Military Nears Revolution in Weapons, War Strategy

FT. BENNING, Ga. — High above the 200-mile-long battle zone in the Middle East, a pilotless Air Force radar plane controlled from a U.S. air base in Missouri charts the precise location of all American and enemy troops, weapons and equipment. It transmits the information to U.S. air, land and sea forces all over the globe and, almost simultaneously, jams enemy air defenses and attacks military and civilian targets with super laser beams.

A hundred miles offshore, a newly developed Navy “arsenal ship”--partially submerged and almost invisible both to radar and to the naked eye--fires hundreds of long-range, precision-guided missiles capable of hitting within 10 feet of their targets every time. A few moments later, Army attack helicopters and ground-launchers use laser-guided missiles to knock out enemy tanks and ammunition depots from miles away.

Small teams of soldiers and Marines--most of them flown in from bases in the United States--race into enemy urban areas, able to stay in touch via belt-carried minicomputers that pinpoint enemy soldiers and keep American troops apprised of everything from the weather to their pulse rates. Within five days the enemy surrenders, and the war is over.

This scenario is still fantasy--but perhaps not for long. The United States may be on the verge of one of the most-sweeping revolutions in military technology and combat tactics since the days of Napoleon.

When everything is in place, the new weaponry will make the high-tech gadgetry used in the 1991 Persian Gulf War--such as precision-guided munitions that dropped down factory chimneys--seem like bows and arrows.

Ultra-long-range weapons are designed to greatly reduce the risk of American casualties. That, in turn, will force the military to revamp both its basic strategy and its traditional structure--the divisions, regiments, battalions and companies that have been a staple of armies for 150 years--by paring them sharply and eliminating middle-level bureaucracies, just as many private corporations are doing. It also will require the four services to work together as a team far more closely than ever before.

Already in Place

The changes are being developed here at an Army “battle laboratory” and at similar installations in each of the services. Some of the new technology is already in place. Much is due to be ready by the turn of the century. And some won’t come online until about 2020.

Central to the new warfare are eye-popping advances in the technology of finding the enemy. Radar and infrared images from satellites and unmanned aircraft, and sound from ground sensors, will locate and identify enemy forces. Night-vision optics will enable U.S. troops to target an enemy in the dark and in bad weather. Invisible laser beams will enable ordinary soldiers to aim their weapons with precision.

Equally important, the military will have the ability to transmit battlefield information instantly to commanders and foot soldiers alike. Information in many forms, from a space-eye, up-to-the-second map of the battlefield to the picture in the night-vision scope on the weapon of the infantry soldier on the ground, can be flashed immediately to points all over the globe.

The Defense Department is only beginning to develop weapons that can take advantage of all this information. Gone, says Andrew W. Marshall, the Pentagon’s leading futurist, will be today’s practice of locating an enemy by satellite and sending in troops for a direct attack. Instead, the military of 2025 will launch long-range strikes with precision-guided missiles, linked to high-tech sensors and command systems, to destroy the enemy.

The force of the future, Marshall predicts, will not be satisfied to establish air superiority over a battlefield. It will also seek to win “information superiority” by destroying, disrupting or deceiving an enemy’s sensors and computer systems.

Put it all together, and commanding an army will become like playing a giant video game in which the services can coordinate their actions as never before and soldiers in the field can directly influence a commander’s decisions.

Battlefields will be far larger: up to 200 miles on a side, compared with the 10- to 20-mile square that usually serves as an action zone today.

The pace of the battle will be far more frenetic than it was during the Gulf War, with the fighting routinely continuing through night and bad weather. Wars will probably be won or lost in a few days or possibly a few weeks--not in the months or years that they have traditionally lasted.

Even logistics will become more efficient. Precision navigation and improved communications will enable commanders to deliver weapons and materiel whenever and wherever the forces require it, reducing the need for huge staging areas.

With improved intelligence, communications and weaponry, the services will need far fewer layers of command, fewer personnel to fight and to maintain weapons and equipment, and substantially less ammunition and fuel. Doctrine and tactics will have to be rewritten almost from scratch.

However, the services will need a high caliber of both officers and enlisted men to operate in the new, high-tech military. Standards for recruiting, already high, may have to be lifted another notch or two. Army Col. James M. Dubik, a brigade commander at the 10th Mountain Division at Ft. Drum, N.Y., suggests that the military may eventually have to exclude officer candidates who are not computer-literate.

Greater Vulnerability

The United States will have to worry that the enemy will come upon the same technology, if less quickly. Brian R. Sullivan, an analyst at the National Defense University, warns, for example, that traditional “large weapons platforms”--such as aircraft carriers, manned aircraft and tanks--will become far more vulnerable. The services may have to develop alternatives, and quickly.

Unlike the case in previous years, the military will not develop the technology itself. With commercial firms surging so far ahead, the services will buy most of their technology “off the shelf” and adapt it for military use.

Not everyone is convinced that the so-called revolution in military affairs will provide the United States with quite the outsized advantage that proponents contend.

With most of the basic technology now manufactured commercially, adversaries can easily acquire enough high-tech weapons.

For example, the global positioning system, which uses transmissions from satellites to tell the users exactly where they are in latitude and longitude, is already available from boating supply stores. France and Germany are marketing commercial communications satellites.

Now that potential opponents know a good deal about how the United States uses sophisticated weapons, they can take steps to neutralize them by deploying antiship missiles and disrupting U.S. military computers. This worries Defense Secretary William J. Perry, who led efforts to develop radar-evading “stealth” technology in the late 1970s.

“The things we were doing were readily defeatable in Desert Storm [the Gulf War], had the Iraqis known how to do it or been smart enough to do it,” he says. Protecting America’s advantage in this field “is not going to be so easy the next time around,” Perry warns.

Then, too, while the new long-range weaponry might do well in major land wars, military strategists argue that it is likely to be less valuable for peacekeeping missions, such as the one in Bosnia, which they expect to make up the bulk of the combat action the military sees.

Harlan K. Ullman, a longtime defense analyst, notes in a new book, “In Irons: U.S. Military Might in the New Century,” that “a lesson driven home in Vietnam is that technological superiority is never the only guarantee of victory.”

Indeed, the Marine Corps, seeing its near-term future linked to peacekeeping-style operations, has decided that while the futuristic space-age laser weapons may do fine in all-out wars, they would be of little real value in a crowded city such as Sarajevo.

As a result, the Marines are veering away from the pack and concentrating on finding the kinds of technology that can be used in smaller, urban-area firefights.

Finally, experts point out that using the new space-age technology will not be cheap. Firing 23 Tomahawk land-attack missiles at Iraq’s central intelligence headquarters in June 1993, may have added a touch of drama, but it took $30 million to replace the expended missiles--far more than an air-strike would have cost. (Each Tomahawk carries a 1,000-pound bomb--a relatively weak weapon for a protected or widely dispersed target.)

Big Savings Possible

Even so, analysts say the technology itself may produce huge savings in other areas:

* The Army is experimenting with a sensor-guided antitank rocket system that is five times as lethal as the M1A1 tank and has 50% more range. Mounted on a light armored vehicle, it would require far less fuel to transport and one-fourth the troops to operate and maintain.

* A long-range land missile guided by fiber optics has several times the range and precision of an ordinary howitzer and 86 times the lethality. Carried on a Humvee, it would be 30 times as fuel-efficient and be operated by only one-quarter of the troops the howitzer requires.

* The Marines are testing a launch device that enables battlefield commanders to launch quickly low-orbit satellites to provide in-theater support for specific missions for periods of up to 30 days.

At least some of the new technology is already in the military pipeline. The Army has set up five battle laboratories to try to find ways that the military can apply new technology to combat.

The Air Force has just completed a major study, conducted by a board of scientific advisors, on what air battles will be like in the 21st century. The Marines have established a “warfighting laboratory” at Quantico, Va., and the Navy has similar studies underway.

The Army “battle laboratory” at Ft. Benning has begun testing vastly improved night-vision scopes and laser beams that can enable foot soldiers to spot enemies in pitch-black night and target them with an invisible laser that an entire platoon can use as an aiming device.

It also is experimenting with digital technology that will tell field commanders, among other things, precisely where each of their soldiers is, how much ammunition he has fired and what his pulse rate is--a handy clue for medics in deciding which of the wounded to treat first.

Col. Arnold J. Canada, the lab’s director, says initial tests using laser-equipped M-1 rifles have shown that a soldier can hit a target at night almost as well as in broad daylight. “This isn’t Buck Rogers--it’s doable today,” Canada says.

Col. Tony Wood, head of the Marines’ new war-fighting laboratory, says the corps is striving to find ways to use existing technology, such as ground-sensors and cellular telephones, to improve short-term performance on the battlefield. “It’s really back to the ‘Small Wars Manual’ in some respects,” Wood declares.

Analysts say the military’s biggest problem will be how to bring all its forces under a common command-and-control system in order for the services to function as a single unit.

Micromanaging Fears

Close behind will be determining how much of the force should have access to specific portions of the information being gleaned from satellites and sensors. Some strategists worry that if top commanders get too much information--what the foot soldier is seeing through night-vision goggles, for example--they may be tempted to micromanage the battle.

Andrew F. Krepinevich, a former Army officer who heads the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, says that the services’ steps toward the force of the future have been halting, partly for lack of research and development money and partly because of inertia among the military leadership.

“The American military “has only begun to exploit the potential” of the emerging technology, Krepinevich says. “It has yet to identify those technological systems that promise the most payback. It has yet to develop operational concepts for introducing them into the force structure, and it has yet to develop clear doctrine and operational concepts for using them.”

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The New Military

Sunday: The lack of a widely accepted mission is hurting current preparedness and depriving the military of a chance to reshape itself for the next century.

Monday: The men and women of the U.S. armed forces, widely regarded as the most capable in the nation’s history, face an uncertain future.

Today: Revolutionary changes in weapons will force the military to revamp both its basic strategy and its traditional structure.