Free Republic

Air-Sea BattleOur defense intellectuals, seeking a new Big Idea, need to seek farther. Unbeknownst to most Americans, the U.S. military is in the midst of another of its many revolutions in thinking. As we depart Iraq and begin positioning ourselves to exit Afghanistan, the military appears in a rush to put the whole idea of Counterinsurgency Warfare behind it. All over D.C. one can hear the sounds of the nation’s deepest military thinkers closing the door on one era as they scramble about in search of the next big thing. Counterinsurgency had a good run — almost ten years. Few...

It looks like this is the week China’s military rapidly advancing military tech keeps getting the limelight . First, we saw pics of the Asian giant’s new stealth fighter. Now, it looks like China is one step closer to fielding ballistic missiles aimed at holding U.S. forces throughout the Pacific at bay. Adm. Robert Willard, the top U.S. officer in the Pacific said this week that China’s new DF-21D anti-ship balistic missiles, with their 900-mile range, have reached an early operational status. Apparently, the missiles, widely fretted over in Washington as one of the most serious threats to the United...

Earlier this week, on a flight back from Utah where I was visiting my ageing parents, I finished reading CSBA president Andrew Krepinevich’s new paper titled “Why AirSea Battle?” (.pdf) The evolving AirSea Battle concept is a spin on the Army’s 1980s AirLand Battle concept that aimed to rain punishing ground and air strikes on Soviet shock armies before they could steamroll NATO defenses. Today, AirSea Battle is targeting China’s rapidly growing arsenal of anti-access and area-denial (A2/AD) weapons, such as aircraft carrier killing ballistic missiles, sea-skimming missiles, stealthy submarines, bristling air-defense networks, anti-satellite and cyber weaponry. Krepinevich writes that...

In the early 1980s, the Army, with Air Force cooperation, came up with a warfighting concept known as AirLand Battle designed to rain punishing ground and air strikes on Soviet shock armies before they could steamroll NATO defenses. Today, the military is formulating a new concept called AirSea Battle designed to counter China’s rapidly growing arsenal of anti-access and area-denial (A2/AD) weapons, such as aircraft carrier killing ballistic missiles, sea-skimming missiles, stealthy submarines, bristling air-defense networks, anti-satellite and cyber weaponry. The 2010 QDR directed the Air Force and Navy to jointly develop the concept to “guide the development of future...

During the Cold War, the Pentagon built the greatest naval and air forces the world had ever seen, endowing the United States with the superpower ability to land huge military forces anywhere in the world, at any time, whether invited in or not. So it was that Washington, using its armada of aircraft carriers, cruise missile-launching submarines, fast cargo ships, long-range bombers, airlifters, and air refueling fighters, could eject the Iraqis from Kuwait (1991), bomb Serbia (1999), kick over the Taliban regime in Afghanistan (2001), and knock off Saddam and his cronies (2003). Everybody else had to meekly follow along...