Posted on 04/14/2003 6:21:27 AM PDT by Valin
So when and how did the U.S. military get this good? The elements of swift victory in Gulf War II have been well laid-out: the agility and flexibility of our forces, the pinpoint accuracy of the bombs, the commanders' real-time view of the battlefield, the remarkable coordination among all branches of the armed services (Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines) and special operations. But these elements, and this degree of success, have not been seen in previous wars, not even in the first Gulf War 12 years ago. Three major changes have taken hold within the military since then—a new war-fighting doctrine, advanced digital technology, and a less parochial culture.
The new doctrine was put in motion in 1983, a decade before Operation Desert Storm, when the U.S. Army's Command and General Staff College, at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., created an elite, one-year post-grad program called the School for Advanced Military Studies. The school's founder was a colonel—soon promoted to brigadier general—named Huba Wass de Czege (pronounced VOSS-de-say-ga). He was in the forefront of officers who had served in Vietnam, witnessed the disaster firsthand, and were eager to change the way the Army thought about combat.
In 1982, Wass de Czege had written a major revision of the Army's war-fighting manual, FM 100-5, the official expression of Army doctrine and the foundation for all decisions about strategy, tactics, and training. The previous edition, written in 1976 by Gen. William DePuy, had recited a strategy of attrition warfare, a static line of defense against the enemy's strongest point of assault, beating it back with frontal assaults and superior firepower. Wass de Czege's rewrite outlined a strategy emphasizing agility, speed, maneuver, and deep strikes well behind enemy lines. The advanced-studies school at Fort Leavenworth was set up explicitly to weave this new strategy into the fabric of the Army establishment.
By the time of Desert Storm, a small group of Wass de Czege's students had been promoted to high-level posts on the staff of Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf's Central Command. This group of officers, who self-consciously referred to themselves as the "Jedi Knights," designed the ground-war strategy of the first Gulf War, and it was straight out of Wass de Czege's book—the feinted assault up the middle, the simultaneous sweep of armored forces up to the Iraqi army's western flank, the multiple thrusts that surrounded the Iraqis from all sides, hurling them into disarray before their final envelopment and destruction.
The Marines, meanwhile, were going through a similar transformation. Col. Mike Wiley, vice president of the Marine Corps University at Quantico, revised his branch's war doctrine on the basis of a 1979 briefing called "Patterns of Conflict" by a retired Air Force colonel named John Boyd. Boyd too had concluded that successful warfare involves surprise, deception, sweeping quickly around flanks, and creating confusion and disorder in the enemy's ranks. The Marine Corps commandant at the time, Gen. Alfred Gray, considered himself a Boyd disciple and ordered his officers, who led the assault into Kuwait, to avoid frontal assaults and to maneuver around the Iraqis and attack their flanks.
For the Air Force and Navy, Desert Storm saw the inauguration of "smart bombs" that could explode within a few feet of their targets. Fewer than 10 percent of the munitions dropped in Desert Storm were smart bombs; the weapons were new and expensive (between $120,000 and $240,000 apiece); not many had been built; and they still had lots of technical bugs. By 1999, in the war over Kosovo, smart bombs were more reliable and a lot cheaper ($20,000 each); they constituted about 30 percent of bombs dropped. In Afghanistan, the figure rose to 70 percent, which is probably how the math will work out in Gulf War II as well.
The war in Afghanistan, however, saw three innovations that would alter the way America fights wars. First, high-tech smart bombs were combined with high-tech command, control, communications, and intelligence. A new generation of unmanned Predator drones flew over the battlefield, scanning the terrain with digital cameras and instantly transmitting the imagery back to command headquarters. Commanders would view the imagery, look for targets, and order pilots in the area to attack the targets. The pilots would punch the target's coordinates into the smart bomb's GPS receiver. The bomb would home in on the target. Total time elapsed: about 20 minutes. By comparison, in Desert Storm, the process of spotting a new target, assigning a weapon to hit it, then hitting it, took three days.
The second new thing about the U.S. strategy in Afghanistan was that it was truly a "combined-arms" operation—a battle plan that involved more than one branch of the armed services, working in tandem. This had never really happened before. Often using the new high-tech drones as the communications link, Army troops on the ground called for strikes from planes flown by Air Force pilots. Some of these planes, such as B-52 and B-1 bombers, had been built 30 or 40 years earlier to drop multi-megaton nuclear bombs on the Soviet Union. The notion of using them to drop 2,000-pound conventional weapons, in support of ground troops, would have appalled an earlier generation of Air Force generals.
Over the previous decade or so, that generation of generals, weaned on Curtis LeMay and the Strategic Air Command, had died out, and so had SAC's central enemy and target, the Soviet Union. Meanwhile, the '90s saw the creation of a new Joint Forces Command, which promulgated doctrines, field manuals, and war games that envisioned all the services fighting wars together, under command structures that were unified or at least "interoperable." One such document, called "Joint Vision 2020," issued in June 2000, emphasized a strategy of "full-spectrum dominance," involving the conduct of "prompt, sustained and synchronized operations with combinations of forces … space, sea, land, air and information"—a "synergy of the core competencies of the individual services, integrated into the joint team … a whole greater than the sum of its parts."
Written doctrines are one thing, actual operations another. However, the new structures and doctrines did breed, in the words of one Joint Forces Command publication, "a common joint culture." The institutional barriers of inter-service rivalry, even hatred, were gradually broken down. Once new technologies made joint coordination possible, and once the war in Afghanistan showed that coordination could reap tremendous advantages, resistance seemed futile.
Operation Desert Storm was really two wars—the air war and the ground war—each fought autonomously and in sequence. Gulf War II was an integrated war, waged simultaneously and in synchronicity, on the ground, at sea, and in the air. The vast majority of airstrikes, from Air Force bombers and attack planes as well as Navy fighters, were delivered on Iraqi Republican Guards, in order to ease the path of U.S. Army soldiers and Marines thrusting north to Baghdad.
Another new thing, which started in Afghanistan and continued in Iraq, was the systematic inclusion of the so-called "shadow soldiers," the special operations forces. The 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Act, which was best-known for giving new authority to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, also made special ops a separate command, with its own budget. (Before then, each branch had its own special-ops division, which tended to get the big boys' leftovers, in terms of money, equipment and everything else.)
Gen. Schwarzkopf didn't think much of special ops, so didn't use them in Desert Storm, except toward the end of the war, to go hunt for Scud missiles in Iraq's western desert. In Afghanistan, these forces were central. They could be parachuted into the country in small numbers, set up airfields, and develop contacts with rebel leaders. The information about Taliban targets, which the Predator drones transmitted back to headquarters, usually came from a special-ops officer riding on horseback with a laptop.
We may never know how much special ops have been doing in Gulf War II. Certainly, these forces were in the Iraqi capital days or weeks before the war began, scoping out targets and lining up contacts. They were in the western deserts again, hunting Scuds and preparing airfields. They were in the north, training Kurds and securing oil fields. They were probably accompanying, and perhaps advancing, the 3rd Infantry and 1st Marine divisions all the way from Kuwait to Baghdad, scouting targets and transmitting their positions to the air commanders back at headquarters.
We don't yet fully know the lessons of this war—in part because it isn't over yet and in part because, as James Carafano, a former Army officer now with the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, put it, "90 percent of the war was going on out of our vision." Most of that 90 percent was being conducted by special ops (no embedded reporters there) and by the laptop-wielding joint-forces crew in Qatar (a few embeds, but no access to that part of the operation). What they were and are doing, however invisible, formed a large part of what made this war so stunning and new.
Velocity was more important than mass [as pointed out yesterday by the Sec.of Def.]
Col Michael D. Wyly, USMC, Ret.
Walt
Michael
I 'll second that recommendation.
[PDF]TOWARD A STRATEGY OF POSITIVE ENDS Huba Wass de Czege Antulio J. ...
File Format: PDF/Adobe Acrobat - View as HTML
Page 1. TOWARD A STRATEGY OF POSITIVE ENDS Huba Wass de Czege Antulio J. Echevarria
II September 2001 ... HUBA WASS DE CZEGE is a retired US Army brigadier general. ...
www.carlisle.army.mil/ssi/pubs/ 2001/positive/positive.pdf - Similar pages
Strategic Studies Institute (SSI)
Brigadier General (Ret.) Huba Wass de Czege. External Researcher.
Studies. Toward a Strategy of Positive Ends, by Brigadier General ...
www.carlisle.army.mil/ssi/bios/ext/hczege.html - 3k - Cached - Similar pages
[ More results from www.carlisle.army.mil ]
AnyBook4Less.com - Author: Huba Wass De Czege
1. Compare Prices, Cover Image, Title: Air-Mech-Strike: Asymmetric Maneuver Warfare
for the 21st Century by David L. Grange, Huba Wass De Czege, Richard D ...
www.anybook4less.com/author/Huba+Wass+De+Czege.html - 4k - Cached - Similar pages
The RMA Debate: Army Transformation
... Gen Huba Wass de Czege. Army Magazine, April 2002. ... Conceptual Foundations of a
Transformed US Army Huba Wass de Czege and Richard Hart Sinnreich. No. 40. ...
www.comw.org/rma/fulltext/ustrans.html - 23k - Cached - Similar pages
Initial Impressions Report: Changing the Army - Chapter 1
... Colonel Huba Wass de Czege built on this framework in the November
1984 issue of the same periodical. (2) Wass de Czege underlined ...
call.army.mil/products/exfor/specrpt/chp1.htm - 13k - Cached - Similar pages
Initial Impressions Report: Changing the Army - Executive Summary
... and force design since the end of the Vietnam War (post-1973) through the lens
of the General Donn A. Starry - Colonel Huba Wass de Czege paradigm, "How to ...
call.army.mil/products/exfor/specrpt/exsum.htm - 35k - Cached - Similar pages
[ More results from call.army.mil ]
[PDF]Conceptual Foundations of a Transformed US Army The Institute of ...
File Format: PDF/Adobe Acrobat - View as HTML
Conceptual Foundations of a Transformed US Army by Huba Wass de Czege and Richard
Hart Sinnreich The Institute of Land Warfare ASSOCIATION OF THE UNITED STATES ...
www.ausa.org/PDFdocs/lwp40.pdf - Similar pages
Behind the military victory
... The school’s founder was a colonel-soon promoted to brigadier general-named
Huba Wass de Czege (pronounced VOSS-de-say-ga). He ...
www.msnbc.com/news/898490.asp?0cl=cR - 67k - Cached - Similar pages
Force Majeure - What lies behind the military's victory in Iraq. ...
... The school's founder was a colonel—soon promoted to brigadier general—named
Huba Wass de Czege (pronounced VOSS-de-say-ga). ...
slate.msn.com/id/2081388/ - 33k - Cached - Similar pages
ABCNEWS.com : Army Fights Future Wars
... Huba Wass de Czege described it, Red’s access to sophisticated space-based intelligence
and reconnaissance systems, and its possession of highly accurate land ...
abcnews.go.com/sections/tech/DailyNews/ spacegame990226.html - 26k - Apr 12, 2003 - Cached - Similar pages
Return to the Table of Contents
16 Enabling Operational Maneuver From Strategic Distances
by Brigadier General Huba Wass de Czege, U.S. Army, Retired,
and Lieutenant Colonel Zbigniew M. Majchrzak, U.S. Army, Retired ©2002
He who occupies the field of battle first and awaits his enemy is at ease; he who comes late is weary.
—Sun Tzu, Art of War
Army and joint Transformation are about more than penny packets of lethal, light, and highly mobile forces. While information can leverage and focus combat power, the laws of physics still apply to bringing sufficient force to bear a continent away during a serious crisis. Army and joint Transformation will also require transforming our system for strategic mobility.
During the past decade, the U.S. Army has been engaged in a deliberate but sweeping effort to adapt its organization, equipment, and methods of operation to meet the requirements of a rapidly changing strategic and technological landscape. The effort began almost.....
Here is the link: http://www-cgsc.army.mil/milrev/english/MayJun02/wass.asp
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.