Land Warrior in Iraq

Major props go to Noah Schachtman, who took time out of a busy schedule of alternatively living in Ba'athist palaces and sleeping in fetid kitchens to look in on how the tech demonstrators from the now-cancelled Land Warrior are doing:

Captain Jack Moore, the commander of the 4/9's "Blowtorch" company, peers into his Land Warrior monocle. Inside is a digital map of Tarmiyah, a filthy little town about 25 kilometers north of Baghdad that's become a haven for Islamists. Blue icons show two of his platoons sweeping through the western half of the town. Two other icons represent Blowtorch soldiers who have teamed up with special forces and Iraqi Army units to raid local mosques with insurgent ties.

A red dot suddenly pops up on Moore's monocle screen: 3rd platoon has found a pair of improvised bombs -- black boxes, filled with homemade explosives. Other troops will circumvent the scene.

As the other platoons move south to north, green lights blink on Moore's map. Each of these "digital chem lights" represents a house checked and cleared. It keeps different groups of soldiers from kicking down the same set of doors twice.

A year ago, these chem lights weren't even part of the Land Warrior code. But after a suggestion from a Manchu soldier, the digital markers were added -- and quickly became the system's most popular feature. During air assaults on Baquba, to the northeast, troops were regularly dropped a quarter or half-kilometer from their original objective; the chem lights allowed them to converge on the spot where they were supposed to go. In the middle of one mission, a trail of green lights was used to mark a new objective -- and show the easiest way to get to the place.

[snip]

[Capt. Aaron] Miller is still not happy with how much the system weighs. "Look, I need this like I need a 10th arm," he sighs. And all this stuff (Land Warrior does), my cell phone basically does the same at home." But Miller is committed to soldiers being networked. So he's willing to be the digital guinea pig. "It's got to start with someone."

The system has become more palatable to the Manchus because it's been pared down, in all sorts of ways. By consolidating parts, a 16-pound ensemble is now down to a little more than 10. A new, digital gun scope has been largely abandoned by the troops -- the system was too cumbersome and too slow to be effective. And now, not every soldier in the 4/9 has to lug around Land Warrior. Only team leaders and above are so equipped.

Frankly, I'm a little surprised how accurately my concerns about the Land Warrior played out on the battlefield. The blue force tracking and land navigation functions are very popular, while the computing and scope pieces were largely relegated to the rubbish bin.

Complaints that the system would better if it were only a quarter of its current weight also indicate that either the underlying technology is not mature enough or that the designers crammed it with superfluous features. I'm going to bet that the latter is a far more likely culprit than the latter -- especially considering how many weapons systems in the pipe feel disconnected from current needs.

The most ironic bit of Capt. Miller's comment about how his cellphone back at home does many of the same functions as the Land Warrior. That sounds a lot like the result of this JASONS report issued two years ago, which theorized that adapting commercial communications platforms to military use might be a better method of improving situational awareness at the lowest levels.

This brings us to something I have been thing about since I read this Defense News piece on how the DoD is effectively hiring a lead system integrator to support their counternaroctics efforts. If there is little evidence that DoD bureaucrats can successfully plan and develop successful weapons platforms for the U.S. military, why shouldn't we be outsourcing large chunks of the acquisition process?

You can at least terminate contractors when it is clear they cannot deliver on the terms of their contract. The same cannot be said about the thousands of 'acquisition professionals' who are barely doing their job right now.

Military doctrine under 'informatization'

Despite my earlier jab, Barry Rosenberg's cover article from this month's Armed Forces Journal is really fantastic. His thesis? The U.S. military must be prepared to make some enormous cultural changes if it really wants to embrace network-centric warfare:

Until recently, collection assets would feed information up the line to divisional commanders and they would pass it up or parcel it down on a need-to-know basis. However, today, many war fighters have access to the same data as their commanders and are being given the opportunity to not only critique that information but also to act upon it independently of commanders' orders.

As a result of everyone having access to the Global Information Grid (GIG), leaders are faced with the challenges of commanding young men and women who have been plugged in to communications and entertainment devices since they were kids, while at the same time respecting the traditional pyramid model of command. In many instances, the growing pains are obvious.

"There's no way to run a military without a hierarchical structure," said retired Lt. Gen. William Odom, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and former director of the National Security Agency under President Reagan. "When you hook everyone up to the Internet and give them processing capability, you are essentially flattening the chain of command. If everybody is making independent decisions, the likelihood they will be coordinated to a mission goes down."

Odom said that what we're experiencing today are "constipated information channels" and "diarrhea of the e-mail." Both have increased the capability and propensity of senior leaders to micromanage from afar. The question now is whether the military can develop senior commanders who will allow lower commanders to make decisions — and then stay out of their hair and live with the results.

In the broadest sense, LTG Odom is right -- the military requires a certain amount of hierarchy that is irreducible. If the general knew his history though, he would know that the idea of 'hierarchy' is sometimes flexible.

I imagine a guy like Field Marshal Donald Haig back in 1915 would have rejected the idea of using fire teams to infiltrate enemy trenches. He would have argued that giving foot soldiers enough autonomy to maneuver on their own would reduce the 'likelihood they will be coordinated to a mission' as well. Two years later, Germany's stormtroopers mostly proved him wrong.

[On an interesting historical note, stormtroopers weren't actually a German idea, but were instead based on the writings of a French Army captain named Andre Laffargue. He proposed this strategy of small units and infiltration to the French General Staff in 1915 and they dismissed it out of hand. In response, Laffargue self-published the operational concept as a pamphlet, which the Germans captured and translated in 1916.]

So how should the military resolve this issue of autonomy? Rosenberg gives commanders a simple four-point plan: 1) Clearly articulate the objective, 2) provide your troops with operational boundaries, 3) set their rules of engagement, and 4) take a very hands-off approach. Frankly, I couldn't agree more. U.S. troops are smarter and better trained today than at any point in the military's history. Sure, they will probably need more classes in anthropology and foreign languages, but changing that is easy enough.

Rosenberg also converges with Marine General Charles Krulak's idea about the strategic corporal. Krulak argues that future battlefields and future missions will be so complex and fluid that troops on the ground will rarely have time to reach up the chain of command for orders. In response, the military should be prepared to devolve leadership to the lowest level, the squad leader, who is typically only a corporal.

Krulak's position seems reasonable enough, but there is a tension between his "strategic corporal" thesis and what is referred to as the "7000-mile screwdriver" -- a term coined to describe Donald Rumsfeld's micromanagement of the Iraq War. Improvements in headquarters-level situational awareness have encouraged commanders to micromanage their troops at a time when they need a greater amount of autonomy.

If current problems any indicator, giving troops more autonomy will probably be far more difficult than suiting them up for network-centric warfare. On the one hand, you have politicians who would rather blow millions on a pie-in-the-sky global strike program than take risks or ask for sacrifice. On the other, you have an inbred generation of military leaders who prefer to go into battle unprepared over providing civilian leaders with objective (but sometimes unpalatable) advice.

Matching doctrine to technology is definitely possible, let's just say I'm not confident about the prospects.

FCS quote of the month

From Renae Merle's article in last Friday's Post (which I can't believe I missed):

In a statement released Wednesday, the White House said that it "strongly opposed" the cuts to FCS, asserting that it would "force the Army to retain its Cold War hardware (developed in the 1970s and fielded in the 1980s) well beyond 2040, preventing our soldiers from fielding the best available equipment in the future."

That's funny. If you read their latest Modernization Plan, the Army clearly feels its "Cold War hardware" is good enough for 30 of the Army's 45 active-duty Brigade Combat Teams to use through 2030. Its not even clear that the Army plans to eventually replace all of its BCTs with FCS after 2030.

I'm amazed to see the White House play the same procurement shell game that they shot down back in 2002 when the Army tried to save the XM2001 Crusader self-propelled howitzer. This is all beside the fact that the Army is procuring hundreds of new tanks, trucks and aircraft to replace ones that were damaged, destroyed or worn down in Iraq -- to the tune of $17.1 billion in 2007 alone.

Crunching the numbers on MRAP

I apologize for the silence, I've been having some trouble with Blogger. Specifically, I wrote two posts last night and they disappeared off the server between hitting "Save Now" and "Publish Post." I have reconstructed the first here:

I've been following the debate over Mine-Resistant, Ambush Protected vehicle closely because it could could be an important direction marker for the future Army. Despite having drug their feet on the concept, it now appears the Army and Marines plan on replacing a sizable part of their HMMWV fleet with MRAPs.

One thing that has gone largely unaddressed in the debate so far is how MRAP will effect the deployability of the Army. I give you an idea of how big this change might be, I've crunched some rough numbers for your edification:

Up-Armored HMMWV
Curb Weight: 4.9 tons
Volume: 705 cubic feet
Crew: 4
Range: 275 miles

Force Protection Industries Cougar 4x4
Curb Weight: 15 tons
Volume: 1336 cubic feet
Crew: 10
Range: 600 miles

Land Systems OMC RG-31 Nyala
Curb Weight: 8 tons*
Volume: 1463 cubic feet
Crew: 10
Range: 559 miles

I put a star next to the curb weight of the RG-31 because most of the data I've seen is conflicting. I've seen curb weights varying between 7.28 and 8.4 (metric) tons so, I rounded the figure to 8 tons for the sake of argument.

The first thing that jumps out at me is the dramatic increase in volume and weight between the up-armored Humvee and the MRAP candidates. This is pretty understandable though, considering that the Cougar and Nyala are twice the size, carry more than twice the troops and go twice as far. Whereas an average squad would require 2-3 Humvees, they would probably only need 1 MRAP. This should help economize on fuel (fewer engines) and manpower (fewer drivers) some.

The increased weight might raise questions about how the Army and Marines could deploy MRAPs from the U.S. to the theater, particularly airlift feasibility. We should be careful to note that strategic and operational airlift are largely still on the drawing board. The Army's current 'move' doctrine still reflects an assumption that the bulk of Army materiel (including vehicles) will be done by sealift.

Setting that reality aside, the Cougar and Nyala are not too heavy for traditional airlift. The C-17 has enough cargo capacity (85 tons) to carry an M1 Abrams, so it can probably fit as many as two MRAPs on board. The Cougar and Nyala also appear to come under the limits of the C-130's mere 22 tons of lift. They will probably be too big for the Joint Cargo Aircraft's projected 7-10 payload limit though.

Since the next generation of strategic air- (the heavy-lift vertical take off and landing aircraft) and sealift (the austere access high speed ship) are still decades away, I don't think the MRAP won't cause too much of a problem our "expeditionary" military.

Where's the DOT before MRAP?

I'm really impressed by the quantity and quality of the debate over U.S. Army and Marine Corp plans to purchase and field a Mine Resistant Ambush Protected MRAP vehicle to replaced the venerable HMMWV. MRAP skeptics, including writers on the left and right of the Iraq debate, as well as my contemporary (or should I say 'blogging upperclassman') J. Sigger point out that the benefits offered by the MRAP in Iraq does not outweigh its hefty pricetag:

We're talking about making a multi-billion dollar procurement deal on a system that hasn't been run through any operational tests, to replace a system that cost about a fifth of the armored vehicle, and the military wants to rush production of "low rate initial production" vehicles through five contractors to meet the demand.

Now I know why the politicians will vote for this, because they've got a knee-jerk reaction to any issue that includes the term "protection from IEDs" in the title. But you have to ask, what the hell are the military leaders thinking by rushing these vehicles to the field? "These MVAPs have to work, because... because... if they don't, it's our asses." There's no excuse to short-cutting the operational testing of this vehicle, not when the consequences of failure are so high. My frustration with these kind of decisions is in part fueled by the continued demands by the military leadership to continue modernizing their aging equipment simultaneous with funding the high optempo requirements of the war, while the training and repair infrastructure in the United States continues to crumble.

While MRAP supporters, such as defense tech super-reporters Noah Schachtman and David Axe, acknowledge this issue, but present a set of compelling counterpoints:

Jason has a point. But, just to be clear, it's not like the things have no military track record. Engineers and bomb squads have been riding in 'em for more than a year, now. And they're based closely on South African designs which I understand performed just fine.

Also, let's not fetishize "operational tests" overmuch. After all, the Predator flunked its 2001 operational exam -- even as it was taking out Taliban in Afghanistan.

Still, there's reason to be skeptical. As the Standard notes, "'Eliminating the source' [of IEDs] is indeed the only way to stop the bleeding. MRAP is a stop-gap measure, [albeit] a good one."

While both side present compelling points, I tend to side with the MRAP skeptics for two reasons. First, physics is a hard mistress and she currently favors the insurgents. The competition over ever-improving Improvised Explosive Device (IED) and counter-IED tactics and technology has been a central theme of the struggle between U.S. ground forces and insurgent groups. While both sides have been forced to continually innovate, the marginal utility of technological innovation declines as the operational needs bump up against the laws of physics. It is not even really clear whether an car chasis can be hardened enough to stop an explosively-formed penetrator.

Second, whatever happened to the Doctrine, Organization, Training, Material, Leadership, Personnel, Facilities (DOTMLPF) process? For those unfamiliar with the term, the best description is found in Field Manual 1:

DOTMLPF is a problem-solving construct for assessing current capabilities and managing change. Change is achieved through a continuous cycle of adaptive innovation, experimentation, and experience. Change deliberately executed across DOTMLPF elements enables the Army to improve its capabilities to provide dominant landpower to the joint force.

The elements of DOTMLPF are organized in order of difficult, from easiest to change (doctrine) to most difficult (facilities). One thing that I have noticed about about U.S. operations in Iraq is a tendency to favor material solutions over doctrinal, organizational, and training solutions when a problem crops up on the battlefield. Just compare the $6 billion spent by JIEDDO on counter IED technology versus the years it took to the U.S. Army to role out a new counterinsurgency manual, despite the clear need for one.

Don't get me wrong, the military should replace part of its HMMWV fleet with MRAPs -- but not all of it. The Army will continue to need an medium-weight, all-purpose truck for missions that don't involve driving through a virtual minefield. Thankfully, it seem like the Pentagon is going to pick up just about the right number of MRAPs (15,000-20,000). In the meantime, I have a few radical proposals for doctrinal and organizational changes for the Army should meditate on:

1. If roadside bombs are such a problem for military supply convoys, why not consider sourcing some material locally? Laundry service, water purification and garbage collection, are could be outsources to local firms. The business will help build ties with the community and infuse some much needed cash into the local economy. As units build trusting relationships with the local population, they should consider outsourcing some functions that would involve a mild amount of risk, but employ important parts of the local economy. This would include preparing meals, mending uniforms and manufacturing basic consumables (batteries, non-sensitive spare parts, tires). Heck, if Iraq's oil ministry could get its act together, the U.S. Army's fleet of generators and trucks would be thirsty, high-paying customers.

2. If you can't make armored cars tough enough to resist IEDs then walk, or at least disperse Brigade Combat Teams into the urban environment even more. If Joint Security Stations commanded at the battalion level, some of them subdivide them into company-sized or even platoon-sized posts. The ultimate goal would be to saturate the security districts with small posts that aren't far apart and don't have to move much. Remember the painful lessons of the Kuomintang's early anti-communist campaigns -- insurgencies require space (or base areas). Slow and methodical encirclement is a proven way of starving insurgents of their space.

3. Abandon the idea of 'focused logistics.' The idea of 'tailored supplies' or 'just-in-time' delivery are not compatible with stability operations. When your mission is to provide 24-hour security to a town, you need to be preparing for everything. Building a 'mountain of metal' may be inexpensive or inefficient, but the opportunity cost of failing at your security mission can be even larger.

These ideas may seem risky, but successful stability operations often requires a wholesale abandonment of the military's conventional wisdom about the elements of operations -- like the 'battlefield,' the 'enemy,' and the whole idea of 'operations' itself.

Transformational Calculus

I've taken plenty of flak for downplaying efforts to develop and acquire new artillery pieces and strategic bombers for the U.S. military. Critics often assert that my outlook on transformation is 'too infantry' or 'anti-mechanized.' My response to such claims is that the commentators themselves haven't done the deep planning calculus required by transformation. As Colin Gray described in a 2005 paper he wrote at the Army's Institute for Strategic Studies:

The transformation needed most urgently in the Army is in its suitability as the primary policy instrument of the sheriff of world order. The transformation now underway in all of the Armed Forces, including the Army, necessarily has as a prominent feature, the further leveraging of information technology (IT) so that the troops can do even better what they do superbly well already. America’s most pressing strategic problem, really a condition so persistent, is that time after time military prowess is not employed as effectively as it should be in the service of policy.

Does the military really need new strategic bombers when its current systems are adequate for U.S. purposes? What about replacing them systems that can achieve similar (or more useful) effects at a smaller cost? To illustrate my point, I will do simple breakdown of the changing costs of a relatively known transformational quantity: Precision-guided munitions

Bombs on Target

A lot of variables going into the circular error probable of dumb bombs, but for the sake of argument, I will use the simple calculation put together by Richard Hallion in his Precision Guided Munitions and the New Era of Warfare. In order to have a 90% certainty of hitting in a target 60' by 100' box from a medium altitude during the Vietnam War, it would take 176 2000 lb MK84 general purpose bombs. With a price tag of $3,100 each, the ordnance cost of the entire operation would cost $545,600.

To reach the same degree of certainty in the same size box using a 2000 lb Joint Direct Attack Munition (JDAM) would require just 2 bombs. The price tag on each JDAM is the $21,000 tail kit plus the $3,100 MK84 bomb body for a total ordnance cost of $48,200. In terms of the munitions needed to hit a target, precision-guidance reduces cost by about a factor of ten.

The savings don't stop there though. Since you only need to drop 4,000 lbs of bombs instead of 35,200 lbs, you need far fewer aircraft per sortie. In fact, precision-guided munitions are so accurate that the U.S. reached a sortie inflection point. Now an individual strike aircraft flies a single sortie against multiple targets, instead of multiple aircraft flying sorties against a single target. This in turn means that U.S.'s strike fighter fleets (Air Force, Navy and Marines) need fewer fighters, pilots and support services to achieve the same effects on the battlefield.

Since precision-guided munitions can reliably hit increasingly small targets, the Air Force and the Navy are discovering that they small blast effects to accomplish missions. In effect, precision has raised the question, "Why destroy an entire building when the target is only on the fifth floor?" The answer to this question has been to design munitions that emphasize penetration and small blast effects, such as the Small Diameter Bomb (SDB) and the Sensor-fuzed Weapon (FSW). This weapons only further expand the number of targets that an individual aircraft can engage.

Complications

Precision-guided munitions do have a number of disadvantages. One issue that the services are struggling with today is supply line size. The reduced quantities of munitions and delivery vehicles demanded does increase short-term costs, but it also reduces long-term profitability. When the Pentagon only plans to build fewer than 200 F-22 Raptors, where is Lockheed Martin's incentive to reduce cost or keep the production line open for more than a decade? Especially if Congress is going to block foreign military sales of the fighter.

Bringing allied nations into production plans early on in the process like the Navy and Marine Corp did with the F-35 Lightning II is going to become an important cost-control and supply tactic for the military. As an insider in the Army procurement community, I can tell you that we have been looking at foreign military sales as a way of keeping GMLRS lines hot and staving off a Nunn-McCurdy breach for the Excalibur. As we are discovering, this may become difficult because of the U.S. military's increasing reliance on the Global Position System and other sensitive technologies.

This is aside from the fact that precision-guided munitions are more complicated, which naturally makes them more expensive than dumb munitions. They also require skilled operators and engineers for support and use, which increases recruiting standards and personnel training costs. As the military tries to reduce cost by outsourcing some support functions, contractors may one day take up the job of preparing and handling precision-guided munitions on carriers and airbases.

Conclusion

Transformation is complex and ultimately leads to major changes in the way we fight. This goes well beyond narrow conceptions of the American Way of War once proposed by Thomas Barnett and Art Cebrowski (or characterized by Max Boot).

Defense Transformation Redux

I apologize for the lack of posts recently, but I've been waist deep in homework assignments this week. Graduation is getting so close that I can taste it. In the meantime, I've refined my original defense transformation info paper to take out some of the jargon.

Military Revolutions and Defense Transformation

BACKGROUND: This memo will define and critique the idea of defense transformation as it relates to the Department of Defense. Specifically, it will highlight the term’s role as tool for with dealing revolutions in military affairs, how it has translated into DOD policy and the limitations of implementing those policies.

DISCUSSION: War is a dynamic enterprise centered around one goal: Control over the production of goods. Agrarian societies fought over arable territory. Industrial societies fought over natural resources and population centers. Post-industrial societies today fight over ideas, information and technology. The methods of fighting war have also shifted to meet these changes in the means of production. Seasonal peasant armies armed with bows and triremes began to give way to conscripted riflemen and ships-of-the-line around the 16th Century. Industrialization gave birth to mechanization and rocketry, but it was radio and the Global Positioning System that fundamentally changed warfare in the 1990s.

These macro-historic changes have been labeled revolutions in military affairs (RMA) and many historians believe they have played a significant role in world history. The DOD coined the term ‘defense transformation’ to break the continental shifts of an RMA into its constituent parts. Each instance of ‘transformation’ is an individual change in defense capability or organization that gestates over a period of a decade or more.

The 2003 Defense Transformation Guidance defines transformation as “a process that shapes the changing nature of military competition and cooperation through new combinations of concepts, capabilities, people and organizations that exploit our nation's advantages and protect against our asymmetric vulnerabilities to sustain our strategic position, which helps underpin peace and stability in the world.” In order to achieve this ‘shaping,’ the DOD has drafted policies intended to array its finite resources against a range of unknowable future threats and vulnerabilities. These policies are designed to balance current and future-spending priorities and competing needs for basic research and system development while avoiding the tendency for path-dependency caused investment in technology.

The advantage of this approach is that it does not commit the DOD to one transformation strategy. It allows for both small, ‘evolutionary’ steps and large, ‘revolutionary’ leaps in military capabilities. Unfortunately, this approach is also fraught with problems. Splitting resources between revolution and evolutionary efforts may yield a military that is a jack-of-all-trades, but master of none. Transforming to maintain a preponderance of power may encourage adversaries to pursue the means to counter maturing U.S. capabilities, creating the technological equivalent of a “self-fulfilling prophecy.”

Two other criticisms can be leveled at defense transformation as well. First is that transformation cannot be pursued in a social or political vacuum. Norms and organizations have placed limitations on the ways in which militaries have been mustered, equipped and used for centuries. There is no reason to believe the nation-state or post-modern society doesn’t share this tendency. The second is that transformation policy creates the mentality that change can be fostered through policy intervention. Transformation only a small part of sweeping social, economic and political change caused by shifts in the means of production. It would be more effective to focus on reducing the factors that prevent endogenous transformation, such as bureaucratic aversions to risk and change.

Rethinking artillery and self-propelled howitzers

My recent post decrying the significance of the Army's forthcoming FCS Non-Line-of-Sight Cannon platform provoked some bitter comments from the artillery community. I won't get into the details of some of the more colorful e-mails I received, but most characterized me as a 'typical rocket-lover.' Many also pointed out the collective inability of M-270 Multiple Launch Rocket System advocates to move out their mother's basement and have carnal relations with the opposite sex.

This isn't the first time I have provoked the ire of artillerymen and when I do, I am usually confronted with the following questions:

1. Why do you hate artillery(men)?

I don't hate the artillery or artillerymen. In fact, I think indirect fire is still a critical player on the battlefield and on a personal level, two of my most significant professional influences were former artillerymen (including CSBA's Bob Work). Setting those affinities aside, I think that howitzers must go the way of the dodo for one simple reason, which is that they don't fit well into the era of guided-weapons warfare. The GPS-guided XM982 Excalibur 155mm howitzer round has the potential to bring traditional artillery into this precision-age. The Army tried this once before with the laser-guided M712 Copperhead, but the munition underperformed on the battlefield and was discontinued.

The problem encountered with the Copperhead was that the explosive power of the powder increments did not mix very well with its guidance system. The M712's engineers managed to hardened the optical sensor well enough, but there were a number of problems maintaining overall quality control on the shells. The Excalibur's engineers have applied some pretty unique tricks to boost the reliability of their product, but I hear that the transition to full production isn't exactly running smoothly.

Since rockets and gravity bombs do not undergo the same physical strain as traditional artillery at the beginning of their flight, their guidance systems don't require the same degree of hardening. This provides non-shell munitions natural architectural advantage that allows for higher performance and better precision.

2. Why do you oppose the idea of building a new self-propelled howitzer for the Army?

I don't object to the notion of a new self-propelled howitzer per se, but I have qualms with the assumption that it must be manned. In my mind, an artillery battery is the perfect operational concept for automation:

- An artillery battery is tight formation of vehicles.

- Each gun in a battery receives its fire mission from a common controller.

- Howitzers generally engage their targets with no line of sight.

- Batteries do not fire while moving.

Why not mount artillery cannons on six unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) and tie each into a single command and control (C2) truck? It would easier to program UGVs to follow a manned 'mother vehicle' than to program them to operate autonomously anyways. You could also reduce the weight of each howitzer without compromising the survivability of its crew. Combining the role of driver and gunner into a single UGV operator would also allow reduce the number of troops needed to operate a battery. A heavily modified pair of Buffalos might even provide an off-the-shelf solution for the C2 vehicle.

My hypothetical battery of unmanned howitzers may be a pipe dream, but it highlights a critical point that the Army seems to continually miss. The Crusader and the NLOS-C are a waste of money because they only provide incremental evolution at a considerable cost.

If the Army wants Future Combat Systems to catalyze a revolution on the battlefield, it will have to more than merely integrate traditional platforms into a common network. Retired admiral Bill Owens's emphasis on linking 'sensors to shooters' is just the first step. FCS planners must be willing to complete abandon traditional notions of tactics and operations if they want their capitalization plan to truly innovate.

Not the 'Son of Crusader,' but so what?

I think David Axe is a fantastic journalist, but his recent assessment of the Army's proposed Non-Line-of-Sight Cannon (NLOS-C) failed to address some critical questions about the system's efficacy.

I'll complete agree with the notion that the NLOS-C is many ways is a step up from the ill-fated XM2001 Crusader both in terms of design and technology. I'm also impressed with the Army's decision to adapt the Navy's Advanced Gun System instead of building a new barrel from the ground up. Leveraging the AGS and FCS's investment in an electric-hybrid engine has undoubtedly saved the Army time and research cash. Setting aside the fact that NLOS-C can not hit the field until its Joint Tactical Radio System (JTRS) radio is ready, I'm still left asking myself "Where's the need?"

The NLOS-C will definitely have advantages over the Army's current M109A6. The AGS will allow the NLOS-C to fire a handful of shells in a quick succession and have them all land on target simultaneously, also know as a Multiple Rounds Single Impact (MSRI) fire mission. In theory, NLOS-C will also only require 2 men to operate and will weigh in at 23-25 tons, as opposed to the M109A6's 4-man crew and 32 ton weight.

The NLOS-C will also take advantage of the XM892 Excalibur, a a revolutionary artillery round that integrates fin-stabilized GPS guidance into an extended-range base-bleed design. There are also plans to include a small radar sensor on the NLOS-C that will allow it to track shells all the way to impact.

The problem is that many of these advantages seem to justify the cost of the NLOS-C at first, but do not hold up under further scrutiny. The first issue is the vehicle's misleading name. There is nothing about the NLOS-C chassis or cannon that allows for its 'non-line of sight' capability. The NLOS function of the NLOS-C is contained entirely in its magazine of GPS-guided Excalibur rounds. Since the Army and Marines intend to use the Excalibur in all of their 155mm howitzers, one of the vehicle's selling points is actually a bit overblown.

The Army should be familiar with this criticism because it was one that the Secretary of Defense's Program Analysis and Evaluation directorate levied against the Crusader.

NLOS-C advocates also argue that a new self-propelled howitzer (SPH) is desperately needed because the M109 is 40 years old. The M109 chassis design may be 40 years old, but the A6 design is only dates back to the Reagan build-up in the 1980s. In fact, most of the current A6 fleet is less than 10 years old and the Army even intends to keep A6 in the inventory for another 10-15 years (only the 15 FCS-equipped brigades will get the NLOS-C, the other 30 or so will be stuck with this supposed 'dinosaur').

Personally, I'm also concerned about how the Army is keeping the NLOS-C so light. They've cut 2.5 tons off of its cross weight by reducing its magazine by a third, but it isn't clear where the other 3-5 tons went. When critics said the Crusader's 60 tons was too much, the Army reacted by stripping down its armor and I'm afraid they followed the same strategy with NLOS-C. I don't see why weight has been such a big issue since the Rumsfeldian era. SPHs can't be deployed by C-130s because Army doctrine prohibits the deployment of artillery in units smaller than a six-gun battery.

In the end, the only advantage that the NLOS-C has to offer is its advanced rapid-fire barrel. I'm not saying MRSI isn't a great capability. I'm just wondering if it isn't smarter to retrofit the A6 chassis with the AGS barrel since we are planning to keep them in the force for another decade. I can see a need for the new barrel, but is there a pressing need for a new SPH chassis? Deferring procurement of a new SPH for a few more years would free up Army R&D cash for other more important Army programs (like a replacement for the HMMWV) or the truly revolutionary pieces of FCS (like the Non-Line-of-Sight Launch System).

What's really ironic about the NLOS-C is that it really smacks of an Air Force affliction known as 'pilot-centric thinking.' When evaluating a system pilots (or in this case, drivers) tend to focus on improving the element that they directly control, the vehicle. This has become problematic in recent years because it has become far cheaper to create smarter, faster and better munitions than to build a smarter, faster and better vehicles. In the same way that the JDAM closed gap in the relative value between old bombers (B-52s) and new bombers (B-2s), the Excalibur is going to close the gap between the Paladin and the NLOS-C.

RMA and Defense Transformation

Here is the revolution in military affairs and defense transformation in 500 words. It earned me an A in my defense policy class at GWU:

War is a dynamic enterprise that centered around one goal: Control over the production of goods. Agrarian societies fought over arable territory. Industrial societies fought over natural resources and population centers. Post-industrial societies today fight over ideas, information and technology.

The methods of fighting war have also shifted to meet these changes in the means of production. Seasonal peasant armies armed with bows and triremes gave way to conscripted riflemen and ships-of-the-line around the 16th Century. These modes of combat themselves gave way to armor, airplanes, radio, submarines and the combined arms assault in the 20th Century.

These macro-historic changes have been labeled revolutions in military affairs (RMA) and many historians believe they have played a significant role in world history. The DOD became aware of RMA in the 1980s when Soviet military thinkers began to study eras of fundamental transformation in warfare. It is this narrower focus on the impact of small-scale technological and tactical changes evolved into the term defense transformation.

The 2003 Defense Transformation Guidance defines transformation as “a process that shapes the changing nature of military competition and cooperation through new combinations of concepts, capabilities, people and organizations that exploit our nation's advantages and protect against our asymmetric vulnerabilities to sustain our strategic position, which helps underpin peace and stability in the world.”

In order to achieve this ‘shaping,’ the DOD has drafted policies intended to array its finite resources against a range of unknowable future threats and vulnerabilities. These policies are designed to balance current and future-spending priorities and competing needs for basic research and system development while avoiding the tendency for path-dependency caused investment in technology.

The advantage of this approach is that it does not commit the DOD to one transformation strategy. It allows for both small, ‘evolutionary’ steps and large, ‘revolutionary’ leaps in military capabilities.

Unfortunately, this approach is also fraught problems. Splitting resources between revolution and evolutionary efforts may yield a military that is a jack-of-all-trades, but master of none. Transforming to maintain a preponderance of power may encourage adversaries to pursue the means to counter maturing U.S. capabilities, creating the technological equivalent of a “self-fulfilling prophecy.”

Two other criticisms can leveled at defense transformation as well. First is that transformation cannot be pursued in a socio-political vacuum. Social norms and political organizations have placed limitations on the ways in which militaries have been mustered, equipped and used for centuries. There is no reason to Western democracy doesn’t share this tendency.

The second is that transformation policy creates the mentality that change can be actively fostered through political or bureaucratic intervention. Defense transformation only a small part of sweeping social, economic and political change caused by shifts in the means of production. It would be more effective to focus on reducing the factors that prevent endogenous transformation, such as bureaucratic aversions to risk and change.

More Land Warrior fun

Special thanks to Anonymous, who sent me a link to this gem of a PR package for the Land Warrior. At 125 pounds and under $300 million a piece, the only ones to lose are the terrorists!

Busy Busy Busy

I have received a few grumpy e-mails regarding my recent lack of posts. The causes of this are twofold:

1) My recently departed boss in the Army secretariat has finally been replaced with a newly-minted SES from the Defense Security Cooperation Agency. He's a nice guy with long experience on the business side of security cooperation, but he is a relative lightweight in the technology department. I was elected to give him a tutorial on missile technology and proliferation that inadvertantly ate up a good portion of my week.

2) The recent spate of helo shootdowns shootdowns has whipped the defense science community into a stir. Weapons managers are once again looking at the relative efficacy of different countermeasures technologies. One thing is for certain, I've heard the word "dazzler" more times in the last week than it is typically used at the average cheerleading competition.

I was originally planning on posting something about MANPADS, but David Hambling beat me to the punch over at DT. I may still write something about U.S. efforts to reign in MANPADS proliferation, provided it doesn't bore my readers.

My boss is also having be write a criticism of DOD attempts at 'defense transformation' that I think I post later this week.

In defense of transformation

I know there are many soldiers and civilians in the defense community who are glad to see the Office of Force Transformation close its doors. The notion of defense transformation has been redefined and thrown around as a justification for pet projects and boondoggles in each service. Heck, I've spent years studying military anthrology and its relationship to technology and I even tired of all the meaningless techno-babble and flashy Powepoints after a while.

This doesn't mean that transformation is somehow dead though. The endless march of technological advancement will continue to change society, governance, warfare and even life itself. The military will spend most of that time just treading water to keep up, but I imagine they will pull of a few coups in my lifetime. There will always be another Battle of the Teutoberg Forest or blitzkrieg into France or a Persian Gulf War (I or II), we just need to make sure that we're on the winning side more often than not.

To me, the biggest failure of the transformation debate going on in and around the Pentagon for the last twenty years is that too much time was spent on the 'how' of transformation and not enough time on the 'what.' To paraphrase the excellent point raised by Steven Metz and James Kievit in their 1995 study "Strategy and the Revolution in Military Affairs: from Theory to Policy", the future military isn't just shaped by what technology allows it do, it is also shaped by what policy-makers think it should do. Without a coherent sense of mission, the services will just keep spinning their wheels, churning out more of the same, only faster, stealthier, more precise and with a GPS tracker on it.

More on the Chinese ASAT test

Now that us weapons nerds have had some time to sleep on yesterday's revelation, we're starting to things in context. Surprisingly, Defensetech plays up the importance of the ASAT test some while MSNBC's Jim Oberg downplays it. Since I had to write a one-pager about the issue to my boss, I will throw my assessment out to the public:

The test itself was pretty controlled:

1) The satellite's flight path was predictable

2) It passed very close to the launch site

3) The target was emitting a trackable signal

4) Modifications were made to the satellite's flight path to line it up with the kill vehicle launcher

As space interceptions go, the Chinese had a pretty good handicap on this test. It is unlikely that this success will translate into any sort of immediately fieldable capability. If the spotty record of our ground-based missile interceptors demonstrate anything, it is the difficulty of intercepting even predictable space targets. Although last week's success was impressive, we should hold off judgement until the Chinese can produced multiple, sequential successes.

I would also dispute Defensetech's characterization of this test as next-gen. In fact, I would categorize it as distinctly last-gen. The last time the U.S. looked into ground-based interceptors was back during Nike Zeus development in the early 1960s. Ground-based missiles are problematic for ASAT purposes because of their limited firing envelope.

Couple that with the detrimental effects the large amount of debris generated by kinetic energy interceptions have on communications and you can see why we went after options like the fighter-based ASM-135 missile. The ASM-135 would not only have been deployable anywhere a U.S. aircraft carrier was present, it would also ensure that the space debris would be someone else's problem.

Ironically, the success of this tech time warp presents two important facts:

1) There is truth to claims from the intelligence community that the Chinese have significantly improved the circular-error probable of their ballistic missile guidance systems. I have no idea what the Chinese used in this test, but my guess is that they supplemented the missile's normal guidance package with a radiation seeker. Even if this true, the performance of the DF-21 or DF-3 guidance package must have been improved significantly to get the kill vehicle close enough for a homing mechanism to work.

2) This is a continuation of recent trends in the innovative application of older weapons technology for new disruptive purposes. The Chinese will undoubted benefit from both the capability itself and the fact that the United States will divert R&D resources to ASAT countermeasures from other R&D programs. In essence, this situation has the potential of becoming the next big Katyusha rocket or IED challenge.

I don't mean to wander too far away from the ASAT issue, but doesn't this raise even bigger questions about U.S. transformation efforts than it does about Chinese capabilities? Questions such as, is the Air Force's Transformational Satellite Communications System really transformational if it can be crippled by such a last-gen threat?

Update: I fixed my grammar a little. As you may imagine, science and tech officesin the Pentagon, including mine, have been burning the midnight oil over the last 36 hours.