A third principle suggested by the RMA is disengaged combat. In the future, U.S. and allied military forces are likely to conduct their operations at a healthy distance from their enemy. This fact carries a number of implications for force structure and technologies. Close contact with the enemy has always been a perilous endeavor. It exposes U.S. forces to direct fire and the risk of substantial casualties. This is especially true when the United States confronts the Soviet-style armies still common in regional aggressor states; the militaries of North Korea, Iraq, Iran, and other rogue nations rely heavily on masses of armor and artillery operating in close contact, on direct fire and relatively close-range indirect fire, to wear down their opponents. The spread of weapons of mass destruction will make close contact even more deadly. Chemical and biological weapons are frequently delivered by artillery or short-range attack aircraft. Until long-range ballistic or cruise missiles have spread further, nuclear weapons in the hands of regional aggressors will probably be carried by attack aircraft as well. [50] In high-intensity war between modern states, moreover, close contact is becoming increasingly lethal. The RMA is making it easier for military forces to locate and destroy the enemy than at any time in history. One need only imagine what a war would be like between two sides with the U.S. capabilities displayed in the Gulf. Eventually, the movement of large-scale forces on the battlefield may be tantamount to suicide, and modern mechanized warfare may become the contemporary equivalent of the Somme. [51] The first hints of this in recent times came via the massive attrition rates of the Arab-Israeli wars. [52] In broader terms, Clausewitz's notion of friction or the fog of war-perhaps the most fundamental fact of life for military leaders in battle-becomes thickest in close quarters. It is there that units become misplaced, the mixture of enemy and friendly forces becomes confused, communications are disrupted, orders are mislaid, and things generally go awry. Disengaged combat still suffers from its own forms of friction, but they may be somewhat less crippling than those of the close battle. From an operational perspective, therefore, U.S. forces have clear reasons to avoid close combat. Another reason is political. It is often said that, in an era of television wars and low tolerance for foreign adventures, U.S. operational commanders must avoid casualties at all costs. And now the Gulf War may have established an incredibly demanding standard against which future conflicts will be judged. Anything that helps minimize casualties would therefore greatly increase U.S. freedom of action, and disengaged combat would have such an effect. All of this suggests that U.S. forces may endeavor to remain as far apart from their adversaries as possible in future wars. [53] U.S. forces will use their superiority in sensor technologies, weapons, and command and control to remain out of range of the enemy's main weapons while inflicting damage upon it. This is, obviously, not a new principle; the tactics planned for the thin-skinned British battle cruisers before World War I come to mind as an example of disengaged combat. This principle was already at work in the Gulf, where U.S. tanks and helicopters stood off at 3,000 yards or more and destroyed Iraqi tanks at will, and where U.S. aircraft flew higher than 10,000 feet, avoiding antiaircraft guns while using advanced sensors to achieve pinpoint accuracy with their precision-guided weapons. [54] Admiral David Jeremiah has spoken of this process. "With longer range, greater precision, and horizontal integration of real-time intelligence and targeting," he argues, future weapons will be able to strike enemy forces at great distances. In mid- or high-intensity combat, it may not always be necessary to physically occupy key terrain on the ground, vital airspace, or critical chokepoints at sea in order to control them. While wars will still be won only when soldiers occupy the enemy's territory, it may not be necessary in every case to 'close with' the enemy in order to destroy him. Jeremiah correctly warns that current ideas about "unit organization, tactics, and modes of thinking may not be appropriate to such a future." [55] Disengaged combat reflects the culmination of a historical trend. For centuries, warfare consisted of the sum of a thousand individual battles fought with personal weapons. Warrior culture stressed physical strength, courage, and the willingness to kill and be killed in brutal fashion. As Sir Michael Howard has recognized, however, the progress of civilization has generally served to water down such values in Western populations, so that by World War II U.S. and British forces generally eschewed close combat. They preferred to call in the artillery rather than fix bayonets. [56] This trend continued through Korea and Vietnam, and stood in sharp contrast to the suicidal sacrifices routinely made by Chinese, North Korean, and Vietnamese units during those conflicts. U.S. forces might achieve this goal in a number of ways. They could pursue disengaged combat strategically, by using forces divorced from the actual theater of combat-distant navy ships launching air strikes or cruise missiles, tactical air power based in a neighboring country, strategic bombers flying from the United States. The Air Force's new ideas of strategic airpower-simultaneous precision attacks against enemy command and control centers, power and communications grids, and transportation nodes-represent a form of disengaged warfare, allowing U.S. forces to place emphasis on targeting enemy assets besides, though including, military forces in close combat. Tactically, a U.S. joint force commander would seek to fight the enemy without ever placing his (or her) forces within range of most enemy weapons. Using the greater accuracy of advanced sensors and precision weapons, U.S. forces could jockey just out of range of enemy artillery, tanks, and battlefield missiles, picking them off in turn. Such a practice might establish a hierarchy of enemy targets: those with the longest range-aircraft and missiles-would be destroyed first, followed by artillery, and finally mechanized or infantry combat units. As the enemy's ability to strike out diminished in range, U.S. forces would gradually advance on it and reduce the separation in forces, gaining in effectiveness as they did so. [57] A doctrine of disengaged combat could help ease the pressure on U.S. defense industrial base policy. Given the massive attrition rates experienced in modern war, some observers see the major vulnerability in the industrial base as a loss of surge capacity. [58] With only a handful of suppliers left for each major weapons system, the industrial base would have insufficient slack to surge production and make up losses once a war began. Disengaged combat, by reducing the attrition to U.S. forces, would help hold casualty rates down and therefore reduce the need for surge production. Disengaged combat holds little relevance to irregular warfare, and in fact may be the only one of the four principles that does not apply to both conventional and unconventional combat. In the ideal world, U.S. peacekeeping and counterinsurgency forces would be deployed in a manner that does not make them vulnerable to guerrillas or partisans but allows them to make use of their own weapons. But that will seldom be possible. A corollary to disengaged combat is nonlinear combat. Irregular warfare has long been nonlinear; as we heard so often about the Vietnam War, there was "no such thing as a front line." If, as some have argued, irregular conflict represents the majority of future conflict, warfare as a phenomenon will therefore become that much less linear. The increasing lethality of the close battle suggests that even traditional, high-intensity combat will be increasingly nonlinear; the growing risk to large-scale deployed military forces encourages decentralization and dispersion. It emphasizes the value of more agile and hard-to-detect units such as airmobile or light mechanized forces as a substitute, in some cases, for heavy armor. Rather than large units moving solidly in a single line of advance, future warfare might therefore see a more confused patchwork of dispositions, with U.S. and allied units in front of, among, and behind enemy forces. This trend is already evident in Airland Operations, which conceives a deep battle of several lines. Future warfare may look like AirLand Operations refracted through a multisided crystal, with each of its layers of operations broken into pieces and slices. [59] The logical end-point of such developments is the replacement of the notion of concentration of mass with one emphasizing concentration of fire. No longer will units have to be massed together to achieve their effect. Instead, the combination of precision weapons of long range and advanced command and control systems will allow widely dispersed forces to focus their fire on specific points. Artillery and missile units tens of miles apart, special forces units across the battlefield, ships dozens or hundreds of miles offshore, and aircraft-including perhaps strategic bombers flying direct from the United States, and bombers firing cruise missiles from hundreds of miles away--could all direct their attack against a single enemy tank division, regiment, or battalion. "We may even reach the point," Admiral Jeremiah has pointed out, "at which fire and maneuver become essentially the same thing under some circumstances." [60] The implications of a strategy of disengaged combat are relatively straightforward. Because this trend was already underway at the time of the Gulf War, and in fact for some years before that, it does not suggest any dramatic new departures from current plans. But it is a useful reminder of those areas that deserve emphasis in defense planning. Full implementation of a strategy of disengaged combat for conventional warfare will require a thorough doctrine, and U.S. forces must be trained and exercised in its principles and familiar with its requirements. Joint exercises will be especially important because, as with all elements of the RMA, synergy is critical to disengaged combat: it is only through efficient collaborative operations among air, land, and sea forces that the principles of disengaged combat could be put into practice. In a strategic sense, the pursuit of disengaged combat requires the ability to find and hit enemy targets over the horizon, rather than weapons systems suited for the close battle. It places a premium on intelligence, long-range sensors, long-range standoff munitions, precision targeting and guidance, advanced optics, and the like-all things designed to locate and hit the enemy at great distance, rather than to drive up and destroy him in a slugfest. Here we see one element of the trend toward the decline in importance of heavy, mechanized ground forces: such forces are designed to fight a war that U.S. commanders should attempt to avoid, not bring about. More broadly, developments in warfare are reducing the role of major military platforms-heavy ground vehicles, large capital ships, and advanced aircraft. With the long range of modern sensors and precision weapons, the vehicles that deliver those weapons-major platforms-need be less capable themselves. Thus Admiral Jeremiah suggests that "we may very well move away from expensive, highly sophisticated platforms in favor of cheaper trucks or barges based on commercial vehicles but crammed with state-of-the-art long-range weapons, sensors, and communications gear." The place of major platforms in the military "may not be the central position they have held for the past half-century or more," Jeremiah concludes. [61] In both its strategic and tactical guises, disengaged combat requires great agility on the part of U.S. military forces. Land, naval, and air units must be capable of redeploying at a moment's notice, of moving about the battlefield rapidly. U.S. defense planners have already put in place the building blocks of both strategic and tactical agility. Robotics and unmanned vehicles can also play a major role in both strategic and tactical disengaged combat, supplementing and in some cases replacing manned vehicles in battle areas close to the enemy. In this sense some U.S. systems could fight an "engaged" battle while U.S. personnel remained at a safe distance from the enemy. Moreover, and in a much more fundamental sense, the kind of unprecedented tactical agility required for disengaged combat may in fact call for more than speedy tanks. It may eventually lead the army to profound organizational innovations. Two such changes that are most likely are an increasing reliance on "middle-weight" forces employing light armored and mechanized units, [62] and a shift to the reinforced brigade as the basic combat unit of the army, replacing the more unwieldy division. Disengaged combat also suggests a growing role for special operations forces. They are uniquely suited to operate in the resulting no-man's land between U.S. and enemy forces as well as far behind enemy lines, directing fire and launching disruptive raids. On a strategic level, special operations forces can participate in the strategic air campaign aimed at enemy centers of gravity, going after enemy leaders, command posts, military depots, energy supplies, and the like. Finally, reliance on a strategy of disengaged combat also carries unpromising implications for coalition warfare. If U.S. allies did not enjoy similar capabilities, how would U.S. commanders work them into such an approach to war? Would they merely be used to mop up? Or could select allies participate in the disengaged attacks at both the strategic and tactical levels? The Gulf War suggests that a U.S. commander might make use of each of these alternatives. Back to Table of Contents Revolution in Military Affairs Back to SSI List of Issues Back to MagWeb Magazine List © Copyright 1994 by US Army War College. This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other articles from military history and related magazines are available at http://www.magweb.com