Providence Journal March 10, 2002
On land, in the air this war is different
The symbol of this war is a Green Beret riding on a horse talking on a satellite phone.
BY JOHN E. MULLIGAN
WASHINGTON -- When Dick Myers was a young F-4 pilot stationed in Thailand 30 years ago, he was in the dumb bomb business. Four years out of the Air Force Academy, Capt. Myers coordinated other fighters on frustrating -- and sometimes fatal -- bombing runs over North Vietnam.
"We'd have orders to knock out a gun, just a dot on a map that when you got in range, was a guy at a gun surrounded by a berm. We'd send in flight after flight after flight and never hit him," Myers recalled recently. "We'd know because he'd still be shooting and sometimes he'd hit one of us. We lost a lot of planes in Vietnam because we had to fly a lot of sorties to destroy a target, put a lot of people in harm's way."
Late in Myers's tour, the Air Force began to develop laser-guided munitions, which sometimes made it possible to nail a target with only a few sorties. That experiment was, in a sense, the start of a revolution in warfare that has matured into a deadly weapon on the one-time fighter pilot's watch in Afghanistan.
As chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Richard B. Myers has presided over a triumph in precision bombing that overshadows not just the primitive beginnings of laser guidance in Vietnam, but also the vaunted "smart bombs" of the Persian Gulf War and even the more recent air campaign over Kosovo.
But that's just part of the picture. If the war in Afghanistan has a symbol, it is the Green Beret master sergeant riding a horse while talking on a satellite phone. This war, say American leaders, has been fought with a blend of new and old war-fighting tools and doctrines. This war, they say, is the pathway to the military future.
U.S. SPECIAL Forces are improvising as never before in Afghanistan, "coordinating air strikes with the most advanced precisions weapons, with cavalry charges by hundreds of Afghan fighters on horseback," Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld told Congress last month. "The effect has been devastating -- and transformational," Rumsfeld said.
Some skeptics warn that it's far too early to be so confident about the success of a war that flared into fatal confrontation for U.S. troops only last week. Even less certain, they say, is what lessons Afghanistan will leave for other campaigns in the war against terrorism. As is so often the case in war, necessity has bred invention. "In a matter of a few minutes, they shattered the prism through which we looked at the entire world," Myers said of the effect of the Sept. 11 attacks.
New technology has rejuvenated old weapons, leading military planners to believe that information technology may change warfare as dramatically as it has changed commerce. Other lessons from Afghanistan would fit neatly in the long-settled orthodoxy of the professional warrior: leadership on the ground matters.
Green Berets' leadership of Afghan insurgents against the Taliban was "a classic use of special operations forces," said Sen. Jack Reed, a former Army Airborne officer trained at West Point. "It was right out of the book. You go in, organize an indigenous force. You support them with logistics and with firepower."
WHAT WAS STARTLING was the swiftness and killing power of the fire from the air -- and the web of technology and hardware that made it possible. Where the use of "dumb bombs" outnumbered that of precision bombs by a ratio of about 9 to 1 in the Persian Gulf War, about 60 percent of the munitions used in Afghanistan have been "smart," according to Rumsfeld.
"I'd sum it all up with JDAMs," said John Pike, a military analyst with globalsecurity.org. The JDAM is the Joint Direct Attack Munition, the precision weapon of choice in Afghanistan. JDAMs are a mechanism of adjustable fins and electronic guidance systems that can be attached to "dumb" gravity bombs cheaply -- about $18,000 a kit, compared to about $1 million for a Tomahawk cruise missile.
In Afghanistan, JDAMs turned the 40-year-old B-52 into an instrument of precision-guided bombing.
For the Navy, Pike cited estimates that the leap in bombing effectiveness has boosted the firepower of a U.S. aircraft carrier by a factor of more than 4.
THEN THERE is the geometric increase in the speed of computers. During the Persian Gulf War, "you practically needed to set up the equivalent of a small town" to accommodate the bulky machines needed to receive and process data from U-2 surveillance planes, Pike said.
The compactness and speed of today's computers (and sensors) lets the U-2 carry much of its own data-collection and processing equipment. The battlefield situation can therefore be continuously monitored -- and fed to the portable computer screens of combatants and distant commanders alike. Similar computing power is how military leaders in charge of Central Asia plotted and tracked the war from a headquarters in Tampa, Fla.
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) such as the CIA's low-flying Predator also made a dramatic entrance in Afghanistan. The drone, which can broadcast "streaming video," was designed for reconnaissance, but has been fitted with Hellfire missiles.
These were battlefield innovations "that would have taken years" to get through the military bureaucracy, said Lt. Gen. William P. Tangney, deputy commander in chief of the Special Forces Command. But as battlefield improvisations, they showed their value quickly, he said.
Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul D. Wolfowitz said the U.S. deliberately avoided the heavy troop and armor concentrations that spelled disaster for Britain in the 19th century and for the Soviet Union in the 1980s.
"We are mindful of history," Wolfowitz said.
RUMSFELD SAID the war has accentuated the focus on "transformation" of the military, which he considers more a way of thinking than of buying new weapons.
"Give a knight in King Arthur's court an M-16. If he takes that weapon, gets back on his horse, and uses the stock to knock his opponent's head, that's not transformational. Transformation occurs when he gets behind a tree and starts shooting," Rumsfeld said.
Wolfowitz compared transformation to the German development of armored divisions between the world wars. Germany was not the first power "to invent a tank, not the first to use a tank in warfare," Wolfowitz said. "But it was the first to exploit the tank with the communications to make it work."
Mr. Bush's 2003 budget calls for transformation to consume about $5 billion of the $48-billion increase over fiscal year 2002, excluding the big boost for replenishment of precision munitions stocks.
Close to $1 billion of the increase would go to the Predator and other drones. About $1.1 billion would go to what Reed calls "the marquee of transformation," the conversion of ballistic missile-firing Trident submarines to carry and launch up to 154 Tomahawk missiles, and to transport Navy Seals near shore.
Submarine stealth will provide "devastatingly effective" firepower with less risk than air sorties into well-defended air space, Reed said.
Navy Secretary Gordon England has said that unmanned underwater vehicles promise in the foreseeable future to carry out over-the-horizon missile attacks "without the cumbersome and expensive life support, hotel functions and other survivability features" needed for manned vessels.
Meanwhile, said analyst Pike, the spiraling development of information technology promises to disperse "the fog of war" -- the confusion that tends to obscure vision and judgment in battle.
THE PENTAGON'S critics are far from convinced.
"That's just techno-hype, typical inside-the-Beltway techno-hype," said Franklin C. Spinney, a civilian analyst at the Pentagon. Spinney added that the United States couldn't even keep track of the Taliban after the attack on Tora Bora. "If we had all this dominant battlespace knowledge with real-time video, then how come we don't know where they went?"
Spinney warned that an overcommitment to certain expensive technologies may overcomplicate the soldier's job and eat up money that should be spent on aircraft and ships that Rumsfeld acknowledges are getting old. "We've got a military force whose teeth are getting older and duller and this plan doesn't do much about it," Spinney said of the 2003 Pentagon budget.
For example, he called the converted Trident submarine "a very expensive" platform to be building when the Navy can already fire cruise missiles from surface ships and the SSN-688 attack subs that are being sent into early retirement. He said such new weapons as the Predator are less miraculous than some of the glowing reports about them. A number of other critics have questioned the continued development of the Crusader, a heavy, self-propelled howitzer first envisioned for battle against the Soviet Union on the plains of Eastern Europe.
Analysts warn, moreover, that some prospective conflicts -- perhaps including new phases of the Afghanistan war -- will not fit the mold of the campaign that routed the Taliban from its city strongholds.
"It's not in the cards that Green Berets on horseback leading proxy forces, with B-52 providing close air support, will cause Saddam Hussein's regime to collapse," said Pike, citing Iraqi air defenses, armor and infantry forces that are superior to anything encountered in Afghanistan. Still, Pike said, the greater lethality of U.S. munitions and battlefield technology means far fewer troops would be needed to topple Saddam than were needed to oust him from Kuwait in the Gulf War.
LAST WEEK in the cave-strewn mountains of eastern Afghanistan, the Predator played electronic witness as the most primitive kind of violence -- men laying hands on men -- reared up on the 21st century battlefield.
When an MH-47 Chinook touched down to deliver commandos to an al-Qaida stronghold, it was struck by a rocket-propelled grenade, and a Navy Seal fell from the helicopter. In the momentary chaos of the Chinook's retreat, his comrades failed to miss him.
But distant commanders watched his capture on video beamed from the battlefield. "We saw him on the Predator being dragged off by three al-Qaida men," said Maj. Gen. Frank L. Hagenbeck, who commands the Army's 10th Mountain Division and the ground fighting in Afghanistan.
The episode touched off a grim 12 hours of fighting that claimed 7 American lives -- the heaviest U.S. casualties of the war. The fierce battle around the Shah-i-Khot Valley seemed to show both sides adapting, even now, to the lessons of the war's first phase. The current fighting also shows the validity of Rumsfeld's repeated warnings that the war is far from over.
Spinney, the analyst in Washington, observed, "Now, you've got a lot of people in this town running around and saying we found the magic formula of ground spotters, proxies and smart bombs with JDAMs. "We don't have to make these claims now. Usually after the passage of time it looks different."
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