by Harold Coyle
If nervous anticipation was the dominant theme within the American military at the moment, panic and pandemonium were the order of the day on the ground in Syria. Throughout the Syrian countryside the men responsible for coordinating their nation's air defense were madly scrambling to assess a situation that defied their every effort to grasp while others in the military chain of command became irate when they discovered that they were unable to make a simple phone call.
This electronic onslaught did not totally paralyse the Syrian military establishment or cast its leadership into utter disarray.
The Syrian military is not completely inept. It is still an organization run by a core of professionals who use the same methods the American military does to assess possible threats and prepare contingencies to deal with them. Through the employment of various alternative means of communications, including messengers dispatched on motorcycles and manual land-line systems that Alexander Graham Bell would have recognized, senior commanders began issuing orders to execute contingency plans to their far flung subordinates. In some cases the harried dispatch rider arrived at his destination only to find that the actions he had been sent to initiate were already being implemented by officers who had correctly assessed the situation and had taken the initiative.
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their men out of their bunks and hounding them until they were at their assigned duty stations. Once this feat was accomplished, officers who owed their success to being cautious and operating within the accepted bounds of their military system held fast to their published orders and awaited developments. For some developments they did not have long to wait.
Informational and electronic warfare is an important element of modern war, sometimes referred to as a force multiplier. It is capable of disrupting and disorienting a foe's command-and control system. In some cases it can even result in physical calamities.
It does not, however, possess an inherent ability to kill men or physically smash things. To achieve this it is still necessary to apply copious amounts of well-directed munitions containing good old-fashioned high explosives. Over the years both the United States Air Force and Navy have raised this ancient form of warfare to a fine art. Through the employment of cruise missiles, unmanned bombers, and conventional strike aircraft these two services had the responsibility of neutralizing and suppressing those enemy units and assets that had been identified as a threat to the inbound Rangers.
Like many words in today's vocabulary, the terms neutralize and suppress have very specific meanings that sometimes conjure
up an image in the mind of a layperson that does not always reflect what those words mean when used by the military. Neutralize, for example, is defined by the military as the act of rendering
enemy personnel or materiel incapable of interfering with a particular operation. Both the word arid its definition make it seem as if the actions necessary to achieve this goal can be rather innocuous. Nothing could be further from the truth. To truly neutralize an enemy unit a sufficient number of its personnel must be killed or wounded. In general terms, a unit that suffers 25 to 50 percent casualties in a short space of time is no longer able to function effectively. While some of the more humane or politically correct military types try to argue that neutralization can be achieved by destroying a foe's equipment or weapons, no one can 338
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deny that death is the ultimate form of neutralization. For a company of a hundred fifty men, this translates as thirty-seven to seventy-five dead and wounded. In a battalion with four companies, it is one hundred fifty to three hundred KIAs and WIAs. And so on, and so on, and so on.
As ambiguous as the term neutralization can sometimes be, suppression is even less exact and more difficult to quantify. One
definition states that suppression is the denial of an enemy's ability to effectively move, shoot, and/or communicate. Another conception holds that suppression occurs when direct and indirect fires, electronic means, or obscurants are brought to bear upon enemy troops, weapons, or equipment for the purpose of preventing the enemy from bringing effective fire against friendly troops. However it is defined, suppressive fire does not have to actually hit and kill the enemy or smash equipment in order to be effective. It simply has to screen friendly activities or encourage the enemy to seek cover rather than fight. In reality, suppression is a means of economy. Fewer weapons and munitions are required to suppress a target than destroy it. A singe burst o"£ machine gun fire can send an entire platoon scurrying in search of cover. One or two bombs dropped within a military compound will cause a goodly number of soldiers to run to their bunkers rather than man their stations or weapons. Even the mere approach of aircraft can set off air raid sirens that will create a period of confusion and panic within a city that can be exploited by an attacker.
Regardless of the means used, once the method of suppression has been lifted or shifted to engage another target, the enemy is left relatively untouched and free to continue as before.
This has led some commanders and trainers to unofficially advocate the notion that death is the ultimate form of suppression, a truism if ever there was one. Of course this point of view ultimately leads to the use of more assets and munitions than the original plan called for, and thus defeats the effort to economize, which the technique known as suppression was meant to provide.
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the United States did not possess the means or have the time to kill every Syrian soldier who could potentially interfere with the efforts of the 3rd of the 75th Rangers. Therefore orders generated by subordinate headquarters supporting Fanfare included the liberal use of both terms. Besides, the stated purpose of the Rangers'
mission didn't justify a wholesale slaughter. Planners like Robert Delmont had to determine which elements of the Syrian military had to be completely eliminated--a term that requires no special military definition--those targets that needed to be neutralized, and those that simply had to be suppressed during the course of the operation. It was only when one finally reaches the bottom links of the chain of command that terminology begins to become a little less important and the actual means of doing the job becomes more concrete and strangely familiar. While the means of delivery vary and the amount offeree used differs from service to service, high explosives in all their modern incarnations are the principal means of eliminating, neutralizing, and suppressing.
In the end it goes back to simply dumping copious amounts of high explosives onto an enemy unit with the ultimate aim of killing its soldiers and destroying their equipment. No matter how sophisticated the means of delivery or whether the platform is manned or unmanned, upon detonation the explosives in the warhead are almost instantly transformed into heat and energy.
While it is true that heat and flame unleashed by an explosion ignites flammable material, burns exposed flesh, and can blind, it is the blast that does the serious killing. The chemically generated energy of a detonating device creates a shock wave that radiates from the point of impact in all directions. Human beings who are close enough to this can be literally torn to pieces. War stories that speak of men being blown to bits are not fabrications. They are grim fact.
Farther out, the expanding shock wave hits a human like a moving brick wall, smashing bones, pulverizing organs, and peeling away soft tissue. The effectiveness of any explosive device is defined in terms of the radius in which 50 percent of all exposed 340
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personnel are killed by this shock wave. While some people cheat this mathematical fact of life by being lucky enough to have some form of protection that shields them from the direct effects of an explosion, others find they are victims of their circumstances.
Accompanying this invisible force is overpressure. If the shock wave is analogous to the surface of a brick wall, overpressure is akin to the effect that the same brick wall would have on a person if it fell upon them. It is a crushing force, one capable of overwhelming the internal pressure of a man's eyeballs and squashing them. The air is literally squeezed out of the lungs, only to be filled by superheated air as the force of the blast wave passes on and releases its invisible grasp of the victim's chest. Other internal organs such as kidneys, liver, and heart are compressed or ripped from their internal moorings. The skull is crushed,^eaving its contents to ooze out like the yoke of a smashed egg.
If the shock wave is the most deadly aspect of an explosion, the wounds created by the fragmentation of the delivery device and debris picked up and tossed around by the event are the most visually stunning. At the instant of detonation the explosive's container as well as the electronic components and propulsion system used to fly the device to the target are all torn apart and dispatched along the leading edge of the shock wave. These fragments, popularly known as shrapnel, rip, shred, gouge, and pierce any human who is not lucky enough to be under cover. Ranging from microscopic to chunks of red-hot metal the size of a man's fist, these fragments pepper the victim with all the indiscriminate randomness of a shotgun blast. If a person is close enough, death through bleeding can occur in mere minutes. Farther away, these jagged and irregular missiles embed themselves in any exposed flesh. If not removed carefully or in time, the razor-sharp edges of the frag MORE THAN COURAGE
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ments that have managed to burrow in or around human organs can continue to gouge new wounds or aggravate old ones every I m time the victim moves on his own or is shifted about by others.
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The men and women of the United States Air Force and Navy who direct and deliver these agents of mayhem and death never see the true effect of their efforts. The most they are privy to are two-tone video images dispatched by sensors in the devices themselves or recorded by other aircraft that have been assigned the duty of "painting" the target with an invisible laser-aiming dot.
The role of the pilots of the manned bombers and the computers guiding unmanned bombers ends when their screens are lit up by the flash of an explosion. Sometimes the manned bombers will linger in the area for a few minutes to. assess the effectiveness of their attack. More often than not this bomb-damage assessment, or BDA, is done by others using space-based platforms, high-level recon flights, or by monitoring electronic and voice traffic on selected enemy command-and-control nets.
When the BDA has been complied it is reported up the chain of command, using the aforementioned terms. Thus a Syrian air defense battery that had lost half of its launchers, equipment, and personnel can be said to have been neutralized. To the men who ordered the strike and those who carried it out, a vivid description of physical carnage or exact body count is unimportant.
To some this antiseptic way of waging war is a mockery and distasteful. The more vehement antiwar crowd even goes so far as to claim that it is a convention used by policy makers in the United States to hide the truth of what its nation's military is actually doing to the enemy. While there have been times when these notions have been correct, the terrible truth is that it must be that way. Twenty-first-century America has given birth to a generation of politicians and media pundits who believe that America can actually wage war without the loss of a single taxpayer.
This fantasy has forced the military into a corner that requires it to wage war at long range using technology to supplant the human whenever and wherever possible.
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This is not all bad, for even the practitioners find it necessary to insulate themselves and their people from the grim, gory facts of their own handiwork. Otherwise many of the men and women who fly strike missions, push buttons to launch cruise missiles, and direct unmanned drones would never be able to do so a second time, for not all wounds suffered in a battle are physical and not all scars can be seen with the naked eye. Wars are won by force of will, by those willing to do whatever is necessary to win. Very few of our nation's sons and daughters have the psychological makeup that would allow them to go toe to toe with their foe and hack them to death for hours on end, in the same manner that was expected of ancient Sparta's youth. Even an elite soldier belonging to the 3rd of the 75th Rangers has a psychological point beyond which he cannot go and still be expected to return emotionally and mentally safe and sound. If there is one thing we have learned from Vietnam, it is that American fighting men are not automatons, machines with a "kill" setting that can be switched on and off without consequences.
As the transports bearing Harry Shaddock's Rangers lumbered on toward their objective, the men and women of the Air Force and Navy went about carrying out their assigned tasks of clearing a path for those slow-moving aircraft. The first in were unmanned bombers with short wingspans and an overall length of little more than thirty feet. Under the cloak of the electronic warfare barrage unleashed against air-defense systems and command-and-control networks these drones penetrated Syrian airspace undetected.
With unerring mechanical precision they honed in on those targets that were deemed to be too risky for manned bombers. Augmenting these technological marvels were cruise missiles, the ultimate Kamikaze.
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that contains a means of propulsion, a guidance system, a targeting system, and the warhead itself. Once a cruise missile is programmed and launched, it flies off to its target where the entire package is thrown against it, rocket motor, navigational computer and all, making it a nonrefundable commodity. The unmanned bomber, on the other hand, is exactly like a conventional bomber in that it is a delivery vehicle equipped with an engine, navigational aids, and a fire-control system designed to deliver a detachable payload. Once the payload or bombs have been expended the aircraft returns to its home base where it is served and rearmed with more bombs. More often than not these are good old-fashioned general-purpose bombs or GPUs that can weigh anywhere between 750 and 2,000 pounds. To turn a dumb GPU
into a precision-guided weapon requires the addition of fins that allow it to glide and a guidance system designed to fly the bomb into its designated target using a laser-designated point of impact, radar homing, or GPS-assisted targeting. Both cruise missiles and unmanned bombers are capable of achieving the same results of attacking enemy targets without needing to use highly trained American aviators. Only the unmanned bomber can do so repeatedly and far more cheaply. Whereas a cruise missile can cost as much as $1 million a pop, a 2,000-pound Paveway GPU with all the trimming costs no more than $50,000.
This first wave of unmanned attack aircraft and cruise missiles was directed against known air-defense acquisition radars and surface-to-air missile batteries.- This sort of mission is referred to as SAM suppression. Destruction or neutralization of these assets opens the way for follow-up attacks by manned attack aircraft aimed at eliminating enemy air defenses that the Syrian high command have held back and hidden from visual or electronic detection. These manned SAM-suppression strikes are flown by a unique group of aviators known as Wild Weasels.
When a sensor aboard the E-3A AWAC, an electronic warfare aircraft, identifies a new threat the controller aboard the E-3A 344
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charged with monitoring and orchestrating all SAMsuppression missions contacts the nearest flight of Wild Weasels and hands off the new target to them.
One of the first such missions occurred even before the last of the cruise missiles and
unmanned bombers had finished their attacks. From out of nowhere an air-defense target-acquisition radar lit up and began tracking one of the cruise missiles. With a speed that defies description this event was reported to half a dozen different aircraft and operations centers scattered throughout the region. From his station aboard the E-3A, the SAMsuppression controller assigned the new target an alphanumeric designation before checking on the status and location of the Wild Weasels. The pair of aircraft he opted to dispatch to hit this new target were two F-18s from the USS Ronald Reagan. After contacting the commander of the F-18s by voice, the SAMsuppression controller transferred data from his station directly into the fire-control system of the F-18s via an electronic data link. Once the F-18 pilots acknowledged that they had a good copy of all the necessary target information, the SAMsuppression controller wished them luck and sent them on their way.
Anxious to achieve a kill even if it were of an unmanned cruise missile, the Syrian air-defense battery commander kept his acquisition radar on far too long. This allowed the Naval aviators assigned to silence his radar more than enough time to acquire the radiation being emitted by the acquisition radar and launch a pair of AGM-88 HARM missiles in the "range-known" mode.
Sensors within the missiles themselves picked up the hostile radar, memorized its location just in case that radar was switched off during their approach, and began to make their way to it. When the HARM missiles reached the Syrian air-defense battery, their high-explosive warheads detonated, showering the entire unit with small prefragmented steel cubes that were designed to inflict maximum damage to the radar unit itself as well as other vulnerable equipment co-located with the target-acquisition radar. In the process of ripping apart the delicate electronics and mechanical MORE THAN COURAGE