Our challenge is to think beyond force—beyond war, as it has come to be understood—and to think instead about power. American power is not, at bot-tom, a military matter. Rather, it is an instrumentally effective, legal, and ethically legitimate, and, above all, strategic appropriation and deployment of our nation’s bounty of force—all for the grand purpose of achieving better solutions to the compound secu-rity challenges our nation faces. Nonetheless, our
conception of power and force does have profound consequences for how we understand and structure our military. In debates over the future structure of the U.S. military, our nation’s tragic obsession with force assumes the form of an equally tragic focus on technology.
Many are already advocating a national strategy, Air-Sea Battle (ASB) that focuses on high technology threats to the global commons or a peer competitor (such as China) with a corresponding commitment never again to fight a low technology, protracted, counterinsurgency war. Such a strategy seductively appeals to those concerned by the growing cost of land forces in the midst of austerity. It also appeals to those who would minimize “fog and friction” in war by using high technology intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR), which leverages traditional strengths of the American military industrial complex.
It appeals so strongly, in fact, that it has risen in a re-markably short period of time to become the de facto national strategy. A critic of Air-Sea Battle, Brigadier General (Retired) Huba Wass de Czege compares this development to other attempts to derive strategy from technological superiority:
An idea that began life as a concept for overcoming the new and envisioned anti-access tactics of a great and modern power like China gained legitimacy in the new American way of high-end war, laden with the faulty logic of its predecessor of a decade ago, Rapid Deci-sive Operations (RDO). RDO informed the logic and design of the 2001 and 2003 invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq to depose the Hussein and Taliban regimes;
both invasions depended on overwhelming precision air and naval firepower and a light presence of U.S.
ground forces to change intolerable situations on the
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ground. The approach endorsed by Secretary Gates would rely entirely on overwhelming precision air and naval firepower. This approach applies the logic of economic sanctions to bring a foreign government to terms by indirect pressure on the public it governs.2
The Air-Sea Battle concept is an operational ap-proach that prioritizes assured access to the global commons of the sea, air, space, and cyberspace do-mains while relying heavily on continued American air and naval superiority. It also envisions a greater reliance on regional alliances and an increased ac-ceptance of risk in other areas. The leading advocate of Air-Sea Battle, Dr. Andrew Krepinevich argues that it amounts to “a strategy of assured access [and]
reflects a sense of what the U.S. military can realis-tically achieve.”3 The realism of Air-Sea Battle arises from both its suitability to a nation unwilling to pay the high costs of maintaining a standing army and its suitability to the high technology U.S. economy. It is a strategy that speaks simultaneously to American fiscal anxiety and to American economic and military pride.
But is Air-Sea Battle in fact a strategy? Even its ad-vocates seem uncertain about the appropriate scope of Air-Sea Battle. Seen as a “new paradigm” for na-tional military strategy, however, Air-Sea Battle raises a host of difficult questions. Foremost among them is the place of Landpower. What size and type of force structure would be necessary to complement air and naval assets? Air-Sea Battle also rests on a questionable notion of deterrence. Air-Sea Battle represents a capa-bility that can be used against our enemies but lacks a strong signaling mechanism to show resolve. Carriers and aircraft come and go quickly into a region; they are excellent signals of capability but poor signals of commitment. Without demonstrating resolve, it is dif-ficult to reassure friends and fence-sitters in regions
of interest that the United States is “there,” not only virtually or “from-a-distance” but in a substantial and sustainable way. Without considerable land forces, it is also more difficult to dissuade actual or potential ad-versaries from testing U.S. will and resolve. So while Air-Sea Battle, as an operational concept, represents an effective military doctrine and method for gaining access in areas where our enemies have adopted Anti-Access/Area Denial (A2/AD) tactics and weapons systems, it does not adequately address the strategic issue of how to avoid conflict in the first place, nor does it speak to what happens after you gain access. It addresses the how but not the why. For that reason, it is better understood as an operational idea rather than a strategy. Ironically, it is Sir Julian Corbett, Britain’s greatest maritime strategist, who best expressed this point. The central theme of his work, he said, was “the powerlessness of a navy without an army equally well organized to act where the power of the fleet ends.”4
The current vogue for Air-Sea Battle has been useful, however, insofar as it has forced military and civilian leaders to reconsider the very nature of Landpower. Again, we can turn to Sir Julian Corbett for an expression of the Army’s essential raison d’etre:
He wrote:
Since men live upon the land and not upon the sea, great issues between nations at war have always been decided—except in the rarest cases—either by what your army can do against your enemy’s territory and national life, or else by the fear of what the fleet makes it possible for your army to do.5
Since war is ultimately a human endeavor, “fog and friction” are inherent in all warfare. And since human beings live on land, not in the sea or air,
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man engagement by soldiers and marines in shaping, combat, and post-combat operations must always fig-ure prominently in the larger and diverse ensemble of forces available to a nation.
To turn to our technological preeminence for solu-tions to vexing human problems is to confuse the fruit of our success with the cause of it. We do not enjoy power because of our advanced technology; we enjoy advanced technology because of our power. It is not in the air and on the sea, nor on cyber or outer space that wars are won. In the final analysis, they are won where the humans who wage them live, and this is on land. If the centrality of Landpower in national strat-egy raises difficult challenges, these are much better confronted with humility than ignored with hubris.