What technological and doctrinal changes have made A2/AD more of an issue? What elements does it chiefly involve?
What are today’s educated guesses about how an A2/AD plan can be defeated?
Several reasons why A2AD is a larger concern now than in the past:
Missiles - have gotten far more capable. Longer range, better seekers, larger warheads in some cases, faster, and most importantly, cheaper so that they would be launched in salvoes.
Radar - more capable, including increasing capability against stealth aircraft.
Submarines - cheaper, somewhat quieter.
Seabed mines - really, really hard to detect the good ones.
But it isn’t just that there’s a revolution in these technologies, it’s also that our adversaries are investing in them. If China had three super-modern diesel-electric submarines, I doubt anyone would call that a part of an A2AD strategy. But 50 of em? That means the U.S. Navy has to think twice about how it can get near China’s coast if war broke out.
Sorry for the ignorance, but how has not all war ever been “anti-access” and “area denial”?
In a classic “we’re going to conquer your village” scenario, there’s an area (the village) that one side wants to gain access to and the other wants to deny access to…
I assume the thinking is that area denial does not necessarily mean occupation.
What if one side conquers the village but doesn’t want to live there, and still wants to deny it to the other side?
As Buckety mentions, A2/AD is more about denying the use of an area than making use of that area oneself. It is chiefly pertinent when it comes to China and Iran. In the case of China, if it decided to invade Taiwan, Taiwan itself would likely not be able to do much about it, it would have to rely on the US Navy. If China could create a No Man’s Land 1000km from its coast in the Pacific, the help the US Navy could lend to Taiwan would be much reduced.
In the case of Iran, much oil shipping takes place some distance from its coast and the US Navy/AF want to make sure that runs smoothly.
Does the longer range comes from bigger size (enabling higher altitude flight) and/or a switch to air-breathing engines?
How have the seekers and software gotten better?
How has radar become more capable?
I know there’s UHF that’s been found to be useful against stealth aircraft. To the Chinese, getting their embassy “accidentally” bombed in 1999 and the gear/intel/expertise they gave the Serbs must seem like a very low price to pay for the intel they got from Serbian air defence.
That explains it! Thanks.
The key thing to understand is that “anti-access / area denial” is a Pentagon, and especially US Navy, buzzword. It doesn’t mean what the plain English words mean.
What it really means is that historically since WWII the US Navy could plan to steam its carriers right up close to the enemy shore, launch strike aircraft, make a big mess in the enemy territory, and there really wasn’t much the enemy could do about that. They (the enemy) might have air defenses that could shoot down some US attack aircraft over their (the enemy) territory, but the US fleet could sit nearby offshore in total impunity.
That has rapidly changed in the last 10-15 years. The Chinese, NK, and Iranians are getting better enough at defending their near shores that now the US Navy realizes the carrier fleet might have to float much farther away. Far enough away in fact that USN aircraft become almost useless at the extreme tip of their range.
But it’d be impolitic for the Navy to call this spade a spade and to call those countries out by name as our planned enemies.
So they coined the new generic buzzword “anti-access / area denial” or “A2AD” to refer to the idea that a generic enemy might invent some generic capability that might generically interfere with a generic friendly countries’ generic ships getting close enough to do some generic damage to such said-but-unnamed generic enemy.
So far so clear?
Late add: …
The USAF had been savoring a similar situation up to recently with stealth technology. In theory at least, longer range USAF aircraft could tool around in defended enemy territory with almost total impunity, attacking at will.
The Chinese in particular are rapidly learning to defeat stealth. Which ruins the USAF’s impunity.
So suddenly USAF is getting on the A2AD bandwagon as well, thinking that buzzword applies to their fast-emerging problems too.
And of course Lockheed Martin, Boeing, etc., are all to happy to invent counter-A2AD weapons to offset the progress China, NK, and Iran, not to mention Putin’s Russia, are all making.
I wouldn’t agree with this explaination. Instead think of WWII, where the Germans tried to deny US shipping access to Europe. It didn’t really work because it’s a damn big ocean, submarines could only patrol so much area, subs could be chased off by destroyers, etc. Sure, the Germans attempted to deny area and access, but it really wasn’t feasible.
Now, modern states are approaching the capability to actually carry out what the Germans could not do: effectively control vast areas by having good enough sensors to detect opponents at long ranges, and sophisticated weapons that makes opponents vulnerable at or near those ranges.
The battle of the Atlantic was not about area/access denial. The Kriegsmarine was flat out trying to destroy our resources. A better example of area denial was some of the chemical warfare tactics the Germans employed in WWI. They learned that gas didn’t kill many enemy and that if hit with gas, they’d weather the attack in place without retreating (once effectve defenses had been developed). But no one would willingly enter a gas-soaked area. Consequently, when the German prepared an attack into French lines they would secure the flanks of the attacking force with a gas shell barrage behind the French front lines. They knew the French would not enter the hit area and therefore it was denied to them. This, in theory, would protect the attackers from a flank attack on that side.
The problem with all analogies is that they fall apart at some point. I used that analogy only to illustrate that the advance of technology enables competitors to effectively threaten their adversaries over really, really huge areas in a manner that simply was impossible before.
The problem with the poison gas analogy, for what it is worth, is that the Germans actually had to use the weapons in order to deny territory to the adversary. Today, China could be effective in pushing the U.S. Navy hundreds of miles further away from its shores without firing a shot. The knowledge that China has much better long-range radars, space-based surveillance, and highly effective anti-ship missiles with ranges in excess of 1,000 miles could be enough to discourage the United States from parking a carrier anywhere near the Taiwan Straits, for example, before a missile is ever fired. And if a carrier is pushed out of range of its tactical aircraft, well, it’s pretty useless. Which is what the A2AD strategy is really about.
It sounds like you’re talking in strategic terms whereas I’m using tactical scale examples.