Ambitious and farsighted ideas, but meanwhile the Army continues work on the Crusader, its latest “big gun”–a self-propelled, computer-aimed 155mm howitzer cannon built to rapid-fire while careering about the battlefield at 60 mph. The Army wants to buy 1,100 Crusaders at a cost of about $11 billion. The problem: the Crusader’s firing-control system is about as complex as that of a fighter plane and difficult to maintain under combat conditions. And the Crusader is so heavy that the Air Force’s biggest cargo plane, the C-5, won’t be able to carry both the gun and its supply vehicle. An armored division equipped with Crusaders would be that much more difficult to deploy. So much for what General Shinseki calls “strategic mobility.”
The conflict between Shinseki’s call for a lighter, faster army and the desire for a bigger, heavier gun underscores a dilemma that sharply divides the U.S. Army. Traditionalists–always a majority in the Army–belong to what might be called the “Big War” school. All soldiers are taught that “the mission of the U.S. Army is to fight and win the nation’s wars.” Most commanders insist that “missions other than war”–like peacekeeping or handling refugees–“degrade” the combat readiness of their troops, and should be avoided. On the other side are pragmatists like former chief of staff Gen. Dennis Reimer, who says that “the wider task of the Army is to serve the nation.” Increasingly, that service includes peacekeeping–the unglamorous work of policing poor and violent Third World hot spots like Bosnia, Kosovo, East Timor and Somalia.
The role of the U.S. Army is so essential to national security that it deserves to be debated by the presidential candidates. So far, only one–George W. Bush–has said anything significant. Meanwhile, infighting has left the Army essentially paralyzed–and unready to face what may be the greatest obstacle to winning future wars: terror weapons like chemical and biological missiles. Many experts–including the planners who stage the Army’s own war games–fear that America’s armed forces are still equipping themselves for the last war, not the next one.
In a real sense, the Army is battling over its soul. Ever since the Civil War, the Army has believed in overwhelming the enemy with superior firepower. In the two world wars, this strategy succeeded; in Vietnam, where Shinseki was seriously wounded as a lieutenant, it failed. During the cold war, the Army readied itself for a massive tank battle on the plains of Europe. In the gulf war, tanks, along with air power carried the day. But the gulf war was, many experts say, an aberration, the last hurrah for an obsolete era of combat. Future conflicts, they argue, are apt to be more like Somalia or Kosovo–trying to subdue, with as few casualties as possible, the paramilitary forces of local strongmen, then keeping order when the fighting is over. The Army’s contribution to the Kosovo conflict was negligible. The Army kept grounded a squadron of Apache helicopters because they were deemed too vulnerable to shoulder-fired missiles. (The Apache pilots, still prepping to kill tanks on open terrain, had not been trained to fly in mountains.) Had President Clinton decided to wage a ground war in Kosovo, it’s not clear when and how the troops and armor would have gotten there. To handle the Americans’ gargantuan armored divisions, the Army would have had to construct almost from scratch a port and a road network across the Balkans.
The heavy-metal faction in the Army has no enthusiasm for playing globo-cop. (The more mobile, less hidebound Marine Corps, on the other hand, has readily embraced the peacekeeping role. And the Air Force is exulting in its new role, fighting low-casualty conflicts with precision-guided bombs.) Army training and doctrine are still focused on a massive armored battle. Incredibly, at a time when Army chiefs were calling for speed and mobility, the average armored division grew heavier–by some 20 percent since 1989. The M1 tank was given a heavier cannon, while both the Apache helicopter and Bradley Fighting Vehicle were beefed up with more complex weapons systems. Their targets are not clear. NEWSWEEK has learned that a classified threat assessment by the Pentagon’s Defense Intelligence Agency predicts that by 2005 the armored forces of likely adversaries will shrink to less than one fifth of those faced by the United States in 1990. The Army is “looking backwards to find the threat,” says Loren Thompson, head of the Lexington Institute, a military think tank in Arlington, Va.. “They’re preparing to do what [Nazi Germany’s General] Guderian couldn’t: they’re going to take Moscow, and this time they’re going to win.”
The true challenge is something Pentagon planners call “an asymmetrical threat.” To Third World troublemakers–rogue states like North Korea, Libya, Iran or Iraq–the basic lesson of the gulf war is to stop the United States before it can get started. Saddam did nothing while Operation Desert Shield grew into an insurmountable force on Kuwait’s borders. Future despots will surely be smart enough to rain missiles on the ports and airfields where tanks, helicopters, artillery and troops must arrive to form an invasion force. At the Army War College at Carlisle, Pa., war-game planners try to emulate battlefields 10 to 15 years in the future. In last spring’s scenario, a resurgent Russia tried to re-conquer oil-rich states in the former Soviet Union around the Caspian Sea. When the “Blue Team” tried to send in a U.S. invasion force to drive them out, the “Red Team” barraged the Army’s arrival points in Turkey with chemical and biological weapons. The mauled U.S. expeditionary force had to fall back so far to get out of Russian missile range that it wound up operating from back bases in Cyprus and Crete.
In the gulf war, it took the Pentagon close to seven months to build up an invasion force in the region. If Army units continue to grow heavier, it could take even longer to field them. The war-game scenarios suggest instead that the Army needs weapons that can be air-deployed right away–including a mobile antimissile defense system and rocket-firing assault weapons.
The Army as it stands now, and the Army being equipped with Crusader howitzers and latest-model M1 tanks, looks nothing like that. At the highest levels, the Army brass has realized the need for change. Successive chiefs of staff have encouraged training for peacekeeping duties. Gen. Gordon Sullivan, the Army chief of staff in the early ’90s, set up a course at Fort Polk, La., with roadblocks, irregular local forces, make-believe rioters and uncooperative relief workers. His successor, General Reimer, converted thousands of acres of Colorado prairie into a huddle of four “Bosnian” villages, complete with a church that had silver candlesticks on the altar. Spanish-speaking troops play the part of locals, so that units coming in will have to learn to rely on interpreters. The training facilities are a start, but they were established only after what General Sullivan calls a “pretty passionate” debate in the leadership between the futurists and the “barons,” the old-line tankers and artillerymen who still dominate the Army’s command structure. There was a price: to preserve internal harmony, both Sullivan and Reimer had to buy off the objections of the “Big War” school by allowing the baronies to purchase the heavy tanks and guns they demanded.
As Reimer’s No. 2, Shinseki was seen as an able mediator between the factions. Now that he is the top man, will he push to reform the Army? Low-key and not given to interviews (he declined to speak to NEWSWEEK), he did put forward some sweeping ideas in a speech last month described by his staff as a “vision statement.” He wants to beef up the Army’s light divisions to give them more firepower, while slimming down the leviathan armored divisions to make them more deployable–ultimately abandoning the tank for some yet-to-be-designed wheeled vehicle. Outside analysts were unimpressed. “Shinseki may think that coming up with a medium-weight force structure is the answer to the Army’s problems,” said retired Col. Robert Killebrew, a widely respected consultant. “But it’s not. It’s almost irrelevant.” The idea of a lighter, more mobile force was proposed 20 years ago by the then Army chief of staff, Gen. Edward (Shy) Meyer. The barons shot it down. To Killebrew, the Army’s real problem is “creeping bureaucratic inertia.”
It will take civilian leadership to shake up the Army. The Clinton administration has provided very little. Of the current presidential candidates, only George W. Bush has called for radical reforms of the armed forces. He sensibly proposed that the Army stop building World War II-era weapons like heavy tanks and instead call a timeout: take advantage of America’s current military supremacy to pause, “skip a generation” of technology and invest in futuristic high-tech systems that can be quickly deployed. (Bush’s lead challenger, John McCain, and the two Democratic rivals, Al Gore and Bill Bradley, have said almost nothing.) Reimer, the veteran of endless bureaucratic struggles, welcomed Bush’s indictment of the status quo. “Great,” he told NEWSWEEK. “Maybe that will provoke the debate this country needs to have about the future of its military.”
Army traditionalists like big tanks and even bigger guns–and if they get their way, the Pentagon will push ahead with an $11 billion program to deploy one of the heaviest mobile cannons even built.
100+ TONS The Crusader It’s a self-propelled 155mm howitzer that can shoot on the move–even at 60 miles an hour
C5A Galaxy This transport is massive–but it could carry only one piece of a Crusader
69.5 TONS M1A2 Tank New model has a bigger gun, weighs seven tons more
8 TONS Apache Helicopter is too vulnerable
25 TON The Bradley has $3 million new electronics–for a $1.5 million vehicle
Throw Weight The weight of a typical Army tank division has gone up in a decade
1989 82,650 tons 1994 110,431 tons 1997 101,340 tons
Defense analysts say a potential adversary could use “asymmetrical” warfare to neutralize U.S. forces’ overwhelming advantage in World War II-era weapons.
Commercial imaging satellites locate U.S. amphibious force, eliminating the element of surprise
Enemy launches missile attacks on communications satellites used by U.S. forces
Fast, sea-skimming missiles attack the U.S. fleet
Smart mines home in on U.S. subs, ships and landing craft
Passive sensors track U.S. aircraft without radar emissions
Surface-to-air missiles force U.S. planes to fly higher
Chemical and biological weapons, delivered by missiles, shut down U.S.-held airfields.
Handheld missiles attack U.S. planes
Enemy communications on land lines can’t be jammed
Enemy hackers disrupt U.S. military computer networks and attack civilian computers as well, causing chaos in the United States
