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

by Tom Clancy

  • 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 senior-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.

  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 en
ergy 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, incidentally, 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?