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.

But if the new American way of war cannot obviate the need for "ground pounders," it can make them more lethal, thereby reducing the need for numbers. As the conflict in Iraq repeatedly demonstrated, a good deal of the firepower that once could be delivered only by tanks and howitzers can now come from the air.

This could leave the future of armored forces in some doubt. It should not. The heavy units proved their worth in Iraq. There was no replay of Black Hawk Down largely because U.S. forces fighting in Iraqi cities had armor, and those who fought in Mogadishu in 1993 did not. Having these armored beasts at their disposal allowed U.S. forces in Iraq to advance at a fast clip, with great confidence that they could handle anything thrown their way. Only three Abrams tanks were disabled, and all their crew members survived.

The problem with armored forces is that they are hard to deploy and hard to supply. (The Abrams tank weighs 70 tons and gets half a mile per gallon of fuel.) The experience of the Fourth ID, which never got into the fight, shows just how formidable these challenges can be. Army old-timers who argued for more heavy forces ignored the difficulties of funneling them through Kuwait's single port and keeping them supplied over hundreds of miles. To address this problem, the army is equipping six brigades with the Stryker, a wheeled fighting vehicle that is much lighter, and hence more easily deployable, than an Abrams tank. But the lightness comes with a price: the Stryker's armor cannot stop anything heavier than a .50 caliber bullet. The Stryker should be fine for peacekeeping, but for high-intensity combat the army needs to hold on to its armored forces, though possibly not as many as it currently deploys.

It may make sense to transform some heavy armored units into lighter, more deployable formations. It makes no sense to reduce the size of the army as whole, an idea that Rumsfeld once toyed with. The army has already shrunk from 18 active-duty divisions in 1990 to 10 today -- a force that is not adequate for all its responsibilities, which include deployments in Afghanistan, Bosnia, Kosovo, Sinai, South Korea, and now Iraq. The army is overstretched and having to lean more heavily on the reserves and the National Guard for vital functions such as policing and civil affairs. These part-time soldiers are not happy about becoming full-timers. The marines should pick up some of the slack by shouldering occupation duties in Iraq and elsewhere. But the active-duty army still needs to be increased in size. Airpower, no matter how awesome, cannot police newly liberated countries -- or build democratic governments.

The army needs to tackle the task of "imperial" policing -- not a popular duty, but one that is as vital to safeguarding U.S. interests in the long run as are the more conventional war-fighting skills on display during the second Gulf War. The Army War College's decision to shut down its Peacekeeping Institute is not a good sign; it means that the army still wants to avoid focusing on noncombat missions. The army brass should realize that battlefield victories in places like Afghanistan and Iraq can easily be squandered if they do not do enough to win the peace.

The air force has taken a starring role in recent years primarily through bombing missions in support of ground forces. This has been a bit of culture shock for a service that has traditionally favored either air-to-air engagements or "strategic" bombing. "Tactical" bombing is derided as "tank plinking." This is an old story going all the way back to World War II, when the only way that Eisenhower could be sure of getting adequate air support for D-Day was to gain operational control of the tactical air forces; left to their own devices, air force generals would have allocated all their aircraft for bombing German cities. The air force has done a great deal to overcome this mindset in recent years, but traces of it still linger.

The air force has only 60 B-1B bombers (and only 36 of them are combat-ready) and 21 B-2 bombers (16 combat-ready), forcing it to continue relying on 76 aging B-52HS (44 combat-ready) and on short-range, low-capacity fighter/bombers such as the F-15 and the F-16. The last B-52 was built in 1962, and they are scheduled to stay in service past 2040. Yet the air force has no immediate plans to acquire more bombers, and it is anxious to retire the slow-flying A-10 Warthog, which is designed expressly for ground support and which proved its worth again in Iraq. Its big acquisitions projects are the F/A-22 Raptor and, in conjunction with the navy and the marines, the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter -- both short-range aircraft with limited bomb capacity, which makes them dependent on forward bases that may not always be available. Building one new fighter makes sense, but two seems excessive, given that in Iraq, as in just about every conflict since Vietnam, the air force's mission was ground attack.

Congress should repeal the absurd law that prevents the army, with some minor exceptions, from fielding any fixed-wing aviation of its own. If the air force does not want the A-10, let the army take it over to supplement its helicopters, the vulnerability of which to ground fire and plain old mechanical malfunctions was once again demonstrated in Iraq.

Just as the air force is slowly weaning itself from the excitement of air-to-air engagements, so the navy is learning to live in a world in which ship-to-ship battles are increasingly rare. Like that of the air force, the primary function of the navy these days is support of ground operations. Roughly half the coalition aircraft in the second Gulf War came from five navy carriers positioned in the Mediterranean and the Persian Gulf. Yet the navy's most capable ground-attack aircraft, the A-6 Intruder, which delivered more ordnance during Vietnam than the B-52, was mothballed after the first Gulf War. The navy is forced to rely on F-14s and F-18s, which have short ranges and limited bomb capacity. The navy, too, needs to concentrate more on ground support -- a mission that marine aviators, who also operate off carriers, specialize in.

These are only a few examples of how the military must continue the transformation process after the second Gulf War. More surveillance platforms, such as the JSTARS and the Global Hawk, are needed, as well as more bandwidth to allow all these systems to communicate with one another. U.S. forces used 30 times more bandwidth in Operation Iraqi Freedom than in Desert Storm, and the need for speed will only keep growing. Satisfying this need, and many others, will be expensive. Even though the defense budget is starting to grow again, it is still inadequate to address all of the military's deficiencies after the procurement holiday of the 1990s. A transformational military will actually cost more than the old force, but the result will be worth it, since it will allow the U.S. military to continue winning wars at a small cost in lives.