Is this betrayal?

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Is it betrayal if a government allows that another state spies on its citizens - in excess of how much it can legally spy on its citizens itself?

article in English


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I tend to think so.

Our law system is unprepared, though:
No parliament seems to have anticipated such an act outlawed it in time.
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"Hostility between British and American military leaders revealed"

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http://donvandergriff.wordpress.com/2009/11/28/
hostility-between-british-and-american-military-leaders-revealed/

This is simply a must read.

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Too many news at once

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We got rid of Jung and Schneiderhahn

Former German SecDef Jung, CDU (who was labour minister in the meantime) and inspector-general (highest German soldier) Schneiderhahn got fired in the past few days because of late fall-out of the Kunduz air strike topic. Actually, the problem was more about the communication than about that incident.

Jung was known to be unfit for cabinet service anyway and was a sub-standard conservative administrator without any drive for excellence. It's a pity that he ultimately fell because of PR failures instead of because of incompetence, though.
He was effectively done after Schneiderhahn had already resigned and his own party had pretty much ridiculed him in the federal parliament Bundestag. Yikes, I won't forget his petrified face during that scene anytime soon.

Schneiderhahn was no better, the 'culture' from Oberst (Colonel) upwards was 'suboptimal' in part due to him. The fish was rotting from the head. His resignation doesn't necessarily mean an improvement, though: There's no really obvious excellent candidate for his succession.

FAZ article

another FAZ article

FTD article

The new SecDef zu Guttenberg, CSU is a media darling and quickly rose from Bavarian state politics to now his second federal cabinet position in just a few months.

He has several issues, such as
* he will very likely do his best to prevent another Kunduz air strike affair while he's in office, thereby restricting the German ISAF troops in their freedom of action (even more)
* the media 'darling' thing will predictably go wrong in about one to three sears. The media isn't actually loyal to its chosen celebrities.
* some very first anecdotes nourish a suspicion that he's going to be a politically correct SecDef - which isn't exactly what the Bundeswehr needs right now.

- - - - -

Mr. Koch (CDU) has won a (Pyrrhic?) victory in regard to Mr. Brender.
See the earlier article about the scandal here.

FAZ article

Welt article

FAZ comment

- - - - -

Politicians in the German state Nordrhein-Westfalen (a very large one in regard to population) are discussing additional legislation, supposedly to enhance domestic security. The police law reform bill of the liberal minister of the interior wasn't close enough to police state for their taste.

Their horror list includes among other questionable projects:
general video surveillance
+ eavesdropping on E-mails
+ eavesdropping on phone lines
+ search of people and vehicles for evidence without specific suspicion
+ online search in private computers with malware (all computers in question are already accessible with a search warrant!)

The online search in computers proposal is especially despicable because the state constitutional court had recently sacked the predecessor law in regard to this practice. It is known to be an unconstitutional offence to privacy.

The search of people and vehicles without a real suspicion is KNOWN to be a disastrous competence. Those politicians are either outright incompetent or police state fanatics, as proven by their proposal. The British have long since demonstrated the utter idiocy of such a law:

The Metropolitan Police used section 44 of the Terrorism Act more than 170,000 times in 2008 to stop people in London.

That compares to almost 72,000 anti-terror stop and searches carried out in the previous year.

Of all the stops last year, only 65 led to arrests for terror offences, a success rate of just 0.035%.

(BBC News)

Now guess which party is pursuing such a horror wish list?
The CDU, of course.

Heise article

Handelsblatt article

B2B article

- - - - -

The party "Die LINKE" ('the 2nd grade successor to the East German dictatorship wannabe communists) is supposed to be the prime threat to our liberties. That's the politically correct assumption. (The Neonazis are too dumb and too few too be of relevance on the federal level.)

Meanwhile, CDU (conservative) politicians are chipping and sawing away the citizen's liberties and protection rights against the state for years (to be honest; the process was raised to the new level by the SPD minister of the interior Schily of the Schröder cabinet years ago).

Whenever there's an assault on civil liberties or the foundation of our rule of law state with its many safeties that guard against a return of authoritarianism: The culprits are almost always CDU or CSU politicians, in opposition to the smaller parties' politicians (especially liberals and greens - there's no reason to take the far left seriously in regard to their civil liberties advocacy).

Maybe you wondered why I sometimes dropped a critical remark about the CDU and about in my opinion dangerous CDU politicians (Schäuble, von der Leyen). Here is the reason. They're even working in parallel - towards police state and against independent media (constitution article 5). And that's just the tip of the iceberg!

Sven Ortmann

edit: one more article about Jung/Schneiderhahn

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The concept of a PGM Company

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Thinking about the disbanding of dedicated tank hunter (Panzerjäger) units, the emergence of non-line of sight anti-tank guided missiles (ATGMs) and the introduction of precision guided missiles (PGMs) into rocket artillery, I came to a new way of connecting these threads.

Comments about the recent MRL article showed the difficulty of drawing a line between multiple rocket launcher 'artillery' and missile launchers (even multiple missile launchers) more related to ATGMs.

It would likely overburden a battalion to meet all rocket artillery and missile tasks of an army in one; ranging from anti-tank missiles up to 300 km operational-level missiles. Dedicated AT units are on the other hand out of fashion - for a reason. They're specialized on defeating tanks with some additional utility against above-ground fortifications. Such a specialization on conventional war targets makes it tough to justify their operating costs and manpower requirements since the end of the Cold War.

Nevertheless, it would be useful to split the missile business into an artillery-like and a PGM business. The artillery-like capability could be included as MRL battery (Company) into general artillery Battalions (Brigade support element) and as MRL Battalion into an artillery Regiment (Corps support element).
The PGM element could be equally sized, but primarily as a separate PGM Coy at (combined arms) Brigade or Infantry Regiment level.


The demands on both are very different; fire control and standing operating procedures should be different, the useful allocation of support availability to supported units is different, ... pretty much everything is different. It makes sense to split these capabilities into different units.

The missile artillery units would keep all the classic MRL jobs and munitions plus the MRL-compatible guided munitions, which are typically long-range munitions (40+ km).It would typically get area fire missions and almost never execute fire missions against moving targets.

The PGM units would instead use missiles more akin to ATGMs - especially non-line of sight missiles. Their job would exclusively be the destruction of point targets, especially mobile targets. The lower end of that range could be covered by missiles as C-KEM and Spike MR (the latter with fibre-optic guidance for a rudimentary indirect fire capability).
The warheads would need to be both capable against main battle tanks and against soft targets (at least for the CE missiles). The Russians had an interesting trend in the last about ten years; they offered new ATGMs types with a range of warheads, typically tandem shaped charge and thermobaric (~fuel air explosive & "enhanced blast") ones.

The upper end of the PGM Coy's munitions could be missiles like Netfires, EFOGM, FOG-MPM and Polyphem. The latter three depend(ed) on long fibre-optical links that seemed to have caused reliability troubles. It would also be possible to assign killer drones with moving target capability into these units.
The actual equipment of such a company should be limited to two different systems, of course. I would probably compromise an EFOGM equivalent plus a C-KEM equivalent.


Investment into the new PGM types has been rather modest (especially in regard to actual introduction as standard hardware), in part due to the need to iron out the problems of novel concepts.
The technical PGM innovation has rarely been met with proper organizational innovation; some armies have lost their dedicated AT units and simply integrate MRL-compatible PGMs into their rocket artillery and modern ATGMs into the infantry and mechanized infantry.

Few armies have really set up PGMs as a third arm for non-line of sight support fires, as an equal to mortars and artillery.

- - - - -

In the end, the PGM Coy would be a very different unit that all previous AT units, albeit slightly in their lineage and taking over their AT mission. It would substitute rapid reaction to calls and indirect fires with several kilometres range for rapid deployment into positions for line-of-sight ambushes.

An important value of the PGM Coy would be that it allows for relatively clean, unconfused MRL artillery units that cover a clearly defined and acceptably large range of tasks because the PGM Coy took over the moving target/short range fire missions.
The PGM Coy could also harbour the AT experts of the formation, its Coy Ldr might develop a Brigade's anti-tank plan, for example. A classic artillery battalion would not nourish such expertise.
The PGM Coy could furthermore be included in the brigade's air defence plan; missiles like EFOGM are a credible threat to helicopters.


The confusion about the place of artillery-untypical PGMs in army structures should end, and the solution should define clear separating lines. Fire support units should not be forced to employ extremely different systems with completely different SOPs. A third fire support arm (PGM troops), equal to mortars and artillery, could be a solution.

Sven Ortmann
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British humour! (?)

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MoD 'how to stop leaks' document is leaked


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Friedman's misunderstanding of authoritarian rule

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I saw this video in which Thomas Friedman basically asserts that authoritarian regimes as in the PR China can better cope with challenges because of more decisive political action:

Yes, that's the Friedman of the Friedman unit.

He may have some good points in that interview, but he got this one badly wrong.

Authoritarian regimes have been good at focusing resources on large improvement or construction projects. That works especially fine in planning economies - see the industrialization of the Soviet Union during the Inter-War years.

Their problem is that much less spectacular maintenance and renewal activities are usually in neglect under such authoritarian regimes. They don't invent resources, after all - they merely change their allocation, focus the resources on high visibility projects.
Stalin's industrialization was paid for with extremely low consumption even down to famine, for example.

Authoritarian regimes have serious allocation and optimization problems; they're completely dependent on the leadership because there's no powerful bottom-up check to power. A very incompetent authoritarian regime could go on for decades without being changed - see Zimbabwe and North Korea. The Chinese government makes many mistakes and many suboptimal decisions - simply for being made up of humans and having insufficient information flow and pressure bottom-up.


On top of his first misunderstanding is another one:
An at high speed usually keeps moving quickly in Newtonian physics and everyday experience, but economics are different. Even very basic life cycle and golden rule of steady state (Solow) models explain the basic fact that the pas is a poor predictor for the future in regard to economy. It's so at least if you simply lengthen the graph into the future.
A quickly growing corporation or national economy is very unlikely to continue high growth, yet many people (not only Friedman) fall prey to the illusion of continuity.
We tend to overestimate future economic growth systematically in regard to those entities that have grown rapidly in the past.
The utterly predictable and stupid overestimation of growth corporations/sectors in stock markets and the Japan panic of the late 80's/early 90's are good examples.


Friedman's basic line of 'our democracy is too weak in face of this authoritarian, less squeamish authoritarian regime' is no innovation anyway.
I recall a very similar American journal article from the early or mid-80's in which the author argued that the Western democracies were bound to fail in the competition with the Socialist powers because they were too defensive, not decisive enough in their actions and so on.

Well, we know how that played out; that pundit had ignored too many variables and overestimated authoritarian regimes as well.

Sven Ortmann
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The Koch-Brender-ZDF scandal

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Germany has several public radio and TV stations, the most prominent ones being the national ARD and ZDF TV channels.

These channels have a above-average reputation in regard to news and reports about political topics (albeit both are well-known for having mostly entertainment content for the 50+ years audience).

These public stations have a special contract with the state and every owner of a TV set or radio in Germany has to pay a fee for its use - which ends up in the budgets of these public broadcasting stations.

The control over these stations is in the hand of certain powers in the society; effectively in the hand of parties and religions, although the supervisory boards are supposed to be politically neutral.

The birth of this politically balanced and at times neutral public broadcasting system was difficult; the Adenauer government (conservatives) originally wanted to set up what would have amounted to a government-run broadcasting station. That political battle happened decades ago, of course.

The history showed that the public broadcasting was mostly balanced and often outright neutral, albeit not very receptive to 'new', not yet established political movements.
I'd rate these stations as "acceptable" to "good" in regard to political coverage and as an embarrassing waste of money in regard to entertainment.

- - - - -

Enough background and introduction. The topic for today is that a state (Hesse) prime minister Roland Koch, CDU (conservatives) has stepped over the line. Attempts to exercise political influence on the public broadcasting stations has been common at low level, but Koch dared to work against a well-reputed politically neutral editor in chief of the ZDF, Nikolaus Brender.

He has obviously crossed the Rubicon with this attempt (which only adds to his long list of unacceptable actions that should disqualify him for any political office anyway).


Journalists of the ZDF addressed the chairman of the ZDF with an open letter back in February.


Yet, that was just one open letter.
Another, more important open letter comes from 35 law professors:

Der Fall Brender – ein Prüfstein für die Rundfunkfreiheit

Offener Brief von 35 deutschen Staatsrechtslehrern

Art. 5 Abs. 1 Satz 2 GG garantiert die Rundfunkfreiheit. Sie ist eine wichtige Säule unseres demokratischen Staatswesens. An dieser Säule wird gerade gesägt, und zwar von einigen Mitgliedern des Verwaltungsrats beim ZDF. Nikolaus Brender soll keine oder eine unüblich kurze Vertragsverlängerung als Chefredakteur erhalten, angeblich weil die Quoten im Informationssegment nicht stimmen.

Um diese Frage aber geht es in Wahrheit nicht. Es geht schlicht darum, wer das Sagen, wer die Macht hat beim ZDF. Es handelt sich um den offenkundigen Versuch, einen unabhängigen Journalisten zu verdrängen und den Einfluss der Parteipolitik zu stärken. Damit wird die Angelegenheit zum Verfassungsrechtsfall und deshalb mischen wir uns ein.

Art. 5 Abs. 1 GG garantiert die Staatsfreiheit des öffentlich-rechtlichen Rundfunks. Auch wenn das gebührenfinanzierte ZDF formal dem Bereich öffentlicher Institutionen zuzurechnen ist, bedeutet Staatsfreiheit, dass der Staat inhaltlich auf seine Arbeit keinen beherrschenden Einfluss ausüben darf. Was geschieht, wenn es die Garantie der Staatsfreiheit nicht gibt, wird uns derzeit am Beispiel anderer europäischer Staaten vor Augen geführt. Zur Garantie der Staatsfreiheit gehört auch eine Begrenzung der Stimmenanteile der staatlichen Vertreter in den Aufsichtsgremien, also auch im Verwaltungsrat. Nun diskutieren Rundfunkrechtler schon lange darüber, ob die im ZDF-Staatsvertrag vorgesehene Machtverteilung zwischen staatlichen und nichtstaatlichen Vertretern mit Art. 5 Abs. 1 GG vereinbar ist. Insbesondere geht es um die Zuordnung der Parteienvertreter und der von den Ministerpräsidenten ausgewählten Vertreter zur staatlichen Ebene. Sollte sich herausstellen, dass letztlich ein Ministerpräsident als Meinungsführer stark genug ist, um einen bestimmten Chefredakteur zu verhindern, so würde dies einen praktischen Beleg dafür liefern, dass die zum Teil geäußerten verfassungsrechtlichen Bedenken gegenüber der Zusammensetzung des Gremiums nicht unbegründet sind. Der Eindruck läge nahe, dass über die Instrumente von staatlicher Einflussnahme und Parteizugehörigkeit politische Mehrheiten in den Aufsichtsgremien organisiert werden. Genau dies will der Grundsatz der Staatsfreiheit verhindern. Staatsfreiheit heißt, dass sich Mehrheiten im Sinne einer autonomen Ausübung der Rundfunkfreiheit nach Sachgesichtspunkten zusammenfinden.

Wir appellieren dringend an die Vernunft und die Sachkompetenz aller Vertreter im Verwaltungsrat. Beteiligen Sie sich nicht an der beabsichtigten staatlichen Einflussnahme auf die Wahl des Chefredakteurs. Qualitätsvoller und unabhängiger Journalismus liegt im Interesse aller.


Unterzeichnende (in alphabetischer Reihenfolge):

Prof. Dr. Hans Herbert von Arnim, Deutsche Hochschule für Verwaltungswissenschaften Speyer
Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Ulrich Battis, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin
Prof. Dr. Dieter Birk, Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster
Prof. Dr. Pascale Cancik, Universität Osnabrück
Prof. Dr. Matthias Cornils, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz
Prof. Dr. Dieter Dörr, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz
Prof. Dr. Udo Fink, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz
Prof. Dr. Andreas Fischer-Lescano, Universität Bremen
Prof. Dr. Dr. Günter Frankenberg, Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main
Prof. Dr. Hubertus Gersdorf, Universität Rostock
Prof. Dr. Thomas Groß, Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen
Prof. Dr. Timo Hebeler, Universität Potsdam
Prof. Dr. Bernd Holznagel, Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster
Prof. Dr. Friedhelm Hufen, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz
Prof. Dr. Stefan Kadelbach, LL.M., Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main
Prof. Dr. Thorsten Kingreen, Universität Regensburg
Prof. Dr. Jürgen Kühling, LL.M., Universität Regensburg
Prof. Dr. Franz Mayer, LL.M. (Yale), Universität Bielefeld
Prof. Dr. Andreas Musil, Universität Potsdam
Prof. Dr. Andreas L. Paulus, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen
Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Franz-Joseph Peine, Europa-Universität Viadrina Frankfurt/Oder
Prof. Dr. Ulrich K. Preuß, Hertie School of Governance Berlin
Prof. Dr. Stephan Rixen, Universität Kassel
Prof. Dr. Ute Sacksofsky, M.P.A. (Harvard), Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main
Prof. Dr. Arndt Schmehl, Universität Hamburg
Prof. Dr. Dr. h.c. Hans-Peter Schneider, Universität Hannover
PD Dr. Wolfgang Schulz, Universität Hamburg, Hans-Bredow-Institut
Prof. Dr. Indra Spiecker genannt Döhmann, LL.M. (Georgetown), Universität Karlsruhe
Prof. Dr. Robert Uerpmann-Wittzack, maitre en droit, Universität Regensburg
Prof. Dr. Thomas Vesting, Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main
Prof. Dr. Astrid Wallrabenstein, Universität Bielefeld
Prof. Dr. Christian Walter, Westfälische Wilhelms-Universität Münster
Prof. Dr. Joachim Wieland, LL.M., Deutsche Hochschule für Verwaltungswissenschaften Speyer
Prof. Dr. Hinnerk Wißmann, Universität Bayreuth
Prof. Dr. Andreas Zimmermann, LL.M. (Harvard), Universität Potsdam

They did basically diagnose an illegal exercise of influence by Koch if his actions suffice to prevent an extension of Brender's contract. They did also point out the long-existing concerns about how the supervisory board members are selected and they refer to our constitution's article 5, which is one of the top 20 articles that define the basic structure of our state and society.

The decision about Brender's contract extension will happen on 27th November.


German conservatives seem to test the limit for the infringement of press freedom quite often. Many scandals since the 60's tell about this, and in the end the result was almost always he same: The conservative politicians failed with a bloody nose. The society's preference for a free press and its readiness to defend the press are too strong.
The current conservative-liberal coalition has agreed to add more safeguards for the protection of journalists - there's little room for speculation about which coalition partner insisted on this.

Sven Ortmann
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Territorial disputes

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Territorial disputes have been one - if not the most - common reason (and likely even more often excuse) for war. One could assume that in a time that values peace highly, foreign policy might be quite attentive to such issues and resolve them ASAP. Well, that impression would apparently be overly optimistic.

Wikipedia has an impressive compilation of territorial disputes:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_territorial_disputes

I suggest to have a look at it, for it's really interesting. Even Germany is being mentioned in the Wikipedia list (with two quite unknown and rather irrelevant disputes).


Many (likely most) mentioned disputes are of marginal relevance or based on quite outlandish claims, but history knows enough examples of wars that were 'justified' (rather excused) with similarly weak or even completely fabricated claims. The Prussian invasion of Habsburg's Silesia in 1740 was such an example.


Sven Ortmann
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How many ground troops are needed?

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I found this at the Armchair Generalist blog:



I think they fail to go the last steps in their conclusions.

a) The allies. (Yeah, there are allies with expectations, not just an auxiliary troops pools.)
I've already heard that Norway doesn't really count on U.S. troops for its defence because none would be available in time*. Eastern European allies wonder about whether the U.S. really lives as ally up to their wild dreams.
At this time the U.S. ground forces are in the COIN/occupation business. Conventional war readiness and thinking have suffered. Many troops are fixed in quite remote places, far away from allies.

So maybe the degree of displeasure among some allies should be mentioned.

b) Needed ground war strength.
The obvious conclusion of this affair is for many commentators that more grunts are needed.

I've got (surprise!) a different view on offer:
The whole affair shows that much less ground force strength is necessary to meet national security needs.

The basic assumption (not entirely unfounded, of course) is that the ongoing wars aren't really about national security. Iraq was a completely useless and needless mess.
Afghanistan was post-2002 needless as well - it was a nation building project, not a national or alliance defence project.

So we've had two wars going on with heavy involvement of most alliance members, almost 200,000 troops fixed in those remote places pretty unrelated to alliance defence or other activities than these two quite voluntary major missions.

Nothing happened. Seriously, nothing happened in the meantime. OK, there was the South Ossetian War. Yet, that one was over after a few days. Not even in Shinseki's wildest dreams would it have been possible to deploy ground forces for intervention and to make a difference with them in time.

So what we had was effectively a look at a parallel universe or parallel time-line in which NATO had 200,000 troops less and about 800,000 in a reduced state of readiness - and nothing terrible happened. North Korea did not overrun Seoul. China did not whatever. Chavez did not invade Miami. Total, utter boredom.

We've got the evidence that we didn't need as much military strength as we had - if we would have been smarter and stayed out of Iraq plus limited our involvement in Afghanistan to chasing the Taliban away in 2001/2002 and subsidizing anti-Taliban forces afterward.
That's as good an evidence as we could hope for without Star Trek physics.


So what does this mean about the post-COIN-mess force strength requirements?
I certainly don't see a requirement for ten thousands more pairs of boots. Instead, I see an opportunity to advance in quality (people and ideas, and a bit technology) while rather reducing the force size in order to save national resources needed to fix domestic troubles.

Sven Ortmann

edit *: This is among the things that are not the official line, of course. You learn about stuff like this through unofficial contacts. There won't be a press release "Norway doesn't expect NATO allies to help it in case of conflict with Russia" ever.
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TacAir of the future (?)

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Afghanistan with its extreme land transportation (and therefore land-bound logistics) shortcomings is a high time for close air support. Close air support (CAS, even flown by heavy bombers) was even preferred out of logistical necessity over artillery and mortars in many, especially early, contacts.

The volume of fighting was relatively small and the supply of precision guided munitions by air power was quite good in comparison to artillery and mortar forces who had a relatively small supply and choice of guided munitions.


Such special small war circumstances don't necessarily tell much about the future, though. Just as the Spanish Civil War told very little about the soon to follow WW2.


The classic, most valuable tactical (air power) support for the army (not to be mistaken with operational and strategic efforts) was as far as I know the support as flying artillery for armoured spearheads. The 1940 Meuse crossing at Sedan was such an example.

Motorized artillery was barely able to keep the pace with armoured spearheads, and its ammunition train didn't always get a high enough traffic priority to keep it supplied. Self-propelled artillery with dedicated artillery resupply vehicles improved the picture, but armoured spearheads on the offence are still difficult to supply and difficult to support with massed support fires.
That is, unless you consider the flying fire support of helicopters and aircraft in CAS missions who can easily bridge the distance from airbase to spearhead int he never really congested airspace.

Such CAS for spearhead forces has its defensive counterpart in QRF and "Feuerwehr" (firefighter) missions; air power can easily shift its focus by hundreds of kilometres within few hours, and is therefore uniquely suited as a rapid theater-level reinforcement for forces in crisis. The battle of Arras was such an example (although the CAS only arrived after the decision).


Yet, artillery increased its reach considerably (about 40 km for 152/155 mm howitzers and dozens, at times 80 km for rocket artillery) over the past two decades.
It did also reduce its logistics footprint at least to some amount (the hype about this improvement of about 1995-2005 was overly optimistic, of course) and should therefore have less supply troubles than before.

This alone justifies a new look at the issue, far away from the basic 'artillery vs. CAS' discussion that arose after Op Anaconda in 2002-2004.


There's more: I considered missiles like ATACMS, Iskander and LORA as operational-level munitions in the past. This has changed recently when I had a look at the all-in-one dispenser for ATACMS.

(Lockheed Martin photo)

Lockheed Martin itself doesn't claim it, but I got a hint that it might be able to actually carry three Small Diameter Bombs as well. That was the last straw that broke the camel's back.
SDBs are no large bombs, but they're bombs and each is about the weight of a 21 cm howitzer shell. An ATACMS-compatible MLRS could be built to project everything from small warheads in the 105 mm range up to 210 mm shell equivalent bombs and of course unitary missiles with a warhead of about 227 kg (much more on bigger missiles like LORA and Iskander).

The range of ATACMS spans from about 150 to about 300 km (of course not with identical warheads weights).


Such technical potential in the missile artillery does seriously question the role of tactical air power (TacAir) . The only remaining advantages of TacAir in CAS remain
* the bird's eye view on the scene (before and after the strike)
* the ability to use very heavy munitions (heavy bombs 1,000 lbs and more - not terribly smart for CAS)
The theater-wide quick reaction capability and the easy reach to far forward spearheads as well as a reach to the battlefield from relatively safe rear positions can be matched by modern rocket artillery thanks to the good range.


Such a new (reduced) set of TacAir advantages over artillery demands a reassessment of an optimal balance and use of assets.

One - probably quite radical - conclusion COULD be to limit TacAir to its strength; the bird's eye view. TacAir could (let's just assume it could despite enemy air defence, for it's got no real advantage if it couldn't) loiter over the battlefield and effectively resort to the FAC (forward air controller) mission for support fires. Its own munitions (if hauled at all) would be used in those cases where immediate effect is critical.


This reduction of TacAir to the FAC role, to an observer's role, could in turn pump happiness molecules into the drone-loving crowd. The FAC mission is feasible with relatively small drones if survivability and communications performance are satisfactory.

The TacAir of the future could look like the German KZO Brevel drone* (certainly a completely accidental result because the KZO project is ancient Cold War stuff with an unsatisfactory program history). That drone was conceived as the bird eyes of the artillery arm of the German army.
Said artillery arm lacks the stock of ammunition to use the playbook laid out here, though.

Circumstances and relative strengths change over time - force structures and ideas about how to mix and use forces should keep pace. Maybe our understanding of such basic and easily visible components of modern warfare as close air support, artillery is already as badly outdated as was the understanding of infantry combat in 1913.

Sven Ortmann

*: An interesting piece of info: KZO Brevel uses a radar absorbing material (RAM) paint. This is afaik never mentioned in public texts and documents about the drone, but I recall a notification about the trade of a certain amount of RAM paint specifically for the KZO project. The notification was about ten years ago in an English language aviation journal, I think Aviation Week.
KZO is - unlike Predator/Reaper/Heron and the like apparently meant to operate over conventional war battlefields, in face of enemy army air defences.

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