"Good news: A Rand analyst (Ochmanek)
has discovered the need for more armored forces, that light forces
(airborne/amphibious infantry) won’t survive contact with the Russian enemy in
Eastern Europe.
Bad news: Ochmanek argues for more
armored brigades without pointing to the top attack threat to armor from the
multitude of UCAVs and MRLS that will proliferate on the battlefield.
Modernization without reform and reorganization to deal with new forms of
warfare leads to no change, and ultimately, defeat. The idea that we might need
a fundamentally new mix on the ground, new tactics and new operational
solutions, not just “more armor” only comes up in the context of A2/AD. More
important, the criticality of tightly integrating ISR, Strike and Maneuver
across service lines within a new integrated all arms/all effects operational
framework to both enhance survivability and extract greater fighting power from
the force is nowhere in sight. Of course, the possibility that long-range
strike systems combined with attacking ground maneuver forces, not new aircraft
that will not penetrate future IADs in any case is the logical answer to IADs
in Eastern Europe (particularly to Koenigsberg/Kaliningrad) is not raised. The
defense of the misguided investment in the false promise of most of what’s in
the third offset is equally disappointing.
On the whole, Ochmanek offers more
conventional wisdom that tries to offset numbers with numbers. He’s like the
people in the commercial that “monitor” the problem, but don’t really fix it.
His comments end up reinforcing a military status quo that will fail in future
war. This should not surprise us, but it is depressing indeed that there
is no advocacy for new capability packages that mobilize combat power that’s
disproportionate to their size (new organization, technology and human
capital)." Doug
Why NATO Needs a Heavy Defensive
Ground Force
A senior defence analyst at the RAND
Corporation explains why the overall message that NATO needs to send coming out
of Warsaw should be one that reinforces the gold standard of deterrence.
At the Warsaw Summit, the Alliance revised its
forward deterrence posture. Over the past year the RAND Corporation conducted a
series of simulations and war-games that exposed the major vulnerabilities that
the Alliance has in the Baltic. Defence Matters discussed ways to mitigate
them with David Ochmanek, a senior defence
analyst at the RAND Corporation and a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of
Defence for Force Development (from 2009 until 2014).
The overall message that NATO needs
to send coming out of Warsaw should be one that reinforces the gold standard of
deterrence that of “confronting your adversaries with the prospect of failure
at the operational level if they choose aggression.”
The access-denial problem is
becoming very sensitive in Europe - in Kaliningrad, but also in the Black Sea.
How do you see the impact of developing these A2/AD bubbles for the traditional
power projection posture?
The issue of A2/AD cuts across all
dimensions of power projection. Every domain of military operations – air,
space, maritime, cyber-space, land – is affected by the A2/AD capabilities. The
extent to which one’s power projection capabilities are affected depends on the
adversary, the type and number of systems that are deployed, the proficiency of
adversary and friendly forces, geography, and other factors. If you look at our
most capable adversaries the threat is such that it is not simply going to be enough for us to continue to modernise our
forces. We are also going to have to revise our entire concept for power
projection operations. The approach that we’ve taken and worked so well
against Iraq, Serbia, Libya is not going to be highly successful in face of our
most capable adversaries. So there is a
conceptual dimension to this as well as a modernisation problem.
How do you see the NATO Wales summit
in perspective? Was it enough for reassuring the most exposed allies especially
in an increasingly A2/AD environment?
The Wales summit took some useful
steps. But it is only the beginning. As we do assessments of potential future
scenarios that will involve Russian forces we are identifying other measures
that would be appropriate to give us a robust deterrent. Some of them are
pretty straight-forward and involve adjusting our posture. Others are about
getting new capabilities to offset some of these Russian A2/AD capabilities.
I like to remind people that between
the US and Europe there is an ocean, and this has important implications for
how we prepare. We have to have the heavy component of NATO’s defensive ground
force in the theatre before a crisis occurs. Specifically,
the Alliance should deploy heavy brigade-sets to the Eastern flank of the
Alliance in order to be prepared for the kinds of challenges that Russia could
pose. The other things are more in the realm of countering specific
Russian capabilities. We need improved capabilities and concepts for suppressing their integrated air-defence. We
are going to need systems that will give us battle space awareness even in
contested environments where we don’t have complete confidence in being able to
operate in space or in the air space over the enemy’s territory. In Europe we
need larger stocks of advanced expendable weapons: air-to-air missiles,
air-to-surface weapons, anti-armour weapons, artillery. It is a mix between
some old and new systems. The challenges posed by Russian forces are not
insurmountable, but sustained investments will be needed to meet them.
The Warsaw summit of the Alliance is
very close. How could NATO instill credibility into the defence of the Baltic
states and (re)secure its Eastern Flank?
Looking back, there were three
things that happened when the Cold War ended. Firstly we became focused on out
of area operations and we changed our forces to do expeditionary operations in
irregular environments. Secondly, the defence spending by most NATO members was
reduced, their forces were thinned out and cut back. Lastly, we didn’t
fundamentally adjust the Alliance’s posture because the idea that Russia would
use military force to forcibly change borders in Europe, didn’t seem to be valid
anymore. We had the expectation that we could partner with Russia and that we
would broadly share objectives. Putin’s actions in 2014 have changed all of
that. We have to focus again on traditional territorial defence, even though
out of area challenges are not going away. We need to invest more--the 2% goal
is a reasonable target. And we need to revise our posture. This last point
means moving more capability toward the Eastern Flank, particularly the Baltic
States that actually touch Russia and where there is very little operational
depth.
A credible defence of the Baltic
states would imply a combination of posture and modernisation. Our analysis points to the importance of
prepositioning heavy equipment for several armoured brigades in the Baltic states,
having a rotational presence of a company or battalion for every one of those
sets so that they are not vulnerable to preemption. The Alliance will
also need to have the proper munitions stocks in theatre, ensure that
transportation networks are adequate to resupply and reinforce, and raise the
readiness levels of some multinational armoured
units in the rear areas of NATO so that those forward units can be reinforced
within a few days by a second armoured force.
So a necessary component should be
the forward presence. There is no way to avoid that in the current environment.
I don’t think so. I don’t see any
substitute for that and the forward presence has to have an armoured component. The forces of the Russian
Federation are overwhelmingly armoured and motorised infantry. In a crisis we
could get light forces there, whether it is from the NATO Response Force or the
173rd from Vicenza or 82nd Airborne from US. But those forces find it difficult to engage armoured
forces on the move because they don’t have the tactical mobility or the
survivability to be effective. So we need a heavy armoured component there.
Is NATO’s deterrence capital on the
Eastern Flank weakened?
I am not comfortable with our
posture now, living in a world where Russia has demonstrated the capability and
will, to use military power to change borders. We enlarged the Alliance under a
set of fairly optimistic assumptions about Russian objectives. Those are no
longer valid so it is extremely important to adjust our posture and capabilities.
We need to get right the underlying military balance between NATO and Russia.
The gold standard of deterrence is confronting your adversaries with the
prospect of failure at the operational level if they choose aggression. We
should not be comfortable until we have a posture that can deny a quick,
low-cost invasion of NATO territory.
Are we going to have a new
capability gap at the horizon? Should the Alliance be able to neutralise an
access-denial bubble? I don’t see many countries ready to invest in the
equipment that can break and put the access-denial network of the other
side in danger.
We face capabilities gaps now. NATO
members collectively have a GDP many times greater than Russia’s. If we want a
stable geopolitical order in Europe and we wish to avoid war, we should invest
prudently in the capabilities needed to confront Russia with the prospect of
defeat should it choose war.
The Pentagon and Bob Work have been
talking for some time now about a third offset strategy. What is its
purpose and what are the consequences for the Alliance?
Our response to this challenge is
going to be in two dimensions: The first one is about posture and the second is
focused on modernisation. The offset strategy is about focused modernisation.
The things that emerged from the RAND war-games made us realise that we need better capabilities to suppress the
integrated air defences--the network of double digits SAMs and their
command and control; we need effective area anti-armour munitions and they are
going to need to be delivered in an environment where the control of the air is
still contested; we need to gain battle space
awareness in contested space-air environment. The third offset strategy
should be focused on addressing a finite number of operational challenges relevant
to operations in the anti-access/area denial environment. Capabilities emerging
from this work will apply not just to the Russia, but also to China because
there are a lot of commonalities between the two.
As in the Western Pacific our
challenge is to modernise the force and come up with new conceptual approaches
in order to conduct power projection. We need to do both in parallel. We should
expand field experimentation, doctrine development, and combined training.
There is an emphasis on forward
stationing around 4 battalions in the Baltic states and Poland, together with
the necessary pre-positioned equipment. Having in mind the results of the most
recent RAND war-games and simulations, is this move along with the ERI funding
enough to provide a credible deterrence? Will the deterrence be robust enough?
What gives robustness to deterrence?
The four battalions and other steps
being taken under ERI and the Warsaw Summit are certainly steps in the right
direction. There is no substitute for having
heavy ground combat power deployed forward. But given the size and firepower of
the forces that Russia is capable of positioning on NATO’s eastern borders, a
forward force of about three heavy brigades, supported by light forces,
artillery, and improved air force capabilities is called for.
Reinforcements for this forward force will be needed as well.
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