Revolutionary thinking

Jane's Defence News ^ | 13 September 2002 | Nick Cook

[ThePythonicCow]

Revolutionary thinking

By Nick Cook with Kim Burger, Luke Hill, Ian Kemp, Andrew Koch and Michael Sirak

The nature of warfare - now and in the future - changed forever on 11 September 2001. For a decade, commentators, analysts and military observers have been talking about a new defence 'paradigm' and the 'revolution in military affairs', but only then, when airliners were used as weapons of mass destruction, did the revolution and the paradigm take flight and a new 'warform' mobilise.

Gen John Jumper, USAF Chief of Staff, has called it "a whole new realm of thinking" and illustrates this new thinking with several examples from the Afghan campaign: how B-52s, designed as strategic Cold War bombers, were operating as close air support aircraft; and how special operations forces (SOF) on horseback were punching in their target co-ordinates on laptops.

"We have found that we are able to do something that we have not been able to do for a very, very long time and that is to relate air power to troops on the ground," said James Roche, Secretary of the USAF.

Gen Jumper refers to it as "innovative thinking", but the speed with which information flies around the battlefield also makes its own demands on simplicity.

A perfect illustration again comes from Afghanistan, where, after a rapid modification programme, USAF AC-130 gunships were able to receive live 'streaming' video from an RQ-1A Predator UAV intended to direct the gunship's fire onto terrorist ground targets. The experiment worked so well that the idea is being taken further. This month, according to Gen Jumper, SOF will experiment with a laptop software programme called 'Rover' that will allow troops on the ground to draw directly onto photographic imagery of the target area. They will be able to 'paint' circles around the 'bad guys' and 'good guys' then shoot the information directly to an AC-130, avoiding any confusion about who is where.

However, innovation - particularly when applied too rapidly - can also bring its own hazards. Gen Jumper relays an account of a SOF operator in Afghanistan who typed in GPS target co-ordinates into his laptop but had to change the battery before relaying the information. It cost him his life. Because of a software glitch, with the new battery installed the laptop gave the SOF operator's own position as the target to a circling US fighter, with inevitable and tragic consequences.

It is important, Gen Jumper says, that these kinds of fallibilities are removed from the 'system'. Data, he says, is best fed directly into a weapon and then merely confirmed by a human in the loop.

The degree to which automation and robotics should be applied to the battlefield is a debate that is only just beginning. It has been pulled sharply into focus by some appalling incidents of 'collateral damage' from recent wars: the destruction of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade during the 1999 Kosovo campaign and the deaths in July of Afghans at a wedding celebration after a mistaken attack by an AC-130. In both cases, data inputs by people were the common denominator.

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[ThePythonicCow]

Recognition of the changing face of the battle field.

[The Great Satan]

For a decade, commentators, analysts and military observers have been talking about a new defence 'paradigm' and the 'revolution in military affairs', but only then, when airliners were used as weapons of mass destruction, did the revolution and the paradigm take flight and a new 'warform' mobilise.

Wow. For a second there, I thought we were going to be treated to an intelligent analysis of the revolutionary implications of suicidists as human delivery sytems for Weapons of Mass Destruction. But the article just turned out to be the same old same old. Oh, well, you know what they say about generals always preparing to fight the last battle. Now we know why.

[wretchard]

For the longest time the "Revolution in Military Affairs" (RMA) was described in terms of a better and flashier Desert Storm hatching at the Command and General Staff College. Crusader, Objective Individual Combat Weapon, etc. were going to be "it". As it turned out, was the real RMA inaugurated by a bunch of young Islamics using off-the-shelf technology and a new doctrinal paradigm?

This question has to be asked seriously. Many observers were frankly so impressed by the Al-Qaeda's "thinking-out-of-the-box" that they believed the war on terrorism to be unwinnable. The US was helpless, its high-tech weaponry useless in a war against the shadows.

This observation turned out to be partly true and partly false. None of the September 11 methods used by Al-Qaeda were actually new. Airplane attacks had been tried at various scales, in the Middle East, Central Asia and Russia before. A dirty bomb had been attempted in Russia. Attacks on skyscrapers had been tried before -- on the World Trade Center. And American military methods were not exactly useless. From the depths of Afghanistan to the neighborhoods of Karachi, to the jungles of Basilan the US military has become a killing machine, perhaps too deadly for comfort.

Technology advanced both the attack and the defense; both America and America's enemies. The second greatest conceit of the 1990 RMA theorists was to think that America alone benefited from technology.

We shall know what the RMA really means for mankind in the next few months. The threat of biological warfare hangs over the entire War on Terror, and in particular the Iraq campaign, like the perfume of death. The greatest conceit of RMA theorists is to think that the surprises are already over.