URL: http://www.ndu.edu/ndu/inss/strforum/z1106.html Strategic Forum THE REVOLUTION IN MILITARY AFFAIRS Martin Libicki, CDR James Hazlett, et al. [Excerpts] DISCUSSION I: STRATEGIC CHALLENGES Those who assess future strategic challenges tend to look to Asian countries, and to categorize competitors as peer, regional, or niche. Asia and the Nation-State Most conference participants believe that, over the next twenty years, the fulcrum of world politics will continue to shift from Europe and its peripheries to the Asia-Pacific region. The period of European dominance produced innumerable wars as various countries challenged each other for power, resources, and sovereignty. With the formation of the European Union and the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact, great power rivalry in particular and the nation-state in general are fading somewhat in importance. The nation-state remains strong in Asia, however. The last fifty years have seen considerable economic progress as various nations have made themselves richer by grasping the secrets of rapid industrialization. This trend, which started in Japan in the 1950s and 1960s, spread to the Tigers in the 1970s, ASEAN countries in the 1980s, and China and perhaps India in the 1990s, has left no Asian country unaffected. Economic growth, however, has not made the nation-state obsolete. To the contrary, the nation-state has been instrumental in creating the internal and external conditions for economic growth. European history suggests that countries, once they taste wealth, will struggle for power. Will Asian countries follow that pattern or demonstrate new models of what the nation-state is capable of? ... Types of Competitors One taxonomy of future threats suggested at the conference is to classify potential competitors as peer, regional, or niche. A peer competitor could challenge our military across the board. A niche competitor would be incapable of doing so, but would strive to inhibit or defeat U.S. intervention by developing capabilities such as primitive weapons of mass destruction, sensor blinders, physical terrorism, information system attacks, psychological operations, or hostage maneuvers. ... DISCUSSION II: OPERATIONAL CHALLENGES Considerable evidence suggests that commercial access to information -- GPS readings, space-based imagery, and Internet data -- could be transformed into military advantage thereby levelling the playing field between ourselves and our potential opponents. Other dual-use technologies, for instance, those that would permit remote piloting of aerial vehicles, permit commercial technologies such as electronic video photography to act as powerful military tools accessible to all (RPVs are made in more than thirty countries). Technologies That Level the Field Does the proliferation in information technologies necessarily negate our current military lead? Information-based warfare creates new vulnerabilities for industrial-age institutions slow to adapt. Because most U.S. logistics facilities and command nodes are not well hidden, they are vulnerable to precision strike. The widespread availability of overhead imagery coupled with GPS integration into weapon systems-- no more than a few years away for countries such as India--poses a serious threat to which our improving defensive measures (e.g., anti-tactical ballistic missiles) will provide only a partial solution . Our own counter-C2 operations are complicated by the rapidly falling cost of bandwidth and redundancy. Even if 90 percent of a bit flow can be interdicted, the remaining 10 percent may suffice for operational uses. Rapid expansion of cellular nodes, particularly through exploitation of commercial space assets, may make targeting and communications denial difficult or impossible. Multiple channels of electronic access will also complicate psychological operations and countermeasures. With the advent of the global information infrastructure, a clever adversary could take advantage of open information systems to enhance its own communications, information, navigation, intelligence, and operational support: examples include GPS, one-meter imagery, weather data, and even CNN. Every year more information with potential military use can be gleaned by anyone from the Internet without leaving fingerprints. How easily can a country's access to the global satellite communications networks be blocked? The coming global information infrastructure will have many points of entry. It will also be difficult to curtail certain services (e.g., global navigation) without denying them to U.S. users or even our own national security establishment. Technologies that Keep Us Ahead The United States, nevertheless, retains an edge in two important areas: space and systems integration. Space systems are relatively difficult to build and although many potential middle-income adversaries can borrow space services from third parties, fewer can own satellites, and far fewer can launch them. Thus the United States will retain a clear edge in the size and sophistication (timeliness and interpretation) of space capabilities, in their adoption and adaptation for military uses, in their augmentation or adaptation for the particulars of future contingencies, and in the assurance of their continuity. The distinctions between data and information, and between information and knowing could also favor U.S. forces. There are vast differences between, for instance, access to meteorological imagery and determining, for instance, that a locus of operations is likely to be fogged in 24 hours hence (a distinction relevant to the Falklands campaign). The art of operational planning is not acquired automatically with the acquisition of computers. Similarly, as sensors proliferate in type as well as numbers, data fusion is likely to become more decisive in future conflicts. ... POLICY RECOMMENDATIONS Two conference threads merit further examination: * U.S. defense policies that make it more difficult for potential competitors to threaten their neighbors and hold off the United States at the same time may be worth pursuing for that fact alone. * If militarily relevant information technologies are everywhere, sophistication at using them may be a better predictor of how challenging a competitor may become for the United States. Therefore, in addition to worrying about how large future foes are (and sizing our own forces accordingly), we should also focus on the potential sophistication of our foes (and develop doctrine accordingly).