed by the two Cold War superpowers. Without either such systems or specialized fixed surveillance systems, the sea would seem to be an effective sanctuary. Striking from well offshore would seem an effective counter to antiaccess weaponry.

It will be pointed out that mobile platforms could offer effective resistance to the U.S. fleet even well offshore, particularly aircraft armed with antiship missiles, missile-bearing boats and corvettes, and submarines. All Third World littoral states invest in some or all of these platforms. Certainly, too, globalization offers both better platforms and improvements to existing ones. For example, France reportedly sold modern sonars to China for installation on Chinese submarines. Israel is currently offering a modernization package for the MiG–21 fighter, and it has enjoyed some success in this venture. What is less clear is how effective such upgraded weapons are likely to be, particularly in the absence of modernized command and control.

Again, however, prospective Third World enemies seem to show little interest in the less glamorous sea surveillance required to make an antiaccess force truly effective. That may be entirely logical. Most countries are concerned more with local politics than with the larger threat of U.S. intervention. Given limited resources, they buy forces that will impress their neighbors. If their neighbors are unsophisticated, expensive sea surveillance is an apparent waste of money.

Incidentally, somewhat similar considerations apply to mines. It is certainly true that an inexpensive mine can destroy a costly ship, but bringing that mine into proximity with the ship is not a trivial matter. Mine warfare is a statistical proposition, which means that a large field must be laid in order to gain a few successes. One modern mine may cost $50,000, but it is ineffective unless it is part of a field of (for example) a thousand mines. Then, suddenly, the cost per victim rises to $50 million. That may seem little to pay to deal with a ship costing ten times as much, but then again the defender’s economy will likely be far less than a tenth the size of the attacker’s. The cost of the minefield may seem anything but trivial to most states. Moreover, a minefield is a single-use weapon. Once the mines are laid, they are essentially impossible to recover for reuse, at least at present.¹⁷

The need to lay large numbers of mines to get useful results suggests the countermeasure that the U.S. Navy is adopting, mine reconnaissance, will be effective. If the planting of the field can be observed, our forces can avoid it. Much obviously depends on just how flexible our amphibious over-the-beach craft are, but it was specifically to gain flexibility that the Navy adopted air cushion landing craft. Of course, reconnaissance can fail. The two minings in the Persian Gulf in 1991 were due to just such a failure, which in turn was due to a failure to realize that the Iraqis were laying mines from extemporized platforms. The planned future reconnaissance technique involves unmanned underwater vehicles and is likely to be more effective. Again, the wider the variety of areas off which ships can operate, the better the chance that they can find clear water.

There are, of course, technologies that present special threats. One is the destructor, a mechanism that converts a standard bomb into a mine. It is not new; the U.S. Navy used destructors in Vietnam and turned over aspects of the mechanism to the North Vietnamese as part of the end-of-war settlement. Later, Argentina advertised a destructor family of mines that it was manufacturing. Presumably others have done the same. The real threat of the destructor is that it is inexpensive to stockpile. Using destructors, a minefield can be extemporized, without earmarking major facilities for mine maintenance in peacetime.

Another technology of interest is the rising mine, pioneered by the Russians and now widely advertised. China manufactures a simple rising mine, based on an early Russian type. From time to time, the United States has considered buying rising mines. These weapons are dangerous because, at least in their later versions, they can cover wide areas and thus make it almost impossible to designate a safe channel. However, they are costly, and the arguments against Third World mine purchases certainly apply to them. They may also be vulnerable to simple deceptive countermeasures.

The overriding point is that the economics of globalization can cripple an enemy’s mine effort. Reports of mine sales generally indicate that buyers purchase sophisticated mines in very small numbers—usually fewer than a hundred. In the past, the Soviets produced vast numbers of mines, which they gave to their client states. Of these, only a limited percentage were modern sensor mines. Such mines demand a considerable investment in storage and maintenance. Contrary to popular conceptions, they can and do go bad.¹⁸

On the other hand, many countries have bought, or have tried to buy, ballistic missiles (which are best used against fixed targets). Some of the same countries have invested in chemical and biological weapons as a kind of nuclear surrogate. At the same time, it can be argued that commercial imaging satellites offer countries much better information concerning any sustained buildup nearby. The main conclusion one might draw is that fixed bases and massive buildups ashore are becoming more vulnerable—although current and future missile defense weapons may well solve that problem. At the least, any fixed buildup, such as that in the desert prior to the Gulf War, will become more difficult to conceal. Conversely, mobile forces are very difficult to spot using imaging satellites because satellite revisit times and swath widths are quite limited. This limitation is unlikely to vanish. One might, therefore, conclude that the balance between ground-based and sea-based intervention forces is changing radically in favor of the sea.

Conclusion

None of this is to suggest that the U.S. Navy can or should cease investment in systems designed to counter antiaccess weaponry. It is, however, to suggest that the threats we face are not nearly so severe as those of the Cold War and, moreover, that the military effects of globalization may be more disastrous to our prospective enemies than to ourselves. That will probably be true as long as the export market rules, and as long as the countries involved do not have wealthy patrons to solve their military problems.

Can things change? Certainly, but that will take time. For example, the Chinese may solve their financial problems and come to resemble the Cold War Soviets—but that will demand not only an internal political renaissance but also gross militarization of Chinese society. Given that the economic vitality of China comes entirely from a nonmilitary sector of its economy, that particular combination is difficult to imagine. A revitalized Soviet Union is easier to imagine, but as time passes nationalist passions in the former republics will make reconstitution much more difficult. The two areas with the economic power to arm against us, Europe and Japan, seem disinclined to do so—although radical shifts are of course possible.¹⁹

Our own foreign policy demands access. If we raise the conceptual bar for force protection unrealistically high, we will deter ourselves, derail a successful foreign policy, and probably lay ourselves more—rather than less—open to foreign attacks like the ones carried out on September 11. We are the engine of globalization, and militarily it is helping, not hurting, us.

Norman Friedman is a widely published defense analyst and historian who spent over a decade as consultant to the Department of the Navy. He writes the Naval Institute Guide to World Naval Weapons Systems and the Raytheon handbook of world missiles and rockets (now in its second edition). His most recent books include The Fifty-Year War: Conflict and Strategy in the Cold War (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2000) which examines the political, military, and economic factors in the Cold War, and Seapower as Strategy: Navies and National Interests (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2001).

Notes

¹ As a case in point, at the end of the Cold War, the U.S. Navy feared a future Soviet capability to lock air-launched antiship missiles onto U.S. ships after launch, but we considered that only a potential problem. In reality, the Soviets fielded just such a missile, Kh-22M (a version of AS–4) in parallel with the “Backfire” (Tu-22M) bomber. This particular reality seems to have emerged only as Russian writers began to discuss Cold War weapons systems in detail. [BACK]

² The author made this case in his The Fifty-Year War: Conflict and Strategy in the Cold War (Annapolis, MD: U.S. Naval Institute Press, 2000). Anyone who read Soviet articles about military technology will remember the emphasis on “reconnaissance-strike complexes” in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Presumably the key Western prototype was Assault Breaker. Given what we now know was an enormous Soviet effort to derail the development of the neutron bomb (which would have given NATO a potent antiarmor weapon to stop a mass attack against Europe), it seems reasonable to see in Assault Breaker and its ilk something even worse, a counter to mass armored attacks that could not be stopped politically. Given the military orientation of the Soviet state, its leader would have been uncomfortably aware of what, in the West, might have been dismissed as a military technicality. [BACK]

³ The Chinese did radically modify Styx (as the series of weapons that NATO nicknamed Silkworm) to create their current antiship missiles, but it is not clear just how much industrial effort was involved. Nor is it clear how easily weapons such as C–801 can be modernized. Official Chinese accounts of missile production suggest vast effort expended for slow progress, but that may have been due to the stress of the Cultural Revolution, which killed off many skilled engineers and technicians, rather than to purely technical problems. It is certainly true that the Soviets produced modified versions of the original Styx (P–15), but it seems notable that development has now stopped in favor of a different missile, Kh-35 (NATO SS–N–25). Aside from any other deficiencies, Styx may have been dropped because it was so unsafe because of its use of hypergolic propellants: dropping one would literally cause a catastrophic explosion. That was why, for example, the Finnish Navy discarded the missile. The Russians seem to be promoting Kh-35 as a preferable replacement, on a four-for-one basis. [BACK]

⁴ At present the most prominent case is fighter multirole radars, which switch among radically varied radar waveforms by computer (the waveform is generated by software and amplified by a tube, typically a traveling-wave tube). The first such radar was probably the AWG–9 of the U.S. F–14 Tomcat fighter (the multirole character of the APG–65 radar on board the F/A–18 was more widely publicized). As an example of the effect of such variability, when the USS Stark was illuminated by the multirole radar of an Iraqi fighter (a French-built Mirage), the ship’s electronic countermeasures operator, who had been coached to fear an Iranian attack, assumed he was picking up the multirole radar of an Iranian F–14. Since both radars had been adapted to the same antiship mission, there was really no gross difference between their emissions. In the past, when radar signals were produced by specialized tubes (magnetrons or klystrons), signal characteristics reflected physical characteristics of the tubes. That is less and less the case. Individual radars still can be identified, but only by much more subtle features, which presumably reflect the physical character of waveguide and antenna. [BACK]

⁵ The British Nimrod replacement is an odd and perhaps telling case. The choice lay between a British airframe equipped with a U.S. combat system (by Boeing) and a U.S. airframe with a British system. The choice was the British-looking airplane with the U.S. combat system. The implication may be that those in charge of the selection were blissfully unaware that combat systems are the major element of the price of this type of airplane (MPA). Their choice was particularly bizarre, since it entailed remanufacture of an existing airframe that probably cannot be duplicated for export—whereas the combat system choice could easily be adapted to other aircraft. In other words, they chose against British suppliers of the only exportable element of the system. The implication seems to be that even sophisticated buyers such as the U.K. Ministry of Defence can become fixated on the airframe element of a larger system. [BACK]

⁶ Some Western European sellers (of submarines, for example) reportedly benefit from very low interest sales loans, which amount to grants to buyers. The rationale is that the governments involved want to preserve key military industries. This subsidy practice is, in theory, illegal within the European Union, so presumably it will gradually decline. [BACK]

⁷ Because the arms market is so central to the survival of the Russian military industry, the Russians have made an unusually public effort to analyze the world arms market and, incidentally, to convince themselves that their industry can survive without many Russian orders. One result was a rather comprehensive account of recent arms sales. See B. Kuzik, N. Novichkov, V. Shvarev, M. Kenshetaev, and A. Simakov, Rossiia na mirovom rynke oruzhiia: Analiz i perspektivy [Russia on the Global Arms Market: Encyclopedia of the Russian Arms Trade and Military-Technical Cooperation] (Moscow: Voennyi parad, 2001). Despite its title, it includes accounts of Western sales. Table 7.2–8 (166178) lists post-Soviet exports. The scale of supply seems to be two missiles (Styx or Kh-35) per missile tube. In some cases, such as the large Indian order for Kh-35, the Russians seem not to have been able to fill the order on time. Other tables in the same volume suggest that at most the Chinese received two missiles per tube of their new Sovremenny-class destroyers. Overall, the implication is that any countermeasure that causes missile craft to waste their weapons would quickly disarm the antiaccess force. Moreover, the number of modern missile-firing craft is quite limited. [BACK]

⁸ A major case in point is Granit (SS–N–19), which employs a scheme of missile-to-missile communication among the weapons in a salvo, to ensure that fire-and-forget operation can be combined with efficient distribution of weapons among targets. Even the configuration of the Granit missile seems not to have been known outside the Cold War Soviet Union. The fire control scheme was revealed at Euronaval 1996, and the configuration only in 2001 (with some earlier hints). Yakhont, now for sale, apparently incorporates the Granit guidance scheme, at least in the version currently on offer. [BACK]

⁹ As a case in point, some years ago the Chinese central government decided to prohibit satellite dishes so as to deny Chinese citizens access to subversive foreign broadcasts. The general staff of the People’s Liberation Army rejected the order because one of its commercial subsidiaries was doing so well producing and selling the dishes. [BACK]

¹⁰ Exocet was conceived as a fast attack boat weapon. At about the same time this weapon began development, the French went into partnership with the Italians in a longer-range weapon, Otomat, which seems in retrospect to have been intended mainly for larger ships (it was also mounted on board some fast attack boats, and, like Exocet, it was sold for coast defense). [BACK]

¹¹ Teseo is advertised as the weapon to arm the Italian version of the European Horizon frigate, but private conversations with MBDA representatives at the 2001 Paris Air Show indicate that it is little more than a component development effort, badly underfunded. [BACK]

¹² One possibility might be interservice rivalries among the Indian armed forces. [BACK]

¹³ In October 2001, a Chinese officer claimed to the author that his missile frigate was armed with C–803 or YJ–3, no details being supplied. The missile-launching boxes were apparently the same as those used for C–801 and C–802. [BACK]

¹⁴ Similar to many Western jet-powered antiship missiles, C–802 is powered by a Microturbo engine—export of which to China is banned. Reportedly, the Chinese managed to obtain a lot of 50 such engines, which powered the first 50 C–802s. Efforts to obtain more missile-suitable engines failed. Reports vary as to whether the Chinese tried a domestic engine (which was too heavy) or a less suitable version of the Microturbo engine. In either case, it would seem that further C–802 production was difficult at best. Exports have been limited. [BACK]

¹⁵ In World War II, both sides depended heavily on external cueing to direct submarines into position to deal with fast combatant ships, and fairly small errors in cueing could negate such attacks. Cueing depends on offshore sensing (in World War II, often on code breaking, which was in effect a kind of sensing). Without cueing, the submarine commander has to guess where the carrier will be. In the Falklands, for example, the Argentine commander knew that the British Sea Harrier had a very short range and that the H.M.S. Hermes would try to stay as far east of the air operating area (Falkland Sound) as possible in order to limit exposure to Argentine air attack. That easily defined her likely location, and he found the carrier—and almost sank her. Presumably, a carrier equipped with longer-range aircraft would have been almost invulnerable. Reports of carriers sunk by diesel submarines during Cold War wargames often or always referred to a practice in which carriers were deliberately confined to small areas in order to allow NATO diesel submarines to practice the attacks. The famous 1968 episode in which a Soviet November-class nuclear attack submarine intercepted the carrier USS Enterprise en route to the Far East required considerable cueing from what the U.S. Navy called the Soviet Ocean Surveillance System. That system has largely died due to the decline of Russian funding. It is also open to question whether the Russians would be inclined to distribute operational intelligence to a third party in some future minor war. [BACK]

¹⁶ Indeed, ducting is frequent in some important parts of the world, such as the Eastern Baltic, the Eastern Mediterranean, the Indian Ocean, the Persian Gulf, and the South China Sea. However, the attacker would certainly be aware of ducting conditions and might well be able to avoid them. The Italian Navy actually uses ducting in an experimental frigate radar, and the Indian Navy modified its “Square Tie” (Rangout) missile fire control radars to exploit ducting. Note, however, that the claimed range was no more than 50 nautical miles, which would not be enough to detect a formation launching aircraft against coastal installations. Presumably, the boats equipped with ducting radars still had to be cued to attack their targets. [BACK]

¹⁷ Periodically, interest is shown in remote control technologies, which can turn a field on and off. Presumably it might be safe to recover mines disabled in this way, though it seems doubtful that anyone would trust a control mechanism immersed in water for months at a time. [BACK]

¹⁸ After the end of the Cold War, the Royal Navy seems to have abandoned offensive mining altogether because all of the explosive in its remaining mines required replacement (explosives can go bad over time). [BACK]

¹⁹ Any historian/analyst must be uncomfortably aware that, if he or she were writing about Germany in 1925, rearmament and revived militarism would have seemed impossible. [BACK]