UPDATED: ManTech Cyber Expert Comment Added WASHINGTON: One day after reports that China has launched powerful and persistent cyber espionage attacks on a wide array of US and allied weapons systems, including stealing blueprints for a new building to house Australia’s top counterintelligence organization, the Pentagon spokesman says this has not led to an “erosion… Keep reading →
WASHINGTON: Singapore is expected to announce sometime in the next 10 days that it plans to buy its first squadron –12 planes — of some 75 of Lockheed Martin’s F-35Bs, further bolstering what had been the flagging fortunes of the world’s most expensive conventional weapon system.
The fact that American allies in the Pacific are the ones committing to the controversial and over-budget aircraft is telling. If you want to understand the calculus driving these choices, first look at China, which to countries such as Singapore, Japan, Australia, and South Korea is the primary long-term threat. Keep reading →
The start of a new year and of a new administration is a good time to think about the future. A key challenge facing the new Obama administration and the Congress is to ensure that US military capabilities continue to innovate and evolve in challenging times.
Paul Bracken has underscored that we are in a Second Nuclear Age, and in this age deterrence is different, but remains as significant as the first. Bracken is concerned that we are ignoring the rebirth of nuclear weapons within the global dynamic at our peril. Keep reading →
SYDNEY: The early signs from the Australian military’s new strategy make it clear that this demographically tiny nation that fights far above its weight is readying itself to refocus on China and Indonesia as it prepares to cope with the end of the war in Afghanistan.
ANALYSIS Keep reading →
Pundits tend to forget that the 21st century is not the 20th repeated. As much as the US competition with a rising China is framed as a reprise of the Cold War with the Soviets or of the Pacific war with Japan, the game has changed.
The rise of China changes the opposing player. The limits of US power projection across the Pacific changes how we can play the game. The opening of the Arctic changes the shape of the board. And America’s key allies in the Pacific are not the same as those of the 20st century. Keep reading →
The pivot to the Pacific started more than a century ago. The United States first became a Pacific power in 1898, the year the US first annexed Hawaii and then gained Guam and the Philippines (as well as Puerto Rico) from Spain after a “short, victorious war.”
The United States is at a turning point as it contemplates the way ahead for its defense and security policy in the Pacific. With the decline of the physical number of platforms and assets, our ability to project dominant power out from the West Coast of the United States and Hawaii is increasingly in question.
The simple, inescapable reality imposed by the sheer size of the Pacific Ocean is that the continental United States is many miles from the Western Pacific. In previous articles for AOL Defense, I have looked at the US and the Pacific seen from a perspective east of Hawaii, but now turning to Hawaii and further west, where the challenge is to shape a credible presence and projection of power in the region for the 21st century.
If the projection of power is seen to be about pushing platforms and capabilities out from the continental United States (CONUS), Alaska and Hawaii, we face significant challenges dealing with the growth of Chinese power and the needs for interoperability and support to empower both our allies and the United States operating in the region.
But if a different approach is shaped, one which rests increasingly on a plug-in strategy, the challenge is manageable. US allies are shaping new defense and security capabilities for the 21st century, investing resources into the re-crafting of their capabilities going forward. How can these efforts be combined more effectively going forward so that both the allies and the US end up collectively with significantly expanded but cost-effective capabilities?
Evolving Capabilities and New Approaches
The evolution of 21st century weapon technology is breaking down the barriers between offensive and defensive systems. Is missile defense about providing defense or is it about enabling global reach, for offense or defense? Likewise, the new 5th generation aircraft have been largely not understood because they are inherently multi-mission systems, which can be used for forward defense or forward offensive operations.
Indeed, an inherent characteristic of many new systems is that they are really about presence and putting a grid over an operational area, and therefore they can be used to support strike or defense within an integrated approach. In the 20th Century, surge was built upon the notion of signaling. One would put in a particular combat capability – a Carrier Battle Group, Amphibious Ready Group, or Air Expeditionary Wing – to put down your marker and to warn a potential adversary that you were there and ready to be taken seriously. If one needed to, additional forces would be sent in to escalate and build up force. With the new multi-mission systems – 5th generation aircraft and Aegis for example – the key is presence and integration able to support strike or defense in a single operational presence capability. Now the adversary can not be certain that you are simply putting down a marker.
This is what former Air Force Secretary Michael Wynne calls the attack and defense enterprise. The strategic thrust of integrating modern systems is to create an a grid that can operate in an area as a seamless whole, able to strike or defend simultaneously. This is enabled by the evolution of C5ISR (Command, Control, Communications, Computers, Combat Systems, Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance), and it is why Wynne has underscored for more than a decade that fifth generation aircraft are not merely replacements for existing tactical systems but a whole new approach to integrating defense and offense. When one can add the strike and defensive systems of other players, notably missiles and sensors aboard surface ships like Aegis, then one can create the reality of what Ed Timperlake, a former fighter pilot, has described as the F-35 being able to consider Aegis as his wingman.
By shaping a C5ISR system inextricably intertwined with platforms and assets, which can honeycomb an area of operation, an attack and defense enterprise can operate to deter aggressors and adversaries or to conduct successful military operations. Inherent in such an enterprise is scalability and reach-back. By deploying the C5ISR honeycomb, the shooters in the enterprise can reach back to each other to enable the entire grid of operation, for either defense or offense.
US allies in the Western Pacific already possess Aegis systems and will most likely add F-35s to their operational inventory, if the United States can have the imagination to shape an integrated attack and defense enterprise with those allies, significant capabilities for defense can be made available to both allies and the United States at the same time. For the allies, their own capabilities would be individually augmented, but the foundation would also be created for de facto and explicit integration of those assets across the Western Pacific. By being able to plug into the F-35 and Aegis enabled honeycomb, the United States could provide force augmentation and surge capability to those allies and at the same time enable forward deployments which the United States would not own or operate.
In effect, what could be established from the United States perspective is a plug in approach rather than a push approach to projecting power. The allies are always forward deployed; the United States does not to attempt to replicate what those allies need to do in their own defense. But what the United States can offer is strategic depth to those allies. At the same time if interoperability and interactive sustainability are recognized as a strategic objective of the first order, then the United States can shape a more realistic approach than one which now rests on trying to proliferate power projection platforms, when neither the money nor the numbers are there.
Now let us apply this approach to a strike and defense enterprise to some fundamental geo-political realities. As things stand now, the core for the US effort from Hawaii outward is to enable a central strategic triangle, one that reaches from Hawaii to Guam and to Japan. This triangle is at the heart of America’s ability to project power into the Western Pacific. With a 20th century approach, one which is platform-centric and rooted in step by step augmentation of force, each point of the triangle needs to be garrisoned with significant numbers of platforms which can be pushed forward. To be clear, having capability in this triangle is a key element of what the United States can bring to the party for Pacific operations, and it remains fundamental. But with a new approach to an attack and defense enterprise, one would use this capability differently from simply providing for push forward and sequential escalation dominance.
Rather than focusing simply on the image of projecting power forward, what is crucial to an successful Pacific strategy is enabling a strategic quadrangle in the Western Pacific, anchored on Japan, South Korea, Australia, and Singapore. This will not be simple. Competition, even mutual suspicion, among US allies in the Western Pacific is historically deep-rooted; as a former 7th USAF commander underscored, “history still matters in impeding allied cooperation.” But in spite of these challenges and impediments, enabling the quadrangle to do a better job of defending itself and shaping interoperability across separate nations has to become a central strategic American goal.
This will require significant cultural change for the United States. Rather than thinking of allies after we think about our own strategy, we need to reverse the logic. Without enabled allies in the Western Pacific, the United States will simply not be able to execute an effective Pacific strategy. Full stop. We are not about to have a 600-ship navy, and putting Littoral Combat Ships into Singapore is a metaphor for the problem, not the solution.
Robbin Laird, a member of the AOL Defense Board of Contributors, is an international defense consultant and owner of the Second Line of Defense website.
Figure 1 Intersecting and Converging Capabilities: A Strategic Triangle with a Strategic Quadrangle
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WASHINGTON: Sloppy number-crunching at the Department of Defense means that the official price tag to move 9,000 Marines off Okinawa to Guam, Hawaii, and Australia – already estimated at a whopping $10.6 billion – is probably short of the real cost, according to a draft Government Accountability Office (GAO) report obtained by Breaking Defense.
[Update: Click here for the Pentagon's rebuttal of GAO] Keep reading →
WASHINGTON: Old combat pilots warn young ones about “target fixation,” when you get so focused on what you want to bomb that you lose track of everything else and fly into the ground. That’s the danger facing US strategy in Asia as the heavily hyped Pacific pivot gets boiled down to “contain China,” warned a panel of top diplomats from Australia, India, and the Philippines.
“Obviously from our perspective in the United States, China seems to be the overriding concern because of economic and military issues,” Rep. Randy Forbes told me before the session started at the annual forum of the conservative Foreign Policy Initiative. [Click here for more from Rep. Forbes on looming cuts in US defense spending]. “This [event] gives us a great opportunity to look at that pivot not just through our eyes but also through the eyes of some of our allies and friends and strategic partners.”
So Forbes’ first question to the assembled diplomats was what the US should be thinking about besides China.
“You are absolutely right not to simply focus on China,” declared Australian Ambassador Kim Beazley. “We are now witnessing globally the simultaneous rise of a dozen major powers – the rapid rise of a dozen major powers — in a set of circumstances where issues between them are not resolved.
“In the Southeast Asian area in particular, there are almost no settled boundaries, almost none,” Beazley went on. “There is no arbiter, there is no guarantor [of a peaceful resolution]. That’s where the U.S. comes in.”
But historically, while the US has been intensely engaged with its long-time allies in Northeast Asia — Japan, South Korea, and (de facto) Taiwan — and even with China itself, said Beazley, “you dropped the ball in Southeast Asia after Vietnam.” That’s more than four decades of neglect to make up for.
By contrast, India, for example, has literally centuries of involvement and investment in Southeast Asia. “We have six million people of Indian origin who live in the Asia-Pacific region,” said Indian Ambassador Nirupama Rao, “three million such people in Burma/Myanmar alone” — 50 percent — “and two million in Malaysia.” What Rao did not say is that the actual size of the Hindu Indian minority in Muslim-dominated Malysia is in fact a bitterly controversial question in regional politics, one of the many sources of tension which Americans tend to overlook.
Even in terms of security narrowly defined, India worries much more about Pakistan-based “militants” like Lashkar-i-Taiba — which Amb. Rao was at pains to link with America’s prime enemies, the Taliban and al-Qaeda — than about China. Yes, Rao admitted, the two countries fought a border war in 1962, and China to this day issues passports and other official documents claiming the disputed territory as its own; on that matter, she acknowledged, “there is no common ground.” But over 50 years, she went on, “we have built a relationship in which we’ve been able to manage our differences in a very rational and grown-up way.”
“China is a neighbor of India’s,” said Rao. “We need a very peaceful and stable neighborhood.”
“We are not looking at isolating China,” the Indian Ambassador emphasized, in an implicit rebuke to American hawks who see New Delhi as a counterweight to Beijing, part of an effort to contain the Middle Kingdom. To the contrary, she said, “we see the need to develop more and more habits of cooperation with China. When it comes to a security architecture for the Asia-Pacific, we also believe it must be open and inclusive and rule-based.” In other words, India won’t be part of any US-led security arrangement that leaves China out.
That no-containment message was echoed even by the panel’s representative from the Philippines, whose US-provided flagship engaged in a tense standoff with Chinese vessels this summer over the disputed Scarborough Shoal. While the former U.S. colony has both increased defense spending and refocused its armed forces from internal security to international conflicts, it’s “not to contain any other power,” said Maria Austria, their deputy chief of mission. “We’d like to disabuse [everyone] of the idea that [we are] strengthening alliances to box out or contain any other power.”
The Philippines do want the U.S. to help ensure “the peaceful settlement of disputes… in the South China — in the West Philippine Sea,” Austria said, hastily switching to Manila’s preferred term for the disputed waters. But the Philippines have many other security concerns as well, she emphasized; nor are they limited to the Pacific. Most notably, Austria, said, “there are close to a 100 Filipino seafarers still in the hands of Somali pirates.”
So if America wants its Asia-Pacific partners’ continuing support, it needs to engage with them on their own terms and about all their interests, not with the narrow aim of recruiting them for a new Cold War against Beijing. That’s true even of longtime treaty allies like Australia, whose economy depends heavily on exports of iron, oil, and gas to China. It’s true of Singapore, which will allow the US Navy to operate regularly out of (but not be permanently based in) its harbors. It’s even more true of “non-aligned” India.
“We have had a history of some distancing [between the US and India]. In the last decade or so the relationship has improved,” said Amb. Rao. Today, “There are no limits to this relationship — but I see this as a gradually evolving process. In India, we have to do things our way.”
That caveat clearly holds true for other US partners as well.
Edited 11/29 1:35 pm Keep reading →
GILLIAM COUNTY, OREGON: This isolated test site in rural Oregon is where Boeing subsidiary Insitu takes its drones “to torture them,” said site manager Jerry McWithey. Temperates soar to 110 degrees in summer and plummet to 10 degrees — with 50-knot winds — in winter. The hot-and-cold ordeal the drones go through is a microcosm of the problems facing the company as a whole as the defense spending boom goes bust.
The era of exponential growth is over. When Insitu was founded back in 1998, it had just four people and a plan to build small numbers of small unmanned air vehicles for weather research. Shortly after 9/11, in February 2002, the start-up partnered with aerospace behemoth Boeing to develop military recon UAVs, and its ScanEagle drone (click here for video) first saw action over Fallujah in 2004. Keep reading →
Colin Clark
Sydney J. Freedberg, Jr.
China, Korea, & The F-35: Reshaping US Forces For A Pacific Strategy
By Robbin LairdIf the US fails to innovate in its re-shaping of its forces in the Pacific, it cannot effectively play the crucial role which is essential to a strategy focused on our allies. Without innovation, the US cannot protect its interests in the Pacific, ranging from the Arctic to Australia, and will lose the significant economic benefits which presence and protection of our interests provide.
The protection of the US and its allies is valuable in and of itself. But it is inextricably intertwined with the economic viability of the United States in the Pacific and beyond. As the Commandant of the USMC, Gen. James Amos, has underscored: “From our allies’ perspective, virtual presence is actual absence.” Keep reading →