LANDPOWER, SEAPOWER, AIRPOWER, SPACEPOWER

 

(Article based on a post made on Linked In a few days ago.)

The Ukrainian War was revealing and doctrine-changing, especially on the limits of the use of armored land forces and airborne power. Airpower was already the key to understand modern warfare in the XXth century. It is now even more so, but with a twist.

Combined with satellite imagery, hypersonic missiles, and remotelly-controlled flying platforms, it has now become so powerful that it turned that Ukrainian conflict, obviously planned to be a commando-style, World War 2-like fast blitzkrieg, into a World War 1-like long static conflict, with soldiers hiding most of the time in trenches, because all the open areas around the frontline, in the air, but also at sea, under the sea and in space, have been turned into killing grounds and death-traps.

Since it is not possible to conquer (as opposed to destroy) an inhabited land with drones, bombers, ships, ballistic missiles and spacecraft, it may become necessary, going forward, to distinguished between fluid-kinetic war and land-combat war, the first one always preceding the second one, and not the contrary, like what happened in Ukraine.

In the Pacific War, from Pearl Harbor to Hiroshima, no Japanese-held island was assaulted before being thoroughly "softened up", usually forquite a long period, with ship-borne guns and plane-borne bombs. Then, and only then, where the Marines allowed to land, in order to finish the job as quickly as possible. It was the most efficient way to do it

Because no civil population exist underwater, in the air, on the water or in space, but only on land, something similar has to be envisioned here. Military installations and ships, then, are to be destroyed (or rendered inoperative) first, wherever they may be, in space, underwater, on the water, in the air, on the ground, until such time as the opponent become powerless and unable to prevent the population centers to be occupied.

For all his personal faults and failings, Trump was on to something with the creation of the U.S. Space Force, and its necessary corollary, the U.S. Space Command. In a sense, he was simply following a well-established trail. At the start of the United States, the American armed forces were organized in two main branches: a land-based one (U.S. Army), the most important one, at the time, and a sea-based one (U.S. Navy), now the most important one, since the possibility of a Chinese landing, Normandy-like, in South California (or in Long Island or Florida, for that matter) is of course non-existent.

After a while, another reorganization of the American armed forces became gradually necessary, with the slow development of airpower. The U.S. Air Force was created after World War 2 by simply separating airpower assets from the U.S. Army in order to create another branch, the USAF. Trump did exactly the same thing, separating space military assets from the U.S. Air Force and regrouping them under the umbrella of the U.S. Space force, under the authority of the U.S. Space Command. The fact that the U.S. Air Force's military academy is located in Colorado Springs, in the Blue State of Colorado, may possibly explain why the United States Space Command was first based in that State, before being moved to a Trumpian State, that is to say to Alabama.

Airpower is not new, of course. It was already a very important factor in WW2, after having been useful in WW1 and even earlier, at the time of the U.S. Civil War (observation balloons). What's new, these days, are the possibilities that exist now, and that were only embryonic at the time of the Second World War and in the following decades. The German A-4 (V2) is the direct ancestor of the hypersonic missile, while Peenemunde is the progenitor of today's spaceports, public or private. The new hypersonic missiles, moving much more fast than the sound can travel through air, a gaseous environment, and also able to change directions in midflight, are a good exemple of military weapons that simply didn't existed ten of fifteen years ago.

The atmosphere, the water and the void all have something in common: they are fluid or semi-fluid open spaces where objects, manned or unmanned, can travel fast, unobstructed, and can be used as tools of warfare. Those objects may be inhabited, and used as air vehicles, sea vehicles, undersea vehicles or space vehicles. They may also be uninhabited, and used as projectiles, or as combat platforms able to shoot projectiles at targets, those platforms being either manned, robots (self-controlled) or drones (remotely-controlled).

The start of human activities outside the atmosphere, first for prestige reasons (in the first space race, from Sputnik to Apollo), then for economic rationale, as in the present space race to occupy other natural bodies in the Solar System, including the ones that are easier to reach, the Moon and Mars, and exploit their resources, has a bearing on the way military activites have to be conceived, and also on the manner in which space must be used in case where political relations that exist between space-faring nations and alliance of nations start to degenerate into military confrontations.

• World War One was essentially a one-level chess game, fought mainly at ground level, either on land or at sea, underlining the well-known difference existing since ancient times between landpower and seapower.
• World War Two was a two-level chess game: fought both at ground level and in the sky, defining the apparition of a third kind of military power: airpower.
• World War Three, if it ever happen, in the shape of a direct, open, military conflict between countries being at a similar technological stage, will be a three-level chess-game, a much more complex, intricate, and dangerous exercise, being fought at different levels, whether at the same time or successively: 1) at ground-level (landpower and seapower), 2) at atmospheric level (airpower), and 3) in the vastness existing above and beyond the atmospheric level, defining the apparition of a fourth kind of military power: spacepower.

The Russian Federation made a grave mistake, underestimating the ability of Ukraine to resist a ground, sea and air invasion attempt, for more than a few weeks or months, making it possible for that country to receive the help of important allies, some of them having access to spacepower assets (especially in the form of military satellites), that is to say the United States, the United Kingdom and France, three Western powers that are members of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and also of the Security Council of the United Nations.

Because of this great miscalculation, the Ukrainian War became thus a multi-years conflict, branching gradually into other theaters of war, over the course of the followwing years, because of the loose political and economic links between Ukraine and Western countries, and also because of the even looser political and economic links then existing between Russia and other powerful Eurasian powers, namely China, North Korea, India, and Iran. All those countries, the Western ones and the Eurasian ones, were (and are still now being) slowly drawn into the Ukrainian vortex, like dust into a vacuum machine or ships into a deadly Maelstrom.

Now that Ukrainian conflict, starting first through a localized conflict in 2014, then morphing into a larger, open war between two independant countries in 2022, is inadvertently morphing again into a global conflict, with overt and covert dimensions, with combats and killings taking place all over the planet:

• in the Middle East (in Gaza, Israel, Lebanon, Syria, Iran, Yemen, etc.),
• in the South Caucasus (between Armenia and Azebaijan),
• in Africa (between opposing factions of the military governement of Sudan),
• in Myanmar (between US-backed forces and China-backed forces),
• in Kashmir (probably as an offshoot of the Gaza War),
• in Southeast Asia (between Thailand and Cambodia),
• in Latin America (apparently as a disguised way to intimidate Venezuela).

It all boils down to an important point: first-level combat between independant countries, equiped with regular armed forces, on the ground and at sea, must come only at the very last stage of an open war, when the adversary is down and out, ready to be conquered and occupied. The conflict must first be won at the second-level and, even more, at the third-level of the global three-dimensional Go board where countries are geopolitically located, all over the Solar System, with military assets on the first-level, on the second-level and (increasingly) on the-third level.

On that third-level, one can already found military satellites, but also space stations, large inhabited vehicles that can be used for all kinds of purposes, both of a civilian and of a military nature. It is simply inevitable that, one day, in a few decades at most, non-terrestrial national bases will be located, outside of the Earth gravitational field, whether in orbit around other celestial bodies or on the surface of those bodies. Those bases will be pawns (and cannot be anything but pawns) in the interplay existing between different States, acting alone or in groups.

The lessons of the Ukrainian War are still being learned all over the world and conclusions are being reached about it, conclusions that would be the departure point of political decisions and economic investments, as soon as the present global conflict finally cease and things start going back to a new normality, a normality that will be very different from the preceding one.

https://defence-blog.com/china-moves-away-from-heavy-tank-armadas/