How China Is Revolutionizing Warfare

Beijing's 'Bitskrieg' -- John Arquilla, National Security/Foreign Policy

How China is revolutionizing warfare.

As the Pentagon's annual report to Congress, released last week, makes abundantly clear, China is on something of a long march in cyberspace. While most attention is being drawn to the report's assertions about Chinese snooping into sensitive classified areas and theft of intellectual property from leading American firms -- and others around the world -- there is some intriguing analysis of Beijing's broader aims as well. Indeed, the Pentagon sees a clear progression in Chinese strategic thought that, viewed as a whole, begins to elaborate what might be seen as an emerging military doctrine enabled by advanced information technologies. Just as the radio made skillful coordination of tanks and planes possible, introducing World War II-era blitzkrieg, so today the computer may be opening new vistas for cruise missiles, precision-guided munitions, and other smart weapons.

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My Comment: For those who are interested in knowing how future cyber warfare will be conducted .... this is my must read post for today.

Robo-Weapons Are Changing The Rules Of War -- A Commentary

Photo: Danger Room/USAF

Dazzling New Weapons Require New Rules For War -- David Ignatius, Washington Post

A new arsenal of drones and satellite-guided weapons is changing the nature of warfare. America and its NATO allies possess these high-tech weapons, but smaller countries want them, too. Here's an inside glimpse of how the process of technology transfer works:

A year ago, Saudi Arabia was fighting a nasty border war against the Houthi rebels across its frontier with Yemen. The Saudis began bombing Houthi targets inside Yemen on Nov. 5, 2009, but the airstrikes were inaccurate, and there were reports of civilian casualties.

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My Comment: There are still limits in using these weapons .... I know because they have been used in the hunt for Osama bin laden and they have not been successful.

Still .... on the battlefield these weapon platforms have proven to be incredibly effective, as the French-Saudi Arabia military alliance has shown on the Yemen-Saudi Arabia border. And while the U.S. may argue for some controls on these technologies, Pandora's Box is now open and countries with military technologies that are equal to the U.S. are more than eager to either sell them to third parties and/or to use them themselves.

An End To Armor Divisions?

M1 Abrams: Let’s Roll
Photo from Defense Industry Daily

COIN And Hybrid War: The Demise Of Armor? -- Judah Grunstein, World Politics Review

A couple of inter-related items on the ongoing shifts in military doctrine and theories of war managed to jolt me out of a self-imposed blogging hiatus (needed to catch up on organizing upcoming feature issues).

The first thing that caught my eye was this post over at Information Dissemination on the U.S. Marine Corps' experiment in company-size autonomous units. I'd noticed this back in December and wondered whether it might not prove an even more lasting impact of our current wars on the U.S. military than the COIN doctrine being applied to fight them. The network of autonomous small units suggested by the Marine experiment follows logically from the emphasis that COIN places on low-intensity combat after the initial battle. But the Marine Corps experiment is being applied to "over the horizon" landing teams, which shows how the concept is not necessarily tethered to the conditions that gave rise to it. As some of the comments to the ID post make clear, the shift is far from universally acclaimed.

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The Winds of War, The Sands of Time, v2.0 -- A Commentary

Transportation coordination of Soldiers is a significant task of the Army logistician. The Army’s new approach to enterprise logistics is one that will make our forces more effective in the present wars and also ready them for future conflicts. Here, Soldiers from the Army’s 1st Brigade 10th Mountain Div, board a C-17 Globemaster III at Kirkuk Regional Air Base, Iraq, Nov. 4, 2008. (Photo by U.S. Air Force SrA Randi Flaugh, 506th Air Expeditionary Group Public Affairs.)

From the Futurist:

This is a version 2.0 of a legendary article written here back on March 19, 2006, noticed and linked by Hugh Hewitt, which led to The Futurist getting on the blogosphere map for the first time. Less than four years have elapsed since the original publication, but the landscape of global warfare has changed substantially over this time, warranting an update to the article.

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My Comment: One man's opinion on what future wars and conflicts may look like.

Military Robots And The Laws of War

Soldiers with the Army Evaluation Task Force give a demonstration of the small unmanned ground vehicle combat application to House Armed Services Committee Chairman Ike Skelton (D-MO) and fellow committee member Syvestre Reyes (D-TX) at Ft Bliss, TX, on July 12, 2008. The Congressmen were briefed on the Army's plans to accelerate Future Combat Systems technologies to Soldiers in combat. (Army photo by D. Myles Cullen)

From The New Atlantis:

More than just conventional wisdom, it has become almost a cliché to say that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq have proved “how technology doesn’t have a big place in any doctrine of future war,” as one security analyst told me in 2007. The American military efforts in those countries (or so the thinking goes) have dispelled the understanding of technology-dominated warfare that was prevalent just a few years ago—the notion that modern armed conflict would be fundamentally changed in the age of computers and networks.

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My Comment: This article from The New Atlantis summarizes my own personal position on what the future of warfare will be .... this is a must read.