Unified Field Theory: The End of Domain Centered Theories of Warfare
“The People’s Liberation Army has successfully sunk a US aircraft carrier, according to a satellite photo provided by Google Earth,” reports the Want China Times,” adding that, “A satellite image reveals two large craters on a 200-meter-long white platform in the Gobi desert used to simulate the flight deck of an aircraft carrier. The photo was first posted on SAORBATS, an internet forum based in Argentina. Military analysts believed the craters would have been created by China’s DF-21D anti-ship missile, dubbed the “carrier killer.” i.
And elsewhere in the news. Sony surrendered to North Korea due to a cyber attack. Newt Gingrich ✔ @newtgingrich “No one should kid themselves. With the Sony collapse America has lost its first cyberwar. This is a very very dangerous precedent.”
It was once joked that in the event of a major war, the US Navy would move all its carriers to Newport, RI, where they host their war games, because at Newport they had never lost a carrier. That joke now rings hollow. China is developing a capability to target aircraft carriers with land based missiles, potentially threatening to take control of the South China Sea without needing a single ship. If ships can be destroyed by land, air, space or even cyberspace based capabilities; does sea power still require a Navy?
The ability to impact or even control one domain from other domains makes almost irrelevant current domain power theories. The introduction of “cross-domain synergy” and similar “cross-domain” ideas in joint and service concepts highlights the struggle to grapple with how precision, range and ubiquitous information have changed how we should think about war. A theory that places domain power theories in their proper perspective, will enable the human aspect of military operations to assume its central place in any holistic theory of war. What the US Military lacks, and probably cannot by itself develop, is a unifying theory of the military application of joint power in the information age.
Understanding why domain power is inadequate and why we need a unified theory of war requires a common definitional baseline, and straightforward English use of terms. For the purposes of this article:
Domain Power is the ability to affect a domain. All military Services possess varying abilities to operate in every domain. Land, sea, air, cyberspace and space power are not the exclusive domain of any one service
Domain Forces are those forces designed to operate primarily from within, and to dominate, a given domain. The Army for example has air, sea, space and cyberspace capabilities, but it is a land force.
The domain-force-equals-domain-power theories worked fairly well through the 19th Century and most of the 20th century. When, in 1890, Alfred Thayer Mahan published his treatise on the importance of naval power in the rise of the British empire, the distinction between domain forces and domain power was almost nonexistent. Even through WWII, the best way to sink a ship was with another ship (even if by 1940 it was probably a submarine). In 1920, when Douhet published “The Command of the Air” and for decades after, the best way to defeat an airplane was with another airplane. Now ground-based air defenses are clearly a part of any nation’s “air power”. When Clausewitz wrote “On War” over the course of the early 19th century, air, space and cyberspace were yet a dream. (In actuality, Clausewitz was not a landpower advocate per se — the idea of focusing on physical domains rather than war as reflected in the trinity would likely have been anathema to him.) Today, the capability for cross domain effects eliminates the coherence of any theory dependent on a correlation between domain power and domain forces.
Obviously, developing a national strategy or fighting a war using only one of the above domain power theorists would be nonsensical. The Capstone Concept for Joint Operations explicitly recognizes this new reality in its central idea, Globally Integrated Operations:
“Globally integrated operations…requires a globally postured Joint Force to quickly combine capabilities with itself and mission partners across domains, echelons, geographic boundaries, and organizational affiliations. These networks of forces and partners will form, evolve, dissolve, and reform in different arrangements in time and space with significantly greater fluidity than today’s Joint Force.”
The global distribution of information, literally at the speed of light, pressures policymakers in as yet poorly understood ways. Pressure on policymakers, who deal ultimately with human objectives, is increasingly bringing the human element of war to the fore among military strategists. One implication of the accelerated rate and momentum of human interaction is that military operations must be increasingly conducted to achieve information objectives not physical objectives. iv. And yet, our institutional debates over the form and function of the US Military during lean times are still too often framed in domain power terms and purely physical outcomes. We still tend to place the domain power cart in front of the human outcomes horse. We lack a unifying theory to guide us.
Make no mistake, domain power is still vitally important, but we must no longer think of domain power as the realm of a single Service or domain force. Moreover, the application of all domain power must be integrated to achieve the human behaviors that are required of a satisfactory political outcome. We must better integrate operations across domains more seamlessly in a changing operational and technological environment. Current force advocacy by Air, Sea, Space, Cyberspace and even Landpower acolytes often fail to link directly to viable policies leading to human objectives. This is not an operating force problem — it is an institutional one. Officers that would bristle at the suggestion that any one service can do it alone while they are in the operating force, will be waving the domain power flag like a NASCAR flagman if they are assigned to the institution. Look at Air Sea Battle — a concept developed in the institution with no Army seat at the table. More damaging, it is almost silent on human outcomes desired of its operations. (Its even named after two domains — how 1980’s is that?).
In one effort to grapple with the emerged reality of the inadequacy of military operations at achieving policy outcomes, the Army, Marine Corps and US Special Operations Command formed the Strategic Landpower Task Force in 2012. The Task Force even briefly considered adding to the domain confusion by advocating for the official creation of a human domain. For now, the official term is HAMO — the human aspects of military operations and the Services through the Joint Staff are drafting a Human Aspects of Military Operations concept. It is a challenging endeavor. Our general theories of war, from which to derive first principles for writing such a concept, inadequately account for the momentum of human interaction in the information age, and the effect it has on policy — the sine qua non of military action. Absent such a theory, from a practical standpoint it remains to be seen whether the HAMO concept can adequately inform the form and function of domain forces, given the fight over equities that any change will bring.
We desperately need an integrated theory of warfare that has information age-driven human behavior at its core and integrates the different domain power theories into a holism that integrates their effects to influence or control human behavior, in the full context of all elements of national power. Domain forces must still be required to be expert in the application of all domain power into their area, and will have a better understanding of how to do that to achieve policy outcomes, but a fuller appreciation of how all forces combine to effect each domain is required — and leaving it to the Services to make that happen will not work..
Yes, we still need a Navy! But the role of naval forces in exercising superiority in the maritime domain is likely to become more complex, as is true for all domain forces in their native domain. Maintaining maritime superiority increasingly requires more than the world’s best Navy. So to for the Army in its domain and the Air Force in its. The best domain forces in the world, must combine to achieve political outcomes in a dizzying array of missions. Our current theoretical body of work is inadequate to ensure that outcome as information age technology proliferates and simply blowing things ups solves fewer and fewer problems.
i. http://www.infowars.com/china-sinks-us-aircraft-carrier-during-war-game/
ii. Two recent articles on Barefoot Strategist highlight this point
https://medium.com/the-bridge/the-meme-of-land-powers-exceptional-discrimination-4230096339b8
https://medium.com/the-bridge/welcome-to-the-post-precision-world-47ded991e31a
iii. http://www.defenseinnovationmarketplace.mil/resources/JV2020_Capstone.pdf
iv. “Clausewitz might have been more flummoxed — as we were — by the challenge of conducting tactical engagements in a global glare of media scrutiny. I often wondered if the most important asymmetry between us and our adversaries was our penchant to use information operations to justify our actions, while our opponents used action to reinforce their information message.” David Fastabend, Books in Baghdad, https://www.rusi.org/events/past/ref:E473884C738FDC/info:public/infoID:E4852915CF2F3C/
