by Tom Clancy
And so it happened.
Because the planners who devised this brilliant takeover of Iraqi airspace had available to them the knowledge of Iraq’s air defense system as a living organism, they knew precisely where to inflict wounds, and they had the means to conduct the attacks at low risk and with great precision. The result was the imposition of a regime of shock and awe so great that the Iraqi military situation became hopeless soon after the opening minutes of the war.
“Shock and Awe” (sometimes also called “Rapid Dominance”) — a relatively simple concept — is one of the foundations of an understanding of the coming revolution in military affairs.
In war, the goal is to make the enemy accede to your will, to make him do what you want him to do. Traditionally, you accomplish this by destroying his means to resist, as we did with Germany in World War II, but that is not the only way. For example, why not catch his attention in such a way that he is unwilling to resist you? In World War II, Japan was worn down as Germany was, but not to the point of total surrender. Then a pair of A-bombs induced such shock into the nation, causing the enemy to hold us in such awe, that they surrendered rather than conduct a bloody defense of the home islands.
In the Gulf in February 1991, Iraqi soldiers were in a state of shock and awe, and surrendered.
★ Today, a B-2 carries sixteen precision bombs (the F-117 carries two) and can strike with the same impunity as the smaller Stealth aircraft. Each of these sixteen precision munitions are guided by signals from global positioning satellites; they can be programmed in the air to strike any target; and unlike the laser-guided bombs of the Gulf War, they can operate effectively in any weather, day or night.
Imagine the impact of a flight of four unstoppable B-2s arriving over an enemy capital and releasing sixty-four 2,000-pound guided bombs on sixty-four targets the enemy deems vital. Instantly, the enemy leader could be denied control of his military forces, his people, and his own governing apparatus. A second wave of four aircraft could then inject shock into another key sector of the enemy’s controlling system.
What is required to exploit this revolutionary technology?
First, we must think in terms of what Admiral Bill Owens, a former Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called “systems of systems.” That is, we must think of an enemy not as an army, navy, and/or air force, but as a system much like the human body. For example, if we wish someone to miss when they shoot at us, we could blind them temporarily with a bright flash of light. If they are chasing us, we might disable the nerves that operate their leg muscles. In other words, we must analyze the weaknesses and strengths of the adversary and apply our force quickly and precisely. The first trick is knowing what we wish to achieve, the second is knowing how to apply our forces, and the easiest trick is to apply the force.
The kind of knowledge I’m talking about requires a break from traditional methods of evaluating our enemies. In the past, we counted ships, planes, and tanks; and then, to impose our will, we destroyed as many of them as possible. Now we must learn how to look at an enemy through his own eyes, so we can attack him where he knows he will feel pain. This will require training not only in how we fight, but more important, in how we think and plan for war. We must have new ways to conduct intelligence analysis.
★ We can learn from the battle for Al-Khafji.
There, once again, the revolutionary technology available to Coalition forces was not known or appreciated by the Iraqis who planned the attack.
On January 25, a prototype Joint STARS aircraft used its revolutionary technology to report in real time the movement of Iraqi forces massing for the attack. The Joint STARS radar discovered and identified military vehicles as they left the protection of their bunkers and moved toward their assembly areas, mistakenly thinking that night and weather made them immune to detection and air attack. They soon learned otherwise.
Their forces were decimated long before they were able to conduct their attack. In the nights and days that followed, the Iraqis gamely attempted to continue their attack, but any movement brought an immediate Coalition air response. As one captured Iraqi said after the battle, “My division lost more vehicles in thirty minutes of air attack than we did in six years of war with the Iranians.”
Though the Coalition response was confused, poorly coordinated, and slow to recognize the enemy plan, Coalition forces fought with great courage and dedication, and a force of about 5,000 soldiers defeated an invading heavy armor force that may have had 25,000 to 35,000 soldiers.
There has to be a reason for this success other than the élan and excellence of the Coalition ground forces, and that reason has to be the revolutionary nature of Coalition technology, especially the technology of the Coalition air forces.
Armies depend on movement. They use it to create surprise and to provide protection (by denying certainty of their location and strength). They move to place themselves beyond the reach of their opponent army’s weapons. They rely on vehicles for heavy firepower, armored protection, supplies, engineering support, and face-to-face meetings between command echelons.
Yet at Khafji, the Iraqis found that to move was to be discovered, to be discovered was to be attacked, and to be attacked was to die, if you stayed in your vehicle (no matter how much armor plating protected you). They quickly found that when they saw or heard aircraft, their best course was to abandon their vehicle. “In the Iran-Iraq War,” a captured Iraqi general reported, “my tank was my friend, because I could sleep my soldiers in it and keep them safe from Iranian artillery. In this war, my tank was my enemy,” because it was constantly attacked by aircraft day and night. If his soldiers slept in their tanks, they were sure to die.
This fact did not impact on our planning as forcefully as it should have. During the Gulf War, we had almost unrestricted information about the size and location of the enemy forces but failed to appreciate all his real strengths and weaknesses. We could count his tanks and locate them daily with overhead intelligence, Joint STARS, or Killer Scouts, but we missed the implications of the Iraqi soldiers’ terror of sleeping in their tanks. Our reconnaissance pictures showed us parked tanks with new slit trenches nearby. Those who measure effectiveness by the number of tanks destroyed fail to understand that sleeping away from your tank means that you are highly unlikely to get the first shot off if you are suddenly attacked, and are therefore likely to lose the engagement.
★ The aircraft and weapons of today are far more capable than those used in the Gulf War. With more modern computers and improved radar, the Joint STARS aircraft now has a far greater capacity to detect and identify moving vehicles. GPS bombs can now be dropped in any weather. The wide-area munitions, such as the sensor-fused weapon, permit aerial attack of massed armor columns, with tens to hundreds of sub-munitions homing in on individual vehicles.
What does the denial of movement mean for battlefields of the future?
Certainly it means that you have to control the air if you want to maneuver your forces. It also means that you should no longer prepare your ground forces to fight force-on-force against a slow-maneuvering enemy. Given that our control of the air puts severe limits on an enemy’s ability to survive the lethal battlefield of the future, expect him to feature small, fast, stealthy movement, and expect him to collapse into urban areas, jungle, or mountainous terrain and to avoid combat in the wide-open spaces.
Meanwhile, if our own ground forces continue to follow current doctrine, our enemy army can expect to find large, massed U.S. ground forces opposing him, but with our mobility and capacity to maneuver hampered by our own ponderous logistical tail. As a result, he will attempt to employ his own form of airpower — guided missiles, ballistic and cruise — to weaken or even defeat this easy target.
This means that the intelligent commander of the future will configure his land forces to mass and disperse quickly. He will reduce the size of his force while increasing the lethality of his firepower. He will select transportation systems that can
rapidly move his forces about the battle space with minimum fuel (to reduce the logistics tail). He will be hard to find, yet able quickly to exploit the advantages his superior surveillance of the battlefield affords him.
To bring all of this about will mean that land forces’ equipment, organizations, tactics, and strategy at the operational level of war will change drastically.
So the question is not whether or not there has been a revolution. There has certainly been a revolution in military technology, but not in how the military fight, or plan to fight.
★ Let’s look at how some of these technological changes affect the individual fighting man.
In the Gulf War, close air support relied on visual acquisition of the target by the pilot in the fighter aircraft, who was guided to his target by voice directions from a forward air controller located on the battlefield. The procedure was cumbersome and imperfect, and too often pilots misidentified the target and attacked Coalition ground forces. Fortunately, such mistakes happened more rarely than in wars in the past; unfortunately, the mistakes were far more devastating than they were in past wars.
Using present technology, however, we can virtually eliminate such mistakes.
For example, our soldiers in Bosnia are now equipped with small Global Positioning Satellite receivers that are coupled with a small laser range finder and radio transmitter. When the soldier sees a target threatening him — say, a tank or a sniper — he simply points his aiming device at it and initiates laser ranging. The device knows where it is in the GPS coordinate system, knows the heading and distance to the target, and relays that information to a nearby F-16 equipped with an improved data modem. The information from the ground is received in the form of a data burst, which is not audible to the pilot but is translated into words that appear on his heads-up display which describe the target and its GPS coordinates. The fighter pilot can either slave his radar crosshairs onto the target; or, when he’s in the clear, superimpose the target on the ground with the target designation box and gunsight on his heads-up display; or insert the target’s coordinates into a GPS-guided precision weapon. In effect, we are giving the individual soldier a 2,000-pound hand grenade.
This raises questions about how the land and air arms of our military services are developing tactical doctrine to exploit this unique capability. How are they exercising to develop procedures for the soldier to call upon air, and how are we examining command-and-control measures to make sure the weapons are used on the highest-priority targets? These questions will be increasingly important, as potential enemies study the Gulf War and conclude that the best way to avoid destruction from U.S. airpower is to hug their opposite U.S. land force member as closely as possible.
CONTROL
Control is the goal of most warfare. When we are unable to achieve our political ends through persuasion or threat, then physical attack, with the goal of controlling the behavior of our enemy, looks increasingly attractive.
In the past, achieving control has required the physical dominance of one side over the other. Today, new technology provides other means of control. For example, with information technology, we can dominate his senses, reasoning, or mental faculties.
During the Gulf War, the vast majority of the Iraqi Army who had not already deserted, surrendered to Coalition land forces. Both the surrenders and the desertions came about because Iraqi soldiers had been dominated by the psychological campaign we had waged. This campaign came with both a stick and a carrot.
The stick: We fatigued and terrified them with unwavering air attack. They knew no peace; they were always in danger; they could not easily be resupplied with food and water; and communications between levels of command were close to impossible.
The carrot: The Arab elements of the Coalition understood which arguments would sway the Iraqis away from their own leadership. Saddam had insisted that Kuwait was part of Iraq, and that it was right and just to return it to the fold, while at the same time he exploited the normal dislike Iraqis felt for Kuwaitis. By way of contrast (and with the help of our Arab allies), we played on their faith in Islam and Arab brotherhood. We told them they were Muslims and Arabs, just as the Kuwaitis were Muslims and Arabs, and it was sinful to make war on brothers of the same faith. While they did not like the Kuwaitis, they felt guilty about the evils the occupation was bringing to Kuwait City. While they were loyal to their families in Iraq, they had no loyalty to Saddam.
For those themes to take root, we needed to control the environment. The air attacks did that.
The Iraqi soldier became fearful. Often, our advancing ground forces found vehicles, tanks, and artillery positions abandoned and filled with blowing sand. With Iraqi soldiers hiding in their bunkers and wondering when the next B-52 strike or A-10 attack would kill them, leaflet, radio, and television messages telling them to give up this unholy occupation of Kuwait easily took root.
Soon, those who could, went home. Those who couldn’t desert, waited for the chance to surrender.
By the time Coalition ground forces moved into the Iraqi lines, we had clearly established control over most of the Iraqi Army, as was evident by the surrender of nearly 88,000 Iraqi soldiers. Most had not fired a shot.
★ Control can also be exerted on the environment.
For example, during the Gulf War, we made extensive use of electronic countermeasures (ECM) and anti-radiation missiles to exert control over Iraqi air defense radar sensors. The ECM hindered the effectiveness of individual radars and confused the long-range search radars used to cue the short-range, and more accurate, radars used to control guided antiaircraft missiles.
This war also featured a new and highly successful form of control, Stealth. The F-117 proved to be the only aircraft we could send into the air defense cauldron of Baghdad and be certain it would survive, and it could do that with unprecedented efficiency — that is, it did not require large support forces of air-to-air escort, ECM support jamming aircraft, and Wild Weasels carrying anti-radiation missiles, while its laser-guided bombs made it truly efficient in terms of targets destroyed per sortie.
The secret of Stealth: it controls its environment.
The F-117 can go anywhere its pilot commands, and it cannot be sensed by the enemy except visually, meaning that it flies only at night and/or during adverse weather. Though an enemy may be aware that an F-117 is present (he can, after all, see or hear bombs exploding), he cannot locate it with enough accuracy to shoot it down.
Stealth and supercruise will give the F-22 even greater control of the environment. With supercruise, F-22s will fly at supersonic speeds without using afterburner. Thus they can cruise at speeds above Mach 1 with their engines at fairly economical fuel flows. Flying that fast cuts down an enemy’s time for action once he detects you — and with Stealth, he will detect you very late in the game. Supercruise and Stealth also collapse the envelope for the employment of his weapons. An air-to-air missile shot from a tail aspect at a supersonic jet has a very small effective range, since the missile has to spend all its energy catching up.
With these advantages, F-22s will almost certainly achieve air superiority over enemy aircraft, and in turn this will permit the entire spectrum of the joint force’s non-Stealth aircraft to operate unhindered by enemy defenses.
★ Another good way to control the environment is by using information warfare — the current hot topic in military circles, and for good reason.
Everyone talks about weirdo, geek computer hackers who break into heavily protected bank or military computer systems. But imagine using hacker skills for military purposes. For instance, imagine the military value of taking an enemy’s command-and-control system, and inserting a depiction of forces you want him to see, instead of the real-world situation. How about entering his air defense system and letting him “see” false attacks to the west, while your real attack comes from the east? Why not lead him to believe that your ground forces are located where they are not, so he will exhaust his artillery ammunition
pounding barren land, while your force escapes unharmed? Or even make him believe the forces arrayed against him are so vast and dominating that he will sue for peace before the battle begins?
Information warfare can be conducted at all levels of conflict, and includes a defensive side as well.
Of all the nations of the world, the United States is the most vulnerable to computer attacks. We use computers everywhere. Our telephones are now simple computer entry pads. Our wristwatches are computers. We plan our days, operate our automobiles, and communicate with computers. Our military equipment is so advanced largely because computers aim our guns, fly our planes, and operate our ships.
Therefore, even as we do our best to control the inputs to an enemy’s computers and knowledge system, we must also protect the integrity of the knowledge systems we are using to prosecute the battle.
Most easily understood is the need to protect our own computer databases from corruption or other manipulation. Though private industry and the military have been working this problem for years, the threat has grown at a pace equal only to the raging change in computer capabilities worldwide. There are no longer “have” and “have not” nations when it comes to the capacity to access and manipulate computer databases and programs.
Meanwhile, most current users are in a state of denial about the vulnerability of their data systems, simply because they have some small protection — and the alternative is too terrible to contemplate.
For example, the banking industry loses millions of dollars each year to computer crime. They can afford to overlook that loss. But what if computer criminals learned how to attack the customer trust and confidence on which their industry is built and relies? Could they afford to overlook that? Other financial markets, such as stock exchanges, suffer the same vulnerability.
