THE USS JANET RENO

October/November 2001 Issue

It was a good tour, says the petty officer aboard the U.S.S. Harry S. Truman, just back from Operation Southern Watch in the Persian Gulf. The six-month deployment was a success, he says, because this time out no one died. Quite often someone does. Of course there were the regular “lumps and bumps” among the 6,000 personnel aboard, but fewer of the usual serious injuries: broken bones, fractured skulls, painful burns from steam pipes and jet blasts.

Sailors and pilots must expect an elevated risk of injury on an aircraft carrier, which can handle two outgoing planes and one incoming plane every 30 seconds. The 70,000-pound fighters (and even bigger specialized planes) go from zero to 165 miles per hour in two seconds, in the space of 300 feet. They do so at night, in all kinds of weather, on pitching seas that roll the vessel as much as 14 degrees. The area of the flight deck is 4.5 acres, but to the pilots coming in it looks like a postage stamp. Sailors get blown overboard by wind and jet wash, and if the safety netting on the side doesn’t catch them it’s a good 50- to 60-foot fall to the ocean.

The 85-bed hospital can do appendectomies, laparoscopies, and vasectomies. It has a digital X-ray machine that can e-mail images to Bethesda Naval Hospital in Maryland for consultations. The medical staff performs two to three combat and mass-     casualty drills per week. A while back a film crew asked Lloyd’s of London to evaluate the carrier. The insurance company deemed its work environment the most dangerous in the world.

The average age of the crew is nineteen and a half.

Such perilous work conditions can create considerable stress. And the crew is away from home for six months at a time, often in hostile territory. So to maintain morale, the Truman boasts five full gyms, seven satellite gyms, a chapel, a library, a post office, a drug store, and a mini-mart. The ship has its own TV and radio stations (the call-in show “Ask the Chief” airs weekly), its own newspaper, Internet access, ATMs, and 2,000 telephones. The crew may avail itself of the virtual MBA program, the televisions in the berthing spaces, and the fully operating movie theater (the ship has a deal with Hollywood to get first-run flicks). The mess serves steak and shrimp every week, and offers an ice-cream bar with “all the toppings you can think of,” as one crewman who has gained ten pounds since coming aboard puts it.

The nation’s enemies see none of that. What they see is a 97,000-ton leviathan surging toward them at 30 knots, loaded down with 80 aircraft capable of taking out a city. America’s 12 aircraft carriers represent the bristling might of the world’s most powerful nation.

And Andrew Marshall would like to see them scrapped.

Advanced in years, publicity-shy, bespectacled, Marshall has long headed the Pentagon’s internal think tank, the Office of Net Assessment. Put in charge of the Bush administration’s proposed major military overhaul by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, he has sharply polarized the defense community. Marshall’s allies and protégés revere him, calling the Office of Net Assessment “St. Andrew’s Prep.” His enemies despise him, deriding his acolytes as “Jedi Knights.”

The present storm surrounding Marshall centers on his push for a “Revolution in Military Affairs”—a sweeping transformation of the armed forces’ mission, structure, strategy, and tactics. Boiled down to its essence, Marshall’s vision consists of a smaller military armed with highly advanced communications and weapons, widely dispersed but well networked, fighting a highly automated war from a distance. He frowns on “forward deployment” such as American troops based overseas and carriers plying the waters off foreign shores. He believes such forces are too vulnerable to high-tech weapons such as the Russian-built, China-bought SS-N-22 “Sunburn” cruise missile, designed to sink carriers.

The U.S., Marshall contends, is stuck in a Cold War mindset and needs to fundamentally rethink its strategy. He believes future conflicts will be fought quickly by highly mobile forces, and that the heavy weaponry on which our current armed forces rely takes too long to transport. There will be no more six-month buildups like the one prior to Desert Storm. The conflict in Kosovo, for instance, was over before the buildup was complete. Marshall deems even the F-22 Raptor, still in prototype, outdated.

So what would he like to see in America’s holster instead? A great many bold new fighting technologies are on their way to becoming realities. Following are some examples of weapons systems and combat approaches that meet Marshall’s criteria for future warfighting, and might conceivably be in the field within the next few years:

• UCAVs are Unmanned Combat Air Vehicles—essentially fighter and bomber drones. With UCAVs, designers need not worry about tailoring the machine to suit a pilot’s needs: Field of view, physical protection and life support, and ejection from a damaged plane are not needed. UCAVs thus cost far less than manned fighters, and operational costs are also lower because the controllers can practice on simulators, saving both fuel and wear and tear. And destruction of a plane brings no human loss. But eliminating the pilot does have its downsides: Should communication be lost, a drone cannot adapt and improvise to changing circumstances. On the other hand, a downed drone would not have led to the type of international incident that ensued when the U.S. EP-3E was forced to land on Hainan Island; controllers could simply order one to self-destruct in such an incident.

• Arsenal ships would be large, lightly manned, and highly armed alternatives to cruisers and aircraft carriers. In various configurations, arsenal ships could serve as floating (or semi-submersed, for stealthiness) missile barges. Targeting would be done from remote locations; the ship would receive coordinates and then launch a volley of Tomahawk missiles, for example. Arsenal ships offer significant savings in operational costs because the crew would be tiny, probably numbering in the dozens. Yet the ships could deliver the same firepower as several cruisers requiring more than 1,000 sailors. More ships could be built for a given investment, placing less reliance on a few platforms. As with UCAVs, however, a break in communications could cripple the arsenal ship.

• Streetfighters are small naval vessels designed to sneak in close to shore, clear mines, launch missiles, destroy coastal subs, and act as a screen for off-shore forces. They could also overwhelm larger enemy vessels by force of numbers. Such ships could have a modular design, making them quickly adaptable for different missions. And their size and speed would make them tough targets. In the Navy’s Global 2000 wargame, officers found them “very difficult targets for submarines,” according to Vice Admiral Arthur Cebrowski, president of the Naval War College and a champion of the concept. But their numbers, size, and firepower almost guarantee that some would be destroyed, leading critics to deride them as “disposable ships.”

• Corsair is a 6,000-ton aircraft carrier concept (one-sixteenth the tonnage of the Truman), also promoted by Cebrowski. The Corsair could supplant the supercarrier by distributing air power among several ships instead of one. It offers the advantage of flexibility and maneuverability, and the ships could go places—such as through the Panama Canal—that supercarriers cannot. Moreover, pocket carriers could provide air cover for operations for which the Navy was not willing to divert a large ship. One difficulty, however, would be their stability in rough seas.

• Sea Lance is a proposed fast-moving attack ship built on a catamaran hull. Conceived by junior officers studying at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, the ship is designed to be deployed in large numbers and used to deliver weapons or special forces to shore. It would cost a tenth as much as a destroyer, operate in extremely shallow water—as little as 10 feet—and operate with a crew of only 13. Its speed and small size would enable it to evade detection and tow weapons on trailers into position near the coast. The loss of one, or even several, would not render the squadron inoperable, the way a single missile could disable a destroyer.

• Older ballistic missile submarines—such as the four Ohio-class boats scheduled to be decommissioned by 2004—could be converted to carry cruise missiles instead of nuclear weapons. Extremely stealthy, the subs could destroy missile batteries and other targets on land that threaten surface ships and airplanes. Their missiles would have a longer range than carrier-based   aircraft, their use would not put pilots in harm’s way, and they cost considerably less than a carrier.

• Land Warrior is a digital system for infantrymen that   combines a portable computer, GPS location-finder, video rifle sight, laser range-finder, and communication network. The  system improves combat locating, communication, and lethality. Land Warrior does raise questions of information overload. Would soldiers see the forest beyond the trees of information on their screens? 

Some wonder whether the U.S. military needs such radical new technologies. After all, the Soviet Union is kaput and Russian arms production has plummeted 90 percent in the past decade. China is populous and soaring in technological sophistication, but still very poor. Military spending and arms imports are actually down in troublesome countries like Iran, Iraq, Syria, Libya, and North Korea. The U.S. slice of world military spending is higher now than it was in 1985. Based on such facts, someone looking to scale back the military could make a fairly credible case against developing new programs and weapons.

But the balance sheet has another side. The nature of foreign threats is changing. Today’s terrorism is more extremist in nature and has vastly improved access to advanced technology and weaponry. Rogue states may not be expanding their armies, but they are developing weapons of mass destruction, and the intercontinental missiles capable of delivering them. Moreover, China has grown increasingly aggressive. Winning its bid to host the 2008 Olympics might temper China’s behavior in the short term, but its increasingly hostile nationalistic rumblings are likely to have some military expression over the long run.

For its own part, the American military suffers on several counts. Despite three major recent reviews—the Base Force Review, the Bottom-Up Review, and the 1997 Quadrennial Defense Review—our forces remain largely unchanged structurally, though reduced in size, since the end of the Cold War. Even with reductions, the services continue to fall short of recruitment targets. The fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise of new enemies has dramatically shifted the threats faced by the U.S. Yet this hasn’t been matched by a comparable reorientation of our offensive and defensive forces.

While some insist the U.S. military remains mired in the industrial era, bypassed by the information revolution, that is somewhat of an exaggeration. Desert Storm was indeed fought to a considerable degree with Vietnam-war technology. But the force deployed in Kosovo relied more heavily on electronics, stealth technology, and other post-computer-revolution innovations. All the same, it took the U.S. weeks and months just to get critical weapons into a position where they could be applied in battle in the Balkans.               

At the time of World War II, France—believing in the traditional brute-force model of warfighting—took great comfort in having both more tanks and more artillery than Germany. But that made no difference against Germany’s strategy of blitzkrieg (“lightning war”). Speed and technology trumped military mass.

Today, suggests Admiral William Owens, former Joint Chiefs vice chair, “synergy wins.” The key is to weave forces together using new communications, surveillance, transport, and targeting tools. And reformers needn’t turn everything upside down to have an effect. As Donald Rumsfeld himself pointed out in a June congressional committee hearing, “The blitzkrieg was an enormous success, but it was accomplished by only a 13-percent-transformed German army.” 

To much of the U.S. public, the Gulf War was a supreme example of the power of superior technology. It was indeed the first war where, as one scholar puts it, “brilliant munitions arrived.” But in certain ways Desert Storm was a throwback to the World Wars: Large masses of men and heavy munitions clashing on open ground, as the U.S. might have done in Europe against the Soviet Union. America’s fighting forces are still organized and armed to fight hard, fierce battles from fixed bases against an enemy that no longer really exists.

America’s heavy armaments—items such as the M-1 tank and the self-propelled howitzer—must either be pre-stationed at nearby bases or else be transported from afar to the theater of conflict—requiring long delays and a snaking supply line. The transport and logistics difficulties that plagued our Army in Kosovo are liable to increase as our likely combat scenarios grow more and more unconventional, especially if Asia becomes the source of threat.

Meanwhile our bases are not only becoming vulnerable to attack, as more nations gain advanced weapons, they also depend on political and diplomatic goodwill for which there is no guarantee. Note how political factors are forcing the Navy to abandon its training site at Vieques—within the U.S. protectorate of Puerto Rico. Note the pressure against U.S. bases on Okinawa, and in the Philippines.      

Our current stock of superweapons suffers from three other failings as well. The first is age. Many U.S. pilots are now flying planes considerably older than they are. Older equipment costs more to maintain, and breaks down more often. Modernizing weapons and equipment is hugely expensive: Midlife modernization of an aircraft carrier can cost $3 billion. Nor does modernization change fundamentals. Today’s M-1 tank, for example, is not going to get any lighter, or freer to roam away from its fuel trucks. And today’s aircraft carriers, for all their whiz-bang gadgetry, remain essentially the same platform as the Navy’s first carrier, the Langley, commissioned in 1922. Our Air Force still relies on several dozen 1950s-era B-52 bombers; the next generation of heavy bombers is not slated to come along until 2037, when the B-52s will be nearly a century old. Imagine the U.S. trying to fight WWII with technology from the 1850s, on horseback and aboard wooden ships.

A related problem is vulnerability. In 1998, North Korea—a comparatively poor and backward nation—launched its Taepo Dong 1 missile, which flies faster than the ship-based missile interceptors now being tested by our navy. Advances in armor-piercing weaponry likewise present an increasing threat to U.S. tanks and armored-personnel carriers.

A third problem has to do with the limitations of nuclear weapons. Our nuclear deterrent is not very useful against the sort of devastating yet limited attack that modern precision weapons enable foes to inflict on us. And so we need more modulated ways of responding.           

There are also some esoteric new threats the U.S. military will have to handle in the future. For example:

• Slipperier Terrorism. Although the number of terrorist attacks against the U.S. has recently declined, the number of casualties has increased. Terrorist groups today receive less state support and turn more often to private patrons such as Osama Bin Laden for resources. Private sponsors are less susceptible to sanctions, negotiated treaties, retaliation threats, and other forms of state-on-state pressure.

• Proliferation of potent weapons. More nations are gaining high-end weaponry and technology such as ballistic missiles, cruise missiles, and satellites—often buying them on the open market. And military reformers such as Andrew Krepinevich, who heads the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, argue that the Navy will increasingly find itself fighting not in favorable deep-ocean environments but close to shore, where ships are vulnerable to land-based missiles. He asks, “How would you move a carrier through the Strait of Hormuz when Iran could have lots of anti-ship mines, anti-ship cruise missiles?” In such theaters, sending Streetfighters or subs armed with Tomahawk missiles would be safer and faster, and could bring significant savings in operational costs.

• Biological warfare. Germ warfare will present a considerable challenge in the future, especially as the ability to manipulate the genetic code becomes more widespread. Ken Alibek, who headed the Soviet Union’s Biopreparat program, finds even Britain’s foot-and-mouth outbreak suspicious. “We cannot distinguish between naturally occurring epidemics and ones we create,” he has said. “We need to take a very aggressive approach and start developing real protection against biological weapons.”

In late July, former chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee Sam Nunn and Oklahoma governor Frank Keating gave a sobering presentation on the possible outcome of a smallpox attack against the U.S. The upshot: thousands dead and mass hysteria. Peter Jahrling, chief science advisor of the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, believes there is “no higher biological threat to this nation than smallpox.” And if terrorists wished to get their hands on smallpox, they might be able to do so comparatively easily, particularly from the notoriously porous former Soviet bio-weapons industry.

• Space hostilities. America’s fighting forces have grown increasingly reliant on satellites for communication and surveillance (one-eighth of the satellites orbiting the planet belong to the Pentagon), and probably will grow more so. Until recently America and the Soviet Union were the only nations capable of significant space launch. Now commercial launches outnumber military launches, and an increasing number of countries are getting involved.

Three years ago, 42 retired top military officers sent a letter to President Clinton urging him to provide the means necessary for U.S. dominance in space. “We can think of few challenges likely to pose a greater danger to our future security than that of adversaries seeking to make hostile use of space—or to deny us the ability to dominate that theater of operations,” they wrote. America’s enemies could knock out our military and commercial satellites relatively easily, doing devastating damage to our communications system, our financial networks, and our economy in very short order.

• Computer warfare. Scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory have made strides in the field of quantum computing, which uses individual atoms as switches. A tiny workable quantum computer using just a few thousand atoms would make today’s most powerful supercomputers look like an abacus, opening up vast possibilities for code-breaking, weapons design, wargaming, threat assessment, and the sifting of tapped telecom information. Such technology is unlikely to be exclusive to the U.S.

And as the world becomes more and more dependent on computer networks, it’s likely that logic bombs, viruses, worms, and other forms of electronic sabotage will become a growing threat. If a computer-school dropout could write a simple program—the “love bug” virus—that did more than $7 billion in damage worldwide in a couple of days, imagine what a serious electronic-warfare division could do.

• Electromagnetic warfare. One of the threats of which the American public is least aware is the possibility of an electromagnetic pulse caused by a high-altitude nuclear detonation. The atmospheric explosion of a nuclear warhead would cripple or impair the performance of electronics throughout a large portion of the country, and likewise cripple or impair the performance of a high-tech military. The possibility of this kind of electronic terrorism is a principal reason the Bush administration wants a national missile defense. 

When Donald Rumsfeld arrived as the new Secretary of Defense this spring, he promised a sweeping transformation of the armed forces. He established several panels that worked largely in secret and without much input from the Pentagon brass. His subordinates have already proposed abandoning the strategy of fighting two major wars at the same time, dropping some weapons procurements, mothballing carriers, eliminating Army divisions, closing more bases, and moving away from Cold War strategies.

This approach has drawn fire from certain quarters. Some conservatives worry about cuts masquerading as reforms. “Don’t be fooled by fancy, defense whiz-kid explanations,” Weekly Standard editors wrote recently. Too much of the “defense reform” movement, they suggest, could just end up being defense shrinkage. Many liberals, on the other hand, view reform as just another way of “wasting resources” on the military. A recent American Prospect article depicted Andrew Marshall as a tool of the military-industrial complex.

Politicians at both the state and national level, meanwhile, worry about what large-scale changes might mean for their favored bases and associated jobs. Defense contractors fret over the potential loss of future sales. All parties stand ready to fight any reforms unfavorable to their own interests.

Resistance to change from outside the Defense Department is mirrored by nervousness within. Almost immediately upon Rumsfeld’s arrival, the Pentagon brass got its back up. The new secretary was relying too much on think tank experts, they complained, and wasn’t conferring sufficiently with senior officers. They complained about a lack of combat experience among many defense policy analysts.

Retired Admiral William Crowe, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, complained to The New Yorker: “First, the idea of precision-guided weapons—you’re really talking about money. In the Gulf War, we almost ran through our entire stock of precision weapons. We took out targets that cost less than the weapon…. Also, in a really tough war you can’t avoid head-on confrontation entirely. You just can’t. My God, if you think you can support arms on the ground with air coming in from three thousand miles away—that’s sheer nonsense.”

There are military analysts, as well, who dispute the need for any radical change to U.S. fighting forces. Loren Thompson of the Lexington Institute, for instance, suggests the need for a so-called revolution in military affairs is all “speculation,” predicated on “unprovable notions.”

Yet even Thompson allows that “we have seen a major transformation in the tools of warfare every one or two generations. In World War I, we saw the introduction of the submarine, the tank, the aircraft, and the easily portable machine gun. In WWII, we saw the introduction of long-range missiles and atomic weapons. Normally it takes a generation after introduction for these revolutionary technologies to dominate war plans,” but eventually they take over.

What’s more, Thompson admits, “Every facet of technology is accelerating. New generations reach the marketplace at a faster and faster pace. The danger for the military is that potential adversaries will leap right by us using technologies from the commercial center.” For a critic of Andrew Marshall, that sounds awfully Marshallite.   

The Marshall-Rumsfeld plans that emerge this fall might founder on the shoals of institutional or political resistance, or be capsized by some crisis that diverts the administration’s attention. But still our military will evolve, because it must. Sometime in the future, probably in our lifetimes, the aircraft carrier will seem almost as anachronistic as Hannibal’s elephants look to us today.

Dramatic new possibilities in warfighting lie on the horizon. Surveillance, detection, and targeting will improve immensely. The U.S. military is currently developing, for instance, a foliage-penetrating radar that will be able to detect targets hidden below a canopy of trees, in day or night. It also is working on a Human Identification at a Distance project that will be able to positively I.D. people from afar, using, in the words of the project’s former director, “different biometric techniques such as face and body parts identification, thermography, voice identification, kinematics, and remote iris scan.”

Laser research is proceeding toward directed-energy weapons. The U.S. is already testing lasers that can destroy missiles and planes. Advances in ballistics could yield ultra-high-velocity railguns of great lethality. Other experimental projects include a self-healing minefield, in which anti-tank mines reposition themselves to close breaches; mobile robots that work in teams with human soldiers in urban warfare; micro-robots 5 centimeters high that can operate cooperatively; and underwater weapons that can walk themselves, lobster-like, up to targets.

Looking further ahead, the U.S. may have to cope with some frightening and formidable germ threats. New biotechnology could make smallpox look like a headcold. Some scientists suggest that brain chemicals such as serotonin could be genetically encoded and inserted into a virus, and the virus introduced into a population to soften its will.

Then there is nanotechnology—tiny machines and substances built almost at the molecular level. Such devices could be used to clean up contaminated soil, identify and destroy cancer cells, or make solar power, but they could also be used for destructive ends. Eric Drexler, the father of modern nanotechnology, posits what he calls the “gray goo” scenario, in which self-replicating nanobots race out of control and overwhelm the ecosystem: “‘Plants’” with ‘leaves’ no more efficient than today’s solar cells could out-compete real plants, crowding the biosphere with an inedible foliage. Tough omnivorous ‘bacteria’ could out-compete real bacteria. They could spread like blowing pollen, replicate swiftly and reduce the biosphere to dust in a matter of days.” The scenario suggests ways in which nanobots could be used to destroy crops, make soldiers too sick to fight, or render the metal in weapons, ships, and trucks soft and “gooey.”

Finally, information—perhaps combined with some of the technologies outlined above—could one day make it possible to wage war against another nation without that nation’s knowledge. Imagine, say, a country where software viruses are subtly slowing and disabling computers, secret nanobots are slightly increasing structural failure, a biological agent has lowered fertility half a percent, crops suffer repeated blights, micro-satellites interfere with the country’s communications, and military hackers routinely disrupt the country’s financial and medical-records systems. Over time, the target nation would degrade and fall further and further behind.

These are not immediate threats. But there are other new weapons which could appear much sooner. We know about the proliferation in the later 1990s of nuclear weapons and advanced missiles. In the wrong hands, one such weapon might vaporize the floating American city that is the U.S.S. Truman. 

One need not buy into the most futuristic visions to see that the face of warfare is currently undergoing some radical shifts, and will continue to do so in the future. Those wishing to get a sense of just how decisive technology may be in years ahead might wish to consult Jared Diamond’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Guns, Germs, and Steel. In addition to explaining why horses are suitable for domestication while zebras are not, how Africa became black, and how Pizarro’s army of 168 defeated an Inca army of 80,000 within minutes, Diamond looks closely at the specific roles of advanced strategy, arms, armor, and transportation in determining national strength and safety. The reader leaves Diamond’s book with a clear sense that cultural dominance belongs to those who climb the technological ladder more quickly than others. This applies even more to military forces than to other branches of civilization.

Individual soldiers and sailors have long been familiar with the imperative of moving “up or out.” Increasingly, that same urgent demand applies to the leaders who must set the course for America’s overall fighting force.

Bart Hinkle is a columnist and editorial writer for the Richmond Times-Dispatch.

October/November 2001
The American Enterprise Online – taemag.org