War,” a captured Iraqi general reported, “my tank was my friend, because I could sleep my soldiers in it and keep them safe from Iranian artillery. In this war, my tank was my enemy,” because it was constantly attacked by aircraft day and night. If his soldiers slept in their tanks, they were sure to die.
This fact did not impact on our planning as forcefully as it should have. During the Gulf War, we had almost unrestricted information about the size and location of the enemy forces but failed to appreciate all his real strengths and weaknesses. We could count his tanks and locate them daily with overhead intelligence, Joint STARS, or Killer Scouts, but we missed the implications of the Iraqi soldiers’ terror of sleeping in their tanks. Our reconnaissance pictures showed us parked tanks with new slit trenches nearby. Those who measure effectiveness by the number of tanks destroyed fail to understand that sleeping away from your tank means that you are highly unlikely to get the first shot off if you are suddenly attacked, and are therefore likely to lose the engagement.
? The aircraft and weapons of today are far more capable than those used in the Gulf War. With more modern computers and improved radar, the Joint STARS aircraft now has a far greater capacity to detect and identify moving vehicles. GPS bombs can now be dropped in any weather. The wide-area munitions, such as the sensor-fused weapon, permit aerial attack of massed armor columns, with tens to hundreds of sub-munitions homing in on individual vehicles.
What does the denial of movement mean for battlefields of the future?
Certainly it means that you have to control the air if you want to maneuver your forces. It also means that you should no longer prepare your ground forces to fight force-on-force against a slow-maneuvering enemy. Given that our control of the air puts severe limits on an enemy’s ability to survive the lethal battlefield of the future, expect him to feature small, fast, stealthy movement, and expect him to collapse into urban areas, jungle, or mountainous terrain and to avoid combat in the wide-open spaces.
Meanwhile, if our own ground forces continue to follow current doctrine, our enemy army can expect to find large, massed U.S. ground forces opposing him, but with our mobility and capacity to maneuver hampered by our own ponderous logistical tail. As a result, he will attempt to employ his own form of airpower — guided missiles, ballistic and cruise — to weaken or even defeat this easy target.
This means that the intelligent commander of the future will configure his land forces to mass and disperse quickly. He will reduce the size of his force while increasing the lethality of his firepower. He will select transportation systems that can rapidly move his forces about the battle space with minimum fuel (to reduce the logistics tail). He will be hard to find, yet able quickly to exploit the advantages his superior surveillance of the battlefield affords him.
To bring all of this about will mean that land forces’ equipment, organizations, tactics, and strategy at the operational level of war will change drastically.
So the question is not whether or not there has been a revolution. There has certainly been a revolution in military technology, but not in how the military fight, or plan to fight.
? Let’s look at how some of these technological changes affect the individual fighting man.
In the Gulf War, close air support relied on visual acquisition of the target by the pilot in the fighter aircraft, who was guided to his target by voice directions from a forward air controller located on the battlefield. The procedure was cumbersome and imperfect, and too often pilots misidentified the target and attacked Coalition ground forces. Fortunately, such mistakes happened more rarely than in wars in the past; unfortunately, the mistakes were far more devastating than they were in past wars.
Using present technology, however, we can virtually eliminate such mistakes.
For example, our soldiers in Bosnia are now equipped with small Global Positioning Satellite receivers that are coupled with a small laser range finder and radio transmitter. When the soldier sees a target threatening him — say, a tank or a sniper — he simply points his aiming device at it and initiates laser ranging. The device knows where it is in the GPS coordinate system, knows the heading and distance to the target, and relays that information to a nearby F-16 equipped with an improved data modem. The information from the ground is received in the form of a data burst, which is not audible to the pilot but is translated into words that appear on his heads-up display which describe the target and its GPS coordinates. The fighter pilot can either slave his radar crosshairs onto the target; or, when he’s in the clear, superimpose the target on the ground with the target designation box and gunsight on his heads-up display; or insert the target’s coordinates into a GPS-guided precision weapon. In effect, we are giving the individual soldier a 2,000-pound hand grenade.
This raises questions about how the land and air arms of our military services are developing tactical doctrine to exploit this unique capability. How are they exercising to develop procedures for the soldier to call upon air, and how are we examining command-and-control measures to make sure the weapons are used on the highest-priority targets? These questions will be increasingly important, as potential enemies study the Gulf War and conclude that the best way to avoid destruction from U.S. airpower is to hug their opposite U.S. land force member as closely as possible.
CONTROL
Control is the goal of most warfare. When we are unable to achieve our political ends through persuasion or threat, then physical attack, with the goal of controlling the behavior of our enemy, looks increasingly attractive.
In the past, achieving control has required the physical dominance of one side over the other. Today, new technology provides other means of control. For example, with information technology, we can dominate his senses, reasoning, or mental faculties.
During the Gulf War, the vast majority of the Iraqi Army who had not already deserted, surrendered to Coalition land forces. Both the surrenders and the desertions came about because Iraqi soldiers had been dominated by the psychological campaign we had waged. This campaign came with both a stick and a carrot.
The stick: We fatigued and terrified them with unwavering air attack. They knew no peace; they were always in danger; they could not easily be resupplied with food and water; and communications between levels of command were close to impossible.
The carrot: The Arab elements of the Coalition understood which arguments would sway the Iraqis away from their own leadership. Saddam had insisted that Kuwait was part of Iraq, and that it was right and just to return it to the fold, while at the same time he exploited the normal dislike Iraqis felt for Kuwaitis. By way of contrast (and with the help of our Arab allies), we played on their faith in Islam and Arab brotherhood. We told them they were Muslims and Arabs, just as the Kuwaitis were Muslims and Arabs, and it was sinful to make war on brothers of the same faith. While they did not like the Kuwaitis, they felt guilty about the evils the occupation was bringing to Kuwait City. While they were loyal to their families in Iraq, they had no loyalty to Saddam.
For those themes to take root, we needed to control the environment. The air attacks did that.
The Iraqi soldier became fearful. Often, our advancing ground forces found vehicles, tanks, and artillery positions abandoned and filled with blowing sand. With Iraqi soldiers hiding in their bunkers and wondering when the next B-52 strike or A-10 attack would kill them, leaflet, radio, and television messages telling them to give up this unholy occupation of Kuwait easily took root.
Soon, those who could, went home. Those who couldn’t desert, waited for the chance to surrender.
By the time Coalition ground forces moved into the Iraqi lines, we had clearly established control over most of the Iraqi Army, as was evident by the surrender of nearly 88,000 Iraqi soldiers. Most had not fired a shot.
? Control can also be exerted on the environment.
For example, during the Gulf War, we made extensive use of electronic countermeasures (ECM) and anti- radiation missiles to exert control over Iraqi air defense radar sensors. The ECM hindered the effectiveness of individual radars and confused the long-range search radars used to cue the short-range, and more accurate, radars used to control guided antiaircraft missiles.
This war also featured a new and highly successful form of control, Stealth. The F-117 proved to be the only aircraft we could send into the air defense cauldron of Baghdad and be certain it would survive, and it could do that
