Tech Power Alters War's Mission

The White House has been stymied so far in making a compelling case to take military action against Iraq.

But according to a retired Air Force colonel who played a key role in shaping U.S. military strategy in the first Gulf War, the issue of what technological advances mean for modern warfare has muddied the dialog.

In fact, the radically improved capabilities of air power require a major perspective shift that actually tries to spare the lives of enemy troops and concentrate on making precision strikes against infrastructure, according to John Warden.

"If we look back at the Gulf War, it seems to me that one of the biggest mistakes we made was in treating the Iraqi military as an enemy and thinking we had to destroy the Iraqi army in Kuwait and the Air Force and so forth," Warden said in recent phone interview.

"The reason I think it was a mistake is it was the Iraqi military that had the capability to do something with Saddam Hussein. We simply never told them during the course of war: Look, we'd be happy to help you, if you're willing to head north and take out this guy Saddam, who you don't like, either. My thought is in today's world, let's ... not target anything that's a traditional military target."

Technology, in other words, is once again redefining the terms and morality of war.

"One of the things that some moralists said made war less likely was the bloodshed," Warden says. "If you could really do something where you had real precision of effect, you really could get yourself to the point where there would be relatively few obstacles in the way of a country possessing these tools from using these.

"It's a tougher problem from a cultural side. There's a tendency on the part of an awful lot of people, not just the military, to say that war is all about killing and bloodshed. And to a certain extent, to do something about the bloodshed is not a correct idea to be pursuing, and it might even be dangerous."

Warden emerged in the first Bush administration as a brilliant theorist who helped rewrite the book on how the United States went to war. Until then, U.S. military doctrine dictated that air power was an auxiliary to ground troops, never an end unto itself.

But the huge change in effectiveness of air power rendered those assumptions obsolete.

As David Halberstam explained in War in a Time of Peace, Warden told Norman Schwarzkopf and then-Defense Secretary Dick Cheney: "(D)uring World War II, an average B-17 bomb during a bombing run missed its target by some 2,300 feet. Therefore, if you wanted a 90 percent probability of having hit a particular target, you had to drop some 9,000 bombs. That required a bombing run of 1,000 bombers and placed 10,000 men at risk. By contrast, with the new weaponry, one plane flown by one man with one bomb could have the same probability."

Warden's role in helping shift U.S. war strategy was so strong, Halberstam argued, "If one of the news magazines had wanted to run on its cover the photograph of the man who had played the most critical role in achieving victory, it might well have chosen Warden."

Warden's emphasis on breaking warfare down to a series of targets that can take out an enemy's infrastructure -- such as communication and electricity -- was ahead of its time.

"Military leaders understand that the technology we choose to fight wars helps to choose the wars we fight," Nicholas Thompson wrote in the Washington Monthly last September. "Cutting-edge weapons such as unmanned bombers could allow us to fight a war without casualties. The Devil's bargain is that they could allow us to fight a war without causalities. And, if we can do that, we can fight short little wars everywhere: the generals' greatest fear."

In the military, Warden had many enemies, as original thinkers often do. After 30 years in the armed forces, he retired in 1995 to found the consulting firm Venturist and to write a book, Winning in Fast Time, in which he applies some of his ideas to the business world.

Now that he's out of the military, Warden can speak his mind -- especially when the upshot of his arguments is that defense spending can be scaled back, which, he says, is possible with advances in unmanned aircraft.

"What we saw in the Afghanistan War was one of these UAVs, (unmanned aerial vehicles) the Predator, that not only could see, it also had Hellfire missiles, so as soon as the people controlling it could say, 'Those are bad guys,' they sent a message, 'Predator, shoot your missile,' and it's gone. There's no mechanical delay from the time you give the order. And the thing can hang around for hours and hours. With the development of the technology, they can be there almost indefinitely, up at 100,000 feet, powered by batteries and solar panels.

"If you can build a bunch of these things that are obviously much cheaper than a manned vehicle, it's not going to be long before someone makes the case that maybe we don't need 1,000 new strike fighters to replace the old F16."

Then again, history shows that the habit of using outdated technology persists. For example, Warden dates the effective demise of horse cavalry as an instrument of war to the 1898 Battle of Omdurman.

"But it was not until 1943 that the United States disbanded its last active combat horse cavalry regiment," he said. "It's easy to say that conservative, hidebound military people act like this, but in reality, everyone does. It's always very difficult for people to drop things that they're comfortable with, and it's particularly hard for them to look at new technologies and see what they're capable of doing and understand that the old mission is no longer even relevant."

John Warden may be the type of guy we ought to listen to. While I agree about his comments concerning the need for new technology, I think he's a little too quick to get rid of stuff that might be worth keeping around.

I think he's a little too quick to get rid of stuff that might be worth keeping around.

Agreed. For example, Calvalry experience might have been quite useful in Afgahnistan. Seeing our guys on horseback was a hoot! Who knows what kind of equipment our men might encounter in battle, it would be good to know something of them.

Warden's biggest problem--the thing that kept him from getting the nod from Horner in Gulf War I--was that he was interested in his own ideas at the expense of the theater commander's mission.

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