Connections 2002

Lecture: Gulf War:

by Russ Lockwood


Perpectives and Prospects 10 Years Later
presented by Col. John A. Warden III

Warden's other book, Air Campaigns, is required reading if you intend to comprehend the use of air power. His efforts in plotting and planning the air war during the Gulf War directly impacted the success of Coalition forces, saved lives, and indirectly contributed to the collapse of the Communist state in Russia. You hate to use the phrase "living legend," but Warden matches the hype when it comes to air power.

Goodbye Clauswitz?

It is Warden's belief that we have the technological and intellectual capabilities to reduce the unknowns of war "close to zero." Superior tactics do not guarantee success, for example, in Vietnam the US won the vast majority of tactial battles but lost the war. However, superior strategy combined with superior tactics do, for example, the Wintel personal computer systems' idea of open software architecture versus Apple's proprietary strategy.

Good strategy requires four good elements: where you'd like to end up, the application of resources to get there, defining and understanding what opposes you and your resources, and a plan for termination (end strategy).

"War is about creating a future."

The idea is to design your future without trying to predict it--the difference is that you concenrate on a stratgic focus and use your effort to create it rather than reacting to outside events.

He specifically points to an environment where new equipment is available, but needs to be deployed in a new way--not just do the same old job. For example, in WWII, to obtain 90% precision on a target required 1000 sorties dropping 9000 bombs--most creating craters, not hits. But today, with precision munitions, that same 90% effectiveness can be accomplished by one F-117 dropping a single bomb. You don't send 1000 stealth fighters or bombers to hit one target. We had to learn to manage hits, not misses--and that's a veritable revolution in air campaign strategy, because we have to unerstand that "craters are misses."

As you ponder the future picture, don't be surprised if you get it. In the Gulf War, the goal was a stable Middle East, and as part of that Iraq had to be tossed out of Kuwait. Yet--and this is arguable--a stable Middle East required an intact Iraq, for if you destroyed Iraq, a new Iraqi government would by definition be unstable. At the time, political planners figured a 10-year period of stability before they had to do something else. Warden comment at the time: if the Coalition got 10 years of peace, it'd be lucky. Well, 10 years have passed and now the Coalition, or what's left of it, hasn't come up with a new strategy for the future.

We operated under certain precepts in the Gulf War to see that our strategy would fall into place. We made the central issue that the war was against Saddam Hussein and not the Iraqi people, that we wanted to minimize civilian damage so that the country could get back on its feet again after the war, minimize our on casualties, and fight asymetrically--which is a fancy way to say we'll fight the war on our terms, using our strengths, and perhaps using unconventional approaches to eliminating enemy combat power.

Finally, as we craft the future, we need a "measurement of merit" to gauge the success of the strategy. For example, in Vietnam, tons of bombs and body counts were the measurements used to drive the entire US war effort. That was not particularly astute. In Iraq, we used electrical power as one measurement--the longer it is off, the more effective the campaign.

However, Warden warned that this edges into effects-based measurement and away from straight quantitative analysis. Using the electricity example, Warden noted that Iraq contained about 200 targets. After 10 days of bombing, the Iraqi electrical system was for all intents and purposes shut down. Yet, in an analysis by one of the Defense Department intelligence agencies, the campaign against Iraqi electricity was called a failure. When a member of Warden's staff called to ask the analyst why, the analyst replied that the Air Force had hit only 20 targets, and 10% is a failure. When it was pointed out that most of the electrical grid in the country (and 100% of the grid in important centers like Baghdad) as offline, the analyst said 10% was 10% and nothing else mattered--and then hung up on the staff officer. The point is that numbers alone do not tell the whole story and we must measure the effectiveness, not just the quantitative effect.

Target For Success

Iraq contained 200,000 potenial targets, such as 750 aircraft, 200 support aircraft, AAA sites, radar installations, infrastructure, and so on. Obviously, a priority was established according weighting targets according to the importance of system effects. The key here is to define the enemy not as the traditional force-on-force mechanism, but as an interlocking system with "centers of gravity." A handful of targets in one center of gravity could have exponential effects on the enemy's ability to resist.

Warden defined five centers--think of it as concentric rings one in the other. From the small inside ring (top priority and effects) to the large outer ring (lowest priority and effects) , the five are:

    Leadership (the brain: Saddam Hussein, the Ministers, etc)
    Process (Electricity, Finance, Communications, Bioweapons R&D, etc)
    Infrastructure (Roads, Highways, Bridges, Railroads, etc)
    Population (by demographics: Shiites, Sunnies, clergy, ethnic minorities, etc)
    Forces (Army, Navy, Air Force, Police)

Thus, there's more "return on investment" so to speak if you hit an individual leader in the leadership ring than in hitting a general of a division. These targets are hit in parallel to maximize damage to all systems, but priorities exist.

Warden noted that the air campaign in Serbia commenced without the planners of the Gulf War campaign and did not create such a system of centers of gravity. The 60-day Serbian campaign was originally designed for four days.

Campaign to Win

This is the nuts and bolts planning for the targets selected above. Again, parallel attacks on each system in a particular order take into account friendly orders of battle as well as enemy organization.

Finish With Finesse

All wars eventually end one way or another. You have to determine the exact exit point and how to terminate the campaign once you reach that point. Finally, you also must figure out how to reconstitute the five rings to bring about the future you defined in the beginning.

CARDINAL RULE

"Plan in the open," Warden said emphastically. Usually, plans are done in asmall, select group, the disseminated for implementation. However, if you open a plan up to more people, within reason, many of the lower level people will bring ingenuity to the table and point out practical pitfalls that may not occur to a small group. Furthermore, all these people, who have been in on the plan from day 1, understand all the information, eccentricies, and nuances of the plan because they have all gone through the process. These people will be in a better situation to help disseminate the plan because they are all experts who followed the elements that went into the plan as well as those elements that were kept out.

When he was planning the air campaign, he opened up the planning process to all in uniform within the Pentagon, getting up to 200 people involved. He notes that an optimum number would be about 50 people, because that isenough critical mass to answer all questions which come up or have the contacts to tap in order to answer such questions.

And as a corollary, always have a Red Team to play Devil's Advocate. If you get a team of smart people to pick a plan apart, you will not get surprised by a smart enemy.

Failures of the Gulf War

War planning failed on a number of items, according to Warden.

Strategic Psyops plan didn't capitalize on the prep work. We did a good job on the tactical front, such as dropping surrender leaflets on front-line Iraqi troops, but nothing went beyond the front lines. And he warned that psyops should never lie--it always backfires in the long run because the lies are always found out.

Insufficent thought was given to war termination plans. We didn't coordinate very well on a whole range of issues.

Measuring the progress could have been better, although this tends to shade into effects-based analysis. The electricity example points out the attrition-war mentality still in operation instead of a newer measurement of how much air power affects the five enemy centers of gravity.

CONCLUSION

"We are at a point of revolution in warfare," Warden contended. "Current wargames teach the synthetic lessons of history, not how to win the next war." The next big jump in war simulations must take into account effects-based measurement of campaign operations, not just quantitative counts.

The Gulf War triggered two global events. First, it put the last nail in the Soviet coffin. Soviet planners realized that they had spent vast amounts of money on defense in the last to years and that overnight, the US had wiped clean the investment with stellar military performance against Soviet-style equipment and doctrine.

Second, the US became a "hyperpower," roughly defined as a power of no equal on the globe. The defense budget increase for 2003 is greater than the entire defense budget of the next biggest ally (France).

And how does a hyperpower behave? That requires a new approach to military, diplomatic, and economic strategy.

QUESTION AND ANSWER

Q: How can you hone skills by not refighting WWII?

A: Emphasize Force Planning and War Planning. You have to get the students to understand the architecture of forces and how they fight and interact. Once you get these core concepts down on a historical level, you ease the students into a more contemporary frame of mind. The concepts apply regardless of historical or contemporary situations.

McCaffrey added that the simulations have to include effects-based modelling, not just attrition modelling. That is, a way to measure the effects of a campaign, not just bean-counting the number of targets hit/captured/destroyed/etc.

Bio

Mr. John Warden - Colonel USAF (Ret), Airpower Strategist, Theorist & Author Col. Warden was architect of the Instant Thunder Air Campaign Plan that developed into Desert Storm. His plan was credited by many with reducing Coalition casualties by roughly 30,000. Author of The Air Campaign, Col. Warden's assignments included Chief of Checkmate of the Air Force strategy cell at the Pentagon and commander of the F-15 wing in Germany. His final assignment in the Air Force was to serve three years as the Commandant of the Air Command and Staff College during which time the school won national recognition for excellence.

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