Tag Archives: Information Operations

Interchangeability Of Fire And Multi-Domain Operations

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Soviet “forces and resources” chart. [Richard Simpkin, Deep Battle: The Brainchild of Marshal Tukhachevskii (Brassey’s: London, 1987) p. 254]

With the emergence of the importance of cross-domain fires in the U.S. effort to craft a joint doctrine for multi-domain operations, there is an old military concept to which developers should give greater consideration: interchangeability of fire.

This is an idea that British theorist Richard Simpkin traced back to 19th century Russian military thinking, which referred to it then as the interchangeability of shell and bayonet. Put simply, it was the view that artillery fire and infantry shock had equivalent and complimentary effects against enemy troops and could be substituted for one another as circumstances dictated on the battlefield.

The concept evolved during the development of the Russian/Soviet operational concept of “deep battle” after World War I to encompass the interchangeability of fire and maneuver. In Soviet military thought, the battlefield effects of fires and the operational maneuver of ground forces were equivalent and complementary.

This principle continues to shape contemporary Russian military doctrine and practice, which is, in turn, influencing U.S. thinking about multi-domain operations. In fact, the idea is not new to Western military thinking at all. Maneuver warfare advocates adopted the concept in the 1980s, but it never found its way into official U.S. military doctrine.

An Idea Who’s Time Has Come. Again.

So why should the U.S. military doctrine developers take another look at interchangeability now? First, the increasing variety and ubiquity of long-range precision fire capabilities is forcing them to address the changing relationship between mass and fires on multi-domain battlefields. After spending a generation waging counterinsurgency and essentially outsourcing responsibility for operational fires to the U.S. Air Force and U.S. Navy, both the U.S. Army and U.S. Marine Corps are scrambling to come to grips with the way technology is changing the character of land operations. All of the services are at the very beginning of assessing the impact of drone swarms—which are themselves interchangeable blends of mass and fires—on combat.

Second, the rapid acceptance and adoption of the idea of cross-domain fires has carried along with it an implicit acceptance of the interchangeability of the effects of kinetic and non-kinetic (i.e. information, electronic, and cyber) fires. This alone is already forcing U.S. joint military thinking to integrate effects into planning and decision-making.

The key component of interchangability is effects. Inherent in it is acceptance of the idea that combat forces have effects on the battlefield that go beyond mere physical lethality, i.e. the impact of fire or shock on a target. U.S. Army doctrine recognizes three effects of fires: destruction, neutralization, and suppression. Russian and maneuver warfare theorists hold that these same effects can be achieved through the effects of operational maneuver. The notion of interchangeability offers a very useful way of thinking about how to effectively integrate the lethality of mass and fires on future battlefields.

But Wait, Isn’t Effects Is A Four-Letter Word?

There is a big impediment to incorporating interchangeability into U.S. military thinking, however, and that is the decidedly ambivalent attitude of the U.S. land warfare services toward thinking about non-tangible effects in warfare.

As I have pointed out before, the U.S. Army (at least) has no effective way of assessing the effects of fires on combat, cross-domain or otherwise, because it has no real doctrinal methodology for calculating combat power on the battlefield. Army doctrine conceives of combat power almost exclusively in terms of capabilities and functions, not effects. In Army thinking, a combat multiplier is increased lethality in the form of additional weapons systems or combat units, not the intangible effects of operational or moral (human) factors on combat. For example, suppression may be a long-standing element in doctrine, but the Army still does not really have a clear idea of what causes it or what battlefield effects it really has.

In the wake of the 1990-91 Gulf War and the ensuing “Revolution in Military Affairs,” the U.S. Air Force led the way forward in thinking about the effects of lethality on the battlefield and how it should be leveraged to achieve strategic ends. It was the motivating service behind the development of a doctrine of “effects based operations” or EBO in the early 2000s.

However, in 2008, U.S. Joint Forces Command commander, U.S Marine General (and current Secretary of Defense) James Mattis ordered his command to no longer “use, sponsor, or export” EBO or related concepts and terms, the underlying principles of which he deemed to be “fundamentally flawed.” This effectively eliminated EBO from joint planning and doctrine. While Joint Forces Command was disbanded in 2011 and EBO thinking remains part of Air Force doctrine, Mattis’s decree pretty clearly showed what the U.S. land warfare services think about battlefield effects.

The Principle Of Mass On The Future Battlefield

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Men of the U.S. Army 369th Infantry Regiment “Harlem’s Hellfighters,”in action at Séchault on September 29, 1918 during the Meuse-Argonne Offensive. [Wikimedia]

Given the historical trend toward battlefield dispersion as a result of the increasing lethality of weapons, how will the principle of mass apply in future warfare? I have been wondering about this for a while in the context of the two principle missions the U.S. Army must plan and prepare for, combined arms maneuver and wide area security. As multi-domain battle advocates contend, future combat will place a premium on smaller, faster, combat formations capable of massing large amounts of firepower. However, wide area security missions, such as stabilization and counterinsurgency, will continue to demand significant numbers of “boots on the ground,” the traditional definition of mass on the battlefield. These seemingly contradictory requirements are contributing to the Army’s ongoing “identity crisis” over future doctrine, training, and force structure in an era of budget austerity and unchanging global security responsibilities.

Over at the Australian Army Land Power Forum, Lieutenant Colonel James Davis addresses the question generating mass in combat in the context of the strategic challenges that army faces. He cites traditional responses by Western armies to this problem, “Regular and Reserve Force partnering through a standing force generation cycle, indigenous force partnering through deployed training teams and Reserve mobilisation to reconstitute and regenerate deployed units.”

Davis also mentions AirLand Battle and “blitzkrieg” as examples of tactical and operational approaches to limiting the ability of enemy forces to mass on the battlefield. To this he adds “more recent operational concepts, New Generation Warfare and Multi Domain Battle, [that] operate in the air, electromagnetic spectrum and cyber domain and to deny adversary close combat forces access to the battle zone.” These newer concepts use Cyber Electromagnetic Activities (CEMA), Information Operations, long range Joint Fires, and Robotic and Autonomous systems (RAS) to attack enemy efforts to mass.

The U.S. Army is moving rapidly to develop, integrate and deploy these capabilities. Yet, however effectively new doctrine and technology may influence mass in combined arms maneuver combat, it is harder to see how they can mitigate the need for manpower in wide area security missions. Some countries may have the strategic latitude to emphasize combined arms maneuver over wide area security, but the U.S. Army cannot afford to do so in the current security environment. Although conflicts emphasizing combined arms maneuver may present the most dangerous security challenge to the U.S., contingencies involving wide area security are far more likely.

How this may be resolved is an open question at this point in time. It is also a demonstration as to how tactical and operational considerations influence strategic options.

On Domains And Doctrine

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Sorry. I could not resist.

There is a lot of smart writing being published over at The Strategy Bridge. If you don’t follow it, you should. Among the recent offerings is a very good piece by Erik Heftye, a retired Air Force officer and senior military analyst in the U.S. Army’s Mission Command Battle Laboratory at Fort Leavenworth. His article “Multi-Domain Confusion: All Domains Are Not Created Equal,” takes a look at an au courant topic central to the new concept of Multi-Domain Battle (MDB).

Defense grognards have been grumbling that MDB is just a new term for an old concept. This is true, insofar as it goes. I am not sure this is in dispute. After all, the subtitle of the U.S. Army/U.S. Marine Corps MDB white paper is “Combined Arms For The 21st Century.” However, such comments do raise the issue of whether new terms for old concepts are serving to clarify or cloud current understanding.

This is Heftye’s concern regarding the use of the term domain: “An ambiguous categorization of separate operating domains in warfare could actually pose an intractable conceptual threat to an integrated joint force, which is ironically the stated purpose of multi-domain battle.” Noting the vagueness of the concept, Heftye traces how the term entered into U.S. military doctrine in the 1990s and evolved into the current four physical (land, sea, air, and space) and one virtual (cyberspace) warfighting realms. He then discusses the etymology of the word and how its meanings imply that all of the domains are equivalent in nature and importance. While this makes sense for air, sea, and land, the physical aspects of those domains do not translate to space or cyberspace. He argues that treating them all analogously will inevitably lead to conceptual confusion.

Heftye recommends a solution: “In order to minimize the problem of domain equivalence, a revised construct should distinguish different types of domains in relation to relevant and advantageous warfighting effects. Focusing on effects rather than domains would allow for the elimination of unnecessary bureaucratic seams, gaps, and turf wars.” He offers up a simplified variation of the domain construct that had been published in the superseded 2005 edition of the Joint Chiefs of Staff’s Capstone Concept for Joint Operations, which defined a domain as “any potential operating ‘space’ through which the target system can be influenced—not only the domains of land, sea, air, and space, but also the virtual (information and cyber) and human (cognitive, moral, and social) domains.”

This version not only simplifies by cutting the five existing categories to three, but it also groups like with like. “Land, sea, air, and space are physical domains involving material reality. Cyberspace and information, as well as the electromagnetic spectrum are virtual domains involving sensing and perception. The construct also included a human category involving value judgements.” Heftye acknowledges that looking at domains in terms of effects runs contrary to then-Joint Forces Commander General (and current Defense Secretary) James Mattis’s ban on the use of the Effects Based Operations (EBO) concept by the U.S. military 2008. He also points out that the concept of domains will not be going away anytime soon, either.

Of course, conceptual confusion is not a unique problem in U.S. military doctrine argues Steve Leonard in “Broken and Unreadable: Our Unbearable Aversion to Doctrine,” over at the Modern War Institute at West Point (which is also publishing great material these days). Leonard (aka Doctrine Man!!), a former U.S. Army senior strategist, ruminates about dissatisfaction and discontent with the American “rules of the game.” He offers up a personal anecdote about a popular military staff pastime: defining doctrinal terms.

We also tend to over-define our terminology. Words in common usage since the days of Noah Webster can find new life—and new meaning—in Army doctrine. Several years ago, I endured an hours-long argument among a group of doctrine writers trying to define the term “asymmetric.” The suggestion—after three full hours of debate—that the group consult a dictionary was not well-received.

I have no doubt Erik Heftye feels your pain, Doctrine Man.