There Will Be War Volume VII

by Jerry Pournelle

  The very size of the Soviet military establishment—in tanks and artillery as well as men—and the problems the Western European countries faced in recovering from the war led to the search for a counter to the Soviet mass. This was found in nuclear weapons for Strategic Offensive Forces (first bombers, then ICBMs), theater forces (aircraft, IRBMs, and even nuclear artillery), and air defense forces. The Eisenhower Doctrine of “Massive retaliation at a time and place of our own choosing” was sufficient; we possessed a credible deterrent. At the same time the demand was raised to create nonnuclear weapons to counter the Soviet mass; as Soviet nuclear capability grew to threaten the credibility of massive retaliation this demand increased.

  Certain defense intellectuals advocated another approach. Arms Control, in theory, might provide an alternate way to contain the Soviet threat. However, negotiations for “Mutual and Balanced Force Reductions” have never resulted in any reduction of the Soviet conventional forces threatening Western Europe; indeed, the Soviets have continued to add to the tank armies facing the West.

  The Soviet development of nuclear strategic offensive forces—to this day they maintain four separate missile system production lines on a three-shift schedule—rendered incredible the threat of massive retaliation against the Soviet homeland; while arms control agreements, whatever their effect on the strategic offensive forces, have made no headway at all in reducing the massive Soviet conventional threat to Western Europe. The Soviet Union has between 2.5 and 3.5 to 1 superiority in tanks and artillery over the deployed forces of NATO; and much greater superiority in men and other equipment.

  Clearly the West has no choice but to invent, adapt, and deploy technology to overcome the Soviet lead in numbers. However, the race for improved performance has led to a dynamic race as the Soviets adapt, apply, and deploy Western technology once the U.S. develops innovative new weapons. Richard N. Perle, former Assistant Secretary of Defense estimates that by 1987 as many as 5,000 Western inventions have been stolen and applied to Soviet weapons and weapons systems.

  There is a great deal more to a wizard weapon than the weapon itself. A weapon system includes the platforms that carry and deliver them; the sensors (ground, sea, air, and space based) that detect and track targets and guide the weapons and their delivery platforms; means to compensate for the battlefield environment in which the weapons must operate; command and control systems that direct their use; and the training of the crews who must fire and maintain the weapons. Leave out any of these and you have technology, but not real weapons.

  At present the focus of technology is on developing “invisible” or “stealth” platforms and missiles to increase their survivability both in prelaunch and during penetration of defenses. The invisible and therefore nearly invulnerable platform ensures precise delivery of the wizard weapon on target.

  Obviously the challenge for the technologist is to find the antistealth sensors that negate the new advantage stealth gives to the offense. As the power on the strategic defensive and in a numerically inferior posture, the U.S. requires the lead in battlefield effects that stealth can produce, but we must also prevent the Soviets from acquiring effective stealth technology. Furthermore, the U.S. must investigate stealth countermeasures to ensure that we can thwart Soviet stealth developments and deployments. The measures-countermeasures race has become increasingly important to U.S. technology because of the lethal effects of wizard weapons.

  Because of precision weapon delivery, high rates of fire, and masses of submunitions now available, troops and equipment are increasingly vulnerable on the battlefield. Mobility alone will not be sufficient to counter this vulnerability because of real-time battlefield surveillance equipment, computerized intelligence evaluations, and rapid delivery of firepower on target. Technological strategy must increasingly be directed toward development and deployment of systems to allow troops to stay out of the battlefield areas while delivering fire with intelligent standoff weapons, and occupying the ground with robots.

  A typical issue involving robots is the long-standing and bitter argument over manned versus unmanned aircraft. The latter, whether called “drones” or “remotely piloted vehicles” (RPVs) have been technically feasible since the days of World War I. They have yet to find acceptance seven decades later; yet it is clear that today’s RPVs can have considerably better performance capability than the kamikaze craft used by Imperial Japan. The technological strategist cannot afford to ignore their potential. The Israeli experiments using unmanned drones and fighter aircraft in combined operations against surface-to-air missile (SAM) sites in the Lebanon War provide a graphic demonstration of “and” techniques, in contrast to the “either/or” approach. The capabilities of unmanned equipment remotely controlled by human pilots is growing rapidly, as is the entire field of “teleoperations” (remote control of robots by human operators). On-board computers in the drones and robots greatly simplify the task of the remote operator; since computer power as a function of weight and size doubles roughly every year and a half, we can expect a similar growth curve in teleoperations capabilities.

  We note in passing that strategic and theater nuclear forces have long been a mix of manned “and” unmanned systems. Most have forgotten the Snark, which was an early intercontinental cruise missile. Snark II or Super Snark may well be part of future intercontinental cruise missiles. Similarly, the U.S. has twice deployed unmanned nuclear cruise missiles to Europe, once in the Mace/Matador weapon system, and the second time with the ground-launched cruise missiles (GLCMs) recently deployed at NATO request. These latter may be withdrawn by agreement because of the so-called zero/zero Intermediate Range Force reduction option.

  The inevitable deployment—by the Soviets, if not by NATO—of defenses against ballistic missiles will cause radical changes in the mix of offensive forces. Once the “unstoppable” and “ultimate weapon,” the increasingly ineffective ballistic missiles will be replaced by a mix of ground-hugging air-breathing weapon systems, both manned and unmanned, launched from the ground, sea, and air.

  While the weapons and weapons platforms of the future pose significant challenges to the technological strategist, the greatest challenge comes from the rapid strides made in developing new sensors, data relay, communications, automated evaluation, and battle management equipment for both strategic and tactical forces. The operation of robots in space, at global ranges, in combined arms operations in theaters of war, and in conflicts remote from the command centers, requires radical new approaches and great expansion of present knowledge. The age of computational plenty will take on new meaning as the machines become faster, smaller, lighter, and more powerful. We will find new applications for them in expert systems, Artificial Intelligence, automated battlefield management, and command and control.

  Simulation of complex strategic force operations, such as the integration and employment of mixed strategic offensive and defensive forces will be commonplace foi strategic battle management. The automated tactical battlefield will be integrated with the automated strategic battlefield for the conduct of global war. This does no mean that we can dispense with strategists and commanders; only that they will necessarily have to learn new skills and techniques if they are to be effective.

  Many of the technologies for the future are being developed under programs such as FORECAST II, the Conventional Defense Initiative (CDI), and the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI). However the pace of technological advance must accelerate if the U.S. is to maintain the technological superiority necessary to overcome our overwhelming quantitative inferiority and thus continue to maintain deterrence.

  Since technology is never secure for any great length of time, it is clear the U.S. must be prepared to continue in pursuit of both stealth and countermeasures to stealth for a long time. Any attempt to halt such development either unilaterally or through agreement would leave the Soviets in a position of offensive superiority.

  REACTIVE ARMOR: A TECHNOLOGICAL SURPRISE

 
In addition to technologies stolen from the West, the Soviets develop low-cost techniques of their own. One example is their new “reactive armor” designed to render ineffective many of the conventional weapon systems deployed by NATO.

  High Explosive Anti-Tank (HEAT) rounds are relatively slow-moving shaped charges that use their explosive power to punch a hole through the target. Reactive armor consists of a relatively cheap “box” bolted onto the surface of the tank. The box contains an explosive detonated by HEAT rounds; the defensive or reactive explosion blows back in the face of the HEAT round, distorting the critical shape and thus rendering the attack much less effective. The reactive armor box can then be replaced at the tank’s headquarters. Obviously a second hit on the same place before the reactive armor is replaced will penetrate the tank, but multiple hits are rare in tank warfare.

  In the period 1985 to 1987 the Soviets continued to beef up their tank armies, not just with paper studies and technological theory, but with new weapons systems deployed in the field. Reactive armor was one of these improvements. Defense Secretary Weinberger’s Soviet Military Power 1987 states that “The U.S.S.R.’s development and extensive deployment of reactive armor capable of defeating relatively inexpensive antitank weapons threatens to shift fundamentally the conventional force balance in Europe.”

  Philip A. Karber, Vice President and General Manager for National Security Programs in the BDM Corporation recently said:

  “I can’t think of a Soviet conventional technology in the last twenty years that has come on so fast with such profound implications for the balance… in eighteen months, they’ve made improvements to 75 percent of all the tanks in East Germany: about 7,500 armored vehicles. It took NATO a decade to field a similar number of the so-called”inexpensive" antitank guided missiles, which with current warheads will no longer penetrate those tanks. How long in the future do you think it will take to field a counter to the threat we face today?"

  The Defense Intelligence Agency “has no exact numerical breakdown of how extensively reactive armor is now deployed, but mounting brackets for that armor are on every tank from the T-55 to the T-80, with either armor in place or the brackets installed.”

  The effect of reactive armor is to render ineffective many of the man-carried antitank systems the U.S. relies on to stop Warsaw Pact penetration of Europe; and while the 120mm smoothbore gun mounted on the U.S. M1A1 Abrams tank is sufficient to deal with the improved Soviet tanks, as of fall 1987 there are only about 250 of these tanks in Europe. The West German Leopard II also carries the 120mm smoothbore; there are about 2,000 of these in the German and Dutch NATO units.

  Clearly the United States has no choice but to meet these technological developments with new Western technology; with “wizard weapons”; in particular, with “hitting missiles” that can quickly be deployed (as new tanks cannot be). These new weapons systems must not only be invented and developed, but deployed, put into the hands of troops who are trained to use them, before they can have any effect on the strategic correlation of forces.

  WHY DON’T WE BUILD THEM

  The U.S. clearly has the financial and technological resources necessary to design, develop, build, deploy, and integrate into the force whatever “wizard weapons” we may need.

  The principal constraint on the necessary innovations in science, research, development, application, and deployment comes from the micromanagement of the Congress and its staffs who try to legislate “risk-free” acquisition of technology. We have shown elsewhere that not every technological investigation leads to a deployable weapons system; moreover, you can’t always tell that from the preliminary research results alone. Although history has proven that good research always pays off, it doesn’t always pay off quickly.

  It is customary to point to failed systems like the Sergeant York missile to demonstrate the wastefulness of military research and development. In fact, the Sergeant York was never properly tested. Its development was rushed; then the preliminary test results were used as if they were definitive. The program was killed before enough data were developed to determine its usefulness.

  Another example is the Bradley Armored Personnel Carrier, which has fallen into a trap generated by rivalry between two Army doctrines: the cavalry, which wants a lightweight mobile system, and the infantry, which is willing to sacrifice mobility to increased armor. The cavalry largely operates along the dicta of Liddell Hart and JFC Fuller, who advocated that the entire army, infantry and armor, be cross-country mobile and able to “fight mounted.” The infantry has other goals incompatible with the cavalry’s. Congressional investigations of the Bradley seem completely to have ignored this basic design conflict, which may best be resolved by construction of two different models of the vehicle.

  Nearly every new technology has this difficulty. If it is truly new, it takes time for its strategic implications to be fully realized. While the young intellectuals who make up Congressional staffs are often able to contribute to that evaluation, it is unlikely that their views will be so useful that we can ignore the military officers who must bring the system into the force and put it in the hands of real troops who will use it; but in fact, the purely theoretical views of the Congressional staffers generally prevail in those debates.

  The Congress, which demands “wizard weapons,” has generated an environment in which it is next to impossible to create them. Until we can find ways out of that dilemma, the U.S. and NATO will find itself in increasing difficulties.

  A Soldier’s Best Friend, by Eric Vinicoff

  Editor’s Introduction

  What will combat be like when both sides have wizard weapons? Will the fundamental difference between the U.S. and Soviet systems matter then? Eric Vinicoff is well known for his realistic stories of conflict in the future. Here is one of his best.

  A Soldier’s Best Friend

  Eric Vinicoff

  I was leading my squad on night patrol through the Alaskan wilderness. Patchy clouds sped from northwest to southeast, causing eerie variations in the moonlight as seen through the image enhancer in my helmet. A cold, cold wind cut through my combat suit’s thermo-control. The sound sensor picked up whipping branches and boots crunching into ice-crusted snow. It was a lousy night for a nature hike, even without the Cossacks.

  As usual, Kelly was griping.

  “Thousands of years, trillions of dollars spent on military technology, and look at us. Still eating mud just like Caesar’s legonaries. What happened to all the modern advances that were going to make foot soldiers obsolete?”

  No one answered, so he answered himself. He waved his rifle. “This happened. The ultimate battlefield weapon, they say. A tank gets in its way. Blam. No tank. Likewise for APCs, copters, tactical aircraft, you name it. No possible defense. So here we are, back to basics.”

  The eight of us were strung out along what the local Indians claimed was a trail. I was on point. The trail meandered through a gloomy forest of white spruce and tamarack squeezed between lumpy foothills. To the north were the peaks of the Brooks Range, to the south the terrain leveled out into the Central Plateau. Our combat suits and the rifles slung over our shoulders were as white as the snow on the branches.

  We weren’t near the free-fire zone yet, so I let Kelly yap. Every outfit has one. Properly controlled, they can decompress the men’s tension by talking it to death.

  “And this happened.” Kelly slapped the thin flexplas cable running from his rifle’s stock to the handcuff on his right wrist, and from there to his helmet. “A slave chain!”

  Most of the squad muttered in agreement, but Kowolski, the new kid, defended the official line. “Would you rather have a com link, so the transmissions could make you a fat target?”

  “Don’t spit book at me, greenie. If that’s all there is to it, why are we wearing these cuffs that only Sarge can unlock?”

  “So eighty thousand dollars worth of very deadly weapon doesn’t end up lost or on the black market.”

  “Or
, in Kelly’s case, traded to the first puta he meets for a blast of VD,” Alvarez contributed. That got a few low chuckles.

  “A Ranger and his rifle are a team,” Kowolski insisted. “That slavery crap is just Com propaganda.”

  Kelly grinned. “You’ve got to learn, greenie. Your rifle is smarter than you, faster, braver, more accurate, and it takes orders better. It’s every general’s dream soldier. What it doesn’t have is arms and legs. That’s where you come in. You’re cheaper than a mech.”

  “My rifle helps me do the job and stay alive. I don’t know what your problem is, but I want to have all the edge I can get.”

  “You think that rifle is your best friend in the world, greenie? They’re designed to trick us that way. What they’re really doing is watching us all the time, reporting every little slip like damned spies.”

  “Don’t blame your rifle because you keep coming up short at stripe time,” Alvarez said. “Some men are natural-born privates.”

  That went over the line. “Seal it tight back there,” I growled over my shoulder.

  A few minutes later Dutch reported, “Call from HQ, Sarge.”

  You never got good news in the middle of a patrol. Reluctantly I dropped back to where Dutch was carrying the laser com pack. It took a lot of gear to relay through a satellite, but unbeamed transmissions were a good way to draw enemy fire. I walked beside him and jacked my com into the pack.

  “Sergeant Rhine here, sir,” I acknowledged.

  Lieutenant Green’s Mississippi drawl clogged my ears: “A change in plans, Sergeant. The Cossacks are moving all along the front. Looks like they’re starting their big push for the north slope. The heavy action is to the west, but we’re going to get hit too. Your orders are to occupy Ridge 772 and hold it against an attack, which is imminent. Repeat, imminent.” A bleep told me the details had arrived by pulse and were stored in Cochise’s memory. “Get to it, Sergeant.”