An interesting article i found in the NY times...
Seems like they learn something new everytime they send troops
out...
Would this signal a shift in the way which America fights its wars
in future or indeed transform conventional warfare altogether as
others learn from their lessons?
Seems to me that size isn't everything anymore... technology can
enable more kills with less men, more destruction with less bombs
and more progress in less time. The key to this is mastering
information on the battlefield and the ability to act descisively
on those info...
comments?
The New York Times
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
September 10, 2002
Service Chiefs Say Afghan Battle Will Help Military Get Smarter,
Stronger and Faster
By THOM SHANKER and ERIC SCHMITT
WASHINGTON, Sept. 9 America's military is applying the lessons
learned in Afghanistan, examining everything from whether the
standard rifle cartridge fired by each soldier packs enough punch
to whether floating oil platforms can be towed around the globe as
secret bases for marines and Navy SEALs.
A number of urgent priorities already have emerged from studying
after-action reports from Afghanistan, which could affect how
billions in tax dollars are spent.
Some decisions promise to cut large silhouettes, such as
determining how best to float a huge, mobile base so Special
Operations forces and Marine expeditionary troops can strike
targets with speed and secrecy even when no land base is
available.
Their ocean-going camp could be an aging aircraft carrier without
its jets; it could be a supertanker; it could be a series of oil
platforms lashed together and pushed around the globe by barge. For
the war in Afghanistan, the carrier Kitty Hawk served as a floating
Special Operations base, but the decision took one-twelfth of the
Navy's centerpiece battle platforms out of the usual
rotation.
Other decisions are small but important, such as the realization
that the 5.56 millimeter cartridge fired by the M-4 carbine, the
standard assault rifle, may not carry sufficient punch. In
Afghanistan, soldiers reported that it routinely took three bullets
to drop an adversary. The Army is studying different rounds.
The Air Force is shopping for lighter, longer-life batteries to
power the laser rangefinders that combat controllers use to
pinpoint targets.
The war plan for Afghanistan may seem like a blueprint for victory,
especially since the unexpectedly swift success was secured with
just 19 American combat deaths.
While the four service chiefs who must organize, train and equip
the military say Afghanistan was a battle laboratory for successful
tests of new tactics and weapons, they add that the campaign
illuminated weaknesses that must be addressed before the next
offensive.
The Army and Air Force chiefs of staff, the chief of naval
operations and the Marine Corps commandant all consented to rare,
on-the-record interviews to reflect on the anniversary of a day
when the Pentagon, their headquarters, became the front line. They
discussed lessons learned and described how the past year changed
the ways they would prepare for the next stage of combat against
terrorism.
The service chiefs pointed to the need to focus on these major
changes:
The Navy has to be even more places at once, and its planes will
have to attack far beyond the shores to bring persistent, credible
combat power around the globe.
The Marines have to think not of amphibious landings, but of
expeditionary invasions hundreds of miles inland.
The Air Force will have to shorten the time it takes to identify
images of potential targets captured by unmanned aircraft, like
Predators and Global Hawk, send that information to command centers
and ultimately dispatch attack orders to bombers loitering high
above the battlefield.
The Army's light forces have to have some form of armored vehicles
when they first arrive at the front, while heavy armor has to be
faster to the battle.
In fact, the Army is already acting to meet one of those needs by
transforming some units into Stryker Brigades as an interim step
between today's tanks and the futuristic weapons of tomorrow. Built
around a light armored vehicle called Stryker, the brigades can be
flown in C-130 transports, as opposed to the massive C-17 required
by tanks.
The face of battle, no doubt, changed forever after the United
States quickly routed the Taliban and Al Qaeda in a landlocked
Central Asian state that in decades past sucked the blood out of
British and Soviet legions.
But speaking as one voice, the service chiefs Adm. Vern Clark of
the Navy, Gen. James L. Jones of the Marines, Gen. John P. Jumper
of the Air Force and Gen. Eric K. Shinseki of the Army all
cautioned that future war may arrive as unexpectedly as
Afghanistan.
"What does that mean to us?" asked Admiral Clark, posing a
challenge to his service that applies to all four. "That means that
we're going to have to be out and about, to keep the global terror
network, to keep them on the run."
He added, "We are the service that is allowed to go out and scour
around the largest maneuver space on the planet, and that's the
oceans."
The task of the American military, he said, "is to keep them
guessing. Where are we going to show up next? And we have the
capability to do that."
The armed forces face a more complicated range of enemy
capabilities, from shadowy terrorist cells that turn hijacked
jetliners into missiles to countries like Iraq and North Korea that
field traditional armies and would fight ferociously to defend
complicated terrain and are suspected of having arsenals of
unconventional weapons. The services therefore must be more
flexible, speedier and stealthier, even more lethal.
Gen. Jumper of the Air Force, who commanded American air forces in
Europe during the 1999 air war in Kosovo, said: "What I saw was the
need to decrease these timelines so you could deal with fleeting
targets in timely ways and still give the decision makers in these
very most sensitive situations time to assess and decide whether
the target was worth striking or not, or valid, or too much of a
risk."
Afghanistan was a war in which Air Force and Navy jets quickly
dominated the skies, hurling a precise and persistent fusillade
onto the deserts and mountains below.
But the axiom that wars are won on the ground was also confirmed.
The air campaign became most effective when enemy forces were drawn
onto the battlefield forming a massed target to confront ragged
guerrilla forces organized by small teams of Army Special Forces
troops who rode into battle on horseback to pick out targets with
hand-held lasers.
Flexibility, ingenuity, creativity and adaptability became the
priorities in Afghanistan, with an emphasis on finding new ways to
use old military tools. Just as important as several revolutionary
developments in military thinking that earned their stars in
Afghanistan, the service chiefs said, was determining which aspects
of their military planning were proven enduring.
The B-52 is an airframe older than most of the pilots in the
cockpit and the soldiers who call in the bombs. It is best known
for dropping carpets of dumb bombs on the rice paddies of Vietnam,
but in Afghanistan it was armed with precision weapons and assigned
the job of close air support if an altitude of 39,000 feet can be
called close. The task of bombing targets close to ground troops is
usually assigned to small and nimble Air Force and Navy
fighters.
"The battlefield of the future will be defined, if we do this
right, by smaller units doing what larger units used to do in the
20th century," said General Jones of the Marines. "The rifle
company of the 21st century will be doing what the rifle battalion
of the 20th century used to do." A company has about 160 troops and
a battalion about 1,000.
In Afghanistan, for the first time in history, marines were
dispatched 400 to 600 miles inland. "There are still a lot of
people scratching their heads and saying, `We didn't know the
Marines could do that,' " he said.
The increased lethality comes from advanced communications among
the fighters, faster and more accurate intelligence about an
enemy's movements and more efficient ways to protect fighters in
the field but most of all because of the accuracy of modern
weapons.
Precision is extraordinarily important to the ability to wage war
with a smaller logistical trail when one smart bomb can do the job
of dozens of heavy, dumb pieces of ordnance. The Air Force and Navy
fired off a substantial percentages of their stocks of
precision-guided munitions over Afghanistan, although the arsenals
are just weeks away from being fully replenished.
The Army's Apache helicopter, designed to take out heavily armored
Soviet tank columns at ground level deep behind enemy lines, was
adapted to strafe the high alpine ridgelines of southeastern
Afghanistan as troops scoured caves for Taliban and Al Qaeda. It
was an unexpected mission that echoed the role of its ancestor, the
Cobra gunship, in Southeast Asia.
The Navy's P-3 Orion, a four-propeller aircraft designed to lumber
over the high seas for 16 hours at a time searching out enemy
submarines with its sophisticated sensors, was just as useful over
the scorching Afghan desert. It flew intelligence-gathering,
surveillance and reconnaissance missions for the Navy's special
warfare teams; SEALs were aboard the P-3s to radio enemy positions
to counterparts carrying out missions against targets on the
ground.
The war in Afghanistan pressed the military services toward a world
in which parochial differences, while not eliminated, were filed
down dramatically.
Air Force refueling planes routinely gassed up Navy and Marine
fighter-bombers. Air Force ground spotters embedded in Army Special
Forces units called in air strikes from carrier-based naval
aircraft hours from their floating bases. The Navy and Air Force
are now working to develop a new electronic-jamming aircraft that
both services can use.
For all four armed services, the enduring lesson of this new
campaign against terror is that, in the words of General Shinseki
of the Army, the military is no longer fighting single-front
battles against a clearly defined enemy.
"Over the last year, look where we've been: everything from on
borders to protecting airports and ports and bridges, and going
forward with very competent and highly skilled soldiers to fight
the war in Afghanistan without dropping any of the other balls in
Bosnia, Kosovo, Sinai, Southwest Asia," he said.
"Handling this broad spectrum of responsibilities has brought an
understanding that the battle space extends from Afghanistan all
the way back, at least, to New York City and Washington," he added.
"It's a far more expanded battle space than in some time, maybe in
60 years, when we were in a world war."