As America is poised to launch into a high-tech war in Iraq, a growing
group of military thinkers is questioning the U.S. military's reliance on
gadgetry.
U.S. precision weapons, Predator drones, and the like were less responsible
for recent victories in Afghanistan and in the first Gulf War than is
generally assumed, they argue. And increasing American dependence on
technology leaves U.S. troops dangerously vulnerable to low-tech attacks.
"Just as technology gives you capabilities, it also gives you an Achilles
heel," said Deborah Avant, a George Washington University international
affairs professor. "It becomes something you have to protect."
In Afghanistan, the conventional wisdom goes, all it took was a handful of
Special Forces, some spy sensors and a few thousand smart bombs to roll
over al Qaeda and the Taliban. But that's a myth, according to Army War
College professor Stephen Biddle.
Predator drones and other advanced spy sensors were only sporadically
effective in Afghanistan, Biddle argues in a recent study (PDF). Before the
battle of Takur Ghar -- one of the bloodiest in the Afghan campaign -- a
massive U.S. reconnaissance effort "focused every available surveillance
system on a tiny, 10-by-10-kilometer battlefield," Biddle notes. But
despite all the technology used, Americans couldn't find more than half of
the al Qaeda positions there before the fight.
Smart-bomb attacks did little to alter the equation, either. In the battles
of Takur Ghar and Bai Beche, day after day of American precision bombing
failed to take out dug-in al Qaeda defenders. Only American and Northern
Alliance ground forces could evict bin Laden's troops from their positions.
That's evidence, in Biddle's eyes, that Afghanistan was a "surprising
orthodox" military campaign, one determined largely by in-close,
on-the-ground effort of our allies' infantry.
Jim Lewis, an analyst with the Center for Strategic & International
Studies, thinks Biddle is just rehashing an age-old military argument.
"Fliers have been saying since about 1912 that you don't need an army
because air power can (win a war)," Lewis writes in an e-mail. "The Army
always pushes back and says, 'no, you need well-trained, well-led ground
pounders.'"
Biddle acknowledges that the new technologies offer a "major increase in
air power's lethality." But having better toys is no guarantee of military
triumph, he notes. American losses in Somalia and Vietnam are but two
examples of this.
Nevertheless, the Pentagon seems poised for a high-tech approach, both in
Iraq and going forward decades into the future. Its major thrust for
weapons development, the Future Combat Systems initiative, leans heavily on
"networked warfare" -- the idea that every infantryman, every pilot, every
drone and every general will share everything they see and hear over a new
Internet for combat.
Giving small groups a common set of information makes sense, military
observers say. The advantages of linking together every last soldier to one
another, however, are murky, at best.
Generals in Tampa were able to observe the battle of Takur Ghar through the
eyes of a Predator drone flying overhead. That didn't stop seven American
servicemen from getting killed, and another 11 from being injured there.
"More information to more people does not necessarily lead to victory in
combat," said Jeff Cares, president of Alidade Consulting, a defense
consulting group. "Much of it is a waste of time -- just creating more work
for ourselves. And when every person is sending every last detail, it makes
it harder for the really important (information) to stand out."
Moreover, as military-information networks become more and more central to
how our forces fight, they become an increasingly ripe target to attack.
Why fight American soldiers directly if you can take down their Internet?
"Any capability leads to a parallel vulnerability," said Kenneth Allard, a
retired Army colonel, now a professor in Georgetown University's National
Securities Studies program.
For now, many soldiers can do their jobs just fine without plugging into
military networks. In the future, however, as the military grows more
reliant on information technology, that may not be as possible. Artillery
gunners accustomed to network-delivered, ultra-precise targeting
information might find themselves at a loss if they suddenly need to go
back to paper-based targeting tables. Similarly, the fog of war might get a
whole lot thicker for infantrymen if the network goes down, and they have a
hard time finding fellow soldiers. And smart munitions could get a whole
lot dumber if satellite links are severed.
Adversaries may not have to do much in order to dismantle this core asset.
The Defense Department's "IT infrastructure is expensive, limited in
capabilities, subject to chronic technical and operator-induced failures,
and vulnerable to attack," John Gentry, a retired lieutenant colonel and
defense analyst with the Mitre Corporation, writes in a recent article in
Parameters, an Army professional journal.
To Cares, the problem isn't that the U.S. military is relying too heavily
on such networks -- it's that the Pentagon isn't embracing information
technology tightly enough. The Defense Department is merely grafting
network connections onto existing battle plans, he argues, rather than
allowing IT to revolutionize how wars are fought.
But it's easy to understand why such a wholesale transition might be
avoided, when crippling a military network could be done, conceivably, for
about $400.
That's how much it would cost to put together a crude flux compression
generator -- a so-called "e-bomb" that could fry circuitry for miles
around, according to Robert Williscroft, an editor at DefenseWatch. Connect
a capacitor bank to some copper coil, wrap the wire around an
explosives-packed tube, and set it off in a strategic spot. Suddenly, a
military growing increasingly dependent on its electronic eyes and ears
would be nearly deaf and dumb.
It seems like awfully shaky ground on which to base your defenses. But then
again, when it comes to technology, the Pentagon has always been willing to
take a leap of faith.
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