The New American Way of War

Max Boot

From Foreign Affairs, July/August 2003

Summary:  "The American way of war" refers to the grinding strategy of attrition that U.S. generals traditionally employed to prevail in combat. But that was then. Spurred by dramatic advances in information technology, the new American way of war relies on speed, maneuver, flexibility, and surprise. This approach was put on display in the invasion of Iraq and should reshape what the military looks like.

Max Boot is Olin Senior Fellow in National Security Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of The Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power.

U.S. forces approached the capital with caution, but they became progressively bolder as their probing attacks revealed the weakness of Iraqi defenses. On April 3, the Third ID's Seventh Cavalry Regiment seized Saddam International Airport, on the outskirts of the capital. Two days later, an armored column of the Third ID's Second Brigade knifed into the center of the city, drawing heavy fire and killing perhaps a thousand enemy fighters while losing only one soldier. A heavy firefight on April 7 allowed the Second Brigade to secure three key highway junctions leading into Baghdad, which U.S. troops called Objectives Larry, Curly, and Moe. Seeing that the defense of Baghdad was crumbling, U.S. commanders ordered a final push, with the Third ID charging in from the west and the First Marine Division from the east. On April 9, the giant statue of Saddam fell in the heart of Baghdad, signaling the regime's demise.

Mopping up operations in the north took a few more days. A conventional northern front had never really developed. The U.S. presence was limited to a couple of thousand light infantrymen from the 173rd Airborne Brigade and a few hundred U.S. special forces working with the Kurdish Pesh Merga. In a reprise of Afghanistan, this force, backed up by substantial airpower, routed the Ansar al Islam terrorist group out of northern Iraq and took the key northern cities of Mosul and Kirkuk. The occupation of the entire country was completed on April 14, when marines rolled into Saddam's hometown of Tikrit. The hard task of "nation building" lay ahead, but the bulk of the military campaign was over.

HOW THE WAR WAS WON

This three-week campaign will be studied and debated by historians and military analysts for years to come, but even at this early stage, it is possible to point to a number of factors that led to a relatively easy U.S. victory. The most obvious point, of course, is the ineptitude of the Iraqi defense. Saddam had to fight with a force degraded by years of sanctions; his army was ill trained and ill equipped. Although they had a few new gadgets, such as Russian-made Kornet antitank missiles and devices that jammed Global Positioning System (GPS) satellite signals, on the whole their equipment was woefully out of date. There was little chance the Iraqi forces could stand toe-to-toe with the mighty U.S. war machine -- and Saddam knew it. His strategy was designed to make the best of a bad hand. The Iraqis planned to fall back into the cities and utilize guerrilla warfare to drive up American and civilian casualties to the point where, they hoped, domestic and international pressure would force Washington to come to the bargaining table. This was a shrewd plan similar to that used by the Chechens to bog down Russian invaders on two occasions. But in Iraq it was undone by poor execution.

Time after time, Iraqi forces missed opportunities to make life more difficult for the invading army. They did not blow up dams and bridges, utilize chemical weapons, or barricade Baghdad. Why they did none of this remains a mystery. It is possible that Iraqi troops simply did not want to fight very hard for Saddam. But although Iraqi bumbling and low morale provide part of the answer, American prowess must not be overlooked.

Coalition forces, led by the United States, severely disrupted Iraqi command-and-control systems and moved much faster than Iraqi forces could handle. In military parlance, the United States got inside the Iraqis' "decision cycle." This task was facilitated by the fact that Saddam ran a highly centralized regime. Commanders were afraid to relay negative news to Baghdad for fear of incurring the wrath of Saddam or his homicidal sons. And once they were cut off from the center, commanders in the field were afraid to exercise their own initiative for the same reason. Saddam had actually set up systems to ensure that his army commanders could not coordinate closely, for fear that they would plot against him. Thus the Iraqi armed forces were organized on opposite principles from those of the United States, namely decentralization and joint operations. It was the difference in mindsets, as much as anything else, that allowed U.S. forces always to stay several steps ahead of their adversaries.

Whereas the Iraqi military was built on the old Soviet model, the U.S. armed forces specialize in what the Pentagon calls "network-centric warfare." This approach means taking advantage of information technology to radically enhance the effectiveness of "c4isr" -- command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance.

The U.S. military operates a bewildering array of sensors to cut through the fog of war. Just consider the lineup of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVS) that operated over Iraq, none of which was available in 1991. At the highest altitude, around 60,000 feet, a RQ-4A Global Hawk provided U.S. commanders with a kaleidoscopic view of the Iraqi battlefield. Lower down, at 15,000-25,000 feet, flew RQ-1B Predators, some of them armed with Hellfire antitank missiles. (Both Global Hawks and Predators can stay on station for more than 24 hours at a stretch.) Beneath them, buzzing just above the battlefield, were smaller, tactical UAVS, such as the army's Hunter and the marines' Dragon Eye, which resembles a model airplane. Then there were all the manned surveillance airplanes: the high-flying U-2, with its synthetic aperture radar; the e-8 Joint Surveillance and Target Attack Radar System (JSTARS), which uses ground-mapping radar to monitor the battlefield; the E-3 AWACS, which coordinates air operations; and the RC-135 Rivet Joint, which intercepts enemy communications. All the information they provide is complemented by reports from ground units, which are equipped with GPS, satellite telephones, and wireless Internet devices that allow them to feed their coordinates to headquarters constantly.

In the first Gulf War, commanders took reports by radio and scribbled down troop positions with grease pencils on a map. Now, troop deployments are displayed on digital screens, with friendly forces shown in blue and the enemy in red. In the most advanced U.S. division, the Fourth ID, this wireless Internet system, known as Force XXI Battle Command, Brigade and Below, is installed on nearly every vehicle. But even units such as the Third ID, which have not yet received Force XXI, are far more networked than their predecessors were a decade ago. This advancement cuts down, even if it does not eliminate, "friendly fire" accidents and gives U.S. commanders much better knowledge of the battlefield than their enemies possess. To give an indication of how blinded the Iraqis were, at one point an Iraqi major general tried to escape Baghdad -- and drove straight into a marine checkpoint that he did not know was there. He was killed in a hail of gunfire.

Once enemy forces are located, either through eyes in the sky or boots on the ground, they can be hit faster than ever before. Coordination among the services has improved even since Afghanistan, when the army and the air force traded recriminations about failures of close air support during Operation Anaconda in March 2002. And it is vastly better than it was during the first Gulf War, when three days could elapse between identifying and hitting a target. Then, air tasking orders had to be flown to aircraft carriers. Now those interactions are performed via high-speed satellite and radio relays. In one notable instance, only 45 minutes elapsed on April 7 between the time an intelligence asset detected Saddam meeting with top commanders in Baghdad and the time a B-1B bomber dropped four 2,000-pound satellite-guided bombs on the restaurant.