reason behind america's victory - lessons for INDIA

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What lies behind the military's victory in Iraq.By Fred KaplanPosted Thursday,

April 10, 2003, at 3:45 PM PT

So when and how did the U.S. military get this good? The elements of swift

victory in Gulf War II have been well laid-out: the agility and flexibility of

our forces, the pinpoint accuracy of the bombs, the commanders' real-time view

of the battlefield, the remarkable coordination among all branches of the armed

services (Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines) and special operations. But these

elements, and this degree of success, have not been seen in previous wars, not

even in the first Gulf War 12 years ago. Three major changes have taken hold

within the military since then—a new war-fighting doctrine, advanced digital

technology, and a less parochial culture.

The new doctrine was put in motion in 1983, a decade before Operation Desert

Storm, when the U.S. Army's Command and General Staff College, at Fort

Leavenworth, Kan., created an elite, one-year post-grad program called the

School for Advanced Military Studies. The school's founder was a colonel—soon

promoted to brigadier general—named Huba Wass de Czege (pronounced

VOSS-de-say-ga). He was in the forefront of officers who had served in Vietnam,

witnessed the disaster firsthand, and were eager to change the way the Army

thought about combat.

In 1982, Wass de Czege had written a major revision of the Army's war-fighting

manual, FM 100-5, the official expression of Army doctrine and the foundation

for all decisions about strategy, tactics, and training. The previous edition,

written in 1976 by Gen. William DePuy, had recited a strategy of attrition

warfare, a static line of defense against the enemy's strongest point of

assault, beating it back with frontal assaults and superior firepower. Wass de

Czege's rewrite outlined a strategy emphasizing agility, speed, maneuver, and

deep strikes well behind enemy lines.

The advanced-studies school at Fort Leavenworth was set up explicitly to weave

this new strategy into the fabric of the Army establishment.

By the time of Desert Storm, a small group of Wass de Czege's students had been

promoted to high-level posts on the staff of Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf's

Central Command. This group of officers, who self-consciously referred to

themselves as the "Jedi Knights," designed the ground-war strategy of the first

Gulf War, and it was straight out of Wass de Czege's book—the feinted assault up

the middle, the simultaneous sweep of armored forces up to the Iraqi army's

western flank, the multiple thrusts that surrounded the Iraqis from all sides,

hurling them into disarray before their final envelopment and destruction.

The Marines, meanwhile, were going through a similar transformation. Col. Mike

Wiley, vice president of the Marine Corps University at Quantico, revised his

branch's war doctrine on the basis of a 1979 briefing called "Patterns of

Conflict" by a retired Air Force colonel named John Boyd. Boyd too had

concluded that successful warfare involves surprise, deception, sweeping

quickly around flanks, and creating confusion and disorder in the enemy's

ranks. The Marine Corps commandant at the time, Gen. Alfred Gray, considered

himself a Boyd disciple and ordered his officers, who led the assault into

Kuwait, to avoid frontal assaults and to maneuver around the Iraqis and attack

their flanks.

For the Air Force and Navy, Desert Storm saw the inauguration of "smart bombs"

that could explode within a few feet of their targets. Fewer than 10 percent of

the munitions dropped in Desert Storm were smart bombs; the weapons were new and

expensive (between $120,000 and $240,000 apiece); not many had been built; and

they still had lots of technical bugs. By 1999, in the war over Kosovo, smart

bombs were more reliable and a lot cheaper ($20,000 each); they constituted

about 30 percent of bombs dropped. In Afghanistan, the figure rose to 70

percent, which is probably how the math will work out in Gulf War II as well.

The war in Afghanistan, however, saw three innovations that would alter the way

America fights wars. First, high-tech smart bombs were combined with high-tech

command, control, communications, and intelligence. A new generation of

unmanned Predator drones flew over the battlefield, scanning the terrain with

digital cameras and instantly transmitting the imagery back to command

headquarters. Commanders would view the imagery, look for targets, and order

pilots in the area to attack the targets. The pilots would punch the target's

coordinates into the smart bomb's GPS receiver. The bomb would home in on the

target. Total time elapsed: about 20 minutes. By comparison, in Desert Storm,

the process of spotting a new target, assigning a weapon to hit it, then

hitting it, took three days.

The second new thing about the U.S. strategy in Afghanistan was that it was

truly a "combined-arms" operation—a battle plan that involved more than one

branch of the armed services, working in tandem. This had never really happened

before. Often using the new high-tech drones as the communications link, Army

troops on the ground called for strikes from planes flown by Air Force pilots.

Some of these planes, such as B-52 and B-1 bombers, had been built 30 or 40

years earlier to drop multi-megaton nuclear bombs on the Soviet Union. The

notion of using them to drop 2,000-pound conventional weapons, in support of

ground troops, would have appalled an earlier generation of Air Force generals.

Over the previous decade or so, that generation of generals, weaned on Curtis

LeMay and the Strategic Air Command, had died out, and so had SAC's central

enemy and target, the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, the '90s saw the creation of a

new Joint Forces Command, which promulgated doctrines, field manuals, and war

games that envisioned all the services fighting wars together, under command

structures that were unified or at least "interoperable." One such document,

called "Joint Vision 2020," issued in June 2000, emphasized a strategy of

"full-spectrum dominance," involving the conduct of "prompt, sustained and

synchronized operations with combinations of forces … space, sea, land, air and

information"—a "synergy of the core competencies of the individual services,

integrated into the joint team … a whole greater than the sum of its parts."

Written doctrines are one thing, actual operations another. However, the new

structures and doctrines did breed, in the words of one Joint Forces Command

publication, "a common joint culture." The institutional barriers of

inter-service rivalry, even hatred, were gradually broken down. Once new

technologies made joint coordination possible, and once the war in Afghanistan

showed that coordination could reap tremendous advantages, resistance seemed

futile.

Operation Desert Storm was really two wars—the air war and the ground war—each

fought autonomously and in sequence. Gulf War II was an integrated war, waged

simultaneously and in synchronicity, on the ground, at sea, and in the air. The

vast majority of airstrikes, from Air Force bombers and attack planes as well as

Navy fighters, were delivered on Iraqi Republican Guards, in order to ease the

path of U.S. Army soldiers and Marines thrusting north to Baghdad.

Another new thing, which started in Afghanistan and continued in Iraq, was the

systematic inclusion of the so-called "shadow soldiers," the special operations

forces. The 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Act, which was best-known for giving new

authority to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, also made special ops a

separate command, with its own budget. (Before then, each branch had its own

special-ops division, which tended to get the big boys' leftovers, in terms of

money, equipment and everything else.)

Gen. Schwarzkopf didn't think much of special ops, so didn't use them in Desert

Storm, except toward the end of the war, to go hunt for Scud missiles in Iraq's

western desert. In Afghanistan, these forces were central. They could be

parachuted into the country in small numbers, set up airfields, and develop

contacts with rebel leaders. The information about Taliban targets, which the

Predator drones transmitted back to headquarters, usually came from a

special-ops officer riding on horseback with a laptop.

We may never know how much special ops have been doing in Gulf War II.

Certainly, these forces were in the Iraqi capital days or weeks before the war

began, scoping out targets and lining up contacts. They were in the western

deserts again, hunting Scuds and preparing airfields. They were in the north,

training Kurds and securing oil fields. They were probably accompanying, and

perhaps advancing, the 3rd Infantry and 1st Marine divisions all the way from

Kuwait to Baghdad, scouting targets and transmitting their positions to the air

commanders back at headquarters.

We don't yet fully know the lessons of this war—in part because it isn't over

yet and in part because, as James Carafano, a former Army officer now with the

Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, put it, "90 percent of the war

was going on out of our vision." Most of that 90 percent was being conducted by

special ops (no embedded reporters there) and by the laptop-wielding

joint-forces crew in Qatar (a few embeds, but no access to that part of the

operation). What they were and are doing, however invisible, formed a large

part of what made this war so stunning and new.Discover your Indian Roots at -

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