The Legacy of War

This is one reason why Europeans understand war differently than Americans:

An Allied bomb left over from World War II has exploded in Germany, killing three military engineers who were trying to defuse it. The blast occurred in the central city of Goettingen on Tuesday after construction workers building a sports stadium discovered it in a densely populated area.

Bomb disposal experts were called to the scene to defuse the 500 kilogramme device, which police said was likely to be British. But it exploded before they could neutralise the device. Another six members of the bomb disposal team were injured in the blast, but all were expected to survive.

The legacy of war remains written into the landscape of Europe in a way that’s not really understandable to Americans. This legacy doesn’t provide a full explanation for why Americans and Europeans tend to view military adventurism differently, but there’s no doubt that it’s a factor.

Read more...

Yay! The Foreigners Have Been Chased Away!

The military procurement field has been made safe for Boeing:

European defense and aerospace consortium EADS and its U.S. partner, Northrop Grumman, have handed an apparent $35 billion dollar gift to rival Boeing — by packing up and going home.

In late February, the Air Force launched a contest to replace its fleet of Eisenhower-era KC-135 aerial refueling tankers. The Air Force envisioned spending $11.7 billion on the new planes over the next five years; over the life of the program, the service plans to buy a total of 179 aircraft, orders worth a potential $35 billion.

But Northrop and EADS complained that the guidelines weighed the contest in Boeing’s favor, and threatened to pull out of the contest unless the service revised the request for bids. And that’s exactly what happened today.

God bless America. I, for one, can rest safer knowing that Boeing will face no competition in its ongoing effort to purchase the entire US Congress.

Read more...

"Why does the country need an independent Air Force?"

A few people have forwarded me this WaPo article about how the USAF is dealing with the increasing importance of drones. Unfortunately, the article doesn't really live up to its opening quote; it deals at length with dynamics internal to the Air Force, but doesn't really give a sense of why Schwartz thinks he has to worry about the future of the institution. The issue of the impact of drones upon USAF culture is different than the issue of the independence of the organization, and I think that the Air Force understands that it is facing troubling questions on both fronts. The two issues are related to one another, but Jaffe doesn't give a very good account of why; I think that he found a fantastic opening quote, but didn't realize that he was dealing with two distinct debates.

It's true enough that a major component of the Air Force's identity is wrapped around a WWI-era vision of knightly fighter pilots and a WWII vision of hardy bomber pilots. However, I think that the importance of these to the survival of the USAF can be overstated. The USAF was reasonably quick to embrace control of the missile forces of the United States, and indeed to make them a key part of the institution. Similarly, many defenders of the USAF point to its role in managing warfare in space, which again represents a departure from the classic fighter and bomber cultures. Drones are probably less of a challenge to the medium or mission oriented conceptions of the Air Force than either space or ballistic missiles; this is to say that if you believe you need an independent service for fighters and bombers, you might as well have an independent service for drones.

Nevertheless, it's fair to say that drones represent a departure from some of the most important elements of the Air Force's identity. I suspect that the problem will become more difficult as we begin to get real air superiority drones, and the manned fighter becomes a thing of the past. The question that the Jaffe article hints at but doesn't really come out and ask is this: Is the operation of a Predator really "military" in the same sense as the operation of an F-16? My qualified answer is yes; if we take Huntington definition of military officer as a professional manager of violence, then killing someone with a drone is not particularly different than killing them with an air-to-air missile or a laser-guided bomb. The drone operator is safer than the fighter pilot, but safety has rarely been the key variable in determining whether a particular task is "military" or not. Even during war, many tasks are undertaken by military personnel that pose no particular danger to their persons. Moreover, there's a fair amount of evidence to suggest that the key element to military training is creating a willingness and capacity to kill, rather than a willingness to die. Drone operators kill; if we assume the need for standing military forces with men and women trained to kill, then drone operations are a part of this project.

And yet, we underestimate identity questions at our peril. Jason approaches the question in a slightly different way, focusing on how drone operations meet certain established and informal criteria for "valor." He suggests that, the shared profession of violence management aside, there are some difficulties in comparing the activities of a Marine captain defending a base in Afghanistan and an Air Force captain defending the same base from Nevada. I suspect that part of the answer may be to come up with an alternative way of thinking about military merit, one that focuses on capability and contribution alongside the traditional ways we have to think about bravery and valor.

Interestingly enough, the drone question didn't really come up during my talk at the Air Command and Staff College. See also Attackerman.

Read more...

2010 Patterson Simulation

On Friday and Saturday, the Patterson School conducted its annual policy simulation. This year, Patterson students simulated the 22 hours following an Israeli attack on Iranian nuclear facilities, with a focus on the diplomatic consequences of such an attack. The University of Kentucky School of Journalism and Telecommunications cooperated in the simulation, with students from thee SJT operating websites representing two news networks, Gulf News Service (an Al Jazeera clone) and International News Network (a CNN clone). A full summary of the simulation can be found at Information Dissemination.

Read more...

A Curious Omission

In the process of engaging In Praise of Aerial Bombing, Edward Luttwak makes an odd claim:

Back in 2006, while the Israeli Air Force was bombing down its target list in Lebanon, assorted experts were almost unanimous in asserting that the campaign would fail. As a defiant Hezbollah continued to launch rockets into Israeli territory day after day, the consensus was seemingly proven right. And because television and photographers in Lebanon kept feeding pictures of dead babies or at least broken dolls to world media while withholding images of Hezbollah's destroyed headquarters and weapons, Israel was paying a very high political price for its bombing. In any case, it was running out of targets: There were only so many bridges and viaducts in Lebanon. Even its friends could only regretfully agree that Israel seemed to be failing.

But that is not at all how it turned out. Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah admitted immediately after the war that he would never have ordered the original deadly attack on an Israeli border patrol had he known that Israel would retaliate with such devastating effect. Before the 2006 war, Hezbollah launched rockets into northern Israel whenever it wanted to raise tensions. Since the Aug. 14, 2006, cease-fire, Hezbollah has rigorously refrained. Whenever rockets are nonetheless launched, Nasrallah's spokesmen rush to announce that Hezbollah had absolutely nothing to do with it. Evidently, Israel's supposedly futile bombing did achieve its aim.

To put it as politely as possible, Edward Luttwak has never been the sort of writer who has felt deeply constrained by empirical reality. He's smart and knows his stuff, but he doesn't let facts get in the way of the argument he wants to make. In this case, I'm sure that Luttwak is aware that, in addition to the long air offensive that almost everyone agrees was a failure, the IDF launched a large ground incursion into southern Lebanon that engaged prepared Hezbollah defenses and caused significant Hezbollah casualties, by some accounts up to a third of the organization's front line strength. This ground offensive was covered on several blogs, as well as every major world newspaper and television network. People have written long reports about the ground war, and even books. Even if we assume that Hezbollah's reluctance to launch rockets was caused by Israeli military action (and this is a tendentious assumption), I would hazard to suggest that it is at least possible that Hezbollah's reluctance to launch rocket offensives against Israel may have something to do with the ground offensive that sapped its strength, rather than with the air offensive that devastated infrastructure targets in parts of Lebanon where Hezbollah has no control.

And so, while I can perhaps understand Luttwak's decision to engage in creative history by assigning all causation for the (questionable in any case) moderation of Hezbollah to the air offensive, I'm rather more perplexed by the editorial decision to allow him to perform such artistry. I appreciate that he's an important guy who's written books and stuff, but he's using Foreign Policy to make an empirical claim (terror bombing is super) and basing that upon an evidentiary foundation that would be laughed out of a freshman political science course. At the very least, Luttwak could have been asked to mention the ground offensive, and perhaps even to explain why the air offensive and not the ground offensive caused the purported effect. Like I said, he's a smart guy; I'm sure he could have managed.

Read more...

Belly of the Beast

Today I'm at the Air Command and Staff College at Maxwell AFB in Montgomery, Alabama. I'm speaking on one panel and in two seminars. No idea what the topic might be. Full report tomorrow or the next day.

Read more...

I Really Wish Emptywheel Hadn't Written This Post...

Emptywheel notes that one element of Shelby's decision to put a blanket hold on all nominees was to defend the Airbus bid for the new USAF tanker aircraft. This represents part of the long competition between Boeing and Airbus for the tanker contract. Unfortunately, Emptywheel decides that it's necessary to engage in xenophobia in order to attack Shelby.

There has been a lot of discussion of how foreign companies will be able to influence elections and politics given the Citizens United deal. But foreign companies are already dominating our politics.

As we'll see, Marcy is arguing that Airbus is "dominating" US politics by providing Richard Shelby with incentive to put holds on all of Obama's nominees. The instrument of Airbus' domination is a promise to assemble key components of its USAF tanker contract in Alabama, which would supply jobs, investment, facilities, etc.

The key issue is that Shelby wants the Air Force to tweak an RFP for refueling tankers so that Airbus (partnered with Northrup Grumman) would win the bid again over Boeing. The contract had been awarded in 2008, but the GAO found that the Air Force had erred in calculating the award. After the Air Force wrote a new RFP in preparation to rebid the contract, Airbus calculated that it would not win the new bid, and started complaining. Now, Airbus is threatening to withdraw from the competition unless the specs in the RFP are revised.

Essentially, then, Shelby’s threat is primarily about gaming this bidding process to make sure Airbus–and not Boeing–wins the contract (there’s a smaller program he’s complaining about, too, but this is the truly huge potential bounty for his state).

If Marcy had followed this discussion since the beginning, she'd appreciate that "gaming bidding process" has been fundamentally about giving Boeing a heavy advantage. Airbus, of course, won the original contract handily, to much consternation and hand-wringing in the substantial portion of the US military-industrial complex that depends on not having to compete with foreign suppliers. There are legitimate questions about the bidding process, and legitimate debate about what needs the Boeing and Airbus bids provide, but it's fairly clear that the revision of the terms of the bid have "gamed the process" to the extent that Airbus has no chance whatsoever to win. Marcy is entering this movie halfway through; Boeing has already exerted its influence on the US democratic process to substantially change USAF requirements in favor of its own bid.

I understand why any Senator would fight for jobs in his or her state. And I understand that there was dirty corruption in this original contracting process.

This is a key point; understanding American politics, Airbus determined that promising to assemble key parts of the tanker in the United States would weigh heavily in favor of its bid. Boeing already plays this game, and plays it very well; it has a wide range of Senators and Representatives in its pocket through diversification of its production all over the United States. In this sense, it was somewhat surprising that the USAF believed it possible to give the bid to Airbus. There was no question that Boeing would mobilize its political support to overturn any deal, even if Airbus had submitted a clearly superior proposal.

But underlying the refueling contract is the question of whether the US military ought to spend what may amount to $100 billion over the life of the contract with a foreign company, Airbus. Particularly a company that the WTO found preliminarily to be illegally benefiting from subsidies from European governments.

I don't recall reading Marcy's robust defense of WTO intervention in domestic subsidy discussions, but it's at least worth noting here that one reason Airbus receives subsidies is to allow it to compete with Boeing in the civilian jetliner market. Unlike Airbus, Boeing has significant DoD contracts that give it sufficient financial security to weather turbulence in the international civilian aircraft market. Airbus doesn't have the kind of cozy relationship with a major defense buyer, and has to rely on subsidies. The story is a touch more complicated than that, of course, but it's nevertheless fair to say that Boeing's ability to sell to DoD is one reason why Airbus needs subsidies.

Richard Shelby is preparing to shut down the Senate to try to force the government to award a key military function to a foreign company.

And this is really the key line. If we're to take this seriously, Marcy is arguing that Airbus should not have been allowed to bid for the tanker contract. Allowing Airbus to to bid meant that there was at least the possibility that they would win, resulting in the "award of a key military function to a foreign company." Now, I suppose it's a defensible position to suggest that only American companies should be allowed to bid for American defense contracts. In this case, since there are precisely three companies worldwide capable of building long range military tankers (including one Russian), this would have the practical effect of awarding the contract to Boeing. The implications of giving a contract to a European company are, to me, a good deal less scary than the suggestion that Boeing should be insulated from defense competition when providing to the DoD. I would further argue that if you're going to award key military functions to any foreign company, it might as well be Airbus; the US and Europe have maintained a tight defense relationship for sixty years, and the US defense industry supplies a very substantial proportion of European defense needs.

And so here are my key problems:

1. Marcy is demagoguing the Shelby question, when she really doesn't need to. Shelby's behavior is despicable enough without making insinuations about the dread domination of foreign corporations.
2. By highlighting the "foreign" aspect, Marcy is playing with the worst kind of xenophobic prejudice. Progressives really, really shouldn't truck in the kind of anti-foreign stereotyping that conservatives love to employ. It's also incidental to the argument; would Marcy have been cool with Shelby's hold if it had been in defense of a Lockheed Martin or Boeing contract?
3. Marcy appears to be suggesting that foreign companies ought not be allowed to bid for major US military contracts. That's all fine and well, but it rather substitutes the domination of US defense corporations for foreign defense corporations. For my part, I'm pretty happy about the idea of letting Airbus into the competition, and of giving them a fighting chance to win.

...And I'm sorry that I have to include this, but when Marcy notes that the first bidding process (which Airbus won) was characterized by "dirty corruption," she links here, which is a letter from a Boeing whistleblower about fraud and corruption at Boeing, rather than at Airbus. In other words, she identifies Boeing as the corrupt party, then argues that Shelby is trying to "game the process" by making sure that Airbus has a fair shot to win a contract that Airbus has, in fact, already won.

Read more...

Ooh, Lasers...

I think there's a limit to the utility of this kind of argument, regarding a new laser-based air defense system:

This all sort of leaves me wondering what problem this technology is a solution to. For the past twenty years every conflict the U.S. military has been involved with has involved overwhelming American air superiority. Finding better ways to shoot down enemy aircraft hasn’t been high on the priority list. But by the same token, the very dominance of American air power means that this would be very useful for America’s adversaries. Nobody we’re realistically going to fight could possibly build up a squadron of fighters to go toe-to-toe with the Air Force, but plane-killing lasers could be very useful. Obviously Boeing isn’t working on this technology in hopes of selling it to the Taliban, but my sense is that we should be hoping that we see relatively little progress on this sort of thing in years to come.

There are a few ways to think about this. There's some space between "we need to buy a fleet of F-22s in order to counter future unforeseeable threats" and "advances in air defense technology are worth the investment." For one, there's a difference between construction of a specific platform and development of capabilities that may or may not be put into mass production. In ten years, I could see myself opposing a proposal to purchase a large number of air defense lasers; right now, I think it would be kind of nice to have the capability to think about the question in ten years. That the national security environment isn't terribly predictable shouldn't be an excuse to build every imaginable weapon, but it's nevertheless nice to have some flexibility.

Second, while Yglesias makes an interesting point regarding the idea that improvement in anti-aircraft technology represents a net loss for the United States, I don't think his (underspecified in any case) conclusion follows. For one, other countries understand the basic relationship between power projection and air defense technology as well as we do, and are already working on more capable systems. There's no "air defense arms spiral," because air defense system do not, after all, fight each other. US strike capabilities already give Russia, China, India and others a strong incentive to pursue advanced air defense technology, and I doubt very much that US air defense will matter very much. Moreover, there's little reason to believe that eschewing air defense technological development will slow foreign innovation, as they already have plenty of reason to pursue advanced capabilities. If anything, the spiral is generated by improvements in US strike capacity.

Third, while it's unlikely that the United States will, in the foreseeable future, have to defend a target from a swarm of fighter-bombers, it's not so unlikely that we'll have to defend against unmanned drones or cruise missiles. The development of cheap and effective drones is much more destabilizing, I think, than innovative development of air defense technology. Drones and cruise missiles give air strike capability to countries that can't hope to win air superiority, as the relatively low cost of the platforms means that high losses become acceptable.

This is to say, then, that developing advanced air defense technology does not a) commit us to the purchase of any particular weapons system, b) provide cause for an arms race, c) provide a solution to a problem that is highly unlikely to arise.

Read more...

SRBMs Shifting Straits Balance Towards PRC?

A few years ago, a student of mine worked out the implications of a large scale Chinese SRBM (short range ballistic missile) attack on Taiwan. He argued that the attack was, based on the historic resilience of regimes to coercion by air assault, unlikely by itself to break the will of the Taiwanese government to resist. It won't surprise readers of this blog to learn that I agreed with this conclusion. However, he didn't really go into the implications of a conventional ballistic missile attack launched against military targets on Taiwan, in particular Taiwan's air bases and fighter aircraft. At Foreign Policy, David Shlapak has an article based on the recent RAND study he co-authored on the likely course and outcome of a PRC-Taiwan conflict. Shlapak argues that a preparatory ballistic missile assault on Taiwan would stand a very high chance of devastating the Taiwanese air force, and of giving China air superiority in any conflict. GPS guidance has rendered SRBMs radically more accurate, improving their ability to strike air bases and other military infrastructure.

Although I haven't read the RAND study, the argument seems pretty compelling to me. I would suggest a few caveats:

1. It seems highly unlikely that a PRC-Taiwan war would result from a surprise Chinese attack. Rather, Taiwanese forces would probably be at high alert. This means that a larger percentage of the fighter force would be aloft at time of attack. However, if the airbases themselves are rendered unusable, this doesn't matter very much.
2. Shlapak suggests that US air bases would also be vulnerable to Chinese SRBM or MRBM attack. While this is technically possible, I suspect the Chinese would be deeply reluctant to escalate the conflict through attacks on US targets, including airbases in friendly countries. While we couldn't necessarily expect to have full freedom of action from Guam or elsewhere, I doubt that US forces would fall victim to a surprise attack.

Shlapak argues that dispersing assets, hardening shelters, and increasing missile defense capabilities are the only real options that the Taiwanese have. In this context, I concur with the last point; missile defense may be nearly useless in a strategic nuclear sense, but it's helpful against a large scale conventional ballistic missile attack. However, SRBMs are cheaper than interceptors; it seems likely that the Chinese will simply be able to overwhelm any Taiwanese system with sheer numbers.

I think that the takeaway is this; there was a long window in which Taiwan was probably capable of preventing a Chinese invasion, even assuming no US intervention. That period is closed, or closing; the balance between Taiwan and China, sans the development of Taiwanese nuclear weapons, is moving inexorably in China's direction. This does not mean that war is inevitable, as China has lots of fabulous reasons for not launching a war of conquest. I think that it does, however, mean that China has greater leverage over Taiwan on a whole host of issues of dispute between the two states. It also means that the United States faces a more difficult choice regarding its level of engagement if the PRC-Taiwan relationship goes hot.

Read more...