[iwar] [fc:1's.and.0's.Replacing.Bullets.in.U.S..Arsenal]

From: Fred Cohen (fc@all.net)
Date: 2002-02-05 20:43:33
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Date: Tue, 5 Feb 2002 20:43:33 -0800 (PST)
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1's and 0's Replacing Bullets in U.S. Arsenal
Success in Afghanistan Propels Shift to Equipping Forces With Digital Arms


By Vernon Loeb and Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writers
Saturday, February 2, 2002; Page A01

FORT LEWIS, Wash. -- Out on an Army firing range, in a conversation
punctuated by machine-gun bursts, Staff Sgt. Michael Land describes how he
and his soldiers are preparing to engage and destroy the enemy using an even
deadlier weapon: digital information.

The most obvious difference between his unit -- a new rapid-deployment
infantry brigade -- and conventional ones isn't that their armored vehicles
are propelled by wheels instead of tank tracks. Rather, Land said, it "is
all the information we're being given" by computers that pull in data from
satellites, drone aircraft and intelligence analysts far from the front
lines.

When even the infantry -- long characterized as "grunts" and "mud soldiers"
-- is focused on moving digits, it is clear a major shift is underway in the
way the U.S. military fights. What the Afghanistan conflict has brought home
to the armed forces is how much the new way of war is built around an
unprecedented dependence on information.

In Afghanistan, the Pentagon has relied on a global umbrella of new
information systems, ranging from satellites far overhead to surveillance
drones circling the battlefield to Special Forces troops with laser
designators on the ground, to find targets, transmit information about them
and then attack. Just as important was a communications network that
permitted gigabytes of information to rocket from Afghanistan to U.S.
commanders in Saudi Arabia, on ships at sea and even as far as Tampa, where
the man responsible for the campaign, Gen. Tommy R. Franks, spent most of
the war at Central Command headquarters.

The military's new dependence on information systems was driven home
Thursday by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld in a speech aimed at
refocusing the Pentagon's efforts to change the military to better counter
the threats of the 21st century. In robust defense of President Bush's
proposed $48 billion increase in military spending next year, Rumsfeld
called for more funding for intelligence and more attention to unpiloted
aircraft and other sophisticated reconnaissance systems.

"We need to find new ways to deter new adversaries," Rumsfeld said. "We need
to make the leap into the information age, which is the critical foundation
of our transformation efforts."

To be sure, the U.S. military -- despite all its technological prowess --
has yet to find Osama bin Laden. But the military's success in routing the
Taliban regime that sheltered the al Qaeda leader has emboldened those at
the Pentagon who favor reshaping the armed forces around more sophisticated
information and weapons systems.

The Bush administration came into office vowing to make major changes in the
structure of the military by eliminating some of the large, hulking forces
designed for fighting a ground war in Europe and replacing them with
smaller, more flexible units capable of being deployed on short notice to
anywhere on the globe.

The initiative stalled last summer. Rumsfeld ordered dozens of studies,
which led to months of contentious reviews but ultimately produced no major
changes in the size and shape of the military. By Sept. 10, the widespread
view in the Pentagon was that defense reform was mired in bureaucratic
infighting and doomed to fail.

All that changed when terrorists piloted hijacked airliners into the World
Trade Center and the Pentagon, killing more than 3,100. The attack and the
war on terrorism sparked an outpouring of support for the military on
Capitol Hill.

One problem Rumsfeld confronted last year was that the Joint Chiefs of Staff
feared he would pay for his priorities by cutting back spending on their
priorities, such as weapons and the number of active-duty troops. But the
new defense budget to be unveiled Monday contains almost $380 billion,
Pentagon officials say, and should be enough to pay for almost everyone's
priorities.

With more than a billion dollars a day available, said William Schneider
Jr., head of the Defense Science Board and a confidant of Rumsfeld, the
course of reform should flow much more smoothly. "The environment is much
more positive now," he said.

This shift has huge implications for the future shape and organization of
the large parts of the military. The part of the Army that is built around
tanks and artillery pieces faces renewed questions about relevancy. The Air
Force, having heavily used long-range bombers in the Afghan war, may be
pressed to explain why it isn't building new bombers and instead is buying
more short-range fighters. Across the board, the ability to move information
rapidly is radically reducing the number of troops and aircraft the military
needs to deploy to fight.
Bandwidth, Not Bombs

The early success of the Afghan war, in which long-range bombers were
directed to targets by handfuls of U.S. Special Forces spotters on the
ground, confirmed what a lot of people already suspected, said Edward C.
"Pete" Aldridge Jr., undersecretary of defense for acquisition, technology
and logistics. "In the war itself, what has changed is a real strong
appreciation of the value of ISR [intelligence, surveillance and
reconnaissance] and the real-time value of being able to target rapidly,"
Aldridge said.

There is talk at the Pentagon that the computer and other information
systems may elbow aside weaponry as the central component in war. Ask a
general or admiral for thoughts about the Afghan campaign and they are more
likely to talk about "bandwidth" than bombs. In the air, on land and at sea,
the American approach to combat increasingly focuses on how to get
information, move it and act on it quickly.

Indeed, retired Navy Vice Adm. Arthur K. Cebrowski, director of the new
Office of Force Transformation, said the overarching change occurring in the
military is a transition from the Industrial Age to the Information Age.

It used to be that mass meant military strength. Now, in an age of 24-hour
battlefield surveillance and instantaneous targeting, mass just makes a
military unit easier to find and hit.

"There is no doubt about it -- that is the fundamental transition, and all
other elements of transformation are subordinate to it," Cebrowski said.

The increasing reliance on precision bombs means fewer bombers are needed.
But it also requires more information about the location of their targets.
All told, the Air Force has operated fewer than two dozen bombers in the
Afghan war, said Air Force Secretary James G. Roche. "You don't need so many
bombers, because they carry so many bombs and each one is so accurate," he
said.

The ability to gather information remotely and transmit it instantly around
the world means fewer troops need to be deployed and that military staffs
and experts can operate in a headquarters thousands of miles away. That
means the United States can wage war less obtrusively. The Pentagon has
deployed just a few thousand troops at bases in Pakistan, Uzbekistan and
Kyrgyzstan, and about 4,000 troops in Afghanistan.

Pentagon officials said Rumsfeld's approach to his transformation agenda
will be different than the contentious path he took last year. Instead of
raising the prospect of radical surgery on the military, they said, the
emphasis will be on continuous but gradual change.

"The way you need to do it is incrementally," Schneider said. "That's much
more the way the commercial sector does it."
Drones Here to Stay

In the first half of January, an official "Lessons Learned" panel traveled
to Afghanistan to figure out what in the U.S. arsenal worked, what did not,
and why. Those results are still being compiled, but officials said some
lessons already have emerged.

The star in the air campaign has been the lethal drone aircraft, or Unmanned
Combat Aerial Vehicle (UCAV), as the military calls it. More than any other
innovation, the use of a Predator reconnaissance drone to launch Hellfire
missiles is likely to be what the Afghan war is remembered for.

The surprise is who was doing the shooting: the Central Intelligence Agency,
not the Air Force. The CIA borrowed the Predator from the Air Force, which
had been experimenting with arming the plane, and used it aggressively in
Afghanistan, firing dozens of missiles at Taliban and al Qaeda leaders.

In October, just days before the war began, the National Defense University
issued a technical and policy assessment of lethal drones. "An operational
UCAV capability is not expected to be available to U.S. field and fleet
commanders for 10 years," it concluded.

Now, with the war not yet over, there is new consensus that the armed drone
is here to stay. Never again is the United States likely to go to war flying
only piloted aircraft. Aldridge predicted the next generation of the lethal
drones will carry larger payloads of bombs and sensors. "That's the right
thing to do," he said.
Keeping the Innovators

At its core, even a warrior drone is a matter of processing heaps of
information. The key to operating one is being able to move enough data
quickly so that it can be flown and operated by a controller hundreds or
thousands of miles away. Information also promises to be the organizing
principle around which personnel policies change.

A small but vocal group of change-minded officers argues that the armed
forces must revamp a half-century-old personnel system that transfers people
every couple of years, encourages generalists and seems to discourage
innovative thinking.

Indeed, a study on how to transform the military done by the Center for
Strategic and Budgetary Assessments for the Pentagon recommended the
military keep innovators in place longer. It also said service chiefs should
be picked from areas likely to grow in importance, such as submarines and
space operations.

The study was especially critical of the Air Force, particularly its
leadership structure. The Air Force increasingly is being used for
long-range airstrikes, but of the service's 17 top officers, only one has a
significant background in bombers, while 10 are fighter pilots, it said.
Personnel choices lead to procurement choices, argued the study's author,
the center's director of strategic studies, Michael Vickers. While the
Afghan war has shown the need for long-range bombers, he noted, the Air
Force continues to focus its acquisition energy on buying short-range
aircraft such as the F-22 and the Joint Strike Fighter.

The Air Force is already adapting on some fronts. In a symbolic
acknowledgment of the emerging role played by information as a weapon in and
of itself, the Air Force has given its new advanced command-and-control
center a weapon-like name, the "Falconer."

"When you go back and look at the lessons identified and the technologies
identified from Enduring Freedom" -- the military's formal name for the war
on terrorists in Afghanistan -- "you will see some wonderful capabilities
that we had not demonstrated before in the ability to kill targets faster,"
said Air Force Maj. Gen. Robert F. Behler, who heads the Aerospace Command
and Control and Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Center at
Langley Air Force Base in Hampton, Va.

The Air Force hopes the center will help integrate the information gathered
by satellites in space, reconnaissance aircraft over the battlefield and
sensors on the ground to help commanders make decisions more quickly.

Each of those information "platforms" would play a special role that makes
the whole greater than the sum of the parts. For example, said Behler, a
targeting sequence might begin when a satellite detected a radio
transmission. The satellite would automatically notify a Joint Stars
airborne radar system that keeps track of vehicles moving on a battlefield.
Joint Stars would find the transmitting vehicle and order a Predator drone
aircraft to move in and take video images of it.

"What we're trying to do is have digits talk to each other, the ones and
zeros talking machine language," Behler said. "You find it and fix it, track
it and target it, and just before you engage it, you have a human break
point that says, 'Okay, that's a good target and all the rules of engagement
are played into it.' "

In Afghanistan, the Predator fed real-time targeting video directly to
AC-130 gunships, which were then able to attack targets. CIA operatives
using armed Predators achieved the U.S. military's long-standing goal of
reducing the time from "sensor to shooter" to almost zero.
Where Battle Is Fought

Ultimately, what Behler is doing at the Falconer command-and-control center
in Virginia is not that different from the Army experiment with the new
brigade in Washington state.

Here at Fort Lewis, Capt. J.C. Glicks's infantry company is part of the
Army's effort to be light enough to deploy overseas quickly but strong
enough to survive once it gets to the fight. To achieve this balance, the
new unit has a far different organization than past infantry brigades. It
has its own military intelligence, signal and medical detachments, not
usually part of a traditional Army brigade.

More strikingly, it possesses a unit not seen before in the Army: A
"Reconnaissance, Surveillance and Target Acquisition Squadron" designed to
acquire information and feed it to other units in the brigade. To help it
acquire the information, the squadron will fly its own air force of four
unmanned armed vehicles.

One of the biggest training challenges facing the new Army unit is learning
how to surf the wave of incoming information, rather than drown in it. So,
for days at a time, commanders and troops from the unit hunker down before
rows of computer screens to learn how to understand and use the battlefield
information flow.

"This is where the battle is fought, so to speak," Lt. Col. Kevin McClung
said. "The key in all this is information dominance -- and we have more
information about ourselves and the enemy, which will make us more lethal
when we fight."

There is concern, however, that the ability of computers and machines to
collect information exceeds soldiers' ability to process it. "We can provide
so much information to you here it will really slow down your decision
process," Behler warned.

As the tense exercises in the Fort Lewis simulation center indicate, the
military's emphasis on information also creates new vulnerabilities. Growing
dependence on information -- and the machines that gather it -- means it is
likely that future adversaries will attack the information networks,
Cebrowski said. He said the military should prepare for attacks on
reconnaissance planes, on satellites and their ground terminals, and on the
communications systems that link them.

"This is the information age," said the career naval aviator. "The battle is
over the source of power."

Ricks reported from Washington.

� 2002 The Washington Post Company

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