As they gear up for an extended campaign against global terrorism,
U.S. troops will have to sharpen their training, specifically, so
they can avoid surprise attacks, said William Schneider, chairman
of the Defense Science Board, a Pentagon advisory panel.
In a war against non-state terrorist groups, “training is
an extremely important issue,” Schneider said during a meeting
with reporters in Washington, D.C. “The absence of training
can emerge as a threat” to the United States.
The unforeseen hijackings of U.S. airliners and the subsequent
attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September
11 could be viewed as an extreme example of what Schneider calls
“a training surprise.” That happens, he said, “when
the adversary focuses efforts on a particular vulnerability and
has very high-quality training to exploit that vulnerability.”
Earlier this year, the Defense Science Board released a study,
titled “Training Superiority and Training Surprise.”
The report outlines the current shortfalls in military training
and recommends ways to shore up training capabilities. “In
1994, Croatia surprised Serbia with a military proficiency built
up in one year,” said the study. In the future, “others
could surprise us.” Even though the United States has well-trained
forces, said the Defense Science Board, “training superiority
is ours to lose and for others to gain.”
U.S. forces, said Schneider, could “encounter a training
surprise,” in a war against ragtag terrorist militias, which
may “turn out to be extraordinarily well trained for some
specific thing.”
For that reason, he said, “a focus on training needs to be
a much higher priority item, much more central to the way in which
we acquire weapons systems, for example.” Sophisticated, computer-driven
weapon systems only are useful if the operators are trained to take
advantage of all the capabilities available, Schneider explained.
“In the efforts of transformation at the Department of Defense,
training is an acutely important thing.”
To prepare for an extended conflict against an international terrorist
network, for example, U.S. forces need to learn how to fight a “non-hierarchical
war,” Schneider said.
The al-Qaeda network, allegedly responsible for the September 11
hijackings, is “horizontally integrated,” said Robert
W. Chandler, a retired Air Force colonel who has written several
books on military strategy. The network cells, he said, “train
each other, they sell each other arms.
“If you go to war against a network, you have to understand
that the network is horizontally integrated, not hierarchically
integrated. ... Being horizontal is a different way to fight. There
are many heads on the snake.”
Chandler speculated that U.S. forces will have time to train properly
for this war, because it will be waged long enough, “so the
network can be taken apart piece by piece.”
According to Schneider, current shortfalls in training equipment
and capabilities can be attributed to the ease with which acquisition
managers can cut training funding from their programs.
The cost of training, he added, should be “identified as
a programmatic element that will need to be included [in the program
budget] and then cascaded into the operating scheme for the employment
of the system.”
The DSB study, published in January 2001, concluded that:
The report recommended that the following issues be addressed: