By MARK PERRY
The Joint Chiefs keep ordering up ambitious new war plans. But their biggest battle might be with each other.
At first, it’s hard to see Operation Desert Storm as anything less than an unparalleled American military victory. The battleship U.S.S. Missouri began the campaign to forcibly remove Iraqi forces from Kuwait by firing four Tomahawk cruise missiles at military command and control centers in Baghdad in the early morning hours of January 17, 1991. “I’ll never forget the day we launched these,” a Missouri crew member who witnessed the Tomahawk attack later wrote. “We listened to CNN radio from Baghdad after we had launched our birds. For an hour, everything was calm, but we knew sorties were on the way. Then all hell broke loose.”
In all, the United States fired 297 Tomahawk missiles from ships and submarines during the Gulf War, of which 282 reached and destroyed their targets. Nine of the missiles failed to fire, six fell into the water after their launch, and two were shot down. The Tomahawks’ carefully tabulated success rate of 94.94 percent was revolutionary, the most precise delivery of munitions on target in the history of warfare. And the Tomahawks were just one of an array of air assets used in the war’s earliest days to destroy Iraq’s military and leadership infrastructure.
The Iraqi military never recovered. Retired Air Force Lt. Gen. David Deptula, who was Desert Storm’s principal air campaign planner, says the air attacks were decisive. While Americans later focused their attention on Army Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf’s famous 100-hour “left hook” against the Iraqi army in Kuwait, Deptula says, the 900-hour air campaign that preceded it made the success of the ground war inevitable. He calls Schwarzkopf’s left hook “the great Iraqi prisoner roundup.”
Yet even as the military was celebrating Desert Storm, a small group of defense intellectuals—those Washington denizens who think about how to organize, train and equip U.S. forces—began to raise a series of uncomfortable questions about the campaign. They pointed out that U.S. naval and air deployments in the Persian Gulf were unchallenged—what if they hadn’t been? What if Iraq had been able to mount a sustained anti-naval and anti-air campaign that denied the U.S. Navy and Air Force access to the waters of the Gulf and the use of air bases in nearby countries? Would we have been able to counter their weapons? Would the operation have been as successful? The difficult questions weren’t aimed so much at Iraq or even its Persian Gulf neighbor, Iran, as at a potential conflict in the Asia-Pacific with China. If the United States were to fight a war with China at some point, it wouldn’t be the pushover that the Iraqi military was in 1991 and in 2003.
The attempt to answer these questions, particularly with regard to a future challenge from China in the Asia-Pacific region, launched a new military doctrine calledAirSea Battle (ASB for short) that became official Pentagon policy in 2010. ASB was meant to be a revolution in the U.S. military: The new plan updated the AirLand Battle doctrine that had guided the military’s Cold War thinking about how the United States and NATO would fight in Europe against the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact. AirSea Battle intended to create a unified war plan that would help the Navy and the Air Force dominate the “battle space” of a war in an environment like, say, the Pacific against, say, an enemy like China.
When the ASB doctrine was announced as part of the 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review, the Pentagon explained, “The concept will address how air and naval forces will integrate capabilities across all operational domains—air, sea, land, space and cyberspace—to counter growing challenges to U.S. freedom of action. As it matures, the concept will also help guide the development of future capabilities needed for effective power projection operations.”
It didn’t go unnoticed, however, that the new doctrine removed the Army from its central role in America’s future war-fighting equation; pride of place was suddenly given to “air and naval forces” that will be responsible for countering the “growing challenges to U.S. freedom of action.” That realization ignited a titanic battle in the Pentagon, little noticed outside defense circles, that still reverberates today.
As the Navy and Air Force joined up to demand more funding under the evolving ASB idea, the U.S. Army—knowing this meant less money for its troops—did everything it could to shoot down the idea. That effort started at the top with Army Chief of Staff Gen. Ray Odierno. According to a senior retired Army officer who knows Odierno well, the Navy-Air Force AirSea Battle announcement “sent him into a tizzy,” “chilled relations” between him and his Joint Chiefs of Staff colleagues and sparked “real resentments towards the Air Force and Navy among Odierno’s staff.”
The resentments gave rise to Odierno’s view that his service was actually fighting a three-front war—one in Afghanistan against the Taliban, another in Iraq against the insurgency there and the third in Washington against the Air Force and the Navy. “There’s always tension between the service heads,” a currently serving JCS officer says, “but this was on an entirely different level. Odierno looked at his Navy and Air Force colleagues as plotting against him—and the Army.”
Ike’s Arsenal Eisenhower poured money into the Air Force to develop its Cold War triad of nuclear threats—land-based and sea-based missiles, ICBMs and bombers. The heavy spending didn’t let up under JFK. | Reagan’s Build-Up Claiming that the United States had “unilaterally disarmed” before he took office, Reagan oversaw a massive defense build-up. Some say the the Soviet Union’s struggle to keep up brought on its demise. | Bush’s Surge The historic peak of Army spending authority came during two land wars—in Afghanistan and in Iraq, where the military was in the midst of a 30,000-strong troop surge. | Source: Department Of Defense, Budget Authority by Branch
Asked for comment, Odierno said he disagrees with the idea that future threats are most likely to be naval and air skirmishes in places like the Persian Gulf or the South China Sea, but he took issue with the claim that the Army is upset with the new concept. The United States “does not need to invent a scenario, or an adversary, or formulate a new problem than those being presented around the world today,” Odierno wrote in an email. “In my opinion, we must avoid framing a single problem and then presenting a single and inflexible solution to it.”
But other sources in the Pentagon say the Army—the military branch excluded by the doctrine’s very name—confronted the now years-long battle over ASB as a near-existential fight for its very future. With the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq winding down, with the Pentagon’s counterinsurgency advocates in retreat and with forced budget cuts paring Army end-strength—from 570,000 in 2011 to 450,000 in 2017—the Army may well be facing a future in which large-scale deployments of U.S. troops are viewed as passé. The infantry, the so-called queen of battle, is no longer thought of as the most versatile and powerful factor in determining victory.
What role, if any, would the Army—and the famous American GI of wars past—play in an Asian war with China? The United States has never fought a major war without the Army being at the center of the battle. What would it mean if the United States settled on a doctrine that held no place for the largest branch of the military?
Until quite recently, there was little urgency for the United States to develop new weapons to ensure that its ships and aircraft would retain their unimpeded access to the world’s strategically important waterways and airspaces. American naval and air power remained uncontested; the United States had 10 aircraft carrier strike groups, while no other country in the world possessed a single one. Why develop new weapons to respond to a threat that didn’t yet exist? Slowly, though, the nagging questions raised in the wake of the Desert Storm victory began to change that, as did events in China and Iran.
The United States, it turned out, wasn’t the only country that had tried to learn lessons from the stunning rout of Operation Desert Storm. According to a highly placed defense consultant who advises the Pentagon on military developments in China, senior officers of the Chinese Academy of Military Science, the country’s most prestigious military think tank, “had watched the January 1991 attacks with dismay” and started a weapons development program to challenge the U.S. Navy’s access to the Strait of Taiwan and the waters of the South China Sea. “Iran did the same,” this official says, by starting “a modernization and anti-ship missile program” to contest U.S. military access to the Persian Gulf. The new weapons included increased numbers of anti-ship cruise and ballistic missiles, more submarines and surface ships, technical upgrades in electronic warfare capabilities, the development of advanced sea mines and the use of more sophisticated command, control, surveillance and reconnaissance systems.
“You can be sure Desert Storm was watched very closely in Beijing, and I would bet that was also the case in Tehran,” confirms James Clad, a former deputy assistant secretary of defense who has spent a career studying and thinking about China. “That shouldn’t come as a surprise. Desert Storm scared the hell out of the Chinese. So they began planning. And from their point of view, that made sense. It would have been irresponsible for them not to.”
The challenge to the Chinese military was highlighted in March 1996, after the People’s Republic announced it would be conducting a series of ballistic missile tests in the seas off Taiwan. The Chinese had done this before, but this time, the tests were taking place closer to Taiwan’s capital. China’s action, the United States decided, was a test of American resolve. President Bill Clinton ordered a carrier battle group headed by the U.S.S. Independence aircraft carrier to take up station off Taiwan’s eastern coast and directed the U.S.S. Nimitz battle group, then in the Persian Gulf, to support it. The United States and China averted a major crisis, but the ability of the United States to project its power was impressive. Defense Secretary William Perry crowed about the quick American reaction. The Chinese, he said, “are a great power, [but] the strongest military power in the Western Pacific is the United States.”
After the incident, China accelerated its development program for so-called anti-access weapons. Since China could not match the striking power of even a single American aircraft carrier, Chinese officials embraced a strategy of “access denial,” building and deploying increasingly accurate conventional weapons—and in great quantity. Aaron Friedberg, a professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton University, puts it this way: “Instead of trying to match the United States plane for plane, and ship for ship,” China’s planners “invested in large numbers of relatively inexpensive but increasingly accurate and effective conventionally armed ballistic missiles, cruise missiles and torpedoes.”
Iran followed the same path. But unlike China, the Islamic Republic had direct experience with American power. When Iran threatened Saudi and Kuwaiti oil tankers in the Persian Gulf in the late 1980s, the United States provided the tankers with naval escorts. The decision brought the United States into conflict with the Iranian navy, inaugurating a one-year “tanker war.” Faced with overwhelming American naval superiority, Iran adopted the equivalent of sea-based counterinsurgency operations, deploying, as historian Marine Col. David Crist has explained, “mines, swarms of small boats and land-based cruise missiles” that would “overwhelm the much larger and sophisticated American warships.” In the wake of the tanker war, Iran increased its investments in anti-ship weapons to contest U.S. access to the waters off Iran.
China’s and Iran’s new investments were worrisome, but after the September 11, 2001, attacks the U.S. military had other priorities, and the voices calling for a response to China’s and Iran’s anti-access strategy were drowned out by the focus on Afghanistan, Iraq and the hunt for Osama bin Laden. But then, in September 2009, Defense Secretary Robert Gates signaled a shift in U.S. strategic thinking. Speaking at an Air Force Association conference, Gates noted that China’s investments in “cyber and anti-satellite warfare, anti-air and anti-ship weaponry, and ballistic missiles could threaten America’s primary way to project power and help allies in the Pacific—in particular our forward air bases and carrier groups.”
It was as if a starting gun had sounded. Even before Gates’ remarks, Gen. Norton Schwartz, the Air Force chief of staff, and Adm. Gary Roughead, the chief of naval operations, had signed a classified memorandum directing their services to develop AirSea Battle, which they described as a new “operational concept.” Just five months later—lightning speed for military planning—the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments published a monographdetailing the new doctrine. Written by Andrew Krepinevich, one of Washington’s leading defense thinkers, “Why Air/Sea Battle?” highlighted China’s and Iran’s anti-access and anti-area denial capabilities. The spread of “advanced military technologies and their exploitation by other militaries,” Krepinevich wrote, posed a challenge to “the U.S. military’s ability to preserve military access to two key areas of vital interest, the Western Pacific and the Persian Gulf.”
The Gates speech, the Schwartz-Roughead memorandum and the Krepinevich monograph not only put AirSea Battle on the Pentagon’s agenda, but also began the long and, some military officers argued, long overdue shift from the war on terrorism. More importantly, as advocates of AirSea Battle now argue, the new model called for a deeper integration of Navy and Air Force capabilities that emphasized highly coordinated “joint operations”—“jointness”in Pentagon parlance. The concept was straightforward, if not so simply stated: “to guarantee freedom of access in the global commons, anywhere and in any domain (land, air, space, sea and cyber) for the armed forces of the United States and its allies through improved joint forces integration and resource allocation.”
The Navy and Air Force had been moving toward AirSea Battle for more than a decade; beginning in the mid-1990s, the two branches institutionalized highly coordinated joint air operations—a necessity, senior officers of the two services thought, in an era of shrinking defense budgets. Eventually, the two services began swapping air crews, tacticians and intelligence officers in what an internal Pentagon paper called “a true joint-service partnership.” The new cooperative environment did not eliminate inter-service feuding, but it helped to iron out the fundamental differences in naval (carrier-based) and air force (land-base) aerial operations. The Army, meanwhile, was nowhere to be found.
The “jointness” planning paid off in the wake of 9/11. In the new environment of enhanced cooperation, carrier-based aircrews became dependent on Air Force refueling capabilities for operations in southern Afghanistan during Operation Enduring Freedom. Grudgingly, both services acknowledged their dependence on the other. “I am very careful about making sure that my comments don’t read, as some believe, that the Navy can do this by itself,” then-Chief of Naval Operations Adm. Vern Clark said at the time. “It cannot. In fact, the early phase, the first several months of OEF, was totally and completely about the marriage and the union of the Air Force and the Navy. … We could have never, ever conducted those missions without Air Force tanking—we couldn’t even think about it. Air Force tankers made our success possible.” The success of Navy and Air Force interoperability during Operation Enduring Freedom gave increased credibility to ASB. It had worked—and laid the groundwork for future collaboration in larger operations.
In the early 2000s, the two services continued to strengthen their command and staff relationships, draft integrated air-asset strike operations and pool and use their common air resources, thereby reducing redundancies.
The War of the Chiefs
Inter-service rivalries are standard operating procedure for the U.S. military. —Mark Perry
The Court-Martial of Billy Mitchell
The head of the U.S. Army Air Service in France during World War I, General Billy Mitchell accused top brass of underestimating air power. Navy officials tried to get him fired for this, especially after he proved air power’s value by sinking a battleship in a demonstration. Armies and navies can no longer “be the arbiter of a nation’s destiny in war,” Mitchell said, before he was court-martialed in 1925 for bringing “discredit upon the military service.” He was convicted, the one nay vote cast by General Douglas MacArthur, a boyhood friend. Mitchell is now viewed as the father of the Air Force.
The Battle of the Bismarck Sea
In March 1943, Air Commander George Kenney’s Southwest Pacific Air Force sank 12 Japanese transports and 10 warships in the Battle of the Bismarck Sea. In Washington, Navy Secretary Frank Knox, who doubted airplanes could sink ships, scoffed at the report. The resulting interservice tussle was one of the war’s ugliest. Kenney’s commander, Douglas MacArthur, defended Kenney’s claims, belittled the Navy and dispatched his chief of staff, Richard Sutherland, to Washington to join the fight. Army Chief George Marshall took to calling Sutherland “the chief insulter of the Navy.”
The War of the Admirals
The Army and Navy went at it again after World War II, when a Pentagon study recommended the creation of a single defense agency, a separate Air Force and one “commander of the Armed Forces.” The Navy opposed the plan, fearing that it would lose its carrier aircraft and its control of the Marine Corps to the Army. After meeting for four months, Air Corps General Lauris Norstad, far left, and Admiral Forrest Sherman, right, hammered out a compromise that created a unitary Department of Defense and an independent Air Force but allowed the Navy to keep its air wings and Marine Corps.
The push for enhanced Air Force and Navy cooperation was a highly collaborative effort, involving some of the defense establishment’s heaviest hitters: Air Force Gen. Carroll Chandler, the CSBA’s Andrew Krepinevich and Jan M. van Tol, former Air Force planners Mark Gunzinger and Jim Thomas (both of whom later joined CSBA), former Under Secretary of the Navy Robert Work, Air Force strategic thinker Thomas P. Ehrhard and Andrew Marshall, the celebrated military guru at the Office of Net Assessments, the Pentagon’s in-house think tank.
This unofficial ASB brain trust was the Air Force and Navy’s answer to the Army’s self-designated and highly influential “Jedi Knights,” alumni of the School for Advanced Military Studies that had transformed Army thinking during the 1980s and ’90s and had a huge impact on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Jedi Knights pulled together an impressive and intimidating array of Army intellectuals, led by the brainy Gen. David Petraeus, but even they could not have compared with the sheer brainpower the Air Force and Navy brought to ASB. The adoption of ASB was also the culmination of a more natural process in which, as Air Force Lt. Gen. Burton M. Field told one audience, the Navy and Air Force “looked at each other and said we have a lot of capability between the two of us.”
As this planning continued—and even as the wars in Afghanistan and later Iraq, became the day-to-day focus of the military—both branches had kept one eye on a future conflict with China. “The Air Force and Navy arrived, almost simultaneously, at the same ‘aha’ moment,” Bryan McGrath, a Navy veteran who authored the Navy’s 2007 Maritime Strategy doctrine, says. “They saw that there was a power rising that could challenge what each of them do best. For the Navy, that’s power projection—and for the Air Force, that’s air power. And for decades, neither of those battle spaces was in jeopardy. But suddenly, with what China was doing, that was no longer true. Suddenly, there was a power in the Pacific that was going to challenge the way they fight.”
The aha moment came in part when the Air Force and Navy in 2007 conducted at least a half-dozen Pacific war games, overseen by the Air Force’s Chandler, that tested American capabilities against an enemy with anti-denial and anti-access weapons. The results of the simulations were sent on to Washington, where they were reviewed by Schwartz and Roughead and then shared with the CSBA and ONA.
The simulations showed the United States faced the same kinds of problems in fighting in East Asia and the Pacific in the post-Desert Storm era that it had faced in fighting against Japan in the earliest days of World War II.
There was the difficulty of what Air Force and Navy officers called the “tyranny of distance,” the ability to project power across thousands of miles of ocean, an enormous area. It is, for example, roughly twice the distance from Sydney to Tokyo as it is from New York to San Francisco. While the U.S. Navy and Air Force could move quickly into the waters off China, they also will have to stay on station and fight once they arrive there. So while the war games tested U.S. capabilities that mimicked what Army Gen. Douglas MacArthur and Navy Adm. Chester Nimitz faced fighting Japan, it substituted the massed fleets, based around aircraft carriers, that Japan had deployed in 1941 for a modern enemy: “multi-dimensional, ‘anti-access’ networks, offensive and defensive space control capabilities, an extensive inventory of ballistic and cruise missiles, and a modernized attack submarine fleet,” as one internal Air Force memo put it. The United States would face barrages of anti-ship and anti-air capabilities, highly networked cyber assets and fleets of ultra-quiet submarines—which China was purchasing in large numbers from Russia. In essence, what the Navy and Air Force were up against was what a rebel commander faced when Robert E. Lee pointed to a spot in the Union line along Cemetery Ridge at Gettysburg. “Can you get there?” Lee asked. The commander nodded and said he could. But it’s staying there that’s the hard part. It’s that problem that ASB was designed to solve.
Not everyone was pleased with the new friendship between the Navy and the Air Force. “The Army just went nuts about this,” a retired senior Army officer told me recently, “And you can see why. The first memo about ASB was secret. So what was the big secret? And the AirSea Battle Office that was supposed to implement this was staffed by 14 Air Force and Navy guys and one Army officer. One? The Army was cut out.” Army officers were panicked about being left out of future budget discussions.
Right after the ASB announcement in 2010, according to the senior officer who knows Odierno well, the former high-profile commander of U.S. forces in Iraq “immediately drafted a strategy that would either undermine AirSea Battle” or, if that couldn’t be done, “make sure the Army had a role in it.”
The most telling—and effective—criticism of AirSea Battle came from those who described it as a “budget grab.” According to one independent report, even after realizing the savings from cutting redundant programs, the Air Force and Navy projected that spending on AirSea Battle programs would increase their service budgets by an estimated $30 billion per year, with one estimate claiming the program would cost $524 billion by 2023. While those budget figures are contested (“That number is nonsense,” Navy strategist McGrath argues, “we’re talking about an absolute tiny percentage of the defense budget”), ASB critics claimed that the Navy and Air Force were simply trying to recut the Pentagon’s budgetary pie to their benefit.
But by 2011, the writing was on the wall for the Army’s future. After 10 years of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Defense Secretary Robert Gates told West Pointers that year that any secretary “who advises the president to again send a big American land army into Asia, or into the Middle East, or Africa should have his head examined.” That sparked headlines, but Gates’ follow-up statement on the Army’s future was as crucial—and it chilled the service’s upper echelons. The Army, he said, “must confront the reality that the most plausible, high-end scenarios for the U.S. military are primarily naval and air engagements—whether in Asia, the Persian Gulf or elsewhere.”
Gates’ successor as defense secretary, Leon Panetta, agreed. Within days of taking office in July 2011, Panetta directed the Air Force and Navy to brief him on AirSea Battle. The two services provided Panetta with a summary of the concept. Panetta approved the ASB program and, five months later, it was included in the 2012 Defense Strategic Guidance.
On January 5, 2012, President Barack Obama appeared beside Panetta and Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey at the Pentagon podium for the Defense Guidance rollout—an unprecedented gesture that signaled that the document had his blessing. The new defense guidance ruled out the need to prepare for large-scale military campaigns, the Army’s specialty.
The War of the Chiefs (continued)
The Rise of the Missiliers
Named Army chief in 1955, General Maxwell Taylor chafed at Dwight Eisenhower’s plan to give budget priority to the Air Force’s missile program. When Taylor ordered up a long-range Army missile, the Air Force went nuts. The feud sparked the first documented shouting match inside the Joint Chiefs’ meeting room, “the Tank,” hours after Russia launched Sputnik in 1957, with the Army saying the Air Force could have launched a satellite too if it weren’t so incompetent. After some bad press, an angry Ike lectured the service heads on military unity—then cut the Army’s budget.
Maxwell Taylor’s Coup
In June 1961, John F. Kennedy brought Maxwell Taylor out of retirement to head up an investigation of the Bay of Pigs debacle. The Army general’s report accused JCS Chairman Gen. Lyman Lemnitzer of failing in his role as head of the military. (Kennedy subsequently appointed Taylor his military representative but then transferred Lemnitzer to Europe and made Taylor J.C.S. chairman instead.) I asked Lemnitzer about Taylor in the mid-1980s. “Young man, don’t ever mention that man’s name in my presence again,” he told me.
The Radford Spy Scandal
When Richard Nixon became president saying he wanted America out of Vietnam, skeptical JCS Chairman Adm. Thomas Moorer decided to keep an eye on the White House outside normal channels. Then, too, Moorer suspected White House aide Army Gen. Alexander Haig, above, of filling Nixon’s ear with pro-Army propaganda. So Moorer ran a spying operation inside the Nixon administration headed up by Navy Yeoman Charles Radford. When the spying was uncovered in 1971, it was kept out of the press by Attorney General John Mitchell. Nixon later reappointed Moorer for a second two-year term.
While Obama left the details of the presentation to Panetta, he made it clear that his administration’s Asia pivot—meant to focus diplomatic and economic interests on the Pacific rim—would also be accompanied by a significant shift in U.S. military priorities. “As we look beyond the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the end of the long-term nation-building with large military footprints,” Obama said, “we’ll be able to ensure our security with smaller conventional ground forces. We’ll continue to get rid of outdated Cold War-era systems so that we can invest in the capabilities that we need for the future, including intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance, counterterrorism, countering weapons of mass destruction, and the ability to operate in environments where adversaries try to deny us access.”
Panetta followed Obama with his own, more explicit, endorsement of ASB. “This country is at a strategic turning point after a decade of war and, therefore, we are shaping a Joint Force for the future that will be smaller and leaner, but will be agile, flexible, ready and technologically advanced. It will have cutting-edge capabilities, exploiting our technological, joint and networked advantage.” The only way that Panetta’s statement might have been more explicit is if Roughead and Schwartz had written it personally.
Dempsey also signed off on the 2012 Defense Guidance. Dempsey, an Army guy, had been cool toward the ASB doctrine in his first months as Joint Chiefs chairman, but Panetta brought him around. Dempsey, who appeared beside the president on January 5, knew members of the press were aware of his hesitations, so after Panetta spoke, he addressed them head-on: “This is a real strategy,” he said. “It represents real choices. And I’m here today to assure you that it has real buy-in among our senior military and civilian leadership.”
The statement hinted at the criticism Dempsey had faced from the Army in the weeks before the release of the defense guidance. The Army’s intransigence had left him exasperated, according to several Pentagon officials, but in the days leading up to Obama’s Pentagon appearance, Dempsey had laid out the bottom line for the Army’s chief, Odierno. The two generals had never been close. But they were West Point graduates two years apart, and they shared both a love of the Army and a dislike for David Petraeus and his “COINdinista” followers, who had brought their counterinsurgency doctrine to the fore in Iraq and Afghanistan. Of the two, Dempsey had proved more politically adept at shrugging off criticisms, while Odierno seemed to take them personally. (Dempsey’s office did not respond to requests for comment.)
According to a retired senior Army officer who knows both, Dempsey carefully leaned on Odierno. “I think it’s pretty clear,” this officer says, “Dempsey worked to bring Odierno around. This was a done deal, so his message was simple: ‘Ray, it’s time to get on board.’”
Odierno was on board, but just barely. He worked furiously behind the scenes to minimize the primacy of the Navy and the Air Force. That same month, in January 2012, the Army won agreement elevating the commander of the U.S. Army in the Pacific to a four-star slot, a rank equal to that of his Navy counterpart. The designation expanded the Army’s role in what has been traditionally viewed as the Navy’s area of operation and left Navy officers fuming.
But the Army’s fears—while justified—proved not entirely warranted. Despite the assembled brains the Navy and the Air Force had brought together for the project, AirSea Battle advocates proved inept at selling their plan, partly because no one wanted to offend China by stating plainly that the new thinking addressed the challenge from Beijing. In a May 2012 presentation at the Brookings Institution, Air Force Gen. Norton Schwartz claimed that ASB didn’t target China or any other particular region, but was “a genuinely global concept consistent with the globalized environment in which we operate.” The statement brought guffaws, even inside the Pentagon, where Army officers noted that Andrew Krepinevich’s AirSea Battle concept paper mentioned China no fewer than 150 times. (Schwartz’s office said the general could not find the time to comment on this article.)
The denials weren’t fooling anyone. Chinese military officers regularly questioned their American counterparts on the ASB doctrine, and the apparent unease reached into China’s leadership. In one unsigned editorial in China’s People’s Daily, the paper noted, “If the U.S. takes the AirSea Battle system seriously, China has to upgrade its anti-access capabilities. China should have the ability to deter any external interference but unfortunately, such a reasonable stance is seen as a threat by the U.S.” In other words, if the United States were intent on developing anti-access and anti-area denial weapons, the Chinese would just develop more of them.
The military’s difficulty with talking plainly about ASB spilled into the press and the halls of Congress. In August 2012 article in Wired, headlined “Pentagon’s Air/Sea Battle Plan Defined. Finally,” a reporter concluded, after nine months of interviews with dozens of defense officials, that “ASB is a help desk for 21st Century warfare”—the focus of a single small Pentagon cubicle where a few officers work to improve coordination among the services. That’s a far cry, presumably, from what Roughead and Schwartz originally had in mind.
The following month, Republican Rep. J. Randy Forbes penned an article in Breaking Defense implying that the Air Force and Navy’s failure to define AirSea Battle was endangering the program and calling on the Navy and Air Force leadership to “develop a broader strategic communications plan to clearly articulate the AirSea Battle message.” Forbes also warned that ASB advocates were vulnerable to claims that their new concept was actually “a type of war plan for Asia.”
Meanwhile, Rep. Adam Smith, the ranking member of the House Armed Services Committee, and a number of his other colleagues wondered aloud during one hearing how the Pentagon could advocate forging a Pacific partnership with China in one breath, while talking about designing weapons to counter China in the next. It was a question being asked in many quarters of Washington as the implications of ASB became known.
After the stumbles of 2012, ASB advocates decided to abandon what one of them described as their “rope-a-dope strategy” and face the issue head on.
“Listen, AirSea Battle is about China, and there’s no doubt about that. But it’s also about a lot more,” Princeton’s Aaron Friedberg says. “Just because we’re thinking about ASB, about ways to protect ourselves, doesn’t mean we think we’re going to have a war with China. Our military talks to their military all the time. But our military has to prepare for every option—which is precisely what we should be doing. We have exaggerated concerns about offending the Chinese, but I think at some point we have to be more candid.”
Army senior officers remain convinced that ASB is aimed at them more than at China. Recently, a retired Army colonel and consultant to the Joint Chiefs of Staff spoke with a roomful of young Army officers. “I asked them, ‘How many of you think that AirSea Battle is just an attempt by the Navy and Air Force to grab a greater share of the defense budget?’ Every hand in the room went up, every single one,” he told me. “It’s an article of faith.”
The Army’s not entirely alone in thinking that. “This isn’t an attempt to deal with escalating threats,” a currently serving Marine Corps colonel argues, “it’s about identifying potential threats so that we can have escalating budget numbers.” This officer described ASB as “a self-licking ice cream cone,” a term used by Pentagon pundits to describe the Pentagon’s strategy of buying weapons that spawn threats that, in turn, lead to the purchase of more weapons—exactly, in a way, what thePeople’s Daily editorial had warned about. The colonel’s view reflects the Marine Corps’ initial reaction to ASB. Just prior to the Forbes warning, in August 2012, aninternal assessment prepared for Marine Corps Commandant James Amos—who joined the Army-led chorus of anti-ASB voices—warned that the Air Force-Navy initiative would be “preposterously expensive.”
Air Force and Navy officers struck back at their critics, defending the budget recommendations. In light of the development upgrades in China, their defense was compelling. “We never claimed that ASB is budget neutral,” Navy strategist McGrath says, “because it’s not. But we have to realize the Navy and Air Force are capital-intensive services, while the Army is a labor-intensive service. What that means is that you can expand or contract the Army fairly quickly, but you can’t do that with either the Air Force or Navy. Expanding the Navy and Air Force is long term, but given the challenges we face, the outlays are vital.”
As the controversy around ASB grew, Odierno tried a new tactic: Beat ASB at its own game. The Army’s initial response to the January 2012 announcement was to meld what it had learned from counterinsurgency operations with its traditional commitment to large units, heavy tanks and massed artillery. The new concept was called “hybrid war.” Ultimately, however, “hybrid war” seemed more like a compromise than a change of direction—a half-pivot aimed at placating the service’s “tank mafia” at the same time that it gave a desultory nod to Gates’ and Panetta’s admonition (and Obama’s principle) that the Army create swift-moving expeditionary forces, highly trained special operations units and airborne infantry.
Odierno pressed the Navy to adopt a series of exercises that would have Army helicopters land on Navy amphibious ships, including aircraft carriers. With the Navy and Air Force bragging about their newfound belief in “interoperability,” Navy planners could hardly say no. The first landings took place in September 2013 and were touted by the Army as proof that its service has a role to play in “a littoral combat environment,” the jargon the Pentagon has adopted to refer obliquely to combat operations in the Pacific.
This time it was Marine Corps officers who were left fuming, as it is the traditional job of the Marine Corps, and not the Army, to storm beaches. The Marines’ close partnership with the Navy dates to its very founding and the two services’ amphibious capabilities form the core of the branch’s identity—what was the Army doing trying to horn in on their turf?
The Army also responded to the ASB challenge by launching a strategic study, the so-called Strategic Landpower Task Force, that included the U.S. Special Operations Command and the U.S. Marine Corps—the core group of ASB critics. The study was a good-faith attempt to integrate the lessons learned from Iraq and Afghanistan into a more overarching strategy, but it was also seen by many Army officers as their service’s response to the AirSea Battle onslaught. Their view, that any future war scenario must take into account the human dimension of conflict, reflected that of Army Chief Odierno.
“Any approach that discounts (or, attempts to remove) the human dimension of warfare fundamentally misunderstands the nature of conflict, and risks over-estimating the impact that technology (specifically, advanced weaponry) has on the decision-making of hostile governments and other influencers,” he wrote in his email to me. “Land forces provide essential capabilities to counter national threats—they uniquely enable access in both physical and temporal spaces in an increasingly connected and rapidly changing world, and are foundational to every other instrument of military, and even national, power.”
Steven Metz, director of research for the Army study, which was released in October 2013, adds that while AirSea Battle “provides a strong case for service integration,” its advocates face the same problem faced by advocates of the AirLand Battle doctrine of the 1980s. “You can’t have a national military strategy that includes just two of the four services,” he says. “We learned that back in the 1980s with the promotion of AirLand Battle and it’s true now with AirSea Battle. What we need is a multi-service component; that’s the only way that any doctrine can be truly joint.”
That same month, October 2013, when the House Subcommittee on Seapower and Projection Forces held a hearing on the ASB issue, Odierno’s staff worked overtime to make sure one of their senior officers—who wasn’t invited—attended anyway. What an Army officer was doing at a seapower subcommittee hearing was anyone’s guess, until Major Gen. Gary Cheek gave his testimony. “I confess I’m a little surprised myself to be here,” Cheek told the subcommittee, “but I would frankly tell you that, for the Army, we look forward to any and every opportunity to partner with our joint brothers and sisters. This is really what makes our military unique, is the fact that we can bring our pieces together.”
“It is absolutely appalling that the Army and Marines took an immature and childish approach to these ideas,” says Deptula, the Air Force’s planner during Desert Storm. “The Army is just not sold on jointness—and their reaction to AirSea Battle shows that.”
Navy strategist Bryan McGrath says the Army has supported “jointness” in the past—as long as it was the Army that was at the center of it, as under the old AirLand Battle doctrine: “Back in the 1980s, jointness was focused on how the Navy and Air Force could support the Army in Central Europe—because that was going to be the main battleground. But the Army is far less comfortable when it comes to the Pacific, because its job there will be to support the Navy and Air Force.”
The result is that, fully three years after the announcement of the 2012 defense guidance, defense thinkers are uncertain whether the Army is fully committed to the ASB concept, leading critics to claim that the Army remains a service without a grand strategic concept that will allow it to compete with the Air Force and Navy for funding—and relevance.
While the last word on AirSea Battle has yet to be written, at least some of Odierno’s strategy worked: The new concept, increasingly muddled and imprecise, now includes the Army. On January 8, 2015, Lt. Gen. David Goldfein, the Pentagon’s Joint Staff director, circulated a memo announcing that the AirSea Battle Office was being renamed. The new office, he announced, would be sponsored by the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines and would develop, evaluate and implement a “Joint Concept for Access and Maneuver in the Global Commons.” And so it is that ASB, as it was once called, is now referred to more simply as JAM-GC.
Even though the ASB fight has left raw wounds among the services, the controversy also generated a number of surprising benefits. The new set of ideas confirmed the Air Force and Navy’s adoption of joint capabilities, identified naval and air asset redundancies, institutionalized the view that future conflicts will likely feature naval and air engagements—and forced the Army to begin rethinking its commitment to large- scale “stability” operations. While Army officers still talk about the Navy the way that American tourists talk about French waiters, the service has started down the path of battlefield interoperability.
“They’re going to have to rethink some things,” McGrath says. “The Army is built around a BCT, a brigade combat team, and that kind of formation is just not appropriate to what could happen in the Pacific. They’re going to have to get lighter, more mobile. They don’t want to do it, but they’re going to have to.”
The Army (and the public at large) retains a special nostalgia for World War II, when the defeat of the enemy was clear, complete and unconditional. But such victories are actually rare, with conditional, bloody and largely unsatisfying campaigns history’s norm. That is especially true for America’s recent wars. In Iraq and Afghanistan, one senior Army officer later claimed—apparently without irony—the Army executed a brilliant campaign and achieved all of its objectives, save one: “the capitulation of the enemy.”
It remains very unclear whether, despite the fact that they’ve now been included in “JAM-GC,” the Army is prepared to embrace its new, and largely supportive, role in what was once the AirSea Battle doctrine. “Don’t kid yourself,” says one retired general who served in a high-profile infantry command slot during the second Iraq War. “The Air Force and Navy still think we can win wars without an Army. In the end, destroying the enemy’s army is what winning a war is all about. And only the Army can do it.”
It’s a sentiment that, at least in the Pacific, the Navy and Air Force will always consider utterly and eternally wrong.
Mark Perry is a writer who lives in Arlington, Virginia. He is the author ofFour Stars: The Inside Story of the Forty-Year Battle Between the Joint Chiefs of Staff and America’s Civilian Leaders. Follow him
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