The influence of such ideas was evident in the 1997 paper “Joint Vision 2010.” It defined information superiority largely in war-fighting terms as “the capability to collect, process, and disseminate an uninterrupted flow of information while exploiting or denying an adversary’s ability to do the same.”12 By means of “excellent sensors, fast and powerful networks, display technology, and sophisticated modeling and simulation capabilities,” information superiority could be achieved. The force would have “a dramatically better awareness or understanding of the battlespace rather than simply more raw data.” This could make up for deficiencies in numbers, technology, or position, and it could also speed up command processes. Forces could be organized “from the bottom up—or to self-synchronize—to meet the commander’s intent,” leading in turn to “the rapid foreclosure of enemy courses of action and the shock of closely coupled events.” There would be no time for the enemy to follow Boyd’s now-famous OODA loop. Arthur Cebrowski and John Garstka argued that a form of “network-centered warfare” could make battles more efficient in the same way that the application of information technology by businesses was making economies more efficient.13 In discussing the move from platform-centered to network-centered warfare, the Pentagon largely followed this formulation (Garstka was one of the authors) and recognized that, following the physical and information domains, there was a cognitive domain. Here was found
the mind of the warfighter and the warfighter’s supporting populace. Many battles and wars are won or lost in the cognitive domain. The intangibles of leadership, morale, unit cohesion, level of training and experience, situational awareness, and public opinion are elements of this domain. This is the domain where commander’s intent, doctrine, tactics, techniques, and procedures reside.14
This form of warfare suited the United States because it played to U.S. strengths: it could be capital rather than labor intensive; it reflected a preference for outsmarting opponents; it avoided excessive casualties both received and inflicted; and it conveyed an aura of almost effortless superiority. Those ideas were deeply comforting, and not entirely wrong. Information and communication technologies were bound to make a difference in military practice, although the RMA agenda understated the extent to which American predominance was dependent on not only the sophistication of its technology but also the sheer amount of firepower—particularly air-delivered—at its disposal. Furthermore, while the United States’ evident military superiority in a particular type of war was likely to encourage others to fight in different ways, that military capacity would also constrain opponents’ ambitions. As a regular conventional war against the United States appeared to be an increasingly foolish proposition, especially after its convincing performance in the 1991 Gulf War, one form of potential challenge to American predominance was removed, just as the prospect of mutual assured destruction had earlier removed nuclear war as a serious policy option.
Nonetheless, the presentation of the RMA was shaped by political preferences about the sort of war the Americans would like to fight. It offered a neat fit between a desire to reduce the risks of high casualties or Vietnam-style campaigns and a Western ethical tradition that stressed discrimination and proportionality in warfare. It assumed professional conventional forces, as high-quality weaponry reduced the relative importance of numbers and put a premium on extremely competent troops. Intolerance of casualties and collateral damage meant targeting military assets rather than innocent civilians. It also precluded resort to weapons of mass destruction. The military would be kept separate from the civil, combatants from noncombatants, fire from society, and organized violence from everyday life. Opponents would be defeated by means of confusion and disorientation rather than slaughter because they could never get out of their OODA loop. If this trend could be pushed far enough, it was possible at some point to envisage a war without tears, conducted over long distances with great precision and as few people as possible—preferably none at all—at risk. The objective was to reduce the role in war-fighting of anything recognizably approaching “battle.” The ideal would be one-sided and highly focused engagements geared to causing cognitive confusion. Far from representing a real revolution, the RMA harked back to the earlier, idealized prototype of a decisive military victory settling the fate of nations—indeed of whole civilizations—except that now the accomplishment could be virtually painless for the greatest military power the world had ever seen.
There was an unreal quality to this view of future warfare. It was for political entities that were not fearful, desperate, vengeful, or angry; that could maintain a sense of proportion over the interests at stake and the humanity of the opponent. It was a view that betrayed a detached attitude to the well-springs of conflict and violence, the outlook of a concerned observer rather than a committed participant. It ignored the physicality of war and war’s tendencies to violence and destruction. It would hardly be a revolution in military affairs if those who embraced it only took on conflicts which promised certain and easy victories. The 1991 Gulf War vindicated this vision, but that was helped by Saddam Hussein’s ignorance of the real military balance. In this respect, the vindication carried its own refutation. Future opponents were bound to take more care when inviting battle with the United States given the proven vulnerability of second-rate conventional forces to attacks by first-rate powers. After 1991 it was unclear who would fight such a war. The American military literature referred to “peer competitors” with comparable military endowments to those of the United States, but it was unclear exactly who these might be. In addition, for a war to be fought along these lines, the belligerents must not only have comparable military capabilities but also inhabit the same moral and political universe. The model was geared to American strengths and for that very reason was unlikely to be followed by opponents who would seek to exploit the presumed American weaknesses of impatience and casualty intolerance. Enemies would be inclined to cause hurt in an effort to encourage a sense of disproportion in the population and unhinge multilateral coalitions.
Precision warfare made it possible to limit but also to maximize damage. Just as high accuracy made it possible to avoid nuclear power plants, hospitals, and apartment blocks, it also made it possible to score direct hits. Even in the American model there were always dual-use facilities that served both military and civilian purposes—for example, energy and transportation. Targeting them as part of a military purpose still led to the disruption of civilian life. In other respects the new technologies encouraged a progressive overlap between the civilian and military spheres. High-quality surveillance, intelligence, communications, and navigation became widely available as consumer gadgets, which could be exploited by crude, small organizations with limited budgets. Lastly, nuclear weapons and long-range missiles (whose arrival had also been described at the time as a “revolution in military affairs”) had expanded the means of destruction and extended the range of its potential application. Attempts to mitigate their effects—for example, through improving anti-missile defenses—had been unimpressive. The capability to destroy hundreds of thousands of human beings in a nuclear flash had not disappeared.
Asymmetric Wars
When a country was in desperate straits and facing defeat in conventional war, attacking the enemy’s society might appear to be the only option left. That is why the history of the twentieth-century war had been so discouraging to those who believed that military power could be contained in its effects. There were a series of measures that the weak could adopt against the strong: concentrating on imposing pain rather than winning battles, gaining time rather than moving to closure, targeting the enemy’s domestic political base as much as his forward military capabilities, and relying on an unwillingness to accept extreme pain and a weaker stake in the resolution of the conflict. In short, whereas stronger military powers had a natural preference for decisive battlefield victories, the weaker were more ready to draw the civilian sphere into the conflict while avoiding open battle.
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The optimal strategies for those unable to match America’s conventional military capabilities (almost everyone) would be to attempt to turn the conflict into what came to be described as an “asymmetric war.” This concept had been around since the 1970s, as a reflection of the Vietnam experience.15 Its resurrection began in the mid-1990s, when it began to refer to any engagement between dissimilar forces. All conflicts were between forces that varied in some respects, in geography or alliance as well as in force structure and doctrine. Part of strategy would always be identifying aspects of those differences that generated special opportunities and vulnerabilities. Even when the starting points were relatively symmetrical, the aim would be to identify and describe a critical asymmetry as the vital advantage to secure a victory. The only reason symmetry had worked in the nuclear sphere as mutual assured destruction was because it had resulted in a degree of stability. In the conventional sphere, symmetrical forces were potentially a recipe for mutual exhaustion.
As with so many of these concepts, inconsistent and expansive definitions of asymmetry began to drain it of meaning. The 1999 Joint Strategy Review defined asymmetric approaches as those that attempted “to circumvent or undermine US strengths while exploiting US weaknesses using methods that differ significantly from the United States’ expected method of operations.” These could be applied “at all levels of warfare—strategic, operational, land tactical—and across the spectrum of military operations.” Put this way, the approach became synonymous with any sound strategy for fighting the United States and lost any specificity.16 The real interest in asymmetrical warfare was in situations where the two sides would be seeking to fight completely different sorts of war, particularly when Americans persevered with regular warfare while opponents either escalated to weapons of mass destruction or adopted forms of irregular war.
The greatest dangers were associated with an enemy that had weapons of mass destruction, but the most likely scenario was being drawn into irregular war. Since Vietnam, the U.S. military had taken the view that rather than make better preparations for irregular war it was best to stay clear of potential quagmires. This tendency had been reinforced by the most celebrated account of Vietnam to emerge out of the army. Harry Summers, an instructor at the Army War College, invoked Clausewitz in explaining how the American focus on counterinsurgency distracted them from the essentially conventional nature of the war. Summers made his point by working backwards from the final victory in 1975 of the North Vietnamese army over the South. This possibility was always inherent in the North’s strategy, but that did not mean that the prior insurgency in the South had somehow been irrelevant. For one critic, who had been closely involved in the counterinsurgency during the 1960s, the problem was that the U.S. army paid insufficient attention to the demands of guerrilla warfare and not that they had neglected the enemy’s “main force.”17
The persistent resistance to Vietnam-type engagements was reflected in a distinction between war defined in terms of “large-scale combat operations,” to which U.S. forces were geared, and “operations other than war,” which included shows of force, operations for purposes of peace enforcement and peacekeeping, and counterterrorism and counterinsurgency, which had a much lower priority.18 Wariness of irregular wars meant reluctance to develop doctrine and training to accommodate them. It was assumed that forces optimized for large-scale conventional war would be able to accomplish other, supposedly less demanding tasks if absolutely necessary. The relatively small-scale contingencies that became common in the 1990s were in effect dismissed as secondary and residual, an inappropriate use of armed forces, apt to tie them down and catch them in vicious crossfire while conducting marginal political business that did not even touch on the nation’s most vital interests.19
On September 11, 2001, the United States suffered a unique and unexpected attack, which took the notion of asymmetry to the extreme. A low-budget plan hatched by a small band of Islamist radicals camped in one of the poorest parts of the world was directed against the icons of American economic, military, and political strength. Two planes crashed into the World Trade Center in New York, one into the Pentagon in Washington, and another would have hit the White House or Capitol Hill had it not been for passenger action which forced the plane to crash. It did not take long to identify the group responsible—al-Qaeda, an extreme Islamist group based in Afghanistan and protected by its ideological soul-mates in the Taliban government.
The government’s response was to declare a “war on terror” and launch a military campaign designed to overthrow the Taliban and break up al-Qaeda. Although the provocation was on al-Qaeda’s terms, the response was on America’s. The Taliban was defeated in a quasi-regular war because the Americans were able to come in on the side of the Afghan opposition (the Northern Alliance), who provided the infantry while the United States supplied communications, airpower, and the occasional bribe to help encourage the factions on the enemy side to defect. On this basis, President George W. Bush concluded that the campaign had shown that “an innovative doctrine and high-tech weaponry can shape and then dominate an unconventional conflict.” It was a triumph of information-age warfare, with commanders “gaining a real-time picture of the entire battlefield” and then being able to “get targeting information from sensor to shooter almost instantly.” There were romantic images of U.S. Special Forces riding on horseback calling in air strikes. Bush claimed that the conflict had “taught us more about the future of our military than a decade of blue ribbon panels and think-tank symposiums,”20 suggesting that this approach had a wider application beyond the special conditions of Afghanistan in late 2001. The next stage reflected this perception. Instead of devising a plan to deal with radical Islamist movements, the United States embarked on a campaign to topple the regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq, because Saddam was suspected of possessing weapons of mass destruction and was thus a potential source for any terrorist group that wished to inflict even more terrible damage upon the United States. Again the United States was able to demonstrate convincing superiority in conventional military capabilities as the Iraqi regime was overthrown in short order.
The Afghan and Iraqi campaigns were both apparently decisive; hostile regimes were toppled quickly after their forces were overwhelmed. In neither case, however, did this settle the matter. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld had been seeking to make a point about how a war could be fought and won with far fewer forces than would hitherto have been thought prudent. This point was made, although against an enemy barely able to resist.21 The lack of numbers soon appeared imprudent as U.S. forces struggled to cope with an insurgency. The transition from old to new regime was further complicated by the fact that the political claim that justified the invasion—that Iraq was illicitly developing weapons of mass destruction—was shown to be in error. This encouraged the development of a new rationale based on helping Iraq make the transition to democracy, a task made even harder by the U.S.-led coalition’s lack of troops to manage what soon became a deteriorating security situation. Out of the minority Sunni community, which had provided the key figures in the old elite, came the hardest resistance. The Sunnis gained support from those humiliated by Iraq’s occupation and fearful of the loss of their power. Their numbers swelled with disbanded military members and volunteers from the many unemployed young men. It included “former regime elements” and a strong al-Qaeda group led by the Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who was as keen to foment civil war with the majority Shiites as he was to expel the Americans. Although Shiites were the natural beneficiaries of the toppling of the Iraqi regime, radical elements from within this community, led by Muqtada al-Sadr, also turned on the Americans. The struggles faced by American forces after such apparently effortless victories demonstrated that victory in battle did not necessarily result in a smooth political transition. It also demonstrated that whatever strengths the Americans had in regular warfare, they coped poorly with irregular warfare.
With U.S. authority under
constant challenge and its troops being caught by ambushes and roadside bombs, there were contrary pressures to both reduce profile and put on forceful displays of strength. The coalition was soon militarily stretched and lacking in political credibility. A poor security situation hampered economic and social reconstruction, the lack of which contributed to security problems. Having ignored counterinsurgency for over three decades, American forces struggled. They would move through towns and villages and clear them of insurgents in a show of strength, but without sufficient American troops left behind, the enemy could soon return. This meant that the local population had no incentive to cooperate with the Americans. Attempts were made to build up local security forces, but these were often infiltrated by the militias. U.S. troops had not been trained to withhold fire, avoid rising to provocations, and find ways to reach out to wary local people. They found it hard to separate insurgents from innocent civilians and soon became suspicious of everyone, which added to the sense of mutual alienation. More effort was going into intimidating opponents than winning over the undecided. An analysis of operations conducted from 2003 to 2005 suggested that most were “reactive to insurgent activity—seeking to hunt down insurgents.” Few operations were “directed specifically to create a secure environment for the population.”22 The strategy of “cordon and sweep” put the onus on holding territory and killing the enemy. Whatever the military effects of this approach, the political effects were invariably detrimental.
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