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Wargame exposed gaping hole in Pentagon strategy

Despite a shift in vision, US looks unready for its foe

Special report: terrorism crisis

Julian Borger in Washington Tuesday September 25, 2001 The Guardian

When terror came out of a clear blue sky on September 11, some of the Pentagon's top brass were given a jolting reminder of a wargame they had recently played. In the game, the US was pitted against a zealous, decentralised terror organisation very like Osama bin Laden's al-Qaida, and the US lost.

Each time the virtual US forces thought they had scored a blow against the terror organisation, codenamed Orange in the exercise, it would regenerate itself to strike on another front. It emerged from the campaign more or less unscathed.

That was four years ago, but some of the military strategists who helped to organise the game believe the Pentagon failed to learn the lessons the wargame provided, and in interviews with the Guardian yesterday they said the US military was still a long way from readiness to fight the adversary it now faced.

As a result, the shock of the September 11 attack has considerably strengthened the hand of the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, who took office promising a root and branch transformation of US forces, known in Pentagon parlance as the Revolution in Military Affairs (RMA). Mr Rumsfeld ran into strong resistance from the armed services chiefs who were fearful that the big defence projects they had committed themselves to, such as new aircraft carriers and a joint strike fighter aircraft, would be scrapped.

That row over priorities was abruptly ended by the attack. Not only is Mr Rumsfeld's vision now seen as prescient, but there will be so much more defence money to go around that there will not have to be a trade-off between the old way of doing things and the new. The Pentagon will be able to afford both.

In the Pentagon's quadrennial defence review, whose overall direction has been described to the Guardian before its release this Sunday, a lot more resources will be devoted to unconventional forms of warfare to combat the "asymmetrical" challenge posed by groups such as al-Qaida.

The 1997 wargame was fought under the auspices of the Army War College. According to Doug Johnson, a strategic studies professor involved in the exercise, the army lost because "it didn't want to play that game".

Frustrated

The army brass, Dr Johnson said, "were intent on fighting a variation of a war against large tank armies on the central plains of somewhere". At one point, the Pentagon officers involved became so frustrated with their elusive opponents that they asked for the game organisers to have a friendly government's armoured battalion defect to the other side. "They did it to give someone to blast," Dr Johnson said. "Everyone went away feeling viscerally satisfied."

As a result, they missed the point. The terror organisation still had most of its cells in place, and a functioning financial network.

"Within the contours of that particular game, the American forces and their allies simply weren't configured to deal with an enemy like the one we created," said Steven Metz, the head of the Army War College's regional strategy and planning department.

Dr Johnson argues that the lessons taught by the wargame and by the situation the US military finds itself in are the same. "What we need is more stuff for the soldier on the ground," he said. "Cruise missiles are interesting, but they don't go and knock on doors. They tend to blow up the whole building."

What is needed instead, he says, is technology that the infantryman or special forces soldier can use, to tell him in an instant where his men are and where the enemy is. The army has been working on digital displays built into army helmets, but the project had been slowed by the weight of the battery required.

The upgraded infantryman is part of the defence review carried out this year on Mr Rumsfeld's behalf by Andrew Marshall, a radical military thinker widely regarded as the godfather of RMA. Both the defence secretary and Mr Marshall argued that future conflicts would be unlikely to involve conventional opponents with arrays of tanks and squadrons of aircraft.

Instead the US would face "streetfighter states" which would use "asymmetrical" tactics aimed at America's water supplies or oil wells. The attacks would come without warning and the goal of RMA was to be ready to counter such threats instantly. The strategy would rely less on big military "platforms" such as armoured divisions or aircraft carriers but would involve an extraordinarily expensive anti-ballistic missile system, National Missile Defence (NMD), which would spot incoming missiles and knock them out.

Resented

The army, navy and air force chiefs resented the diminutive, 79-year-old Mr Marshall and his schemes. The row slowed down the Rumsfeld-Marshall plan but - according to Pentagon officials - did not knock it off the tracks. According to one source, the defence review expected on Sunday envisages a big increase in expenditure on asymmetrical threats, including counter-terrorist and counter-guerrilla forces, as well as units dedicated to defending against nuclear, biological and chemical threats. "The gist of what the review says is that we need all our conventional forces, as well as a broader range of unconventional forces," the official said.

Loren Thompson, a military strategist at the Lexington Institute, said the effect of the September 11 surprise attack would be to increase the defence budget, probably by a third to $400bn in 2003, and to accelerate movement towards RMA.

"Mr Rumsfeld's priorities have been vindicated greatly," Mr Thompson said. "Before he had to make a choice between conventional and non-conventional. He no longer has that problem."

However, since September 11 not all elements of the Rumsfeld-Marshall plan look equally relevant. NMD would have been of no use against domestic airliners. Marcus Corbin, an analyst at the Centre for Defence Information in Washington, argues that RMA still does not meet the new realities. "What is important now is how good is your human intelligence, and how good are your diplomatic relations with neighbouring countries so you can base operations on their soil," Mr Corbin said. "RMA is nice but when it comes to a question of priorities, Bin Laden has shown the RMA is still going in the wrong direction."

-- Little Nipper (canis@minor.net), September 25, 2001

Answers

It strikes me that many aspects of this struggle are asymmetrical. The tactics, certainly. Also the size of the targets, and the types of organizations. When entropy is used as a weapon, the more organized, developed and civilized side is at a disadvantage in direct proportion to their superiority in these directions.

I'm not surprised any army would not want to play a game that can't be won, it can only be lost less worse.

-- Flint (flintc@mindspring.com), September 25, 2001.

The battery size slows down the implementation of displays in helmets...could small LED displays be powered by normal human movement, such as walking? Can you get some power from small, automatic movements such as breathing? Could you keep a smaller battery charged that way?

-- helen (too@much.star.trek), September 25, 2001.

War has always been simple Flint. The entropy weapon only works until the other guy remembers just how simple and then the big guy always wins. Will we cope? Havn't since '45 so your guess is as good as mine.

-- Carlos (riffraff@cybertime.net), September 26, 2001.