With a huge budget and technology that
is unrivalled on and above the battlefield,
PAUL KORING writes, the U.S. military
seems invincible. But is that the case?
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By PAUL KORING SOURCES: DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE; MAJ. CHARLES HEYMAN, JANE'S WORLD ARMIES; GLOBALSECURITY.ORG; COUNCIL ON FOREIGN RELATIONS; ASSOCIATED PRESS; SOURCE: U.S. AIR FORCE; SOURCE: CENTER FOR DEFENSE INFORMATION
WASHINGTON -- In the opening hours of the U.S. attack on Afghanistan last October, a pilotless American aircraft had Mullah Mohammed Omar in its sights, in an extraordinary feat of technology that was about to shape the war. As the Taliban leader prepared to leave Kandahar, the Predator caught him on a grainy, green nightscope video image that it bounced off a satellite to a truck-mounted container sitting on the edge of a Pakistani airfield hundreds of kilometres away. The container looked like it should be sitting aboard a cargo ship. But inside, it was crammed with sophisticated computers and communications links, and two pilots staring at 50-centimetre television monitors. While one of the pilots monitored the video stream, the other swivelled a sensor ball mounted on the aircraft's belly. Using rudder pedals and a joystick like the one on toys used by thousands of kids in the United States, the pilots were able to track the fleeing mullah's convoy as if they were right on top of it. For the Predator pilots, there is little glamour and none of the Top Gun swagger that the U.S. Air Force enjoyed through the Second World War, Vietnam and the Persian Gulf war. "It's strange," said Lieutenant-Colonel James Burlingame, a veteran combat pilot who during the gulf war flew EC-130s -- large aircraft that carry jamming equipment and other electronic devices -- but is spending this war running Predators by remote control. "You can't hear the engine. You can't hear the wind. There's no sensation, no feeling of movement because we're flying off a TV screen." Introduced as reconnaissance tools in the Kosovo campaign, the Predators and other UAVs, or unmanned aerial vehicles, have been mounted in Afghanistan with Hellfire missiles and also used as "killer-scouts" that can find, identify and destroy a target. At a cost of $3-million (U.S.) each, the robo-planes are redefining how America wages war. The Pentagon can afford to. With a budget that the rest of the world cannot match, and technology that is unrivalled, the U.S. military seems invincible. This was not the case on Sept. 11, when the terror attacks exposed a gaping hole in the United States' homeland defences. Despite the scrambling of more than 20 warplanes within an hour, not a single U.S. fighter managed to get within missile range of any of the four hijacked jetliners. Not even the Pentagon, nerve centre of the most fearsome military ever created, could protect itself. Within hours, of course, every major U.S. city was protected by combat air patrols. And in a scant few weeks, a formidable array of military power -- four carrier battle groups, scores of land-based warplanes, more than 100 tankers, long-range bombers and thousands of Marines -- was poised to deliver an overwhelming counterpunch half a world away. Since then, the U.S. military has deployed thousands of troops to new positions across Asia and the Middle East. But as the Pentagon spreads its wings, it is again discovering that its enemy is unlike any it has fought before, and its high-tech, high-cost approach to battle may not be enough to win the day. Flaws in the U.S. war plan emerged that night last October in Kandahar, as a delay in the complex command structure enabled Mullah Omar to escape the Predator's watchful eye and its missiles. Details of the wrangling remain unclear but apparently the Predator, which was being operated by the Central Intelligence Agency, never received permission to fire from the Pentagon's Central Command in Tampa. Other problems have crept up in the Afghan campaign. Heavy bombing raids, called down by special forces on the ground, have failed to produce any of the top Taliban and al-Qaeda leaders who are thought to still be in hiding. There have been large-scale civilian casualties -- in the thousands, according to human-rights groups, but far fewer according to the Pentagon -- as well as the four Canadian soldiers killed by U.S. friendly fire. But the greater stress placed on the U.S. military may be a strategic one. In Afghanistan, the United States' endgame remains obscure while the huge military coalition that the Bush administration claimed to have assembled last fall now seems like a chimera. Only Canada and Britain ended up sending sizable ground combat units, and six months later they have gone home. Elsewhere, President George W. Bush's declaration of war on international terrorists and states that support them has ripped up a policy of containment that for half a century defined U.S. military policy. In its place, Mr. Bush is floating a vague and still-evolving doctrine of pre-emptive war to wipe out potential and emerging threats such as Iraq -- a doctrine that has been criticized around the world. The President, who serves as commander-in-chief of the U.S. military, has also junked his aversion to nation-building, realizing since Sept. 11 that fragile states such as Afghanistan or a post-Saddam Hussein Iraq require a long-term commitment if new governments are to survive and grow into democratic ones. The new policy of regime change entails nation-building on a scale not seen since the United States led the rebuilding effort of Japan and Western Europe after the Second World War. For the Pentagon, it also means tearing up a key element of a doctrine laid out by Secretary of State Colin Powell when he was chairman of the joint chiefs of staff and by Vice-President Dick Cheney when he was defense secretary under former president George Bush. Gen Powell believed in having defined exit strategies, not an open-ended mission like the one in Afghanistan. The new doctrine may sound the death knell for the 20th century U.S. Army, which since the First World War has been built around heavy tanks in huge armoured divisions. Heavy and cumbersome, the army has sat out most of the Afghan campaign, aside from a few thousand light infantry soldiers guarding air bases and scouring empty caves. The Afghan war, like that in Kosovo, Bosnia and Somalia, is not suited to the army's heavy divisions that take months to deploy (five months in the case of the Persian Gulf war) and are trained for Cold War conventional conflicts. "The heavy-armour division were white elephants even before Afghanistan," said Ivan Eland, a military specialist at the Washington-based Cato Institute. "To some extent, the army just doesn't get it, that it needs to recreate itself with smaller, lighter, faster and air-mobile units." While the army remains largely on U.S. soil, the navy, air force, Marines and special forces have shouldered the fight in Afghanistan. Air Force gunships have rained down fire that, in an earlier era, artillery would have delivered. Navy carriers have proved to be versatile bases for special forces operations. And the lightly armed and air-mobile Marines showed again that a beachhead can be hundreds of kilometres inland. If the world's biggest military is to be restructured, it will be done at the Pentagon itself. On Sept. 11, the hijacked American Airlines Flight 77 destroyed about 185,000 square metres of the building. Today, only a single, flame-scarred slab of Indiana limestone stands as a grim marker of the explosion. The rest of the debris has been removed and replaced in a $500-million (U.S.) rebuilding project that was massive in scope and lightning quick in its speed. Without the same media spotlight that was cast on ground zero in Manhattan, the reconstruction work, known as the Phoenix Project, was completed ahead of schedule, $200-million under budget and in time for a dedication ceremony on Sept. 11. "I'm humbled. I've never seen anything like this with everyone feeling they were part of a common cause," deputy manager Jean Barnak said. "I'll never forget the explosions and the huge plumes of fire and I'll never feel like this about a job again." Amidst the dust devils whipping across the site on a brutally hot summer day, flag-bedecked workers finished the job with a clear purpose. But inside the new reinforced exterior, with its blast-proof glass, a battle still roils over the Pentagon's future, and that of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Until Sept. 11, the 70-year-old Mr. Rumsfeld, who first held the post in the 1970s, was rumoured to be on his way out. His hard-driving demands for the military to transform itself by shedding its Cold War containment mentality and creating a flexible, mobile, high-tech force made him a target for bureaucratic resistance. But with the terror attacks, and talk of rogue nations, suitcase nukes, asymmetrical warfare and cyber-combat, Mr. Rumsfeld has emerged as an untouchable minister of war, a senior citizen who often seems more in touch with the cutting edge of combat than his much younger cabinet colleagues. Even as the defence budget has jumped to a requested $398-billion for the 2003 fiscal year -- more than Russia, China and the 16 next largest military spenders combined -- he has slashed big-ticket programs such as the army's huge new Crusader cannon. Scrapping the Crusader was the toughest indicator yet that Mr. Rumsfeld is determined to win the internal war over transforming the army from a slow Cold War fighting force into something far more nimble that depends on air power for its fire support. As Pentagon planners turn to Iraq as the likely next phase of its war against terrorism, a debate is raging over whether the lessons learned in Afghanistan can be usefully applied so soon. Anthony Cordesman of the Centre for Strategic and International Studies warns that the Pentagon must be prepared to use U.S. and allied ground forces, rather than relying solely on air power and questionable Iraqi opposition forces. He argues that even after Iraq's 1991 defeat and a decade of international sanctions, its military strength is still far greater than that of the Taliban's makeshift army. But if Washington waits for Iraq's neighbours to co-operate and allow a slow buildup of U.S. heavy-army divisions, the next phase of the war on terror may never come. Mr. Rumsfeld has pushed hard for more aggressive, pre-emptive strikes, suggesting that special forces might deploy secretly to strike at terrorist cells anywhere on Earth. Leaked reports from the Pentagon, later denied, suggest the military is weighing a massive first strike that would wipe out Baghdad's political and military command. If that happens, the pilotless Predators will be in the vanguard. They already are prowling Iraqi skies, helping to draw a detailed picture of Iraqi defences, possible targets, military communications and minute details about the habits of Mr. Hussein's commanders. They have also guided British and U.S. aircraft carrying out counterstrikes against the Iraqi air defences that occasionally target warplanes as they patrol the no-fly zone covering all but the centre of Iraq. At least one Predator has been lost recently, but its $3-million cost was hardly a blow to the Pentagon, with its billion-dollar-a-day budget. The real challenge may come if another Predator is able to get Mr. Hussein in its sights. Should that happen, no one seems sure what the order would be, only that it would be one of the oldest decisions of war.
Remote-control war
Military might
United States $396 Allies* $198 Russia $60 China $42 Rogues** $15 -*Refers to the NATO countries, plus Australia, Japan and South Korea.
Copyright 2002 Guardian Newspapers Limited
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