The Defense Department has a new Air-Sea Battle Concept office expected to integrate air and naval combat capabilities–and soon to incorporate the Army–in support of freedom of action for U.S. military power projection in light of emerging national security requirements.
The 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review directed the Navy, Marines and Air Force to create an Air-Sea Battle Concept that integrates air and naval forces to counter and operate in an anti-access area denial (A2AD) environment.
Recently, the secretary of defense acknowledged the work as “credible” and lit the green light to move forward implementing the air-sea battle concept.
The A2AD challenge had in the past been aimed generally at the Western Pacific–China–and Iran, where such issues might be greatest.
Think tanks such as the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments have taken a look at the concept, and issued several reports in the past two years, most recently a June report, “Resourcing the Air Sea Battle Concept,” which mentions China.
Defense officials briefing reporters Nov. 9 said the issue now is that: “state, regional, and non-state actors have been developing, proliferating, and acquiring emerging modern military capabilities, technologies.”
Some of those technologies could aid in foiling U.S. power projection: precision fires with longer range, electronic warfare, advanced integrated air and missile defense systems, increased capability submarines, surface ships and fighter aircraft.
The end state is “freedom of access in the global commons,” one official said.
“It’s not about a specific actor. It’s not about a specific regime,” a second official said. It’s about confronting and overcoming technologies and capabilities no matter where they are –air, sea, land, space and cyberspace.
The concept is not telling combatant commanders how to do their jobs, an official said, it’s the services’ ability to organize train and equip forces, and collaborate to create those needed capabilities to field them for what combatant commanders want.
This priority to integrate air and naval forces involves three areas of change: institutional, conceptual and material, another official said.
On the materiel side, it is about collaborative development and vetting of systems to ensure “we are complementary and appropriate and redundant material and nonmaterial solutions have been mandated by capacitor requirements, we have interoperability, we have compatibility, and they’re fielded with integrated acquisition strategies seeking efficiencies where they can be achieved,” an official said
The new Pentagon office is to facilitate inter-service and interagency coordination during the development, the implementation and the maturation of the Air Sea Battle Concept, supervise the implementation of the training, manning and equipping of integrated air and naval forces, and manage the concept execution.
Officials did not address how the concept fits with such things as the Joint Operational Access concept and Joint Forcible Entry concept. The work, will, however, inform joint work.
“A lot of our work is state of the art, and it’s characterizing A2/AD in a way that the joint force hasn’t quite understood or hasn’t quite arrived at that understanding of what it is, its ramifications and consequences,” said one official. “Our work will inform the follow-on conceptual work that will be executed by the chairman and other people for quite some time. It’s a concept that won’t tell you everything you will ever need to know right now. And there’s a lot of refinement that must occur over time. We will feed a lot of those efforts.”
The office will bring the Army on board. Another defense official said then-Secretary Gates did not task the land service as he did the Air Force and Navy because “he was concerned about areas of anti-access/area denial in the global commons. Things that are land are typically–on land, are typically not the global commons so–but we recognize willingly and are actively seeking now to fold the Army in and on board so that we will be a four-service program on this.”