Into the Storm: On the Ground in Iraq sic-1

by Tom Clancy

  The Army in the early 1990s was a remarkably adaptive organization. Recent leaders had seen to that. Thus, if point men for change, such as Fred Franks, did not always have their complete attention, it was not so much because they were resistant as that the Army was already handling responsibilities that were close to unmanageable. They just had so much to do in order to take care of the increased commitments, the rapid downsizing, the budget cuts, the massive drawdown in Europe — just to name a few. At the same time, they had to master new ideas, face up to new strategic realities, and look forward into the next century, while simultaneously taking in about 60,000 new recruits annually.

  To bring about reform, you have to know the culture with which you are dealing. The Army culture does not so much resist reform as it has to be convinced that it is in the best interests of the entire organization. It wants proof, then it wants broad acceptance by the whole Army. Thus, it is highly suspicious of suggestions advocated by small groups, unless the small groups can eventually bring about that broad acceptance. We have seen the difficulties with the Active Defense FM 100-5 of 1976. Though Active Defense had been the right doctrine for the time, it had been developed by a relatively small group at TRADOC and thus it was initially misunderstood within the Army.

  In the Army, you achieve consensus not by following the path of least resistance and compromise, as in a legislative process, but by arguing and debating. You go out there in the Army marketplace of ideas and try to sell your wares… and you improve them until you get them right. In the process, you teach them and bring others to accept them.

  With these thoughts in mind, Franks and his staff at TRADOC devised their approach to revising the 1986 FM 100-5—the book's last Cold War edition. They consulted as broadly as they could within the Army — for the sake of both the substance of the book, and of its acceptance. They talked the ideas out; they debated them. In that way, they got not only a broad sense of what the Army was thinking, but also good ideas that hadn't occurred to them. By the time the book was published, the ideas were well known, and change had already begun.

  IDEAS FOR CHANGE

  This was the world the Army faced: The Soviet Union had collapsed, the worldwide communist monolith had crumbled, the Cold War had ended, and the world had entered a new era with a vastly different strategic landscape. A relatively predictable strategic environment was gone. A predominantly forward-deployed military posture was gone. The focus of potential warfare within the confines of a highly developed structure of joint and combined relationships was gone. And gone with that were the operational constraints of the Cold War and its clearly defined potential enemy.

  In place of all that was a new strategic landscape, marked by a broader and much different set of conditions, in a more unstable and ambiguous setting. As events since 1989 have demonstrated, we now live in a world that is more complex and uncertain than we ever imagined. "After forty-five years of fighting a dragon, we finally killed it," says R. James Woolsey, former Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, "and now instead, we find ourselves standing in a jungle with a bunch of snakes."

  This new strategic era demanded an entirely new security stance for the United States and, in turn, a distinctly different posture for our Army.

  As he went around and about the Army, Franks used five categories — warning lights — to define the need for change, which came out of his own battlefield experience and his longtime study and reading of history. They were:

  • threats and unknown dangers,

  • the national military strategy,

  • history and the lessons learned from it,

  • the changing nature of warfare, and

  • technology.

  At times only one indicator may be lit, and that one dimly. At other times, maybe two or three burn. As Fred Franks looked out at the world of the early 1990s, he saw all the indicators burning brightly.

  Both Just Cause in Panama and Desert Storm in southwest Asia had set off the lights. Franks calls them "Janus Wars." They had both been fought with twentieth-century tactics, technology, and doctrine, but they both had shown signs of twenty-first-century warfare.

  They showed that the United States' competition — whether rogue nations or rogue groups — could quickly acquire and field new technologies and advanced weapons — including weapons of mass destruction — without research-and-development establishments of their own. Even if these weapons were acquired in relatively small numbers, they would give considerable battlefield leverage.

  To counter such threats, rather than looking back at twentieth-century industrial-age technologies, the Army had to look ahead to the potential of virtual reality, digitized communications, and other information-age technologies for sharing, retrieving, and transmitting information; they had to talk to futurists about where the world might be heading; and they had to try to make the right decisions about how to put it all together. The last was particularly important. Yet it wasn't the technology itself that they had to examine; rather, they needed to synthesize various disparate pieces — some new, some old — into a new concept for the battlefield. This was not easy, as history has shown.

  What were some of the other warning lights?

  The Goldwater-Nichols National Security Act of 1986 was one. It changed the way service departments would be involved in operational matters, increased the authority of the regional war-fighting CINCs, and increased and streamlined the war-fighting chain of command. A new national security strategy was published, and a new national military strategy was emerging. Regional conflicts, and even what were then called operations short of war (such as the peacekeeping mission to Bosnia), were replacing the Cold War. Information-age technology was spreading to all parts of the private sector, and there were exciting new possibilities for its application to the military. The days of mobilization of a large standing army to fight the Soviets were over. The U.S. Army was now becoming a smaller army. It now needed to become a force-projection army. It now had to be able to deploy large organizations overseas quickly. In essence, World War II ended in 1989.

  The change in size of the Army was dramatic — from a Cold War size of 18 active divisions, 10 National Guard divisions, 5 corps, and 50 percent stationed overseas, to 12 active divisions (later 10), 8 National Guard divisions, 4 corps, and about 80 percent stationed in the U.S.A. The active component strength of the Army dropped from 770,000 during the Cold War to 495,000. In the total active armor force today, there are twenty-eight tank battalions and twelve armored cavalry squadrons. In Desert Storm, VII Corps alone had twenty-two tank battalions and seven armored cavalry squadrons.

  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 consis
tent 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 combined — 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.