Revolutions in Military Affairs

[Scott B]

I've only been reading here for a couple days, so the thread ignorance warning is still in effect - if this has already been discussed or mentioned in detail by BFC I'd be interested in reading about it.

For those of you who don't follow modern defense issues, the popular "very big idea" of the past decade and a half in the U.S. defense policy community has been the idea of the revolution in military affairs (RMA):

A Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) is marked by a fundamental transformation in military affairs that results from changes in weapon technology and equipment, operational concepts and military organizational methods. RMAs usually take place over a few decades and profoundly affect, and often replace, existing warfighting practices.

There's no shortage of articles out there on this topic, and if some of the people here are interested I can offer some guidance on decent articles to learn more about it.

The reason this matters to those who are interested in CM:SF is simple: the Stryker Brigade's very existence is based on the current assumption that we stand at the beginning of a new RMA. This idea that network-centric warfare and information dominance can carry the day is the reason we have a full RSTA battalion in the SBCT TO&E. Shock Force will take a position, one way or another, on this debate.

One thing I'd say this implies for all of us now scrambling to find U.S. Army pubs on the Stryker is that these units are designed in part on a bet that the U.S.'s advantage in recon and communication will allow them to usually detect and engage the enemy first. Be cautious in what you believe from Army documents on the RMA, because a lot of the stuff from about 1999 to 2003, when the Stryker was the Next Big Thing, was written by people who'd drunk the RMA kool-aid. They've mellowed out a bit since then - thanks to the war - but keep in mind that this was a development largely implemented from the top down by people who'd already made up their minds.

Hey BFC, what are we looking at for "off-table" recon in this game, anyway? How are you dealing with the qualitative differences in different types of communications (tactical internet vs bicycle messenger, to take an extreme case)?

Per M. Dorosh's suggestion, in order to keep this thread on the level:

"THIS BLOW CHUNKS I WANT TO KILL JAPS"

Scott

[Andrew H.]

I was following along fine until "a full RSTA battalion in the SBCT TO&E" came up. TO&E I recognize...

[jrcar]

Never a strong support of RMA... in my mind was mainly a way for academics to sell books Heavily pushed by the (evil) airforces for their own ends.

It was heavily based on "lessons learned" from the first war against Iraq. A classic ironic comment by a senior US General at the time was something like "we do desert, we don't do forest".

The premise being that what you can sense to can kill. Sensing conventional targets in the desert was relatively easy from an ISR (intelligence recon, surveillance) perspective... and the airforce would gleefully waste fuel, aircraft and expensive bombs to do something that a soldier and a few dollar bullets could do...

Kosovo, Bosnia, Afganistan and current Iraq conflict has shown that our ability to sense has certainly improved, but is still not good enough, and that doing things the old fashioned way with bayonets is still required.

IMHO what happened is an evolution, not revolution... but then I never had to make money from writing books either...

Cheers

Rob

[jrcar]

Originally posted by Andrew H.:

I was following along fine until "a full RSTA battalion in the SBCT TO&E" came up. TO&E I recognize...

Recon, Surveillance, Target Acquisition (ie radar)

Also includes an intelligence function.

Stryker Brigade Combat Team.

Cheers

Rob

[jrcar]

I was in a unit that was trialing a similar concept in 1996 in Australia. It was called RISTA (Recon, Intelligence, Surveillance, Target Acquisition).

It worked, but was never implemented due to corps (US branch) politics, the commander of RISTA was an intel officer and the other corps didn't like it... but as an ex intel guy you can sense my allegiance

Cheers

Rob

[Andreas]

In Europe, it appears that the RMA is still at a much more fundamental stage.

From www.ft.com

Retired Nato generals blast European military

By Peter Spiegel in London

Published: October 11 2005 22:03 | Last updated: October 11 2005 22:03

Two of Nato's most respected retired generals will on Wednesday issue a stinging indictment of European military capabilities, arguing that unless the continent pools its defence resources it may be unable to meet mounting security risks such as international terrorism.

Gen Joseph Ralston, the retired US officer who headed Nato until 2003, and retired General Klaus Naumann, Germany's former chief of defence and head of Nato's military committee, argue that European leaders have “lacked the political will” to improve military capabilities. “Failure to meaningfully improve Europe's collective defence capabilities in the coming years would have profoundly negative impacts on the ability of European countries to protect their interests, the viability of Nato as an alliance, and the ability of European countries to partner in any meaningful way with the US,” according to the report, a copy of which was obtained by the Financial Times.

The 97-page study, due to be presented on Wednesday to European Union and Nato leaders in Brussels, was a year in the making, involving consultation with former defence chiefs of almost all European powers, including the UK and France. The generals will brief European defence officials during the next two weeks and present their findings in Washington next month, in an effort to provoke action by Europe's politicians who have not delivered on past promises to Nato.

The call for greater integration in European military research and procurement is likely to be controversial since France and Britain, in particular, have been at odds over the extent to which a pan-European defence agency should have a say over national budget priorities. Britain has resisted French calls for a more centralised procurement process.

But the report argues that without a more co-ordinated approach, flat or declining defence spending by most European countries will make it impossible for militaries to execute stated security strategies, which include combating terrorism and the proliferation of unconventional weapons, and dealing with failing states.

“Some question whether further defence integration can occur among European nations which value their sovereignty and see the world from diverse perspectives,” the report finds. “Although this will be no small challenge, there really is no viable alternative. Staying the course is not an option indeed, it is a recipe for disaster.”

The report calls on European powers to re-allocate defence spending so that 25 per cent of budgets are spent on research and acquiring new weapons, while no more than 40 per cent is spent on personnel. For smaller militaries unable to provide a wide-range of capabilities, it calls for increased specialisation that can make “high-value contributions to collective security”.

The report says such shifts in budget and specialisation should be done in close co-ordination with Nato and the EU's new defence agency so that critical shortfalls which include a scarcity of transport aircraft, sophisticated command and control systems and special operations forces are met and duplication is limited.

[John D Salt]

Originally posted by jrcar:

I was in a unit that was trialing a similar concept in 1996 in Australia. It was called RISTA (Recon, Intelligence, Surveillance, Target Acquisition).

Those crazy colonials, using weirdo abbreviations when they talk about ISTAR!

Then again, I expect the Russians are thoroughly bemused by our need for so many words to describe "razvedka".

All the best,

John.

[John D Salt]

Originally posted by Andreas:

In Europe, it appears that the RMA is still at a much more fundamental stage.

From www.ft.com

In the UK, at least, it seems that there is a thread of government thought (if that's not too strong a word) that the benefits of the RMA and all the spiffy new technology it brings will enable defence to be done much more cheaply than in the past. Much the same argument was used to support the "independent deterrent" back in the 50s, when the idiot boy Duncan Sandys cut the British Army's strength by half and declared manned aircraft obsolete. Still, if we learn anything from history, it is that we learn nothing from history.

The target for UK defence procurement is typically not to achieve any increase in defence capabilities, but to maintain a flat level of capability at lower cost. The "Better, faster cheaper" mantra of "smart procurement" assaults ones ears periodically, and it is impossible to go five paces without treading in words and phrases like "synergistic effects", "network-centric", "joint battlespace", "agile mission grouping" and "system of systems", which are never closely defined, but are expected nonetheless to serve as guarantors of the spiffiness and shininess of the exciting new technologeee -- or what Dave Hackworth used to call "Buck Rogers wonder-junk".

One of the reasons for all this is the general fascination with that prodigy of our times, the internet. The internet has brought strange new ways of behaviour and strange new ways of doing business to the world, and some senior people in the defence world think that they would like to have something similar. They imagine that the whole trick to business success, battlefield command and lovely long sticks of rhubarb until the age of 109 is digitization, "managing the flow of information" and "getting the right information to the right people at the right time". Years after the dot-com bubble burst, the DPA wants the Army to have its own internet thingy.

Unfortunately for digitization, nobody has yet managed to come up with a compelling account of any way in which pumping and flooding of great dobs of information across internet-like comms plumbing will offer any critical edge to people occupying a muddy field in a battlefield dominated by those pinnacles of 19-th Century technical achievement, high explosives and conoidal bullets. The internet runs on a huge number of boxes mostly in benign, clean, permanent offices with colossal comms capacity available, lots of alternative routes possible and no very great penalties for failure. The Army does its real work in hostile, dirty, mobile offices with tiny comms capacity, few alternate routes, and potentially lethal penalties for failure. Keen-eyed readers may be able to spot some differences.

While expensive technological solutions have been rattling around the defence markets looking for problems, the British Army has been quietly consolidating and extending its recent cultural shift towards mission-based command (and idea that goes back at least to 1906). This has been an evolution in thinking that probably contributes much more to battlefield success than any amount of Gucci kit, but unfortunately it's hard to see how defence contractors can make money out of it.

It seems to me that the Army has a much more robust and sensible attitude towards these things than the government does. The annual Shrivenham symposium on "Network Enabled Capability: The Human Dimension" throws up papers that show not merely agnosticism, but overt and well-reasoned hostility to the ideas pushed by the RMA-boosters. If we are re-roling some heavy-weight brigades to medium-weight, it is more because of the low armour threat and need for deployability that future "Bush Wars" will be likely to bring than because of some bizarre belief that information can reliably substitute for firepower and protection.

It has been pointed out that Battlefront can hardly avoid implicitly taking a position on the RMA with the publication of CM:SF. I'm not sure this is entirely true, because the RMA-boosters -- insofar as they can ever be pinned down to a clear statement of anything -- seem to rely on quasi-magical effects resulting from the free flow of information, and Battlefront has often disclaimed the intention to write what Kip Anderson calls a "command game". Sometimes, too, the benefits of digitization are claimed for command levels of brigade and above, rather than the battalion and company levels that CM concentrates on. So maybe people eager to preserve their image of coming revolutionary change in military affairs will be able to use those two as get-outs, along with the plea that the RMA will start promptly in 2010 and therefore CM:SF will just miss it.

I rather expect CM:SF to carry the same message as the previous CMs, in that it is futile to rely on better kit, even vastly better kit, if your tactics are rubbish and your troops are badly outclassed in competence. Nothing revolutionary there, but maybe there is a practical limit to the amount of revolutionariness one can expect from a brigade of re-badged Piranhas, even if they do have bedsteads strapped to their sides. If CM:SF can provide a good game on modern battle with light armour without the light armour all brewing up before turn 5, then I hope we can look forward to a series of modules covering South African externals, the Toyota Wars in Chad, Saladins patrolling the Radfan, French light armour in Indo-China and all that kind of stuff.

Then again, maybe CM:SF will provide the first coherent account of why "information superiority" is decisive on the tactical battlefield. Not very likely, IMHO, but if it did there would be an awful lot of DoD and MOD sales, and a lot of people would have the perfect excuse to point at me and say "Nya-aah, you're wrong".

We'll see.

All the best,

John.

[gunnergoz]

Technology is fine, intel is great, airpower is super, just be sure you have sufficient boots on the ground to do the damn job...

[cassh]

If HM Government really wanted to get serious about modernising fighting capability they could start with a vehicle based IFF standard that could be adopted by all NATO forces.

This would allow for more fluid manoeuvre, engagement and situational awareness reducing the chances of blue-on-blues in the fog of war.

The RMA has the potential to be significant if the combat/operational value of technology is actually grasped.

Previous RMA

Heinz Guderian the father of the German Panzer arm was a signals office, not a tank specialist. His expertise was getting mobile radio systems into AFV allowing them to manoeuvre and co-ordinate action. Coupled with 'mission tactics' rather than control by detailed order and you had the makings of something quite different from the military orthodox.

More importantly radios allowed the artillery to become mobile so any breakthrough could be rapidly supported by bring up the guns and aircraft to directly support ground troops.

They secret of Blitzkrieg was not the tank or the aeroplane - as both these had existed during WWI - but the radio which allowed command and control. In this way the Wehrmacht was able to concentrate firepower, mobility and protection when and where they wanted at a higher tempo than the enemy - which meant they held and maintained the initiative.

Current RMA

The only real considerations once you strip away all the technology regarding any system, platform or doctrinal development is will it give us better command and control under a mission tactics methodology, and does it allow us to "get there firstest, with the mostest" to use an ACW expression.

If the RMA doesn't achieve a faster tempo of decision making and action then what's the point. A Major-General looking at the big screen at HQ might well be able to see Pvt. Johnson and Sgt. Smith are at phase line Gandalf but should he have this level of info and detail - surely this will merely produce information overload and stop him thinking about the Corps above and his own Division, Brigades and Battalions. Two elements up, three down is all a commander should be dealing with. If RMA can help him in this job, great.

As to CMSF

Off-screen ISTAR that may need modelling in some way to reflect 'knowns' of OPFOR during setup.

J-STAR

Satellite imagery

UAV - especially Synthetic Aperture Radar imagery

airborne recon

ground recon - SF team recon, Bde, Bn assets

[ October 12, 2005, 07:43 AM: Message edited by: cassh ]