In the first of a two part series, Washington think tank Rand, with the Army serving as a sponsor, issued a report detailing the motivations, technology and economics behind adoption of anti-access area denial (A2/AD) capabilities.
A trendy buzz word frequently thrown around defense policy circles, A2/AD describes methods in which adversaries seek to deny and prevent outside entry of forces into certain territories.
Rand’s report, titled “Smarter Power, Stronger Partners, Volume I: Exploiting U.S. Advantages to Prevent Aggression,” examines A2/AD’s difficulties and high costs of countering, “and whether the erosion of U.S. force-projection capabilities is inexorable; and assesses how long the U.S. has to respond or adjust to these changes.”
The 279 -page report asserts that if certain trends such as Chinese, Russian and Iran aggression continue, “so will the danger that U.S. adversaries will use A2/AD as a shield behind which they can commit aggression.”
Of these three potential adversaries, Rand concluded that China has by far the greatest economic and technological capacity to raise the costs and risks of U.S. force projection. This, despite heightened tensions with Russia over their assertive posture in Syria, purported meddling into the American electoral process and assertion by top U.S. generals that Russia poses the greatest strategic challenge to the U.S.
“With respect to challenges that potential A2/AD threats pose to the United States, we found that east Asia poses the greatest technical concern: Although China is not an outright U.S. adversary, its A2AD capabilities are already significant and steadily improving, thanks to the country’s astounding economic and technological development.”
The report did note, however, that if Russia managed to revive its ailing economy and menace nearby former Soviet states, it could enhance A2/AD capabilities to check NATO’s response. Moreover, as if to not downplay other regions vis-à-vis China and the Pacific, Rand said “the [A2/AD] problem stems from deep technical and economic trends and could increase in all three critical and contested regions.”
The report also includes a series of case studies to examine challenges in force protection in 2015 and 2025 forecasting how this challenge might evolve in the coming years.
Rand detailed certain scenarios that A2/AD produces basic advantages over force projection that work against the United States. They include, among others that technologies needed to locate, track, and target high-value weapon platforms, such as ships and aircraft, are increasingly available and inexpensive providing more pronounced advantages in A2/AD and that A2/AD is significantly cheaper overall than platform-based force projection with the weapons cost, on average for A2/AD only being a small fraction of the cost of the platforms they are designed to strike explaining why adversarial A2/AD has increased.
Additionally, the report indicated effective measures the U.S. can take to counter A2/AD capabilities. These include killing the enemy’s kill chain through early kinetic and cyber effects on critical command, control, communication, computers, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance systems, though, this risks escalating conflicts.
Another option the report notes could be preserving force protection by improving it by amplifying research and development that focuses on “unproven but high-potential force protection” technologies such as drone-supported laser missile defense and non-acoustic submarine detection, though, these technologies are unlikely to produce practical value in time to counter increasing A2/AD problems.
The U.S. could also rely more heavily on cyber means as opposed to kinetic effects. This measure, however, could open the U.S. to cyber retaliation, for which the interconnectedness of the U.S. homeland makes it uniquely vulnerable.
Lastly, the report notes that a more attractive option to counter A2/AD could involve shifting to less vulnerable platforms such as unmanned systems, distributed low-cost platforms such as drone launchers and submarines, to name a few. This option would take years to complete with large investments required with A2/AD problems continuing to grow.
As a result, the report’s authors propose a multi-pronged strategy to exploit U.S. advantages as a means to prevent aggression: leverage U.S., allied and coalition forces’ A2/AD to increase costs and risks for regional aggressors and use “power to coerce” as a means of deterring regional intimidation and low-grade aggression, which includes economic and diplomatic means.
Read the full report here
Report outlines A2/AD challenges for U.S. force projection
