Strategy (40 page)

Lastly, there was behind all of this a presumption of cause and effect, that combinations of “ambiguity, deception, novelty, mobility, and actual or threatened violence” would generate sufficient surprise and shock to cause enemy confusion and disorder. The essence of moral conflict, Boyd insisted, was to

create, exploit, and magnify
menace
(impression of danger to one's well-being and survival),
uncertainty
(impressions, or atmosphere, generated by events that appear erratic, contradictory, unfamiliar, chaotic, etc.), and
mistrust
(atmosphere of doubt and doubt and suspicion that loosens human bonds among members of an organic whole or between organic wholes).

The evidence that this would be working would be “surface
fear, anxiety
, and
alienation
in order to generate many non-cooperative centers of gravity.”
⁴⁶

While comparative morale and coherence undoubtedly made a difference, and confused commanders could watch helplessly as their armies fell apart, this story was told in excessively stark terms of headquarters tipping over in collective nervous breakdowns, organized troops turning into a disorderly rabble, and apparently disciplined and intelligent individuals suddenly reduced to helpless fools thrashing around in the dark. Boyd saw “courage, confidence, and esprit” as constituting a form of “moral strength”
that could counter such negative effects. If the enemy did indeed enjoy such moral strength, the imaginative physical effects designed to cause a moral breakdown would fail. Alternatively, individuals and groups would vary in their responses, with some being able to absorb the implications of events and adapt quickly. Their responses might be suboptimal, but sufficient to regroup and cope with the new situation.

One famous example of a commander thrown into mental confusion by a shock military move (although one about which he had been warned) was Stalin in June 1941 as the German offensive began and made rapid gains. For a few days the Soviet people heard nothing from Stalin as he struggled to make sense of the situation. While he was doing so, individuals at the front responded as best they could, some retreating and some throwing themselves into the fight with great bravery. Eventually Stalin rallied himself, broadcast a stirring message to his people, and took command of the fight. The size of his country and his population meant that a quick victory for the Germans was essential, and Hitler was sufficiently contemptuous of the Slav mentality to believe that a hard push by his forces would see the enemy crumble. When the moral collapse failed to materialize to the degree necessary, Hitler's forces were stuck and eventually pushed back. The shock effect wore off as the Soviet leadership steadied itself.

It was one thing to argue that because minds controlled bodies, disrupting the workings of minds was preferable to eliminating their bodies, but quite another to assume that just as physical blows could shatter bodies, so mental blows could shatter minds. It was one thing to recognize the importance of the cognitive domain, but quite another to assume that it was susceptible to straightforward manipulation. Human minds could be capable of remarkable feats of denial, resistance, recovery, and adaption, even under extreme stress.

[T]he revolution in military affairs may bring a kind of tactical clarity to the battlefield, but at the price of strategic obscurity
.

—Eliot Cohen

T
HIS “OPERATIONAL” APPROACH
to war was never tested in the circumstances for which it was designed. At the end of the 1980s, Soviet communism imploded and the Warsaw Pact soon evaporated, taking with it the possibility of another great power war in the middle of Europe. The American military soon came to be preoccupied with a quite different set of problems. Because circumstances had changed so much this might have provided good reason to challenge the operational approach, but instead it became even more entrenched, now spoken of as a revolution in military affairs.

There was no need to worry about an extremely large and capable enemy. The efforts the Americans had put into new technologies had created a quality gap with all conceivable opponents, while the greater stress on operational doctrine made it possible to take advantage of superior intelligence and communications to work around opponents. Almost immediately, there was a demonstration of the new capabilities. Iraq occupied its neighbor Kuwait in August 1990; early the next year, a coalition led by the United States liberated Kuwait. Up to this point the impact of improvements in sensors, smart weapons, and systems integration were untested hypotheses. Skeptics
(including Luttwak) warned of how in a war with Iraq the most conceptually brilliant systems could be undermined by their own complexity and traditional forms of military incompetence.
¹
Yet in Operation Desert Storm the equipment worked well: cruise missiles fired from a distance of some one thousand kilometers navigated their way through the streets of Baghdad, entered their target by the front door, and then exploded.

This very one-sided war displayed the potential of modern military systems in a most flattering light. The Iraqis had boasted of the size of their army, but much of its bulk was made up of poorly armed and trained conscripts facing professional, well-equipped forces with vastly superior firepower. It was as if they had kindly arranged their army to show off their opponent's forces to best advantage. A battle plan unfolded that followed the essential principles of Western military practice against a totally outclassed and outgunned enemy who had conceded command of the air. A tentative frontal assault saw the Iraqis crumble, yet General Norman Schwarzkopf went ahead with a complex, enveloping maneuver to catch them as they retreated, but did not quite cut them off quickly enough. The Americans still announced a ceasefire, deliberately eschewing a war of annihilation. This reflected a determination to keep the war limited and not allow success in reaching the declared goal—liberation of Kuwait—to lead to overextension by attempting to occupy all of Iraq. This made good diplomatic and military sense, yet the consequence illustrated the arguments favoring decisive victories. Saddam Hussein was able to survive and the outcome of the war was declared at best incomplete.
²

The idea that this campaign might set a pattern for the future, to the point of representing a revolution in military affairs, can be traced back to the Pentagon's Office of Net Assessment (ONA), led by Andrew Marshall, a redoubtable veteran of RAND. He was aware that during its last years there had been talk in the Soviet Union of a “military technical revolution” that might bring conventional forces up to new levels of effectiveness. Marshall became convinced that the new systems were not mere improvements but could change the character of war. After the 1991 Gulf War, he asked one of his analysts, Army Lieutenant Colonel Andrew F. Krepinevich, who had been working on what had become the non-issue of the military balance between NATO and the Warsaw Pact, to examine the combined impact of precision weapons and the new information and communication technologies.
³

By the summer of 1993, Marshall was considering two plausible forms of change in warfare. One possibility was that the long-range precision strike would become “the dominant operational approach.” The other was the emergence of “what might be called information warfare.”
⁴
At this point he
began to encourage the use of the term “revolution in military affairs” (RMA) instead of “military-technical revolution” to stress the importance of operational and organizational changes as well as technological ones.
⁵
Krepinevich described the RMA in 1994 as

what occurs when the application of new technologies into a significant number of military systems combines with innovative operational concepts and organizational adaptation in a way that fundamentally alters the character and conduct of conflict … by producing a dramatic increase—often an order of magnitude or greater—in the combat potential and military effectiveness of armed forces.
⁶

Although the origins of the RMA lay in doctrine, the driver appeared technological, a consequence of the interaction between systems that collected, processed, and communicated information with those that applied military force. A so-called system of systems would make this interaction smooth and continuous.
⁷
This concept was particularly appropriate in a maritime context. At sea, as in the air, it was possible to contemplate a battlespace empty of all but combatants. Even going back to the Second World War, air and sea warfare offered patterns susceptible to systematic analysis, which meant that the impact of technical innovations could be discerned.

By contrast, land warfare had always been more complex and fluid, subject to a greater range of influences. The promise of the RMA was to transform land warfare. The ability to strike with precision over great distances meant that time and space could decline as serious constraints. Enemy units would be engaged from without. Armies could stay agile and maneuverable, as they would not have to move with their own firepower, except for that required for self-defense. Instead, they could call in what was required from outside. Reliance on non-organic firepower would reduce dependence upon large, cumbersome, self-contained divisions, and the associated potential for high casualties.
⁸
While enemy commanders were still attempting to mobilize their resources and develop their plans, they would be rudely interrupted by lethal blows inflicted by forces for whom time and space were no longer serious constraints. The move away from the crude elimination of enemy forces could be completed by following the Boyd line of acting more quickly and moving more deftly, thus putting enemy commanders in a position where resistance would be futile. Enthusiasts hovered on the edge of pronouncing the “fog of war” lifted and the problem of friction answered.
⁹
At the very least, warfare could move away from high-intensity combat to something more contained and discriminate, geared to disabling an enemy's military establishment with the minimum force necessary. No more resources should
be expended, assets ruined, or blood shed than absolutely necessary to achieve specified political goals.

All of this created the prospect of relatively civilized warfare, unsullied by either the destructiveness of nuclear war or the murky, subversive character of Vietnam-type engagements. It would be professional war conducted by professional armies, a vision, in Bacevich's pointed words, “of the Persian Gulf War replayed over and over again.”
¹⁰
The pure milk of the doctrine is found in a publication of the National Defense University of 1996 which introduced the notion of “shock and awe.” The basic message was that all efforts should be focused on overwhelming the enemy physically and mentally as quickly as possible before there was a chance to react. “Shock and awe” would mean that the enemy's perceptions and grasp of events would be overloaded, leaving him paralyzed. The ultimate example of this effect were the nuclear strikes of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which the authors refused to rule out as a theoretical possibility, though they were more intrigued by the possibility of disinformation, misinformation, and deception.
¹¹

The influence of such ideas was evident in the 1997 paper “Joint Vision 2010.” It defined information superiority largely in war-fighting terms as “the capability to collect, process, and disseminate an uninterrupted flow of information while exploiting or denying an adversary's ability to do the same.”
¹²
By means of “excellent sensors, fast and powerful networks, display technology, and sophisticated modeling and simulation capabilities,” information superiority could be achieved. The force would have “a dramatically better awareness or understanding of the battlespace rather than simply more raw data.” This could make up for deficiencies in numbers, technology, or position, and it could also speed up command processes. Forces could be organized “from the bottom up—or to self-synchronize—to meet the commander's intent,” leading in turn to “the rapid foreclosure of enemy courses of action and the shock of closely coupled events.” There would be no time for the enemy to follow Boyd's now-famous OODA loop. Arthur Cebrowski and John Garstka argued that a form of “network-centered warfare” could make battles more efficient in the same way that the application of information technology by businesses was making economies more efficient.
¹³
In discussing the move from platform-centered to network-centered warfare, the Pentagon largely followed this formulation (Garstka was one of the authors) and recognized that, following the physical and information domains, there was a cognitive domain. Here was found

the mind of the warfighter and the warfighter's supporting populace. Many battles and wars are won or lost in the cognitive domain. The
intangibles of leadership, morale, unit cohesion, level of training and experience, situational awareness, and public opinion are elements of this domain. This is the domain where commander's intent, doctrine, tactics, techniques, and procedures reside.
¹⁴

This form of warfare suited the United States because it played to U.S. strengths: it could be capital rather than labor intensive; it reflected a preference for outsmarting opponents; it avoided excessive casualties both received and inflicted; and it conveyed an aura of almost effortless superiority. Those ideas were deeply comforting, and not entirely wrong. Information and communication technologies were bound to make a difference in military practice, although the RMA agenda understated the extent to which American predominance was dependent on not only the sophistication of its technology but also the sheer amount of firepower—particularly air-delivered—at its disposal. Furthermore, while the United States' evident military superiority in a particular type of war was likely to encourage others to fight in different ways, that military capacity would also constrain opponents' ambitions. As a regular conventional war against the United States appeared to be an increasingly foolish proposition, especially after its convincing performance in the 1991 Gulf War, one form of potential challenge to American predominance was removed, just as the prospect of mutual assured destruction had earlier removed nuclear war as a serious policy option.