Military Experimentation - navy operations

Naval War College Review, Wntr, 2001 by Andrew F. Krepinevich, Jr.

Time to Get Serious

In January 1929, the U.S. Navy undertook a major exercise known as Fleet Problem IX, part of a series of exercises conducted by the service between the two world wars. Despite the isolationist mood of America at the time, compounded by tight budgets and arms control constraints, the Navy persisted in conducting these exercises as, among other things, a means for determining the influence upon sea power of continuing rapid advances in aviation technology. [1]

Fleet Problem IX took place off the coast of Panama. Present for the first time in these fleet problems were two ships of radically new design-the air craft carriers USS Lexington (CV 2) and USS Saratoga (CV 3). During the exercise, Vice Admiral William V. Pratt, commanding the attacking force, authorized Rear Admiral Joseph Reeves, commanding the Saratoga and a light cruiser, to execute a high-speed run toward the Panama Canal. Reeves then "attacked" the canal with a seventy-plane strike force launched 140 miles from the target.

Following Fleet Problem IX, Admiral Pratt observed, "I believe that when we learn more of the possibilities of the carrier we will come to an acceptance of Admiral Reeves' plan which provides for a very powerful and mobile force ... the nucleus of which is the carrier." [2] The following year, upon becoming Chief of Naval Operations, Pratt directed that carriers be placed in offensive roles in war games and fleet exercises. In such exercises, involving experimentation with new kinds of equipment, doctrine, and formations, were sown seeds that brought forth the fast carrier task forces that enabled the U.S. Navy to defeat the Imperial Japanese Navy during World War II.

Eight years after Fleet Problem IX, on the north German plain, a new and very different formation appeared in exercises conducted by the German army: the panzer division. The panzer division was a combined-arms formation possessing large numbers of fast tanks with extended ranges; it was centered on a doctrine that called for rapid, deep penetration as a means to achieve quick victory. This represented a dramatic departure from Germany's World War I experience against its principal enemy, France. That conflict had been dominated by slow-moving forces employing heavy firepower and wag ing a war of gradual attrition.

In the 1937 German maneuvers, after a sixty-mile approach march, the panzer division went into the attack, forcing the enemy to commit its reserves. The following day the panzer division not only broke through the enemy front but penetrated deep into its rear. The enemy position quickly became untenable, and the issue was essentially decided only four days into what had been planned as a seven-day exercise. General Franz Halder, who witnessed the spectacle (and who would become chief of the General Staff a year later), was stunned by the "fluid mobility" of the panzer operations. [3]

Many other exercises were conducted during the 1920s and 1930s by the German military. They included experiments not only in mechanized warfare but with radio communications schemes and the use of aircraft to provide re connaissance and close air support for rapidly moving ground forces. These exercises were indispensable in enabling the German high command to develop a devastating new form of land warfare known as blitzkrieg--lightning war.

Today, the U.S. military finds itself in a circumstance somewhat similar to those that confronted the two military services mentioned above. As in the interwar era, rapidly progressing technologies have emerged, creating a military revolution ("revolution in military affairs," in Pentagonspeak) that will produce dramatic changes in the instruments of war and how military operations are conducted. But as with naval aviation and mechanized ground operations seventy years ago, it is not yet clear how this revolution will play out.

THE RISK OF STAYING ON OUR CURRENT PATH: POWER PROJECTION

Despite all the uncertainties the U.S. military must confront in preparing for the future, two things seem certain. First, the incentive is high for would-be adversaries to present the American military with challenges very different from those that confronted U.S. forces during the 1991 Gulf War. Second, the diffusion of military technologies and the rapid progression of military-related technologies will offer such adversaries the means to achieve this goal. Their prospects are particularly good with respect to traditional power-projection operations, which form the core of the current U.S. two "major theater war" de fense posture.

This "two war" posture is founded on the nation's ability to project power rapidly and decisively to threatened regions around the globe. The Defense De partment's last Quadrennial Defense Review, conducted in 1997, concluded that "it is imperative that the United States now and for the foreseeable future be able to deter and defeat large-scale, cross-border aggression in two distant theaters in overlapping time frames." [4] Along these lines, the Joint Chiefs of Staff's vision statement, Joint Vision 2010, declared that "power projection ... will likely re main the fundamental strategic concept of our future force." [5]