In World War I the world was introduced to a new warfighting concept: modern combined
arms warfare.
By closely coordinating the use of artillery and infantry, both the Allied and Axis armies
made effective use of a tactic known as the 'creeping barrage', in which artillery would
strike just in front of the advancing infantry.
As the infantry made its way forward, the artillery would adjust its fire using pre-planned
timetables so as to avoid hitting friendly forces.
The creeping barrage, first pioneered by the British, was a game changer in many was for
the way war was fought.
Before this artillery would be massed and fire on the enemy, killing many but allowing
many more to seek cover in battlefield shelters.
Once the barrage was over, the enemy would simply re-emerge and take up old defensive
positions.
The creeping barrage however ensured that friendly infantry would be ready the moment
the bombardment let up in order to take the enemy off guard and not give them enough time
to get back to their defensive positions.
The enemy thus had a hard choice to make- seek shelter and ignore advancing enemy troops,
or fight off advancing troops while in the midst of an artillery barrage.
The strategy of combined arms warfare further evolved in World War II, though this time
it would be the Germans who shocked the world with their mastery of this concept.
The German blitzkrieg was a brilliant and extremely well coordinated attack involving
artillery, infantry, armor, and air power.
By working together, all four elements could achieve far more than any single one could
acting alone.
The next big revolution in combined arms warfare would come from the United States as it fought
its war in Vietnam.
Given the difficult terrain, the US adapted the use of airmobile infantry, which could
be quickly deployed to any battlefield from nearby fire bases.
In larger scale battles, American armor would make contact with NVA forces while close air
support assets and even its brown water navy gave fire support.
Airmobile infantry would then be dispatched to strike at the enemy's flank or rear.
America's loss in Vietnam was ultimately not due to a military defeat, but rather a political
one as the will to fight collapsed in South Vietnam.
Militarily, the United States had decimated both the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong armies,
and the Tet Offensive was a last ditch effort to intimidate the south to quit fighting.
Unfortunately, it worked, and with the south no longer having the will to fight, and domestic
support collapsing, the US was forced to return home.
In the First Gulf War in 1991, the United States showed the world the power of modern
combined arms warfare against a powerful adversary.
At the time Iraq had one of the largest tank forces in the world, and a very respectable
air force backed up by one of the strongest air defense networks in the world- courtesy
of the Soviet Union.
In short, Iraq as no easy nut to crack- yet by using information warfare, electronic warfare,
stealth assets, naval bombardments, and close air support, the US and its coalition allies
dismantled Iraq's defenses in a matter of days.
After watching how well the branches of the United States military operated together,
the Russian ministry of defense famously stated that the only way to stop an American military
thrust into Russia would be with the use of nuclear weapons.
War however is ever-evolving, and today the United States faces a serious problem versus
it's projected future rival: China.
With the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War, the United States
military began to slack on research and development, there was after all no major threat to NATO
and the democracies of the world anymore.
When the Global War on Terror began in response to the September 11th attacks, the US defense
industry continued to shift its focus away from developing tools to combat modern and
near-peer enemies.
Now the United States faces a tactical situation where China is threatening to challenge it
in the South Pacific, and the traditional technological advantages it has long held
against any adversary are quickly eroding.
One sign of this erosion is the development of 5th generation aircraft by both Russia
and China.
While Russia officially mothballed its 5th gen program by announcing it would not be
purchasing the plane in significant numbers, China has gone ahead with starting production
on its J-20 stealth fighter.
While the J-20 is widely acknowledged as an inferior copy of the F-35, which is no surprise
as its design is based on stolen F-35 secrets, it still signals a huge erosion of the traditional
advantage held by the United States.
The biggest problem with maintaining an untouchable advantage against an adversary is that traditional
weapon systems- also known as monolithic weapon systems- have an incredibly long development
and acquisition process.
The F-22 Raptor for example began its development process before the Cold War had even ended.
While the plane was in development, the world had made five generational leaps in anti-air
missile systems, with the latest being Russia's S-500 anti-air weapon system which is without
a doubt, the best in the world.
So Department of Defense military planners face a sobering reality: monolithic weapon
systems take so long to develop and build that by the time they hit the battlefield,
the tools to counter them have advanced by several generations.
An anti-air missile system is after all much easier to develop than an entire stealth fighter
jet.
The same goes for ground platforms though- a new tank is much harder to develop and research
than a new anti-tank missile.
Another major problem for American military planners is that all of these new weapon systems
typically require long and complex kill chains in order to be effective.
A kill chain is the different assets that are required in order to locate an enemy,
identify it, relay targeting data, and finally service that target.
This is made up of low-observable drones, satellites, communication relays, and finally
combat assets- and any break in this chain can render an entire weapon system completely
ineffective.
You can't hit what you can't locate or identify after all.
And with defensive weapons typically being cheaper and faster to develop, complex kill
chains are becoming ever more vulnerable to disruption.
Kill chain troubles are affecting no nation more than China, which relies on a complex
chain of assets in order to threaten the US Navy with its ballistic missile forces.
While on paper the thousands of ballistic missiles China has at its disposal seem like
a deadly threat to the US Navy, the truth is that those missiles require an extremely
complex and vulnerable kill chain of assets to even get close to hitting a moving target
at sea.
And China has not shown that it has the ability to protect its vulnerable kill chain from
disruption by US forces, which is one reason that the American Navy respects, but doesn't
fear, China's ballistic missile forces.
With counter-weapon systems and their fast evolutionary cycles threatening America's
traditional high-tech monolithic weapon systems, Department of Defense planners knew they needed
a new way of waging war.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency was quick to respond to this call to action.
DARPA for short is world renowned as the most advanced military think tank in the world.
Their sole purpose is to use the billions in funding they receive every year to brainstorm
how future wars will be fought, and to come up with new weapons to fight them with.
Their latest development is nothing short of a revolution in warfare, and a way to ensure
that the United States maintain its untouchable fighting edge over any near-peer adversary.
Mosaic Warfare as it is known takes its name from the new nature of warfighting that it
enshrines.
Modern combined arms warfare can be thought of as a puzzle, with each system fitting into
an exact place and connecting exactly with its neighboring puzzle pieces.
When this method works, it works to stunning success, but modern weapons threaten to disrupt
this perfect puzzle from being put together effectively.
Mosaic warfare on the other hand makes use of weapon systems that don't have a set place
in a puzzle, and can thus be cobbled together into any formation needed by warfighters on
the ground.
Mosaic warfare is adaptable, and instead of creating a kill chain of systems to destroy
enemy targets, it creates a kill web of different systems that has built in redundancy.
Eliminate one strand of the web and the rest can still ensure that the enemy will get serviced
properly.
Mosaic warfare however relies on three new developments currently being tested in war
games by the United States.
The first of these is advanced military AIs that can help a commander on the ground sort
through the realms of incoming data from various other battlefield sources.
In one wargame the commanders of friendly forces were unable to exploit a massive technological
advantage against the enemy because they simply couldn't make sense of all the data being
fed to them by various unmanned weapon and recon systems deployed on the battlefield.
This resulted in friendly forces resorting to conventional tactics which cost a large
number of lives to achieve the same victory that could have been achieved faster, and
with less lives lost, if they had been able to capitalize on all that battlefield intel.
Military AIs are now being developed to sort through incoming data, prioritize important
data, and even make recommendations to commanders on the next course of action to take.
The second development currently being field tested by the US military is advanced autonomous
logistical systems.
In essence, these are things such as battlefield 3d-printing units which can be pre-positioned
via airdrop or brought along by friendly forces.
The 3d-printers can then create unmanned combat drones on the spot, or 3d-print explosives
for use against enemy targets.
This would allow friendly forces to adapt to any combat environment, and open up a host
of tactical possibilities that would normally not be available.
Rather than deploy with a set weapon package and perhaps one or two alternatives to service
a target, an American combat unit could be deployed with a mobile 3d-printing station,
or simply meet up with one pre-deployed via aircraft, and use it to develop entirely new
weapon packages on the fly.
The third development required for mosaic warfare is the integration of electronic warfare
personnel into rank and file combat units.
In a signal-rich combat environment knowing how to protect your electronic emissions is
just as important as knowing how to disrupt those of your enemy.
In DARPA wargame scenarios, units without skilled electronic warfare personnel fared
much worse in combat encounters than those with.
So what does this all actually mean?
What would Mosaic warfare look like versus traditional combined arms warfare?
Well, luckily DARPA provided a ready-made example using a realistic and very possible
future combat scenario.
It's sometime in the mid 2020s, and tensions in the South China Sea have reached boiling
point.
War between the US and China has finally broken out, and right now a platoon of American marines
are on their way to eliminate a Chinese radar installation located on a small South China
Sea island.
The Marines hit the beach and link up with a mission payload delivered just minutes before
by an unmanned drone.
The payload consists of a battlefield 3d-printing station and raw materials needed to quickly
print out anything from explosives to combat drones.
As the grunts set up the printer, the commander checks in with his battlefield computer assistant,
which sorts though the latest intelligence on the enemy target and helps weed out enemy
decoys.
The assistant recommends several plans of attack on the enemy installation, and the
commander opts for the use of several scout drones to find and fix enemy positions, electronic
warfare drones to silence enemy communications and stop them calling for reinforcement, and
finally explosive suicide drones to strike enemy positions and clear the way to the target.
Traditionally, the Marines would have to conduct their own recon, and advance on the target
based on intelligence that could be anywhere from a few hours to several days or more old.
This would limit their avenue of attack against the target to a single direction, though the
unit could be split up into smaller teams to strike from different directions- albeit
risking that the smaller units will be destroyed by superior enemy firepower.
Once making contact with the enemy, close air support assets would have to be called
in to deliver fire support, which would expose friendly pilots to enemy air defenses and
give up the element of surprise altogether.
Then a protracted firefight would be required to destroy the enemy defending the installation,
and that's if the enemy wasn't packing any surprises that the Marines weren't expecting
and perhaps not equipped to handle.
Today though, the Marines are able to 3d-print several drones to augment their own forces.
The scout drones immediately set off through the treetops and circle the island, advancing
on the enemy simultaneously from different angles.
Upon successfully fixing the enemy's location, electronic warfare drones then zip to enemy
command and control nodes and begin to jam them, opening up for an attack by the explosive
suicide drones which eliminate enemy fortified positions and armored vehicles.
The Marines then advance on the target to finish the fight and destroy the enemy installation.
At its core, Mosaic Warfare is all about giving the battlefield commander more options with
which to engage a target, and eliminating the risk posed by traditional weapon systems
which more and more readily can be easily hard-countered.
Mosaic warfare aims to make American troops more versatile, more adaptable, and thus fight
battles on their own terms, forcing the enemy to fight on its backfoot.
In an age where traditional weapon systems no longer provide the technological superiority
they once did, mosaic warfare aims to restore America's warfighting dominance by shifting
to low-cost adaptable technologies that the enemy will never see coming.
Do you think mosaic warfare is a better way to fight than using traditional monolithic
weapon systems?
Is this how the wars of tomorrow will be fought?
Let us know in the comments!
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