Copyright © 2002 The International
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For the first time, the Pentagon has based a major campaign on the idea that U.S. combat power can be orchestrated simultaneously, not sequentially, all over the target country to destroy the regime, essentially from within. Instead of launching a major attack across a very broad front, U.S. forces have concentrated their striking power on spots considered to be vulnerable nerve centers, militarily and psychologically, for the Iraqi regime. Quickly, the combined effect, a Pentagon planner said, is supposed to be an explosion from within that tears away Saddam's ability to intimidate the Iraqi population. This new doctrine, radically different from the overwhelming force used in 1991 by Colin Powell, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, rejects the need for U.S. combat power to fight its way through Iraqi defenses in order to reach the regime's nerve centers. Instead, the new approach, based on U.S. ability to fuse precision-guided weapons and complete electronic mastery of a battlefield the size of Iraq, is designed to paralyze resistance and compel capitulation with Iraq's civilian population largely unharmed and its infrastructure intact. It was a sign of U.S. confidence in this new approach that Washington launched ground operations in Iraq during conflict's first hours without feeling obliged to wear down Iraqi defenses with an extensive preliminary air campaign. Instead, a combination of carefully targeted air strikes and operations by special forces and mobile armor has already seized oil fields in southern Iraq and started disrupting the ability of Saddam Hussein's regime to control major cities outside Baghdad. This new warfare doctrine - effects-based operations - means that U.S. forces no longer concentrate on destroying enemies just because they are there and, instead, hit targets whose loss will paralyze the Iraqi regime's ability to resist and hold power. U.S. planners have repeatedly predicted massive defections in Iraq once it is clear that Saddam has lost his ability to deliver commands and order reprisals against local uprisings. With this strategy, the United States reportedly hopes to damage the Iraqi regime in so many, highly visible ways that it collapses, first outside Baghdad and then totally. "Pockets of resistance can be problematic, but they won't affect the overall picture once Iraqis know they have to choose between Saddam and Americans," a Bush administration official said this weekend in Washington. Paralyzing enemy resistance and encouraging the population to welcome a change in regime is the goal in Iraq, but the so-called effects-based approach has much broader implications. It will enable U.S. forces to go "well beyond the activity of destroying an opposing force and achieve the ultimate purpose of war - to compel a positive political outcome," according to the strategy's main architect, Air Force Brigadier General David Deptula. If successful in Iraq, this approach will dictate U.S. thinking about future wars. "Iraq will be the template for doctrinal changes and defense investments that will favor high-tech airpower and more special forces," a key adviser to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said. Critics of this doctrine - mainly in the regular Army and the Marine Corps, which could see their roles cut back - note that it has never been tested on a large scale. But already in Afghanistan, it worked to some degree in enabling the U.S. military to use proxy ground troops and then protect them with airpower. The fusion of electronic technologies - communications, precision-guided missiles and alternative battle scenarios - has now spawned the new strategy. It is a measure of the change that right up to the outbreak of the hostilities last week, many analysts had predicted a two-week air war to soften up the Iraqi defenses, not the almost-simultaneous rolling start that actually occurred. Alluding indirectly to this new warfare doctrine, Britain's defense secretary, Geoff Hoon, said Sunday that the U.S.-$ led coalition was delivering "a series of effects" that would produce victory in Iraq. Specifically, he added, "targeting is staying on message" - in other words, the allies are destroying the symbols and sinews of the regime's grip of terror in Iraq and creating a vacuum of power in which a new regime can emerge. Television viewers around the world saw a sample of the U.S. approach Saturday night when precision-guided warheads knocked out the electricity supplies to a Baghdad neighborhood that has several key government buildings and presidential palaces. "Throughout most of the city the lights stayed on as the attack paralyzed power to this protected area for key facilities," Hoon said in a news conference in London. Cutting power to radars or missiles or secret police networks has always been viewed as a cheaper, safer tactic than destroying the sites themselves. But until now it has been beyond the reach of U.S. planners to be so selective in targeting. The weak point of the new approach remains the need for good intelligence of the quality that is often missing in a closed nation such as Iraq or North Korea. But the Rumsfeld team, citing the growing potential of electronic surveillance such as real-time video from small unpiloted drone aircraft, ordered U.S. commanders last summer to change their battle plans to rely more on the mobility and precision firepower involved in effects-based operations. Copyright © 2002 The International Her |