Keep an eye on "competition by major powers", implement the "distributed killing" concept, and implement dynamic force deployment

U.S. military adjusts global military strength to maintain hegemony

　　According to reports, the US Navy "Reagan" and "Nimitz" aircraft carrier battle groups recently held a joint exercise in the Philippine Sea. With the addition of the "Roosevelt", the US military has currently deployed three aircraft carrier battle groups in the Indo-Pacific region.

　　Earlier, in April this year, the US Air Force announced the withdrawal of the B-52H strategic bomber deployed at Anderson Air Force Base in Guam, ending the static deployment model of the continuous deployment of strategic bomber troops in Guam. 1B strategic bomber to verify the dynamic force deployment model.

　　These actions are a microcosm of the US military's adjustment of the global military situation in the context of competition among major powers, reflecting the latest trend of the US military in accelerating the reshaping of its global power situation in response to the new situation.

　Around the new national defense strategic goals

　　Change with the situation

　　After World War II, the US military built the largest overseas base group in the history of mankind, and formed an overseas garrison network covering the whole world. It nominally protects allies and deters its opponents. In fact, it is to safeguard US global hegemony. Over the past 70 years or so, the US military's global military strength has undergone many major adjustments, and most of them have closely focused on national defense strategic requirements and have changed according to the situation.

　　During the Cold War, the U.S. military continued the traditional policy of Europe before Asia, with the defense strategy of responding to the threat of the Soviet Union in Europe as the national defense strategy. It has stationed heavy troops in Western Europe for a long time and deployed a large number of heavy army troops, air defense forces, and fighter and bomber forces of the Air Force. . After the end of the Cold War, Soviet threats ceased to exist and were replaced by non-traditional security threats such as international terrorism and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. The need to maintain large-scale overseas troops was greatly reduced. Over the next 20 years, the size of the U.S. military's overseas troops has shrunk from nearly 500,000 in the late Cold War to 193,000 in 2016. During this period, the United States launched the Afghan War and the Iraq War successively. Overseas troops stationed in Europe and East Asia and other traditional garrison-intensive areas concentrated in Afghanistan and Iraq.

　　Since December 2017, the United States has successively issued the "National Security Strategy Report" and "National Defense Strategy Report", arguing that the world has re-entered the "age of great power competition." Based on the new threat judgment, the US global force layout is rapidly adjusted. On the one hand, re-emphasis on frontier deployment and frontier deterrence, the overseas garrison scale increased to 225,000, and more than 30,000 people were added in 2 years. This does not include emergency deployment to the Middle East. On the other hand, the layout of the global force will focus on the two lines of Asia and Europe, including the reduction of the size of the US military in the Middle East and Africa, the deployment of a combat aviation brigade to Europe and part of the logistics force. In the two directions of Asia and Europe, change the traditional practice of Europe before Asia, transform Asia into a new center of strength for the US military, quickly advance the Indo-Pacific strategy, and transform the F-35B fighter, the "America" ​​amphibious assault ship, and the Army’s multi-domain special New types of combat platforms and combat forces, such as troops, are given priority to deploy to the Indo-Pacific theater.

　Pay close attention to the potential opponent's ability characteristics

　　There are advances and retreats

　　In recent years, the US military has given priority to Indo-Pacific and Europe, and the increased overseas troops are mainly deployed in these two regions. In addition to increasing troops, the U.S. military also continuously optimizes its power deployment based on the potential opponents' combat capabilities and characteristics.

　　In the European theater, on the basis of stabilizing the size of the troops stationed in Italy and the United Kingdom, the US military strengthened its presence along the entire Russian border from south to north, and formed a siege to the west of Russia. On the northern line, in spring 2017, four NATO combat groups were deployed to Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and other countries, including one US military combat group, each with about 1,000 people. In the center line, deploy a "Patriot" missile company and a battalion-scale combat group to Poland in a normalized manner, and increase joint training with the Ukrainian army. In June last year, the United States and Poland reached an agreement to send an additional 1,000 garrisons to Poland to consolidate relations between the two countries and counter the “Russian threat”. Not long ago, the US ambassador to Poland Mosbach also publicly stated that the United States can transfer nuclear weapons deployed in Germany to Poland, causing strong dissatisfaction with Russia. On the southern route, frequent joint training with Georgia, Romania and other countries, the US Navy’s Sixth Fleet entered the Black Sea regularly. According to the Russian Ministry of Defense, NATO, led by the United States, holds nearly 40 large-scale military exercises in Russia each year that clearly target Russia. In 2019, the number of air reconnaissance along the Russian border increased by 33% year-on-year, and the number of maritime/coastal reconnaissance increased by 24 %.

　　In the Indo-Pacific theater, while enhancing the anti-missile and anti-missile capabilities of the US troops stationed in Japan and South Korea, the United States relied on advancement, and the heavy weapons retreated from the first island chain to the second island chain centered on Guam and Hawaii. The third island chain at the center. This time the US military withdrew its strategic bomber forces from Guam and intensively practiced its intercontinental strike capability. It was precisely based on the operational thinking of retreating, shaping the combat situation of "you can't hit me, but I can hit you."

　　While striding backwards, based on the fact that the opponent's long-range precision attack on weapons has greatly increased the power, it adheres to the "decentralization and de-node" thinking in the deployment of troops and conducts wide-area evacuation of weapons. This approach is in line with the US Navy's concept of "distributed killing". The basic idea is to disperse frontier bases, main forces, and main battle platforms in a broad, multi-dimensional battlefield space to avoid being saturated by enemy attacks and being "one-pot". At the same time, it forces opponents to use reconnaissance and early warning and firepower strike resources in a decentralized manner, making it impossible for them to clenched their fingers into fists; while they can carry out aggregated centripetal attacks from multiple directions to achieve the combat effect of "diversity and divinity".

　Extensive implementation of dynamic force deployment

　　Shape the situation

　　The concept of the deployment of dynamic forces in the United States was formally proposed in the "National Defense Strategy Report" issued in January 2018. The concept is a force management tool specifically designed to cope with competition from major powers. It is also a force deployment model. By enhancing the suddenness, ambiguity, and nonlinearity of the US military deployment, it enhances the US military’s survivability and deterrence, and achieves “strategic "Predictable, unpredictable action" effect.

　　The US Navy was the first service to switch to a dynamic force deployment model. In April 2018, under the impetus of the then Defense Minister Matisse, the Navy's "Trumen" aircraft carrier strike group began to shift to a dynamic force deployment model. Under the new model, the deployment cycle of the carrier strike group has been reduced from 7 months to 3 months, but the deployment frequency has increased, the deployment locations and time intervals have broken the rules, the routes and missions are flexible and variable, and the flexibility and unpredictability have been significantly enhanced. At present, several aircraft carrier strike groups in the Indo-Pacific theater have tried the dynamic force deployment model, and the navy in the theater is promoting this deployment model to other types of ships.

　　The US Army mainly implements dynamic force deployment through short-term rotation training. In the Indo-Pacific theater, the Army mainly carried out short-term rotation training based on the "Pacific Channel" project. Each channel generally has 3 training stations, each station is located in a different area of ​​the theater, such as Southeast Asia, South Asia, East Asia, etc. The Army forces and the national forces of each station conduct joint exercises for several weeks to several months, which is conducive to maintaining the Army’s presence in the Indo-Pacific theater. The presence of power enhances the ability of coordinated operations with partner countries, and it can temper the long-range power projection capabilities of Transport Command, giving more troops the opportunity to understand the front-line situation in the theater.

　　Compared with the Navy and the Army, the US Air Force's shift to a dynamic force deployment model started a little bit slower, but not less. In mid-April of this year, the Air Force announced that the strategic bomber force will change from a static force deployment model based on front-end deployment to a dynamic force deployment model based on local deployment, so as to better leverage the advantages of the strategic bomber force "run far and have long arms". To enhance strategic deterrence. In the more than a month since then, the Air Force has conducted at least 7 exercises of "Full Course Intercontinental Strike Training". The route, time, attack direction, and coordination methods used for each exercise are different, and the feasibility of the dynamic force deployment model is concentrated. In fact, the dynamic force deployment model has many similarities with the concepts of "rapid raptor" and "agile combat deployment" proposed by the Air Force in recent years, and the next step is likely to be used in combination.

　　Chen Hanghui Zhang Zezheng