Restructuring the military

Columnist Col (Retd) EAS BOKHARI calls for immediate reorganising of the Armed Forces.

“Transforming the military is not an event; it is an ongoing process.” — Donald Rumsfeld. 

I suppose the topic at hand is an emotive discussion due to our peculiar current environments and involvement particularly in the US coalition and the fight against terrorism, a contingency for which we had never really catered for.

As we are committed to cooperate with the US and other Allies in this rather unexpected venture it will be profitable to digest the salient threads of Secretary Rumsfeld’s thoughts on the transformation of the military which appear in the ‘Foreign Affairs May/June 2002.’ I am only trying to bring out the main ideas which the learned secretary has about this transformation. Much in fact of this thought process is due to the US commitment in Afghanistan and fighting against Taliban/terrorists which still continues.

Fighting in Afghanistan has always been of a special type i.e. a mixture of archaic and latest technologies at the same time. You may consider this a fighting by Crusades with an MBT or a ballistic missile. Currently the fighting is being carried out (I mean the ground fighting) by ‘special forces’. While describing the operations at Mazar-i-Sharif the secretary of defence describes the operations something like this. “From the moment they landed in Afghanistan, these troops began adapting to the circumstances on the ground. They sported beards and traditional scarves and rode horses trained to run into the machine gun fire.... They used pack mules to transport equipment across some of the roughest terrain in the world, riding at night, in darkness, near minefields and along narrow mountain trails with drops so sheer that, as one soldier put it, “it took me a week to ease the death grip on my horse”. Many had never been on horse back before.

The secretary continues with a stirring account of the special forces charge along with Afghan troops through a cloud of dust and shrapnel. “A few of these Afghans carried rocket propelled grenades; some had fewer than ten rounds of ammunition in their guns, but they rode boldly — Afghans and Americans together, into tank, mortar, artillery, and the sniper fire. “It was perhaps the first US cavalry attack of the twenty first century.

“After the battle, one US soldier described how an Afghan fighter motioned for him come over and began to pull up the leg of his pants. ‘I thought he was going to show me a wound’, he said. Instead, the fighter showed him a prosthetic limb, he had ridden into battle with only one good leg.” That’s how the Taliban were defeated and their fall from power took place.

The point to note about this battle of Mazar is the use of the most advanced laser guided weapons (duly tried and used in gulf War-1991), the antique 40 year old B-52s and the most rudimentary, a man with a gun on a horse together in an unprecedented way with devastating effect. The lesson to be learnt is not to stockpile saddles, but to prepare for the future which will require fresh thinking and development of forces and capabilities that can adapt quickly to new challenges and unexpected circumstances. It is important to be able to deal with surprise and uncertainty in most effective fashion. This is the essence of transformation of the military.

Although the Western powers and US had done well in the cold war as they knew the threat which was predictable, US learned and painfully too on the 11 September the challenges of the new century which were not nearly as predictable as of the last century. US never could imagine that the terrorists would take commercial airlines, turn them into  ‘missiles’ and use them to strike the Pentagon and the World Trade Centre, killing thousands. So the challenge now is fairly clear: to defend against the unknown, the uncertain, the unseen, and the unexpected. Military must be geared to this task.

To meet this abnormal challenge Rumsfeld has suggested an equally challenging course of action. His words are “.... It is not. But to accomplish it, we must put aside comfortable ways of thinking and planning, take risks and try new things, so we can deter and defeat adversaries that have not yet emerged to challenge us.” Translated in more mundane language, the secretary implies that the Pentagon must fix America’s weaknesses, before its enemies learn how to exploit them.

As an example the potential US adversaries know that the US is not yet in a position of having an anti-missile missile and, therefore, they are in the process of acquiring weapons of mass destruction (WMD)and means to deliver these. The military should cater for this contingency.

The answer as per secretary Rumsfeld is “Our job is to close as many of those avenues of attack as possible.... We must prepare for new forms of terrorism, to be sure, but also for attacks on US space assets, cyber attacks on our information networks, cruise missiles, ballistic missiles, and nuclear, chemical and biological weapons.... At the same time, the United States must work to build up its own areas of advantage, such as our ability to project military power, over long distances, our precision strike weapons and our space, intelligence and under sea warfare capabilities.”

The above reasoning leads to a six step strategy as below:

• To protect the US homeland and our bases overseas.

• To project and sustain power in distant theatres.

• To deny our enemies sanctuary, making sure they know that no corner of the world is remote enough, no mountain higher enough, no cave or bunker deep enough, no SUV fast enough to protect them from our reach.

• To protect our information network from attack.

• To use information technology to link up different kinds of US forces so they can fight jointly.

• To maintain unhindered access to space, and protect our space capabilities from enemy attack.

Continuing with the six point strategy of Secretary Rumsfeld, he emphasizes that the new budget should be so designed as to move the defence posture in the listed strategic directions. He writes “...We are increasing funding both for the development of transformational programmes that give us entirely new capabilities, and for modernization programmes that support transformation.”

While funding for the new programmes has been increased manifold some of the rather older and antique programmes are being shelved. This I suppose should be applicable in all the armies of the world. Take the case of USA, where some of the deletions are spelled out by the US Secretary of Defence. “At the same time, we have proposed terminating a number of systems not in line with the new defence strategy, or struggling, such as the DD-21 destroyer, the Navy Area Missile Defence Programme, 18 Army Legacy programmes, and the Peace-keeper missile. We have also proposed retiring aging and expensive to maintain capabilities, such as the F-14 fighter and 1,000 Vietnam-era helicopters.”

The object of all this is not to transform the entire US military in one year, or even in a single decade. That would be both unnecessary and unwise. Transforming the military is not an event; it is an ongoing process. Clarifying further Rumsfeld says “There will be no point at which we can declare that the US forces have been ‘transformed’.”

The ultimate aim is not simply to fight and win wars, but to prevent these. To be able to do this ways and means must be found to influence the decision-making of potential adversaries and to deter them not only from using existing weapons but also from building dangerous new ones. As far as the new US programmes, the defence secretary writes “.... We must develop new assets. For example, deployment of effective missile defences may dissuade others from spending to obtain ballistic missiles... Hardening US space systems and building the means to defend them could dissuade potential adversaries from developing small ‘killer satellites’ to attack US satellite network. New-earth, penetrating and thermo baric weapons (such as those recently used against Taliban and Al-Qaeda forces hiding in the mountains near Gardez, Afghanistan) could make obsolete the deep underground facilities where terrorists hide and terrorist states conceal their WMD capabilities.”

In addition to this the military would need rebalancing of the existing forces and capabilities by adding more of low density i.e. high demand assets, a euphemism for our priorities were wrong, and we didn’t buy enough of the things we now find we need.’ For example the shortage of UAVs was found critical in Afghanistan for ‘real time’ battlefield information. Again some of these that were available were quite vulnerable even to machine gunfire, and perhaps the first US casualty in Afghanistan was a UAV.

Some of the other shortages which have been pinpointed by the defence secretary in the present US arsenal are:

• Manned aircraft for reconnaissance, surveillance and command and control functions, especially for fighting in under developed country like Afghanistan.

• Air defence potential/units.

• Chemical and biological warfare units.

The secretary then goes on to theorise and spread his gospel rather vehemently by saying “as we change our priorities, we must begin shifting the balance in our arsenal between manned and unmanned capabilities, between short and long-range systems, between stealthy and non-stealthy systems, between shooters and sensors, and between vulnerable and hardened systems.... And we must make a leap into the information age, which is the critical foundation of all our transformation efforts.”

Referring to the September 11, the secretary finds that the US responsibilities in homeland defence has exacerbated these deficiencies. “No US President should have to choose between protecting citizens at home and US interests and forces overseas. We must be able to do both.... The notion that we could transform while cutting the budget was seductive, but false.”  

In view of the new adversary such as the terrorists and their weapon systems, the US response and the calculus of deterrence has radically changed. For example the terrorists who struck US on September 11, were not scared of the massive US build up of atomic missiles which the US surely possesses and can use. In fact this is a pointer towards a unilateral massive cuts in these somewhat in fructuous weapons of mass destruction.

In a nutshell the new triad of defence capability will be much reduced nuclear offensive forces, advanced conventional capabilities, and a range of new defences i.e. ballistic missile defence, cruise missile defence, space defence, and cyber defence. The military must be transformed further by encouraging a culture of creativity and intelligent risk taking i.e. by being proactive and not reactive. Here are some of the more important lessons of recent fighting (though not a real model fighting) which have a bearing on restructuring.

• Twenty first Century will increasingly require all elements of national power: economic, diplomatic, financial, law enforcement, intelligence, and both overt and covert military operations. Clausewitz who said “War is the continuation of politics by other means” will probably imply other means sans military.

• Ability of the Armed Forces to communicate and operate seamlessly on the battlefield i.e. carry out effective ‘joint operations’.

• Our policy in the (Afghanistan War) of accepting help from any country, on a basis comfortable for its government, and allowing that country to characterize how it is helping enables to maximize both that country’s cooperation and our effectiveness against the enemy.

• Wars can benefit from coalition (of the willing), but these should not be fought by committees. The mission must determine the coalition, the coalition must not determine the mission.

• Defending the US requires prevention and sometimes preemption. It is not possible to defend against every threat, in every place, at every conceivable time. Defending against terrorism and other emerging threats requires that we take war to the enemy. The best, and in some cases, the only, defence is a good offence.

• Rule nothing out, including the ground forces to defeat the terrorist and make whatever sacrifices are necessary to achieve victory.

• Put the Special US Forces on the ground as early as possible.