Bull's-Eye War: Pinpoint Bombing Shifts Role of GI Joe
By Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, December 2, 2001; Page A01
Over the last seven weeks in Afghanistan, the U.S. military has shown the world the latest version of the new American way of war, one built around weapons operating at extremely long ranges, hitting targets with unprecedented precision, and relying as never before on gigabytes of targeting information gathered on the ground, in the air, and from space.
This capability, first seen in its infancy during the Persian Gulf War a decade ago, has now matured to such a degree that some argue it has become the key element around which the U.S. military should be reshaped as it faces terrorism and other threats of the 21st century.
"We may have reached critical mass," said John F. Guilmartin Jr., an Ohio State University expert on the history of air power.
Such a shift in U.S. military posture would have immense implications for what investments are made in troops and weaponry, how war is waged, and when the United States chooses to go to war.
If air power moves from its traditional role of supporting ground forces to become the decisive force in U.S. war-fighting, ground troops of the future would likely be ancillary, with U.S. Special Forces serving as target spotters and liaisons to local militias. Conventional U.S. units might be relegated to a mop-up role of holding ground and keeping the postwar peace.
In terms of foreign policy, the shift could have a subtly belligerent effect. Some analysts worry that the new American capabilities, by minimizing the casualties suffered not only by the U.S. military but also by civilians in the war zone, have lowered the bar for the use of force, making the military option seductively easy for policymakers to select.
But those conclusions are hugely controversial. In a unusual joint interview, the chiefs of the Air Force and Navy rejected the notion that the apparent success of the Afghan war amounted to a prescription for military reform, arguing that every conflict is different.
Still, they, too, emphasized how much technological progress has been made since the Gulf War. Back then, noted Gen. John P. Jumper, the Air Force chief of staff, the Navy couldn't receive its daily air orders electronically, so printouts had to be delivered by hand to aircraft carriers.
"We've come a long way from 10 years ago, when we had to fly ATO [air tasking orders] out to the aircraft carriers in order to get us all on the same sheet of music," Jumper recalled Friday afternoon as he reviewed the air war in a joint interview with Adm. Vern Clark, the chief of naval operations. "We couldn't even communicate with each other at the beginning of Desert Storm."
By contrast, Jumper said, in Afghanistan the Air Force's unmanned Predator drone reconnaissance plane has used its laser designator to point out targets for Navy fighters, while Special Forces troops on the ground have given satellite-guided target coordinates to Navy and Air Force pilots.
Jumper described how a constellation of information-gathering systems -- from imaging satellites to surveillance aircraft to ground troops -- combined to enable U.S. forces to precisely find and hit the al Qaeda terrorist network and its allies in the Taliban while minimizing civilian deaths and opening the way for proxy forces to advance on the ground.
"The turning point came . . . when all these systems began to come together at the 30- to 40-day point, so that your accuracy and precision improved greatly," he said.
Unlike earlier wars, the Afghan campaign required the U.S. military chiefly to pursue ephemeral "emerging targets" -- such as people meeting in houses -- rather than traditional "strategic targets" -- such as airfields and military communications bunkers. "That's different than anything we've ever been involved in," said Clark, the Navy chief. "It really placed a premium on this type of capability, merging all of this information and getting it to the guy in the cockpit."
For example, a U.S. reconnaissance aircraft might detect a spike in satellite phone calls being made from a known Taliban office. A Predator drone then might be steered in for a look, transmitting real-time video of the office to targeters in Saudi Arabia and their superiors at U.S. Central Command headquarters in Tampa. A Navy fighter pilot "loitering" nearby would fly close enough to look for additional telltale signs, such as bodyguards waiting outside, and verify the target. Then a targeter would read the precise coordinates of the office to the weapons officer sitting behind the pilot, who would punch them into a computer keypad in the cockpit and let loose a precision bomb that -- if all went well -- would steer itself to that office, destroying it and the Taliban fighters inside.
The Gulf War introduced the public to this new information-oriented approach to war. Back then, cruise missiles and smart bombs were novel concepts, greeted with skepticism even by some in the military.
But for all the breathless headlines at the time, precision weapons during the Gulf War were still a niche specialty. Only about 10 percent of the bombs dropped in the Gulf War were precision-guided, meaning they could either sense and hit a target dot from a laser beam, or could pick up signals from a global positioning system (GPS) satellite. By contrast, 90 percent of the bombs dropped in Afghanistan have been precision munitions. Also, for the first time in warfare, an unmanned aircraft, the Predator, has carried and fired missiles.
The cost of precision has plummeted. The cruise missiles that played a central role in the Gulf War were roughly $1 million each. In Afghanistan, the centerpiece of the air campaign is the Joint Direct Attack Munition, a kit that makes dumb bombs smart by attaching a GPS system and tail fins that can guide a bomb 10 miles from aircraft to target. It costs $18,000.
Nothing in the U.S. arsenal looks more like a relic of the Cold War than the lumbering, half-century-old B-52. Yet in the Afghan war, the big eight-engine bomber has become a precision weapon. B-52s have been using data provided by Special Forces troops on the ground to navigate by satellite and drop bombs precisely in designated 1,000-yard-long boxes.
A handful of Special Forces troops in northern Afghanistan called in the precision airstrikes that, in the view of the Air Force, cleared the way for the Northern Alliance's sudden progress in early November. "When history is written, it will show that three or four guys up there [in the north] made the difference in this conflict," Air Force Lt. Gen. Charles F. Wald, until last month the commander of the air war in Afghanistan, said in a recent interview. "When Mazar-e Sharif started falling, it was basically because of them."
The debate is already underway about whether and how to reshape the U.S. military to reflect this new way of fighting. What sort of Air Force does the nation need? And if the United States indeed will fight mainly at a distance, with long-range bombers, missiles and carrier-based aircraft, how big an Army must it have?
Most strikingly, there already are sharp disagreements over whether the Air Force should reexamine its acquisition priorities, which emphasize short-range fighters and don't buy any of the long-range bombers that have been central to its campaign in Afghanistan.
"Look at this war," said Michael Vickers, an expert in military reform at the independent Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. "It's practically a referendum on how to change the Air Force."
Vickers contrasted the land-based bombers the Air Force has used in the Afghan campaign -- B-1s, B-2s, B-52s and F-15Es -- with the service's plan to spend tens of billions of dollars on two short-range fighters, the F-22 and the Joint Strike Fighter. The Air Force approach, he concluded, is "entirely wrong."
In their joint interview, however, Clark and Jumper argued emphatically against reshaping their services in light of the Afghan war. "It is going to be different in every scenario," said Clark. "You know, the last one wasn't like this one, and the next one won't be like this one, and this one is like this one."
Some outside experts also warn against reading too much into the nation's recent spate of small wars. U.S. air power may have been "spectacularly successful" in Bosnia in 1995, in Kosovo in 1999 and now in Afghanistan, said Christopher Bolkcom, a defense analyst at the Congressional Research Service. But, he added, it is crucial to remember that in all these fights, "U.S. air power has been essentially unopposed."
There is still general agreement that air power alone can't nail down victory and that some land forces will always be needed. "You don't win until some snuffy with a rifle . . . walks into the bunker and takes out whoever is still there," commented Guilmartin, the Ohio State historian. That is the phase of the war in which the United States now finds itself in Afghanistan, with about 1,000 Marines landing south of Kandahar last week.
But just how many troops would constitute an appropriate standing ground force, and of what sort -- conventional infantry or Special Forces target-spotters -- isn't clear. "The conventional Army needs to be very worried with this campaign," one Special Operations officer recently said about the Afghan war. He predicted that the Army could be cut to six divisions from its current level of 10.
Even the Air Force may need far fewer aircraft in the future. Instead of carrying 16 2,000-pound bombs, said Vickers, the analyst at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, the B-2 bomber eventually may carry 324 250-pound bombs that make up in accuracy what they lack in explosive power.
At the same time, military experts worry about two dangers in devising a small, precise force. One is the long-term worry that it would be too small to take on -- and so to deter -- a big opponent such as China.
The other is that these revolutionary steps in precision may already be making it easier for U.S. leaders to turn to the use of force.
"The advent of precision weapons -- and the ability to deliver those weapons with minimal risk to U.S. forces -- has chipped away at old inhibitions regarding the use of force," said Andrew Bacevich, a Boston University expert in war and foreign policy. "The policy elite has become comfortable not simply with the notion of possessing great military power, but of using it."
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