Author : Matthew E. Herzberg
Publisher :
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 42,97 MB
Release : 2023
Category : Military sealift
ISBN :
Book Description
"The expectation is clear. Anytime and anywhere United States interests are threatened, or an application of national power is desired, the United States military can get there in force to achieve strategic effects, and fast...or so the thinking goes. But rapid and persistent strategic mobility is not an American birthright, even if reliance on it over the last 35 years has increasingly assumed as much. Exemplified by deployment to the Persian Gulf War and catalyzed following the Cold War, the capabilities of airlift, sealift, and pre-positioning proved vital elements of U.S. national power projection across the competition continuum. Still, focusing on capabilities alone cannot tell the whole story. Instead, re-orienting the understanding of strategic mobility systemically on creating or exploiting access provides the ways for strategic mobility to generate vital strategic effects. Unfortunately, decision-makers lack a framework for properly thinking in this way. Throughout history, transportation technologies that increased the capacity, range, and speed of transportation have affected strategic mobility, but not through capability alone. Instead, an interdependent system of strategic mobility exists to create or exploit opportunities for access to enable strategic effects. As a "decisive decade" unfolds, and technological capability and the geopolitical context change, assumptions about access must be re-examined and centered adequately in grand and military strategy formulation and planning with a proper understanding of the strategic mobility system. Future technologies will disrupt current assumptions, such as reusable rockets that deliver terrestrial cargo anywhere on Earth in minutes and autonomous vehicles that negate risk to human life. Therefore, now more than ever, strategic mobility capabilities must be considered in light of the systemic interactions among capability, administration, and strategy. Access theory is a vital first step to developing a new and necessary theoretical framework to build such understanding."--Abstract.