“Don’t knock the war that feeds you” read a sign on the wall of a Lockheed plant in California in the late 1960s. The bitter struggle in Southeast Asia may have killed millions of people, including 58,000 Americans, but it had been very good for business. It therefore stood to reason that with the outbreak of peace and the withdrawal of the huge U.S. expeditionary force from Vietnam, Pentagon weapons spending would inevitably decline. But that was not what happened. Money authorized for buying weapons and developing new ones ballooned from $26 billion in 1975, as the last shots were fired in Indochina, to $40 billion three years later. Defense-industry profits marched in tandem. In 1976, McDonnell Douglas, then the largest contractor, announced that its profits had grown 75 percent in a year.
The inspiration for the rearmament drive no longer came from third world peasants lurking under the jungle canopy but from something more ominous: the enormous forces of the mighty Soviet Union, supposedly ready, able, and eager to confront the United States across the globe. Intelligence reappraisals of Soviet intentions and capabilities smoothed the way for a readjustment of U.S. defense priorities. In this scenario, the specter of a Soviet blitzkrieg smashing into outnumbered NATO forces in central Europe occupied a central role. The Fulda Gap in the mountains of central Germany, the presumed route of a Soviet invasion, may have been a long way from the Ho Chi Minh Trail, but the dream of remote-controlled warfare, which inevitably led to the drone strikes of the twenty-first century, never died. Five years after closing Task Force Alpha, the Pentagon began planning another electronic barrier.
The project was publicly justified by the assumption that Soviet forces vastly outnumbered NATO defenders, whose only hope supposedly lay in “force-multiplier” high-technology weapons. The military bookkeeping was in truth highly suspect: readily available evidence showed that the numbers were almost even, while Soviet troop and weapons quality was far inferior. Nevertheless the defense lobby effortlessly ignored such discordant notes right up until the day that the USSR finally crumbled, laying bare the sorry state of its vaunted military.
The new barrier fostered by the Pentagon’s DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) in conjunction with the air force and army, was called Assault Breaker. There were no carpets of sensors strewn among the trees this time, but the basic idea was faithful to General Westmoreland’s promise in 1969 of “surveillance devices that can continually track the enemy” and “first round kill probabilities approaching certainty.” Instead of the sensors, airborne radar would peer far behind enemy lines and detect suspicious movements of Soviet “second-echelon” reinforcements moving up behind the front line. An on-board computer would process the information and sort out which signals revealed a genuine target. On the basis of this information, missiles would be launched in the general direction of the enemy. At ten thousand feet above the targeted armored formations, the missiles would burst open and dispense a carpet of self-guiding bombs equipped with heat seekers and tiny radars that would drop down and then search out their armored targets. A variant added a further layer of complexity with “skeet” projectiles that would fly off from the bomb canisters at speed to impact on the tanks. Proponents claimed Assault Breaker could destroy “in a few hours” sufficient vehicles in (Soviet) reinforcement divisions “to prevent their exploiting a breakthrough of NATO defenses,” without—and this was an important selling point—anyone having to resort to nuclear weapons, all for a bargain price of $5.3 billion.
Task Force Alpha had used powerful software programs to try and distinguish trucks from elephants, soldiers from peasants. Assault Breaker followed the same concept: ambiguous sensor signals were processed into coherence by massive computing power, thereby discriminating a tank army from traffic on the autobahn, tanks from East German tractors, and armored personnel carriers from Volkswagens. Even the bombs homing in on the final targets had to be able to decide if a hot spot was really a tank or a smoking bomb crater or some other distraction. Everything depended on recognizing preset patterns. A tank, for example, would be expected to have a distinctive pattern of hot spots to distinguish it from some other heat-emitting object, such as a bus. To disorient the weapon, an enemy merely needed to rearrange the pattern, just as General Nguyen had hung buckets of urine on the Ho Chi Minh Trail.
Presiding over the entire operation was a man destined to exert a potent influence on U.S. defense for decades to come. In 1977 President Carter appointed William J. Perry, an affable Californian defense contractor, to John Foster’s old job overseeing all Pentagon research and development. (Foster had moved to defense contractor TRW Inc. in 1973.) Like Foster before him, Perry loved esoteric weapons projects, and he outmatched his predecessor in his ability to charm all comers. He was soon a popular figure in Washington, conveying an air of deeply considered expertise in the mysteries of defense technology that served him well in selling his agenda while dispensing billions of dollars on development programs that might, if actually put into production, yield contracts worth multiples of the development money. Politicians appreciated his gentlemanly and patient explanations of technological mysteries. The military, though occasionally irritated by his interference in their prerogatives, appreciated his ability to extract money from the politicians. Liberals warmed to his unmilitaristic demeanor, not least his support for strategic nuclear arms limitation agreements.
Before entering government, Perry had spent his career exclusively in the defense-electronics industry, initially for a firm deeply involved in the highly classified ballistic-missile early-warning system. In 1964, he founded Electromagnetic Systems Laboratory (ESL), Incorporated. Located close to Stanford University, the firm grew and prospered in the business of processing digital information from sources such as sensors, radars, and reconnaissance pictures for the U.S. military and National Security Agency.
Perry thus arrived in office with an enduring interest in the ability of technology to cut through the fog of war. “The objective of our precision guided weapon systems is to give us the following capabilities: to be able to see all high value targets on the battlefield at any time; to be able to make a direct hit on any target we can see, and to be able to destroy any target we can hit,” he told a senate committee in 1978. Pentagon officials began referring to Assault Breaker as “Bill Perry’s wet dream.” Comprehensive testing was deferred on the grounds that the system was urgently required in the field. On the few occasions individual components were tested, they tended to fail, and the whole system, with its many steps, was never tested all at once. The General Accounting Office, the watchdog agency that monitors government programs on behalf of Congress, reported in 1981 not only that the system could not tell the difference between armored vehicles and “lower value targets” (trucks or automobiles) but also that these distinctions were “not designed into the advanced development radar and is not part of DARPA’s planned testing.” In other words, the interests behind the program appeared not to care whether it actually worked.
Assault Breaker was formally canceled in 1984, felled by a combination of ballooning costs, failed tests, and bad publicity. But in its dying days it garnered powerful endorsement from a gilt-edged source. “Precision weapons, smart shells, electronic reconnaissance systems,” commented a Soviet military writer in a Pravda article about Assault Breaker in February 1984, “could enable NATO to destroy a potential enemy which is still in its rear staging area.” The Soviets even coined a helpful catchphrase to describe this claimed ability to see everything, strike anything—the “military technical revolution”—and proclaimed their intention of producing their own versions. In no time, talk of this revolution was gathering momentum in U.S. military commentaries, largely thanks to assiduous promotion by an already legendary Pentagon official, Andrew Marshall. Trained as an economist, Marshall had spent his early career at the Rand Corporation, the famed Santa Monica–based think tank staffed with brilliant minds devising nuclear war strategies for the U.S. Air Force, which financed the undertaking. In retrospect it is clear that Rand’s core mission was to devise strategies justifying and whenever possible enhancing the air force budget. When, for example, the navy’s development of invulnerable ballistic-missile submarines threatened the air force’s strategic nuclear monopoly in the early 1960s, Rand quickly served up a rationale for a “counterforce” strategy. According to this theory, the Soviets could be deterred only by precisely targeted nuclear warheads, which would necessitate a crash air force program for new intercontinental missiles with an accuracy that the navy could not deliver.
In 1973, under the patronage of Defense Secretary James R. Schlesinger (a fellow Rand alumnus), Marshall moved to the Pentagon to head a newly created Office of Net Assessment. He was still there, forty years later, in the second Obama administration. In the intervening period he had evolved into an object of reverence, perhaps because his proposals, despite their iconoclastic flavor, somehow never threatened established interests—and often required lavish additions to their budgets. Marshall’s sharp eye for ambitious talent and his skill in the careful deployment of study contracts ensured that, while administrations came and went, generations of mutually supporting graduates of his office were seeded throughout the defense establishment, orbiting between corporations, the bureaucracy, and think tanks.
The eye-catching feature of the revolution in military affairs as popularized by Marshall and others was the emphasis on “precision guidance.” This was a long-anticipated development. At the beginning of World War II the air force had claimed that its recently acquired Norden bomb sight, an instrument carried in the plane to enable the accurate launching of bombs, would ensure that 50 percent of its bombs would fall within 75 feet of their target. The boast went unfulfilled. On an infamous raid against the German ball-bearing works at Schweinfurt in October 1943, with the attackers suffering huge losses and little damage to the plants, only one in ten of Norden-aimed bombs fell within 500 feet of the target. (The device was still being used to drop sensors for the electronic barrier in 1967.) While the Norden sight was an attempt to position a bomber in the correct spot to drop a bomb, postwar efforts were concentrated on ways of guiding a bomb after it had left the bomber. In December 1968, John Foster told an interviewer that although bombing Vietnam had produced “meager results … we’ve recently developed a series of weapons that permit us to get incredible accuracies, as compared with normal aircraft delivery systems. Instead of having accuracies of hundreds of feet, we now talk in terms of ten feet.”
At the time, this had been another idle boast. Repeated efforts to hit “critical” targets in North Vietnam were still missing by hundreds of yards. One such target was a bridge over a river about one hundred miles south of Hanoi near a town called Thanh Hoa that was supposedly crucial to the enemy supply effort. The air force and navy bombed it obsessively with guided and unguided bombs between 1965 and 1972 to zero effect—apart from the loss of dozens of pilots. Finally, in May 1972, the bridge was cut with two laser-guided bombs. Though hailed as a momentous event then and since, it turned out that the Vietnamese had stopped using the bridge years before, while traffic flowed unmolested across an undetected river ford five miles upstream. Meanwhile the bridge itself was put to use as the center of what Pentagon wags termed “a flourishing anti-aircraft school.”
The notion that this triumph of precision might have been irrelevant found little favor where it counted. Under the tutelage of Perry and Defense Secretary Harold Brown (a former nuclear weapons lab director who had also had Perry’s job directing defense research and development), billions of dollars poured into variants of precision guidance, some focused on directing the missile via a little TV camera in its nose or by tracking hot shapes with a heat-seeking infrared camera. Others followed the reflection of an infrared laser beam shone at the target by a pilot or a soldier on the ground. Once Ronald Reagan replaced Carter in 1981, defense spending, already inflated, went into a steeper climb, with the costs of all the revolutionary new weapons systems predictably following suit.
Among these were various subsystems of Assault Breaker that took on independent but nonetheless prosperous lives after the program was officially ended. The heart of the original system had been the component that Perry hoped would make it possible to see “all high value targets on the battlefield at any time.” This radar was “side looking,” meaning that the antenna stretched along the plane’s fuselage and thus looked sideways, which, because of its size (bigger is better for radar antennae), promised to deliver sharper images. By filtering the data’s echoes to display only objects in motion, the system was billed capable of revealing Soviet tank armies moving up in the rear. Unfortunately, it proved all too efficient at detecting any moving object, not merely tanks, but also automobiles and even trees blowing in the wind. Though the problem proved intractable, the program lived on, to the recurring benefit of the Northrop Corporation, under a variety of code names that ultimately settled on JSTARS for Joint Surveillance Target Attack System.
Soon after his appointment by Carter, Perry began assiduously promoting an even more ambitious concept, pouring huge amounts of money into a technology called radar cross-section reduction. This was first invented by the Germans to make their World War II submarine snorkels harder to detect with special shaping to reflect radar waves away from the sender and special materials to absorb radar. Perry renamed the technology “stealth” and changed the security classification from a low-level “confidential” to the highest levels of “top secret.” Intimations that something new and incredibly sensitive was in the works helped to justify the massive funding while simultaneously making test data inaccessible to skeptics. Meanwhile, Perry pursued his grand vision of stealthy cruise missiles and large stealthy aircraft, even stealthy ships. The services were aghast at the impact the inevitably staggering cost would have on more cherished projects, but Perry calmed their fears by promising that the programs would be “technology driven, rather than funding driven,” meaning that there would be no limits on spending for any apparently promising advance in technology. Behind the cloak of secrecy the multibillion-dollar B-2 strategic bomber and the smaller F-117 proceeded slowly and expensively toward production, their performance and, more important, their budgets screened from the outside world.
While these technologically ambitious programs were under development, one program founded on radically different principles was quietly entering service. The A-10 Thunderbolt II, to give it its official name, was commissioned to provide “close air support” to troops actually on the battlefield rather than to attack enemy forces far in the rear. Pilots soon renamed it “the Warthog.” True to its core belief in waging war entirely independently of the other services, the air force had no interest in such a weapon, but there came a moment in the early 1970s when it seemed possible that the army might capture the close air-support mission for itself with a costly new helicopter, a development that would have deleterious effects on the air force budget. Consequently, the service turned to an analyst then working in the Office of the Secretary of Defense known for his unconventional view on the importance of the close-support mission.
Pierre Sprey, a mathematical prodigy whose parents had escaped to the United States from Nice in 1941, had worked summers at Grumman Aerospace from the age of fourteen, the year he was admitted to Yale. By the time he had left Yale at age eighteen and moved to Cornell for his masters, Grumman was paying him as a statistical consultant on programs that included NASA’s Lunar Excursion Vehicle and navy jets. In 1960 he was enlisted to work on an experiment with a direct bearing on “remote sensing” systems of the kind that would one day enable operators looking at a video screen in Nevada to target a truckload of tribesmen on the other side of the world. The experiment was designed to test whether it was worth putting TV cameras in reconnaissance planes to give pilots images better than those they could get with the naked eye.
In a research facility on Long Island a Grumman team crafted a display filled with models of tanks, jeeps, command posts, and other tactical targets, all carefully camouflaged to appear as they would on an actual battlefield. Combat veterans monitored the effort to ensure realism. An observation platform overlooking the display gave observers the same view they would have from an airplane, with a shutter in front of the platform that could be opened to allow only as much time to view the scene, ten or twenty seconds, as a pilot would have as he flew past. In those few seconds the observers were asked to pick out as many targets as they could. Then, for the same amount of time, observers were shown a TV picture using a high-definition camera of a similar display and asked again to look for targets. The results were surprising. Only when the camera had zoomed in enough to show a narrow view, the equivalent of looking down through a soda straw from 15,000 feet up and seeing an area no larger than two tennis courts, were the TV viewers able to find as many targets as those spotted with the naked eye. But the TV viewers also identified five times as many false targets—tanks and other objects that were not there—as those identified with plain eyesight. The implications were very clear: electronic imaging does not depict battlefield reality with the same acuity as the human eye, an essential truth long forgotten by the time the U.S. military and CIA began watching the world via drone-fed video imagery, with tragic consequences for many a false target.
Graduating with a masters in operations research and mathematical statistics, Sprey worked full-time at Grumman for two years until, in 1966, he moved on to the Pentagon as a member of the “whiz kids,” an iconoclastic team of analysts recruited by Defense Secretary McNamara to bring a fresh look to military thinking. Before long, the young mathematician had earned the wrath of air force generals with a study demonstrating that their plan to fight the Soviets in Europe with long-range bombing was essentially worthless and that the only effective use of airpower was in close support of ground forces on the battlefield. Faced with the political necessity of fending off the army’s bid for the close-support mission and the money that went with it, the chief of staff, a devious bureaucratic politician named John McConnell, detailed Sprey, despite the repugnance of his views on air power, to come up with the basic design for a close-support plane that would underbid the army’s helicopter candidate.
Endowed with this high-level support, Sprey conceived a design that enabled pilots to operate low and close to the battlefield (thanks to the plane’s maneuverability and multiple safety features) and thus be in a position to see and judge for themselves what course of action to take. This was a very far cry from the sensor-dependent concepts underpinning the revolution in military affairs, but faced with the threat from the army, the air force went ahead and put the plane into production.
Like all new systems, the A-10, which first flew in 1975, was officially justified by the perennial Soviet threat, which would be confronted in a mighty clash on the plains of Europe sometime in the future. In reality, an actual Soviet invasion of Western Europe seemed highly unlikely (though Andrew Marshall proposed in the 1980s that a weakening USSR might “lash out,” thereby generating a billion-dollar nuclear shelter scheme). Then, to everyone’s complete surprise, opportunity knocked for a real live demonstration of what the post-Vietnam high-technology military could do, and under near-perfect conditions.
Within a few days of Iraq dictator Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in August 1990, U.S. Central Command forces had been rushed to Saudi Arabia to prepare the counterattack. Following in their wake came the air force’s Deputy Director for Strategy, Doctrine, and War-Fighting, Colonel John Warden, complete with a plan for the air force to win the war on its own. Warden, deeply immersed in the subject of bombing, had long ruminated on the theory that identifying and destroying a limited number of specific “centers of gravity” essential to the functioning of an enemy society would lead inescapably to the enemy’s collapse or paralysis.
This was not a new idea; the air force had maintained for years that the destruction of “critical nodes” would ensure such an outcome. The problem had always been how to identify these critical targets, let alone put them out of action. Repeatedly, during bombing campaigns, assaults on supposedly crucial nodes tended to yield minimal effects, so new nodes were designated and targeted. In World War II, for example, ball-bearing plants were succeeded by rail networks, which were followed by oil refineries. None of them brought about the anticipated enemy collapse. In addition, a recurring consequence of these campaigns had been an eventual broadening of target categories, so that in the end, everything got hit. As we shall see, this syndrome applies even when the targets are individual humans rather than things.
Warden believed that technology had changed the equation. New methods of intelligence and surveillance, including radars such as JSTARS, combined with stealth bombers invisible to enemy defenses and precision-guided bombs and missiles would enable U.S. bombers to do their job not only rapidly but with a gratifying economy of force: one plane accomplishing what had required hundreds or thousands of missions in World War II. As for targets, he had developed what he called the “five rings” theory, in which the rings denoted targets of progressively greater criticality, with the innermost representing the enemy leadership. The other rings were “centers of gravity,” such as power plants and communications centers, which, if put out of action, would lead to enemy paralysis in a neat, surgical, and above all predictable manner. Resorting to metaphor, Warden compared an enemy system to the human body, with the brain and nerves representing enemy leadership, bones representing infrastructure, and so on. This sounded like an “organic” approach to war, except of course the human body cannot replicate or bypass lost parts, whereas enemies like General Nguyen, defender of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, certainly could.
Untroubled by such quibbles, Warden and a specially assembled team code-named Checkmate drew up a plan, Instant Thunder, which he was convinced could defeat Iraq without the army firing a shot. The targets associated with each ring were duly posted on a board in Checkmate’s Pentagon basement office. At the top of the “leadership” list, the most important target, was a name: Saddam. Critical nodes were no longer just things—bridges, oil tanks, and power plants—now they could be people. Two days later someone remembered that assassination was officially banned as an instrument of U.S. foreign policy. Saddam’s name was erased and the entry changed to “Isolate and incapacitate Saddam’s regime.”
Under “Expected results,” Warden wrote: “National leadership and command and control destroyed.” He estimated it would take six days. After getting an enthusiastic response from the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Colin Powell, who exclaimed, “This could win the war!,” Warden flew with his team to Saudi Arabia to lay out the plan to General Charles Horner, commander of the coming air war with Iraq.
Horner, a notoriously emotional character, took an instant dislike to the obsessive theorist from Washington and ordered him on the next plane home. However, Warden had brought with him Lieutenant Colonel David Deptula, who had been seconded to the planning team from the office of the secretary of the air force. Deptula, a former fighter pilot like Warden, had developed greater skills as a bureaucratic politician. Earlier in 1990 he had coined the air force’s new motto: “Global Reach—Global Power,” the title of a manifesto he penned at the secretary’s request, touting the air force’s unique and enduringly desirable attributes of “speed, range, precision, and lethality” in a changing world when the Soviet threat appeared to be going away. These assets, he noted, offered “decisive capabilities against potentially well-equipped foes at minimum cost in casualties—increasingly important in an era in which we believe the American people will have low tolerance for prolonged combat operations or mounting casualties.”
While a despondent Warden flew back to Washington, Deptula had ingratiated himself sufficiently with Horner to stay in Riyadh and was soon ensconced at headquarters as the chief attack planner for the coming war. With Warden’s ideas and Horner’s backing, he was about to make his reputation.
The air attack on Iraq launched on January 16, 1991, incorporated the basic scheme of Instant Thunder and appeared to be a triumphant success. Lights went out all over the country. Military and other government headquarters were neatly demolished without damage to their neighbors. Within a few days, residential streets in affluent districts of the capital bore the stench of meat that had rotted in freezers left without power. Adding to the triumph were the TV broadcasts of videos beamed from the bombs’ cameras as they unerringly zeroed in on their targets. For the first time the public at home could watch and thrill at the air force’s “precision and lethality” administered with cool professional efficiency. (The navy, to its chagrin, had not installed the necessary equipment for broadcasting the videos and was thus bested in the public relations war.) Publicity regarding the hitherto highly secret Lockheed F-117 stealth bomber, with its excitingly futuristic design and mystique of invisibility, only added to the allure. As Lockheed publicists reported, on the first night of the war, the plane had “collapsed Saddam Hussein’s air defenses and all but eliminated Iraq’s ability to wage coordinated war.” Not to be outdone, Texas Instruments, makers of the Paveway III laser bomb-guidance system, advertised “one target, one bomb.”
Even at the time there were some disquieting indications that not everything was going as predicted. Though the Iraqi air force had been easily neutralized, the Iraqi army remained obdurately in place in Kuwait, clearly still receiving and responding to orders from Baghdad. When Iraqi Scuds fired from mobile launchers started landing on Tel Aviv, intense surveillance efforts using all available technologies failed to find a single launcher. The Iraqi army was driven out of Kuwait only when attacked and outmaneuvered by U.S. and allied ground troops. Saddam, the one-man innermost ring, remained alive and in charge.
Nevertheless, the impression prevailed that the war had been an unalloyed triumph for airborne technology. The promises of Foster, Westmoreland, Perry, and Deptula had been dramatically vindicated, as some of them were happy to point out. Writing soon after the war, Perry celebrated the success of various systems he had fostered and championed, including JSTARS and other surveillance systems—“manned and unmanned”—that had tracked the enemy on a continual basis, not to mention the stealth bombers, 80 percent of whose bombs, he claimed, had destroyed their targets. Andrew Marshall was quick to catch the wave, encouraging a military assistant, Andrew Krepinevich, to pen a pamphlet, “The Military-Technical Revolution: A Preliminary Assessment,” that echoed Warden’s nostrums about centers of gravity, precision strikes, and other possibilities of the new technology. A year later it was reissued with the catchier title “Revolution in Military Affairs,” a phrase that was soon firmly lodged in the defense-intellectual lexicon.
Deptula, who had moved back to the air staff headquarters in Washington, also took to print. The operation he had planned and directed, he began telling the world, had marked a “Change in the Nature of Warfare.” The new technologies, especially stealth, had spawned “parallel warfare,” whereby it was possible to attack and disable an enemy in one fell swoop, rather than sequentially eliminating air defenses and then other targets, thus foreclosing the enemy’s ability to recover.
Over time, Deptula expanded his vision, unveiling the concept of effects-based operations, the notion that precision now made it possible “not just to impede the means of the enemy to conduct war or the will of the people to continue war, but the very ability of the enemy to control its vital functions.” In other words, it was now possible so thoroughly to understand the way an enemy system functioned, its “centers of gravity,” as he (and Warden) termed it, as to predict precisely the reverberating effects of destroying a particular target. It was a beguiling concept, especially to the air force at a time when the disappearance of the Soviet enemy threatened U.S. military budget cuts.
Unfortunately, the Gulf War as invoked by Deptula, Perry, Marshall, and others was not the war that had been fought. True, most of Iraq’s power supply had been knocked out on the first night or shortly afterward, reducing Iraqi civilian society to a preindustrial state in one stroke. All major bridges met the same fate, as did the phone system, TV, and radio. The Iraqi army had certainly been hard hit from the air, though most of the damage was inflicted not by the huge allied fleet of high-speed jets but by a force of 122 A-10s that had been reluctantly dispatched by the air force to the Gulf at the urgent insistence of commander in chief General Norman Schwarzkopf. Thanks to its carefully designed attributes of ruggedness and maneuverability at low altitudes, the plane proved supremely effective at destroying Iraqi armor and other units in the field, so much so that the emotional General Horner was famously moved to signal the Pentagon that “the A-10 saved my ass.”
Meanwhile, despite expectations (and media exhortations to “go after” the Iraqi dictator), Saddam Hussein, the “first circle,” had been neither hit nor cut off from control of his government. Inevitably, he had reacted and adapted. As former Iraqi military intelligence chief Wafiq al-Sammarai explained to me later, “Saddam would come to my headquarters every day but at random times. He traveled in an ordinary Baghdad taxi, just with a driver. No guards or entourage.” Al-Sammarai himself had moved out of his headquarters a day before the war and watched from his new location as the U.S. carefully gutted his empty former office.
Even systems that had demonstrably failed could bask in the warm glow of the technological triumph. Thus JSTARS’ side-looking radar, the system originally developed for Assault Breaker to detect Soviet tank columns, could find no sign of the mobile Scud launchers moving stealthily about the deserts of western Iraq, despite their being the highest-priority target of the war. (The two prototypes of this system used in the war zone were inside preowned Boeing 707s. Previously used to ship cattle around the Middle East, they stank of cow manure.)
Needless to say, the various official and semiofficial post mortems did not stress such aspects of the conflict, and so the merits of pinpoint accuracy and invisible planes went unchallenged while the relevant weapons programs, and the corporations that sold them, grew and prospered. Only in 1996, when the General Accounting Office published the results of a diligent three-year investigation, did light dawn on what had actually happened. The F-117 had not flown unescorted and unafraid to its targets. It always needed the company of many escorting planes dedicated to jamming the enemy radars that supposedly could not see the Lockheed plane anyhow. So far from “one target, one bomb,” it had taken an average of four of the most accurate laser weapons, and sometimes ten, to destroy a target. Overall, the investigators concluded, “Many of DOD’s and manufacturers’ postwar claims about weapons system performance … were overstated, misleading, inconsistent with the best available data, or unverifiable.”
It didn’t make any difference. By the time the investigators issued their sobering findings, the revolution in military affairs was carrying all before it. Though defense spending overall sank for a few years—the superpower enemy poised to pour through the Fulda Gap had disappeared, after all—research in and development of all the exciting possibilities foreshadowed in the Desert Storm triumph roared ahead, much of it aimed at the same goals that Igloo White and Task Force Alpha had pursued so many years before.
Catchphrases such as “system of systems” and “net-centric warfare,” introduced in the 1990s, were still expressions of the idea that it is feasible to collect, sift, and use information with a minimum of human intervention. “If we are able to view a strategic battlefield and prevent an enemy from doing so, we have dominant battlefield awareness,” Admiral William Owens, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Congress in 2001, “and we are certain to prevail in a conflict.” Owens, an influential figure who talked about RMA (revolution in military affairs) a lot, also coined the acronym ISR for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, a term destined to loom ever larger in intelligence planning and budgets. Other high-ranking officers talked wistfully of how “if we had today’s sensors, we would have won in Vietnam.”
Another influential admiral, Arthur Cebrowski, is credited with inventing the term net-centric to describe the virtues and possibilities of connecting all sources of information—planes, ships, drones, the more the better—to put them in constant communication with a central processor and each other. He drew inspiration from the Wal-Mart chain of superstores, deemed a net-centric organization because every time a cash register rang up a light-bulb sale, a central computer automatically ordered a new bulb from the supplier.
Much of the excitement had been generated by the rapidly increasing power of computers. The Pentium III microprocessor introduced in 1998, for example, had a “clock speed” eighty times faster than that of Task Force Alpha’s IBM 360/65 and over a hundred thousand times more directly accessible memory. But while computers had become more powerful, the sensors providing the information, such as infrared and TV cameras, still could not distinguish one hot spot from another or see through smoke or haze. These were facts of life that would not go away.
This inherent problem was apparently lost on Cebrowski, who suggested that if every soldier and warplane was connected up like the Wal-Mart cash registers, an entire force could operate as a coordinated mechanism, identifying and destroying targets with maximum efficiency and discrimination. Jasons pondering how to block the Ho Chi Minh Trail back in the summer of 1966 would have caught on to the idea immediately. Unsurprisingly, the defense intelligentsia was quick to fall into line. Two Rand Corporation researchers, David Ronfeldt and John Arquilla, academic foot soldiers in the revolution in military affairs, popularized the notions of “cyberwar” and “netwar” as well as the catchy slogan “It takes a network to defeat a network.”
Meanwhile, politicians were getting in on the act. In 1996 Senators Joseph Lieberman and Dan Coats sponsored a National Defense Panel as a forum to advance “the revolution in military affairs.” Andrew Krepinevich, the Marshall aide who had coined the revolutionary slogan, was picked to represent the senate Democrats on the panel. The Republicans selected a burly former naval officer and fellow graduate of the Marshall office, Richard Armitage. Their report, “Transforming Defense: National Security in the 21st Century,” was a paean to revolutionary techno-wizardry, thanks to which a transformed military would be able to “project power” around the globe. Prominent in their conception was a huge role for unmanned aircraft—drones—in every aspect of the fight. “Air forces,” for example “would place greater emphasis on operating at extended ranges, relying heavily on long-range aircraft and extended-range unmanned systems, employing advanced precision and brilliant munitions.… Aircraft, unmanned aerial vehicles, and unmanned combat aerial vehicles operating in theater could stage at peripheral bases outside enemy missile range…”
Not everyone bought in. Paul Van Riper, for example, an acerbic and somewhat intimidating three-star marine general, publicly derided the doctrine of “information superiority,” as preached by Owens, Cebrowski, and others, which he said consisted of “sweeping assertions and dogmatic platitudes.” Nor did Van Riper think much of airpower enthusiasts in general, on occasion delivering a speech entitled “From Douhet to Deptula, a History of Failed Promises” in which he referred scathingly to “those who espouse much of the current nonsense” coming from “organizations within the armed forces that are generally far removed from the confusion and horror of the close-in fighting that occurs in real war.… ‘Fighting’ for them revolves around the movement of icons and tracks on a screen.” A Vietnam combat veteran who had made a name for himself as a junior officer for “leading from the front,” Van Riper was amazed, as he told me later, “that people who were smart could believe this stuff. The hubris was unbelievable.”
Such critiques had little effect, partly because the most influential figure in U.S. defense policy for most of the 1990s was William Perry, who returned to the Pentagon as deputy defense secretary in 1993 and was promoted to secretary the following year. Among his first acts was to direct and subsidize a series of mergers among the major defense contractors on the grounds that the end of the cold war rendered a spending famine inevitable. As it turned out the relatively small decline that did occur lasted only for a brief period in the 1990s, after which spending began once again to edge up and then soar far above even the cold war’s bountiful levels. Meanwhile Perry continued to pursue the dream, unrealized in Desert Storm, of seeing “all high value targets on the battlefield at any time.”
Perry’s undeviating objectives were of course a reaffirmation of those pursued by his predecessor, John Foster, ardent proponent of Task Force Alpha. But Foster, the model-airplane enthusiast, had felt no less strongly about the ultimate weapon that would not only see all those high-value targets but also destroy them. In 1973, in his final session of congressional testimony before a deferential house committee, Foster was asked about his priorities for defense. “To improve surveillance” over land and sea, he answered, and “to get remotely controlled vehicles that can perform that surveillance and the attack missions.” The age of drones was not far off.
Foster had hoped that unmanned aircraft might play their part over the Ho Chi Minh Trail, but the effort had proved unsuccessful. Even so, money continued to sluice into drone development for some time after the United States had pulled out of Vietnam, but it was difficult to pretend that drones could defend themselves against Soviet antiaircraft missiles and fighters. For that, a thinking pilot on the scene was obviously necessary. Even so, Boeing and other defense corporations mobilized support in Congress for various drone projects, including Condor, an enormous high-flier proposed by Boeing, with a wingspan wider than that of a 747. None got further than the test stage.
But with the Soviets gone, the U.S. military would now be operating where there was little or no danger from unfriendly fire in the air, a perfect time for drones to flourish. Civil wars in defenseless Somalia, Bosnia, and elsewhere provided a strong rationale for ever more surveillance, for which drones were thought to be ideal.
Perry helped speed the process along by setting up a special office under his direct control called the Defense Airborne Reconnaissance Office to develop and buy a whole new generation of drones. Most of these projects never came into service. One that did was called Predator, the weapon that in the eyes of large parts of the world would one day come to define America.