Report on U.S. Military Power 2012 (18)

Chapter Four New Development in Operational Doctrines

In 2012, the U.S. military keeps on developing and enriching operational theories. Apart from furthering studies on existing concepts such as the Air-Sea Battle, DoD released new operational concepts and doctrines by publishing new documents such as "Joint Operational Access Concept: Gaining and Maintaining Access", "Capstone Concept for Joint Operations: Joint Force 2020", "Counter-IED Operations, Joint and National Intelligence Support to Military Operations", and "U.S. Army Social Media Handbook".

I. New Developments in the Air-Sea Battle Concept

On January 17th, 2012, the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessment published "Outside-In: Operating from Range to Defeat Iran’s Anti-Access and Area-Denial Threats". According to the report, Iran poses a unique A2/AD threat to the U.S.. The U.S. Armed Forces would pay a high cost if they responded to the threat with the present posture. They should give up the Cold-War approach of force projection from nearby bases; instead, they should conduct long-distance operations to deal with Iran’s threats.

On February 20th, General Norton Schwartz, Chief of Staff of the U.S. Air Force, and Admiral Jonathan Greenert, Chief of Naval Operations. co-authored an article entitled “Air-Sea Battle: Promoting Stability in an Era of Uncertainty“ in The American Interest , the first time when high-ranking U.S. officers expressed their opinions on the concept. The article states that the Air-Sea Battle is “networked, integrated attack-in-depth“ and is used to pursue three lines of effort to disrupt, destroy and defeat adversary A2/AD capabilities.

On April 19th, 2012, the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessment published a report entitled "Changing the Game: the Promise of Directed-Energy Weapons", calling DoD to change the current budget priorities in order to step up the R&D of directed-energy weapons, improve combat effectiveness of new operational concepts such as “Air-Sea Battle“, promote service integration, and facilitate the shift from a resource-intensive development approach to a technology-intensive one. The report argued that only by a change of current budget priorities could the U.S fend off A2/AD threats and maintain the generation gap between the U.S. and other countries in terms of military technologies.

In addition, think tanks such as RAND, CSIS, Institute for Defense Analyses, and Center for Naval Analyses, and scholars such as Mark Schantz, Philip Davidson, and Randy Forbes are also actively engaged in furthering the concept of "Air-Sea Battle".

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