by Tom Clancy
★ Being in a coalition means doing business the hard way. It takes time and patience. Ego has to be set aside, as the lives of men and women hang in the balance. You won’t have all the answers, and mistakes will be made. But if you build a relationship of trust and openness, respect and acceptance, then you can work through the difficult times.
The immediate success of the Gulf War was the liberation of Kuwait. Perhaps the more enduring success was the working together of the Coalition nations.
In the future, the United States will face many national security challenges that will require military operations ranging from humanitarian aid to war. We already see the United States in a NATO-led coalition doing housekeeping (technically termed “out-of-area operations”) in the former Yugoslavia. It is likely that similar combined military operations will be the pattern for the future — ad hoc coalitions that provide room for many nations to be united in a common cause, with the United States providing leadership but not necessarily in charge.
We were lucky in the Gulf. We had a history of working with the Gulf nations and our NATO partners. But how will we prepare for the future?
Coalition operations are not easy. Command arrangements can be difficult. So can communications (radio equipment is often incompatible, even when the language is common). Intelligence must be shared (the United States often classifies for “U.S. eyes only” even the most obvious details about an enemy). Yet the last remaining superpower needs international partners. We not only gain valuable insights from our compatriots about what needs to be done and how to do it, but we are inhibited from making stupid mistakes. Our combined efforts gain legitimacy because they come from many nations, not just one. Therefore, we need to prepare in peacetime to undertake combined operations during a crisis.
This has begun to happen. Already, United States military forces train with the men and women of other nations. Blue Flag exercises at Hurlburt Field bring together the Gulf War nations to plan and execute air operations, should they be needed in that part of the world. As our focus turns from the Cold War to a more complex new world of ethnic violence, proliferating weapons of mass destruction, and peacekeeping operations, U.S. forces in Europe work with new partners from Poland, the Czech Republic, Ukraine, and Russia.
Annually, our airmen, sailors, soldiers, and marines deploy to Korea, the Middle East, and Africa to train alongside our friends around the world, and our sale of American equipment to other nations ensures we will be capable of operating side by side.
The only question that remains is this: Will our future political leadership have the wisdom and training to form a coalition like the magnificent team that fought in the Gulf? Or will we repeat the mistakes of Vietnam?
16
Beyond Iraqi Freedom
A little over a decade after Operation Desert Storm (1991), when Coalition forces liberated Kuwait following the 1990 Iraqi invasion, General Tommy Franks and his air boss Lieutenant General Michael (Buzz) Mosley, initiated Operation Iraqi Freedom; this time to liberate the Iraqi people from the rule of fear imposed by Saddam Hussein. This action, often referred to as Gulf War II, was undertaken for a number of reasons and envisaged a number of goals.
The immediate causes for the new war included a firm belief that Saddam had reinitiated his efforts to produce — or at least acquire — Weapons of Mass Destruction: Defecting Iraqi scientists had outlined his efforts to create mobile laboratories capable of growing spores for anthrax. There was evidence that he was acquiring equipment needed to produce weapons-grade radioactive materials. Large amounts of his pre-1991 war poison gas stockpile had not been accounted for by the United Nations inspection teams. And during the years following 1991, the Iraqi dictator had cunningly thwarted the efforts of the UN weapons inspection teams, sent to Iraq in accordance with the agreements that ended the Desert Storm conflict.
The longer-term causes go back to Desert Storm itself and its aftermath.
We can start with the widespread opinion, which grew up after Desert Storm, that we had halted the operation short of its necessary goal, the removal of Saddam Hussein and his criminal cronies… a view stated publicly by former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and other world leaders. Given the terrorist atrocities of 2001 and later, they may well have been right.
But history has twenty-twenty hindsight.
At the end of February 1991, we had achieved our stated goal in Desert Storm, the liberation of occupied Kuwait. Though the total liberation of Iraq was always an obvious option, we rejected that option in our military councils. There we had discussed the difficulty we would incur fighting an Iraqi enemy defending his home as opposed to one who was pillaging and raping a fellow Arab nation. We were also concerned about adding the severe problems of administering aid to a large and complex country like Iraq to the already daunting problems of assisting current refugees and those ravaged by war in Kuwait.
It must also be understood that the liberation of Kuwait was achieved by a coalition of military forces, not by a single force under a single, unified command. In 1991 ours was a “coalition of the willing,” who were united in the goal of liberating Kuwait, but far less unified in the approach to handling the source of the problem, Saddam’s Iraq. Many of our Coalition allies — most notably our Arab allies, who played a major role in the conflict and were eager to help overturn the occupation of Arab Kuwait — would have had reservations about taking the ground war to Baghdad. Most did not want to be seen as aggressors against an equally Arab Iraq, while some would have objected to a large non-Arab, non-Islamic occupation force in Iraq, with its many historic shrines and Muslim holy places. Some also viewed an evil Saddam more acceptable than a weak Iraq that could not prevent the political/ military force of Iran from encroaching on the borders of the Gulf Arab states. Some members of the Coalition may even have abhorred the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait, yet had strong commercial ties to the leadership in Baghdad and wanted a tamed Saddam to remain in power. These were issues for the political, not the military, leadership to sort out.
If our failing in Desert Storm was stopping too soon — and I don’t know that to be the case — the failing came about in part because we did not understand our enemy: Saddam Hussein. Those of us who grew up in the United States, England, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates all came from diverse cultures, but none of us had experienced or understood life under the rule of Saddam and his Baath party colleagues.
That lack of understanding changed after the war, when we were able to learn the truth about conditions inside Iraq from discussions with ordinary Iraqi citizens and captured military personnel. After the war we were able to document the horrific acts committed by the Iraqi secret services against the people of Kuwait. After the war we were able to witness from afar the brutal subjugation of the Kurds, the Marsh Arabs, and other Iraqi people who had attempted to rise up against the dictator in rebellions that we had tacitly encouraged by our defeat of Saddam’s military forces. As we watched Iraqi Army helicopters savage their own citizens, the part we had played, our unwillingness — or inability — to intervene to halt these tragedies, left a bitter taste in our mouths. What could we do? What should we have done?
Such complexities — and the many other complexities of postconflict Iraq in 1991 and 2003—show that while our military is amazingly capable of ever-increasingly efficient and successful conduct of warfare, both our own nation and the coalitions of nations of which we have been part remain much less capable of resolving the effects that result from our use of military force, regardless of our strategies and goals.
Meanwhile, the mission we were sent to launch on January 17, 1991, was to liberate occupied Kuwait, and that is what we did. At the end of February 1991, we had driven the Iraqi Army out of Kuwait City, and shown the vaunted Iraqi Republican Guard to be inept and impotent. Our military had done what was asked of us and had done it in a manner of which we were proud. We had been in the desert for three-quarters of a year — the soldiers, sailo
rs, airmen, and marines of the Coalition were tired of the killing and were eager to go home. Unfortunately our desires may have caused the next generation of soldiers, sailors, airmen, and marines to spend a much longer period of time in the vast deserts of the Middle East. But then in 1991, who foresaw September 11, 2001?
THE NEW THREATS
The attacks on New York’s twin towers and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., changed the United States, her people, and their leaders.
Before the events of 2001 we had weathered a host of attacks carried out by Al-Qaeda and the agents of Saddam Hussein. These events involved a number of actors and may or may not have been related, yet all were aimed at the United States. The bombings by Al-Qaeda agents of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania caused large numbers of civilian casualties. An Al-Qaeda attack in Yemen nearly sank a U.S. Navy ship, the Cole, and caused the deaths of several of our service men and women. Earlier, agents of Saddam had attempted to assassinate former President George Bush in Kuwait. Later, Iraq expelled the United Nations Weapons of Mass Destruction inspectors and then was caught building surface-to-surface missiles that failed to comply with the agreements that ended Gulf War I.
While these events drew condemnation from many nations, America was seen as big, strong, and resilient, and so reactions out in the world were less vocal than if a smaller, more helpless country had been exposed to actions and attacks such as these. And even in the United States, though our citizens were seriously concerned about these events, they were not outraged enough to be moved toward significant action.
That does not mean that we did nothing. We did retaliate with cruise missiles fired against Al-Qaeda facilities in Afghanistan. We punished Saddam’s misdeeds with air attacks (which seriously damaged his W.M.D. capabilities). We brought our concerns to the UN and other international forums (though such diplomatic efforts were often stifled by other nations, for reasons of their own). Yet none of those actions could be called significant, much less decisive.
It was the stunning visual displays of two Boeing 767 aircraft slicing into the twin towers in New York City, and the smoke and debris of those mighty buildings crashing to the ground, that changed things. It was also the sight of smoke and flames rising around the Pentagon, while our F-16 jet fighters roared overhead looking for the enemy who had just completed his mission, that changed things. It was the recordings of the voices of Americans on an airliner over Pennsylvania that changed things — calling their loved ones on cell phones to tell them of their decision to overpower their hijackers, dying in the effort, and saving the lives of the terrorist target where their aircraft would have been turned into a guided bomb.
The nation was energized on September 11, 2001. It was a shocked nation that quickly became united in grim determination that we had not seen since December 7, 1941.
At that time this was a nation whose military was in the midst of significant reforms, which in some ways made it superbly ready to face the challenges thrown at it by this new war, “a war on terror.” But there was still a long way to go to reshape a military organized, trained, and equipped to fight the Soviet Union into the force needed to counter those who now threatened our national security and the security of our allies around the world.
RAPID DOMINANCE
In January of 1991, Desert Storm unveiled military capabilities that the general public had not previously appreciated. Precision-guided bombs, aircraft that could see moving targets in the air and on the ground, and infrared sights that allowed both pilots in the air and soldiers on the ground to target the enemy in the dead of night all became popular fare on evening television during that dramatic month. Modern warfare had evolved in ways that many considered revolutionary. In the years between Desert Storm and our later wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, military leaders searched for concepts that might explain what was revolutionary in Desert Storm and what was needed and possible in future wars.
In 2001 incoming Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld used the word “transformation” to describe his plans to adapt new ways of operating our military forces, based on exploiting new capabilities and combining these systems with legacy systems, while fighting as a joint land, sea, air, and space team.
Another concept phrase that has been used to describe future warfare is “Rapid Dominance.” The Rapid Dominance approach to defeating the enemy relies heavily on achieving effects against an enemy’s vital systems and institutions — sometimes instead of, sometimes in addition to, destroying his military might. Effects-based operations may include destroying an adversary’s military force, but they may also choose more radical means to influence the enemy to conform to our desired outcome.
In Kosovo, for example, our goal was to remove Serbian forces conducting ethnic cleansing. After fifty-five days of air strikes against Serbian armor had failed to deter the Serbs, NATO forces changed to an effects-based operations strategy that attacked the Serbian leaders’ economic power base. Within three weeks the Serbian forces surrendered Kosovo to the United Nations peacekeepers. The Serbs left the province undefeated in battle, yet NATO had achieved its desired outcome.
★ In order to be effective, Rapid Dominance requires four major elements:
First: Effects-based operations require that their implementers have thorough knowledge of their enemy and of themselves. This goes well beyond the traditional counting of ships, planes, and troops. It requires that the strategists have awareness of what makes the enemy tick — its leadership, populace, economy, and so on. It requires that planners understand how to influence both the enemy leadership and the general populace, and then how to judge the effects of the measures taken to achieve that influence. It requires that new strategies be undertaken as the enemy moves toward the end state desired and also what unintended consequences may result from the military force applied to achieve those goals. Lastly, war impacts both sides. An understanding of how the conflict will affect your own side is needed to avoid undesirable effects to you, even while achieving success over an enemy.
In Vietnam, the enemy was defeated on the battlefield, but the war was lost because of the effects visited on the American public by inept strategies and shoddy execution of military force.
In Operation Iraqi Freedom, we had excellent knowledge of how to defeat the Iraqi forces, but we lacked understanding of the best postconflict strategy. We were aware, for example, that the Iraqi Army was often indifferent, even hostile, to Saddam Hussein’s leadership — and if given alternatives, would not fight. Yet instead of taking this reality into account and acting on it, Coalition forces followed traditional procedures after Iraqi soldiers surrendered. They disarmed them, vetted them for possible war crimes, and then returned them to their homes, if they proved to be guilt-free.
Several Iraq experts are convinced that many Iraqi soldiers felt so shamed by the deprivation of their professional identities and livelihoods that they were driven either to join the armed resistance or to suicide. If these soldiers had been allowed to retain their uniforms and arms, the experts believe, and had been given proper leadership, they would have been useful in combating the postconflict resistance. Without the support of this large contingent of recruits, the former regime members and foreign terrorists who form the core of the resistance would have had a far harder time generating an insurgency. True or not, this analysis demonstrates the kind of intellectual understanding needed to approach the many dimensions of modern warfare.
Second: Once the required knowledge is gained, operations must be undertaken in a rapid manner.
The time dimension has always been an important factor in military operations. But today, due to virtually instant communications, time has become critical. Compare the speed and volume of communication of mail packets between England and the American colonies. Or look at today’s airmail compared to the speed and volume of communications possible using global cell phones or E-mail. An image of an enemy sniper hiding in an enemy stronghold can be transmitted around the world for analysis and
identification. Within seconds the sniper can be targeted and killed with a precision weapon.
It is vital that modern military forces learn how to exploit this time factor.
In Operation Iraqi Freedom, the 3rd Infantry Division (ID) closed on Baghdad with astonishing speed. In so doing they broke with traditional doctrine on movement of ground forces, which emphasizes the maintenance of orderly boundaries with allied forces and the importance of logistical supply. In Iraq, as the 3rd ID moved toward Baghdad, they did none of that. They isolated pockets of enemy forces in their rear, lost contact with adjacent friendly forces, and hurtled forward, even when their lines of logistics support became vulnerable to enemy attack or were unable to keep up. The swiftness of their advance was so great that it preempted the enemy’s ability to create defensive rings around Baghdad. By ignoring the traditional doctrine, the 3rd ID and adjacent Marine Corps units imposed their own time-lines on the enemy; and the enemy was unable to keep up with the pace of the battle. The ponderous command-and-control system of the Iraqis, their inability to move freely (due to Coalition airpower), and the speed of our Abrams tanks overwhelmed an Iraqi defense that was never able to establish itself. Even as the Iraqi propaganda spokesman, dubbed “Baghdad Bob,” claimed that Coalition forces were being defeated, Coalition tanks were rumbling up the streets of Baghdad a few blocks away.
Third: To exploit knowledge and act quickly one needs to control the environment.
The environments associated with combat come in many forms. These could include weather, public opinion, electronics, communications, cultures, and peoples, as well as geography and the many other environments associated with war.
In Operation Iraqi Freedom a very harsh sandstorm threatened to mask the movement of Iraqi tanks from Coalition airpower. This would have allowed Iraqi forces to directly engage Coalition ground forces closing on Baghdad and disrupt our uniquely rapid pace of attack. In Operation Desert Storm, an aircraft called Joint STARS made its debut — a Boeing 707 with a large radar system mounted under the fuselage. This radar system can see through sandstorms and observe the movement of ground forces en route to attack our forces. In Iraq, bomber aircraft equipped with bombs guided by Global Positioning Satellite navigation signals were able to take the Joint STARS target coordinates and guide these weapons to the Iraqi tank columns, even though the pilots were unable to see their targets. The combination of the Joint STARS radar and the GPS-guided bombs defeated the effects of the sandstorm; and we were able to control the weather environment.