The New York Times
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September 10, 2002
Service Chiefs Say Afghan Battle Will Help Military Get Smarter, Stronger and Faster
By THOM SHANKER and ERIC SCHMITT
WASHINGTON, Sept. 9 — America's military is applying the lessons learned in Afghanistan, examining everything from whether the standard rifle cartridge fired by each soldier packs enough punch to whether floating oil platforms can be towed around the globe as secret bases for marines and Navy SEALs.
A number of urgent priorities already have emerged from studying after-action reports from Afghanistan, which could affect how billions in tax dollars are spent.
Some decisions promise to cut large silhouettes, such as determining how best to float a huge, mobile base so Special Operations forces and Marine expeditionary troops can strike targets with speed and secrecy even when no land base is available.
Their ocean-going camp could be an aging aircraft carrier without its jets; it could be a supertanker; it could be a series of oil platforms lashed together and pushed around the globe by barge. For the war in Afghanistan, the carrier Kitty Hawk served as a floating Special Operations base, but the decision took one-twelfth of the Navy's centerpiece battle platforms out of the usual rotation.
Other decisions are small but important, such as the realization that the 5.56 millimeter cartridge fired by the M-4 carbine, the standard assault rifle, may not carry sufficient punch. In Afghanistan, soldiers reported that it routinely took three bullets to drop an adversary. The Army is studying different rounds.
The Air Force is shopping for lighter, longer-life batteries to power the laser rangefinders that combat controllers use to pinpoint targets.
The war plan for Afghanistan may seem like a blueprint for victory, especially since the unexpectedly swift success was secured with just 19 American combat deaths.
While the four service chiefs who must organize, train and equip the military say Afghanistan was a battle laboratory for successful tests of new tactics and weapons, they add that the campaign illuminated weaknesses that must be addressed before the next offensive.
The Army and Air Force chiefs of staff, the chief of naval operations and the Marine Corps commandant all consented to rare, on-the-record interviews to reflect on the anniversary of a day when the Pentagon, their headquarters, became the front line. They discussed lessons learned and described how the past year changed the ways they would prepare for the next stage of combat against terrorism.
The service chiefs pointed to the need to focus on these major changes:
The Navy has to be even more places at once, and its planes will have to attack far beyond the shores to bring persistent, credible combat power around the globe.
The Marines have to think not of amphibious landings, but of expeditionary invasions hundreds of miles inland.
The Air Force will have to shorten the time it takes to identify images of potential targets captured by unmanned aircraft, like Predators and Global Hawk, send that information to command centers and ultimately dispatch attack orders to bombers loitering high above the battlefield.
The Army's light forces have to have some form of armored vehicles when they first arrive at the front, while heavy armor has to be faster to the battle.
In fact, the Army is already acting to meet one of those needs by transforming some units into Stryker Brigades as an interim step between today's tanks and the futuristic weapons of tomorrow. Built around a light armored vehicle called Stryker, the brigades can be flown in C-130 transports, as opposed to the massive C-17 required by tanks.
The face of battle, no doubt, changed forever after the United States quickly routed the Taliban and Al Qaeda in a landlocked Central Asian state that in decades past sucked the blood out of British and Soviet legions.
But speaking as one voice, the service chiefs Adm. Vern Clark of the Navy, Gen. James L. Jones of the Marines, Gen. John P. Jumper of the Air Force and Gen. Eric K. Shinseki of the Army all cautioned that future war may arrive as unexpectedly as Afghanistan.
"What does that mean to us?" asked Admiral Clark, posing a challenge to his service that applies to all four. "That means that we're going to have to be out and about, to keep the global terror network, to keep them on the run."
He added, "We are the service that is allowed to go out and scour around the largest maneuver space on the planet, and that's the oceans."
The task of the American military, he said, "is to keep them guessing. Where are we going to show up next? And we have the capability to do that."
The armed forces face a more complicated range of enemy capabilities, from shadowy terrorist cells that turn hijacked jetliners into missiles to countries like Iraq and North Korea that field traditional armies and would fight ferociously to defend complicated terrain — and are suspected of having arsenals of unconventional weapons. The services therefore must be more flexible, speedier and stealthier, even more lethal.
Gen. Jumper of the Air Force, who commanded American air forces in Europe during the 1999 air war in Kosovo, said: "What I saw was the need to decrease these timelines so you could deal with fleeting targets in timely ways and still give the decision makers in these very most sensitive situations time to assess and decide whether the target was worth striking or not, or valid, or too much of a risk."
Afghanistan was a war in which Air Force and Navy jets quickly dominated the skies, hurling a precise and persistent fusillade onto the deserts and mountains below.
But the axiom that wars are won on the ground was also confirmed. The air campaign became most effective when enemy forces were drawn onto the battlefield — forming a massed target — to confront ragged guerrilla forces organized by small teams of Army Special Forces troops who rode into battle on horseback to pick out targets with hand-held lasers.
Flexibility, ingenuity, creativity and adaptability became the priorities in Afghanistan, with an emphasis on finding new ways to use old military tools. Just as important as several revolutionary developments in military thinking that earned their stars in Afghanistan, the service chiefs said, was determining which aspects of their military planning were proven enduring.
The B-52 is an airframe older than most of the pilots in the cockpit and the soldiers who call in the bombs. It is best known for dropping carpets of dumb bombs on the rice paddies of Vietnam, but in Afghanistan it was armed with precision weapons and assigned the job of close air support — if an altitude of 39,000 feet can be called close. The task of bombing targets close to ground troops is usually assigned to small and nimble Air Force and Navy fighters.
"The battlefield of the future will be defined, if we do this right, by smaller units doing what larger units used to do in the 20th century," said General Jones of the Marines. "The rifle company of the 21st century will be doing what the rifle battalion of the 20th century used to do." A company has about 160 troops and a battalion about 1,000.
In Afghanistan, for the first time in history, marines were dispatched 400 to 600 miles inland. "There are still a lot of people scratching their heads and saying, `We didn't know the Marines could do that,' " he said.
The increased lethality comes from advanced communications among the fighters, faster and more accurate intelligence about an enemy's movements and more efficient ways to protect fighters in the field — but most of all because of the accuracy of modern weapons.
Precision is extraordinarily important to the ability to wage war with a smaller logistical trail when one smart bomb can do the job of dozens of heavy, dumb pieces of ordnance. The Air Force and Navy fired off a substantial percentages of their stocks of precision-guided munitions over Afghanistan, although the arsenals are just weeks away from being fully replenished.
The Army's Apache helicopter, designed to take out heavily armored Soviet tank columns at ground level deep behind enemy lines, was adapted to strafe the high alpine ridgelines of southeastern Afghanistan as troops scoured caves for Taliban and Al Qaeda. It was an unexpected mission that echoed the role of its ancestor, the Cobra gunship, in Southeast Asia.
The Navy's P-3 Orion, a four-propeller aircraft designed to lumber over the high seas for 16 hours at a time searching out enemy submarines with its sophisticated sensors, was just as useful over the scorching Afghan desert. It flew intelligence-gathering, surveillance and reconnaissance missions for the Navy's special warfare teams; SEALs were aboard the P-3s to radio enemy positions to counterparts carrying out missions against targets on the ground.
The war in Afghanistan pressed the military services toward a world in which parochial differences, while not eliminated, were filed down dramatically.
Air Force refueling planes routinely gassed up Navy and Marine fighter-bombers. Air Force ground spotters embedded in Army Special Forces units called in air strikes from carrier-based naval aircraft hours from their floating bases. The Navy and Air Force are now working to develop a new electronic-jamming aircraft that both services can use.
For all four armed services, the enduring lesson of this new campaign against terror is that, in the words of General Shinseki of the Army, the military is no longer fighting single-front battles against a clearly defined enemy.
"Over the last year, look where we've been: everything from on borders to protecting airports and ports and bridges, and going forward with very competent and highly skilled soldiers to fight the war in Afghanistan without dropping any of the other balls — in Bosnia, Kosovo, Sinai, Southwest Asia," he said.
"Handling this broad spectrum of responsibilities has brought an understanding that the battle space extends from Afghanistan all the way back, at least, to New York City and Washington," he added. "It's a far more expanded battle space than in some time, maybe in 60 years, when we were in a world war."
alot nations use 5.56mm ball.....Originally posted by Viper52:Excellent article CX!
I think the article has brought out some very good points, the most important of all being that the world has become a very different and much complicated place since the end of the Cold War, and the US, as the lone superpower, is facing tasks that are totally different from what its Cold War armed forces expected to face, and have to change to meet it.
Just wondering on the 5.56mm round issue. I wonder if its a problem with the small size of the round, or is it the fact that the new rounds are designed to penetrate flak vests that are the problem? Should it be the latter, this matter was brought up in the book Black Hawk Down by Mark Bowden, where the Delta operators found that as the Somali militiamen wore no flak vests, the bullets had a tendency to go clean through the target without tumbling and doing damage like the older rounds. It would be quite reasonable to assume that the Taliban or Al-Qaeda in Afghnistan wouldn't have flak vests as standard issue.
Conversely, the Russians found the 5.45 cartridges used by the AK-74 as lacking punch, and have started reverting back to the good ol' 7.62 x 39 in their newer Kalashnikov designs