There is also a puzzling omission in the new document.
A leading point in Joint Vision 2010 in 1996, repeated
in the follow-on "Concept for Future Joint Operations" in
1997, was that "we should be increasingly able
to accomplish the effects of mass-the necessary concentration
of combat power at the decisive time and place-with
less need to physically mass forces than in the past."
That point has disappeared without a trace in Joint
Vision 2020. In its place are assorted nuggets about
the rapid massing of forces. (See box.)
The strong suspicion is that the change demonstrates
the influence on the Joint Staff of those with a vested
interest in the massing of forces. If so, it culminates
the sniping campaign of recent years against technology
and the "revolution in military affairs." To
some extent, it would also mark the return to the traditional
force-on-force models of attrition warfare.
A curious passage in the new joint vision says that "the
presence or anticipated presence of a decisive force
might well cause an enemy to surrender."
That sounds very much like the claim of some Army
officials and enthusiasts that it was the presence
of an unengaged Army ground force in Albania, not the
11-week air campaign, that caused the Serbs to surrender
to NATO in 1999.
For its part, the Air Force seems confident in its
own capabilities and expresses support for the revised
joint vision.
"We believe that Joint Vision 2020 provides the
Air Force the latitude to do what we need to and can
do to contribute to full spectrum dominance for the
nation," said Maj. Gen. John W. Brooks, special
assistant to the Chief of Staff for the development
and communication of Air Force vision, policy, and
plans.
2. Air Force 2020
The first of the military vision statements-although
it was not called that at the time-was a white paper, "Global
Reach-Global Power," published by the Air Force
in June 1990.
It predicted that "advanced technologies will
provide United States forces decisive capabilities
against potentially well-equipped foes at minimum cost
in casualties." It said that air operations could
support land campaigns or sea campaigns, but could
also project power directly in an air campaign.
Within a year, events of the Gulf War had confirmed
all of that, but by 1996, the Air Force felt the need
for a change and published a new vision called "Global
Engagement." The best remembered line of it said
that "we are now transitioning from an air force
into an air and space force on an evolutionary path
to a space and air force."
That was a hard proposition to live with. It was taken
to mean that airpower would gradually decline in favor
of space power. It was also interpreted to mean, in
the words of Sen. Bob Smith (R-N.H.), that tomorrow's
space force would be paid for by "shedding big
chunks of today's Air Force."
The reality was that airpower was becoming more important
to military operations, not less so, and that the requirement
for both airpower and space power was increasing. To
the discontent of some space advocates like Senator
Smith, the Air Force began talking about integration
of air and space into an operational aerospace regime.
"Air Force Vision 2020: Global Vigilance, Reach,
and Power," published June 19, confirms the service's
commitment to an integrated aerospace domain that "stretches
from the Earth's surface to the outer reaches of space
in a seamless operational medium."
Global reach and power are long-standing elements
of the Air Force credo, but "global vigilance" is
new this time. "By vigilance, we think in terms
of the Air Force being on watch across our domain," Brooks
said. "The aspect of it that people may think
of first is surveillance. That's an important part
of it, but it's not the only part. It's also F-15s
on combat air patrol in Northern Watch. It's security
forces on watch at Tuzla. It's missileers."
Secretary of the Air Force F. Whitten Peters and Gen.
Michael E. Ryan, the Chief of Staff, were closely involved
with development of the new vision, and all of the
Air Force's four-star generals took part several times
in the scrub down.
The emphasis is on effects "regardless of where
platforms reside, fly, or orbit."
"It doesn't say command goes to people who are
pilots," Peters explained. "It doesn't say
command goes to people who are just space people. It
says it goes to the brightest people in the Air Force
we can find who understand all these types of technologies
and how to use them effectively as a basis for systems."
Brooks said the Air Force was building on rather than
completely throwing out the ideas in the 1996 vision
statement. "Global Engagement made a useful point
in causing us to think in that sense," he said.
The issue is not "whether the capabilities are
largely air or largely space" but how best to
put them together. However, "will they be more
space capabilities in the future than they are now?
I believe they will be."
The Air Force contributes about 90 percent of the
resources for the military space program-although it
never received any budget increase for doing so-but
it does not have clear title to the space mission.
Later this year, a Congressionally mandated panel
will make recommendations on the best way to organize
the military space effort.
Expeditionary Force
The Air Force has grouped its combat forces into 10
Aerospace Expeditionary Forces (AEFs), two of which
will be deployed or on call at any given time.
The expeditionary concept was designed for two purposes:
to provide tailored forces to theater commanders and
to put some stability and predictability back into
the lives of Air Force people who go on the deployments.
The concept did not officially go into effect until
October 1999, but the Kosovo air campaign earlier that
year provided a test of it. In addition to forces operating
from the United States-notably, the B-2 bombers--and
from existing bases overseas, the Air Force established
21 expeditionary bases where there had been no bases
before.
The vision statement says that an AEF task force,
packaged for a smaller-scale contingency, "can
provide intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance,
and command and control of aerospace forces over an
area roughly half the size of Texas." It can also
provide air superiority and strike about 200 targets
a day.
As capabilities improve, the Air Force will be able
to deploy an AEF in 48 hours, "fast enough to
curb many crises before they escalate," and up
to five AEFs in 15 days. The Air Force also proposes
to expand the battlespace an AEF can control and increase
the number of targets it can strike per day.
The Air Force seeks to reduce its "forward support
footprint" by having the deployed forces use links
to space systems to "reach back" to bases
in the United States for combat support.
Inclusiveness is a recurring theme in the vision statement.
Just as "vigilance" means all of the aerospace
forces on watch and on guard, not just those engaged
in intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance,
the AEFs are part, but not all, of the expeditionary
concept.
"Airmen from all across the Air Force contribute
to our ability to deploy and sustain powerful aerospace
capabilities," Ryan said. "Air expeditionary
forces are an important part of that, but so are the
capabilities-ranging from the mobility to get them
where they need to go to the acquisition, logistics,
health care, education, and training-they depend on."
Ryan uses the term "AEF prime" to refer
to operational capabilities, such as those of Space
Command, that are essential to a deployment but which
are not an organic part of the AEF.
The new vision statement says that aerospace power
can "strike directly from the United States or
from regional bases." With advanced capabilities,
it says, "we'll provide the ability to find, fix,
assess, track, target, and engage anything of military
significance anywhere. We'll transition from the ability
to do that in hours to the ability to do it in minutes."
The Air Force will continue "providing the mobility
to rapidly position and reposition forces in any environment,
anywhere in the world."
3. Soldiers On Point for the Nation
When the Army adopted its previous vision statement
in 1996, it saw no need to be humble. The contribution
of land forces, it said, was "to make permanent
the otherwise transitory advantages achieved by air
and naval forces."
In aid of living up to that, the Army launched a project
to develop a powerful "Army After Next" by
2025, getting there by means of a "knowledge-based" intermediary
step in 2010 called "Force XXI."
The Army has now pulled the plug on all of that and
is looking at a radically different future.
For many years, both the Army and many leaders assumed
that the land battle would be the central focus of
any conflict. The Gulf War of 1991 called that into
question. Army boosters claimed that the 100-hour ground
campaign was the decisive factor, but the general consensus
was that the 38-day air campaign, which took most of
the starch out of the Iraqis, was the pivotal element.
Harsher questions arose from Operation Allied Force
in the Balkans in 1999. Army forces were not engaged,
although it deployed a brigade-sized unit with 24 Apache
helicopters to Albania. Army advocates continue to
argue that the reason the Serbs gave up was not the
air campaign but rather the intimidating presence of
the helicopter task force.
By most estimates, it would have taken several months
or longer to prepare and execute a ground invasion.
In August 1999, the Army took two warning shots from
defense officials. Deputy Secretary of Defense John
Hamre said that "if the Army only holds onto nostalgic
versions of its grand past, it is going to atrophy
and die." Jacques Gansler, undersecretary of defense
for acquisition and technology, told an Army audience
that crises of the future will call for a response
within hours, not days, and that "massed forces
will be replaced by massed firepower, precisely placed
on targets."
The Army was in danger of becoming marginal. Gen.
Eric Shinseki, who became Chief of Staff in June 1999,
acknowledged that the Army's heavy divisions were too
cumbersome for deployment and its light divisions lacked
lethality and staying power.
In a landmark speech to the Association of the US
Army Oct. 12, 1999, Shinseki declared a new vision.
The Army would rebuild around lighter divisions and
strike brigades. A combat brigade would be able to
deploy anywhere in the world in 96 hours. A division
could be on the ground in 120 hours, and five divisions
in 30 days.
The heavy tank would give way to a 20-ton combat vehicle
that runs on wheels rather than tracks and which can
be transported by a C-130.
The new Army vision statement, "Soldiers On Point
for the Nation," calls the force Shinseki described
the "objective force." It says the Army will
keep portions of the "legacy force" for the
next 15 years and bridge the gap between the two with
capabilities developed in an "interim force."
Money and Other Complications
The Army has canceled some programs to help pay for
this but is still about $35 billion short. Secretary
of the Army Louis Caldera, meeting with the Defense
Writers Group in March, said that decision-makers should
look at the cost "to transform the Army once in
a generation" compared to what the other services
were planning to spend on aircraft programs. "You've
got to ask the question, where is the smart investment
for the nation?"
"No wonder the Army wants more money," said
Jeffery Barnett, writing in Armed Forces Journal International. "It
wants both transformation and the status quo. It wants
to modernize its heavy divisions until the objective
force is fielded throughout the Army. This will require
funding two forces at once."
Finances aside, Shinseki and Caldera have encountered
flak from inside the Army. The heavy armor community
is not enthusiastic about replacing tanks with light
combat vehicles that run on wheels. The helicopter
forces feel left out of the new vision.
Other questions await answers. The practicality of
putting five ground divisions into a combat theater
in 30 days is debatable unless the Air Force and the
Navy have established air supremacy and have weakened
the enemy considerably. An enemy of a size to call
for five Army divisions would take a lot of weakening.
That leads to the problem of airlift. To get to the
fight early, the Army wants priority on a large share
of the Air Force's airlift capacity. An Army staff
paper, circulating in the Pentagon several months ago,
complained about the "large lift requirement for
Air Force wings" early in a conflict.
Indeed, the Air Force would need airlift to move its
own units, especially the five AEFs in 15 days promised
by the new vision statement. The Air Force says it
takes about 16 airlift sorties to support deployment
of a fighter squadron with 24 aircraft to an established
base like Aviano in Italy. Deployment to a bare base
would take additional airlift.
Moving the Army's 24 Apache helicopters, tanks, and
troops of Task Force Hawk from Ramstein AB, Germany,
to Tirana, Albania, in 1999 took 30 days and 542 C-17
airlift missions.
On a happier note, the Army and the Marine Corps seem
to have buried the hatchet. The Army used to resent
the Marine Corps as being "a second land army," and
the Marines worried that the Army wanted to take away
their mission.
After a meeting last year with Gen. James Jones, Commandant
of the Marine Corps, Shinseki announced that "we
have both agreed that neither of us have been on a
battlefield so crowded that you couldn't have more
capability there." The Army and the Marine Corps
have since formed a working group to enhance cooperation
between the two land forces.
4. The Future ... From the Sea
It has been a long time since the last big battle
at sea, and in recent years, the Navy has turned its
attention toward the shore.
The first big step was in 1992, when the Navy shelved
its ambitious "Maritime Strategy" and replaced
it with a concept called "... From the Sea," which
concentrated on operations along the littorals and
coastlines of continents.
That gave way, in turn, to a revised vision statement
entitled "Forward ... From the Sea" in 1994.
The main difference was that the new vision put more
emphasis on forward presence. The concept was updated
in 1997.
A new vision statement, "The Future ... From
the Sea," has been circulating in draft this year
to Navy reviewers. It says it is building on the "landward
focus" of previous visions and that "the
Navy and Marine Corps are on course with a heading
landward."
Defense News reported in March that a new strategic
vision, "Power and Influence ... From the Sea," was
the brainchild of Secretary of the Navy Richard Danzig
and that in it, the sea services would play "a
more central role in operations ashore."
The paper that Air Force Magazine downloaded from
a Navy Web site appears to be a subsequent version
of that.
It says that "by remaining forward, naval expeditionary
forces guarantee that the landward reach of US influence
is present to favorably shape regions of vital interest."
