Testimony
Restoring the Power Projection Capabilities
of the U.S. Armed Forces
David Ochmanek
CT-464
Testimony presented before the Committee on Armed Services on February 16, 2017.
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randRestoring the Power Projection Capabilities of the U.S. Armed Forces
Testimony of David Ochmanek1
The RAND Corporation2
Before the Committee on Armed Services
United States Senate
February 16, 2017
ood morning, Chairman McCain, Ranking Member Reed, members of the committee,
and staff. I appreciate the opportunity to share insights that my colleagues and I have
gained from more than a decade of analyzing emerging threats to U.S. military
operations. Our work has revealed some serious and growing gaps in the capabilities of U.S.
forces, raising questions about their ability to accomplish the strategically important mission of
deterring and defeating aggression by adversary states. I therefore applaud the committee’s
efforts to focus attention on how the Department of Defense (DoD) can best act to reverse the
deterioration in the military balance of power in key regions.
The security environment in which U.S. forces operate and for which they must prepare is, in
important ways, more complex and more demanding than the one that DoD has used to build and
evaluate today’s force. To be clear:
to deter large-scale aggression against the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).
needed to meet the manifold challenges posed by China’s rapidly modernizing armed
forces.
potentially, Iran poses challenges for which we do not have satisfactory answers.
As these threats have emerged and our forces have carried on a multifaceted campaign
against Salafist-jihadi forces in several locales, the nation has not committed the resources called
1 The opinions and conclusions expressed in this testimony are the author’s alone and should not be interpreted as
representing those of the RAND Corporation or any of the sponsors of its research.
2 The RAND Corporation is a research organization that develops solutions to public policy challenges to help make
communities throughout the world safer and more secure, healthier and more prosperous. RAND is nonprofit,
nonpartisan, and committed to the public interest.
Gfor to build and sustain the capabilities that our forces need to succeed in this more demanding
environment. As a result, the United States now fields forces that are simultaneously
component units.
Put more starkly, our wargames and simulations suggest that U.S. forces could, under
plausible assumptions, lose the next war they are called upon to fight.3
Of course, DoD has not been idle in the face of these developments. The defense
development community, the services, and industry are generating new ideas, technologies, and
operating concepts that offer real promise for countering the threats that are the cause for greatest
concern. For the remainder of this testimony, I would like to highlight a few of these new
approaches and show how they can enable a robust defense in the face of emerging challenges.
One of the most vexing problems facing power projection operations stems from the
proliferation of accurate, long-range strike systems—ballistic and cruise missiles. Our land and
sea bases today are exposed to attack as never before.
There is no single, “silver bullet” solution to these threats. Hunting down mobile missiles
deployed deep in enemy territory is not a promising solution. Currently available ballistic missile
defense systems are expensive and can be overwhelmed by modest-sized missile salvos. But
wargaming shows that a number of complementary efforts can significantly increase the
resiliency of forward bases and allow them to generate sustained combat power even in the face
of repeated attacks. Chief among these are
cost shelters, moving them frequently, and using decoys and deception measures
as positioning rapid runway repair materials and fuel bladders at each base and reducing
the vulnerability of key nodes, such as fuel pumping facilities.
Analysis also shows the value of active defenses against cruise missile attacks. The Army’s
new short-range air defense system, IFPC-2, seems particularly well suited to defeating even
sizable salvos of cruise missiles.
Another part of the answer to the vulnerability of forward bases is to rely more heavily on
platforms that can fight either from afar (long-range bombers) or from sanctuary (submerged
submarines). In wargames, U.S. bombers—B-52s, B-1s, and B-2s—often operate relatively
3 For a succinct assessment of the military balance between Russia and NATO and the prospects for a defense of the
Baltics, see David A. Shlapak and Michael W. Johnson,
Reinforcing Deterrence on NATO’s Eastern Flank
, Santa
Monica, Calif.: RAND Corporation, RR-1253-A, 2016. For an assessment of trends in China’s armed forces and
their implications for U.S. defense strategy and planning, see David Ochmanek,
Sustaining U.S. Leadership in the
Asia-Pacific Region,
Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND Corporation, PE-142-OSD, 2015.unscathed by missile attacks but fail to make decisive contributions to defense because they run
out of munitions that they can survivably deliver. U.S. forces could get much more capability
from the bomber fleet by greatly expanding inventories of weapons like the Joint Air-to-Surface
Standoff Missile–Extended Range (JASSM-ER) and miniature air-launched decoy (MALD)
cruise missiles and by accelerating the development of new weapons, such as antiship cruise
missiles and swarming unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), that can be delivered by our bombers.
Similarly, the Virginia-class submarine has unparalleled stealth capabilities and can fight
from areas off the coast of adversary nations, but it has limited weapons carrying capacity. The
Virginia Payload Module modification boosts this capacity. Other promising concepts for
affordable delivery of payloads from undersea are being developed, such as unmanned
underwater vehicles.
A second priority for the force is to find more robust ways to rapidly detect, track, and attack
key military targets—the enemy’s operational centers of gravity, if you will—in contested areas
from the outset of a campaign. What do I mean by this Traditionally, U.S. forces open military
campaigns by first establishing freedom of maneuver in the air, at sea, and on land. Once the
enemy’s air defenses have been suppressed, for example, our air forces are free to observe and
attack other targets—the enemy’s ground forces, naval forces, command and control centers—
more or less at will. This approach has been central to the success of U.S. military operations
since World War II.
Russia and China are fielding air defen