Defense: A New Military -- Infrastructure - About Face
Sydney J. Freedberg Jr.
An earthquake is about to hit the U.S. Army. For more than a
decade, powerful forces have been stirring beneath the surface
of the service, grinding slowly along the fault lines of an
institution wrenched by two simultaneous, but unrelated,
revolutions: the fall of the Soviet Union, and the rise of
computer technology. The combined upheavals have forced the Army
to ask some fundamental and hard questions. How much emphasis
can it place on keeping (or imposing) the peace in places such
as Somalia and Kosovo -- the "small wars" -- without
compromising the killing power needed to win the next "big war"?
How much can the Army rely on high technology and air support to
enable lighter, smaller, and more-agile forces -- the vision
embraced by President Bush and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld
-- without sacrificing the hard-to-deploy heavy armor needed to
survive an old-fashioned close-in fight?
There have been plenty of answers, but no consensus. During
the 1990s, change advanced in disjointed lurches: A computerized
command network was added to the 4th Infantry Division, new
organizations were improvised for the Bosnia deployments, new
training for peacekeeping and urban warfare was tacked on here
and there. All were significant, but isolated, innovations. With
the Army slashed from 18 divisions in 1990 to 10 by 1996, many
generals feared that embracing wholesale change toward
peacekeeping or toward a high-tech future would simply give
politicians another excuse to cut the force; and indeed, in
early 2001 key Rumsfeld advisers were calling for an
eight-division Army.
Then came 9/11, Afghanistan, and Iraq. The new global war on
terrorism hardly makes everything clearer, but it has dispelled
the paralyzing fear of budget cuts and overcome the
institutional inertia that denied the need for change.
And on the key questions -- High tech or heavy metal? Small
wars or big? -- the experience in Iraq, especially, has brought
the answer, "All of the above." Traditional 70-ton tanks raced
to Baghdad with unprecedented agility, enabled by new computer
networks that could coordinate fast-moving, dispersed forces, by
on-call smart bombs from the Air Force and Navy, and by
old-fashioned armor that kept them alive through ambushes. Yet
as U.S. forces overran Iraqi regulars, commanders begged for
more civil-affairs specialists to sort guerrillas from
noncombatants. And in Baghdad, the challenge changed quickly
from tanks shrugging off rocket-propelled grenades to foot
soldiers struggling with looters. Peacekeeping and war-fighting,
precision air strikes and close-quarters street fights, had
converged.
So the future is here -- and the Army, to its own surprise,
is largely ready to face it. Tangible progress has been
"frustratingly slow," said retired Lt. Col. Ralph Peters, a
former military intelligence officer who is now an analyst and
author, "but the most important thing is to transform the
mind.... In the 1990s, I wrote extremely critically about the
Army and its failure to adapt, but as I look back, there was an
invisible revolution. Guys in places like Bosnia, Kosovo,
Rwanda, and Somalia understood how the world had changed,
viscerally. By the time Afghanistan and Iraq rolled around,
these guys were one- and two-star generals."
Leading the charge of this new generation is a distinctly
unconventional old soldier, plucked out of retirement by
Rumsfeld and elevated over a score of more-senior serving
generals: Army Chief of Staff Peter Schoomaker. A veteran of
both extremes of the service -- he began his career in tanks and
ended as a commando in the Special Forces -- Schoomaker by all
accounts seems comfortable in a world where extremes converge.
And the new chief is bringing together the past decade's
scattered innovations into a unified program. During the 1990s,
the Army war-gamed some dramatic changes in operations and
organizations, but in war games the changes stayed, said retired
Col. Richard Hart Sinnreich, a frequent participant in the
games. "All of that work was essentially disconnected from the
Army we own; it all had to do with some hypothetical force out
there in 2020." Conversely, said Sinnreich, especially under the
pressures of the Balkans operations, "the Army in the field was
doing a lot of adaptive things, but it wasn't getting a lot of
support from the institutional Army. The biggest change that
we've seen with Schoomaker is the frank acknowledgment that
'transformation' starts with the Army that you have."
The details of Schoomaker's program are still imprecise, the
debate over them intense. "He has taken the first step, which is
to challenge the status quo," said one former officer, "but he
is only now hinting at taking the second step, which is to
articulate a shared vision of who we are and where we're going.
That's the piece that will take not only courage, but uncommon
smarts."
Nevertheless, the essential outlines are coming clear. Among
a host of initiatives, three crucial directions stand out.
First, the Army is trying to embrace Information Age agility
without sacrificing Industrial Age robustness. Second, it is
reorganizing the basic building blocks of its fighting units.
And, most subtle but most important, the Army is transforming
the way it brings individual soldiers together into fighting
teams.
The Human Factor
This Army has transformed itself before. Indeed, one of the
crucial initiatives planned for 2004 -- one little understood
outside the service -- is the piece that was missing from the
last Army revolution, after 1975.
For generations, the Army's basic approach to warfare was to
mobilize masses of young men -- sometimes volunteers, mostly
draftees -- and hurl them at the enemy. From Bull Run in 1861,
to San Juan Hill in 1898, to Kasserine Pass in 1943, to Task
Force Smith in 1950, to Vietnam, brave but barely trained young
men learned war the hard way -- at least those who survived did.
But after Vietnam, the draft ended. Some feared the Army would
collapse, but instead the service, prompted by Congress and the
Ford and Carter administrations, changed this threat into an
opportunity: If it could no longer suck in and spit out
draftees, the Army would have to attract the best volunteers it
could and keep them long enough to make them into professional
soldiers.
"We tightened up the initial entry training; we created a
noncommissioned officer education system; we changed the officer
education system considerably," recalled Gen. Donn Starry. From
1977 to 1981, Starry commanded the Training and Doctrine
Command, which was created to oversee the professionalization of
the force. Units went through regular "laser-tag" war games that
were far more realistic than the old exercises. And to keep
troops together in one unit long enough to form tight-knit
teams, recalled Starry, "we developed a regimental system" along
British lines. But this unit-cohesion reform, unlike the others,
never took hold.
So one crucial bad habit of the old mass-mobilization force
persisted into the new all-volunteer Army: the way it assigned
soldiers to units -- and then reassigned them, and re-reassigned
them, and re-re-reassigned them once more. In a system designed
in the early 1900s, at the same time Henry Ford was inventing
his assembly line, a central personnel bureaucracy treated all
troops, from grunts to generals, as interchangeable parts that
could be popped in and out of units as individuals. In
peacetime, this process kept the ranks tidily filled with all
the various bodies and specialties the regulations required. In
wartime, it meant that troops routinely faced death alongside
men they scarcely knew -- bad for morale, bad for institutional
memory, bad for working out "team plays" to win a battle.
"I went through three first sergeants" as a company commander
in Vietnam, recalled retired Lt. Gen. Dan Christman -- who
himself was rotated out after seven months (a month longer than
the average for young officers then), just as he was really
learning the tricks of how to fight the Viet Cong. Christman's
replacement had to reinvent the unit while his soldiers died.
In the two Iraq wars, by contrast, the Army did not practice
this "individual rotation" -- in spite of stated policy. During
the months of buildup in the desert, units were allowed (albeit
sometimes only after much bureaucratic wrangling) to keep their
troops together and train as teams. The official "After Action
Report" of the 3rd Infantry Division (filed by the unit that led
the drive to Baghdad last year), states flatly, "The ability of
the division to stabilize [key personnel] produced a seasoned
fighting force that was trained and ready to fight and win."
Why not make such stable units the norm instead of the
exception? Maverick officers, most notably Maj. Donald
Vandergriff (see NJ, 8/4/2001, p. 2474) have fought for this
"unit manning" for decades, and the institutional Army has tried
it from time to time. But the brass always limited the
experiment to a few units, and the bureaucracy struggled without
the flexibility of individual reassignments, so in a crisis the
effort was easy to abandon. The most recent attempt at unit
manning, the "Cohort" program of the 1980s, became a casualty of
the Army's post-Cold War downsizing.
But now, at the time of the Army's heaviest overseas
commitment since Vietnam, Gen. Schoomaker has insisted that U.S.
forces in Iraq be rotated, not individual by individual, but
unit by unit. The administrative and logistical burden is
immense: In the coming months, eight of the Army's 10 divisions
will be entering or exiting Iraq, some 250,000 troops on the
move at once.
What's more, as weary units come back from Iraq, Schoomaker
intends to keep them together. Building on groundwork laid by
former Army Secretary Thomas White (booted out last year by the
irascible Rumsfeld), a group called "Task Force Stabilization"
is working out how to form stable units across the Army. "We'll
never be able to have 100 percent of a unit stay together for X
period," said Brig. Gen. Robert Durbin, a senior Army planner,
"but we will be much closer."
An outline of the new system is already fairly clear. All
combat units will be put on a 36-month "life cycle." Instead of
soldiers continually coming and going as individuals, more than
95 percent of transfers in and out of a unit will be made in a
two-month "reset phase" once every three years. (Soldiers lost
to training injuries or combat deaths will still be replaced as
needed, but by periodic "packets" of troops rather than by a
stream of individuals.) After the reset, the unit will have six
uninterrupted months to train together and solidify as a team.
Only then will it be certified as ready and placed on call for
deployment. After 28 months on call (either in active operations
or in training), the unit will undergo another reset and re-form
-- but troops will be encouraged to sign on for a second tour
with the same team whenever possible.
Specialized units that cannot afford eight months offline to
reset and train -- high-level headquarters staffs,
chemical-warfare defense troops, and the like -- will still have
soldiers coming and going, but even these rotations will be in
the form of infusions every 10 to 15 months, instead of the
current continuous trickle of disruptions throughout the year.
And, to reduce the hardship on military families now forced to
move every three years or so, the Army will attempt to
"homebase" soldiers in a particular part of the country for at
least their first seven years in service.
These seemingly straightforward changes will cause ripples
across the Army. The most challenging effects may well be felt
within the Army's prized military education system, which
professionalized the force after Vietnam, but which requires
senior sergeants and commissioned officers to leave their units
and attend courses for months or even years in order to be
promoted. The new Army may have to loosen these requirements.
Overall, said one Task Force Stabilization official, "there are
some 162 personnel policies that we're going to look at, adjust,
or amend."
And unit stabilization is linked to a second key element of
the Army's reorganization. The units to be stabilized are not
divisions, the 15,000-strong formations that have been the
Army's building blocks since World War I. Instead, for both
personnel assignments and combat operations, the focus is
shifting to a smaller, more agile organization, the brigade.
Organizing for the Fight
In the grand old days of Waterloo and Gettysburg, armies of
100,000 men massed on a single battlefield. The coming of radio
communications allowed forces to spread out -- and the lethality
of 20th-century weapons forced them to. By World War II, the
main operating unit was the division, usually 10,000 to 20,000
soldiers strong, the smallest unit that had all the infantry,
tanks, artillery, and support troops needed to operate on its
own. But today's units, using long-range sensors, smart weapons,
satellite communications -- and facing the block-by-block
mutation of peacekeeping to war-fighting and back -- have been
able, and obliged, to disperse and decentralize still further.
In Kosovo, it was reinforced brigades, each with about 5,000
soldiers, that the Army rotated in and out. And it was brigades,
operating 12 to 125 miles ahead of the rest of their parent
division, that made the dash to Baghdad. Increasingly,
experience in both peacekeeping and war-fighting has shown that
the unit of military organization large enough to handle a
crisis but small enough to react quickly is the brigade.
The problem is that brigades don't quite exist in the U.S.
Army. Except for a few special cases, brigades are essentially
just holding units, mere headquarters to which their parent
division assigns forces to meet a particular mission. Typically,
brigades are built around three tank or infantry battalions. But
all sorts of essential specialized support troops -- logistics
experts, maintenance units, helicopter crews, engineers,
military police, civil-affairs officers, even scouts -- are
generally held back under divisional control.
This centralization of support specialists is meant to create
efficiencies of scale. But in practice, it means that Army
divisions generally don't have enough support troops to go
around when brigades need to operate alone. Throughout the
1990s, single-brigade deployments (say, to the Balkans)
typically took such a large bite out of their parent division's
support base that the remainder of the division was considered
"broken," unable to deploy its other brigades. And since the
Army formed the brigades on an ad hoc basis for each mission,
the deployed units had to remake their teams each time.
The result was tremendous -- if painful -- improvisation.
This forced invention and reinvention notably plagued 1999's
Task Force Hawk -- the cobbled-together unit that the Army took
embarrassingly long to form and send to Albania on the eve of
the Kosovo war. "If you look at Bosnia and Kosovo, no task
organization was the same," said retired Gen. Montgomery Meigs,
chief of U.S. Army forces in Europe from 1998 to 2002. "Nothing
in Task Force Hawk had ever been put together that way before.
Nothing in the structure that went into Bosnia initially [in
1995] was the same as anything that had been done before."
In 1999, after Task Force Hawk had laboriously organized
itself and deployed to Albania, only to be held out of the
fight, the incoming Army chief of staff, Eric Shinseki, decided
that the Army needed a new, more rapidly deployable kind of
brigade. Most of the debate focused on Shinseki's plan to equip
this prospective unit with new "Stryker" vehicles, which run on
wheels and weigh just 19 tons, to replace the old-style 70-ton
tracked tanks. But equally radical was the planned unit's
organization: It was a brigade intended to deploy as a
self-sufficient unit, rather than an ad hoc amalgam of soldiers,
pulled together on a moment's notice.
But Shinseki kept the rest of the Army as it was, organized
in divisions. And a Stryker brigade, in order to meet its
extremely ambitious deployment goals -- to go by air to anywhere
on Earth in 96 hours -- had to slim down so much that it lost
important components. Not only did the brigade have to give up
its heavy armored vehicles, it also lacked helicopters,
long-term logistical support, and even enough headquarters staff
capacity to coordinate with Air Force squadrons during war
fighting or relief agencies during peacekeeping. (Leaked
documents suggest that the lone Stryker brigade now serving in
Iraq has had to augment its headquarters with 100 additional
personnel.) To give a brigade everything it needed to be truly
self-sufficient and still make it light enough to deploy by air
required breakthroughs in technology, breakthroughs that
Shinseki expected to come from a "Future Combat System" that
would enter service around 2010.
Schoomaker doesn't want to wait that long. He wants to
reorganize the Army right now into self-contained, "modular"
brigades, using their current equipment. The brigades might have
to get to the fight by ship instead of by plane, but they'll
still get there faster, and fight more flexibly on arrival, than
the unwieldy 15,000-soldier divisions.
The mechanics of such change are tricky, though. And
complicating things even more, Schoomaker doesn't just want to
make brigades more self-sufficient for deployment, he also wants
to make more of them. He wants divisions to have more than the
normal count of three brigades. That requires spreading combat
forces thinner, an unnerving prospect for many officers and
analysts. Maj. Gen. William Webster, whose 3rd Infantry Division
is the test bed for the new organization, candidly told Inside
the Pentagon recently that initial plans to make his current
three brigades into five had proved impracticable. He says that
even going to four self-sufficient ground combat brigades, which
is the current plan for his division, will require 3,000 to
4,000 more troops than he now has.
Critics -- chiefly acolytes of Col. Douglas MacGregor, a
pioneeering advocate of robust brigades -- note that the new
brigades will have fewer combat troops than the old ones and
that helicopters will remain under division control. And there
are no plans to eliminate division headquarters, disappointing
many MacGregorites who see this link in the chain of command as
a needless "middleman" between Army fighting units and the other
services.
The debate over Schoomaker's plan will continue, and the
details will change. But whatever the outcome, the future Army
will fight wars and enforce peace by brigades -- brigades with
enough in-house support to make them reasonably self-sufficient.
What makes such dispersed operations possible in the first
place? The answer is threefold: The Air Force's ability to
smartly smart-bomb any enemy that slips through the gaps between
brigades, the Army's ability to coordinate widely separated
units, and the new communications networks that link together
all of these scattered forces of different services. It is a
new, Information Age way of war.
Information Age Warfare?
Since the media briefings of the first Gulf War, the military
magic trick that wows the folks at home has been "Watch me make
this building disappear." The ability to locate and destroy
distant targets with precision-guided bombs is essential to the
modern American way of war. But it is only half the high-tech
story. The other half is the ability to locate and coordinate
your own people.
Traditionally, "90 percent of the message traffic that goes
over military radios is, 'Where am I?' 'Where are you?' and,
"Where's the enemy?' " said Maj. Gen. William Bond, recently
retired as chief of the Army's Simulation, Training, and
Instrumentation Office. Today, he said, "that can all be taken
care of, digitally."
This new way of war was born in the early 1980s with an
innovation called the "Air-Land Battle," a doctrine that sought
to stop a theoretical Soviet advance not just with tanks along
the front line but also with air strikes against key support
units far to the enemy's rear. Such an aggressive defense
required unprecedented coordination between the Army and the Air
Force, and among Army units themselves. "We simply had to have
the capability to rapidly exchange information," recalled
retired Lt. Gen. Frederick Brown, at the time the Army's chief
of armor. As early as 1984, said Don Sarna, one of Brown's
civilian collaborators, the Army envisioned a communications
network that automatically shared both friendly positions and
spot reports of potential enemies, giving every vehicle "a
digital map with the locations of the red [enemy] forces and the
blue [friendly] forces."
Getting there took years. In 1991, troops went to war in Iraq
with Global Positioning System devices, so they at least knew
where they were; and Air Force surveillance aircraft (JSTARS)
could track the enemy. But no network existed to pool and share
this data. Throughout the 1990s, then-Army Chief of Staff Gordon
Sullivan oversaw years of experiments aimed at fitting one Army
division with such a network. But in Operation Iraqi Freedom
last year, that unit, the 4th Infantry, had not even reached the
borders of Iraq when Baghdad fell. The Turks refused to let the
4th cross their territory, and it had to redeploy through
Kuwait. So the Army hastily equipped the 3rd Infantry Division
with a scaled-down computer network, originally improvised, like
so much else, in the late 1990s for the Balkans. This network
was known as "Blue Force Tracking" because it showed only the
locations of friendly forces, not the enemy.
That capability alone had an enormous impact. "The [Blue
Force Tracking] 'magic box' was one of the most valuable items
that we used during this war," raves the normally staid
after-action report of the division. "It creates a common
understanding [of the tactical situation] instantly." Army
units' ability to locate and communicate with each other even
while widely dispersed and on the move, coupled with streamlined
procedures to call in Air Force support, allowed U.S. units to
dash between the slower-reacting Iraqis without fear of getting
cut off, lost, or trapped.
And Blue Force Tracking was only half a capability, hastily
tacked onto a traditional heavy unit. How far and fast could the
Army go if it built a unit around a full Red and Blue Force
Tracking network from the start? The Army in the 1990s had
struggled to shorten the time it took to deploy its heavy
forces, whether to the Persian Gulf or to Kosovo. But if
information technology was so effective, then a much lighter
force, one easily deployed by air, might be able to accomplish
some of the same missions as a heavier force. That was Chief of
Staff Eric Shinseki's vision in 1999. His "interim force,"
planned to meet the immediate need, was the Stryker brigade,
equipped with light armored vehicles linked by a network. The
first Stryker brigade is now in Iraq. But Shinseki's ultimate
vision, to enter service around 2010, was a "Future Combat
System" -- a still-unrealized combination of weapons, vehicles,
drones, and technologies -- that collectively would be as light
as the 19-ton Stryker but as powerful as today's 70-ton M1
tanks.
Shinseki's challenge certainly jump-started change. But even
using lightweight vehicles, his theoretical deployment timelines
required more cargo planes than the Air Force could spare, and
more airfield capacity than most global hot spots have. Shinseki
wanted a Stryker or Future Combat System brigade to be able to
get to anywhere on Earth in four days. But studies by both the
Rand think tank and the Army itself estimated that even in ideal
conditions, either type of light brigade might take a week, or
even two, to deploy. By contrast, fast ships need three to five
weeks to reach the most-distant battlegrounds. and one ship
carries more cargo than the Air Force's entire fleet of C-5 and
C-17 intercontinental transports. It is significant that
Schoomaker's plans now make no mention of a four-day deadline,
instead describing "responsive, agile, and expeditionary forces
that typically respond in the first 15 days of an operation."
But Schoomaker has inherited a Future Combat System program
that is still under orders to fit each vehicle into a single
C-130, which can carry, at the most, 20 tons. On an M1 tank, the
armor alone weighs about that much. So the future fighting
system will have to survive by substituting information
technology for armor. It is a tall order.
To fill that order, the Army proposes that swarms of scout
robots would first fly and roll into battle ahead of the human
troops. Then the soldiers could call in air strikes, launch
long-range weapons, or simply go around the "red" forces
pinpointed on their computer screens, closing to direct combat
range only at decisive, carefully selected places and times.
Networking these drones, manned vehicles, and foot soldiers
will be a tremendous challenge. Program officials acknowledge
that the first Future Combat System units scheduled to enter
service in 2010 will have only "Version 1.0" of some key
capabilities, notably in robotics, which will be upgraded over
the years. Given the high bar the Army has set for itself, said
Claude Bolton, assistant Army secretary for acquisition,
logistics, and technology, "I think our probability of success
right now is somewhere in the 60 percent range."
Even if it works, however, some critics argue that the Future
Combat System is not what the Army needs. "While it may be
transformational, it may also be irrelevant," said Andrew
Krepinevich, executive director of the Center for Strategic and
Budgetary Assessments, an independent defense think tank. With
its emphasis on long-range precision warfare, the Future Combat
System could annihilate enemy formations in the open -- but that
is what the American military already does best, critics say.
Where the Army has problems is in the mountains of Afghanistan
and the cities of Iraq, where enemies are hidden and among
civilians. That is where long-range sensors cannot see, where
smart weapons are dumbfounded, where air strikes are impaired,
and where ground troops are essential -- where, in short,
America needs an Army.
"It would be very nice to be able to stand off and have your
precision weapons do all of the hard work for you," said Lt.
Gen. John Riggs, who oversees Future Combat System planning and
is hardly a technophobic reactionary. "But to bring an adversary
to their knees, it is going to require an engagement on the
ground -- close combat."
Indeed, some of the most ardent proponents of Information Age
warfare still see a crucial role for Industrial Age armor. "It
was great to have 70-ton tanks on the way to Baghdad and on
those 'thunder runs' through Baghdad," said retired Brig. Gen.
Huba Wass de Czege, a leading figure in Army studies of the
future and now an adviser on the Future Combat Systems program.
As the 3rd Infantry Division's after-action report emphasizes,
only its heavy armor allowed U.S. forces to fight through
repeated ambushes -- staged by enemies that long-range sensors
did not see.
Wass de Czege and his school are strong advocates of the
Future Combat System, which they see as essential both for
swiftly seizing a foothold at the start of a campaign and for
launching lightning raids behind enemy lines later on. But tanks
are needed as the massive anvil to the Future Combat System's
agile hammer, just as spearmen worked with the cavalry of old,
said former Army War College commandant Maj. Gen. Robert Scales:
"The phalanx is always going to be that solid mass of
conventional forces."
So the Army of the future may well have an elite striking arm
of air-deployable light vehicles. It will probably even go into
battle preceded by swarms of scouting robots. But it will also
retain its heavy armor. The most crucial differences will be the
invisible information networks connecting the machines -- and
the intangible ties among the human beings who have to turn all
this technology into victory.
National Journal |
