Interview with David Ochmanek

CSDS-SWJ STRATEGY DEBRIEFS • 9/2025

Interview with David Ochmanek, by Octavian Manea

10.3.2025

The most recent US national defence strategies and decades of wargames have underscored the obsolescence of the American expeditionary approach to warfare, which marked the post-Cold War era. In light of this, what are some contemporary methods for projecting power in proximity to mature Anti-Access/Area Denial (A2/AD) powers to effectively counter aggression in the absence of air, maritime, information or space superiority? This Strategy Debrief examines some of these potential new ways with David Ochmanek, a senior international and defence researcher at RAND, and a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Force Development from 2009 to 2014.

How would you define the legacy approach to warfare practiced by US in the post-Cold War era?

David Ochmanek: If we think back to Desert Storm and all the interventions we have had since then – against Iraq, Serbia, Afghanistan, Libya – there are parallels across those. What I call the legacy American approach to war, which carried us through the post-Cold War era, was characterised first by its expeditionary approach. The bulk of the force that was required to achieve our objectives had to be deployed to the theatre from elsewhere after the decision to intervene. The second feature of it is that it was sequential. What did we do for the first four days of Desert Storm? It was devoted to gaining dominance over the battle space. We attacked air defences and military Command and Control (C2) so that we could create an environment where the rest of the joint and combined force could operate – if not with impunity – at least with freedom of action.

In our early wargames where our adversaries were either China or Russia, our Blue Teams representing NATO or a coalition in the Pacific tried to apply that basic model. And they lost every time. The expeditionary approach fails because these are adversaries that would not give you five months to build an iron mountain of materiel in the theatre before you are ready to conduct operations. These are adversaries that would disrupt your deployment with at least non-kinetic cyber means before hostilities begin. And the sequential approach fails because of the robustness of the enemy’s A2/AD and C2 capabilities. So this notion that you can spend the first phase of the war creating a more permissive environment before attacking the enemy’s centre of gravity is false.

In our wargames, the Red Teams in Baltic scenarios sometimes have armoured forces on the outskirts of Tallinn and Riga within 60-72 hours. This is, of course, a Russian military before it was massively degraded by the hostilities in Ukraine. Prudent planners have to assume that Russia will at some point reconstitute its conventional force. It is the same thing with a Taiwan scenario. If you give the Chinese 5 to 10 days they will have tens of thousands of troops on the island of Taiwan before you are going to be able to engage. So how do you reach into that highly contested environment, before you have gained air superiority, when your bases are under attack, to locate, track, engage and neutralise the operational centre of gravity, namely, the invasion force?

Can we pinpoint an identifiable centre of gravity of the Blue Team?

David Ochmanek: We think about centres of gravity at different levels of warfare. At the strategic level our centre of gravity is probably our will to fight as a society and our alliance cohesion. Milosevic in the 1990s was trying to attack the alliance’s cohesion (during Operation Allied Force).

Secondly, at the operational level, certainly our dependence on the ability to project and sustain power over distance is an Achille’s heel for the Blue Team, and the Red Team understands that. The Chinese do not call their strategy A2/AD, but counter-intervention for a reason. In this sense, they purposefully built a force that can disrupt the flow of forces, it can disrupt the sustainment of those forces and generally disrupt the generation of combat power within the theatre. They can reach as far as Guam and the second island chain to attack repeatedly our centres for power projection. Broadly speaking, the centre of gravity at the operational level is associated with the set of dependencies of the Blue Team: the transportation links between our nation and the theatre and the ability to generate combat power within a theatre.

Thirdly, what we know from the People’s Liberation Army doctrine is that they place great emphasis on information superiority as the key to success in modern warfare. They are determined to deny us information about the battle space and to secure it for themselves. That explains their investment in anti-satellite weapons (both kinetic and non-kinetic), in cyber-weapons and in electronic warfare (EW) capabilities.

As a non-expert, I would nominate these three dependencies as centres of gravity for the Blue Team.

You have run so many wargames over the past two decades – you are basically “Mr. Wargames”. What was your conclusion in terms of the feasibility of the (or the preferred) American Way of War as we have seen it practiced in the 1990s and early 2000s? Why are we at an inflection point?

David Ochmanek: That legacy approach to warfare that the US has operated under relies on – if not superiority – at least a measure of dominance. If we do not have that dominance in a domain at the outset of hostilities, we work to achieve it before we are prepared to pursue the rest of our objectives. We did not try to roll back Saddam Hussein’s forces in Kuwait until we established air superiority, maritime and information superiority while at the same time degrading the morale and will to fight of that force before we engage. That is the American way of war. And if you cannot achieve that dominance in a time frame that is consistent with your objectives then you have to find a different way to achieve those objectives.

We emerged from the Cold War with forces that were qualitatively and quantitatively superior to those of our adversaries. A whole generation of officers and professional military people in our armed forces have become used to that world. It has created a sense of complacency among the force itself and among the policymakers that sent that force repeatedly to war. We are confronting a very different situation today. When you fight in the backyard of an adversary he has the geographic advantages: he will have the initiative from the outset of hostilities and that changes the game.

The legacy American way of war is predicated on having qualitative superiority over the adversary. And in our experience, the adversary’s capability to disrupt the deployment of our combat power and the generation of our combat power has been quite limited. For all the obsession with the SCUD missile problem, Saddam Hussein only had about 200 ballistic missiles. They were useful in terrorising Tel Aviv and Riyadh, but they were not significant military assets. That is completely changed vis-à-vis China and Russia and indeed in relation with countries like Iran and North Korea.

Based on the recent wargames that you have conducted, what are some of the new ways to project power in the proximity of the mature A2/AD powers? What do they tell us about the associated new operational concepts? In short, what are the building blocks of a new US approach to warfare?

David Ochmanek: I like to remind people that in the 1980s we also faced an inflection point with regard to the credibility of our deterrent against the Soviet Union. In that context, we came up with a new operational concept called “Air-Land Battle”. That operational concept told commanders that they are going to fight differently in the future – particularly by finding ways to deal with the flow of the forces to the forward line of troops by attacking the second and third echelons. Both the Army and the Air Force bought into that and it not only guided the preparation of operational plans, it also guided the development of military capabilities – this is how we got stealth, ATACMS and JSTARS. It is the generation of capabilities that worked so well in the post-Cold War world. We need an analogue to Air-Land Battle today. We do not have it yet, but the building blocks are beginning to emerge from wargaming and analysis. They suggest turning the legacy approach to warfare on its head. Instead of thinking about weeks to months to prepare for war, we have to think about days. That means changing our posture, it means having more combat power available more quickly in the advent of hostilities becoming probable.

In a world where the enemy has a massive amount of firepower to bring to bear in the theatre, simply putting more F-15s at Kadena is not going to be the answer. Our posture has to be hardened, has to be dispersed, has to be defended and increasingly needs to be mobile. We are learning from Ukraine that if you are stationary on the modern battlefield you are not likely to survive. If you are concentrated on the modern battlefield, you are not likely to survive. There is a certain amount of innovation that has to take place such that we have combat power readily available, but not targetable. In the future that increasingly means mobility for land forces and subsurface for maritime forces. That is not to say that F-35 and destroyers are obsolete. They have a role to play, but the employment of those assets has to be changed.

Breaking the expeditionary mindset is the number one requirement. Number two is getting at this question about sequential operations – finding a way to reach into the contested battle space from the opening hours of the hostilities to locate the enemy invasion force and bring lethality to bear. In a Baltic scenario you might have 40-50-60 battalion tactical groups committed to an offensive against NATO. That means several thousand armoured vehicles. They will be mixed with trucks, cars and other vehicles, creating a very confusing battlefield situation. As we begin to come up with concepts for readily generating combat power to attack that centre of gravity, we must also ensure that we can use our combat power effectively and not waste it on false targets. This is what drives us to novel concepts for sensing and targeting over the battlespace.

Our strike systems must be more survivable, more mobile and less targetable by the enemy and our sensing capabilities must be able to operate even in the presence of an undegraded air defence, heavy jamming and cyber-attacks. So how do you do that? JSTARS is not going to help you. It cannot get close enough to do its work. Global Hawk, Predator, AWACS – all these systems simply cannot survive in this environment. Space will provide some opportunity, particularly with the proliferation of lower orbit assets for sensing and communications. It is no longer possible for the enemy to think about killing a dozen or two dozens of satellites and taking out our eyes. That having been said, our sensors are still jammable and there is the question of getting the data off the birds and down to the warfighter who needs it.

We want to supplement those space assets with land, maritime and with airborne unmanned systems. Recent technological trends indicate the potential for establishing a ubiquitous and resilient sensing and targeting grid using a large number of unmanned platforms. In the European theatre, there is no reason why we could not have thousands of unattended ground sensors ready to be deployed along the expected main axes of advance hours and days prior to the expected Russian invasion. Those sensors have the capability to transmit digital data to a grid for edge processing, providing real-time information on the identity and location of high-value targets. That information can be fed both to operation centres in the rear if the communications links can be sustained, but also to incoming weapons. So I have launched a precision missile from Germany and its headed into the concentration of Russian forces in Belarus. The sensing grid provides real-time updates on the movement of a target to the incoming missile, indicating any displacement in its location. In that way you are ensuring that the combat power you are generating is accurately and effectively applied.

It seems there is a real effort to bring mass back, while adding precision. The “Hellscape” as well as “Replicator” initiatives seem to be about that. What is the role of the Replicator Initiative, of the Hellscape, of the “cats and kittens” concept in the overall US Indo-Pacific posture?

David Ochmanek: Some of the ideas about the “Hellscape” were inspired by Ukraine. The Ukrainians have inflicted serious damage on the Russian Black Sea Fleet without a navy. They have shown to us that sensing and striking in a contested battle space without an air force is possible using proliferated, inexpensive but smart machines (drones). My understanding is that this is the spirit behind the Hellscape. If you try to defend Taiwan, you can still fly B-52 bombers from Alaska, but you can also make Taiwan into a very tough “porcupine” by putting large numbers of expendable, smart machines there prior to the commencement of hostilities. We want a mixed portfolio of capabilities that includes “traditional” things (like our superb undersea force), but you can only get a certain amount of mass from a limited number of expensive platforms. It makes sense to complement them with large numbers of inexpensive and expandable machines.

The term “cat” comes from the LCAAT – low cost attritable aircraft technology. This is a very interesting system because it can be launched from a mobile platform, fly a 1,000 miles with a 1,000-pound payload, deliver that payload and come home and land with a parachute. If your air bases have been decimated, you are still able to conduct operations. We are very interested in that capability or things like it that can be more robust in terms of sustaining combat operations in the face of attack. We want to complement it with things that are smaller and cheaper that can dwell on the battle space.

Again, the LCAAT can deliver 1,000 pounds of ordnance into the battle space and come home. But those weapons have to be told where to go. We do not want a 3 million dollar platform like the LCAAT to be hanging around the battle space searching for targets. That is where “the kittens” come in – we want thousands of small, much less expensive UAVs, also runaway independent, that can dwell on the battlespace, that expect to be shot at in order to exhaust the enemy’s supply of readily available anti-aircraft missiles and guns, and still do the mission. That drives you to small inexpensive platforms with commercial off-the-shelf sensors that can be built in the thousands and stored in prepositioned locations in the theatre years prior to the hostilities. That combination of posture, mass and runaway-independence gives you a way to reverse this structural dependence on an expeditionary approach, vulnerable fixed bases and a sequential approach to warfare.

When talking about reinventing the expeditionary approach and thinking about new ways of projecting power, the US Marine Corps (USMC) seems to be at the forefront of this journey. How do you see the reinvention of some parts of the USMC as a first island chain-centric force? Their stand in forces display mobility, flexibility and dispersion traits and are repurposed for sea denial missions. Is this transformation in line with a much needed new approach to warfare?

David Ochmanek: Certainly it is in that environment. When are we going to learn the value of mobility? We have sent hundreds and hundreds of sorties looking for the SCUDs in the Iraqi desert where we had complete air superiority and we found very few. There is nothing we can do about the dozens of battalions of mobile missiles that the PLA Rocket Force will be deploying on mainland China. Why cannot we create the same problem for China? They know where our bases are. They will not know where elements of the Marines Littoral Regiment are in the islands around Japan because they are small, mobile and they take advantage of concealment and cover. We need more of this portfolio.

Having in mind what we have seen in Ukraine, should we prepare for fighting and deterring decisive sharp wars or protracted extended campaigns?

David Ochmanek: We cannot assume that our adversaries will sue for peace, but if you do not win the first battle you will not have the chance to fight the second battle. The priority must be to create that blunting force to create a credible deterrent for the first battle. At the same time the Ukraine war is a brutal reminder that if the enemy is not ready to capitulate or even negotiate you can be drawn into a very ugly protracted battle. In that context, the centre of gravity of political will can be threatened and there are profound implications for our industrial base.

Our wargames concentrate overwhelmingly on the first battle because it is necessary, albeit not necessarily sufficient for victory. Everything we might say on the distinctive requirements of a protracted battle would be much more speculative. In the old days once you achieved your superiority in the theatre, you had it. The last time an American soldier was killed by an enemy airplane was in Korea in 1952. That assurance is disappearing because of the UAS problem. You can destroy your enemy’s air force and still not be assured of preventing the enemy from doing observation and strike in your rear areas as we are seeing in Ukraine – large numbers of inexpensive things can ruin your whole day. Thinking both about the blunting battle and the protracted battle we also have to think about defence: counter unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) is going to be a very important mission in both phases of the fight and across the spectrum of warfare.

In the recent past there was a lot of talk about the Air-Sea Battle. What happened with the Air-Sea Battle construct? It was completely purged from the lexicon. Was it more of a top down, imposed, construct rather than a bottom-up, organically developed, concept having in mind the specificities of the theatre and adversary?

David Ochmanek: My understanding is that the Air-Land Battle was both bottom-up and top-down. The Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) initiated the process and brought the Air Force onboard. Together they began fleshing out the concept. At the same time the leadership in the Department of Defense on the civilian side understood it, especially Harold Brown and William Perry. From their end they were able to accelerate investments in the development programmes that would create the capabilities needed to implement the concept. There was teamwork between the civilians in the Office of the Secretary of Defense (OSD) and the Army and the Air Force at the operational level.

Air-Sea Battle did not manifest that way. It was basically done in the Air Staff in the Office of Naval Operations in the Pentagon. I do not think it had buy-in from the field operating commanders of those two services and there was no evident connection to the development community. I actually wrote the guidance in the 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) that said go out and develop an Air-Sea Battle concept, but at the time the Secretary of Defense was saying that our priority is to “win the wars we are in today”, namely, Iraq and Afghanistan.

So we faced some headwinds and it took a while for people to understand that the threat from highly capable state adversaries was no longer over the horizon, but rather was a here-and-now problem.

Why is parity (particularly of peer competitors that are on the verge of achieving parity in Precision Guided Munitions and theatre-level battle networks) perceived as a danger? Is it something to be avoided at all costs? There seems to be always a push for overmatch.

David Ochmanek: Having comprehensive overmatch versus one’s principal opponents is, obviously, a good thing for deterrence and, if deterrence fails, a good thing for warfighting. Given the experience of the post-Cold War era, I think that many American strategists implicitly assume that one can only have a credible deterrent if one’s forces enjoy a degree of overmatch in key domains of military operations. What our research shows is that, vis-à-vis China, US forces have lost overmatch in the key domains of air, sea, information and maybe space and that it is difficult to see how we might regain it. This realisation has led us to seek ways to defeat enemy aggression in the absence of air, maritime, information or space superiority. The good news is that wargames suggest that this can be done.

By pursuing approaches such as Replicator, preparing to flood the battlespace with sensors, posturing the bomber force for high-tempo, long-range operations and taking other steps to enable a new approach to power projection, US and partner forces can confront an adversary with the prospect of severe attrition from the outset of hostilities, even if that adversary has some measure of domain superiority.

There are many observers that point out that the emergence of meshed civil-military sensor nets is transforming warfare and our discussion makes a similar point. These meshed civil-military sensor nets are essential to what it becomes a new approach to warfare and deterrence in the first island chain or on the Eastern Flank. But if these ways of warfare and deterrence are so dependent on the meshed civil-military sensor nets, almost like an operational centre of gravity, how do we make sure to/can we protect the integrity of the targeting and sensing mesh against disruptions?

David Ochmanek: The sensing mesh, or what I prefer to call the sensing and targeting grid, will support operations on at least two levels:

First, at the engagement level, it can help to ensure that shooters – aircraft, ships, missile firing units – are apprised of the battlefield situation and are attacking the appropriate targets. Even after those agents have launched their weapons, the grid can monitor changes in the location and disposition of their targets and update the weapons in-flight, guiding them to the desired points of impact. This can provide a level of robustness to targeting in the presence of GPS jamming and other enemy countermeasures.

Second, at the theatre level, the information developed by the grid can support personnel at operations centres charged with orchestrating the operation and allocating forces to specific missions.

Given the importance of these two functions, it will be essential that our forces be able to keep the grid working even in the face of intensive enemy countermeasures, such as air defences, anti-satellite weapons, electronic jamming, and cyber intrusions. Our analysis suggests that overcoming these threats is possible.

• One key to overcoming them is mass. At the most basic level, our forces will need to be able to populate the battlespace with sensors at rates that exceed the enemy’s ability to shoot them down. This implies that the platforms carrying those sensors, whether they be airborne, on the surface, or in space, must be affordable so that they can be purchased and prepositioned in forward areas in large numbers. And the teams that operate the sensor platforms must themselves be survivable on the modern battlefield, which means, increasingly, that they must have small signatures and be mobile.
• Mass helps in another way: The denser the array of sensors, the greater assurance one has that they will be able to communicate with one another in the presence of heavy communications jamming. Picking the right frequencies, power levels, and antenna types for the data links helps with this as well.
• My colleagues at RAND have also explored options for hardening the grid against cyber intrusions. They conclude that exploiting techniques such as those used in blockchain protocols can be effective in this regard.

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