when persuasion, compensation, bribery, and intimi-dation fail, and others choose to defend the status quo by force. This is the purpose of offensive wars, cam-paigns, battles, and even offensive engagements with-in defensive wars. In other words, this logic applies to counteroffensives to restore sovereign territory lost to an aggressor.
Offense has its own peculiar logic as well. To change the existing status quo is the most ambitious of all intended uses of military forces, requiring the most preparation, effort, expertise, and good luck.
The Fundamentals of Attack: Bringing Real Potential to Bear Against Defense.
What matters in the art of attack is also real potential and how best to bring it to bear to defeat the defense.
Once launched into his enterprise, the attacker will test his own potential against the image that failed to
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deter. To counter the defense’s strengths, the attacker has the advantage of deciding when and where initial engagements will be fought. The defender is obliged to react and either shift and expose reinforcing forces or meet local attacks with inferior forces in prepared positions.
All offensive endeavors—any effort to change the status quo—require a two-armed strategy. One arm communicates threats or inducements aimed at the intellect, or will, of the opposing chief decisionmak-ers. Such communications, whether through actions, words, or images, are intended to shape decisions and elicit desired responses. For best results, the intended recipient must perceive the communication, under-standing and interpreting it in such a way that the message compels him to act in the way intended by the sender.
Because of the extraordinary difficulty of achiev-ing the desired change in the status quo through this arm alone, the other arm must act to force the desired change in the status quo, regardless of the decisions or actions of the opponent. This arm creates new and very relevant facts, sometimes in plain sight, some-times hidden, until the new reality is fact.
The real enemy of the attacker is culmination be-fore ends are achieved. Sound intelligence is vital to the attack: Having misjudged the situation is the most frequent cause of premature culmination. While un-derstanding physical systems such as transportation, industrial, financial, and communications infrastruc-tures is challenging for modern intelligence, it is rela-tively easy compared with learning how a complex society will react to attack. The logic of a society’s re-sponse can be learned only through a combination of very intrusive intelligence sources prior to action and
purposeful interaction during offensive operations.
Even then, the attacker’s understanding of his oppo-nent’s response will be imperfect.
The single advantage of the offense over the de-fense is having the initiative to optimize all available potential, but knowing what potential is available and relevant and how to optimize it depends on a sound theory of the situation. Such theories then become the provisional “truth” upon which optimum plans are made and actions taken. The trick is to understand the provisional nature of such truths and revise them as the situation changes and learning takes place; plans and actions must adapt in media res.
All of this takes time, however, and time is the en-emy of the impatient attacker. The traditional answer to such complexity has been shock and overwhelming force, which simplify complexity by treating much of it as irrelevant. Such methods require the willingness to accept heavy collateral damage and the potential loss of internal allies as the acceptable price for the desired change in status quo. The alternative is to be patient. Although modern democratic states lack pa-tience when wars are costly and they have difficulty accepting the heavy collateral damage associated with traditional ways to simplify complexity, when suffi-ciently aroused, modern democracies will send their troops to war for a change in the status quo, even though they do not fully comprehend the complexi-ties they will encounter. When that happens, it pays to understand the logic of the offense and its dilemmas.
The offensive schemes of sophisticated modern au-thoritarian states will be governed largely by similar logic and its dilemmas. They, too, will respond to in-ternal pressures to change a status quo that is broadly believed to be intolerable, especially when leaders see
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responding to such pressures will enhance remaining in power, the deterrent of opponents is not credible, and the risks are acceptable. They, too, will misread the logic of those they attack.
Attack and Modern Technology.
If the argument so far is based on historical evi-dence, how will modern military technology affect it?
There have been at least three stages in the recent ap-plication of technology to attack. Let us consider each in turn before turning to the weaknesses they share.
1. The 1980s: Reconnaissance Strike Complexes. In the 1980s, the Soviets developed the idea of reconnais-sance strike complexes. Offensively oriented networks with high tech reconnaissance elements initiating the kill chain could be a prominent feature of all future offensive actions, at every scale. These networks could be reliably keyed to finding and destroying specific key components of the enemy’s man-made systems of defense. Such proactive systems could also carry out deliberate ambush-like engagements with devastat-ing effects on the enemy. The greatly expanded ability to acquire, track, and process more targets at greater ranges would make it possible for proactive offensive systems to strike many discrete targets that comprise the essential elements of an opposing military forma-tion or funcforma-tional grouping, all at once. This would affect forces mounted in land, sea, or air vehicles far more than dispersed light infantry.
There are great advantages to employing precision weapons in large numbers and within compressed time frames. The concept of “time-on-target” artillery strikes is not new. The advantage of precision fires is
greatest against unwarned enemy mechanized air, sea, and ground formations or against fixed sites. Their ef-fectiveness against such forces when mobile begins to degrade rapidly once the enemy is warned and begins to evade. Such evasion greatly increases the difficulty of subsequent targeting. The greatest challenge for such tactics is dispersed conventional or paramilitary infantry, or irregulars in sophisticated urban web defenses.
Equally important will be a planning mindset that sees target sets in terms of their systemic sig nificance.
This mind-set merely requires the adap tation of the principles of “target value analysis” developed by the Army artillery school in the early-1980s. This ap-proach to “deep battle” targeting was used to identify the highest payoff targets in a large force array based on our knowledge of enemy doctrine, the context of the engagement, and the mission of the friendly force.
The role of reconnaissance strike complexes will grow as a prominent feature of modern offensives because of their efficiency in finding and dismantling man-made systems of the defense and vital physical infrastructures, even when hidden and well guarded.
2. The late-1980s and early-2000s: Warden’s Con-centric Rings. Prior to the First Gulf War, thinkers such as Colonel John Warden of the U.S. Air Force thought along similar lines.4 Warden’s important in-novation was to introduce a new way to think about how to achieve desired results, or effects, using rapid-ly evolving aerospace technologies. He argued against the current serial approach to bombing campaigns and advocated attacking many targets in parallel, us-ing the new capabilities of the Air Force. Older tech-nology required many aircraft carrying many bombs
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to concentrate on a few strategically valuable targets at one time. Bombing campaigns proceeded in series from target to target. This lengthy and predictable process exposed many aircrews to achieve a particu-lar outcome. New technology permits many such tar-gets to be attacked in parallel by fewer aircraft, and each aircraft can attack more than one target because the bombs they carry are far more precise and more potent. Warden reasoned that enhanced technical in-telligence permits a greater knowledge of how man-made enemy defensive systems combine, and where to strike for maximum effect.
In theory, attacking large numbers of targets in parallel within a very compressed time frame should yield greatly magnified shock effect at greatly reduced aircrew exposure. The demonstration of Warden’s methods and new airpower capabilities have been truly awesome in recent conflicts such as the Kosovo air war and the opening campaigns to depose the Tali-ban regime of Mullah Omar in Afghanistan and the Baathist regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq.
But Warden went further. He also argued that the modern industrial state is very vulnerable to precision weapons delivered by American Airmen in stealth air-craft, especially if they attack large numbers of targets in parallel within a very compressed time frame. The key to this sort of an attack was Warden’s concentric rings theory. He saw the modern state in terms of five concentric rings of targets with the power grid in the center and military communications next, followed by fuel supplies, normal communications, and the transportation system. Destroying these would para-lyze an enemy without destroying his people. Field forces would be of little consequence because the en-emy leadership would capitulate before the campaign
of precision bombardment completed the final ring of targets. This strategy of striking vital infrastruc-ture rapidly and surgically, Warden believed, would guarantee rapid success with limited risk and with-out the great loss of life of earlier bombing methods.
This implied that the old two-armed logic of offensive strategy no longer applied—the arm necessary to en-force the desired change in the status quo regardless of the decisions or actions of the opponent would not be needed.
Source: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Warden%27s_Five_Rings.svg.
Figure 5-1. Warden’s Five Rings.
3. Today: Air-Sea Battle. In 2010, other innovators proposed a variant of Warden’s theory. The second or
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necessary in a war with rising powers, they suggest-ed. These authors revised Warden’s concentric rings theory to “distant blockading” the flow of goods and resources from and to an adversary power’s economy for as long as it takes for its leadership to come to terms. And they argued that, applied long enough and competently, distant blockade—their form of “shock and awe”—would prove decisive. In its fundamental assumptions, “Air-Sea Battle” is revised Warden. Like Warden’s theory, Air-Sea Battle has already proven to be widely popular, but like Warden’s theory, it ne-glects the decisive element of military power: the ca-pacity to force a change in the status quo regardless of the opponent’s decisions.
4. The Weakness of One-Armed Attack. Proponents of concentric ring theory and Air-Sea Battle share a common flaw: they use only the arm of strategy that attempts to communicate with the intellect or will of opposing decisionmakers, and not the arm of strategy that attempts to force a change in the status quo re-gardless of the opponent’s decisions. Some will argue that only one arm of offensive strategy is required be-cause, according to Warden’s concentric rings theory, air forces can essentially deprive the opponent of the capacity to decide since modern states (and modern warmaking) depend on networks vulnerable to air strikes. But will such operation enforce our will on the enemy? While leaders cannot communicate as before and the country may not be able to fight as before, the fighting will not be over after this first major shock and awe battle and a desirable peace will not be in sight. If all outcomes, beyond such a point, are accept-able, then one arm will do.
Once chosen, one-armed offensive strategies are roads to unpredictable and unfavorable outcomes;
they are not reliable ways to change intolerable sta-tus quos. This is so because, within these strategies, cause and effect are weakly linked; between bombing campaigns and capitulation, there lie the very human brains of war-stressed leaders, most of whom are only partly known to the attacker.
Regardless of what happens to networks and in-frastructures, when countries like China or Iran are attacked based on this theory, enemy leaders and the people of the country would decide to continue re-sistance. Events will have solidified the people more than cowed them. This appears to have happened after the “London Blitz” according to the study of Canadian psychologist J. T. McCurdy.5 During the summer of 1940, British military and civilian lead-ers prepared for hundreds of thousands to be dead, more than a million wounded, and mass panic in the streets. One military estimate predicted the Army un-able to defend the British Islands because it would be preoccupied with controlling a traumatized public.
They believed that an air campaign against London could cause the British to lose the war with Germany.
During the fall of 1940, the Germans commenced 57 consecutive nights of devastating bombardment at the beginning of an 8-month-long concerted effort to cause the British government and its people to give up fighting and accept the will of their enemy. Tens of thousands of high-explosive bombs and a million incendiary devices fell, damaging a million buildings.
Entire neighborhoods were laid waste, and the casual-ties were indeed high, if not as high as expected. The British leadership had assumed that a traumatic effect,
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like being bombed, would have the same effect on ev-erybody, and that the difference between near misses and remote misses would be the degree of trauma they suffered. This was not the finding of McCurdy’s study. It found that those who survived near misses were indeed traumatized, but those who survived remote misses were affected in an unexpected way.
They became hardened by the experience of surviving the severe bombardments, and ever more determined to persevere. And, as we know, Winston Churchill’s government became all the more determined not to give in, but to pursue unconditional surrender instead.
They will fall back on low-tech communications. Na-tional security and political organs now in existence in such countries stretch to the grass roots. The final fall back for populations in such disastrous straits are tra-ditional social frameworks. Soon varied suppressed contending forces (ethnic, religious, political, or other) will spring into action with various change agendas.
If matters are left to the remaining forces and frame-works to resolve, some new order will evolve. But the outcome is as likely to be as intolerable as the situation that warranted offensive operations in the first place.
It would be as unwise to have caused it deliberately as it would be to try to predict the outcome.
We have already mentioned how well Wardian theory performed in the first battles of the Afghan and Iraqi wars. But such thinking also fueled over-opti-mism about the course and outcome of those wars. It also caused high-level leaders to believe in an ill-de-signed and puny second strategic arm—one that was not able to impose an acceptable status quo within po-litically acceptable costs and time.
Distant blockading compounds this weakness by setting in motion causal chains affecting globalized
economic interdependencies in unpredictable, frat-ricidal, and even suicidal ways. For instance, China is now America’s third largest export customer after Canada and Mexico. How broad would be the eco-nomic ramifications of a distant blockade of China?
Are we confident they would harm China more than the United States? How certain can we be in regard-ing the response of Chinese leadership? So not only might unpredictable causal chains transform China into something more intolerable than it was when war started, but unpredictable causal chains will surely shrink the global economy intolerably as well.
It is one thing to modify or disrupt man-made sys-tems; it is quite another thing to modify or disrupt the intentions of actual men. Because we can only ever guess what strangers are thinking and what factors matter to them, we cannot know with certainty wheth-er air and naval attacks on high value targets will cause submission, or how long it will take before decisions to submit are taken, or what form these decisions will take. Democracies may respond one way to damaged infrastructure, while tyrants, who are as likely as not to have let infrastructure crumble while constructing palaces, may respond differently. All decisionmakers are dealing with varied pressures, some unknown to us, and these pressures arise from various directions and constantly change in direction and amplitude. We can predict with some confidence, however, that once we attack a determined enemy, that enemy’s defini-tion of winning will promptly become not losing, or delaying defeat (indefinitely, if possible) until the coalition tires of pursuing its original strategic ends.
Rather than trust in our predictive powers, we should recall how powerless we were against Ho Chi Minh’s unification of Vietnam, and allow this memory to
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spire strategic modesty and prudence. Above all, we should assume an inscrutable and implacable enemy.
Naval and air forces play the leading role in the first arm of offensive strategy, and they figure promi-nently in the second. Naval, air, and space forces can gain information about objects and activities on the ground, and they can influence adversaries’ activities and strike objects. Nevertheless, only truly integrated operations containing a sufficiency of ground forces can control the activities of adversaries and enforce desired outcomes. When implacable foes have to be defeated and the desired outcome is a specified new condition or behavior, only unified action including a significantly large land force can secure it. We should also be reminded beforehand how difficult such un-dertakings remain.
THE LOGIC OF MILITARY POWER