A rchive Date
[ 02-04-2003 ]
Category
[ International Relations ]
sub-Categoy
[ U.S ]
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[http://www.canoe.ca/Columnists/dfisher.html
Gretzky an inspiration to U.S. military thinkers
By DOUGLAS FISHER - Sun Ottawa Bureau
April 2, 2003
OTTAWA - To fathom America's war plans, and the global strategy behind them, it helps to recall Wayne Gretzky as the supreme hockey player.
Vice Adm. Arthur Cebrowski, director of the Pentagon's Office of Force Transformation (OFT), has said: "U.S. operations increasingly resemble hockey superstar Wayne Gretzky's 'speed' on ice ... Gretzky concentrated less on skating to where the puck was and more on skating to where the puck would be."
In short, for America's 21st-century military the goal is not "to be everywhere all the time, but to be exactly where you need to be exactly when you need to be there."
The Great One was born with the ability to anticipate events two or even three moves ahead. That America's leaders should wish their forces to be similarly capable is understandable. How can the U.S. military - an organization of over one million people - achieve this?
According to the admiral, "network-centric warfare" is the key.
Sensors, satellites and interlinked computer systems now provide America's warriors, be they generals in the Pentagon or junior officers in the field, with a comprehensive and "transparent" view of the battlefield. For them, the days of stumbling about in the "fog of war" are over.
Network-centric warfare also makes it possible for the four service branches to be merged into "a seamless, joint warfighting force."
Given their huge edge in precision-guided munitions and logistics, the result is a new and uniquely capable American military that can generate "extraordinary levels of operational efficiency."
Network-centric warfare won't just happen. As the Centre for Defence Information noted when the OFT was created in November, 2001: "The military services traditionally have been skeptical of radical transformation, preferring slower evolutionary development."
The OFT was to push for radical transformation. Before long, the Washington consensus was that Cebrowski and his boss, Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, were losing the battle. Then came the World Trade Center attacks.
CHANGE IN POLICY
A year after 9/11 the George Bush administration released its National Security Strategy (NSS). It stated that America would operate alone, if necessary, to deal with nations that harbour terrorists or seek to develop weapons of mass destruction. This assertiveness - bordering on unilateralism - broke with U.S. defence and foreign policy as practiced from the late 1930s on. It also overturned the Powell Doctrine, which held that war-fighting coalitions are imperative in order to ensure U.S. military power is not over-extended and American forces should only be unleashed on a massive scale for a clearly identifiable and immediately achievable goal.
It is essential to the NSS that network-centric warfare change the calculus for military operations. If American forces are more powerful than previously thought, due to network-centric efficiencies, then concerns about diluting their power are less critical, and their use, particularly on smaller, dispersed operations can be more readily entertained. And so, as the NSS was released, Rumsfeld began musing on taking down Saddam Hussein with a relatively small and light force, There were anonymous rumblings from the Pentagon about the risks, but these passed.
The war launched two weeks ago shows how completely the transformers won that round. The force dispatched to Iraq is, by historical standards, very small and light in armour for the task. The attempt to kill Saddam at the start, based on the latest intelligence and made possible by real-time programming of guided weapons, was truly a "network-centric" attack.
The battle plan, with the allies driving straight to Baghdad, bypassing Iraqi positions in the south, was obviously premised on the notion that informational superiority (with air superiority) would allow the allies to easily block any Iraqi attacks on either the advance or its logistical train. Finally, the knockout blow was to be delivered before Saddam could even prepare to face it.
The battle for Iraq was meant to prove the validity of the network-centric warfare concept. Victory of the "supereme-powered" American forces would cow opponents of U.S. policy throughout the region, leaving them to wonder - what comes next? And the NSS would be well on its way to being realized.
LOST FRONT
But the transformers were impatient. Turkey's refusal to allow allied troops on its soil meant they lost a whole front - and the 60,000 men and tanks that went with it. Yet they launched the attack anyway, the plan otherwise unchanged. Ironically, the missing force (now making its way to Kuwait by air and sea) is considered the prototype of the "transformed" U.S. military.
Surely, the military problems of the Alliance to date in Iraq have been overblown; nevertheless, the network-centric warfare has not eliminated the fog of war, and the movement of larger forces to Iraq begs a question: is it still even being applied?
Certainly, the present situation ought to make the proponents of network-centric warfare pause, and give their opponents ammunition for the coming debate about U.S. security policy, post-Iraq.
Letters to the editor should be sent to editor@sunpub.com
 World Fact Book (CIA)]
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