Sept. 30, 2014

Is Military Science “Scientific”?

The term military science generally describes the body of theories, concepts, and methods for employing armed forces. However, as an academic discipline it is ill defined, drawing from a patchwork of curricula including history, foreign affairs, security studies, leadership, operations management, and systems engineering, as well as other elements of the physical and social sciences. Notably, the Department of Defense dictionary does not even provide a definition. This vague categorization is somewhat reflective of the term’s diminished status from its 19th-century usage when Military Science was frequently capitalized and placed alongside Physics, Philosophy, and other well-established academic disciplines.

Sept. 30, 2014

The Best Man for the Job? Combatant Commanders and the Politics of Jointness

The U.S. military today fights jointly. A joint commander—reporting to the Secretary of Defense—commands all Service components during military operations. And as a key sign of this jointness, combatant commanders no longer come solely from a single Service as they once did. In fact, the combatant commanders and their control of operations are often considered the greatest expression of jointness.

Sept. 30, 2014

A Potent Vector: Assessing Chinese Cruise Missile Developments

The numerous, increasingly advanced cruise missiles being developed and deployed by the People’s Republic of China (PRC) have largely flown under the public’s radar. This article surveys PRC cruise missile programs and assesses their implications for broader People’s Liberation Army (PLA) capabilities, especially in a Taiwan scenario.

Sept. 30, 2014

Determining Hostile Intent in Cyberspace

According to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, hostile intent is defined as the threat of imminent use of force against the United States, U.S. forces, or other designated persons or property. It is the indication, the belief, a commander has that an adversary is about to attack. That belief provides the groundwork for “anticipatory self-defense,” an American legal concept that allows a commander to attack before being attacked.

Sept. 30, 2014

Understanding the Enemy: The Enduring Value of Technical and Forensic Exploitation

The escalation of improvised explosive device (IED) incidents and related casualties during Operations Iraqi Freedom and Enduring Freedom led to a new intelligence field related to technical intelligence (TECHINT) called weapons technical intelligence (WTI), which combined technical and forensic IED exploitation techniques to link persons, places, things, and events. WTI operationalizes technical and forensic activities by fusing the technical, forensic, and biometric disciplines to produce actionable intelligence for countering threat networks. It is an especially powerful tool against terrorist organizations that rely on IEDs as a primary weapon in their arsenals. Given the enduring nature of the IED problem, careful consideration is required to ensure that we have the necessary counter-IED capability and capacity to meet future threats across the range of military operations. Across this range and at each level of war from tactical to strategic, TECHINT and WTI make critical contributions to joint warfare and military decisionmaking.

Sept. 30, 2014

Challenges in Coalition Unconventional Warfare: The Allied Campaign in Yugoslavia, 1941–1945

During World War II, operatives and military advisors of the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) and the American Office of Strategic Services (OSS), which was a precursor to both the current Central Intelligence Agency and U.S. Special Forces, conducted a challenging unconventional warfare (UW) campaign against the Axis forces with and through guerrilla resistance elements in Yugoslavia. The resistance movement effectively fixed in place 35 German and Italian divisions, consisting of roughly 660,000 soldiers in the western Balkan region during 1941–1945.1 This campaign rendered them strategically irrelevant by preventing their use in other theaters. The combined United Kingdom (UK)–United States (U.S.) contingent achieved this effect with never more than 100 Allied personnel on the ground in the denied area. The number of Axis personnel killed in the Balkans is estimated at 450,000.2 This extremely favorable force ratio and its associated effects commend UW as a low-cost, high-reward method of warfare.

Sept. 30, 2014

Book Review: You Cannot Surge Trust

You Cannot Surge Trust is a valuable review of the unique relationships that bind the U.S. Navy and its British, Canadian, and Australian counterparts. Edited by Sandra Doyle of the Naval History and Heritage Command, the book is a collection of essays by naval historians from the United States, Australia, Canada, and United Kingdom (UK) that provide insights drawn from common experiences derived from combined peace support operations between 1991 and 2003. These insights offer useful pointers for the U.S. Navy leadership as it seeks to establish close cooperative arrangements with other navies around the world.

Sept. 30, 2014

Book Review: Engineers of Victory

Best-selling author and historian Paul Kennedy, the Dilworth Professor of History and Director of International Security Studies at Yale University, has written a stimulating book about the middle—the middle years of World War II, the middle or operational level of war, and the middlemen, problem-solvers, and midlevel commanders that made victory possible. In doing so, he focuses attention on a largely unexplored portion of the war’s history and provides professional historians and general readers a deeper understanding of how and why the Allies won World War II.

Sept. 30, 2014

Book Review: Next-Generation Homeland Security

The threats to U.S. national security have evolved, but the means to respond to them lag far behind. After 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, and countless other natural and unnatural disasters, now is the time to rethink U.S. security strategy. John Fass Morton’s Next-Generation Homeland Security could not be timelier in proposing an overhaul of the Cold War–era system. Policy change, he argues, will not be enough; we must change the structure of national security governance because the Cold War structures reflect only the strategic conditions that were relevant at that time. The United States can no longer rely on the forces that made it powerful in the second half of the 20th century, as the international system has changed, so too must our national security system. As globalization has reshaped the meaning of sovereignty, nations are no longer the only important actors. In today’s strategic environment, states play a co-equal role in policy development and strategy formation, and so they must also play a co-equal role in national security governance.

Sept. 30, 2014

Implementing Joint Operational Access: From Concept to Joint Force Development

Strategic guidance issued to the U.S. military over the past 5 years explicitly cites the emerging challenge to what has been a significant advantage for American and partner forces for decades: the unfettered ability to project military force into an operational area with sufficient freedom of action to accomplish a designated mission. In some instances this ability includes access to sovereign territory, but in all cases it requires access to the global commons. Potential enemies are developing antiaccess/area-denial (A2/AD) capabilities that could threaten access and jeopardize missions. Concept development, as the bridging mechanism from strategic guidance to operational capabilities, has played a key role in the past few years to guide joint and Service force development activities in this area. The Joint Operational Access Concept (JOAC) and the recently signed Joint Concept for Entry Operations are examples of where strategic guidance to overcome A2/AD challenges is translated into operational concepts intended to guide how the U.S. military is organized, trained, equipped, and employed.