Counterforce

a response to deficiencies in US counterforce operations

The neglected pillar of theatre missile defence by Dennis M. Gormley and K. Scott McMahon.

Years after the 1990-1991 Gulf War ceasefire, the conflict's most prominent lessons arguably stem from Iraq's sustained Scud missile cam-paign against Israel and Saudi Arabia and the allied coalition's vain attempts to locate and destroy Iraq's missile launchers. Losing the Scud hunt, as the counterforce effort was known, had almost no military impact on the war. Politically, however, Iraq's continued missile strikes took their toll. Israel came close to intervention, an event that could have split the coalition at a decisive point in the war. And, as if to remind us of our vulnerability, an errant Scud struck the US barracks at Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, killing and wounding over 100 soldiers.

Today, the US maintains military superiority over any conceivable adversary, yet according to retired Gen. Buster Glosson, Desert Storm's chief air campaign planner, US counterforce capabilities are only marginally better than they were in 1991. Given the challenges of further proliferation, it is timely to examine the deficiencies in US counterforce operations and present an action plan to improve the targeting of mobile missiles.

The strategic context

The current slow rate of progress in counter-force is unacceptable. Iraq's use of modified Scud ballistic missiles and the continued pro-liferation of ground-mobile missiles as noted in Table 1, foreshadow more sophisticated means of future attack.

According to a 1994 estimate by the US Defence Intelligence Agency, there are approximately 8,800 short-range (50-500km) theatre ballistic missiles (TBM) in service in thirty-two countries and eight to ten new TBM types under development. Also by early in the next century, cruise missiles for precise attacks on land targets may eclipse their ballistic cousins as the delivery means of choice for rogue states. More than 70 countries now deploy approxi-mately 75,000 cruise missiles, most of which are designed to strike ships at sea.

However, as notionally depicted in Figure 1, relatively low cost and technically straightfor-ward modifications can convert anti-ship mis-siles for land-attack missions. When anti-ship missiles are combined with cheap guidance, navigation maps developed from commercial satellite imagery, defence penetration measures and improved propulsion systems, they present a stark reality: anti-ship cruise missiles trans-formed into precision land-attack models could emerge swiftly to threaten western interests.

Figure 1: Notional land-attack cruise missile converted from Chinese HY-4 antiship cruise missile

While delivery systems similar to the type depicted in Figure 2 diversify, so do warhead options. Fed by the dual-use technology marketplace, weapons of mass destruction ­ nuclear, biological and chemical (NBC) ­ are now real or highly pro-bable, even for countries with rudimentary economies. Shocking events of 1995 included the discovery of the advanced state of Iraq's biological weapon programme and the chemical arsenal secretly amassed and later used by a Japanese religious cult.

The C201W, a low altitude medium-long range coast-to-ship missile

The strategic consequences of NBC weapon and missile proliferation are profound. Rogue states armed with such weapons and with the stakes far higher for western nations than for their casualty-intolerant adversaries, means that western intervention would be problematic. The west could fall back on punitive deterrence- deterring NBC attacks by threatening nuclear retaliation (the US has renounced the use of chemical and biological arms). This appears to have convinced Saddam Hussein not to use his chemical or biological weapons in 1991.

Figure 2: Harpoon anti-ship cruise missile and launcher

But there are reasons to believe that future threats of nuclear retaliation will neither deter NBC strikes nor reassure regional allies sufficiently for them to permit western use of their bases while under the threat of NBC attack. Senior US military officers, for example, have de-clared that they would not condone nuclear retaliation under any circumstances, even if NBC weapons were used against the US. Although such comments are unofficial, when combined with a termination of nuclear testing and the virtual elimination of nuclear planning, it is apparent that nuclear deterrence is becoming an existential rather than a practical option.

As the credibility of punitive deterrence declines, deterrence through denial, deterring by demonstrating the capability to thwart an aggressor's attack, may be a more viable approach. But this places a heavy burden on western conventional forces, especially on theatre missile defences (TMD) that must protect intervention forces while also reassur-ing regional allies. It is within this strategic context that marginal US counterforce capa-bilities are unacceptable militarily and politically.

TMD'S four pillars

No single defensive tactic will provide effective protection against missile attacks. Acting on this notion, the US Joint Chiefs of Staff devel-oped a doctrine that identifies four pillars of the TMD mission. These are attack operations (or counterforce); active defence; passive defence; and command, control, communica-tions, computers and intelligence (C⁴I).

Each TMD pillar is critical to limiting and perhaps avoiding damage from missile strikes. Attack operations are conducted to destroy and dis-rupt missiles as well as their associated launch platforms and support infrastructure. Theatre missiles that launch successfully are attacked in TMD pillar two, active defence, when the defender's aim is to destroy cruise and ballistic missiles and their launch platforms as early as possible to preserve battle space. Well-known anti-missile systems such as the US Patriot would enter the conflict during this phase.

The goal of pillar three is to execute protective and post-attack recovery measures to minimise damage from missiles that penetrate the first and second pillars. Finally pillar four, C⁴I, pro-vides commanders with data and systems to plan, monitor, and direct overall TMD opera-tions. In addition to a multi-faceted approach, effective TMD requires early access to regional territory. Such access might not be granted unless the US is able to guarantee high levels of protection against NBC-armed missiles. Getting ground- and sea-based TMD into place is time-consuming. Establishing robust active defences will depend greatly on the effectiveness of quick-reacting counterforce strikes designed to eliminate an adversary's missile attacks or at least reduce them to negligible levels. The reaction time in the current approach to counterforce is too slow to furnish this kind of support.

History of the neglected pillar

The development of counterforce operations has been buffeted by evolving threats and changes in the international security environment. These factors have shifted the fortunes of attack operations within the US defence policy bureaucracy. US recognition of the leverage provided by TMD's attack operations pillar therefore has been slow.

US counterforce efforts began in earnest in the early 1980s. The Department of Defense (DOD) funded projects evaluating improved exploitation of intelligence assets to enhance targeting of Soviet TBMs. But this mission was overshadowed by the perceived need to boost NATO's conventional capabilities against growing Warsaw Pact manoeuvre forces.

	The C601

President Reagan's Strategic Defence Initiative announced in 1983, raised awareness of the TBM threat. Attention to the counterforce approach increased accordingly and was heightened further by the determination that new, conventionally armed Soviet TBMs in conjunction with Soviet air attacks, could cripple NATO airfields.

The Warsaw Pact's collapse and Iraq's invasion of Kuwait in 1990, radically changed the strategic and operational context for DOD's counterforce programmes. The urgent need to make dramatic advances in targeting Soviet manoeuvre forces declined. Meanwhile Desert Storm showed that the US could not prosecute the Scud hunt effectively while relying on a targeting system designed to attack manoeuvre units and air defences. The Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) responded with a new programme dubbed War Breaker, to address the Scud hunt's deficiencies in sensors, weapons and information processing. But despite the Soviet bloc's demise, War Breaker was soon expanded to include targets such as manoeuvre forces and air defences that, unlike mobile missiles, had not given Gulf-War planners any particular targeting difficulties. Bureaucratic necessity probably accounted for War Breaker's dispersed focus. Because of its original focus of targeting mobile missiles, War Breaker risked being taken over by the Pentagon's Ballistic Missile Defense Organisation, the manager of former strategic defence initiative programmes. So by expanding the project to cover a variety of time-critical targets, DARPA could tout War Breaker as a traditional, high-technology project aimed at generic theatre-targeting challenges. An expanded focus also facilitated DARPA's search for customers within the military services. Given interservice friction over TMD roles and missions, DARPA probably found it easier to gain support by broadening the programme and spinning off pieces of technology to fit each military service's idiosyncratic approach to targeting.

Whether changing threats or bureaucratic politics has had most impact on DOD counterforce programmes is less important than the result of these influences. Addressing deficiencies in attack operations against mobile missiles is no longer viewed with the same urgency that it was immediately after the 1991 Gulf War. This development comes despite the fact that the 1994 US joint doctrine on TMD calls attack operations the preferred method of countering enemy mobile missiles. Preferred or not, future counterforce improvements will depend on two factors: competition with other TMD pillars for resources, and interservice friction over TMD roles and missions.

Competing pillars and service rivalries

Some US officials have charged that the Penta-gon favours active missile defence and that this bias is a hold-over from the strategic defence initiative project. The latter concen-trated exclusively on active defences primarily to combat strategic missile threats.

The US focus on active defences has led the country to fund this pillar far more generously than the rest. For instance, according to one official account, 63 per cent of the entire DOD counter-proliferation investment for the fiscal year 1996 was devoted to research and development of active missile defences. The same report found that when all executive branch counter-proliferation activities were tallied, programmes that focused on counter-force operations against mobile missiles in particular were funded at less than eight percent of the level for active missile defences. Hence the bulk of US effort is devoted to TMD systems such as the Patriot, THAAD, and the navy's upper and lower tiers that shoot at attack-ing missiles relatively late in their operational lives.

Some might argue that resource priorities among the various TMD pillars should be adjusted. This may be the case but service infighting has been the single greatest impediment to the development of an effective attack operations capability.

For some time the US military services have been engaged in a battle over roles and missions and how best ­ organisationally and doctrinally ­ they might fight the counterforce war. As defence budgets shrink, the military services have fought to preserve core capabilities, in-cluding doctrine, missions and organisational formations. Given the importance of TMD in the aftermath of the Gulf War and its relatively robust spending profiles compared with other mission areas, the services have competed to shape how TMD, and thus attack operations, fits into a post-cold war war-fighting scheme.

The US Navy has devoted the bulk of its TMD resources to adding an anti-missile capability to its formidable air-defence capabilities. This has been evident in the utilisation of Aegis cruisers equipped with SPY-1 radars as the heart of the navy's upper and lower tiers. Because naval assets could arrive first in a regional contin-gency, this concentration on active defence would seem prudent. However, navy strike assets ­ based primarily on unguided ordnance delivered by manned aircraft ­ will not generate significant pre-launch attrition. This leaves active defences vulnerable to saturation.

The navy could bolster its active defences by pursuing a mobile target-seeking capability for its Tomahawk land-attack cruise missiles and/or developing a sea-launched variant of the army's ATACMS ballistic missile system, but to date these counterforce options have received limited attention. Thus the navy largely has ceded the attack operations pillar to the air force and the army.

The air force-army debate over counterforce boils down to the US Air Force's one-size-fits-all doctrinal mentality versus the US Army's call for a dedicated approach to finding and attacking mobile missiles. Parochial interests colour both approaches.

	The C601 being carried on the B6D aircraft

Generally, the US Air Force views TMD as a natural extension of its air defence mission. Like aircraft, cruise and ballistic missiles are fly-ing objects that require intense air co-ordina-tion. Like manoeuvre units on the ground, mobile missile launchers are one among many time-critical ground targets against which reconnaissance and attack resources must be allocated. Following the precept that unity of effort is achieved by unity of command, the US Air Force sees its joint forces air component commander (JFACC) as the proper venue for co-ordinating all target acquisition and force allocation decisions. This was the case during the Gulf War.

Following the war, the air force has striven to enhance attack operations largely by upgrad-ing manned aircraft and C⁴I functions. These improvements are designed to accelerate the cycle time for reconnaissance, target acquisition and strike processes for all targets, including mobile missiles. Indeed, the air force's watch-word in the counterforce debate has been flexibility, reflecting its preference for making manned platforms as effective as possible against an array of targets, all of which are approximately equal in importance, while admitting that target values change as a func-tion of time and objectives. The call for flexi-bility thus translates into a fixation on aircraft platforms with non-optimised weapons that require a man in the loop no matter how dif-ferent or strategically important a particular target might be.

By contrast the US Army sees the TMD battle as a distinct mission area with its own target set and command relationships. Because army planners believe that troops are prime targets for missile attacks, they argue that the land component commander should have authority to play a major role in TMD planning and exe-cution. Toward that end, US Army officials have floated the idea of a missile defence inte-grator who would be assigned by the joint forces commander to oversee the TMD tasks that the US Air Force believes should be JFACC prerogatives. According to one US Army offi-cial a missile battle operates on a different timescale to an air battle. As a missile defence battle occupies an entire theatre and because of the range and consequences of the weapons used, it can make or break a theatre comman-der-in-chief's (CINC) campaign.

Figure 3:Teledyne Ryan's Tier II+ unmanned air vehicle for theatre missile defence

Not unexpectedly, the US Army's position reflects in part its own parochial interests. It is not clear, as the US Army argues, that adver-sary missiles threaten land troops any more than other critical targets such as airfields, ports and logistics centres and of course cities of regional allies and the very foundation of coalition formation. However, the US Army is correct in arguing that, fundamentally, a mis-sile battle stands apart from other warfighting requirements and thus demands a more focused approach than that of the US Air Force.

Revitalising counterforce

Fixing the west's shortcomings in attack operations does not demand significant new invest-ments in technology programmes. Although perhaps a more disciplined technology effort is required, the challenge of targeting mobile missiles is less a matter of resources than one of organisational and political change. To suggest the broad outlines of an approach to improvements, we offer recommendations that fall into three interrelated dimensions: military-technical, military-organisational, and allied planning.

The military-technical dimension of counter-force is shaped by the spread of NBC weapons and missiles to potential aggressors and by the tempo of modern missile operations. Once again the Desert Storm experience is instruc-tive. During a typical night only a fraction of Iraq's Scud launchers were exposed after firing their missiles and so were susceptible to detec-tion and attack. But in future conflicts allied forces will have to strike before launch, a more daunting challenge.

Pre-launch attack operations will benefit immensely from the achievement of what Admiral William Owens, former Vice Chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, has called compre-hensive battlefield awareness. That is a near real-time picture of hostile and friendly force order of battle, operations, and combat envi-ronment. To support Owens' vision, DOD and the military services are investing in technolo-gies for so-called automated intelligence preparation of the battlefield. This effort will provide usable intelligence on the locations and readiness of adversary missile launchers.

Achieving comprehensive battlefield awareness also demands a seamless connection between peacetime, crisis and wartime intelligence collection and analysis. It assumes related improvements in intelligence data fusion, exploitation and communications.

Regarding data fusion and exploitation, DOD has already demonstrated significant progress in automated facility monitoring and terrain analysis, but much more needs to be accom-plished in on-going advanced technology pro-grammes. As for communications, the global commercial grid should be exploited. Currently the grid supports US military requirements in peace and war, but the system's ex-tremely high data rates and potential for worldwide military connectivity at all organisational levels portend revolutionary communications advances. The grid should be used imaginatively to enable new command-and-control arrangements, organisations (decen-tralised and distributed for survivability), and operational concepts, as well as radical increases in the combat potential of individual platforms.

Perhaps most critical for achieving comprehen-sive battlefield awareness, particularly in light of the brief exposure times of mobile missiles, are new means of continuous, wide-area sur-veillance of mobile missile operating and con-cealment areas. High-altitude, long-endurance unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) of the type depicted in Figure 3 will use greatly improved moving-target imaging and foliage penetra-tion sensors with advanced target recognition software for target identification. They offer near-term potential for continuous surveillance of operating areas for high-priority targets.

Over the long term UAVs should be considered as furnishing robust, affordable, combined reconnaissance and strike capabilities over appropriately long ranges. To counter mobile missiles during a crisis, UAVs could reach a theatre in a fraction of the time required to deploy other TMD pillars.

	The C301, a supersonic, long range and very low altitude coast-to-ship missile

Technical advances alone will not improve western attack operations against mobile mis-siles. The military-organisational dimension of counterforce must be revamped also. The diversity of threats and shrinking defence budgets compel military planners to explore new ways of employing forces through organisational change. Increasingly planners must draw on special capabilities, regardless of service ownership, to enhance force effectiveness. This has led Admiral Owens to call for the creation of adaptive joint-force packages to counter unique threats faced by regional CINCs. Such counter-measures are being examined, for example NATO is considering a UAV force dedicated to monitoring mobile SAMs, tracking them when they move and then designating them as tar-gets once they turn on their radars.

Joint force packages also can be tailored to theatres. Some may require only a few dedi-cated UAVs, linked for example to internetted ground sensors, special operations forces and fast-reacting weapon systems. Other theatres, because of size or terrain differences, may demand quite different combinations of sensors and forces. But organisational and operational changes are most important. To execute attack operations successfully, joint force planners must begin to emulate the US Navy's conduct of anti-submarine warfare: internetted forces providing continuous, long-duration surveil-lance and strike capability over a wide area.

Planning among western allies is the final counterforce dimension requiring improvement. A dedicated approach to targeting mobile missiles will require detailed allied planning and intense peacetime practice. It will foster opportunities for collaboration with regional allies and possible coalition partners also. Allied discussions should be initiated to determine how active defences such as Patriot and THAAD would be introduced in a region while allies and active defences are protected by a robust counterforce component.

A revitalised approach to mobile missile tar-geting will help protect western interests and buttress regional stability. Joint-force packages aimed at mobile missiles boost deterrence of adversary missile strikes because aggressors no longer will be able to count on firing the first shot. Aggressors also will face the prospect of their NBC warheads detonating on their own, rather than allied, territory. In this new environment, the credibility of rogue state blackmail threats surely will decline.

The west's rapid deployment of mobile missile countermeasures during a crisis will hearten regional allies. Also it will establish a protective cover for coalition building and full TMD deployment that are critical elements of crisis intervention. Allied reassurance will be bol-stered further because the US by its actions ­ backed by tangible capabilities ­ will be seen as accepting the mutual risks of facing jointly NBC-armed adversaries.

This is a revised and updated version of an article that appeared in the May 1996 issue of Jane's International Defence Review.