Network Centric Warfare and Coalition Operations

Paul T. Mitchell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9781134064502
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'armée et de la marine

This book argues that Network Centric Warfare (NCW) influences how developed militaries operate in the same fashion that an operating system influences the development of computer software.

It examines three inter-related issues: the overwhelming military power of the United States; the growing influence of NCW on military thinking; and the centrality of coalition operations in modern military endeavours. Irrespective of terrorist threats and local insurgencies, the present international structure is remarkably stable - none of the major powers seeks to alter the system from its present liberal character, as demonstrated by the lack of a military response to US military primacy. This primacy privileges the American military doctrine and thus the importance of NCW, which promises a future of rapid, precise, and highly efficient operations, but also a future predicated on the 'digitization' of the battle space. Participation in future American-led military endeavours will require coalition partners to be networked: 'interoperability' will therefore be a key consideration of a partner's strategic worth.

Network Centric Warfare and Coalition Operations will be of great interest to students of strategic studies, international security, US foreign policy and international relations in general.

1
US military primacy and the new operating system

Two issues currently play dominant roles in shaping the current international landscape. Processes commonly referred to by the label ‘globalisation’ are affecting every area of the world through environmental modification, electronic communications, financial shifts, and the evolution of a worldwide civil society. Juxtaposed against this multidimensional globalisation is US military primacy. In 2004, the United States spent $466 billion on defence; the next largest spenders were China and Russia, at $65 billion and $50 billion respectively.¹ These twin developments, one generalised across the planet and the other specific to the US, will interact in complex ways as the world responds to US military primacy and as an increasingly globalised environment compels political, economic, humanitarian, and military engagement between states.

The conjunction of these two issues underlines the political applicability of US military power. This became apparent early on in the War on Terror, when then US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld indicated that military imperatives would take precedence over diplomatic considerations in constructing a ‘coalition of the willing’. According to Rumsfeld, the US must ‘avoid trying so hard to persuade others to join a coalition that we compromise on our goals or jeopardise the command structure. Generally, the mission will determine the coalition; the coalition should not determine the mission.’² Such political bravura has now receded significantly as the US actively courts the shrinking number of partners willing to work with it in dangerous missions. However, as the only leader capable of mounting large, complex, and global operations, how the US conducts its future military operations will shape how others conduct theirs.³ In IT terms, American doctrines will dominate military operations in the same way that Microsoft’s Windows operating system dominates computer programming.

American hegemony and military primacy

Military power is only one aspect of America’s hegemonic position, and it is by no means always relevant. The greatest source of US strength is found in the ideological sway it holds over much of the world; its inherent ‘soft power’, as Joseph Nye characterises it. The United States exercises an ideational authority unlike that of any other state. Despite the United States’ ideational influence, the extent of its control over the global economy is open to question. Moreover, a rising tide of anti-Americanism is challenging American soft power. The status of American military power, however, is largely beyond question, both rhetorically and in practice.⁴

The basis of American military primacy has been described in terms of ‘command of the commons’. The ‘commons’ are those areas over which there is no national jurisdiction (most obviously, the sea and outer space) and those areas where military control is difficult to enforce. These areas can be used by any actor possessing the requisite capability. But because of the ubiquity of America’s military power, as opposed to the ‘niche’ and localised roles played by other states, the United States is able to exploit these areas more effectively in pursuing its military ends. More importantly, it may deny the commons to others. Wresting command of the commons from the US would require a generalised war, which is clearly currently beyond the capabilities of any other state. Command of the commons in its essence gives the US global agency, a privileged global ability to act in other words. When the US confronts its enemies in their own specific areas of local control, they will already have been greatly weakened through diplomatic, economic, and moral isolation, and through stand off military strikes from air, space, and the sea.⁵

Command of the commons is enhanced not simply through the comprehensive nature of American military might, but also through its capacity for a global approach to operations. No other state possesses a comparable worldwide network of military outposts in friendly states, which provide logistics support for operations distant from the US homeland. The wide-ranging exercises that US forces conduct with the armed forces of allies and security partners also enhance American familiarity with the operational characteristics of international military actors, and with diverse operating environments. Finally, no other state organises its military activities on a global basis, as the United States does in the form of its Unified Command Plan (UCP). The UCP enables the American military to ‘develop responsive war plans that can generate significant combat power in far corners of the world on relatively short notice’.⁶

The globalised nature of American military power does not obviate the need for allies and other security partners, as every US National Security Strategy has pointed out.⁷Although some have challenged the notion of unipolarity on this basis, it is the case that the strong ‘have more ways of coping’ than weaker powers.⁸ The point here is that, at present, America’s overwhelming military power provides it with options to structure the world that other states do not possess. In previous eras, this type of dominant power would have been of such concern to other states that it would have given rise to alliances, arms races, and outright political and military confrontation. There is speculation that the European Union (EU) may evolve as a potential counterweight to American hegemony, or that China will in time become a potential peer competitor. However, the fact that war between the major states is now largely ‘unthinkable’⁹ suggests that American power does not threaten the core interests of potential rivals in the way that the rise of Spanish, French, German, or indeed Spartan power did in the past. Concern over America’s power centres on more generalised unease about global issues confronting all states, such as climate change, religious extremism, and cultural domination in all its varied forms. The nature of these challenges has limited reactions to the scope of US power to considerations of restraint and ‘socialisation’ in order to keep American behaviour within acceptable boundaries, much as one would deal with a friendly but unruly dog.¹⁰ The issue for other nations is not wars of re-balancing, but how to engage American power: prodding it into action here, restraining it there. Thus, while the US seeks to shape the future of the world, other states seek reflexively to shape America’s engagement with it. In the present global society of states, everyone has their own ‘special relationship’ with the US.

Allies and dominance

The public falling out in 2003 between the United States and some of its allies, particularly France and Germany, caused some to wonder whether American hegemony might be declining. Unlike in 1956, when the US was able to force France and Britain to back down over Suez, in the post-Cold War environment of 2003, Washington was unable to make its allies modify their policies. Indeed, as the dispute went on, each side became more intransigent. ‘What this shows’, argued Christopher Layne, ‘is that it is easier to be number one when there is a number two that threatens numbers three, four, and five, and so on. It also suggests that a hegemon so clearly defied is a hegemon on a downward arc.’¹¹

Yet as the French historian Raymond Aron has noted of another hegemon’s decline, ‘a change from Pax Britannica to the Pax Americana did not involve a change of universe, and pride, rather than the soul itself, suffered’.¹² Aron’s observation points to the surprising absence of competition between the United States and Britain as they exchanged roles in the twentieth century. But it also bears some relevance to the absence of military competition between America and its Cold War partners. One might point to the process of military ‘de-globalisation’ that took place throughout the 1990s.¹³ While American military spending fell somewhat in the early part of that decade, it has since recovered to the levels of the 1980s. At the same time, no state has responded in kind to American spending, and none has sought to challenge US dominance in key areas of military technology such as electronic warfare, intelligence, and surveillance. No peer competitor, whether China or Europe, has emerged in the military realm since the end of the Cold War, and no state seems likely to challenge the US militarily in the near future. Given the huge disparities in power between the US and China, massive increases in China’s military budget would be necessary to develop the kind of power projection capabilities the US currently enjoys. Furthermore, such enormous changes would take years to mature to the level of operational proficiency that the US currently exercises.

A neutered Europe ‘unable to focus its latent military power’,¹⁴ comprised of states incapable of fighting among themselves, Layne argues, has long been the goal of American policy.¹⁵ If this is so, then it is at odds with America’s declaratory policy throughout the Cold War, and its continued irritation with the lack of European burden-sharing since 1991. Still, the creation of a strategic environment dominated by American power has been part of US security policy since the end of the Cold War. In 1992, a draft copy of the still-classified Defense Planning Guidance was leaked to the New York Times and the Washington Post. As the Post’s Barton Gellman reported:

The central strategy of the Pentagon framework is ‘to establish and protect a new order’ that accounts sufficiently for the interests of the advanced industrial nations to discourage them from challenging our leadership while at the same time maintaining a military dominance capable of deterring potential competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global role … ‘we will retain the pre-eminent responsibility for addressing selectively the wrongs which threaten not only our interests but those of our allies or friends, or which could seriously unsettle international relations’.¹⁶

This was a first attempt at reformulating American security policy to take account of the changes accompanying the end of the Cold War. Some argue that it was based on an honest attempt to reassess the doctrines that would guide American action abroad, and what America could expect in terms of cooperation from partners no longer existentially threatened as they had been throughout the Cold War.¹⁷ Gellman noted that the 1992 document was not a revolutionary departure from traditional American policy, which had sought to ensure that no one power dominated any key region, placing it in a position to alter the global balance of power.¹⁸ And indeed, the leaked document did refer specifically to the necessary role of allies and coalition partners, noting their ‘considerable promise’ in assisting America to further its interests abroad.¹⁹ Additionally, some have argued that the 1992 document was in keeping with ‘American exceptionalism’, the notion that the United States always uses power benevolently. Some have noted this aspect of America’s ‘myth of invincibility’, arguing: ‘According to this faith, American global power is limited by its own political scruples and humanitarian self-restraint.’²⁰ Despite this, the document barely conceals its scepticism that such cooperation would be easy to orchestrate, or would be there simply for the asking: instead of relying on its own system of alliances, the US ‘should expect future coalitions to be ad hoc assemblies’, and ‘should be postured to act independently when collective action cannot be orchestrated’.²¹

The policy did not withstand the withering criticism directed at it from both the media and America’s allies; the language of Defense Planning Guidance was altered to make it more acceptable, and it seemed to be relegated to the status of a footnote in US security policy. However, the emergence of George W. Bush’s first National Security Strategy in the post-9/11 environment strongly recalls the words of the discarded 1992 Guidance.²² Shortly before its publication, Bush noted in his 2002 address to the graduating class at the US Military Academy at West Point that ‘America has and intends to keep military strength beyond challenge – thereby making the destabilising arms races of other eras pointless’.²³ The undertones of 1992 in subsequent US strategic policy, and the participation of several personalities from the first Bush administration, including the original document’s author, Paul Wolfowitz (who became Deputy Secretary of Defense in 2001), linked the two policies.

It seems that the quest for military supremacy remained part of Pentagon policy post-1992,²⁴ as shown by the development of the concept of ‘Full Spectrum Dominance’ during the mid-1990s. First articulated in the 1995 document Joint Vision 2010 (JV2010), Full Spectrum Dominance was supposed to enable the US ‘to dominate the full range of military operations from humanitarian assistance, through peace operations, up to and into the highest intensity conflict’.²⁵ Here was the articulation of a policy that called for American preeminence across the full span of military operations, not just in traditional conventional force-on-force engagements. The goals of 1992’s Defense ...