The History Of Ring Warfare
Well looks like I can't change your mind but maybe Walt can. Walt Disney Movie explaining the theory of Ring Warfare and how to win using Airpower.
Links to the Disney Classic from 1942 "Victory Through Airpower"
Part 7,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Zxof...eature=related
Part 8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zlr_H...eature=related
Part 9
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KfaFk...eature=related
Part 10
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IuVkY...eature=related
Enjoy your trip.
How do you know what the key nodes of the 5 rings are without troops on the ground!
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Originally Posted by
Marc
This thread is difficult. the conversation about the validity and applicability of a strategy keeps evolving into a sterile discussion between believers and non-believers. To improve the exchange of ideas, I propose a mental war game.
- We fast-forward the American Revolution War into the future. The thirteen colonies are under British rule in 2011.
- Everything on the ground (weapons, tactics, vehicles,...) remains the same.
- The British Crown receives five aircraft carriers, a manual on the application of the Five-Ring Strategy and John Ashley Warden III himself to lead the British forces at Her Majesty's service.
- The use of the aircraft carriers would double the monthly burden of the war effort, but only for the duration of the war.
My question is the following: under these circumstances, would the British forces win the War of American Revolution and keep the thirteen colonies under British rule?
Not a legitimate scenario because views of what is acceptable vary depending on who employs the air/seapower.
If the colonists hugged populations, hid in the woods, used anti-ship ballistic missiles and diesel electric subs that waited for carriers to come to them, and hidden mobile radar air defense systems that engaged carrier aircraft and then shut down radars and repositioned...game on for the colonists. Plus, a more evolved colonist would simply move more inland with his leaders, processes, populations, infrastructure, and land-based aircraft and TBM...thus outdistancing carrier attacks.
Don't forget jamming GPS, attack of satellites, and an EMP attack of Hawaii, Guam, and Alaska...err I mean Britain and Canada. Lots of inflatable decoys out in the open will be sure to waste multiple bombs, followed up by air defense ambushes.
If the air/seapower didn't care about the population and bombed cities, infrastructure, and processes into oblivion, and bombed houses of perceived leaders killing their families (but not the leaders)...the British probably win. But the U.S. would never do that today, or would they per Warden's methodology? Russia appears to have leveled much of Chechnya to suppress that revolution. Gulbuddin Hekmatyr shelled Kabul and Russian bombers killed 24,000 in Herat early in the war. Did any of these methods solve the undlerlying problem and is the leader and his colonist lead followers still in power?
Would the colonists become meek, passive zombies following this slaughter...or increase their resolve and guerilla activities, not to mention terror attacks in Britain?
The bottom line Warden seems to miss, is it is virtually impossible to understand the ASCOPE and PMESII (whatever it is) operational environment without troops on the ground to report and attempt to understand those conditions. In addition, following the precision attacks, the underlying tensions remain and are aggravated by the need to rebuild...not a condition likely to endear colonists to the "homeland."
Plus cannot believe that any CoG analysis would ignore the intrinsic value of attacking key targets of the adversary's military! In a China scenario, for instance, air-to-air becomes largely irrelevant if you succeed in repeatedly attacking runways and airbases killing the enemy's aircraft and related logistics on the ground rather than in the air. Isn't that a 5 rings approach, largely ignored in the emotional desire to fight the white scarf war? Plus those attacks of airfields do not have to occur using fighters or manned aircraft. The enemy obviously can use the same methodology to destroy our few land-based airfields for fighters in a place like the Pacific where they are far and few between and well within range of TBM and ASBM.
Cuius regio, eius religio.
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Originally Posted by
slapout9
Marc, I am really confused now. I read the article when it was first published and I just reread it again. I don't see anything new in fact didn't the Holy Roman Church operate in a similar fashion? The church operated the public welfare system and they certainly did a lot of preaching but they also had a military arm to keep the kings in check if need be.
It is not my point that a religion running a welfare system is something new. My point is that strategists have to take political restrictions into account (wether new or age-old). ALL power systems have political restrictions to worry about.
Autocrats derive their power from the barrel of a gun, so they face the political constraint of coup-proofing to avoid that barrel being pointed at themselves, at the price of military effectiveness.
Democrats derive their power from the consent of the governed, so they face the political constraint of fighting within the bounderies set by elections, opinion polls, lawyers, and pressure groups, at the price of military sustainability.
Islamists derive their power from the obidience of the faithful, so they face the political constraint of consistency to avoid alienating people from their faith, at the price of military applicability.
Your analogy with the Holy Roman Church is correct. Like the Islamic duty zakat, Christians have the duty to help the poor, resulting in a welfare system that advances the obidience of the faithful. Throughout history, this obedience has allowed the church to mobilize against "the further enemy" (the crusades against Muslims in the Holy Land for instance) BUT NOT (and that is the point) against the "nearer enemy". When the renaissance popes tried to mobilize the faithful in an effort to further their worldly power in the Italian political chaos, they lost all credibility in the eyes of the faithful and sparked a christian revolution headed by Martin Luther and the protestants. Similarly, Islamists can easily mobilize Muslims to fight against the west, but they have difficulty to mobilize the faithful against Muslim autocrats. Muslim autocrats exploit this Islamist political constraint.
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Over decades, the relatively moderate governments of Egypt and Jordan developed a delicate social, political, legal, military, and law enforcement apparatus to keep Islamist militant organizations in check. Conceptually, it takes the form of an arsenal of mutually reinforcing population control measures, and its focus is on the da’wa infrastructure, not on the jihadi operatives. The apparatus’s most important capabilities are to co-opt (parts of) Islamist militant organizations, to subject their da’wa activities to registration and licensing, to control their fund raising, to provide permanent surveillance of their cadres, and to intervene decisively when this surveillance detects preparations for a jihadi campaign.
A similar thing happened in Europe. After the renaissance popes and the protestant revolution headed by Martin Luther, a bloody thirty year war erupted in Germany. This war resulted in the treaty of Westphalia which is still the foundation of the current nation-state world political system. One of the pillars of this system was the principle "cuius regio, eius religio" in which each prince would have the right to determine the religion of his own state, the options being Catholicism, Lutheranism, and Calvinism. The power of this system is that the prince and the clergy can mobilize the faithful to fight a "further enemy", but that no priest or bisshop can mobilize the faithful against the prince.
Successful attack from the sea, and 3 B-2s...so why do we need a big USAF?;)
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The Media gets a vote. Warden doens't include this at all in his theory and assumes that you can conduct your application of effects in a vacuum of broader scrutiny and political context. The Colonists will play the "underdog card" and ensure that the British are portrayed in the media as evil, jackbooted nazis because they are DELIBERATELY ignoring your military forces and conducting political assassination and brutal destruction of your civil infrastructure. Buy the PLO playbook and add Christien Amanpour and Anderson Cooper to speed dial. Play up that "good guys" use their military to attack the other guys military ONLY and that means there can be on other characterization of the British other than EVIL.
An example of what you described occurred during the recent Northern Waziristan attack that killed 40 with unmanned aircraft missiles. The Pakistanis promptly halt talks with the U.S., saying it was a meeting to discuss chromite mining between elders and Taliban. Unspoken was that the Taliban were attempting to tax the mining operation to gain funds for Afghan combat operations.
So in theory, it may have been a legitimate target, however, the elders representing the mining operation were no doubt under pressure to give up funds to the "good Taliban"...or else. This is a classic example where aerial ISR alone, and SOF/CIA operations alone are insufficient to gain the total picture. Innocent or CLAIMED innocents are brought into many an aerial attack situation if insufficient aerial ISR is all that is available without a parallel context of ground forces fusing their information with that of the UAS operator.
To counter Slapout's point that SOF/CIA/JTACs are sufficient, Bin Laden was able to escape because we had so few troops on the ground that even when calls came to reinforce the Tora Bora area, those ground forces were not available. Even with ample ground forces in Afghanistan and Iraq, it was not until the surge that we were fully able to cover all affected areas and threats. Small teams are insufficient when the insurgent can simply move elsewhere.
Today we see the successful use of cruise missiles and three B-2 bombers to attack air defenses and airfields. So why do we need a huge USAF when we have these asymmetric capabilities...and no place to launch lots of fighters and tankers from near China outside TBM range?
In addition, we see Admiral Mullen saying that Qaddafi's overthrow is not the objective. So guess my question is how is this different than the last Northern Watch/Southern Watch that lasted a decade without ousting Hussein or suppressing ground operations?
A parting olive branch...
Warden's theory at its root is about improving the use of CoGs and a systems thinking framework to make military operations shorter, more efficient and more effective. It assumes that faster more parallel operations are "better". Reducing the unknown (both known and unknown) is assumed to be a key enabler of the attaining the understanding of the enemy system required to do this. Working back systematically from a singular desired endstate is the strategic method.
There are circumstances where this is the preferred approach. In these situations "airpower" is the supported arm.
Army COIN and Design-inspired theory (and much of USMC "Distributed operations" theory) is about accepting that there will never be enough information to "solve" the military problems associated with irregular and hybrid warfare - or even fully understand the nature of the problems you are trying to solve until you "grab the tarbaby". You are stuck engaging in a serial "probing' of the system you are trying to understand/affect along a number of lines of operation that are iterative, heuristic, and unpredictable in their outcome. Evolving solutions over time to favorable shape a wide potential set of endstates is the strategic method
There are circumstances where this is the preferred problem approach. In these circumstances "landpower" is the supported arm.
The Navy is off being "The "Global Force for Good" and is happy to be a resource provider in support of either one :rolleyes:
Would Warden support that construct and a "why can't we all just get along" approach and accept that the two approaches have their preferred problem sets, both are necessary but insufficient to address the complete range of possible military operations and need to be integrated rather than in competition? (which is oh by the way basically what the Joint Operating Concept series describe).