The Changing Limits of Conventional Power

For much of the history of conventional warfare, military operations were shaped by a relatively understandable relationship between the range of weapons and the location of logistics.

Artillery could deliver large quantities of ammunition against an adversary, but only within its effective range. Its sustained use also depended upon an enormous logistics effort: ammunition had to be transported forward and guns had to be maintained to keep firing. Important logistics installations could therefore be positioned sufficiently far behind the front to reduce their exposure.

Air power extended the reach of warfare considerably. Aircraft could attack targets deep inside enemy territory, but this capability came with limitations of its own. Combat aircraft are expensive platforms, require sophisticated maintenance and support infrastructure, and must operate against enemy fighters and increasingly capable air-defence systems. The number of aircraft available, their payload and their survivability therefore placed practical limits on the amount of destructive power that could repeatedly be delivered at long range.

These factors contributed to an important advantage enjoyed by major conventional military powers. A technologically advanced force could combine air power, artillery, armour, logistics and industrial capacity to create operational depth that was difficult for a smaller adversary to challenge.

That assumption is becoming less certain.

The conventional superiority of a major military power remains extremely important. But the distance over which that superiority can operate without serious disruption is increasingly being challenged.

Range Is Becoming an Industrial Question

The growing availability of drones, ballistic missiles, cruise missiles and other long-range precision weapons is extending the battlefield far beyond the traditional front.

The important development is not merely that these weapons exist. Sophisticated long-range weapons have existed for decades. What matters increasingly is whether a country can manufacture effective long-range systems in sufficient numbers and replenish them during a conflict.

This brings the military-industrial base directly into the operational equation.

A country capable of producing large numbers of comparatively inexpensive drones or missiles may be able to maintain pressure against targets far behind opposing forces. Warehouses, ammunition storage areas, maintenance facilities, command centres, airfields, transportation nodes and other supporting infrastructure can increasingly become part of the contested battlefield.

The traditional distinction between the fighting area and the comparatively protected rear area consequently becomes less clear.

This changes one of the assumptions underlying conventional military power. Superiority at the front does not necessarily guarantee security throughout the operational system supporting it.

The Economics of Precision Are Changing

This also creates an interesting imbalance between sophisticated and comparatively simpler military-industrial systems.

Traditionally, the most technologically advanced military-industrial base possessed a considerable advantage because it could manufacture advanced aircraft, sensors, missiles, armoured systems and command-and-control equipment that less developed industrial systems could not easily reproduce.

That advantage remains important. But it is no longer the entire equation.

A country does not necessarily need to reproduce every sophisticated capability of its adversary. It may instead concentrate industrial resources on selected technologies capable of creating disproportionate military effects.

Drones illustrate this particularly well. A relatively inexpensive unmanned system does not have to perform all the missions of an advanced combat aircraft. If produced in sufficient numbers and provided with adequate navigation, communication and targeting capability, it may still threaten valuable targets.

The same principle applies to missile systems. A nation able to manufacture significant numbers of sufficiently accurate missiles creates a different strategic problem from one possessing only a small inventory of highly sophisticated weapons.

The relevant comparison therefore increasingly becomes not simply advanced weapon versus less advanced weapon, but cost, quantity, accuracy, survivability and the industrial ability to replace losses.

This does not eliminate the advantage of technological superiority. It changes the conditions under which that superiority can be exercised.

Logistics Must Move — But Distance Has a Cost

This development has major implications for logistics and MRO.

One of the basic principles of military logistics has always been to position critical support facilities where they can sustain operations without being unnecessarily exposed to enemy action. Increasing weapon ranges make this considerably more difficult.

If logistics installations must move farther away from the battlefield, supply distances increase. Transport requirements grow. Equipment takes longer to move between operational and maintenance locations. Repair cycles may become longer. Fuel, ammunition and spare-parts distribution becomes more complicated.

Alternatively, if logistics and maintenance facilities remain closer to the operating forces, they may require greater dispersal, protection, redundancy and air defence.

Either response imposes a cost.

A technologically superior force may therefore retain its battlefield advantage while simultaneously having to devote increasing resources to protecting the system that makes that advantage possible.

This represents an important emerging limit on conventional power. The question is no longer only whether a force can defeat an adversary’s frontline formations. It is also whether it can sustain its own operational system across a depth that the adversary can increasingly reach.

Modern warfare may consequently require something beyond traditional MRO efficiency. Maintenance systems themselves will have to become more distributed, mobile and resilient.

Instead of relying excessively on a limited number of large facilities, future forces may require dispersed repair capability, mobile technical teams, modular workshops, distributed spare inventories and the ability to restore equipment closer to where it is operating.

Industrial design and battlefield maintenance therefore begin to converge.

From Asymmetric Technology to Distributed Military Power

This argument extends a theme I have discussed previously on MRO Channel Forum.

In The Rise of Asymmetric Technology: A New Phase in the Evolution of the Military Industrial Base, I argued that relatively low-cost technologies can allow smaller defence ecosystems to create military effects that previously required much larger industrial structures. In The Changing Nature of Military Power: From Superpowers to Distributed Strength, I suggested that military capability itself is becoming more widely distributed as drones, missiles and digital technologies become accessible to more countries.

The next step in that argument concerns the limits these developments can place on stronger conventional forces.

A smaller military-industrial base may not be able to match a larger one across aircraft, naval platforms, armour, sensors, space systems and other advanced capabilities. It may not need to.

If it can develop and manufacture selected systems capable of reaching into an adversary’s operational depth, it can begin to influence not only what can be destroyed but where the adversary can safely sustain military operations.

That is potentially a much larger effect.

A weapon does not necessarily have to destroy a logistics system to influence it. Merely creating a credible threat may force dispersal, relocation, additional air defence, hardened infrastructure, redundancy and longer transportation routes. All of these consume resources.

Asymmetric technology can therefore impose asymmetric costs.

This is where smaller military-industrial bases may acquire influence disproportionate to their overall size. They may remain weaker in conventional terms while still possessing sufficient industrial depth in selected technologies to constrain how a stronger adversary operates.

A New Measure of Conventional Power

The military-industrial base of the future may ultimately be judged by a somewhat different set of measures.

The ability to manufacture the world’s most sophisticated platforms will remain a major indicator of technological capability. But warfare is increasingly demonstrating that sophistication alone does not determine military effectiveness.

The ability to manufacture enough systems, replace them quickly, repair equipment under dispersed conditions and continuously adapt designs to battlefield experience may become equally important.

This does not mean that smaller military powers are becoming equal to major conventional powers. The difference in overall military capability can remain enormous.

What is changing is something more subtle.

The stronger power may no longer be able to assume that superiority gives it the same degree of operational freedom that it once did. A smaller adversary with sufficient industrial capacity in selected technologies may be able to threaten rear areas, stretch air defences, disperse logistics, complicate maintenance and impose continuing economic and operational costs.

Conventional power therefore remains powerful, but its limits are changing.

Before entering a conventional conflict, nations will increasingly have to ask not only what weapons the adversary possesses, but what its industrial system can continue producing after the conflict begins — and how deeply those weapons can reach into the systems that sustain military operations.

That may become one of the defining questions of future warfare.

Military power will increasingly depend not only on how far a weapon can reach, but on whether conventional superiority can continue to operate effectively when the depth behind the battlefield is no longer secure.