PDA

View Full Version : Wrong Lessons



thedrifter
07-11-04, 07:21 AM
Joe Galloway: Don't Take Too Much From U.S.' Iraq War Experience


WASHINGTON - Historically armies are inclined to prepare to fight the last war they fought, and historically that is generally a major mistake.

The greatest danger in the current drive to draw lessons from the three-week blitzkrieg that toppled Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein is that we will build a future military that assumes all future enemy armies will be as incompetent and untrained as the Iraqis.

Maybe we will be twice as likely to draw the wrong lessons because we beat that same army swiftly in two wars - just 100 hours in the Gulf War of 1991 and 21 days in Operation Iraqi Freedom last winter.

This is the underlying cautionary note sounded in an Army War College study titled "Toppling Saddam: Iraq and American Military Transformation," which was headed by Dr. Stephen Biddle, associate professor of National Security Studies at the War College's Strategic Studies Institute.

The study, completed in April, has yet to be made public. An Army spokesman says this is because it is an "internal Army document" that has yet to be analyzed and commented on by the chain of command. Others say the fact that the findings run counter to current Department of Defense transformation plans that focus on lighter, faster, high-tech warfare may have something to do with the delayed release.

In a summary, the Biddle team writes that before the war many feared that the invasion of Iraq would mean deadly urban warfare with heavy American casualties, a protracted siege of Baghdad, a scorched-earth campaign or Iraqi use of weapons of mass destruction.

None of that came to pass, and the American forces and their coalition allies suffered one of the lowest casualty rates ever for a major mechanized campaign.

"What accounts for Saddam's inability to impose a heavier toll? ... How was the coalition able to oust the Ba'athist regime without incurring the costs so many had feared beforehand? And what do the answers mean for American military transformation and American defense policy generally?" the Biddle team asks.

They argue that advanced technology in the hands of the allies and a major difference in the level of training and skill between the opposing forces "enabled a small but skilled coalition force to defeat the world's 12th-largest military at very low cost."

But they warn that drawing the wrong lessons - as some in the Defense Department and Office of Secretary of Defense seem to have done - that lighter and faster is the answer could be very dangerous in the future.

"Without the targets' errors to exploit the same technology can produce very different results," the study says. "The Iraqis' shortcomings created a permissive environment for coalition technology that a more skilled opponent elsewhere might not. The 2003 outcome was thus a product of a powerful interaction effect between coalition strengths and Iraqi weaknesses. Our strengths were indeed essential for the outcome, but so were the Iraqis' shortcomings. Both advanced technology AND a major skill imbalance were required."

The study authors add that "this explanation holds some very different implications for transformation than the 'speed, precision and situation awareness' view now commonplace in accounts of the war."




In other words, if you are going to fight someone whose military fighters are better trained and better motivated than Saddam Hussein's hapless Republican Guards and more hapless regular army - some Iraqi divisions' soldiers had not fired live rounds with their rifles in over a year and none of them had been trained in urban warfare - "we cannot safely assume that speed, precision or situation awareness will yield 2003-like effects against more skilled opponents elsewhere."

"A transformation agenda that would trade speed for mass and standoff precision for close combat capability could be a risky choice," the Biddle team writes, adding, "Nor does the experience of 2003 demonstrate that major warfare is now so easy for the United States that we can safely restructure the great majority of our forces for peacekeeping, nation building or counterinsurgency."

Boiled down, what the best thinkers in the Army are saying is that we cannot count on winning all future wars with two Special Forces A Teams and an Air Wing. Even with all the high-tech stuff, all the precision GPS-guided bombs, all the blinking markers on blue flat-panel screens, you may very well need Abrams tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles and Apache helicopters and well-trained infantrymen to whip your next enemy.

This may not be the message that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld wants to hear but it has the ring of truth.

Ellie