US warfare equation 'full of baloney'
By David Isenberg
Back in June 1997, the United States General Accounting Office (GAO) issued a report titled "Operation Desert Storm: Evaluation of the Air Campaign". It was a report that debunked many of the claims made about the efficacy of US air power during Operation Desert Storm against Iraq in 1991. But in retrospect, perhaps the most interesting thing about it was that it took six years before such a report was done.
Eventually, studies were published detailing deficiencies in US military operations. But most of these were found in the professional military literature in journals like Military Review or Parameters, trade press like Jane's Defence Weekly, Aviation Week and Space Technology, Defense Week, Defense News, and academic journals like International Security or special government commissions like Gulf War Air Power Survey.
In the aftermath of the second US war against Iraq one might hope that claims about US military prowess would be evaluated more skeptically. But, sadly, far too many claims about US military battlefield successes are being accepted uncritically.
Consider the words of Winslow Wheeler, who directed the GAO study. Back in April he wrote: "I first started hearing about revolutions in warfare after some guided munitions hit a bridge in the Vietnam War. Since then, the declaration of another new revolution in warfare based on the accomplishments of guided munitions and aircraft has occurred for every single American war ever since. These declarations have become as predictable as they are full of baloney."
Yet, since the end of major combat operations in May 1, not much of the debate in the US has been over whether the model of warfare championed by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, ie heavy reliance on air power, precision guided munitions, special operations forces, and intensive use of automated sensors and realtime communications - generally referred to as the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA) - and correspondingly less emphasis on armor forces and conventional infantry, is the way to go.
This is not merely an academic debate. The lessons US officials draw from this war will shape equipment and personnel decisions for years to come.
One of the few moments of skepticism thus far occurred on October 21 at a hearing of the House Armed Services Committee that took testimony from nongovernmental witnesses.
The first witness was Major General Robert Scales (Retired). In his written testimony he took aim at the RMA advocates who believe that technology is the answer. He wrote:
"Some futurists claim that new information and computing technologies will allow US military forces to 'lift the fog of war'. According to this view, a vast array of sensors and computers, tied together, can work symbiotically to see and comprehend the entire battle space and remove ambiguity, uncertainty and contradiction for the military equation, or at least remove these factors to manageable and controllable levels. Technology will triumph over the general friction of war, they claim. This view leads to the belief that all the American military needs to do to remain preeminent is to focus on acquiring more sophisticated technology. The arguments in support of technological monism echo down the halls of the Pentagon, precisely because they involve the expenditures of huge sums of money to defense contractors. In some cases law makers may reduce spending on relatively inexpensive but critical items such as body armor, believing that technology has precluded its use. Such policies, however, rest on a profound ahistoricism that entirely misses the lessons of the past, much less even a reasonable examination of recent events."
Similarly, a draft army study of lessons learned in the Iraq war, titled "Iraq and the Future of Warfare: Implications for Army and Defense Policy", led by Stephen Biddle, a professor of strategic studies at the Army War College in Carlisle, Philadelphia, who also testified at the hearing, found that the combined effect of US technological superiority and an incompetent Iraqi military was the primary reason for the quick victory over Saddam Hussein's forces.
As a result, the study cautions against using the war as a model for planning future conflicts. It "would be dangerous to assume Iraqi-style scenarios as the future norm", the study said.
According to a slide version of the draft study that was leaked to the Baltimore Sun, "Without Iraqi ineptitude, even 2003 technology could not have enabled a force this size to prevail at this cost." Against an "adept enemy", the authors said, "results could be very different."
Another point made by Scales, which has implications beyond military operations, dealt with intelligence. He noted, "Raw information is not intelligence. The problem over the past 65 years has not been a lack of data. Rather, the problem has been erroneous interpretation of that data. Since World War II, intelligence organizations, both civilian and military, have proved to be all too willing to interpret information in light of preconceived political prejudices or expectations."
In that regard, it is worth noting that the New York Times reported in September that an internal assessment by the Defense Intelligence Agency has concluded that most of the information provided by Iraqi defectors who were made available by the Iraqi National Congress was of little or no value.
Similarly, in September the Washington Times reported that a secret report titled "Operation Iraqi Freedom - Strategic Lessons Learned", written for the joint chiefs of staff, lays the blame for setbacks in Iraq on a flawed and rushed war-planning process that "limited the focus" for preparing for post-Saddam operations.
Although various military units and different military services, the joint chiefs, defense agencies, and the Office of the Secretary of Defense have all conducted various "lessons learned" efforts, there has not yet been a comprehensive, objective effort. Dr Andrew Krepenenvich, director of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessment in Washington, DC, noted, "I cannot emphasize how important a thorough independent assessment of the conflict is, similar to the Gulf War Air Power Survey commissioned by the US Air Force after Operation Desert Storm."
Krepenevich also said, "since the gap between us and everyone else is growing, our adversaries are moving to the far end of the conflict spectrum: Get nuclear weapons, or go terrorist, or go irregular warfare. That's where the competition is heading. And so, if we think about this war in terms of how would we fight it better next time, we're missing the point because that's not where the competition is going. And I think that's how you have to view the lessons of Iraqi Freedom."
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