Into the Storm: On the Ground in Iraq

by Tom Clancy

  TRADOC had a major advantage over earlier experimenters--computer-assisted simulations. These simulations, including the new virtual reality simulations, had reached such a level of accuracy that they could replicate the battlefield with great fidelity, which permitted experiments to be performed. This was not only cheaper than running experiments in the field, it also allowed many more repetitions in a given time. When results justified full-scale field experiments, they could then be set up. This approach became the basis for the TRADOC Battlefield Laboratories formed in April 1992. There were five of them, each corresponding to a core idea of Battle Dynamics--a single area where the land battle was changing.59

  In the labs, various organizations, not only from within the Army, but from academia, civilian contractors, other services, and the like, came together to work on a common battlefield idea. Such teamwork was unprecedented in the Army.

  But there was more to the labs than that.

  In fighting, as we have seen, at each echelon (battalion, brigade, division, etc.) you integrate arms--including tanks, infantry, artillery, aviation, and fire support--to get the combined-arms orchestra effect. Franks wanted the same approach in the Battle Labs. There, new technology and ideas were to be integrated at each echelon, rather than vertically by arm.

  For example, in the past, the next generation of night-vision equipment might go to Abrams tanks, but not to Bradleys or other members of the combined-arms team. That would no longer be the case. Franks also demanded in the Battle Labs that war-fighting experiments be done with what he termed "real soldiers in real units." That way the Army would get normal soldier and leader behavior. He also wanted the experiments done at the NTC or JRTC, the most tactically competitive environments. Both these directives would increase the fidelity of the results.

  Battle Labs proved to be such an innovative idea that the Air Force recently announced the formation of six of their own, and the USMC adopted the concept three years ago.

  During those days at TRADOC, an excited buzz of activity could be found at Fort Monroe. People were eager; people were brimful of ideas; there was a lot of productive talk . . . there was a glow of energy about the place. Fred Franks used to tell people that he wanted the energy level at Fort Monroe to be so high that when a satellite passed overhead, the fort would glow in the dark like a diamond. Now and again in those days, I would look into my own Maryland night sky south toward Virginia and catch an unusual brightness over Fort Monroe. . . .

  FUTURE BATTLEFIELDS

  Battlefield technology evolves and develops, as does the nature of threats, tactics, strategy, and doctrine. Yet the military is a hierarchical institution. It needs to be in order to impose some order out of the chaos of battle. The way that order normally is imposed is by adherence to a strict hierarchy of command and by the physical means of control, such as formations, the ability to see others, the assignment of sectors to operate in, and phase lines. When radios came along, units could become more dispersed and still retain a semblance of control, yet adherence to physical means of control continued--and for good reason. There was no better way to bring the team of teams together at the right place at the right time in the right combination relative to the enemy and terrain, and then to fight and win physically.

  The outcome of land battles is still decided by physical force. In army versus army, on a given piece of terrain, forces that prevail kill the enemy, destroy his equipment, and capture his soldiers, then control the area. Raw physical courage, physical toughness in all types of terrain and weather, combat discipline, skill with weapons and in units, and leadership in the face of chaos and life-and-death choices are still very much needed. Lethality, survivability, and the tempo of the operation are still measurable quantities that very often determine the physical outcome of the battles and engagements.

  Deciding where and when to fight, and at what cost, and where battles and engagements will lead, continue to be the province of what the army has called operational art and strategy. These continue to be influenced by a variety of factors, some physical and some not.

  TRADOC and the Army have long been very much aware of what other high-performing organizations also have learned--that information not only passes through the normal hierarchical chain of command, it flows in other ways to get quickly where it's needed. In order to take advantage of that fact, the Army needed to structure its own organizations and problem solving so that information flowed in ways that enhanced unit performance. Then the Army had to invest in technologies that promoted it.

  Today there's a lot of buzz about winning the information war, as though that in itself wins battles and engagements, as though it were something new. In point of fact, since the early days of warfare, one side has always tried to win the information war over the other. Sun Tzu advised us to see ourselves and see the enemy. The goal of units in combat has always been to know the enemy and to see the terrain, then to decide what to do . . . and to have the skills to do it faster than an enemy. The information age just provides new ways to do it on the battlefield.

  That does not mean that the information age is not changing the battlefield. Far from it.

  The emergence of information technology, operated by truly high-quality soldiers, is bringing about a revolution in land warfare. In the not-at-all-distant future, commanders will find themselves on a battlefield where all soldiers and weapons platforms will carry sensors. With their help, soldiers will not only know precisely where they are, they will also be able to engage the enemy directly and at the same time to transmit information about the enemy to other platforms that also can engage the enemy. Thus, combat power can be applied simultaneously throughout the depth of the battlespace to confound and stun, then rapidly defeat any enemy.

  And that's only the beginning. Other changes may follow:

  * telemetry-based logistics;

  * broadcast and warrior pull-down intelligence on demand;

  * an expanded direct-fire battlespace;

  * battle command on the move; and

  * rapid tailoring of combat capabilities.

  This transformation will have enormous implications for how units are commanded and soldiers are led into battle; for the size and function of staffs; for the interaction of combat-support organizations in such a high-tempo context; and for interactions among joint partners.

  Thus, for example, the trend in land combat has been toward fewer and fewer friendly forces in a given battlespace. They will no longer have to be confined to preset physical control measures. They won't even have to be contiguous to one another. Though massed effects on the enemy will still be possible (and usually without the need to mass physically), dispersal will be the norm, physical mass the exception. If it is necessary to physically mass in order to achieve an intended purpose, you can still do it, and then rapidly disperse again afterward. Such dispersal has the added benefit of increasing survivability probabilities.

  In other words, we are moving toward what the British writer Paddy Griffith calls "an empty battlefield"--a battlefield where the trend in direct-contact battle is away from gaining coherence by means of physical mass to gaining it by means of a common picture of the situation, one that is constantly updated and available to all elements in the team of teams.

  The U.S. Army vision for the future battlefield has been driven by the following overriding concept: quality soldiers and leaders whose full potential is realized through the application of information-age technologies and by rigorous and relevant training and leader development.

  Two recent technical innovations symbolize that vision in a small way.

  In September 1992, when the Army took its first M1A2 tank platoon to the National Training Center, Fred Franks and Major General Butch Funk, his old 3rd AD commander in Desert Storm, and at the time the commander of the Armor Center at Fort Knox, visited the NTC in order to see how well the soldiers could handle the rapid display of information while they fought their individual tanks (they did it very well, incide
ntally, and with initiative). It was the first de facto experiment of the future.

  Inside the M1A2 were two revolutionary devices. The first was an independent viewer for the commander. With its addition, both commander and gunner now had sighting systems that could fire and find targets simultaneously. Thus the tank's lethality was almost doubled. As the gunner was engaging one target, the commander was independently finding another, which allowed the gunner to go right to the next.

  The second device was even more significant. It looked something like a laptop computer and it was called the Intervehicular Information System (IVIS). IVIS was initially invented so that units would be able to know the location of all vehicles, transmit orders, automatically update logistics information about each tank, and consolidate that information for virtually automatic resupply.

  Following the NTC tactical exercise, Franks and Funk huddled with the tank platoon and their platoon sergeant, Sergeant First Class Phil Johndrow, and listened to their experiences. What he learned from the unit was more than just eye-opening.

  Navigation was no longer a concern. Nor was the location of other tanks in the unit. The IVIS told them not only their own exact location, but the exact location of each of the other tanks in their unit (there were screens for both drivers and tank commanders). Thus, they did not have to see each other physically in order to keep unit coherence, which meant that they could disperse more. The tank commander only had to give drivers a way point on which to guide, and the drivers did the rest (the driver steers between way points, which are provided automatically from the vehicle commander's screen). Consequently, the commander didn't have to spend as much of his time on navigation as before, which meant he could spend more time fighting the tank. (In Desert Storm only commanders had GPS, and the rest of the unit had to guide on his tank. Moreover, since his GPS was handheld, the vehicle commander constantly had to give course corrections to the driver.)

  Before IVIS, all a tank crew knew was what they saw or were told by voice over the radio. They would peak to attention when the tank commander barked out a battle command, then they faded back to an awareness simply of what was available to their immediate senses. Now that the picture of what all the pieces of their unit were doing was available to them, the tank crew were much more able to anticipate platoon tactics and to engage in tactical tasks without being told. Independent action. Their heads were in the situation all the time. Even if another tank in the platoon became a casualty, they were able to continue the mission without missing a beat.

  Imagine the power of quality soldiers, in highly trained units, all of whom have a continuing sense of the situation and the direction needed to defeat the enemy. It is the power of information. Further war-fighting experiments at Fort Knox in March 1993, then with battalion tank forces at the NTC in April 1994 by then-Major General Larry Jordan, confirmed the vision.

  Some time after that, Franks visited TRADOC's dismounted Battle Lab at Fort Benning, where Major General Jerry White was conducting experiments in advanced night-vision equipment.

  The working hypothesis: With an ability to see better, troops can disperse more and, with even fewer soldiers, inflict more damage on the enemy.

  Later, troops at the Battle Lab were equipped with a communications link that let them all talk with each other on a common radio net. Soldiers don't like to be out of touch with the others in their team, but they don't need physical contact, as long as they can talk to one another. If they can do that, and if they can see the enemy at ranges greater than those at which the enemy can see them, they will take it from there.

  Dispersion: Fewer soldiers in a given battlespace wielding the same lethality against the enemy. That means you don't have to protect so much of your own force.

  Power of information: All your troops know what is going on.

  But what then? What happens to the hierarchical military command structure? Does it remain the same? Do units remain the same size? Do they need to be as big? Can you expand the leader-to-led ratio while you disperse units, keep them informed, and place fewer troops in a given battlespace? What happens when you horizontally integrate all members of the combined-arms team (tanks, infantry, artillery, engineers, aviation, etc.) the same way you wired that tank platoon? Do you increase the tempo of your operation? Can you bring more lethal fires on the enemy?

  By the spring of 1994, results from the Army's Louisiana Maneuvers and TRADOC's Battle Labs, both in TRADOC and at JRTC and the NTC, led to the decision to field an experimental force to explore further issues concerning changes in doctrine and technology investments. Army Chief General Sullivan directed that an experimental unit named Force XXI be established at Fort Hood, Texas, with a goal of a full-brigade war-fighting experiment at the NTC in 1997. The Army had come a long way toward the future since 1991.

  As the Army forges into that future, it faces a multitude of questions of ever-growing complexity--but it knows how to go about solving them. Fred Franks retired from TRADOC in 1994, but today TRADOC continues to experiment, continues to work on the answers. At TRADOC's Battle Labs, Fort Hood, Fort Knox, the NTC, and JRTC--everywhere, activity flows. The rebirth of the Army is not a one-time thing. Thanks to Fred Franks and his colleagues, the generations before and the generations that will follow, the Army is a living, breathing organism. It has seen the twenty-first century--and it welcomes it.

  Fred Franks has the last word. . . .

  REFLECTIONS

  On 5 May 1970, the day I was wounded near Snoul, Cambodia, I could never have predicted the course the next twenty-five years would take--years that ended at a retirement ceremony at Fort Myer, Virginia, after I had completed thirty-five and a half years in the Army.

  There is no mystery to what we do as soldiers and as an Army. When called to do so, we fight and win our nation's wars as part of a joint team. We spend a lifetime getting ready to do that. I was no different.

  I make no apologies about my pride in our nation, our Army, and our soldiers. From that day in July 1955, when I proudly put on the fatigue shirt with "U.S. Army" over the pocket and took my place in the line with my West Point classmates, I was excited every day to be an American soldier. I loved the Army. I loved soldiering. I loved the cause we served. It is a profession as much about the heart as the mind. There is much passion in what soldiers do. What matters most is the cause we have been privileged to serve and those we've been privileged to serve with.

  Someone asked me a few years ago why I wanted to be a soldier. I thought a few seconds before answering. Then I said, "If you like what our country stands for and are willing to fight to protect those ideals, you ought to be a soldier.

  "If the sound of the national anthem and the sight of our flag stir something inside you, then you ought to be a soldier.

  "If you want to be around a lot of other people who feel the same way about all that as you do, you ought to be a soldier.

  "If you like a challenge, are not afraid of hard work, and think you are tough enough to meet the standards on the battlefield, you ought to be a soldier.

  "If you and your family are strong enough to endure the many separations, often on a moment's notice, and can live that kind of life, then you ought to be a soldier.

  "If the thought that at the end of your life you can say--or have said about you--that you served your country, if that appeals to you and you need no other reward than that, then you ought to be a soldier."

  I think of the selfless and total commitment of our men and women and their families. The soldier in Captain Dana Pittard's tank company, who said, "We're family." The troopers of the 1st Squadron, 3rd Cavalry, who in 1975 accepted an amputee Lieutenant Colonel as their commander and who made me feel whole again as a soldier three years out of the amputee ward. The members of the great Blackhorse fist in the Fulda Gap in the early 1980s that we had ready and cocked for the Warsaw Pact.

  They are the JAYHAWKS, Blackhorse, Brave Rifles, and Iron Soldiers. They give all they have. Sometimes their lives
. They speak in whispered tones, or not at all, about what they have done. They are the best we have in America. I can see their faces and remember their names. They look like America. They are America. Some of them are Cooper, Wiggins, Hallings, Johndrow, Vinson, Hawthorne, Johnson, Bolan, Burkett, Linberg, McVey, Cotton, Williams, Murphy, Butler, Wilson, Woodall, and Paez.

  They are my generation of Vietnam veterans and fellow amputees, for whom there were no yellow ribbons or parades, but who did what our country asked and did it so well and at great personal sacrifice. They are our Desert Storm generation, who also did what our country asked and did it so well and at great personal sacrifice. They are America's army. Who would not be proud to serve in the ranks of such Americans and to be called to lead them in battle? "No mission too difficult, no sacrifice too great, duty first," they say in the Big Red One. "Allons"--"let's go"--they say in the Blackhorse. "JAYHAWK" in VII Corps. Iron Soldiers, Spearhead, First Team, Always Ready, Brave Rifles. Values such as selfless service, heroism, sacrifice, honor. Values given real meaning by soldiers' actions in service to our nation on battlefields and at duty posts the world over.