"You go to war with the army you have,"
former US secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld
famously noted. "They might not be the army you
want or have at a later time." Echoing Rumsfeld,
President George W Bush said in his 2007 State of
the Union address: "This is not the fight we
entered in Iraq, but it is the fight we are in."
Yet the Pentagon continues to spend money
on weapons that are ill-suited for the fights "we
are in". As a top US Air Force (USAF) commander
told Aviation Week and Space Technology, the most
expensive fighter aircraft ever built may be ready
for war, but it's
not
ready for the war the US has today in Iraq. The
F-22 isn't "ready for Iraq" because it probably
can't fulfill its core mission, especially in the
Baghdad area. In straightforward language, the
F-22 would be electronically "blind", despite
having the most advanced suite of intelligence,
surveillance and reconnaissance devices in the
USAF.
The mismatch between the F-22 and
the Iraq war highlights a central problem for the
US military. Technological progress has not
necessarily produced more efficient weapons. The
destructive capabilities of these high-tech
devices can often turn back upon themselves.
Paradoxically, however, this self-destructive
tendency may be a good thing in the long run.
The wrong weapons The F-22
isn't the first weapon system the Pentagon has
ordered that couldn't perform as advertised. The
army's M551 Sheridan "armored reconnaissance
vehicle" - really a light tank - was designed to
fire both a conventional tank shell loaded with
flechettes (a small metal dart, usually steel,
with a sharp-pointed tip and a tail with several
vanes to stabilize it during flight) and the
Shillelagh anti-tank missile. The US infantry in
Vietnam, where the M551 saw combat, appreciated
the firepower support, but virtually none of the
88,000 Shillelagh missiles bought for the Sheridan
were ever fired in anger. The tank's
missile-guidance system could not withstand the
recoil when the main gun fired. In effect the tank
"killed" half of its own offensive capability.
Warfare has long been indiscriminate in
its lethal effects. As armies have gotten larger,
battlegrounds bigger, and weaponry more indirect
in their fire, the greater has become the
possibility that non-combatants could be killed.
In the 20th century, soldiers using new forms of
warfare occasionally ended up killing themselves
instead of the enemy - and not simply from the
"friendly fire" of their fellow soldiers.
Earlier recorded instances of biological
warfare - catapulting carcasses of dead animals
into walled cities under siege and handing native
Americans disease-laden blankets - introduced
difficult-to-control pathogens into warfare. But
the widespread use of poison gas in World War I
represented a new and systematic use of substances
other than explosives, kinetic energy, or piercing
devices to kill or incapacitate people. The
toxicity of war thus made a quantum leap. In rapid
order, military innovators introduced radiation,
herbicides and, during the 1991 Gulf War against
Iraq, depleted uranium. Those suffering from the
cocktail of diseases known collectively as Gulf
War syndrome can attest to the growing
self-destructiveness of war.
The wireless
radio set the stage for a new type of battlefield
toxicity: electronic. Initially, the radio
frequency spectrum was large enough that each side
could easily avoid the other's frequency. Problems
began when opposing armies, having unwittingly
chosen the same frequencies, came into contact.
Inevitably, the nets with the more powerful
transmitters or better line-of-sight dominated,
forcing the weaker communications nets to scramble
to change frequencies even as fighting raged. Put
another way, the side with the stronger signal
proved "toxic" to its rival.
Then someone
realized that interfering on purpose with an
opponent's radio net could be advantageous. There
could be problems with this new weapon of
electronic "jamming". For example, the use of a
super-strong signal by a transmitter to jam an
enemy net could also wipe out the ability of
nearby friendly units to communicate. Moreover, it
did not take long before countermeasures such as
frequency-hopping radios were introduced.
Meanwhile, use of the electronic spectrum spilled
well beyond the frequencies of human speech, so
much so that the Pentagon has been pressing for
increasing the military's slice of the total
spectrum.
The F-22's
utility This brings us back full circle.
USAF General Ronald E Keys is concerned that the
surveillance suite of the US$350 million F-22 may
not be able to operate around Baghdad. Although
nominally a fighter aircraft, the F-22 also can
act as a signals intelligence interceptor, which
would be its role in Iraq. Keys notes, however,
that the electronic spectrum around Baghdad is
polluted by the myriad jamming devices that
coalition forces primarily employed to thwart
remote detonations of the improvised explosive
devices that have inflicted 70% of all US
fatalities in that war.
The potential
problem was discovered when the first F-22s were
operating near US Navy ships off the Atlantic
coast. Navy radars overwhelmed the F-22's
automated sensors. Even now, larger,
multi-station, purpose-built
electronic-intelligence-gathering airplanes
encounter difficulties around the Iraqi capital
because of the extreme density of jamming devices.
Supporters of the F-22 propose that one
headquarters should coordinate F-22
intelligence-collection missions with the use of
both airborne and ground-based jammers.
An
alternative to the F-22 is the MQ-9 Predator.
These carry both sensors and bombs and missiles,
allowing the remote operator to "see" where the
unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) is flying, avoid
hazards, and deliver ordnance on "target". The
differences - and the choices - are plain. One
super-fast, super-expensive ($350 million each)
manned airplane cannot, at this point, do a better
job of collecting information about and reacting
to insurgent movements than an $8.3 million UAV
can.
Considering that political insiders
are projecting a $700 billion budget for the
Pentagon and the "war on terror" supplemental
requests, new Secretary of Defense Robert Gates
ought to end Cold War programs like the F-22
before the rest of the money is lost to unneeded
procurement.
And the future? Humans went
from one-on-one fighting to massing armies of
people. The next step was massing machines to kill
people and then to kill masses of people with
indiscriminate weapons. What we could use now are
weapons that self-destruct before they are used,
like the F-22 if it is effectively mothballed,
followed by weapons that self-destruct in the
computer design stage before they are built. That
would save lives and money. Eventually, the
reverse process could take us all the way back to
not even thinking about weapons.
Dan
Smith is a military affairs analyst for
Foreign Policy In Focus, a retired US Army
colonel, and a senior fellow on military affairs
at the Friends Committee on National Legislation.
His blog is "The Quakers' Colonel"
(Quakerscolonel.blogspot.com).
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