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By James R. Blaker
Operation Desert Storm taught us many things, politically and militarily. Now, the U.S. armed services—particularly the naval services—must incorporate the lessons they learned into a smaller, but still workable force structure. One thing is certain: any philosophical shift in the use of military force—e.g., from deterrence to rapid reaction—will always involve a tightly-knit Navy-Marine Corps team, capable of projecting power from the sea across the world’s littorals.
It takes a long time for the armed services to incorporate the experiences, the successes, and the mistakes of war into “lessons,” particularly lessons that affect the size and structure of forces and how those forces operate. Desert Storm is no exception, for what happened in the Gulf War is only now beginning to affect congressional and Department of Defense decisions. So, even though the victory parades are over, and discussions of the Gulf War have slipped off the front pages, the best time to think about what Desert Storm meant is now. And the process is just beginning.
The nascent lessons from the war run from ways of using particular weapons more effectively to ways of defining the “new world order.” But six important lessons will most likely influence the nation’s thinking about national security and the role of the U.S. Navy over the next decade. Arguing that these are certain to be integrated into the planning process is quite a claim. But that assertion stems from the notion that the general shift away from Cold War assumptions had begun in the Pentagon before the Gulf War broke out. The most-remembered aspects of the war and those most likely to be incorporated in planning are those that supported or tended to confirm some of the planning assumptions that had emerged as early as 1987.1 If so, the “salient six” are as follows:
Military force is an effective instrument of U.S. foreign policy.
The success of Operation Desert Storm showed that military force can produce results with respect to policy goals—quickly and decisively. That sounds simplistic and would be dismissed as such, except for the fact that this war took place against the backdrop of major changes in the U.S.-Soviet relationship. Even the Pentagon now has rejected the scenario of a short-warning Soviet attack as a planning assumption, and Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, in congressional testimony a year ago, stated specifically that the department will no longer structure its forces to fight a worldwide war with the Soviet Union.2
In effect, that signaled the end of the lexicon of conflict escalation and the demise of its inhibitions toward the use of military force. In the bilateral world of the 1970s and early 1980s the utility of military force was deterrence: how to manipulate the threat of force without resorting to its actual use. And as long as the fundamental national security problem focused on avoiding conflict with the Soviet Union without losing in the zero-sum games of the bipolar world, military forces were supposed to demonstrate resolve, indicate interest and concern, show the flag, and exude all the other manifestations of presence. But force was not actually to be used. The fear of escalation hung over virtually all military planning. Deterrence, not military force, was the key to peace and U.S. foreign policy.
But as that image of the bipolar world evaporated, escalation-control and deterrence theory slipped also. The use of force was no longer inhibited by the fear of escalation, and as Saddam Hussein said in a March 1990 speech, nations could no longer count on the U.S.-Soviet power standoff to protect them from the military aggression of one or the other superpowers. As DoD testimony beginning last year shows, the department no longer has to hedge about building forces to fight wars, at least as long as the wars are waged against regional threats.3
More than a fear of escalation inhibited the use of force by the United States, of course. The Vietnam War experience had suggested that the use of military force might always be expensive, ineffective, and immoral. But Desert Storm challenged each of these assumptions. The United States spent somewhere around 60 billion dollars, but most of those costs will be paid by the Kuwaitis, Saudis, Germans, and Japanese, not the U.S. taxpayer. It used 110,000 tons of air munitions, but those came from decade-old, two-trillion-dollar inventory built to fight a worldwide war against a powerful Warsaw Pact. In the absence of that threat, little has to be replaced. The war took too many U.S. lives, but losses were less than 1% of what had been anticipated. And while Saddam Hussein may not have been another Adolf Hitler, it was hard to argue that he was not Hitler’s moral equivalent in some ways.
So the war tended to confirm what military planners had already been moving toward. U.S. military forces would be designed primarily to fight—not deter—forces other than those of the Soviet Union. Dealing with the Soviet conventional military capability would be relegated to the problem of reconstitution—how to regain the capability to deter a Soviet Union that might return to a posture of confrontation. (Soviet nuclear capabilities were another matter, of course—but they, too, are no longer viewed in the same light.)
This does not mean that forces will necessarily fight rather than deter. Indeed, many have long argued that the only way military forces can deter conflict is to maintain a credible war-fighting capability. But the context for these discussions is changing. The risks of using force are no longer the same. The costs we have tended to associate with the use of force—human, moral, financial, and economic—no longer seem as formidable in the aftermath of Desert Storm. The third fundamental inhibition—that military force does not achieve a good outcome—remains more ambiguous. Desert Storm suggests that the application of military power can achieve specific political goals (like getting the Iraqi military out of Kuwait) quickly and effectively. Less clear is the notion that Desert Storm has resulted in a more peaceful, democratic Middle East.
But the net effect of the Gulf War is that the use of military force is a more viable policy option than it was five years ago, and resorting to force is more likely to occur in the future.
Force use rests on intercontinental mobility.
Before Desert Storm, the Joint Chiefs of Staff were contemplating a force that would surge outward from the United States or one that could assemble rapidly by moving forward-deployed units from their normal stations to the area of concern. This notion is, of course, rooted in the Rapid Deployment Force concepts that emerged in the early 1980s. But it now differs, because it is neither con-
ceived as a force designed against Soviet capabilities nor as a central reserve to bolster U.S. forward deployments. The basic notion is that this force would deal with regional threats; it was to be the primary force. And because of this, it would be the primary focus for planners. Establishment of a separate unified command may ensure that this is the case. The primary task of another unified command—a transport command—would be to get this force to the regional war and supply it while it fights there.4
Desert Storm tended to validate these ideas. Forces came from the United States and from units deployed through-
out the Pacific and Europe. The United States had never before moved as much force over as great a distance in as short a time.5 If the crisis in the Gulf taught military planners anything, it underscored the perceived need for intercontinental mobility.
The new emphasis has two aspects. One is the traditional view that rapid, intercontinental mobility requires transportation assets, unrestricted basing access at the destination and along the way, and unconstrained routing options. The other aspect, a view advocated by the Air Force, is that the United States should have the capability of using force directly from U.S. bases, immune from questions of foreign basing access. This harbors one of the likely foci of the new national security debate; namely, the tradeoff in force projection power and costs between forward-deployed aircraft carriers and U.S.-based B-2 bombers. In either thrust, the emphasis is on freedom of movement.
What is emerging, accelerated by the experience of Desert Shield and Desert Storm, is an end to the static forward force deployments that have driven planning for most of the last four decades. Forward peacetime presence will shrink most dramatically in terms of Army and Air Force units in Europe. Some argue that this represents a shift of the forward presence role to the Navy. But Navy peacetime presence will likely decrease, as well. Fiscal and basing constraints make this almost inevitable. Therefore, shifting the forward presence role to the Navy will not be automatic, and it will happen only if the Navy makes the case for it.
But this constriction is not being driven by a foreign policy of less involvement or by the notion that military force is not a viable instrument of foreign policy. To the contrary, strategic mobility is becoming a commonplace term. Base transit and overflight agreements are in; military exclusion zones are out.
Control the transparency of the battlefield.
The central lesson of the Gulf War was how nice it is to know where the opponent is without his knowing the same about you. The single most important contributor to the success of U.S. operations was target acquisition. It allowed the centrally planned air campaign to work, because important nodes of the Iraqi command-and-control system were where we thought they were. And planning was correct about what had to be done to destroy them. The fundamental reason the ground campaign was so successful was that we knew where the Iraqi forces were, before and during the operation.
The transparent nature of the opponent in this war stemmed from two things. One was the technical advantage of the United States, not only because of the reconnaissance assets, but because of the computer and communications capacities used to convert that information to real-time understanding of what existed, where, and why. The other source of transparency was Iraq’s having built its military from weapons and systems purchased from other nations. And those nations, for the most part, were willing to share the specifications of hardware they had sold to the Iraqis. So Iraq was, in effect, naked—not only
because of our edge in observation and intelligence technologies, but because the people who sold Iraq its military shared the blueprints with us.
The technical disparity confirmed what Pentagon planners had been saying for several years about the military utility of space. In particular, they have perceived a need for unimpeded access to space for early warning, intelligence surveillance, navigation, and command, control, and communication.6 The second factor’s effect on military planning is more ambiguous. On one hand, the fact that Iraq could buy what appeared to be such a formidable, relatively modern military capability argues for restrictions on technology flow from industrial nations. On the other, Iraq’s dependence on external sources turned out to be a kind of Achilles’ heel, not because the equipment the Iraqis bought failed, but because we knew how it worked. This does not necessarily mean that technology transfer controls are wrong. But U.S. military operations with other industrial nations can provide intelligence leverage that makes a real difference in planning and operations.
Joint and combined operations are the future.
The emphasis on global mobility and maintaining the transparency edge against any opponent reinforces the new utility and feasibility of operating with other nations. With fewer overseas bases and the likelihood of greater constraints on U.S. unilateral actions from those that remain, a coalition response such as Desert Storm will be more than an option; it will be a requirement. And the need to make opponents transparent while remaining opaque to them at the same time will underline the need for solidarity with the technically advanced nations of the World, including any from the Commonwealth of Independent States that qualify.
The rationale for joint operations, which has been emerging since the Goldwater-Nichols Act, probably set a new course after Desert Storm. The Desert One opera- lion to free U.S. hostages was an example of the danger
in military operations conducted jointly for the sake of being joint. The Grenada operation showed how little the services had overcome interoperability problems that had become endemic with the Reagan administration’s penchant to let the services do whatever they thought best from their own, parochial perspectives. Operation Just Cause in Panama was essentially a one-service operation. So, behind verbal commitments to joint operations, nothing could really be used to argue that a joint operation was a more effective way of using military force, however much some military planners wished otherwise.
Desert Storm, however was an honest indication of military synergism in joint operations, which would have been hard to attain without the presence and activity of all the
armed services. The amphibious feint really did contribute to the success of the ground campaign. The Navy’s control of the Persian Gulf and the air space above it really did free Air Force assets to strike against Iraqi targets. The mixed strike packages composed of aircraft drawn from both the Navy and the Air Force really did combine the strengths of the aircraft effectively. The ground force operational scheme did get the Iraqi forces out of their bunkers and expose them to the ravages of overwhelming air power. The bottom line is that joint operations were combat-effective, which gives the jointness concept a stature it never had in defense planning before.
If jointness is now a viable—as opposed to a verbal— planning consideration, it will almost inevitably become a standard for both operational and structural decisions. Desert Storm suggested in several ways how this might apply in terms of military operations. One was the extent to which Navy strike effectiveness depended on Air Force tanker support. Another, less noticeable example was the extent to which Navy close air patrol missions over the Persian Gulf (often reported as “fleet defense sorties”) freed Air Force tactical aircraft for strikes. The significance here is that the relative utility of different service forces will be assessed increasingly in terms of how they help other service forces perform their respective specialties.
Real commitment to joint operations probably means a formal consideration of the extent to which a given system or force in one military service contributes to the ef-
ficiency or output of systems or forces in another.
Force structure and sustainability can be sacrificed at the expense of modernization.
Defense budget strategy argues in favor of investments in research and development, to be funded generally by reductions in strength and force structure. This already was under way as early as 1990, but it is now a planning trend highly unlikely to be altered over the next halfdecade.
Little in Desert Storm contradicted this budget strategy. One could argue, of course, that the apparent success of higher technology weapons argued for higher levels of procurement, not only to replenish the stocks expended, but to change the mix of the inventories in favor of even more advanced technology. But most of the high-tech weapons used in the war were not exhausted—they had been built on the assumption that the expenditure rates in a war with the Soviet Union would be higher and more prolonged. Generally, the Pentagon is now more inclined to use the war to demonstrate the need to maintain a technical edge and not current inventories of relatively high technology weapons.
Similarly, the commitment of so many of today’s forces, in part by diverting them from missions elsewhere (this was particularly the case with aircraft carriers), will likely demonstrate the flexibility of the force structure rather than prove a need for more.
Strategic bombardment campaigns are here to stay.
The Desert Storm air campaign was not a pure example of what its planners meant by a strategic bombing campaign. But it had enough such aspects and was generally successful enough to solidify the notion in planning. The general concept argues that the way to defeat the enemy is to separate the linkages of his society in particular, to separate the leadership from its military forces and political support. This notion has, of course, been around for some time, and as the strategic bombing survey after World War II documented, it was not a viable concept as far as the technology of the 1940s was concerned. The idea was cloaked by the dominance of strategic nuclear strategy (which could not discriminate between separating the linkages of an enemy’s society and eliminating the society entirely). The idea was tested in the Vietnam War.
By the time of Desert Storm, however, technology had evolved such that advocates believed strategic bombing campaigns could win wars. Specifically, they argued, important linkages could now be identified and targeted, and precision-guided munitions could sever these linkages with discrimination. Stealthy delivery platforms, combined with precision munitions, could provide enough military leverage to engage in parallel attacks; that is, the linkages that held the society together could be severed simultaneously, thus avoiding the problem of the strategic bombardment campaign; namely, how to bring enough power to bear across the enemy society so that the
REUTERS/BETTMANN
The high-tech munitions of Desert Storm lent credence to the strategic bombing campaign, as a means of isolating critical components of the enemy—here, by destroying a bridge in Iraq.
parts damaged could not be fixed sequentially.7
Desert Storm was successful enough to commit the nation to refining the capabilities necessary to conduct successful strategic bombing campaigns—with nonnuclear weapons—in the future. Specifically a good bet is that the nation will continue trying to develop the four capabilities upon which the strategic bombing strategy rests: precise targeting, stealthy delivery platforms, precision- guided weaponry, and real-time damage assessment that focuses on the functional results of the attacks. The United States may not be willing to fund some proposals for consummating the capabilities, such as the B-2 bomber. But it is hard to believe that the basic concepts associated with the strategic bombing campaign will not move to the center of U.S. military planning.
The “salient six" influence naval forces.
If these are the important lessons from Desert Storm and we can assume that they will be part of the nation’s view of national security, some implications for the Navy follow. The Navy seems to be the most obvious beneficiary of the intercontinental mobility imperative. With the fiscal problems of the B-2 undercutting the “Global Reach, Global Power” argument—that the B-2 is a cost-effective alternative to forward-deployed carrier forces—and with a shrinking overseas basing structure, the nation will focus on the idea of “forward presence.” And this is ostensibly a fundamental of the current U.S. security strategy that must be carried out by the Navy. If naval forces will take the primary responsibility for forward presence, then the nation will also likely turn to these forces for crisis response and coalition warfare. Something is compelling about the notion that the forces nearest the scene should be the first to respond to a crisis. And during peacetime, these are the logical mechanisms to help build coalitions. A budgetary strategy that uses this argument will resonate within the Congress.
But the Navy will be going against the current if it tries to argue that it can do things alone. The operative implication is that the Navy should argue, and be able to demonstrate, that it is designed to accommodate and enhance application of ground forces and ground-based air power. This is already a major role for U.S. naval forces, and that role will likely be an increasingly important size and structuring criterion in the future. This is all because the U.S. Congress, with the strong support of the public, simply is not going to pay for the kind of redundant capabilities that would allow any one of the military services to handle any but the most limited crises on its own. Secretary Cheney and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Colin Powell understand this, and the latter has already institutionalized the notion by proclaiming that “modern warfare is synonymous with joint warfare.”8
This means some important changes that go beyond the common understanding of “interoperability.” It means, among other things, that the Navy has to talk seriously about force synergy with other U.S. and allied military forces and to know how to enhance it. It must demonstrate that its choices for aircraft, surface vessels, and submarines contribute more than a fulfillment of traditional naval warfare tasks (they have to do this at a minimum, of course). The Navy must also be able to defend its choices in terms of how they enhance the application of military power by other services. And this is an issue that goes beyond the question of how much sea lift is enough.
All military services will have to do this, but the Navy, in particular, must be able to articulate this rationale, because it has already argued that it should be seen as an enabler of the nation’s military power.9 And it becomes a logical imperative, since Congress is likely to make sure that the Navy cannot cope with other than minor military contingencies on its own.
The Navy also has to take the theory of strategic bombardment seriously. This probably means revising its doctrine on weapons loads, magazine stocks, and training. But it may also mean changing its understanding of power projection—a strategic bombing campaign is not a punitive strike, and the theory of strategic bombardment got such a boost out of the war that the Navy has to understand it better. There just might be something to it.
The lessons can have impact, if learned.
Some have argued that the Navy came out of the Gulf War overshadowed by the successes of the Air Force and Army. The air campaign was, after all, conceived and executed largely by the Air Force, which had the preponderant numbers of aircraft in the theater, flew the most combat sorties, and dropped most of the guided munitions used during the war. The ground campaign featured the sweeping flanking movements by the U.S. Army, not amphibious operations by the U.S. Marines. So, in the views of some journalists, at least, the Navy entered the postwar defense budget debates with far less momentum than the other services.
But this view is too narrow. The six salient lessons of the Gull War certainly suggest changes in the way the Navy planned and operated in the past. Some of those changes will not be easy. It is easy to pay lip service to joint operations, but harder to make them central to force structure and operational decisions. It is easy to talk about the theory of strategic bombardment campaigns and to laud the utility of stealth and the precision-guided munitions, but harder to develop the capabilities of precision targeting, weapons delivery, and battle-damage assessment necessary to transform the theory into reality.
Taken together, though, the big lessons of the war argue for a robust, highly ready, modern, forward-deployed Navy. They, along with overall defense reductions and overseas basing, build the case for a Navy that becomes the nation’s premier means of maintaining forward presence. And forward presence leads logically to the conclusion that the Navy should be the first to respond to crises. They forecast a Navy that becomes the central link to coalition warfare, building the arrangements, understandings, and procedures during peacetime for the smooth application of multinational military force in the event it has to be used. And they postulate the Navy at the front of the effort to ensure a smooth transition to the new world order.
'The old saw about the military always planning to fight the last war is not precisely right. What really happens is much more dynamic and selective; planners use the experiences of war to demonstrate the validity of their postwar thought. In the 1920s and 1930s, for example, the dominant concepts among military planners in Europe and the United States was not how to wage the trench warfare experienced in World War I better, but how to avoid it altogether. (It was Gudar- ian, Douhet, and Mitchell who set the “vision,” and they talked about mobile warfare and strategic bombardment, not trench sieges.) Similar examples can be found for the post-World War II period, post-Korea (remember “massive retaliation?”) and post-Vietnam.
“Statement of Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, House Armed Services Committee, 7 February 1991, p. 1.
’See, for example, statement by I. Lewis Libby, Principal Deputy Undersecretary of Defense (Strategy and Resources), House Armed Services Committee, Defense Policy Panel, 12 March 1991, p. 13.
’See the statement of GEN Colin L. Powell, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, before the House Committee on Armed Services, 7 February 1991, pp. 8-11; Statement of ADM David E. Jeremiah, Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, before the House Committee on Armed Services, 12 March 1991, pp. 9-13.
’The United States moved almost as much tonnage to the Persian Gulf during the eight months of the crisis as it moved in the four years of the Vietnam War between 1965 and 1969. The sealift tonnage of Operation Desert Shield was about the same as that moved into France during the period from D-Day (4 June 1944) to the Battle of the Bulge (December 1944) in World War II. But most of that was moved across the English Channel from the stocks built there during the preceding three years. In Desert Shield about the same amount went halfway around the world.
“Op. tit., Powell, p. 11. Jeremiah, p. 11.
Strategic bombardment is now at the root of several important decisions that will atfect the Navy and Air Force. See, for example, congressional response to work by RAND for the Air Force dealing with the B-2, Securing U.S. Interests in the Future: The Roles of Strategic Bombers in U.S. Strategy, RAND. Congressional Record, 6 May 1991.
Joint Chiefs of Staff, Joint Warfare of the U.S. Armed Forces. Joint Pub. 1, November 1991, p. 1-2.
Secretary of the Navy H. Lawrence Garrett, Chief of Naval Operations ADM Frank B. Kelso II, Commandant of the Marine Corps GEN A. M. Gray. "The Way Ahead,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings. April 1991, pp 39-40.
Dr. Blaker is currently a project director at the Center for Naval Analyses. He was the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Policy Analysis (1981-1985) and served as the Deputy Undersecretary of the Air Force (International Affairs) between 1980 and 1981.He served as an Army infantry officer during the Vietnam War. Dr. Blaker holds a Ph.D. from Ohio State University, and he has taught at the University of Michigan. His most recent book is U.S. Overseas Basing: An Anatomy of the Dilemma (New York: Praeger Publishers, 1990).