Col. Kenneth Allard on Technology's Impact on the War in Iraq

Mon, September 22, 2003 — CIO — Because the American military does not believe in re-fighting the last war in Iraq, it is proceeding with after-action reviews and analyzing lessons learned. But it is not too soon to suggest that Gulf War II will be remembered as a conflict in which information fully took its place as a weapon of war.

Just as the railroad, the telegraph and more accurate battlefield weaponry made the American Civil War the harbinger of industrial age conflict, consider the only more pronounced effects of the information age weapons used during Operation Iraqi Freedom:

Clusters of unmanned aerial vehicles loitered over the battlefield for hours, providing continuous surveillance and occasionally serving as convenient launch platforms when attractive targets were spotted.
Complementary groups of aerial surveillance platforms, including aircraft and satellites, were able to pinpoint Iraqi forces in daylight and darkness—and in weather conditions that included sandstorms of biblical proportion.
Precise navigation allowed controllers to distinguish American troops, vehicles and logistics from those of the enemy. Armed with this information, pilots programmed an array of precision munitions that hit Iraqi targets with devastating accuracy while largely, though never completely, avoiding collateral damage to civilian facilities and minimizing the ever-present problem of "friendly fire."
Networks of satellite communications and tactical data arrays enabled information-sharing quite literally from the foxhole to the Pentagon. Military services whose lack of interoperability had been proverbial ("We have only the same travel agent in common..." ) now found themselves linked to each other and coalition partners with a pervasive connectivity that allowed everything from the exchange of e-mail and graphics via battlefield laptops to interactive chat room discussions between widely separated command headquarters.

The tactical results of this information flow could be appreciated in several ways. Iraqi artillery batteries could barely fire before American ground and aerial surveillance spotted and fixed on their positions. The information was immediately passed either by voice or tactical data links to Army ground stations or fighters, setting the stage for devastatingly accurate return fire by rockets or artillery—a "sensor-to-shooter" sequence usually completed within seconds or minutes. Iraqi air defenders quickly learned that to radiate their fire control radars was to invite an immediate audience with the Almighty as U.S. Air Force high-speed antiradiation missiles almost invariably found their marks. Consequently, the Iraqis mostly fired "in the blind" while their American counterparts usually hit their targets with the first round.

The information differential could also be seen in planning the calculus of battle. The U.S. force assembling to overthrow the Baghdad regime (a far more exacting mission than kicking the Iraqis out of Kuwait) was less than half the size of its Desert Storm predecessor. The reason: During the 12 years between wars, the American military had come to realize that the enemy treated information in the same unimaginative, hierarchical way that characterized its whole approach to battle tactics. It could hardly have been otherwise, since Saddam Hussein constantly shuffled his military commanders—and periodically executed some of them—in order to ensure that none could threaten his regime.

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Col. Kenneth Allard on Technology's Impact on the War in Iraq