Five-Dimensional (Cyber) Warfighting: Can the Army After Next be Defeated Through Complex Concepts and Technologies? by U.S. Department of Defense

Author:U.S. Department of Defense
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, pdf
Published: 2015-07-12T04:00:00+00:00

Table 3. Black’s Employment of Mercenaries.

Can the AAN Be Defeated?

Our leaders called them criminals, not soldiers. How does that explain what happened to my platoon?

Surviving BlueFor Soldier The overriding question, based upon the above fivedimensional warfighting scenario, is: Could BlackFor defeat BlueFor? If we accept the June 1993 FM 100-5 Operations concept of decisive victory as the only way BlueFor can “win,” then BlackFor will come out victorious:

The Army must be capable of achieving decisive victory . The Army must maintain the capability to put overwhelming combat power on the battlefield to defeat enemies through a total force effort. It produces forces of the highest quality, able to deploy rapidly, to fight, to win quickly with minimum casualties. That is decisive victory.71

Based upon this scenario, BlueFor would be denied th e following key components of its definition of victory:

•

“the capability to put overwhelming combat power on the battlefield . . .” •“. . ., to win quickly . . .”

•“. . . with minimum casualties . . .”

•“. . . [achieve] decisive victory.” The traditional four-dimensional battlefield, based upon open spaces and non-complex terrain, which BlueFor dominates was surrendered by BlackFor the moment hostilities began because it represents killing ground. Instead, BlueFor would be required to place its combat power directly within complex terrain containing BlackFor's stealth-masked forces, both human and machine, mixed in with innocent civilians. BlueFor's legacy mechanized forces would lose much of their qualitativ e superiority in such terrain and be susceptible to BlackFor's advanced technologies and CONOPS.

In heavily urbanized coastal zones containing sprawling slums such as a massive Mogadishu-like environment, BlackFor would be defending in the equivalent of a number of World War II Stalingrads. The German army fighting over that city lost tens of thousands of men prior to being cu t off and decimated. If BlueFor lost a fraction of that number, the operation would be deemed a disaster. The question arises whether BlueFor would possess sufficient soldiers in its ranks to even engage in such an undertaking. Time als o becomes a factor. Large scale urban operations and th e ensuing terrorist/guerrilla campaign likely to follow, even if the urban centers could be occupied, far exceed any notion of a quick win on BlueFor's behalf. BlueFor would have to counter terrorists, narco-groups, and gangs in a “police” type setting for which its forces are not suited.

To further erode BlueFor's potential for victory, its ability to defeat Black decisively comes into question. Black represents a new warmaking entity based on a heavil y internetted command structure—its relationships are more weblike than hierarchical. Physical terrain is meaningless to this entity, it does not field an army which can be decisively defeated in open battle, and its leadership is stealth-masked and transnational. As a result, traditional Clausewitizian centers of gravity or, for that matter, concepts of defeat do not apply.

What is most striking about these observations is that they appear to support three of the emerging impressions of the 1997 Summer AAN Wargame held in September:

• Future conflicts may have very unique characteristics.

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