Looking at the Wiki on retired Army Brigadier General Huba Wass de Czege, I saw that one of the source materials was an April 2003 Slate essay by Fred Kaplan subtitled “What lies behind the military’s victory in Iraq.” Given that few would now argue that we achieved “victory” in that conflict, I was intrigued.
So when and how did the U.S. military get this good? The elements of swift victory in Gulf War II have been well laid-out: the agility and flexibility of our forces, the pinpoint accuracy of the bombs, the commanders’ real-time view of the battlefield, the remarkable coordination among all branches of the armed services (Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines) and special operations. But these elements, and this degree of success, have not been seen in previous wars, not even in the first Gulf War 12 years ago. Three major changes have taken hold within the military since then—a new war-fighting doctrine, advanced digital technology, and a less parochial culture.
The new doctrine was put in motion in 1983, a decade before Operation Desert Storm, when the U.S. Army’s Command and General Staff College, at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., created an elite, one-year post-grad program called the School for Advanced Military Studies. The school’s founder was a colonel—soon promoted to brigadier general—named Huba Wass de Czege (pronounced VOSS-de-say-ga). He was in the forefront of officers who had served in Vietnam, witnessed the disaster firsthand, and were eager to change the way the Army thought about combat.
In 1982, Wass de Czege had written a major revision of the Army’s war-fighting manual, FM 100-5, the official expression of Army doctrine and the foundation for all decisions about strategy, tactics, and training. The previous edition, written in 1976 by Gen. William DePuy, had recited a strategy of attrition warfare, a static line of defense against the enemy’s strongest point of assault, beating it back with frontal assaults and superior firepower. Wass de Czege’s rewrite outlined a strategy emphasizing agility, speed, maneuver, and deep strikes well behind enemy lines.
The advanced-studies school at Fort Leavenworth was set up explicitly to weave this new strategy into the fabric of the Army establishment.
By the time of Desert Storm, a small group of Wass de Czege’s students had been promoted to high-level posts on the staff of Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf’s Central Command. This group of officers, who self-consciously referred to themselves as the “Jedi Knights,” designed the ground-war strategy of the first Gulf War, and it was straight out of Wass de Czege’s book—the feinted assault up the middle, the simultaneous sweep of armored forces up to the Iraqi army’s western flank, the multiple thrusts that surrounded the Iraqis from all sides, hurling them into disarray before their final envelopment and destruction.
The Marines, meanwhile, were going through a similar transformation. Col. Mike Wiley, vice president of the Marine Corps University at Quantico, revised his branch’s war doctrine on the basis of a 1979 briefing called “Patterns of Conflict” by a retired Air Force colonel named John Boyd. Boyd too had concluded that successful warfare involves surprise, deception, sweeping quickly around flanks, and creating confusion and disorder in the enemy’s ranks. The Marine Corps commandant at the time, Gen. Alfred Gray, considered himself a Boyd disciple and ordered his officers, who led the assault into Kuwait, to avoid frontal assaults and to maneuver around the Iraqis and attack their flanks.
For the Air Force and Navy, Desert Storm saw the inauguration of “smart bombs” that could explode within a few feet of their targets. Fewer than 10 percent of the munitions dropped in Desert Storm were smart bombs; the weapons were new and expensive (between $120,000 and $240,000 apiece); not many had been built; and they still had lots of technical bugs. By 1999, in the war over Kosovo, smart bombs were more reliable and a lot cheaper ($20,000 each); they constituted about 30 percent of bombs dropped. In Afghanistan, the figure rose to 70 percent, which is probably how the math will work out in Gulf War II as well.
The war in Afghanistan, however, saw three innovations that would alter the way America fights wars. First, high-tech smart bombs were combined with high-tech command, control, communications, and intelligence. A new generation of unmanned Predator drones flew over the battlefield, scanning the terrain with digital cameras and instantly transmitting the imagery back to command headquarters. Commanders would view the imagery, look for targets, and order pilots in the area to attack the targets. The pilots would punch the target’s coordinates into the smart bomb’s GPS receiver. The bomb would home in on the target. Total time elapsed: about 20 minutes. By comparison, in Desert Storm, the process of spotting a new target, assigning a weapon to hit it, then hitting it, took three days.
The second new thing about the U.S. strategy in Afghanistan was that it was truly a “combined-arms” operation—a battle plan that involved more than one branch of the armed services, working in tandem. This had never really happened before. Often using the new high-tech drones as the communications link, Army troops on the ground called for strikes from planes flown by Air Force pilots. Some of these planes, such as B-52 and B-1 bombers, had been built 30 or 40 years earlier to drop multi-megaton nuclear bombs on the Soviet Union. The notion of using them to drop 2,000-pound conventional weapons, in support of ground troops, would have appalled an earlier generation of Air Force generals.
[…]
Another new thing, which started in Afghanistan and continued in Iraq, was the systematic inclusion of the so-called “shadow soldiers,” the special operations forces. The 1986 Goldwater-Nichols Act, which was best-known for giving new authority to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, also made special ops a separate command, with its own budget. (Before then, each branch had its own special-ops division, which tended to get the big boys’ leftovers, in terms of money, equipment and everything else.)
Gen. Schwarzkopf didn’t think much of special ops, so didn’t use them in Desert Storm, except toward the end of the war, to go hunt for Scud missiles in Iraq’s western desert. In Afghanistan, these forces were central. They could be parachuted into the country in small numbers, set up airfields, and develop contacts with rebel leaders. The information about Taliban targets, which the Predator drones transmitted back to headquarters, usually came from a special-ops officer riding on horseback with a laptop.
There’s more but you get the idea.
The intent of the post isn’t to dunk on Fred Kaplan, who’s generally speaking an astute analyst, but to reflect on how perspectives change over time. And, indeed, nothing in the excerpt above (except for the technicality that the creation of USSOCOM was mandated by Cohen-Nunn rather than the more famous Goldwater-Nichols) is wrong.
Wass de Czege, who turned 80 last month, is still producing brilliant analyses of Army doctrine and is widely revered as one of the most brilliant military thinkers of modern times. SAMS produced a bevy of imitators across the services, all of which are quite good, and, while the “Jedi Knight” mystique has worn off, the graduates of these advanced programs are among the best and brightest officers.
Wiley’s name isn’t one I hear much at MCU (indeed, he was passed over for promotion and retired from the Corps almost immediately after the 1991 Gulf War) but Boyd is still part of our curriculum today. And our university library is named after Gray.
Smart bombs, remotely piloted aircraft, and special operators continue to be widely used and tactically effective. Alas, despite their awesomeness as tools, they haven’t been paired with effective strategies or achievable policy goals.
