Achieving the desired effect

Effects Based Strategy (EBS) is all about combining the most appropriate people, technology, and plans that will cause an adversary to stop aggressive behaviour against Australia, its territories and interests.

EBS as a policy seeks to target the mind of the adversary. The instrument of the strategy can be any legitimate element of national power available to a government.

If it involves the planned or potential use of lethal force then most likely the instrument of choice will be that element of the ADF most appropriate to generating the effect.

EBS is not a concept used only in war, but it is more commonly employed in war. The Air Force can use EBS to determine what specific targets should be the object of any national campaign designed to achieve an effect. But equally, the Air Force can employ EBS to deliver aerospace services against non-state entities in any conflict scenario that is not war, now and in the future.

The Air Force will more commonly employ lethal force in an EBS, but there is considerable latitude to employ non-lethal force.

Is EBS new? It is and it is not.

The bomber offensive in World War II, for example, had a desired effect: to undermine German support for the war by targeting with lethal force the German homeland. A key limitation in enacting something like the bomber strategy was that no targeting or weapons system then available offered air crews sufficient precision to allow specific objectives to be hit. A second factor behind failure was the lack of a coordinated plan that exploited all the resources for warfighting in a coherent and desired manner.

Precision improved after WWII, culminating in the use of laser-guided bombs late in the Vietnam War, and GPS-guided munitions in the 1990s. Planning and coordination of support operations also underwent improvement. But together, neither allowed an air force to do much more than blow things up more quickly and with more accuracy. For government and other military planners, air operations as late as the 1990s were still largely seen as a means to cause attrition to observable military and military support targets. Air force planners around the world, led by thinkers in the United States, began to think there were smarter ways to employ air and space power.

One result was the realisation that where we do need to employ deadly force, that force needs to be overwhelming but limited to affecting the system or person(s) a government believes is directly the cause or source of danger to its citizens. For this reason, an EBS will often talk of “precision effects” and the use of “limited effects weapons”.

EBS relies on those employing it understanding the cascading effects of physical action, in particular the secondary consequences of dropping bombs on a specific target. It is also crucial that EBS practitioners appreciate that the strategy is intended primarily to target the will and motivation of the leadership of those elements threatening a nation’s citizens. The employment of military force, the shape of military forces, and the influence they direct into an arena of modern conflict are likely to be radically different to traditional attritionist concepts of conflict resolution.

Information superiority is at the core of EBS. Information superiority is the reason why the Australian Defence Organisation has adopted a concept of Network Centric Warfare. We want to be able to pass information between ourselves more quickly and accurately than we have in the past in order to understand the strategic effect of any action we undertake. At the same time, we want to deny any adversary the ability to use information. EBS, combined with other warfare concepts, will enable the Air Force, the ADF and Australia to shape the nature of conflict, often without the need to resort to the use of deadly force.

Adopting EBS does not mean the Air Force is no longer in the business of heat, blast and seeking control of the air. As AAP1000 states, “Australian forces must be prepared for war.”

The Air Force believes, “The ADF is unlikely to be fighting for Australia’s survival – but it must remain capable of doing so.” At the same time, Australia needs a military strategy that combines 21st Century thinking about warfare. Such a strategy will allow the ADF to assist in a great many security activities which are not of themselves war, but which are beyond the response capabilities of traditional law-enforcement.

• By Peter Rixon
  Peter Rixon is Deputy Director Strategic Assessment at the AeC.

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