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.

The precision of U.S. airpower is by now well known and almost taken for granted, but it continues to improve. In the first Gulf War only 9 percent of munitions were precision-guided. In the most recent conflict, that figure soared to 70 percent. Much of this increase was due to the deployment in the late 1990s of Joint Direct Attack Munitions (JDAMS), a cheap ($20,000) kit that can turn dumb bombs into satellite-guided smart bombs. Aside from their price tag, JDAMS enjoy other important advantages over the laser-guided smart bombs used in the first Gulf War: They can operate in all weather conditions and at all altitudes. The use of JDAMS has made it possible to turn even high-flying bombers such as the B-1, B-2, and B-52 into close air support platforms. Previously, they would have been judged too imprecise for use close to friendly troops or in urban areas. No longer.

Paradoxically, increasing precision makes U.S. firepower both more effective and less destructive. Because U.S. bombs can hit within a meter or two of their aim point, they can carry a lighter load of explosives. U.S. war planners tried hard to minimize collateral damage by employing the smallest possible munitions to get the job done, on occasion going so far as to drop bombs filled with nothing but concrete. Saddam's regime sought to take advantage of U.S. sensitivities by locating military installations among schools, hospitals, and mosques. But even with such dire provocations, U.S. forces still took great care to spare civilians. The U.S. air campaign never deliberately targeted water and power facilities in Baghdad, as had happened during the first Gulf War. (Electrical power failed anyway on April 4 for reasons that remain mysterious.) Ground forces also did their best to avoid killing civilians, even though Saddam's thugs used human shields in blatant violation of the laws of war. Even though U.S. Army doctrine favors nighttime operations, the 101st Airborne Division operated mainly during the daytime -- because, as one of its brigade commanders put it, "You can much more easily discern civilians during the daytime." No one knows how many civilians were killed in the second Gulf War, but even Saddam's regime, which had an obvious interest in exaggerating the figures, claimed the total was no more than 1,254 as of April 3 -- a remarkably low number considering the savagery of the fighting.

A large part of the reason why U.S. forces wanted to limit civilian casualties was that they were fighting a battle for hearts and minds -- primarily in Iraq but also in the rest of the world. As part of this campaign, a massive propaganda blitz preceded the start of ground operations. U.S. forces used leaflets, radio broadcasts, faxes, e-mails, and other means to urge Iraqi troops not to fight. This campaign did not prevent all resistance, obviously, but it contributed to the decision of most regular army units to stay out of the fray.

Saddam waged his own psychological operations campaign. In an attempt to rally international public opinion against the war and to keep his own people fighting, his TV station broadcast nonstop pictures of U.S. prisoners of war and of Iraqi civilians supposedly killed by coalition air strikes. U.S. forces were surprisingly slow to target Iraqi TV transmitters, and even when a Predator took out a satellite dish with its Hellfire missile on March 25, the Baathists managed to keep broadcasting for a time with redundant systems. Gradually, however, Iraqi propaganda became too far divorced from reality to be effective. Information Minister Muhammad Saeed al-Sahhaf became a global joke as he kept proclaiming that coalition troops were nowhere near Baghdad -- even as they were just a few miles away.

The United States waged a much smarter information war, the centerpiece of which was the program of "embedding" reporters among coalition units. This move succeeded in bridging the chasm of distrust between the media and the military. Indeed, before long reporters were referring to U.S. forces as "we" rather than "they" ("Lester, we're moving out now ..."). The embedded reporters presented a convincing picture of the professionalism, heroism, and restraint of U.S. and British soldiers. This may not have won over the Arab world, where the media focused almost exclusively on alleged American atrocities, but it did help to sway many Westerners who had been skeptical of the war. As the war's success became evident, support surged in public opinion polls across Europe, America, Australia, and Canada.

Psychological operations are the responsibility of the Special Operations Command. The commandos also handled a number of other missions, from securing western Iraq, to leading Kurdish resistance in the north, to hunting down leadership targets in Baghdad, contributing greatly to the final outcome. In the first Gulf War, Schwarzkopf was wary of the "snake eaters" and used them sparingly. In the second Gulf War, Franks made better use of them, and they delivered outstanding results as "force multipliers."

Although special operations forces are the best of the best, U.S. troops as a whole displayed remarkable skills in Iraq. They were able to fight effectively for long stretches at a time, react quickly to events, and avoid most of the traps the Iraqis had laid for them. The little-heralded logisticians deserve special praise for keeping so many fast-moving troops so well supplied.

Rumsfeld and Franks tried to sell the story that everything went "according to plan." It did not, but the true genius of U.S. forces was their ability to improvise on the spot rather than stick to a rigid blueprint. The troops' fighting edge, honed by realistic training programs, and nonstop overseas operations since the end of the Cold War, allowed coalition forces to fully leverage the benefits of superior technology.

FIGHTING THE NEXT WAR

What lessons does the second Gulf War offer about the future shape of the U.S. military? Although the increased potency of airpower was clearly on display -- it took six weeks to destroy the Republican Guard in 1991 and just a week this time around -- the air force still has not realized the dreams of Giulio Douhet, Billy Mitchell, and other early advocates of airpower, who claimed that aerial bombardment could win wars by itself. Nato tried that approach in Kosovo in 1999, and it was not stunningly successful: 11 weeks of bombing left most of the Serbian army intact. Slobodan Milosevic eventually sued for peace, in large part because he was abandoned by Russia and feared that he might face a ground invasion, but it is doubtful that he would have capitulated if the allied goal had been to liberate the entire country rather than just one province. Four days of air raids against Iraq in December 1988 -- Operation Desert Fox -- achieved even less. Nor did Saddam's regime crumble during the first few days of the more recent bombing of Baghdad; he was neither shocked nor awed by the initial onslaught. The problem is that airpower's edge can be blunted by dispersing and concealing defensive forces; it takes ground forces to root out hidden troops. Airpower by itself is also incapable of preventing Scud launchings or oil-field destruction, both of which were precluded in the second Gulf War through early ground action by conventional and commando forces.