I would like to thank my faculty advisor, Dr. Vardell Nesmith who gave me invaluableinsights and assisted me in narrowing my research to focus on a critical area that must be addressed in future warfare. I extend my gratitude to the staff of the Joint Forces Staff College Library for their assistance with my research efforts. Additionally, I would like to thank BG Joseph E. Martz, USA, COL Raymond L. Lamb, USA, COL Charles W. Hooper, USA and LTC Jeffrey Peterson, USA for providing me with a framework for conducting my research and helping me focus on a topic that is beginning to grow roots within the Army.
Finally, I would like to thank my fiancée, Charmain, for supporting me during this difficult journey and encouraging me to stay focused on the endstate.
“We are egregiously mistaking, if we....should [not] be well informed of the nature of the country, the abilities of the general to whom we are opposed, the situation of his magazines, the towns that are most convenient to him, those from which he draws his forage, and when these various circumstances are well combined together, the plan is to be formed and maturelydigested.” (Fredrick, 1757, 17)
Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld entered office in January 2001, with the mandate to transform the Department of Defense (DOD) during his tenure by restructuring organizations and adopting new operational concepts that would exploit modern technological advances. Since the early 1990s, the Armed Forces have been experimenting with an approach to planning, executing and assessing military operations with an explicit focus on effects as opposed to targets or even objectives–this concept is known as effects-based operations (EBO). Admiral Arthur K. Cebrowski, Director of the Office of Force Transformation, said “as demonstrated by the superb performance of U.S. forces during recent combat operations, we are on course to transform our military into an agile, network-centric, knowledge-based force capable of conducting effective joint and combined military operations against all future adversaries.” (Cebrowski, 2003, 1)
The attacks of September 11, 2001 and the resulting combat operations in Afghanistan and Iraq compelled the Armed Forces to thoroughly review and revise current warfighting concepts such as the Marine’s Operational Maneuver from the Sea and the Navy’s Fleet Response Plan to determine if they are adaptable to changing technologies, threats and missions. The Services are moving forward with transformation roadmaps to build a capabilities-based force, but what has not moved as quickly is the development of doctrine for implementing effects-based operations in this complex and challenging strategic environment.
Because the Information Age provides tremendous capabilities for the improved application of the elements of national power, combatant commanders should exploit this potential by using effects-based operations that enable simultaneous attacks against an adversary’s entire system with lethal and non-lethal means, resulting in controlling or altering his behavior. Effects-based operations utilize all or selected elements of national power in concert to achieve strategic goals. The elements of national power are the means by which the nation achieves its national objectives, and are composed of diplomatic, informational, military and economic (DIME) instruments. For example, the diplomatic element possesses numerouspolicyinstruments to address problems, one such, may be an ambassador issuing a demarche to a nation that is violating an international treaty. Another may be the ecretary of State building a coalition or alliance to support U.S. diplomaticressure or isolation of the offending nation. In concert with these efforts, economic sanctions may be imposed by the U.S. as well as the United Nations, through a U.S. introduced Security Council Resolution to effect a change in the treaty violator. Concurrently, the military element may conduct strikes or raids, combined training exercises, maritimeinterdiction operations or deploy forces forward for an invasion of the belligerent nation as coercivemeasures.
One of the first effects-based operations may have been executed by Thutmose III, the 2nd millennium B.C. pharaoh; when he led his army against a numericallysuperior Canaanite coalition and swiftly defeated them. His “strategic” objectives were to gain complete control of the Egyptian empire and expand his territorial holdings; his “operational” objective was destruction of the armies of the revolting Canaanite kings. During the Battle of Megiddo in 1454 B.C., the world’s first recorded battle, Thutmose used a combination of raids, information operations, military deception and “combined arms” operations to achieve his desired objectives.
The King of Kadesh (modern day Syria) supported by the Mitanni empire, led this revolt and with his allied armies occupied the high ground around Megiddo, a fortress which controlled the three main supply routes to the Hittite Empire and to Mesopotamia. Thutmose sent messages to the cities that were revolting to cause panic; he deployed his army in three wings gaining positional advantage and outmaneuvering the Canaanites by taking a route that was believed to be too difficult to traverse; and before the battle he conducted a full dress parade in view of the enemy, bolstering the confidence of his inexperienced army and causing panic in the Canaanite forces. The Canaanites unable to react to the unexpected avenue of approach of the Egyptians, and their swift and well ordered attack, became quickly overwhelmed and forced to flee into the city. Thutmose’s army then laidsiege to the city for seven months and captured rulers of the revolt. (Battle of Megiddo, 2005)
One of the requirements Thutmose placed on the defeated kings was that each send a son to the Egyptian court to be educated in Egyptian customs and traditions and return to their homelands to rule with loyalty to the pharaoh. The resulting effects from this campaign was stability and quiescence within the Northern provinces for the remainder of his reign, and a stronger Egypt whose borders “extended...as far north as Syria and as far east as the Euphrates,” and “aroused fear in the Hittite and Babylonian Empires;” which further set the conditions for their eventual defeat by the pharaoh’s army. (Brooks et al, 2000, 10) Another example of EBO in military history is MG William T. Sherman’s “March to the Sea” in which he explained his conceptin a letter to MG Henry Halleck, “...we are not only fighting hostile armies, but a hostile people and must make old and young, rich and poor, feel the hard hand of war, as well as the organized armies.” (Sherman et al, 2000, 568) In that campaign he aimed to not only fix and then annihilate the Confederate Army in the southeast, but to attack the will of the citizens of Georgia and South Carolina and their support for the Confederate cause through deprivation and isolation.
Historically, all U.S. warfighting doctrine has revolved around the classical concepts of attrition and annihilation and focused on the destruction of the enemy’s people, materiel and infrastructure. However, unlimited and unrestricted warfare are concepts of the past due to globalization, technological advances in weaponry, the international community’s uneasiness with inflicting massive casualties and causing collateral damage. This framework requires combatant commanders to have campaign plans that take into account how one or multiple sets of actions with its desired effects can influence, control or alter the actions and/or behavior of the adversary to achieve operational and strategic objectives. Therefore, operational planning must concentrate on the efficacious employment of military power to achieve objectives with the least expenditure of resources, and mitigate the consequences of second and third order effects which result from unified action.
The question is often asked “haven’t commanders always focused on the effects they want to achieve?” The answer is invariably yes, senior commanders always considered effects when planning and executing battles, but those effects where physical; destruction of lines of communications and mechanized forces, or suppression of enemy integrated air defense systems. Past operational commanders lacked the tools and capabilities to examine an adversary’s behavioral characteristics and the ability to determine how to control or affect an adversary’s behavior. EBO has the potential to provide such capabilities and move operations away from focusing on the physical domain and enable commanders to attack an adversary’s physical, cognitive and informational domains simultaneously.
EBO is an evolutionary concept that does not nullify the traditional concepts of annihilation or attrition, but broadens the options available to the joint force commander. The concept expands our warfighting capabilities through the dynamic application of all or selected elements of national power to achieve operational and strategic endstates. Using EBO the joint force commander can conduct simultaneous operations to overwhelm an adversary with kinetic and non-kinetic means such as, air interdiction/strategic attack operations, computer network attacks, influence operations, maritime interdiction operations and ground operations. Through the use of advanced technologies, such as operational net assessment and system of systems analysis, EBO has the advantage of identifying the targets, objectives and nodes that will produce the best result from our actions and enable combatant commanders to achieve full-spectrum dominance during major combat operations or campaigns.
EBO requires a systems approach to evaluating the enemy as a system or more specifically a system-of-systems. U.S. Joint Forces Command (USJFCOM), which is tasked with developing new concepts for the Department of Defense, defines system-of-systems as, “a grouping of organized assemblies of resources, methods, and procedures regulated by interaction or interdependence to accomplish a set of specific functions.” (USJFCOM Glossary, 2005) By looking at the enemy as a system-of-systems with dependent sub-systems, the U.S. military in conjunction with the other elements of national power can bring to fruition Clausewitz’s ideal form of war, the striking of blows everywhere at the same time.
In the most recent, National Military Strategy of the United States of America,General Richard B. Myers, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, stated, “we will transformthe Armed Forces...field new capabilities and adopt new operational concepts while actively taking the fight to terrorists.” (Myers et al, 2004, iii) EBO is being used with various levels of success by the U.S. led coalition forces in Operations Iraqi Freedom and Enduring Freedom; however, the question is whether U.S. combatant commands make decisions and take actions faster than the enemy can develop them and act. Doing so creates the probability that the coalition will be able to take advantage of opportunities as they arise on the battlefield–essentially getting inside the enemy’s OODA (Observe-Orient-Decide-Act) Loop.
EBO is a broad subject with no doctrine formally published by any of the services at this time. Therefore, the scope of this thesis is limited to examples from de-classified operations conducted during Operation Enduring Freedom and Operation Iraqi Freedom and experiments conducted by USJFCOM. USJFCOMinitiated EBO experimentation during Millennium Challenge 02 and continues it during Pinnacle exercises; USJFCOM also issued several white papers on the subject, including, “Operational Implications of Effects-Basted Operations.” The majority of the theories on EBO have been developed within the U.S. Air Force with two of its officers taking the lead in promoting EBO as a new warfighting framework, Colonel John Warden and Major General David Deptula. Recently, the U.S. Army began experimenting with EBO at its combat training centers and gathering lessons learned through the Center for Army Lessons Learned at Fort Leavenworth, KS.