By SYDNEY J. FREEDBERG JR
CRYSTAL CITY: Don’t think Beijing. Think Abottabad. The evolving concept known as Air-Sea Battle isn’t all about a war with China, nor a budget war with the US Army, said the former Air Force chief of staff who is one of the concept’s founding fathers. Instead, said Gen. Norton Schwartz, who retired just last fall, Air-Sea Battle is an earnest effort to find ways to operate in the face of high-tech defenses, and the lessons learned apply everywhere from North Korea to the commando raid into Pakistan that killed Osama Bin Laden.
“It’s harder to address some of the mythology over the phone,” Gen. Schwartz said as he sat down with me at a restaurant a few minutes’ subway ride from the Pentagon. As Air-Sea Battle gained momentum and attracted attention, both good and bad, he said, “there were efforts, I would argue, to sort of hijack the concept.”
The harshest criticism has come from those who felt Air-Sea Battle “demonized” China as a potential adversary. In fact, “there were those who argued we shouldn’t have called it ‘battle,’” Schwartz said, “but in the end, this is about warfighting” — just in a much broader range of scenarios than the critics gave it credit for.
Read the full story at Breaking Defense