Force MajeureWhat lies behind the military's victory in Iraq.
Posted Thursday, April 10, 2003, at 6:45 PM ET
So when and how did the U.S. military get this good? The elements of swift victory in Gulf War II have been well laid-out: the agility and flexibility of our forces, the pinpoint accuracy of the bombs, the commanders' real-time view of the battlefield, the remarkable coordination among all branches of the armed services (Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines) and special operations. But these elements, and this degree of success, have not been seen in previous wars, not even in the first Gulf War 12 years ago. Three major changes have taken hold within the military since then—a new war-fighting doctrine, advanced digital technology, and a less parochial culture.
PRINT
DISCUSS
E-MAIL
RSS
RECOMMEND...
Facebook
MySpace
Mixx
Digg
Reddit
del.icio.us
Furl
Ma.gnolia
Sphere
StumbleUponThe new doctrine was put in motion in 1983, a decade before Operation Desert Storm, when the U.S. Army's Command and General Staff College, at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., created an elite, one-year post-grad program called the School for Advanced Military Studies. The school's founder was a colonel—soon promoted to brigadier general—named Huba Wass de Czege (pronounced VOSS-de-say-ga). He was in the forefront of officers who had served in Vietnam, witnessed the disaster firsthand, and were eager to change the way the Army thought about combat.
In 1982, Wass de Czege had written a major revision of the Army's war-fighting manual, FM 100-5, the official expression of Army doctrine and the foundation for all decisions about strategy, tactics, and training. The previous edition, written in 1976 by Gen. William DePuy, had recited a strategy of attrition warfare, a static line of defense against the enemy's strongest point of assault, beating it back with frontal assaults and superior firepower. Wass de Czege's rewrite outlined a strategy emphasizing agility, speed, maneuver, and deep strikes well behind enemy lines.
The advanced-studies school at Fort Leavenworth was set up explicitly to weave this new strategy into the fabric of the Army establishment.
By the time of Desert Storm, a small group of Wass de Czege's students had been promoted to high-level posts on the staff of Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf's Central Command. This group of officers, who self-consciously referred to themselves as the "Jedi Knights," designed the ground-war strategy of the first Gulf War, and it was straight out of Wass de Czege's book—the feinted assault up the middle, the simultaneous sweep of armored forces up to the Iraqi army's western flank, the multiple thrusts that surrounded the Iraqis from all sides, hurling them into disarray before their final envelopment and destruction.
The Marines, meanwhile, were going through a similar transformation. Col. Mike Wiley, vice president of the Marine Corps University at Quantico, revised his branch's war doctrine on the basis of a 1979 briefing called "Patterns of Conflict" by a retired Air Force colonel named John Boyd. Boyd too had concluded that successful warfare involves surprise, deception, sweeping quickly around flanks, and creating confusion and disorder in the enemy's ranks. The Marine Corps commandant at the time, Gen. Alfred Gray, considered himself a Boyd disciple and ordered his officers, who led the assault into Kuwait, to avoid frontal assaults and to maneuver around the Iraqis and attack their flanks.
For the Air Force and Navy, Desert Storm saw the inauguration of "smart bombs" that could explode within a few feet of their targets. Fewer than 10 percent of the munitions dropped in Desert Storm were smart bombs; the weapons were new and expensive (between $120,000 and $240,000 apiece); not many had been built; and they still had lots of technical bugs. By 1999, in the war over Kosovo, smart bombs were more reliable and a lot cheaper ($20,000 each); they constituted about 30 percent of bombs dropped. In Afghanistan, the figure rose to 70 percent, which is probably how the math will work out in Gulf War II as well.
The war in Afghanistan, however, saw three innovations that would alter the way America fights wars. First, high-tech smart bombs were combined with high-tech command, control, communications, and intelligence. A new generation of unmanned Predator drones flew over the battlefield, scanning the terrain with digital cameras and instantly transmitting the imagery back to command headquarters. Commanders would view the imagery, look for targets, and order pilots in the area to attack the targets. The pilots would punch the target's coordinates into the smart bomb's GPS receiver. The bomb would home in on the target. Total time elapsed: about 20 minutes. By comparison, in Desert Storm, the process of spotting a new target, assigning a weapon to hit it, then hitting it, took three days.
The second new thing about the U.S. strategy in Afghanistan was that it was truly a "combined-arms" operation—a battle plan that involved more than one branch of the armed services, working in tandem. This had never really happened before. Often using the new high-tech drones as the communications link, Army troops on the ground called for strikes from planes flown by Air Force pilots. Some of these planes, such as B-52 and B-1 bombers, had been built 30 or 40 years earlier to drop multi-megaton nuclear bombs on the Soviet Union. The notion of using them to drop 2,000-pound conventional weapons, in support of ground troops, would have appalled an earlier generation of Air Force generals.
Over the previous decade or so, that generation of generals, weaned on Curtis LeMay and the Strategic Air Command, had died out, and so had SAC's central enemy and target, the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, the '90s saw the creation of a new Joint Forces Command, which promulgated doctrines, field manuals, and war games that envisioned all the services fighting wars together, under command structures that were unified or at least "interoperable." One such document, called "Joint Vision 2020," issued in June 2000, emphasized a strategy of "full-spectrum dominance," involving the conduct of "prompt, sustained and synchronized operations with combinations of forces … space, sea, land, air and information"—a "synergy of the core competencies of the individual services, integrated into the joint team … a whole greater than the sum of its parts."
Written doctrines are one thing, actual operations another. However, the new structures and doctrines did breed, in the words of one Joint Forces Command publication, "a common joint culture." The institutional barriers of inter-service rivalry, even hatred, were gradually broken down. Once new technologies made joint coordination possible, and once the war in Afghanistan showed that coordination could reap tremendous advantages, resistance seemed futile.
Operation Desert Storm was really two wars—the air war and the ground war—each fought autonomously and in sequence. Gulf War II was an integrated war, waged simultaneously and in synchronicity, on the ground, at sea, and in the air. The vast majority of airstrikes, from Air Force bombers and attack planes as well as Navy fighters, were delivered on Iraqi Republican Guards, in order to ease the path of U.S. Army soldiers and Marines thrusting north to Baghdad.
Another new thing, which started in Afghanistan and continued in Iraq, was the systematic inclusion of the so-called "shadow soldiers," the special operations forces. The 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Act, which was best-known for giving new authority to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, also made special ops a separate command, with its own budget. (Before then, each branch had its own special-ops division, which tended to get the big boys' leftovers, in terms of money, equipment and everything else.)
Gen. Schwarzkopf didn't think much of special ops, so didn't use them in Desert Storm, except toward the end of the war, to go hunt for Scud missiles in Iraq's western desert. In Afghanistan, these forces were central. They could be parachuted into the country in small numbers, set up airfields, and develop contacts with rebel leaders. The information about Taliban targets, which the Predator drones transmitted back to headquarters, usually came from a special-ops officer riding on horseback with a laptop.
We may never know how much special ops have been doing in Gulf War II. Certainly, these forces were in the Iraqi capital days or weeks before the war began, scoping out targets and lining up contacts. They were in the western deserts again, hunting Scuds and preparing airfields. They were in the north, training Kurds and securing oil fields. They were probably accompanying, and perhaps advancing, the 3rd Infantry and 1st Marine divisions all the way from Kuwait to Baghdad, scouting targets and transmitting their positions to the air commanders back at headquarters.
We don't yet fully know the lessons of this war—in part because it isn't over yet and in part because, as James Carafano, a former Army officer now with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, put it, "90 percent of the war was going on out of our vision." Most of that 90 percent was being conducted by special ops (no embedded reporters there) and by the laptop-wielding joint-forces crew in Qatar (a few embeds, but no access to that part of the operation). What they were and are doing, however invisible, formed a large part of what made this war so stunning and new.
Obama's Small Masterpiece of a Speech at Fort Hood
Can Death Row Convicts Have Whatever They Want for Their Last Meal?
Does Rupert Murdoch Really Hate Google?
The Crops That Are Secretly Terrible for the Planet
The Three Kinds of Liberals Who Could Bring Down the Health Care Bill
Short Sayings That Make Me Happy
Remarks from the Fray:
Hard to believe that Fred Kaplan doesn't talk about intelligence much. All of these wonder-weapons are useless if you don't know where to point them. And for all the vaunted accuracy of Gulf War weapons, the fact remains that the bulk of Iraqi forces were destroyed in ground actions. The incredible kill-ratio in Gulf War ground actions occurred not because of the tactics Kaplan describes -- they're pretty basic armored tactics, Guderain and Rommel would have been reasonably comfortable with them -- but because American troops had trained long and hard at locating the enemy while denying the enemy the ability to locate us. It's not too difficult to pin the enemy down, encircle him and smash him if you have freedom of movement and know where he is. Finding out precisely where he is is the hard part. In the end, most casualties in modern wars occur as a unit is trying to locate the enemy. Be it a tank or a sniper, the time that they're shooting the snot out of you lies between the moment they spot you and the moment you spot them. After that, the situation becomes manageable. Everybody outside of military circles has been amazed at the low American casualties in this war...in light of our Gulf War experience, nobody expected them to be terribly high, but we all expected them to be more than a trickle. I expect that the explanation is fairly simple: between technology and training, we've gotten very, very good at spotting the enemy before he can spot us. After that, it makes little difference whether you use a PGM rapier or a carpet-bomb bludgeon. It's the intelligence battle that's decisive.
--WVMicko
(To reply, click here)
Joint Vision and interservice tours for senior officers and senior nocoms notwithstanding, there have always been, in essence, three combat arms: Infantry, which attacks using men on the ground, preferably after preparation by the other two combat arms; Artillery, which lobs projectiles of various sorts at the enemy to prepare the way for assaults by the other two combat arms; and Cavalry, whose job is to either break through the enemy's front lines or, by choice, outflank and outthink the enemy - but in any case to get into the enemy's rear and trains areas and there raise merry hell, the object of which is to fubar enemy planning, supply lines and communications, and tie up as many enemy troops as possible chasing them or trying to defend against them. Nowhere is it written, however, that the Cavalry Philosophy requires troops to be mounted on horses... or tanks... or helicopters... or landing craft... or parachutes. It is a philosophy, not a weapons system… They use any means suitable to get their forces into the enemy rear, disrupt lines of communications, and raise hell so that the Infantry (however mounted and equipped) can follow up and smash the enemy. It's not a new concept. It's simply the application of an old one on a vast scale, with superior weapons and training. I'm not running the Jedi down; but what they are about would be instantly recognizable to Nathan Bedford Forrest, John Grierson, Heinz Guderian, Geroge Patton or William Slim. They all thought that way, too.
--RoyJaruk-18
(To reply, click here)
I wonder if there are two other important factors that led to our unprecedented success in Iraq this time that Mr. Kaplan does not mention. The first of these factors is how successful the past ten years of economic sanctions imposed upon Iraq were at undercutting the strength of Saddam's military infrastructure. We know of course that he lost every warhead and missile we could find and destroy at the conclusion of the 1991 Gulf War but he still retained his Republican Guard and other large-scale conventional forces. Moreover, once he ejected UN weapons inspectors in 1998, fears grew that Iraq was secretly rearming itself through rebuilding and acquisitions. It became apparent that the bulk of money raised by Iraq through the "Oil for Food" program authorized by the UN was being re-directed by Saddam away from its intended humanitarian relief and used for other purposes, presumably military. It seems clear now that regardless of how much money Saddam secretly had to spend, it was insufficient to develop and support even the forces he had remaining to him, let alone undertake a major rearming initiative. Thus, coalition soldiers faced Iraqi troops who were simply weaker than they were at the height of Saddam's power and aggression at the beginning of the 1991 Gulf War. They lacked the degree of missile support from last time but also were under-trained, under-armed, and under-provisioned. The second factor is the role of intelligence - not the tactical intelligence gleaned in the field that Mr. Kaplan mentions but rather covert intelligence. Two surprise attacks were carried out by coalition forces on buildings where Saddam and his sons were thought to be present. The first is widely believed to have wounded Saddam and the second to have very possibly killed him… It is my understanding the intelligence for the first attack was provided to the military by the CIA among other sources. While I am not clear about the specific source(s) for the second attack, I read the other day that multiple intelligence sources were confirming their beliefs that Saddam was in the building at the time we attacked it. This means that not only is there greater coordination between the branches of the military, as reported by Mr. Kaplan, but also greater coordination between military intelligence and other domestic and international intelligence agencies. I surmise this greater cooperation resulted from reforms put in place as a result of the investigations into how the U.S. failed to predict the attacks of September 11.
--The_Bell
(To reply, click here)
(4/13)