Air Power in the Second Nuclear Age

Results from today’s battlegrounds strongly suggest that drones, AI, and other novel technologies favor the defender, with nuclear weaponry supplying a backstop in some cases.

The lords of warfare have arranged a series of field trials for Admiral JC Wylie’s ideas about “sequential” and “cumulative” operations. Circumstances differ markedly from test case to test case. Russia and Ukraine have been at war for more than three years, both on land and in the Black Sea. The prolonged Russia-Ukraine war pits the world’s largest nuclear power against an adjacent nonnuclear opponent. The US Navy has been bombarding Yemen’s Houthi militants from the Red Sea in hopes of stemming missile and drone attacks on mercantile shipping. An oceangoing, nuclear-armed hegemon has striven to achieve decisive results against a substate antagonist without resorting to ground combat. A tenuous ceasefire is holding for the moment. And, most recently, India and Pakistan, two nuclear-weapon states that abut each other by land and sea, fought a brief but intense air, missile, and drone battle across their common frontier following last month’s terrorist attack against Indian tourists in the disputed Kashmir region. The combatants fashioned a ceasefire after a few days of fighting.

“Sequential” and “Cumulative” Military Operations

Air power, including its precision-guided missile contingent, played a key part in each conflict. Readers of these pixels know that Admiral Wylie postulated that military operations take two basic forms. “Sequential” operations take place in series, proceeding from tactical action A, to tactical action B, to tactical action C, and so forth, until a fighting force reaches its objective. A sequential endeavor is readily intelligible from a visual standpoint. Observers can plot it on a map or nautical chart using a vector or continuous curve leading to the objective. If any battle or engagement were to turn out differently, the operation as a whole would turn out differently, taking on a new pattern as the sequence shifted. Wylie regarded sequential operations—Sherman’s march through Georgia to the sea, to name one among countless examples—as the mode of warfare that promised decisive results.

Wylie pronounced “cumulative” operations useful if not necessary to the larger war effort, but insufficient on their own to deliver victory. This was a scattershot mode of warfare waged by unleashing a multitude of small-scale attacks unrelated to one another in time or geophysical space. Plotting a cumulative campaign on the map or chart creates a paint-splatter effect. Rather than hammer away at enemy forces in sequence to achieve a final goal, cumulative operations grind them down over time. No individual attack does the enemy grave harm on its own, but many minor attacks can add up to something big. Cumulative warfare is combat by statistics.

Air and naval warfare fall into the cumulative bin. The US Eighth Air Force combined bomber offensive against Nazi Germany during World War II was a classic cumulative effort, as was the US Navy’s submarine campaign against Japan. Again, Wylie contended that cumulative operations were indecisive in themselves. Air and sea power helped exhaust a foe, but they could not defeat it. By wearing down an antagonist, however, they could make the difference in a closely matched contest of arms—bolstering the sequential offensive’s prospects for success.

New Military Technology Favors the Defender

With that, the theoretical stage is set. Let’s see how Wylie’s appraisal of cumulative operations holds up in Yale professor Paul Bracken’s “second nuclear age,” an era marked by fewer nuclear weapons in national armories but more contenders that possess those ultimate weapons.

The first nuclear age saw roughly equal atomic alliances square off in long-term strategic competition. Fewer nuclear-armed competitors made for relatively symmetrical, stable, and predictable competition, with occasional glaring exceptions such as the Cuban Missile Crisis. Today, by contrast, nuclear-weapon states vary greatly by indices of national power—physical size, economic prowess, demographics, conventional military might, and so on. And such powers are often situated uncomfortably close to one another on the map. Territorial disputes are rife, while proximity compels leaders to make snap operational decisions amid superheated situations.

Perverse incentives can result from mismatches in power, from claustrophobic strategic surroundings, and from perennial feuds such as those that periodically convulse relations between Russia and Ukraine and between India and Pakistan. Bracken gauges the likelihood of nuclear-weapons use as higher today than during the Cold War, even though the repercussions of a doomsday exchange would be less cataclysmic overall. Such novel technologies and warmaking methods as artificial intelligence, unmanned weapon systems, cyber combat, and orbital sensors and armaments only compound the dangers and intricacies inherent in the second nuclear age. Navigating an epoch such as ours is not for the fainthearted.

This brings us back to the notion of “cumulative” operations, which Admiral Wylie argued could not be decisive in modern warfare. With great respect, I disagree. It all depends on what sorts of political and strategic aims the combatants entertain. In other words, what they intend to decide by force of arms determines what qualifies as decisive.

A veteran of World War II, Wylie probably meant that cumulative operations could not deliver an “unlimited” victory in which one combatant overthrows the other militarily, then changes its government or otherwise dictates whatever terms its leadership pleases. As he maintains, victory over the likes of Japan and Germany probably demands a sequential approach, with strong cumulative accompaniment. And in general, he is likely right about the limits of cumulative operations.

But there are two potential exceptions. One, a competitor could set more “limited” aims—aims that can be obtained short of outright battlefield victory. And two, it could set strategically defensive aims. In essence, playing strategic defense means playing to keep what you have rather than wresting something from an enemy. Results from today’s battlegrounds strongly suggest that drones, AI, and other novel technologies favor the defender, with nuclear weaponry supplying a backstop in some cases. Denying access to physical space is far easier than advancing. Ergo, cumulative operations help defenders—those who already possess what they mean to defend—win wars in this topsy-turvy age.

Sometimes.

Russia and Ukraine

Look at Russia and Ukraine, whose war has exhibited a strongly cumulative character. President Vladimir Putin’s government clearly set unlimited goals at the outset of the war, aiming to subdue the entire country and oust its government. But rather than concentrate forces to land a massive sequential blow, the Russian high command fragmented the army into multiple offensives at the outset, diluting its combat power at any one scene of battle. The Russian offensive took on a cumulative feel while—as Wylie might have predicted—stagnating. The following year, Kyiv repeated this mistake; it went to excess in defining its goals, vowing to expel Russian forces from 100 percent of Ukrainian territory but ultimately failing to retake the initiative.

In both cases, the combatants needed an effective sequential strategy to attain their lofty goals. Yet both have struggled to devise such an offensive. Despite some back-and-forth on the battlefield—Ukraine’s fall 2022 counteroffensive in the east stands out—both armies have largely been stymied by drone warfare, standoff missiles, and other implements of cumulative operations. On dry earth, the two combatants have each denied the other their war aims. The results at sea have been even more striking; with no navy to speak of, the Ukrainian armed forces have deployed an array of ordnance, anti-ship missiles and drone craft top among them, to punish and ultimately repel the vaunted Russian Black Sea Fleet by cumulative means.

Ukraine is not going to win the war, at least in the sense that its leaders have defined winning. So far, they have set wildly unrealistic goals vis-à-vis their much larger, much better-resourced foe. There is little sign the Ukrainian military can mount a sequential offensive sufficient to evict Russia from eastern Ukraine and Crimea. But humbler aims remain within reach. Retaining eighty percent of the beleaguered country’s territory—the current estimate from the battlefield—marks a triumph of cumulative warfare in a lopsided trial of arms against a vastly larger and nuclear-armed antagonist. Ukraine will stand, where few commentators gave it a chance in the beginning.

The Red Sea

Both the Houthis and the United States have waged cumulative warfare in the Red Sea, to desultory effect. Stepped up in recent weeks, the American and allied naval campaign against the Houthis may have induced militant leaders to set aside their onslaught on Red Sea shipping lanes, achieving the campaign’s primary purpose. But that effort was only an accessory to their campaign against Israel. The US campaign’s outcome, then, was partial, ambiguous, and perhaps perishable. Yet attacks on mercantile traffic have halted—allowing President Donald Trump’s administration to claim to have accomplished the limited, strategically defensive ends for which it launched the expedition.

Nuclear weapons were irrelevant in the Red Sea standoff, but newfangled non-nuclear technology played an outsized part in how the naval war unspooled. The Houthis have proved extraordinarily creative, but have so far been unable to replicate Ukraine’s success at employing novel types of coastal artillery to pummel hostile ships of war. US Navy defenses have proved effective. The Houthi campaign against shipping nevertheless prompted shipping firms to reroute merchantmen around the Cape of Good Hope into the South Atlantic rather than hazard the Red Sea. Accordingly, Houthi leaders can tout the success of their cumulative harassment campaign. After all, their mischief-making strategy made little pretense of harvesting decisive results against much stronger opponents. They set the bar low.

If wreaking havoc to no particular end was the Houthis’ goal, they fulfilled it and then some. Both sides in the Red Sea have succeeded by the metrics they set.

India and Pakistan

And then there are India and Pakistan. Both nuclear-armed belligerents kept their air and missile campaigns carefully cumulative in outlook. They launched no ground offensives that might have set nuclear escalation in motion. Mutual self-restraint ruled out any sequential component—and thus, in Wylie’s terms, ruled out a complete victory for either.

Perhaps even more remarkably, political and military chieftains in both capitals confined their air forces to their own sovereign airspace, directing them to use long-range precision munitions to engage hostile aircraft from across the common Indo-Pakistani border. Or, in the case of the air wing attached to the 36-ship Indian Navy armada lurking off Karachi, carrier aircraft remained in international airspace rather than breach sovereign Pakistani skies. Similarly, each side launched missile and drone strikes into the other’s territory from sites on its own territory. In short, there was no question of deploying weapons platforms—planes, ships—into enemy-controlled space in search of sequential gains. Weapons payloads employed in cumulative fashion were the implements of choice for New Delhi and Islamabad.

And air and missile power might have been decisive for India. New Delhi set forth an ambitious tripartite policy, proclaiming that it now has zero tolerance for terrorism, refuses to tolerate nuclear blackmail, and will no longer make any distinction between terror groups and their state sponsors. Yet the leadership still circumscribed the operations and strategy used to carry out this policy. New Delhi reported rebuffing Pakistani assaults while hammering away at terrorist strongholds. Even so, the casualty figures from “Operation Sindoor” were on the modest side. Officialdom claimed to have killed some 100 terrorists while wrecking their infrastructure. One imagines the operation’s underlying purpose was to make a statement about power and resolve alongside its stated purpose of degrading manpower and the material dimension of strategy for the red teams.

In that sense, Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his advisors wisely set limited goals for the enterprise—and could plausibly boast of delivering them.

Next: China and Taiwan?

So it turns out that cumulative operations can yield decisive results after all—provided the political and military circumstances permit and political leaders carefully manage expectations. One imagines Wylie would agree, were he among the quick today. He would not dismiss the potential of this mode of warfare. Nor should other red teams around the world discount it. If indeed new technology has come to be an ally of the side pursuing humble aims, and of the strategic defender, then trends in the evolving character of warfare should give the likes of Xi Jinping pause.

China has much to learn from all three test cases detailed here, of course. But the ongoing conflict in Ukraine should trouble Beijing the most. It bears the closest resemblance to a cross-Taiwan Strait war, and what differences there are between the two examples work in Taiwan’s favor. In particular, the physical setting is more daunting for would-be invaders. Unlike the Russian Army, the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) has no land access to its foe. The Taiwanese armed forces, along with backers such as America and Japan, can strew weaponry in an invasion or blockading fleet’s path while pounding it with ultramodern artillery and swarms of drones—the probable result being a very bad day for Xi.

If Taiwan’s defenders harness new implements and warmaking methods sagely, they could make the Russian Black Sea Fleet’s yesterday the PLA Navy’s tomorrow—sowing a hellscape in the Taiwan Strait. The lords of warfare smile.

By: James Holmes

James Holmes is J. C. Wylie Chair of Maritime Strategy at the Naval War College, a Distinguished Fellow at the Brute Krulak Center for Innovation & Future Warfare, and a Faculty Fellow at the University of Georgia School of Public and International Affairs. A former U.S. Navy surface-warfare officer and combat veteran of the first Gulf War, he served as a weapons and engineering officer in the battleship Wisconsin, engineering and firefighting instructor at the Surface Warfare Officers School Command, and military professor of strategy at the Naval War College. He holds a PhD in international affairs from the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and MAs in mathematics and international relations from Providence College and Salve Regina University. The views voiced here are his alone.