PBS News Hour October 8, 2001
MILITARY ASSESSMENT
MARGARET WARNER: To further analyze the military campaign we turn to Retired General Merrill McPeak who was Air Force chief of staff during the Gulf War; he's now with ECC International Corporation, which produces training and simulation equipment. And John Pike, the director of globalsecurity.org, a non-partisan think tank in Washington.
John Pike, we've just heard the Pentagon's assessment. Give us yours.
A restrained military response
JOHN PIKE: This is a remarkably restrained, limited air campaign compared to the beginning of the Kosovo air war three years ago or Desert Storm, the Gulf War a decade ago. You're looking at a small fraction of the number of aircraft being launched, a small fraction of the number of targets being hit. Those wars started out 10, 20 times larger than this. One reason is there's simply not that many targets in Afghanistan. You're looking at maybe a dozen airfields, a few dozen aircraft. There could be a danger to special operations helicopters later on.
What else they're striking remains to be seen. A few leadership targets, perhaps some Taliban forces out in the field. But I think it is clear that in contrast to those previous wars where the air campaign was the center of gravity, the focal point, this is simply setting the stage, as they said, for the follow on Special Forces and other operations.
MARGARET WARNER: General McPeak, can you tell from what the Pentagon said today how successful or effective it has been in beginning to set the stage. In other words, however limited the objectives are, how easy is it to tell how well it's gone?
GENERAL MERRILL McPEAK: Well, it's probably too soon to tell, but it ought to be relatively straightforward. By and large, these are fixed targets. Buildings, airports, training camps and so forth that we can fly either with satellite photography or U-2s or unmanned photographic systems will give us high resolution pictures so we ought to be able to make a pretty good assessment. I must say that judging by appearances, it seems to be a very well planned and well-executed air campaign. I agree entirely with John Pike, very limited, very deliberate. We do much bigger exercises than this in normal peacetime. So, by and large it looks like a proportionate response.
MARGARET WARNER: And, Rumsfeld said that they had gone after dozens of command-and-control and leadership targets and he wasn't satisfied that they successfully disrupted them. What is he talking about there?
GENERAL MERRILL McPEAK: Well, I really am not sure. First of all, the Secretary said they attacked 31 targets with 40 sorties yesterday. So that doesn't sound like if you took the sub category of command-and-control, it would constitute dozens. Mind you, as near as I can tell, we fired more Tomahawks at bin Laden following the attacks on the African embassies two or three years ago than we have so far. So this has been a very restrained response. Now, if we have attacked Taliban headquarters and compounds and so forth, then the message clearly is to other Afghans to distance themselves from the Taliban leadership -- because we would fully understand that Sheik Omar and others are not going to be in those buildings.
Targeting Taliban communications
MARGARET WARNER: Another big target, John Pike, related, of course, is communications. Again Secretary Rumsfeld said he felt the Taliban and al-Quaida could still communicate. What did we know about how they communicate and what will it take to take that out?JOHN PIKE: Well, unfortunately the open literature doesn't know an awful lot about what the communication networks are there. Presumably the National Security Agency, our eavesdropping agency, has been spending a lot of time looking at that. It's clear that at the strategic level, at the highest level a lot of the communications simply consist of face-to-face meetings. Now if the Taliban leadership is dispersed, if they're worried about traveling around in convoys where they may be attacked it's going to be difficult to do face-to-face meetings. It is clear from the open literature that the Taliban military out in the field use a variety of military radios, commercially available radios in order to coordinate the small militia bands that make up their organization.
To the extent that they attempt to function as organized military units they're going to be talking on the radio, that's something that American reconnaissance aircraft can pick up and American attack aircraft can target. In both directions I think that this... establishing the conditions is the operative phrase that by reducing the ability of the Taliban to control its territory, giving Americans freedom of action, that that's going to enable the special operations units to go after the terrorists.
Taliban resistance
MARGARET WARNER: Let me ask you, General McPeak, about the Taliban's resistance. We heard about the anti-aircraft fire that there were some portable surface-to- air missiles. How good or how effective is the Taliban... are the Taliban's assets in this area and does it surprise you that all the planes came back unharmed?
GENERAL MERRILL McPEAK: It's not surprising at all. What I've seen on television has been unaimed fire from triple A. It looks like 37 or 57 millimeter AAA.
MARGARET WARNER: Triple A?
GENERAL MERRILL McPEAK: Antiaircraft Artillery. It has an undisciplined look. It's not aimed. It's sort of hold the trigger down and fire off the clip kind of thing. That's a big sky up there when you're trying to hit aircraft at high altitude. I do think it's a potential threat to helicopter operations, as John Pike says, when we get around to inserting special forces-- and we may have done that already as far as I know-- but insertion of special forces and support of them on the ground and withdrawal and relief of them is going to require helicopter operations that could... these systems that they've shown so far could pose a threat to.
Capturing Osama bin Laden
MARGARET WARNER: All right. Let's go to what... What's the intent here in terms of creating these conditions, John Pike? What are the steps between air strikes and essentially and apprehending or getting Osama bin Laden.
JOHN PIKE: That's still unclear both in terms of what the U.S. Government has stated and in terms of exactly how this is going to play out in the real world. My working hypothesis is that over the next several days, the U.S. Government will decide that the Taliban is no longer effectively functioning in a coordinated fashion and that based on satellite reconnaissance they're going to identify probable dispersal areas of Taliban units of al-Quaida units of other terrorist organizations, possibly using predator drone aircraft to decide whether a group of people that they've focused in on are refugees or commandos and then possibly a ranger unit, a delta team would go out either to attack that unit, more probably I think though to try to capture people for interrogation to see what they're prepared to say about what the unit in the next valley might be doing, and gradually to try to move up the food chain, to try to roll up these organizations, to capture the leadership and to capture a lot of the commandos that might have been planning future actions.
MARGARET WARNER: General McPeak, very briefly, would this kind of operation or anything like it continue to require air cover or air support as well?
GENERAL MERRILL McPEAK: I think air support will be required but quite frankly what we're doing is fairly straightforward. The hard part to date has been the diplomatic part, assuring the over flight rights and the basing and so forth, and going forward, the hard part will be the intelligence of digging out this network and actually making it... presenting it for attack. The attacks so far and into the future are pretty easy, straightforward stuff.
MARGARET WARNER: All right. General McPeak, John Pike, thank you both very much.
Copyright © 2001 MacNeil-Lehrer Productions. All Rights Reserved.
