U.S. Is Shaky on the ‘Escalation Ladder’ : Technology Can’t Be Precise Enough to Squelch the Moral Issues

When experts outside the Pentagon look at the U.S. raid on Libya, some suspect that the problems encountered were the result of both a too-demanding set of rules of engagement and over-reaction to the earlier loss of two carrier-based fighters in daylight missions over Lebanon.

The United States may have weaknesses in its power projection capabilities, but there is no question that these capabilities are massive--particularly against as poorly organized a threat as Libya. With its sophisticated mix of attack and air defense aircraft, the United States might well have been able to carry out an effective daytime strike against Libya.

Some observers believe that the only reason for not striking during the day was the desire to avoid an all-out air suppression battle, particularly one that might have either led to U.S. strikes hitting large numbers of Soviet advisers or revealing more electronic warfare secrets than the low priority of the target justified. This, however, is a highly controversial thesis, and many in the Pentagon would argue that the United States simply used the best available force mix.

One thing is clear: The combination of shortcomings in the aircraft that were used gave the raid a highly unpredictable overall effect for what was supposed to be a surgical strike with carefully calculated effects.

This performance raises serious questions about how well the United States can manage its “escalation ladder” in tailoring the use of force to a particular political objective. Achieving less than 50% of the desired military effect in the Libya bombing may have been better than the total failure of U.S. battleships and carrier aircraft in Lebanon to hit any useful targets at all, but it is scarcely a desirable standard of performance. And in future engagements, the United States is almost certain to encounter problems similar to those in the Libya action.

The raid’s civilian casualties also are somewhat disturbing, although more in terms of public and congressional reactions than military effects. U.S. military planners had known from the start that some losses were likely even under the most stringent engagement rules.

The problem is that the United States must try to fight terrorist units or bases with real weapons in the face of impossible political and moral demands.

At least at the political level, the Libya bombing is forcing the United States to relearn some very important lessons about escalation: It is always difficult to control and unpredictable. No technology can eliminate U.S. military or foreign civilian losses. No technology is good enough to produce surgically precise or fully predictable results. No use of force can ever avoid at least some moral issues and contradictions.

The predictability problem is particularly important given the uncertainty about whether the United States did or did not try to kill Moammar Kadafi or regarded him as a sort of “bonus” target. Some experts feel that the very ambiguity of the results may have had a sobering effect on Kadafi. Others feel that one of the key weaknesses in the raid is that no one now really understands what the United States was trying to accomplish, or what would have happened if all of the strike force had delivered all of its payload accurately.

A few critics have raised the broader issue of whether compromises in military policy debates prevent the United States from ever acting decisively enough. These critics believe that political constraints force military planners to create patterns of escalation that are so finely calculated and fully coordinated, they lack coherence and purpose. An accountant’s mentality has crept into policy planning; the government winds up over-calculating its actions and substituting arguable theory for effective strategy.

This school of thought generally supports the argument that the United States should either have waited for still greater justification or simply gone for Kadafi or Libya’s oil export capability. They say that hitting terrorist bases and camps is pointless, and that much of the European and moderate Arab Angst over the raid would have disappeared overnight if Kadafi had not survived or if there no longer was a major Libyan oil export capability for Europe to worry about.

Some U.S. defense experts, including influential members of the Senate such as Sam Nunn, now argue that we should use cruise missiles against carefully chosen targets of critical political, economic or military importance to the nation or terrorist movement involved.

However, many Pentagon and aerospace insiders believe that the current generation of cruise missiles and support systems lacks the reliability, targeting and navigation capability, and warhead lethality for such a role, and that such targets are far easier to talk about in the abstract than find in the real world. They express particularly strong doubts about the current performance of sea-launched cruise missiles (SLCMs), and some experts say that we may have rushed to deploy conventional SLCMs that lack meaningful mission capability.

An equally serious debate is beginning to emerge over the reactivation of U.S. battleships. Neither the SLCMs on the battleships nor their long-range guns have emerged as having the kind of contingency value that the United States would like in so expensive a platform.

There is considerable uncertainty over whether an adequate solution has been found to the targeting and accuracy problems that were revealed in U.S. attempts to use the battleship guns in Lebanon. Many predict that the ships will turn out to be white elephants--particularly when the United States seems less and less likely to take the political and military risk of sending Marines into amphibious landings against hostile forces in pursuit of limited military aims.

All these issues aside, U.S. planners are satisfied that some very important advanced technology systems did work in Libya. Our electronic warfare systems proved highly successful, even though their full capability was not used. (Many technical secrets remain carefully kept in reserve for a defense against a Soviet or Warsaw Pact attack.)

Unclassified data on Col. Kadafi’s air defense holdings are uncertain, but it is known that Libya has more than 100 SA-2, SA-3, and SA-6 batteries--each with two to six launchers. At least 30 to 60 of these batteries are operational, in spite of the general lack of readiness in every aspect of the Libyan forces. Our technology proved highly successful against the SAM batteries.

The United States not only confirmed its ability to kill and jam the Soviet SA-5, but also found that the EF-111 and EA-6B electronic warfare gear worked well in virtually every respect. The Navy’s short- and long-range anti-radiation missiles also performed well.

All in all, the strike against Libya served well as a testing ground for U.S. force capabilities, even if it revealed some serious shortcomings in our long-range attack forces.