Into the Storm: On the Ground in Iraq

by Tom Clancy

  In short, battle and operational environments were going to be hard to predict. This meant that the Army had to be able not only to fight and win in several different types of battlefields, but also to accomplish several types of operations other than war. And this in turn meant that the Army's doctrine had to address the issue of the smaller force's versatility. It also meant doing away with the term "AirLand Battle"--not because the concept was no longer useful, but because it suggested the linear battlefield of central Europe. Though such a battlefield might turn out to exist in the future, Army commanders had to be capable of adapting to a very different kind of battlefield.

  So this is what they did:

  LAND BATTLE

  Changes to the land war doctrine fell within four areas: Force Projection, Operations Other Than War, Joint and Combined Operations, and Conduct of the Land Battle.

  Force Projection

  Because the likelihood that the Army would fight or operate close to garrison locations (as it did in Germany during the Cold War) was about zero, it had to become skilled at quickly putting together tactical teams to fit fast-arising mission requirements that were hard to predict in advance. Then they had to get to where they were going and, depending on the nature of their mission--from fighting their way in to operations other than war--they had to figure out how to place the force on the ground consistent with the way they wanted to conduct the operation (an error in initial disposition, as Moltke said, might not be corrected for an entire campaign). Meanwhile, they had to get early intelligence as rapidly as possible in order to deploy the units. And finally, once there, they had to supply themselves, perhaps half a world away from the U.S.A., or else hundreds or thousands of miles from their garrisons, and sometimes in areas where they wouldn't get local help.

  The Army taught itself how to do all that. An entire chapter on force projection was put into the 1993 100-5. Force projection scenarios became the object of study in Army schools. Training programs were begun. Army Chief Sullivan and his principal logistician, Lieutenant General Lee Salomon, began prepositioning Army equipment in key locations around the world, to allow sizable land power to be sent into a region quickly. The recent deployment of a 1st Cavalry Division brigade from Fort Hood to Kuwait has demonstrated that the Army has indeed become a strategic force for the 1990s.

  Operations Other Than War

  More and more, the Army is finding itself involved in non-war-fighting missions, in operations such as VII Corps's humanitarian relief efforts in southeastern Iraq following Desert Storm; Provide Comfort in northern Iraq; and peacekeeping operations, such as that which the U.S. Army has been performing in the Sinai Desert since 1979. In a world that is no longer bipolar, regional conflicts or crises are sure to demand the peaceful use of U.S. forces.

  There is a sharp distinction between the two types of operations: On the one hand, there is war, the deliberate use of force to gain a national or coalition strategic objective. The Army's purpose is to fight and win the nation's wars as part of a joint team, and it trains, equips, and mans itself to do that. In war you want aggressive, tough soldiers and units. That behavior does not always work best in an operation other than war.

  On the other hand, military forces can be used to gain objectives by means of (usually) non-combat operations, and (usually) in combination with other elements of national power. Though occasionally some of these operations might involve actual combat, force is not the principal means to the strategic ends. However, the discipline, skills, teamwork, and toughness that come from preparing to fight and win can be used in these operations. (You cannot go the other way. Soldiers and units trained only in skills for operations other than war are not prepared for the rigors of the land battlefield.)

  OOTWs, as such operations are called, are not new. The Army has long conducted them--beginning with George Washington's use of the militia to put down the Whiskey Rebellion in Pennsylvania in 1794.

  How do you conduct OOTWs?

  You need

  * a sense of objective: the ability to focus all your efforts on achieving that objective; and the discipline to stay within those parameters;

  * unity of effort: all the various military, government, and non-government agencies have to work toward the same goal;

  * a sense of legitimacy: the operation must be conducted in such a way that the authority of the local government is reinforced;

  * perseverance: OOTWs tend to take much longer to reach objectives than the use of force;

  * restraint: you have to stay within specified rules of engagement; and, finally,

  * security: you need to protect the force against a variety of threats while it is conducting its operations.

  One interesting anomaly that the Army began to notice about OOTWs: while the actual battlefield was becoming less dense with soldiers, these OOTW missions tended to be manpower-intensive. Such a contradiction would lead to tensions, as budget analysts attempted to reduce the Army end strength.

  Joint and Combined Operations

  Passage of the Goldwater-Nichols legislation in 1986 ensured the pre-eminence in the U.S. military of joint operations over operations conducted by a single service alone.

  Does that mean that Goldwater-Nichols created joint warfare? Far from it. It's been practiced almost from the beginning of the nation's history. World War II saw the largest joint operations in the history of the U.S. military, and the landing at Inchon in Korea was a joint operation masterstroke. Later, however, the long Cold War fixed the services into set patterns of operation. They were ready to fight if that conflict grew hot, but were perhaps not as ready to combine forces to operate quickly in other environments. That changed when Desert One and Grenada inspired a reemphasis on the skillful conduct of joint operations. After that, Desert Storm proved the worth of the new legislation.

  Before 1986 little joint doctrine had been published, and actual warfighting doctrine was published by individual services (principally by the Army and, to a lesser extent, by the Marine Corps, since operational doctrine seemed most useful to land forces). The services would then informally meld their doctrines together--essentially with a Cold War scenario in mind--to achieve whatever harmony was appropriate. Starting in 1973, for instance, and lasting into the 1990s, the Army and the USAF had struck up a close working partnership at TRADOC and the AF TAC (Tactical Air Command). The result was the AirLand Battle doctrine. Similar close relationships between the Marines and Army had for years harmonized land battle doctrines--while recognizing the special nature of amphibious warfare.

  Yet no body of joint doctrine existed when forces of two or more services were combined to conduct operations. Goldwater-Nichols changed that, but it was General Powell who drove the first real operational joint doctrine, JCS Pub 1, published after Desert Storm, that laid out operating guidelines for joint forces. Soon after that came JCS Pub 3.0, which was a joint version of the Army's FM 100-5.

  The June 1993 FM 100-5, written by Fred Franks and his TRADOC team, contained an entire chapter on joint operations, which gave members of the Army the basic outlines of joint operations, joint task force, joint command, unified commands, and command relationships.

  Joint operations were clearly not always going to be on the scale of a Desert Storm. In today's more multipolar world, a smaller joint task force would be formed quickly to deal with fast-moving situations in areas such as Somalia, Haiti, or Bosnia. Each would be commanded by a joint task force (JTF)--a headquarters comprised of members of all the services, with component commands of each service reporting to the JTF. Normally, the commander of the JTF would be from the service with the most forces represented, while individual members of the joint task force staff would have to be skilled in working with a joint team. This was a marked change from the Cold War. Learning how to do this--and teach it--required a significant redesign of curricula in the service and joint schools: another provision of the 1986 legislation requiring joint education and joint duty.

  IN a combin
ed--as opposed to a joint--operation, the U.S. military conducts missions with the forces of another nation, either in coalition warfare or coalition operations other than war. In the emerging multipolar world, with U.S. Army forces now smaller than in generations, most future operations will likely be combined.

  Combined operations are not new to the U.S. military, either. Without the assistance of the French army and navy, Yorktown would not have happened. And in the twentieth century, combined operations have been the norm rather than the exception. During the Cold War, most combined operations were within the NATO framework . . . or, to a lesser extent, within the framework of the alliance with South Korea. Procedures within those two alliances had long been worked out.

  In Desert Storm, the U.S.A. put together a political and military coalition of a very different kind--ad hoc, more or less improvised, but highly effective. As Fred Franks and the thinkers at TRADOC looked about the world, they saw that this was likely to be the model for future operations. If so, TRADOC needed to teach the upcoming generation of Army leaders how to do their part in putting such a coalition together, and then operating within it.

  Some of the lessons learned in Desert Storm proved applicable:

  * Teamwork and trust among members of the coalition team are absolutely essential.

  * You have to consider how to combine the forces. Normally, you like to retain a single command; you don't want to break up the allied force and put it with your own. Such a principle governed the use of Pershing's U.S. forces under the French in World War I, and they governed Fred Franks's use of British forces in VII Corps in Desert Storm.

  * Forces placed under a single operational command must be employed in accordance with their capabilities and assigned missions with a reasonable chance of success.

  * National pride is often at stake . . . and so is mission accomplishment. Assignment of a mission to a subordinate national force that results in failure of the mission or in high casualties has serious consequences for the combined commander and the nations involved.

  LAND OPERATIONS: BATTLE DYNAMICS

  Land war changes. It will always be changing. In order to make sure that the Army stays ahead of it, and to give it an institutional lens directed at the future, Fred Franks and his team created a concept in 1991 under which all the various ideas about the evolving battlefield could be included. These ideas would then form the basis for experimentation in simulations and in the field. Out of the experimentation would come new insights and discoveries, which in time would lead to changes in the individual ideas. This concept TRADOC called "Battle Dynamics."

  There were five central ideas to Battle Dynamics:

  BATTLE COMMAND. The battlefield envisioned during the Cold War was almost scripted. After the Cold War, the U.S. Army found itself in a strategic situation where ambiguity ruled. How best to combat ambiguity?

  * By reviving the art of command--command in the fluid and constantly changing attack instead of in the defense, which is more orderly and controlled.

  * By rapidly applying principles of doctrine to situations that commanders might not be able to predict far in advance.

  * By rapidly assessing situations--that is, by rapidly seeing oneself and the enemy and the terrain.

  * By focus on the commander, not on the command post. The information and command system would be so constructed that the commander could make decisions and focus combat power from wherever he needed to be on the battlefield. Thus he would be freed from what Fred Franks calls "the tyranny of the command post."

  Battle command is decision making. The commander will visualize the present friendly and enemy situations, then the situation that must occur if his mission is to be achieved at least cost to his soldiers, and then devise tactical methods to get from one state to the other (which is what leadership skill is all about). The more completely and accurately a commander can share his pictures of both situations with the rest of his command, the more effectively he can move his organization at a high tempo and focus his own combat power with the combat power available from outside. He will do all this while being with his soldiers, while feeling their pain and pride, and then making the necessary decisions.

  BATTLESPACE. In the Cold War, we arrayed our own forces to defend against a powerful force that echeloned itself in depth in order to constantly feed forces into battle and thus maintain momentum. To defend against that threat, the United States laid out geometric lines for its own forces (phase lines, etc.) in order to determine who was responsible for real estate on our side and for carving up the enemy echelons deep in their territory.

  That was a special situation against a special enemy. In the future, enemies will look and behave differently, yet we will still want to attack him in depth. To do that may not require the precise geometry of the Cold War battlespace. We may not need forces to be right next to one another. In fact, units will likely operate out of visual range of one another--though they will be in close electronic contact. And battle lines between opposing forces may well be much more amorphous than they are now. Thus, Franks wanted Army commanders to think their way through the tactical problems of the (likely) fluid, free-form, and ambiguous future battlefield without automatically applying Cold War battlespace templates. Since these templates had been so closely associated with the term "AirLand Battle," the Army dropped that term.

  DEPTH AND SIMULTANEOUS ATTACK. In the past, there had been a segmented, sequential battlefield model of rear, close, and deep. That model would change and be redefined in future operations. In these operations, we would attack the enemy (or control a situation in operations other than war) simultaneously--not sequentially--throughout the depth of the battlespace.

  EARLY ENTRY, LETHALITY, AND SURVIVABILITY. In a fast-moving situation, when a force has to go into an area quickly (called early entry), you want to be able to tailor it so that it goes in with power and protection. Just Cause in Panama was an example of a force so well tailored for that mission that it finished the fight in hours. Similarly, the 10th Mountain Division was rapidly tailored for its Somali mission, and later for Haiti. The Army wants to make a habit of such situations--especially in a world where the likelihood of early-entry missions has increased (and likely to be over a very wide range of situations).

  Thus, early-entry forces must be tailorable in a number of ways. They need

  * to meet changing conditions and a variety of missions;

  * to provide the commander as many options as possible;

  * to be able to protect themselves;

  * and to have punch, not only close in, but out deep.

  In short, they have to be able to win the first battle.

  COMBAT SERVICE SUPPORT. In the Cold War, most of the focus was on tactical logistics. Force projection puts a premium on strategic and operational logistics. This new strategic environment will demand rapidly tailorable logistics systems, which must be capable of providing support for joint and combined operations, sometimes over great distances.

  Tactical logistics will also continue to be one of the keys to more rapid tempo operations. Anticipation, long a goal of logisticians, will sometimes be aided by what are called telemetry-based logistics. Telemetry on equipment will allow support personnel to know when something is needed before it is needed. Total asset visibility, or the ability to pinpoint supplies worldwide, should help strategic logisticians to provide more precise support in future operations and in more than one operational theater.

  BATTLE LABS

  Ideas are not enough. The Army is a pragmatic profession. It makes things happen. It gets results for the nation. Army professionals are military practitioners, not military philosophers. As noted, the worth of a new approach has to be demonstrated before Army professionals will change over to it.

  During Fred Franks's professional lifetime, he himself was powerfully impressed by the success of air assault and attack helicopter ideas. The pioneers who brought these ideas to the Army banded together in the late 1950s, got s
enior-level support, some resources for experiments, and by 1963 had a full-scale experimental division going. In 1965, the division was the 1st Cavalry, which fought successfully in Vietnam from 1965 until its departure in 1971. Air assault and attack helicopter pioneers demonstrated the worth of both their war-fighting ideas and their organizational changes, and they supported them either with new technology or with technology that had long been available in the civilian sector.

  From this, Franks concluded that the Army needed to do some experimenting. Specifically, it needed an organization to try out new directions in land warfare . . . something like the air assault division experiment in the early 1960s and the series of field experiments known as the Louisiana Maneuvers in the early 1940s, just before World War II.