No of References to Sea Control
3.3 Manifestations of the Principles in Operational Practice
3.3.2 Case Study: Operations Enduring Freedom and Iraqi Freedom
In Subsection 3.3.1, a relationship between battlespace control and visibility in operational practice was outlined in Figure 12. Given that the section focused on just one concrete example (namely Russian naval and military activities in the Mediterranean, particularly concerning the Syrian conflict), it would be of great interest and importance to see whether this relationship can be seen in practice in other naval operations outside of the Russian case. Doing so will serve to test the findings of Subsection 3.3.1 and see whether they can be corroborated by other cases.
Of the various naval and military operations across today's world, two of the largest examples are Operations Enduring Freedom (the official name for the US-led, so-called Global War on Terror) and Iraqi Freedom (the invasion of Iraq in 2003). These cases have been selected as they are two recent examples of operations where naval forces played a role; furthermore, they have also been selected because they involved naval forces from a number of states (as such, the findings of this section are applicable across national boundaries rather than simply being the experiences of any particular state, giving them a greater degree of validity).
What these operations reveal appears to differ slightly from the Russian case with regards to visibility. Concerning the relationship between battlespace control and visibility, the former seems to account for the latter, but there is little to suggest reciprocity in this case. In regards to the relationship between forward positioning and visibility, there is a difference with Subsection 3.3.1; a suggestion that in some cases visibility can be an enabler of forward positioning, but not in others. Both of these relationships will be discussed in turn.
The initial stages of these two operations are very much an illustration of the concept of battlespace dominance in action. US carrier groups and naval platforms from a number of additional states acted as part of a joint force covering more than just the maritime domain of operations. In the early stages of Operation Enduring Freedom, for example, naval aviation and land attack missile platforms played a key role in the bombardment of targets within Afghanistan359. Yet there was more than just
a fusion of the traditional land, sea and air domains. As the operation progressed, the information domain came more and more to the fore; especially as the coalition partners began to identify interoperability problems, a number of which (though not all) were the result of inconsistencies in technological hardware. Such problems diminished with improvements in the adoption of a common communications system and the increasing ability of US commanders to relay sensitive information to their coalition partners360. Activities in the space domain (a domain also of importance to
359 Schneller, R. J., ‘Operation Enduring Freedom: Coalition warfare from the sea and on the sea’, in
Naval Coalition Warfare: From the Napoleonic War to Operation Iraqi Freedom, ed. by Elleman, B. A. and Paine, S. C. M., pp. 193-207 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2008), p. 196.
360 Ibid., pp. 203-4; Boardman, J. L. and Shuey, D. W., ‘Combined Enterprise Regional Information Exchange System (Centrixs); Supporting Coalition Warfare World-Wide’, USCENTCOM, last modified April 2004, http://www.au.af.mil/au/awc/awcgate/ccrp/centrixs.pdf.
the concept of a ‘battlespace’) also played their part in Operation Enduring Freedom361.
Similarly, in the early stages of Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003, naval forces from the US and the UK were part of a multi-domain mission that involved the use of naval aviation and land attack missiles, launched from carriers, surface ships and submarines, to hit targets in Iraq from the air362. The information domain (as well as
the space domain) once more was of particular importance, linking all of the physical domains together in a communications network. This is not to say that information and intelligence processing and dissemination did not encounter problems in this case. Indeed, in a similar vein to Operation Enduring Freedom, there were sometimes issues surrounding inconsistencies in the information and communication systems used by different elements of the coalition – whilst some were able to integrate with few problems, others faced challenges with interoperability, speed of operations and other matters363.
The importance of linking the non-physical information domain to the traditional physical domains of land, sea and air was not something limited to the early stages of these operations, of course. Maintaining control of this battlespace has been of great importance right throughout the duration of these missions. For an example, consider the impacts of information domain activities in the early stages of Operation Enduring Freedom; in this instance, such activities continued to have an impact on the way in which the US Navy handled and processed information and knowledge in later years of the mission364.
Regardless of the issues faced during both of these operations, however, what was often witnessed in practice was a validation of the concept of a ‘battlespace’. As part of a joint and coalition effort, navies involved in these operations were not purely focused on ‘sea’ control or ‘sea’ denial. Their operations were not limited to merely controlling the maritime domain; they assisted with activities in the air, on land and in the information spheres.
361 RAND Corporation, The New Face of Naval Strike Warfare, RAND National Defense Research Institute Research Brief (Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2005), p. 2.
362 Bradford, J. C., ‘Iraqi Freedom, Operation, Coalition Naval Forces’, in US Conflicts in the 21st
Century: Afghanistan War, Iraq War, and the War on Terror, ed. by Tucker, S. C. (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2015), pp. 423-4.
363 Bradley, C. M., ‘Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance in Support of Operation Iraqi Freedom : Challenges for Rapid Maneuvers and Joint C4ISR Integration and Interoperability’ (Dissertation, Naval War College, 2004).
364 Garstka, J. et al, Network Centric Operations (NCO) Case Study: Task Force 50 During Operation
It is important to note how visibility relates to these practical examples of battlespace control/dominance, as in this instance there is no convincing demonstration of a reciprocity between the two. The gradual improvements in the means of controlling visibility witnessed as the operations progressed imply that the imperative of battlespace control incorporates the imperative of visibility control – suggesting that the latter is merely a component of the former, serving to smoothen and maintain it.
Knowledge and information is a product pursued at all stages of an operation, not just in the midst of the process, but in this case it is difficult to argue that visibility control ‘drove’ battlespace control. Indeed, reading accounts of information domain activities prior to the commencement of Operation Enduring Freedom, one takes the impression that the role of visibility controlling measures as an enabler of battlespace control is contentious in this particular case (though they did, undoubtedly, help to ‘smoothen’ actions)365.
Thus, what this case of operational practice may suggest is that visibility and battlespace control do not always have a reciprocal relationship. In this instance, battlespace control included information domain activities designed to control visibility, though whether these visibility controlling measures can then be regarded as an ‘enabler’ of battlespace control or as actions designed to merely ‘smoothen’ it is open to dispute.
In reference to forward positioning, however, there appears to be some confirmation – to an extent – of the idea of a reciprocal relationship. Little evidence was found to suggest that visibility concerns in Operation Enduring Freedom drove the coalition’s movements to position naval forces forward in the first place, but this does not necessarily mean that visibility control did not play some role in maintaining the ability of coalition forces to operate forward.
Forward positioned naval forces were able to contribute in large part to the attainment and control of visibility during Operation Enduring Freedom, mainly by acting as a base from which aerial surveillance operations could be conducted. Given the nature of the Afghan theatre, air superiority was deemed to be important; not only for defending coalition forces against Taliban air attack, but for enabling a high degree
of extensive surveillance of the difficult terrain that ground forces would have to operate in366.
Thus, in a manner of speaking, forward positioning in this operational case appears to account for visibility, as part of the purpose in moving naval forces forward to the North Arabian Sea was to enable aerial reconnaissance and surveillance sorties (among other things). Coalition commanders knew that they were facing a 'fleeting' enemy; Taliban positions may have been more easily identifiable, but Al Qaeda assets were less easy to locate367. The intelligence dimension of Operation Enduring
Freedom cannot therefore be understated; air superiority would not just give coalition forces a free hand to target the enemy, but it was also imperative if the coalition was to accumulate the information required to enable this targeting in the first place. Coalition forces thus made use of dedicated intelligence aircraft as well as strike aircraft equipped with their own capabilities for gathering intelligence; the networking of all these airborne platforms, many launched from ships operating in the North Arabian Sea, enabled swift analysis, interpretation and dissemination of this information, which could be time-critical368.
What this case suggests, then, is that during Operation Enduring Freedom forward positioning was intended (in part) to control visibility through information gathering and analysis - but the control of visibility in turn allowed coalition forces to continue operating forward. Thus, there is a reciprocal relationship, perhaps not quite to the extent or in the same vein as that outlined in Figure 10 - but a relationship nevertheless where one aspect of the visibility triad, information, is at once both something that forward positioning seeks to achieve as well as something that more clearly enables its continued usage.
The picture in Operation Iraqi Freedom is not quite as clear-cut. Forward positioning of naval forces did help with the control of visibility, though perhaps not quite to the same extent as was the case in Operation Enduring Freedom. The forward positioning of naval forces was not motivated solely by a need to control visibility, but by being positioned forward coalition navies were able to assist with maintaining a clear operational picture by contributing aviation assets that could carry out
366 Lexington Institute Naval Strike Forum, Killing Al Qaeda: The Navy's Role (Arlington, VA: Lexington Institute, 2002), p. 6.
367 Ibid.
surveillance of the theatre369. Whether this control of visibility then had a reciprocal
contribution in terms of enabling naval forces to remain positioned forward is less clear. Given the differences between the campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq, however, the reason for this may be that controlling visibility was less a concern for naval forces involved in Operation Iraqi Freedom than it was in Operation Enduring Freedom. In the latter, naval forces were operating against foes who were not always visible, in a difficult physical environment where air and ground forces faced access issues370. Thus, navies had a larger role to play in ensuring air superiority to allow
surveillance of the battlespace. In contrast, there were comparatively fewer access difficulties for air and ground forces in Iraq; Kuwait, for example, allowed the build- up of coalition forces within its territory in preparation for the invasion of Iraq, reducing the reliance on the likes of carrier-based surveillance aviation to a limited extent371.
What the Operation Enduring Freedom and Iraqi Freedom cases thus show is that there can be a definite reciprocal relationship between forward positioning and visibility in operational practice, though this is not always the case in every instance of a military operation. In the former, forward positioning was an enabler of visibility control. On the surface, this might seem to suggest that the latter is accounted for by the former and is therefore not distinct. However, bearing in mind the thought laid out in various maritime strategic documents covered earlier, visibility control can in turn allow naval forces to remain positioned forward, or at the least ensure that naval assets in forward locations can function most effectively. Thus, visibility can still be seen as something of an enabler or driver of forward positioning.
Whilst the Operation Iraqi Freedom example may not seem to back up the reciprocal relationship between forward positioning and visibility to quite the same degree, this is not necessarily a contradiction of such a relationship. Indeed, the possible counterargument is that in this instance, visibility control was less of a priority for forward positioned coalition naval forces given that forward positioned air
369 Bradford, J. C., ‘Iraqi Freedom, Operation, Coalition Naval Forces’, p. 423; Gouré, D., Operation:
Iraqi Freedom: Lesson One: The Importance of Aerospace Supremacy, Lexington Institute Issue Brief (Arlington, VA: Lexington Institute, 2003).
370 Lexington Institute Naval Strike Forum, Killing Al Qaeda; RAND Corporation, The New Face of
Naval Strike Warfare.
371 Tucker, S. C., 'Iraqi Freedom, Operation, Ground Campaign (March 20-May 1, 2003) in US
Conflicts in the 21st Century: Afghanistan War, Iraq War, and the War on Terror, ed. by Tucker, S. C. (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2015), p. 424.
and ground forces possessed better access to the Iraqi battlespace than was the case with Afghanistan during Operation Enduring Freedom.
In summary, two key points emerged from this case: 1) that the relationship between battlespace control and visibility is never always reciprocal in the sense that they both reinforce each other; and 2) that a similar argument can be made in regards to the relationship between forward positioning and visibility. This case study has not outright denied that such relationships cannot be reciprocal at times; merely that it is never always true.