instantaneous combustion or slow fuse?

fears regarding starting and escalating conflicts

The news is just so cheery these days: banks drying up, inflation still humming at 6% annually, the former Governor of Maryland’s former Chief of Staff on the lam, and the NCAAs without the University of North Carolina Tar Heels. Goodness, what is the world coming to?

There is good news, of course, such as Dave Maxwell’s educating us on the 20th to clarify Korean security concerns, a new webinar with Dr. William Hill, former Foreign Service Officer and National War College professor, on 3 April on Russia, and another webinar with the Chancellor of the College of Cyberspace on 20 April regarding AI. Oh, and the days are lengthening.

The really worrying part today regarded the Russian plane colliding with a U.S. drone in central Europe. The news to me is not that it occurred but that it’s taken this long. Military operations are quite complex and the space over which the Ukraine conflict is transpiring is actually pretty constrained.

I did not serve in uniform so I don’t pretend to be all knowing on Russian aircraft or certainly on drones. I do know one thing from my 30 years teaching the best in uniform from around the world: operations are multifaceted and much harder to carry our in practice than Tom Cruise made it seem in both Maverick movies.

Military personnel operating in the field often know absolutely the barest minimum about other parts of their own military. Translation: the Russian forces operating airplanes know little, if anything about their own Army or Navy assets, and they know they don’t like us. Militaries who are effective train those soldiers/airmen/sailors to operate equipment to be superbly competent, if possible, with the pieces of equipment relevant to their roles.

But, Russia’s is a broken force. Evidence is that poor, if any training, for the conscript boys means they have no expertise in the U.S. sense with their arms. I am making a gross statement but the evidence over the past 13 months is that part of what Putin miscalculated was the prowess of his force. Training has to be repetitive, thorough, and effective; it’s not a ‘one and done’ for kids dragging into combat.

Those kids who appeared in the Top Gun movies, on the other hand, drill repeatedly to assure the operations on the flight deck of an air craft carrier are at the highest standard only because we not only want to win but because we owe the kids who volunteer in our armed forces a return ticket home safely. Safety is a huge concern in the military so constant monitoring occurs should a problem within our own forces crop up.

In the summer of 2017, the US Navy had a series of mishaps in the IndoPacific area of operations. This was ugly as none of the services ever want to feature front regarding operational problems but it was a sad banner year. The USS McCain collided with a Liberian-flagged tanker in a busy seaway, killing 10 sailors and costing the taxpayer $100 million in repairs. The inevitable but brutally frank ‘after action review’ deemed crew exhaustion resulting from extended deployments to meet ‘ops [operations] tempo’ in the region a major contributing factor.

The Navy relieved the ship’s Commanding Officer and several of his team, the 7th Fleet Commander lost his job and overall Pacific Fleet commander retired rather than receiving the nod long expected for him to rise to direct the overall joint IndoPacific command. Turned out that the trend in this fleet included deferring (and ignoring) required training to keep to the operational needs of the Navy and the nation in addressing a modernising People’s Liberation Army.

And everything I have just mentioned was within the single Navy of the United States. Digging further, it was primarily the Surface Warfare community within the Navy although the passed over senior admiral was an aviator. Other portions of the Navy faced similar difficulties resulting from an overstressed force.

These problems were not between the Army, Marine Corps, Air Force and Navy. The joint operations required by law after the 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Military Reform Act intended to assure that the synergies, or benefits, accrued by the four U.S. armed services, along with the Coast Guard, when adequately trained and educated to work together far outweighed the dangers and insufficiencies before that joint education occurred.

The United States suffered two noteworthy instances where ‘fratricide’ resulted from lack of understanding from one service to the other regarding their capabilities. The 1980 ‘Desert One’ Iranian hostage desert disaster followed three years later by poor communication and interoperability in Granada where much confusion reigned.

Both of these were intra-military operations yet they proved the increasing difficulty of asking well trained personnel—in their specialities—to grasp other partner technologies, operations, and mindsets without much specific targeted training. Goldwater-Nichols, as the law is known, said that to achieve stars on one’s shoulder, the services could not longer promote their personnel solely based on the knowledge of their service but each potential flag officer had to have a significant ‘joint’ position in her/his career.

We can argue, and likely will later, whether Goldwater-Nichols achieved its desired outcome but the crucial point here is that even within the U.S. military knowledge of the remainder of the force is hard to master. This does not mean we know specifics about the Russians with whom we are de facto enemies over Ukraine, meaning there is absolutely no chance that forces on either side of the line this morning knew with any certainty the rules of engagement, the capabilities, and the tactical or operational actions about to occur. We simply would have had no occasion for that training to occur nor was there any reason for it.

Russia, Ukraine, and NATO forces are not the only ones where miscalculation, poor knowledge, or simply compressed time and space lead to probable errors. Military leaders worry day in and day out that the type of razor-thin room for error that led to the Ep-3 incident over the South China Sea, killing a PLA Air Force pilot, on 1 April 2001 could easily happen again.

Today, the actors in the region include more partners and allies, of various skill level, co-training and inter-operating with the U.S. military in all of the western Pacific where China vocally and repeatedly asserts its sovereignty over the region, the friction points increase second by second. You start seeing how this problem expands.

In particular, fears center on miscalculations or simply misreading signals or cases of nerves innocently launching a conflict in ever-tightening waters of the South China Sea. With Xi Jinping’s call for the PLA to climb to ever higher parts under the nationalism supporting the PRC simultaneous with Washington, Tokyo, and other capitals rebuffing Chinese actions, the probabilities for friction grow.

The so-called confidence building measures that one would expect for states with nuclear arms are shaky along the Pacific Rim as the CCP’s highly stove-piped system exacerbates decision-making prevent sharing responsibilities. Instead, Xi’s consolidation of power discourages anyone from appearing a potential challenger to his role or those of his hand-picked PLA leaders. Thus, senior U.S. military personnel have an extremely hard time getting through to their PLA counterparts or those Party figures who might offer much capacity to bring down tensions in a crisis.

We are not in a better position with Russia although there were small steps in place during the Cold War between the NATO and Warsaw Pact militaries to slow things from going nuclear (literally) too easily. Thirty-five years after that cold war ended we now have chilling histories on how perilously close we came to nuclear exchanges more than once, again usually because of miscalculation or misinterpretation of the adversary’s motives.

Drones and other new technologies further aggravating these conditions. Small, hard to detect, and cheap to produce and deploy, they offer a new aid on the battlefield but are one more friction point between militaries who don’t know much about each other except they firmly distrust one another. Hypersonics, on the other hand, accelerate decision-making out of the imperataive to respond quickly.

Nationalism is in high warp today especially in China. Mercifully, the Russia-U.S. drone skirmish did not create escalate as it likely would in Asia where Beijing’s demands for respect and accommodation are more intense than in decades. Both Russian and Chinese governments blame the United States for escalations while Washington warns of these two allies seeking to change the global