GlobalSecurity.org In the News

Campaign Proves the Length of U.S. Military Arm

By Joseph Fitchett

While the war in Afghanistan is not over yet, the first phase of conventional warfare has already demonstrated America's new ability to deliver devastating firepower against targets thousands of miles from the nearest friendly military base. U.S. capabilities to wage war at great distance is the main lesson being drawn by analysts after last week's campaign wrested Afghanistan out of Taliban control.

This new reach shows that Washington could launch military strikes against terrorist movements or hostile regimes or nuclear missile sites that would have been considered too far away to be attacked by any force short of a full-scale U.S. invasion of the sort mounted a decade ago in defense of Kuwait. Success in Afghanistan, one month into the campaign, came when the United States managed to marry three crucial elements: long-range airpower, good tactical intelligence and highly mobile ground forces that can operate independently because they pack enough firepower and electronic support systems to protect them from getting caught in ambushes.

With just a few hundred American troops on the ground, the U.S. military showed that it could pinpoint targets accurately enough to destroy Taliban forces with the limited number of bombing sorties that could be flown from aircraft carriers 1,000 miles (1,600 kilometers) away and from Diego Garcia Island, even farther away in the Indian Ocean. Special forces not only used laser designators to guide the smart bombs but also spearheaded Northern Alliance attacks that drove the Taliban into trenches where they were vulnerable to long-range bombers. Initially, the Taliban tried to scatter their forces in small hiding places.

The tactical combination, according to a Defense Department planner, is "a new way of doing war." It "puts U.S. power in business in areas that used to be off-limits for anything except cruise missiles."

In a week, the regime of Mullah Mohammed Omar was destroyed as a national force, and the Taliban-controlled area of Afghanistan shrank from 90 percent of the country to perhaps 10 percent.

Assailed everywhere by combined air and ground assaults, Taliban forces sought to switch sides or melt into the hills as their strongholds changed hands at a dizzying pace, usually with short battles or only light resistance from demoralized forces.

In the past 10 days, as the U.S.-charted campaign got into high gear with proxy Afghan militias spearheaded by U.S. special forces, at least 5,000 Taliban combatants were killed in bombing and ground clashes, experts said Sunday. In addition, according to French military sources, up to 1,000 other fighters have been killed in the ranks of the Qaida terrorist organization and the other special units comprising mainly veterans from Arab countries and neighboring Pakistan.

The most loyal Taliban units "didn't disintegrate or collapse, they fell back in a way that is typical of combat units that have sustained casualties of 30 percent," according to John Pike of GlobalSecurity.org, a defense consultancy. Estimates of the Taliban forces' strength a week ago ranged upward of 25,000 men, so his calculations would put their losses at between 5,000 and 10,000.

"What has succeeded so well in Afghanistan," said Richard Perle, head of the Pentagon's Defense Review Board, "are the highly mobile, long-range units with massive firepower: Today, they are drawn from about 20 percent of our forces in the three services, but I believe that we will seek an accelerating shift in that direction."

In an interview, he predicted that the next defense budget, due for initial debate next month in Washington, would bring action to retire more Cold War-era warships, fighter-planes and heavy tanks and restructure U.S. forces in smaller, more mobile units that depend on electronics to bring new effectiveness to their firepower.

In routing the Taliban, U.S. forces apparently sustained minimal losses, with reported casualties being two airmen who died in a helicopter crash in Pakistan. Contrary to suggestions that U.S. ground forces would be committed to combat only as members of armored units, the Pentagon said that hundreds of highly mobile U.S. special forces were fighting on the ground.

Already, these units have "killed Taliban combatants and terrorists" and emerged largely unscathed, according to the defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, who displayed pictures of heavily armed U.S. elite troops riding on horseback with anti-Taliban Afghan fighters. "While they look like cowboys," another U.S. official said, "they're actually following directions from a Predator drone far overhead so that they can call in airpower if there is trouble over the horizon."

In Afghanistan, where these small, remotely piloted surveillance aircraft were used effectively for the first time in combat, the official said, "the Predators did wonders" by beaming back video pictures in real time showing enemy movements and pinpointing targets. Overall, other officials said, the growing U.S. array of electronics and sensors, which can now peer through darkness and clouds, were crucial in enabling U.S. forces to eliminate even small elusive targets with precise smart bombs and other guided weapons.

The initial outcome in Afghanistan points up the widening gap in military technology between the United States and European armies, which have not matched investments in high-precision arms and other equipment designed to provide enough mobility to fight in remote theaters such as Afghanistan.

With European armies unable to play a role in the Afghan campaign, questions about the Bush administration's handling of the war had started bubbling up in Europe 10 days ago, just before the U.S.-orchestrated offensive hit full stride.

In starting the bombing war in October, U.S. sources said, the U.S. assets were largely confined to long-range airpower: carrier-based fighter-bombers and B-52 bombers based in the Indian Ocean. "We didn't even have good intelligence ties with the Northern Alliance," a policymaker acknowledged recently.

Quickly, the B-52s were equipped with precision-guided heavy bombs that rely on all-weather targeting by satellites, a technology that enables bombers to destroy targets with a single payload that might have required several runs before, even as recently as the Kosovo conflict.

"Still, we had absolutely no intelligence from the ground, so we couldn't even send in special forces or air controllers to manage air strikes because for all we knew our teams might be dropping into hostile hands," the source said.

Visibly, however, an initial turning point came in late October when Northern Alliance fighters, almost overnight, acquired boots and uniforms. "It took weeks to start deliveries because Pentagon lawyers first had to work through a U.S. legal ban, which nobody seemed to know about ahead of time, on supplying munitions to nongovernment forces," a Bush aide said. By early October, with the Northern Alliance getting U.S.-funded ammunition for their Russian-made arms, U.S. special forces teams were at work, using laser-beam range-finders to guide air strikes.

Never exposed to heavy air raids, even during the 1980s war against Soviet forces, "the Taliban behaved in the classic fashion of Afghan fighters: They bluster one day and melt away the next," according to Olivier Roy, a French specialist on Central Asia. Outgunned and often leaderless, many Taliban fighters simply went home, or changed sides, often for payment, according to Mr. Roy.

Now the Afghan war seems headed into a new phase focusing heavily on intensive commando operations to hunt down Osama bin Laden and other terrorist leaders and hard-core Taliban leaders. "This manhunt is what we came for," a Bush administration aide said, "not just the Taliban regime's overthrow."

Copyright 2001 International Herald Tribune