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ROCKET LAUNCHERS light up the pre-dawn desert sky, artillery lines fire, tanks speed past troops wearing green night-vision goggles, making their way across a featureless desert. Then, suddenly, droves of ragged Iraqis, surrendering.
Barbecued Iraqis hanging out of smoldering tanks. Hundreds of destroyed vehicles littering the road back to Baghdad. We've all seen images of the allied assault on the Iraqi army during the 1991 Gulf War. But the A-to-B aspect of Desert Shield still isn't entirely clear in the public mind. What happened in between the opening salvos of the ground war and the Iraqi evacuation of Kuwait?
What happened was that thousands of Iraqi soldiers were killed. In their trenches, in their bunkers, in their tanks, and out on the open -- systematically, ruthlessly, and swiftly. On CNN it looked like an antiseptic war -- even, as many observed, like a video game. But on the ground, carnage and destruction were plentiful. Technology was a decisive factor, but so were brutality and Blitzkrieg tactics. (Schwarzkopf's flamboyant flanking maneuver might not have been as risky as MacArthur's Inchon landing, but it was still a classic example of crushing an opponent before he could mount an effective counterattack.)
This is the American way of war in the late 20th century. The way we fight is total and enveloping. It is conducted without pause, and with an aloof precision that masks an essential mercilessness. The history of war has been one of attack, counterattack, and retreat. But today's warfighting doctrine professes to truncate that process, destroying the enemy utterly, with "dominant maneuvers," "massed fire" and other menacing martial catchphrases. Abstracted from doctrine, Operation Allied Force over Yugoslavia and Kosovo has been a model of this new kind of combat: using air power, and later air supremacy, to cut off an enemy's head as a prelude to complete obliteration. The trouble is, it also opens up possibilities for a new type of retaliation.
AT THE OPERATIONAL core of this warfighting doctrine is the "Battlespace" -- a three-dimensional, real-time conceptualization of the killing zone, enabled and managed by technology. It is the deadliest expression so far of the technological revolution in American society. Nor is there just one battlespace. According to the Pentagon, US forces are currently structured to fight -- and win -- two "major theater conflicts nearly simultaneously." This means that, on paper, the US alone maintains sufficient "force readiness," to invade Iraq and hold off a North Korean invasion of South Korea: one real war, one holding action. Many still think of the United States as the world's policeman, but the metaphor belies a misunderstanding of the ways in which we apply military force -- police departments defend communities; the US military defends its own budget. What it wants to do is set the terms of conflict and win the fight before the fight even gets started. Thus, the battlespace is everywhere.
This is why -- despite the evident, though tardy, "victory" of air power through the Serb's capitulation to NATO's diplomatic demands -- Kosovo has turned into an albatross around the military's neck (and given the lag in negotiations, there's no immediate guarantee that the bombings will cease any time soon). It's difficult to underestimate the negative effect that waging a war out of today's doctrine has had on the military mindset, which has been riding high in the wake of the Gulf War. In today's army, Kosovo has led to a polarization of opinion, with the "in it, have to win it" John McCain position at one extreme, and the "cut your losses" position at the other. But if there haven't been many actual Allied losses (there have been exactly two: Apache helicopter pilots lost in training accidents), what has been sacrificed is the doctrine -- and with it the overall concept of battlespace. Allied warplanes bombed Yugoslavia for three months, but to what end? Not to pave the way for a ground invasion -- though this was the way the doctrine was successfully applied in the Persian Gulf -- or even to provide cover for limited ground operations that would exploit the advantages of combined arms. Thus, in spite of the apparent acceptance of NATO's terms by Yugoslavia, the campaign strikes many observers as a Yugoslav triumph -- one that NATO may resolve diplomatically, but can't reverse militarily. As such, the bombing campaign continues to look like superpower terrorism.
It wasn't supposed to happen this way, not after the Gulf War. But Kosovo can now be viewed as the culmination of a series of flaws in the new art of war. Chief among these is the deep reluctance of American politicians to accept casualties. Technowar is seen as a means to bring massive force to bear without actually having to stuff any body bags. In fact, the Pentagon's warfighting doctrine never claimed that it could eliminate casualties; it simply refused, after Vietnam, to tolerate escalating losses. During the Gulf War, the combination of air power and total land war led to a swift victory and very few allied casualties. This, plus high tech, led to a perception that all America's future wars would be similarly bloodless, at least on our side. Effective shaping of battlespace would relieve us of the traditional price of war.
TECH -- WHICH may have changed the rules of war much as gunpowder did -- has led to another flaw: the US overreliance on expensive weapons platforms, which can be easily threatened by "asymmetrical" weaponry. One of the reasons floated for not getting the detachment of Apache attack helicopters deployed in Albania into the action is that the Serbs have plenty of shoulder-fired missiles, and that -- lacking support from artillery, armor, and troops -- Apaches would be hovering ducks. And the Apache issue is not an isolated one -- asymmetrical threats against US weapons platforms abound.
America's current domination of the world's oceans rivals that of 19th century Britain; our "blue water" navy is composed of eleven aircraft-carrier battle groups, and no nation in its right mind is going to challenge its hegemony. But "brown waters," or "littoral regions" -- coastal areas such as the Persian Gulf -- are a different story. Cheap anti-ship missiles, submarines, and aircraft make defense of the carrier itself the battle group's primary function. Entire platforms are devoted to this end -- the Aegis cruiser, for example, bristling with expensive systems that, if tested, will get one chance to succeed and none to fail -- is the perfect example. Not a single anti-ship missile can be allowed through the screen to strike the carrier. There is no margin for error.
This is why the Pentagon is now looking to control the seas from space, or with significantly less vulnerable platforms (such as the "arsenal ship," essentially a massive dreadnought-style vessel, perhaps submersible, manned by a small crew, maneuvering in coastal waters to launch cruise missile attacks). Meanwhile, military planners struggle to promote offensive and defensive systems -- "information operations" (IO), "Joint Vision" among the services branches, electronic espionage and warfare. But the US defense budget, reduced from Cold War levels, is still disproportionately devoted to large weapons platforms. They're smart platforms that deliver smart weapons. The question is, are they smart enough?
There's a divergence of opinion on whether they ever will be. Some security analysts, like George Friedman of the independent consulting firm Stratfor, believe that technology will assure American global military dominance well into the next century, and that American planners will sensibly phase out hard-to-defend platforms. In his book The Future of War, he anticipates space as the next region to be colonized by the battlespace. "Space is already being extensively used for reconnaissance," he writes. "It follows from this that the next phase of warfare will be an attack on space-based reconnaissance systems, along with attempts to protect these platforms from destruction."
With the advent of GPS satellite-guided bombs of the sort already dropped on Belgrade, it's not hard to see why Friedman might be correct. But Chris Hables Gray, author of Postmodern War: The New Politics of Conflict, takes a less optimistic view. "Platforms are a bad way to think about contemporary and future war," he explained to me in an email exchange. "Yet because platforms equal procurement programs, that's the way Congress likes to think about future war needs."
This view is echoed by Rolling Stone national editor William Greider, who is one of the few serious left-wing journalists to report extensively on the current US military picture. In his book Fortress America: The American Military and the Consequences of Peace, he contends with the asymmetrical-threats proposed by an over-reliance on platforms in an age of dueling systems: "A deadly irony is embedded in the potential of these new technologies: smaller, poorer nations may be able to defend themselves on the cheap against the intrusion of America's overwhelming military strength. They can do it if they are willing to adopt various nasty defense systems and spend their money smartly."
IN OTHER WORDS, the Gulf War, from which so much contemporary military doctrine springs, was an anomaly, and the battlespace concept it represents is a theoretically convincing illusion. Kosovo is the reality, the norm: militarily inferior people valiantly defending their homeland against a perception of American oppression -- or at least taking the punishment. Korea, Vietnam -- these Cold War regional conflicts, wars of ideology, set the pattern that the Gulf War, a resource war, interrupted, and that Kosovo has now restored. From 1950 to 1989, the US deployed ten times. From 1990 until 1996, forces were deployed 25 times, mostly in peacekeeping operations, shows-of-force, and counter-terrorism. Real war, from the Pentagon's perspective, was scarce; Operations Other Than War (OOTW) were plentiful.
There is, then, a disturbing gap between the way America plans for war and the way American forces are used -- or not used -- in conflict. With every wildly expensive, opponentless platform -- B2 Stealth Bombers, or aircraft carriers, both of which are vulnerable to next generation weapons -- another opportunity to direct increasingly scarce resources to intelligence, surveillance, tactical systems, and well-trained soldiers slips away. The US destruction of the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade -- with precision munitions whose "precision" was diminished by outdated maps -- serves as a tragic illustration of the American military's Achilles' heel: it has the finest armaments available, but the gang wielding them can't shoot straight. In this sense, the well-wrought battlespace -- the product of a military culture determined to fight the last war and preserve its prerogatives at all costs -- is a dangerous fiction. Ultimately, it is a reactionary, not a revolutionary, design for a war with rules of engagemt no smart enemy would agree to abide by.
Matthew DeBord is a FEED contributing editor.