CSBA "Third Offset" paper

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isayyo2 said:
Bhurki said:
U.S. Air Force Talks New F-16 Orders In Latest Acquisition Shake-Up. (!!)
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So much for getting out of the death-spiral?
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More like the china scare...

Most likely, the usable assets of ANG units will be made active (incoming F35, F15Ex) while the ANG are filled with F16.

Moreover, auxillary tasks like training etc will recieve systems that can help offload current aircraft to attrition reserves.

They are really gearing up for a head on impact in terms of upcoming conflicts and expecting severe damages. Quite a shift from the slow burn airframe life sucking missions in the middle east.
 
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Bhurki said:
isayyo2 said:
Bhurki said:
U.S. Air Force Talks New F-16 Orders In Latest Acquisition Shake-Up. (!!)
Click to expand...
So much for getting out of the death-spiral?
Click to expand...
More like the china scare...

Most likely, the usable assets of ANG units will be made active (incoming F35, F15Ex) while the ANG are filled with F16.

Moreover, auxillary tasks like training etc will recieve systems that can help offload current aircraft to attrition reserves.

They are really gearing up for a head on impact in terms of upcoming conflicts and expecting severe damages. Quite a shift from the slow burn airframe life sucking missions in the middle east.
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Agreed. It's only a matter of time that the F-15EX's are swooped up to replaced the F-15E's for the active duty fliers. Some new Block 70/72s would be a nice replacement for any remaining Block 25/30/32's in service; I'm sure it'd be a great jobs program for South Carolina as well...
 
Covid world will massively shrink office space footprints. This is just one company.


Lockheed plans to cut 'at least a couple million square feet' of its real estate​

Lockheed Martin is preparing a plan on the future of work, which it says will result in a footprint reduction of at least 2 million square feet in the coming years
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I used to joke that I’ll see in my lifetime the only buildings left will be fast food restaurants, data centres and Amazon warehouses
 
Given the new administrations obsession with biofuels, EVs, ground based solar, and especially wind power, I fear not. :(

Huge sums are about to be squandered at a time when the United States can ill afford such waste.
 
Grey Havoc said:
Given the new administrations obsession with biofuels, EVs, ground based solar, and especially wind power, I fear not. :(

Huge sums are about to be squandered at a time when the United States can ill afford such waste.
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I'm mildly positive the advanced reactor programs in the DOE will continue with the current administration. Still, any commercial roll out is early 2030s at best. Perhaps we can start a thread on the Bar about nuclear energy, etc?
 
https://warontherocks.com/2021/02/k...2.05.21&utm_term=Editorial - Early Bird Brief

Hubin imagines small units moving around the battlespace passing from the control of different commanders, each responsible for specific zones and responsible for coordinating activities and also providing resupply, in conformity with the objective determined by the “conception echelon.” Units in their space will associate with each other temporarily and flexibly. Implied here is the idea of abandoning traditional correlations between a commander’s rank and the degree of authority and responsibility. “One must break the existing relationship,” he writes, “between the importance of the level of responsibility and the volume of the subordinates.” Hubin argues that such a radical transformation is necessary to derive from the new technologies their full benefit. Training and Doctrine Command, in comparison, comes close to this idea by arguing for granting to “the lowest appropriate echelon” authority to access support from across the range of “domains,” such as intelligence from national surveillance assets, and certainly fires from joint capabilities to which normally only higher echelons might have ready access. As we have seen, however, Training and Doctrine Command appears to be thinking brigades, while Hubin is thinking companies and below. More precisely, Hubin is arguing for no longer even thinking in terms of echelons.

Units also have striven to maintain lines of communication and support. Meanwhile, they would do everything possible to break the cohesion of opposing forces, which Hubin notes is a far better objective than seeking to destroy them materially. On the modern battlefield, proximity is dangerous, and, in fact, the situation in many ways is reversed: The better a force can operate physically scattered and mixed up with the adversary, the more likely it is to succeed. To maintain coherence, commanders at all echelons will have to have a shared understanding of the situation and trust that everyone else is, in effect, on the same page. They will have to have confidence in their shared methods and the accuracy of their technique.

Combat forces’ job now is to find the enemy and, ideally, concentrate the enemy’s forces so they can be destroyed by indirect fires, which, from now on, will do the killing.

as stated even the Army will be a DMPI +mobile DMPI (not an accepted term) servicing service.

According to France’s leading scholar of military strategy, Hervé Coutau-Bégarie, American military leaders, are guilty of a “cult of decisive force,” which results in “a reticence, if not an incapacity, to understand the subservience of operations to political ends.” Indeed, Training and Doctrine Command 525-3-1 identifies as a major challenge the threat posed by Russian political and information warfare and, for example, Russia’s ambition to use information warfare to undermine political solidarity among NATO allies, yet it suggests the Army can deal with the problem somehow through fires and political action of its own undertaken by special operations forces, as if Green Berets or Army psychological operations officers can somehow shape European public opinion the way they might operate in Anbar Province, Iraq. There is no suggestion that perhaps the Army needs to subordinate itself to a civilian-determined and managed strategy in which its own contribution in the form of ground forces and associated fires are but one means among many to a broad political end. There’s also strikingly little attention in multi-domain operations literature to the limits on warfare with great powers that nuclear weapons imply. For Beaufre, that was the whole point: One cannot fight the Soviets directly because of the risk of nuclear war, so all strategy has to be “indirect” or “total” in the sense of relegating military action to a limited role.

The real question, Hubin asks, is whether or not armies will do what he believes is necessary, which is to abandon the homothetic force structures inherited from centuries of practice. To this one should add the question of whether the American defense establishment can learn, finally, to think more asymmetrically with respect to the proper and limited role of force relative to non-military means of imposing one’s will on one’s adversaries.
 
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jsport said:
https://warontherocks.com/2021/02/k...2.05.21&utm_term=Editorial - Early Bird Brief

Hubin imagines small units moving around the battlespace passing from the control of different commanders....
Click to expand...
Unimpressed, this level of thinking appears narrow, on the order of "don't need fronts now with turrets on tanks, since they can shoot backwards" level of depth.

The novel situation with regard to land warfare (fire on the move, long range precision strike...) is very old in naval and aerial domains. Then there is horse archers if you push it.

The concept for front and rear is defined by information more than tactics: whether you have information or not.

Precision long range fires do not facilitate dispersion, massed long range fire does. When the attack is limited by sensors, dispersion is useful (but not universally so, extremely concentrated forces can avoid recon for outsized effects if coverage rather than signature is limiting factor). If attack is limited is limited by active defensive measures (interception, soft kill), "concentration" of mutual support is the solution.

The idea that forward forces exists to find the enemy is all about exploiting enemies on old paradigms and not about facing opponents with doctrine and equipment matching modern technology. An non-stupid enemy can read RMA (now 40 years old!) and understand that long range precision strikes is a thing and there is no reason to leave forces around to be pounded without reason. For forces in contact, a few characteristics would be needed:
1. Speed to avoid long range fire
2. Stealth and sensing power to detect and respond (either evasion or destruction) opponent sensors before detection
3. Low cost to sustain attrition via long range fire
4. Required in achieving nonlinear (decisive) effects outside of attrition
Against a enemy that follow those concepts, the front force would be fighting a counter ISR battle with similar opponents, the loser would lose information and risk effective targeting to the rear. One can also see how powerful air superiority is in this regime and air-ground cooperation is decisive.

The notion that long range precision strike means end to concentration is funny, when one could cram 1 million loitering munitions and 1000 loyal wingmans in a singularity in space and time. Just because concentration is difficult in one domain does not mean it is impossible in other, interrelated ones: machineguns already made "mass impossible" but offensives still happened, even without tanks! Artillery can be massed to generate local superiority.

The notion of complete battlefield information is also meh. Now imagine two sides with total information: the outcome is overdetermined and there is no battle between semi-rational actors. War happens because of incomplete information. In any case, it is short range weapons relative to sensors that result in good information: long range fires merely closes the equation and the ability to kill sensors at ranges returns uncertainty to war. The obsession with old "maneuver" platforms with miserable signature to, weapon and sensor range ratio is what makes this ideas a thing: they won't be the arm fighting the counter-ISR battle.

Can't comment much on command relations, not having taken a leadership role, but if it is the same quality of thinking I'd probably discount it.
 
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shin_getter said:
jsport said:
https://warontherocks.com/2021/02/k...2.05.21&utm_term=Editorial - Early Bird Brief

Hubin imagines small units moving around the battlespace passing from the control of different commanders....
Click to expand...
Unimpressed, this level of thinking appears narrow, on the order of "don't need fronts now with turrets on tanks, since they can shoot backwards" level of depth.
Click to expand...

Dispersed units of ever diminishing size but growing cmbt power is simply the future.
shin_getter said:
The novel situation with regard to land warfare (fire on the move, long range precision strike...) is very old in naval and aerial domains. Then there is horse archers if you push it.
Click to expand...
As battlefield operating systems (BOS) (an old Army term) will evolve systems w/Lrg Rg indirect fire and close/short direct fire capability in the same vehicle.
shin_getter said:
The concept for front and rear is defined by information more than tactics: whether you have information or not.

Precision long range fires do not facilitate dispersion, massed long range fire does. When the attack is limited by sensors, dispersion is useful (but not universally so, extremely concentrated forces can avoid recon for outsized effects if coverage rather than signature is limiting factor). If attack is limited is limited by active defensive measures (interception, soft kill), "concentration" of mutual support is the solution.
Click to expand...
Massed precision effects from dispersed vehicles in both indirect and direct fire is the only mass mutual support to overcome active defensive measures.
shin_getter said:
The idea that forward forces exists to find the enemy is all about exploiting enemies on old paradigms and not about facing opponents with doctrine and equipment matching modern technology. An non-stupid enemy can read RMA (now 40 years old!) and understand that long range precision strikes is a thing and there is no reason to leave forces around to be pounded without reason. For forces in contact, a few characteristics would be needed:
1. Speed to avoid long range fire
2. Stealth and sensing power to detect and respond (either evasion or destruction) opponent sensors before detection
3. Low cost to sustain attrition via long range fire
4. Required in achieving nonlinear (decisive) effects outside of attrition
Against a enemy that follow those concepts, the front force would be fighting a counter ISR battle with similar opponents, the loser would lose information and risk effective targeting to the rear. One can also see how powerful air superiority is in this regime and air-ground cooperation is decisive.
Click to expand...
The old Soviet "Recon-Strike Complex" implied a ISR/counter ISR confrontation. "Movement to contact", "recon by fire" but now w/ better, especially unmanned tech which will eventually most ISR platforms will need to be shooters. The Soviets were correct but yes information does amplify and accelerate as no time before.
shin_getter said:
The notion that long range precision strike means end to concentration is funny, when one could cram 1 million loitering munitions and 1000 loyal wingmans in a singularity in space and time. Just because concentration is difficult in one domain does not mean it is impossible in other, interrelated ones: machineguns already made "mass impossible" but offensives still happened, even without tanks! Artillery can be massed to generate local superiority.

The notion of complete battlefield information is also meh. Now imagine two sides with total information: the outcome is overdetermined and there is no battle between semi-rational actors.
Click to expand...
Near total information on both sides is subject for much analysis and discussion. Asymetric advantage , yes, is necessary as there is no battle between semi-rational actors.
shin_getter said:
War happens because of incomplete information. In any case, it is short range weapons relative to sensors that result in good information: long range fires merely closes the equation and the ability to kill sensors at ranges returns uncertainty to war.
Click to expand...
One would have to prove the above. Information is generally never complete enough but getting thus the above analysis being necessary.
shin_getter said:
The obsession with old "maneuver" platforms with miserable signature to, weapon and sensor range ratio is what makes this ideas a thing: they won't be the arm fighting the counter-ISR battle.
Click to expand...
Vehicle signatures will need be to reduced even as their in/direct fire Combat Power and range increases and thus each vehicle ISR range and fidelity will need to increase. Every engagement will be a dispersed ISR/counter ISR/cyber skirmish first.
shin_getter said:
Can't comment much on command relations, not having taken a leadership role, but if it is the same quality of thinking I'd probably discount it.
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Commentary on the command relations is, of course, paramount in the chaos of 360 degree highly dispersed battlefield. . Commanders intent, clustering intent etc. will become ever more difficult to mange as a general would know. Eventually, the "strategic corporal" sure but on the "same page" all the way up to General-officer level, while flipping through the pages.... very difficult but absolutely imperative. Servicing the most DMPIs vs servicing the right DMPIs to get at the COG.. Always conflicting..
 
https://warontherocks.com/2021/01/i...1.27.21&utm_term=Editorial - Early Bird Brief
Understanding the Information Age

The speed and ubiquity of information presents an independent challenge to an organization attempting to “unfreeze, change and then freeze.” Author Douglas Rushkoff in his book Present Shock argues that the information age is destroying our ability to think about the future. He asserts that the information environment creates a fixation on the present. The younger generation even has an acronym for it: “FOMO” or fear of missing out. Even the president of the United States is pressured to make decisions within a 24-hour news cycle or less. The obsession with “now” makes leaders believe that they must sustain their credibility based on performance within the shortened news or review cycle. It will be exceedingly difficult to remain steadfast on long-term investments if the Army cannot resist the stress, pressure, and even public criticism that comes with decisions on short-term adjustments or savings.

Additionally, one of the casualties of a focus on the “now” is continuity of effort and messaging over time. For example, while the Army messaging from 1975 to 1992 about AirLand Battle was remarkable in its steadfastness, the same cannot be said for the Army modernization messaging of the last 20 years, which has been marked by several different major changes. Changes to the message create confusion, communicate indecision, and cause distrust, which in turn causes people to hesitate to invest in change and thus remain frozen......


For the Army, a scenario in which the U.S. has lost dominance of the global commons is a situation it has not faced for 50 years. Counterintuitively, perhaps, a loss of dominance in the global commons increases the importance of landpower. The Army should develop and communicate that role, because many believe that the future of national security lies almost exclusively with air and naval power.

At the same time, can Army leaders today visualize a brigade devastated, lying in smoking ruins? Those that cannot are not thinking thoroughly enough about the adversaries U.S. forces will likely face in future conflict, and the increasingly evident capacity of our peers.
 
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