Inside The Navy September 9, 2002
ANALYSTS: NAVAL FORCES MUST NOT USE AFGHAN MODEL FOR IRAQI WAR
Malina Brown
The Navy and Marine Corps would be mistaken to directly apply lessons learned from Afghanistan to a potential military operation in Iraq, defense analysts told Inside the Navy. While the two services will likely be used in their traditional capacity -- conducting air and Tomahawk strikes from ships, providing air defense, utilizing amphibious and Special Operations forces on shore, delivering prepositioned equipment -- a conflict in Iraq could require new U.S. strategies, analysts predicted.
Former Navy Secretary Richard Danzig warned that prematurely defining one's military responsibilities too narrowly is "dangerous to the country and is ultimately dangerous to the Defense Department because what it says is that I define my problem so much in the traditional way that when anything else comes up and changes the nature of what we are dealing with, that's somebody else's job."
Leaders should be imaginative, rather than pigeonhole their perceived responsibilities in military conflicts, Danzig said Sept. 5 at a conference sponsored by the Marine Corps and the U.S. Naval Institute.
In framing a potential Iraqi conflict against the war in Afghanistan, defense experts point out the vast differences between the two nations, politically and militarily, which they believe will prevent a U.S. incursion of Iraq from mirroring Operation Enduring Freedom.
For starters, the Afghani population is far smaller than Iraq's and the Taliban militia was "a rag-tag collection of 20,000 to 30,000 guys whereas the Iraqi army has over 300,000 troops," said John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, a Washington, DC-based defense policy group. Iraq has diminished but still significant conventional military capabilities, a congressional source said, including the regular army and the heavily mechanized Republican Guard. In the case of Afghanistan, there were no "conventional military forces of a significant scale," he added. Iraq, like Afghanistan, has no significant navy to speak of, analysts concurred. Thus, ground forces -- particularly Special Operations forces and Navy SEALs -- would play a pivotal role in a war with Iraq, as they did in Afghanistan, analysts said.
However, a great boon to the war against the Taliban was that an indigenous resistance force -- the Northern Alliance -- was already operating before the United States intervened, whereas Iraq's opposition forces are less coordinated and active, the congressional source noted. The U.S. government is currently working with prominent Iraqi resistance groups in order to encourage cooperation amongst the different leaders.
Pike also emphasized the differences between the two countries politically -- Afghanistan was led by a coalition of tribal leaders that had been in power for only a few years while a traditional, authoritarian regime has ruled Iraq for decades. "Afghanistan is a geographic expression, Iraq is a state," he bluntly summed up.
Marine Corps Commandant Gen. James Jones has warned that the U.S. military should be careful not to draw the "wrong lessons" from the war in Afghanistan.
"Afghanistan was Afghanistan. Iraq is Iraq, and it would be foolish, for example, if you ever committed to going into Iraq to think that the [Special Operations forces] principles that were successful in Afghanistan would necessarily be successful in Iraq," said Jones in an interview with the Washington Times last month. "In my opinion, it would not."
Instead, in developing strategic plans, military leaders should "learn the lessons from Afghanistan and try to apply them in a thoughtful way to future contingencies," the congressional source said. However, these lessons should not be viewed as "a cookbook to repeat over and over again."
For this reason, Pike criticized the "Downing Plan," which is seen as an enlarged version of the operation conducted in Afghanistan -- employing local opposition forces aided by American Special Forces and airpower. Considering the fundamental differences between the two countries, it seems unlikely that the Downing Plan would succeed, said Pike, earning it the term "Bay of Goats," since the results would approximate the Bay of Pigs.
Yet some analysts favored a variation of the United States' first confrontation with Iraq, saying the Navy and Marine Corps could adopt an improved Gulf War model. The services would generally repeat what they did in the first Gulf War in terms of providing air and missile power, said Bob Work, a senior analyst for maritime issues at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. Since the Iraqi navy is not very strong, he said "naval warfare won't take up much time."
The difference, according to retired Rear Adm. Stephen Baker, a senior fellow at the Center for Defense Information and a battle group operations officer during Desert Storm, is that the Navy's and Marine Corps' capabilities have "never before been achieved," particularly in comparison to Desert Storm. Major differences encompass "the lethality of the on-board precision guided munitions now." Baker said less than 10 percent of munitions were precision guided munitions in Desert Storm while the Navy is now shooting for close to 90 percent. He added that "intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities have been significantly enhanced and for that reason will play a fairly important part in all of that in the daily interactions there with conflict into Iraq."
Moreover, network-centric warfare philosophies in today's Navy "will pay some dividends in the form that there won't be, I don't think, wasted sorties on strikes or targets that have already been hit that don't need to be re-struck or if there are, the battle damage assessment capabilities will be significant." He added that the Tomahawk cruise missiles are greatly improved today and that new unmanned aerial vehicles will provide more options to military commanders.
Nonetheless, Pike believes a more advantageous plan would be rapid decisive operations, which is often characterized as a reversal of the 1991 Gulf War strategy. This plan, nicknamed the "inside out" approach, would seek to cripple Hussein's command by striking Baghdad first rather than targeting the Iraqi army.
According to Pike, this concept of operations is precisely what the Millennium Challenge 2002 war game worked on. "I would have to assume that some major elements of Millennium Challenge were regarded as being a dress rehearsal for Iraq. . . . How could it be otherwise?" Some media reports said Millennium Challenge targets simulated Iran and still others said target sets were taken from an Iranian database, but played out with an Iraqi scenario in mind, said the congressional source. Regardless, Pike stressed that Millennium Challenge had to have some sense of a potential Iraqi incursion in mind, since it would be to the Navy's advantage to have a dry-run of military operations before initiating an attack, especially with all the technology of Millennium Challenge at its disposal.
In addition to training operations like Millennium Challenge, Baker added that no one should discount the experience American troops gained from operations in Afghanistan, lessons that can be brought to an Iraqi theater. For example, by the one-year anniversary of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, "eight of the 12 carriers [will] have been involved with Operation Enduring Freedom." So, if the United States enters in a conflict with Iraq, "all the air wings that will be involved are experienced, seasoned and aware of the environment, if you will. So their readiness is certainly as high as it should be," Baker said.
All talk of an Iraqi battle plan must be framed as speculation, Work cautioned, saying the way a military incursion against Iraq would play out is largely dependant on the strategy of the commander-in-chief.
Most importantly, whether the United States will initiate military action against Iraq remains to be seen. Last month, Vice President Cheney presented the administration's argument for a preemptive strike against Iraq, saying he was convinced Iraq's Saddam Hussein would develop a nuclear weapon "fairly soon." Nevertheless, many skeptics have come forward and questioned the administration's ability to balance a war in Iraq with the greater war on terror, including several prominent Republicans.
Although President Bush has remained largely silent on the Iraq issue this summer, last week he promised to consult Congress before taking any military action against Iraq. He also said he would make his case against Hussein in a major speech at the United Nations this week.
Copyright 2002 Inside Washington Publishers
