Category: Current Affairs

Is There A Mission For A Space Force?

On June 28, 2018

In Current Affairs, Military History, Military Theory

Or is it like Indians trying to form a navy with their canoes? There aren’t any significant space trade lanes to block or keep open (…someday…), but a space force could focus on establishing “space supremacy” in a manner analogous to air supremacy.

Why Separate Service Branches Exist

The army is the oldest and most basic military service (indeed, “military” used to refer only to the army). I’m not familiar with the history of navies as a distinct organization from the army, but humans have been plying the oceans since well before recorded history. It’s clear that the crew and officers of military vessels were at least somewhat distinct from soldiers even in Antiquity. What’s important is that a navy does something that doesn’t and can’t involve the army: enforcing or denying freedom of navigation. This requires establishing command of the sea.

Sometimes an army may need to move things across the water in support of their operations on land, and they might have some vessels to enable this. Likewise, navies use marines in support of their own operations. But “the navy” doesn’t invade Donovia, and “the army” doesn’t blockade ports.

Which brings us to air forces. The fundamental reason that independent air forces exist is strategic bombing. Armies and navies only operate on the two-dimensional surface of the earth or ocean. If an army wants to burn down the enemy’s capital, they have to move there, and if anyone else is in the way they have to fight them and win first. The navy has to get off their boats if they want to take anything over, especially if the objective isn’t near the coastline. With the airplane, you just fly over the enemy, drop your payload, and the target dies.

In theory, at least. Air power advocates had and continue to have a serious problem overestimating the effects of strategic bombing. That being said, it ain’t worthless, it isn’t going away, and it empirically exists outside the purview of the army and navy — that’s what the “strategic” adjective is really doing there.

In an air power-centric view, establishing air supremacy (which is air superiority, but more of it) is a derivative mission of strategic bombing. Air forces must establish some control of the air in order to attack targets on the ground and bomb the enemy into submission. Destroying enemy aircraft accomplishes very little, materially, on its own. Of course the army and navy don’t want to be attacked by enemy aircraft either, and in reality this is part of the reason you want air supremacy, not just because it enables you to conduct strategic bombing. At any rate, we can see that air supremacy is basically a “shaping” or enabling rather than decisive mission, not something that achieves strategic objectives on its own. You’ll note that “air operations in direct support of ground forces” or close air support doesn’t really fit into this picture; this is the source of endemic squabbles over whether the USAF should have any responsibility for it at all.

The air force isn’t the only novel service branch. The Soviet Union maintained a separate Air Defense Force. I’m not directly familiar with the logic for doing so, but I would guess it is because their view of air supremacy aligned with the above: it’s to enable strategic bombing and maybe protect expeditionary ground and naval forces, not to defend against enemy bombing. Russia continues to have a separate “Strategic Missile Force” service for the operation of nuclear missiles, viewing this as sufficiently different from strategic bombing by aircraft to justify a separate service.

So What

Right now, the individual services put things into space in support of their operations on the ground. Joint coordination must occur to make sure no one crashes into each other, and to mitigate the formation of information silos, but that’s about it. Claiming that this justifies a new service branch, on its own, is a bit like deciding that naval aviation or army mariners should form their own service.

The lame answer is that the Space Force just serves as a coordination center for defense-related space operations, sort of like the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. This might fix some hypothetical coordination problems between the uniformed services and civilian agencies like the National Reconnaissance Office, but while the current state of such coordination is far from public knowledge there aren’t any obvious signs of problems.

The most obvious role for a Space Force is “space supremacy”: deny the use of space to the enemy and enable it for the United States. Since there are no strategically significant activities in space outside of Earth’s orbit, the space force’s purview would be limited to near Earth, as a practical matter.

The space force could also supplement or supplant civilian agencies like NASA in conducting space exploration, in a Faustian bargain exchanging militarization for funding. However, while space pilots usually come from the military, the majority of work is done by civilians doing identifiably civilian jobs in science, engineering, and administration.

Notice that space supremacy doesn’t derive from the need to live or trade in space. Even space-based weapons would only be incremental upgrades from currently existing strategic bombing methods. So far norms against space weapons have held up pretty well, if only because any “improvements” over ICBMs are likely to be self-defeating for game theory reasons.

Perhaps someone in the White House or DoD thinks they can skirt the relevant norms and treaties by putting only “space-to-space” weapons in orbit — the real fear being space nukes — by avoiding nuclear or even kinetic weapons (orbiting jammers). I don’t know if anyone has ever recovered an enemy satellite from orbit for investigation — it’s possible. If so, sensitive satellites might have anti-handling devices. EOD…in space.

The need to police and control access to off-world or orbital installations, which would pretty strongly justify a space service, is completely irrelevant for the foreseeable future, as those things don’t currently exist.

Space Supremacy

So, at least for the foreseeable future, “space supremacy” is probably going to be the basic mission of the space force. Separation from the air force would be justified on the basis of differing technical requirements and — maybe — even to avoid excessive militarization by keeping the brimstone scent of strategic bombing away. What space supremacy is, is obvious by analogy to air supremacy: allow friendly use of space and deny it to the enemy. How to go about it, and then actually doing it, might be something for a new service to work on.

North Korean Nuclear Weapons as Economy of Force Pt 3: Conclusion

By sfoil

On June 26, 2018

In Current Affairs, Korea, Military Theory

We took a look at the comparative effects of a conventional artillery attack and a nuclear attack on Seoul. North Korea has maintained the ability to inflict tens if not hundreds of thousands of fatalities on the South using inaccurate and labor-intensive but voluminous long-range artillery fire for decades. Nuclear weapons allow North Korea to maintain the threat of a countervalue attack on Seoul, while providing more flexibility than their current deterrent forces. Also, the probable reliance of the North Koreans on chemical weapons in a shooting war means their legacy “conventional” deterrent already stands a high likelihood of provoking nuclear retaliation by South Korea’s American ally.

Even given high rates of missile interception, nuclear weapons allow the North Koreans to accomplish with a few munitions what previously took hundreds of thousands. And antimissile defenses are not perfect. Not every missile will be hit, and not every hit will actually kill the warhead. The use of decoys and saturation salvos are likely tactics that would lower the intercept rate against North Korean missiles compared to those fired from Yemen in the linked article.

The nuclear deterrent is also more flexible. Nuclear-tipped missiles can threaten not only all of South Korea — including important ports like Busan and Pohang that are out of reach of long-range artillery — but also off-peninsula support zones such as Japan, Okinawa, and Guam. (North Korean nuclear ballistic missiles are probably useless against naval targets — they aren’t accurate enough and they can’t likely get target-quality data anyways). They even open up the possibility of retaliation against the US mainland.

missile ranges

Ranges of North Korean missiles, 2016

Nuclear weapons can point not only to the south but to the north. The North probably doesn’t consider China a threat in the same way they do the South Koreans or the United States, but there’s intents and then there’s capabilities, and China has a lot of capability sitting on the other side of a comparatively lightly-defended border. If Kim thinks he’d ever like to do something the Chinese might not like — such as Korean reunification — he’ll probably feel a lot more comfortable being able to announce that any invasion would or could be met with nuclear retaliation.

The point is that the North’s nuclear weapons can replace their conventional deterrent while adding a lot of capabilities that howitzers and artillery rockets can’t, and it probably isn’t even costing them that much. Again, North Korea can spend ~10% of its current defense budget on its nuclear program to replace an entire artillery corps, at the absolute minimum, and may set the stage both militarily and politically within the North for an even further drawdown of the North’s bloated conventional forces, a legacy of Kim Jong-Il’s “military first” economic policy.

North Korea isn’t the only country which has ever made this calculus. The United States made a similar, deliberate choice in the 1950s to counter Soviet forces in Europe with nuclear weapons on the grounds of cost-effectiveness. Stephen Schwartz of the Brookings Institution, who wrote the Atomic Audit book I cited in the last post, believes that this was ultimately false— however, he attributes this to the development of an excessive diversity of warheads and delivery systems, pork barrel politics, and mismanagement of the targeting process, NOT to the cost of nuclear weapons themselves. North Korea, even if they are totally unaware of this history, is constrained by its poverty into not investing trillions of dollars into overkill. One warhead type mounted on a few dozen missiles of various ranges — culminating in submarine-launched and intercontinental types — will suit them fine.

All of these benefits also suggest that North Korea’s nuclear weapons aren’t going away. The “international community” has already “allowed” Pakistan, Israel, India, and the People’s Republic of China to build nuclear weapons. The examples of Pakistan and Israel are particularly instructive: in both instances, a relatively small state threatened by larger neighbors (India, the Arab states) maintains a nuclear deterrent as an equalizer. In many ways this asymmetric viewpoint is a more natural use of nuclear weapons than as one more asset in the arsenal of wealthy states with large militaries.

Robert Oppenheimer cropped

God created the nations, but J. Robert Oppenheimer made them equal.

North Korean Nuclear Weapons as Economy of Force Pt 2: Estimating Effects of Nuclear Weapons

By sfoil

On June 22, 2018

In Current Affairs, Korea, Military Theory

In the last post, I looked at what sort of damage North Korea can do with its Long Range Artillery, including both conventional and chemical payloads. Now we can try to estimate what the North can accomplish with nuclear weapons. The number and type of nuclear warheads and delivery systems the North Koreans possess isn’t knowable, but using some publicly available information and making up plausible-sounding numbers can give us an idea of what they can accomplish.

Effects

North Korea has tested several some small Hiroshima-level ~15kt devices and, in their last test in 2017, a higher-yield ~100kt bomb.

Presumably the North Koreans are confident in their 15kt bomb design, which they claim will (unlike the bombs detonated in 1945) fit onto a missile. There’s no reason not to believe them; if it doesn’t, they’ll just keep conducting tests until they have something that works and is small enough. If they don’t set off another 100kt+ detonation, it’s an indicator that the 2017 test was of a missile-suitable warhead, which it probably was – -they don’t have much use for something that can’t be put on a missile.

I’m going to use Alex Wellerstein’s NUKEMAP app to estimate the effects of a nuclear explosion, and as a comparison to the uniform population density method from the last post. He also has a “MISSILEMAP” app, but we’re not concerned with the ability to destroy a specific target; this is a countervalue attack against a densely populated area.

Playing around with the 15kt explosion on NUKEMAP, I get between 60-200k killed and 250-500k wounded depending on the nature of the district in which the bomb hits using Mr. Wellerstein’s model. In the .017人/m^2 uniform density model from the last post, and the 1200m 500 rem dose radius as a kill radius (this area also includes a shockwave >5psi), we get 76,867 fatalities. Using the 100% third-degree burns radius as the wound radius (1.9km) gives us 201,000 wounded. So, this is in the ballpark of Wellerstein’s more detailed model, on the low end. His model accounts for the possibility of casualties outside the radii noted above. Mine is much more conservative. I don’t put too much trust in the resolution of his population-density data, since the population shifts around the city substantially during the day and week. Still, we’re generally in agreement.

nuke1

nuke2

Commercial/Government vs Residential

When discussing the damage done by conventional munitions, I decided to reduce the “damage radius” in order to account for the protection provided by the broken, built-up urban environment. I don’t believe this to be the case with a nuclear detonation, because the large shockwave produced will tend to cause the total collapse of buildings, by applying the shockwave overpressure against a much larger area, compared to smaller conventional explosives. This isn’t an inherent characteristic of nuclear weapons, and emulating this effect with non-nuclear explosives is the point of weapons like the GBU-43 or Timothy McVeigh’s hobby project. However, none of the North Korean artillery warheads are anywhere near large enough to cause wholesale collapse of structures as in an earthquake. It is possible that the construction of larger buildings in Seoul would enable them to avoid collapse collapse by one or several nuclear blasts. If so, these are probably overestimates, but a lot of people are still going to die.

Aleppo_2014

Aleppo, Syria in 2014. Despite heavy fighting, most of the buildings are basically intact.

Unfortunately, the paltry 15kt bomb is a firecracker compared to North Korea’s state of the art, for which I’ll use a conservative 100kt estimate. Depending, again, on the district hit, NUKEMAP estimates 245,000-480,000 dead and 800,000-1,200,000 wounded. Using our own model above — and 1600m/4500m kill/wound from the same source — gives us 140,000 dead and 1.1 million wounded. This is almost certainly lowballing the number of people killed, since many outside the radius would be killed by building collapse, burns, radiation, etc.

nuke3

RIP Noise Basement

So, it looks like it would take 2-6x 100kt warheads or 5-15x 15kt warheads to inflict the same number of casualties as the conventional artillery barrage, while acknowledging that even one single warhead on target, especially the larger one, would do the job just fine.

Cost

We guessed in the last post that throwing 70 kilotons of high explosives at Seoul would cost about a billion dollars worth of munitions and require 50,000 people. The North Koreans’ job isn’t quite so simple as it appears above, because not every warhead can hit its target. If South Korean missile defenses can intercept 75% of incoming missiles, then the North need to launch 8 missiles to get a 90% chance of hitting. Even 50% interception rate means you need 3-4 missiles for a 90% probability of hit. Better, but do you feel lucky?

So, the North wants some combination of suppression and saturation of missile defenses in order to actually hit the target. If launching missiles in salvos reduces interception rates to 50%, and suppression of missile-defense sites (such as by maintaining a small fraction of the conventional artillery above, or by using small drones as improvised precision munitions) can get the interception rate to 33%, now we’re in business. Launch a five-missile salvo, 99% chance one goes off.

Nuclear disarmament advocate group Global Zero estimates that North Korea spends about $700 million per year on its nuclear program, compared to about $10 billion on its military overall. Estimating the marginal cost of a nuclear weapon is very difficult even in the best of circumstances. The 1998 book Atomic Audit estimates that China spent $28 billion in 1988 dollars ($58 billion in 2017) to build 450 nuclear warheads, about $120 million apiece. The comparison is apt given the similarities of a relatively poor state with modest aims. This article estimates a marginal cost of $50 million for an American ICBM. Given their possession of a workable warhead design and nuclear material, it is far from unreasonable to assume that North Korea can build and maintain 10x 100kt IRBMs and a flock of decoys for less than the billion dollar stock cost of its conventional deterrent munitions.

This also means that if nuclear forces allow the North Koreans to decrease spending on conventional forces by 10%, they’re coming out ahead. Spinning this shift as “conventional disarmament” even allows them to parlay the weapons program that in theory contributes to their pariah status into a diplomatic positive.

What’s Possible with North Korea?

By sfoil

On June 11, 2018

In Current Affairs, Korea

President Trump will meet with Kim Jong Un on Tuesday in Singapore. Nothing concrete will come out of this summit — the lack of South Korean representation guarantees that — but if things go well some sort of agreement is possible eventually. Still, both sides have things to offer economically, diplomatically, and militarily. What might that look like?

The New Marine Squad

By sfoil

On May 22, 2018

In Current Affairs, Military Theory

General Robert Neller, the Commandant of the Marine Corps, announced earlier this month that the Marines were making a major change to the organization of their rifle squads:

The Marine Corps is capping off 18 months of overhauling the way infantry units are trained and equipped by shaking up the structure of the rifle squad.

In an address to an audience of Marines at a Marine Corps Association awards dinner near Washington, D.C., on [May 3rd], Commandant Gen. Robert Neller said future squads will have 12 Marines, down from the current 13.

Also, the M16 rifle and M249 Squad Automatic Weapon (a light machine gun which the DoD refers to as an “automatic rifle” because it only has a single operator) will all be replaced by the M27 Infantry Automatic Rifle (which has, in fact, already replaced most of the M249s in the Marines)

Why?

The current Marine rifle squad consists of 13 soldiers, organized into three fire teams of four soldiers under a squad leader. Each fire team consists of three soldiers under a team leader (the Marines call this the “Rule of Three”):

Marine_Squad_Old - Edit

Compare this to an Army rifle squad:

Army_Rifle_Squad

(Soldiers promote faster than Marines, that’s why an Army squad leader is a Staff Sergeant and a Marine squad leader is only a sergeant. The details of this situation are beyond the scope of this article.)

The Marine squad is larger than the Army squad. Marines expect their infantry squads to do more, so they give them more resources. The M203 and M320 are both 40mm grenade launchers.

The new squad looks something like this:

Marine_Squad_New

What this does is turn the Marine squad into something like a miniature platoon, with its own headquarters element. This will make squads more capable of functioning independently. The “Equipment Operator” Lance Corporal in the squad HQ will be tasked with using small unmanned systems. The RQ-11 Raven is probably the default option, but a number of other existing and future devices could be used, depending on the mission. Currently these and similar systems are mostly used and managed at the platoon or company level in conventional units. Each squad now has its own reconnaissance element and redundant leadership.

The M27 is similar to the RPK in being a heavier version of a standard assault rifle. The Marines have employed the M27 in combat since 2010, and have mostly replaced the M249 SAW. The M249 is a belt-fed 5.56mm weapon, essentially a small machine gun (the manufacturer, the Fabrique Nationale, calls it the “Minimi”). It can sustain a far higher volume of fire than AR-15 pattern rifles like the M4 or M16, comes standard with a bipod, and can be readily adapted to tripod and pintle mounts if needed.

While the M249 is a small machine gun, the M27 is a heavier rifle. The weight reduces recoil and muzzle climb, especially for long bursts of automatic fire, and reduces overheating compared to the M16. It is not capable of the same sustained volume of fire as the M249, but is more accurate. The M27 favors precision and versatility over volume of fire. The M249 replaced the much heavier M60, a full-fledged machine gun, in the 1980s, so the adoption of the M27 continues a trend of lighter weapons.

The Marines have used the M27 increasingly widely for several years now, and presumably have plenty data and anecdote to build troop confidence and justify their use of the rifle as general issue. The two major factors enabling the change are probably the high standards of marksmanship in the USMC (e.g., qualification targets out to 500m instead of only 300m for the Army) and the exploitation of attachments, especially optics, which have a proven durability and capability that did not exist when the M249 was introduced. Both of these enable Marines to confidently shoot at targets 500-800m away (the M249’s engagement envelope) with enough accuracy to at least reliably suppress, and without needing the volume of fire provided by the M249. The 5.56mm cartridge imposes hard limits on engagement ranges, but the M249 uses the same cartridge and has those same limitations. The M27 is also much more amenable to suppressors than the M249, and the Marine Corps is interested in issuing suppressors to everyone.

(General issue of suppressors is a great idea. I believe it would have been accomplished long ago but for restrictive laws surrounding civilian ownership. I note that the expiration of the Assault Weapons Ban coincides very suspiciously with some marked improvements to the AR-15, such as magazines)

Overall, the new Marine squad TOE will allow squads to function more independently, and take advantage of new small UAS/UGV technologies. The use of a common weapon by all members of the squad will make individual Marines more versatile, compensating for loss of fire volume with accuracy. Any “failure” will consist of only a marginal decrease in capability, and will be easily reversible.