Champion of "a new American way of war"

Sea Power, Jun 2003

Arthur K. Cebrowski is known in Washington as the Pentagon's transformation czar, the individual tapped by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to lead the conversion of the U.S. military from the heavy forces of the Cold War era to lighter, more mobile, highly lethal units able to defeat the wide variety of threats likely in the 21st century. Cebrowski views his mission as much broader than that, however. He envisions "a new American way of war" made possible by information technologies that vastly improve battle area awareness. He believes that will, in turn, generate a tectonic shift of the U.S. military establishment "from focusing on things to focusing on behavior or action" to produce new sources of combat power.

To achieve that end, Cebrowski challenges the system, not for the first time. As president of the Naval War College, he became known as the creator of network centric warfare, now a byword of the U.S. military. It is a concept that envisions the use of new technologies to move the Pentagon from the industrial age to the information age. A principal tenet of network centric warfare is the fielding of a robustly networked force to improve information sharing among units.

Before his tenure at the Naval War College, Cebrowski, a retired vice admiral, was commanding officer of the aircraft carrier USS Midway and the USS America carrier battle group, and Director of Command, Control, Communications, and Computers for the Joint Staff. As the Director of Force Transformation for the Department of Defense, he says he is less interested in the definition of military transformation than in its goal: creating a sustained American competitive advantage in the conduct of war. He recently discussed these and other issues with Editor in Chief Rick Barnard.

You recently said that "a new American way of war is emerging" based in part on the substitution of information technology for mass. One example is that the Air Force once used 1,000 bombs on a target that can now be destroyed with just one bomb. Targeting technology made the difference. What are some other examples from the Iraq war?

Cebrowski: High-speed forces. You cannot be dragging around a giant supply dump if you have that kind of speed. That means you have to be looking at very good battlefield transparency. One of the things that we see broadly is that information technology is running well ahead of the physical domain. We aren't looking at a giant bandwidth shortage, something that everyone predicted would happen. We aren't seeing that. We would like to be on the fully non-contiguous battlefield, but that means you have to have very good battlefield mobility, and that's in the physical domain.

The fully non-contiguous battlefield?

Cebrowski: The complete disappearance of the front-or the notion of a front-so the forces can be wherever they need to be. Forces should be able to disperse when they need to and come together when they must. We have the information systems that allow that to happen. But it still takes time just to move the physical elements and make it come true. So that means you're going to want to increase this substitution of information for mass so that you can reduce the drag of the physical domain.

Sea basing is one of the key concepts in the Navy's Sea Power 21 strategy, and there are lots of ideas floating around about how it would work. Some people think Sea Basing is an actual base. What is your view of Sea Basing?

Cebrowski: There is a compelling reason to pursue operational maneuver from the sea and operational maneuver from strategic distances. In a word, it's Turkey. We're dealing with matters of strategic geography. You want to bypass some of the political, geographic, and military obstacles blocking your way to your operational objective. Sea basing is a way to do that.

In my mind, sea basing is not a ship. It is not crafting some kind of big new vessel with a supply dump on it and then have forces fall in on this supply dump. Although you may have some of that. The sea base may be, it seems to me, quite dispersed. It could consist of a great variety of facilities and ships. Forces that would come to that sea base-air, sea, or land forces-need to come in one smooth motion and then maneuver operationally from it. So there is no intermediate staging base.

Tactical units are moving at higher speeds, but what about logistics?

Cebrowski: If mobility matters to you, then speed must matter. [He holds up a photo of the experimental ship HSV-X1 Joint Venture, a catamaran with a wave-piercing design capable of sustained speeds in excess of 40 knots.] Great picture, huh? It was in Kuwait two weeks ago. And I guess the Westpac Express [a fast catamaran used to move troops and equipment from Okinawa, Japan, to training sites in the Pacific] is still running. And the Navy takes delivery of another high-speed vessel this month and it will go directly to theater, I've been told.

We're going to see that inter-theater lift merges with intra-theater lift and the speed of both increase, and the distinction between logistics and operations goes away. We're talking about logistics as part of your operational maneuver scheme, as are intelligence and force protection. So you have a blurring of the lines.