As events unfold in Iraq, much second-guessing goes on in Washing- ton, not
just about the overall U.S. strategy or lack thereof, but also on whether the
hundreds of billions of dollars allocated every year to weapon systems are being
spent on the right things.
Every commander agrees that the winning edge comes from well-trained, smart
troops, not necessarily from superior technology. But it’s also true that
the fundamental thinking that prevails in the Defense Department today is based
on the concept of “transformation.”
The military services have spent the past several years trying to figure out
how to transform into leaner, faster-moving forces with fewer heavy formations,
more special operations, information technology and bandwidth. To that end,
the defense secretary in recent years has pushed the services to redirect their
$75 billion yearly procurement budgets away from Cold War platforms—such
as tanks, large warships and air-to-air combat jets—to “transformational”
technologies such as unmanned reconnaissance aircraft, space surveillance systems
and precision weapons.
But what is happening on the Iraqi battlefield, so far, indicates that while
the overpowering U.S. technology is winning battles, this prowess has not helped
achieve strategic objectives, such as stabilizing Iraq and creating conditions
for a new regime.
The question of whether the U.S. military’s high-tech weaponry can compete
against guerrilla tactics was the topic of a PBS documentary aired earlier this
month, called “Battle Plan Under Fire.” Most compelling in that
program were comments by retired Army Maj. Gen. Robert H. Scales Jr., former
commandant of the Army War College and a forward-thinker, who predicted more
than a decade ago that the Army’s future wars would be unconventional
and that the enemies would fight “asymmetrically,” rather than try
to match the capabilities of U.S. weaponry and forces.
“An obsession with technology blinded us to some degree to this countervailing
universe that happens in all wars: that is the cultural side of wars, and the
ability to understand your enemy: his intents, his motives, his will,”
Scales told PBS. In the kind of close combat U.S. forces are in today, the enemy
“doesn’t need a UAV to locate you or a precision bomb to kill you.
All he needs is a 13-cent bullet.”
Slogans such as “transformation” and “revolution in military
affairs” increasingly are masquerading as ideas, said retired Marine Corps
Lt. Gen. Paul Van Riper, who also was featured in the documentary. “In
a sense, they make war more antiseptic. They make it more like a machine. They
don’t understand it’s a terrible, uncertain, chaotic, bloody business,”
Van Riper said.
“My experience has been that those who focus on the technology, the science,
tend towards sloganeering. … It does a great disservice to the American
military, the American defense establishment. … Information dominance,
network-centric warfare, focused logistics—you could fill a book with
all of these slogans.”
But even though war in Iraq has exposed flaws in the theories of transformation,
it also is providing military planners and weapons system developers useful
lessons that could help direct future budgets to technologies that could fill
gaps in the services’ current capabilities.
The vulnerabilities of U.S. forces to unconventional guerilla tactics were
dominant themes in a war game hosted by the U.S. Army and the Joint Forces Command
in early May. In “Unified Quest 2004,” fictitious regional wars
unfolded between the “blue” force of the United States and allies,
and “red” forces in the Middle East and Southeast Asia.
Although the final outcome of the game will be unknown for several weeks, some
of the observations by the “red” commanders offer potentially useful
insight that could help budget planners and procurement officials figure out
how to make better use of defense dollars. Two examples are the need to improve
intelligence collection capabilities and to make U.S. logistics re-supply operations
less vulnerable to “anti-access” tactics.
The growing reliance by the U.S. military on satellite imagery and airborne
sensors played right into the enemy’s hand during the war game. The red
commander decided to overwhelm blue’s sensors by dispersing his forces
throughout the country. He deceived blue by creating so much confusion that,
even though blue had sophisticated sensors, its information pipelines were overloaded,
and blue commanders had difficulty understanding what they were seeing.
In urban battles, the enemy took advantage of the fact that blue sensors cannot
see inside buildings. The only sure way for blue to find the “bad guys”
was to rely on special operations forces on the ground.
Another tactic that red effectively used to offset blue’s technological
superiority was to plant mines in the coastal waters around the Southeast Asian
theater of operations, which also was a major shipping route for commercial
vessels. Red commanders not only were able to sink blue’s logistics re-supply
vessels, but they also succeeded in psychological warfare by propagating panic
as ships tried to navigate that area.
Even critics of the transformation movement, such as Van Riper, concede that
technology is important in today’s military. “Anyone who understands
war would never deny the place of technology,” he said. “The American
nation needs to invest all that it can afford in new technologies for the military.
It just needs to be very careful that that investment supports an operating
idea or concept. It’s not technology for technology’s sake. Worst
of all would be for technology to lead the military, instead of the ideas leading
the development of the technology.”
But, as we are witnessing in Iraq, hostile forces are not scared away by overwhelming
force. The challenge for U.S. commanders and civilian leaders is to understand
the enemy and, thus, devise the means to defeat him quickly and decisively.