News ANALYSIS : U.S. Gulf Arsenal Appears Far From Fail-Safe in War

In April, 1980, eight U.S. helicopters took off from the aircraft carrier Nimitz in the Arabian Sea on a mission to rescue 52 American hostages in Iran. The mission, planned and rehearsed in excruciating detail, seemed fail-safe.

But reality was unkind to the U.S. rescue team. Although the choppers worked well enough in the United States, they couldn’t handle conditions in the desert. Two of the helicopters never reached the remote staging area 200 miles from Tehran. A third developed hydraulic problems and couldn’t continue the mission.

The rescue effort was called off because there weren’t enough remaining choppers to do the job. The mission, code-named Desert One, ended in disaster when a helicopter and a C-130 transport crashed as the commandos fled the landing zone, killing eight servicemen.

Today, the failure of Desert One stands as testament that the best-laid battle plans of policy-makers and generals often can go wrong.

That lesson looms today in the U.S. troop deployment in Saudi Arabia. The U.S. contingent includes nearly 200,000 troops and an impressive array of weapons systems: M1-A1 tanks and multiple rocket launchers, cruise missiles and laser-guided bombs, Stealth fighters and radar-seeking rockets.

But in the remorseless arithmetic of the battlefield, there are serious questions whether U.S. forces have enough of what they need--and whether their equipment actually will do what it is assigned to do.

To begin with, while U.S. weapons are technologically advanced, analysts fret that commanders may not always have enough reliable weapons to counter Iraq’s estimated 5,500 battle-tested heavy tanks, thousands of artillery tubes and scores of ballistic missiles.

Then, too, the U.S. combat force in the desert lacks experience in war. And armies in combat learn quickly that campaigns seldom go as planned, weapons seldom work as advertised and men rarely perform as trained.

Plans go out the window when the first shot is fired, Gen. Colin L. Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, noted in describing the first hours of the Panama operation last winter.

“Even in tested armies, things go wrong when combat commences,” said Arizona’s Sen. John McCain, a former Navy pilot shot down over North Vietnam in 1967. “With an untested army, you can count on it.”

There are these anomalies:

* If shooting starts in Saudi Arabia, the Army will rely heavily on the tank-killing capabilities of the Apache helicopter, the newest and most lethal chopper in the U.S. inventory. But the Apache has proven to be a highly temperamental bird, failing many of the Army’s own standards for reliability.

The Army expects to fly the complex helicopter four hours a day in combat. But under the far less rigorous conditions of peacetime training, Apaches break down and require major maintenance every 2 1/2 hours, according to a congressional report released last week. At any given time, only half of the Army’s Apache fleet is capable of carrying out its job, far below the Army’s 70% “mission-capable” goal, Congress’ General Accounting Office found.

In what could stand as a stark warning to U.S. commanders in Saudi Arabia, the GAO wrote: “Given that the Apache has not been able to attain availability goals in peacetime despite favorable conditions, it is questionable whether it can meet the far more strenuous demands of high-intensity combat.”

* Even in a relatively benign training environment, some of America’s most advanced weapons--including the M1-A1 tank and the Apache--fail with alarming frequency. The M1-A1 tank, flagship of U.S. armor and a mainstay of the desert deployment, breaks down during exercises after an average of only 152 miles. The tank experiences some system failure--electronic or mechanical--every 21 minutes. The Army’s standards are 320 miles and 101 minutes between failure.

* High-technology systems such as the Navy’s Aegis-class guided-missile cruiser and the F-117 Stealth fighter have sometimes proven too complex for their human operators in the real world of combat. The crew of the cruiser Vincennes shot down an Iranian jetliner in 1988 because of chaos in the computerized combat information center. A Stealth fighter missed its target in Panama last December by 160 yards after pilots became confused over their orders and the wind changed direction.

These errors were caused not by inherent mechanical flaws in the systems, which the Pentagon and the weapons-makers staunchly defend, but because of human error compounded by the stress of battle.

“The F-117’s performance in Panama left it open to question,” says Bill Arkin, a military critic at the environmental group Greenpeace. He noted that a system as complicated as a state-of-the-art jet fighter or a computerized missile cruiser can overwhelm its human operators, regardless of the machine’s theoretical capabilities.

“While it may work well in computer simulations, in the lab, in conditions at training at Nellis (Air Force Base in Nevada) on a sunny day when the guy’s had a good night’s sleep, the people factor in a real war is very different,” Arkin said.

The Vincennes incident also dramatized the problems of discriminating between civilian and military targets and between friendly and hostile forces. With more than two dozen allied armies contemplating joint action against Iraq, and with many of the same weapons in use by both sides, the potential for catastrophic error on the battlefield is magnified, experts said.

* The Pentagon has also deployed a variety of weapons that have never been tested in combat, including a raft of electronic warfare systems and the Army’s most advanced antiaircraft and antimissile weapon, the Patriot surface-to-air interceptor.

But even if the Patriot works as well in Saudi Arabia as it does at the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico, so few have been deployed that commanders worry about their ability to defend critical installations, including oil fields, air bases and troop encampments.

The 19th-Century Prussian general and writer on military strategy, Karl von Clausewitz, called the snafu phenomenon “friction”--the tendency in combat for everything possible to go awry.

Contemporary military strategist Edward N. Luttwak noted, “The chief reason why armies experience problems--sometimes severe problems, occasionally crippling problems--at the outset of a war is that in designing their forces, they have underestimated or overlooked the effects of friction. Friction is hard to estimate. It’s not a single obstacle. But in wartime, a thousand little things go wrong.”

To be sure, American commanders have a more than ample supply of certitude that their men and their machines will prevail against the forces of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein.

“If he dares, if he dares come across that border and come down here, I’m completely confident that we’re going to kick his butt,” says U.S. Mideast commander Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf.

Air Force generals speculate that the Iraqi air force and air defenses can be crushed in a matter of hours. A Marine Corps officer recently promised Iraqi forces “the most violent five minutes” they have ever experienced.

Like most of their weapons, the vast majority of U.S. troops in the region have never experienced combat. Recent military experiences, from the botched Iran hostage rescue mission in 1980 to the successful but less-than-perfect Panama invasion last December, ought to provide a sobering reminder to U.S. generals that war is inherently an unpredictable enterprise.

Superior tactics, training and technology do not always guarantee success, as the United States learned to its sorrow in Vietnam.

“Although I have confidence in the ability of our forces to ultimately prevail militarily, I don’t believe it will be as easy as some envision,” said McCain. “I worry about what appears to be some commanders’ overconfidence, because overconfidence leads to error.”

He noted that U.S. war planners and politicians consistently underestimated North Vietnam’s capabilities and tenacity.

“There was a total misplaced confidence in ability of our tactical air power to have impact on the North Vietnamese ability to wage war,” McCain said. He warned that U.S. military leaders should be wary of underestimating Iraq’s capacity to withstand the pain of U.S. aerial bombardment.

Clausewitz noted that warfare was not a technical exercise against a static entity, but rather an application of will upon “an animate object that reacts.” And animate objects often react in unpredictable ways.

“We frequently misjudge the enemy--we misjudged Ho Chi Minh and the North Vietnamese,” said Fred S. Hoffman, a former senior Pentagon spokesman. “What (former Defense Secretary Robert S.) McNamara thought was logical wasn’t logical to the enemy. We may be doing the same in the Middle East.”

And it’s not only the enemy that reacts in unpredictable or illogical ways. More battles have been lost to blunder than to superior firepower or strategy, military analysts noted.

Military historian Harry G. Summers, a retired Army infantry colonel, cited the first battle of the Somme in World War I, when British Gen. Henry Rawlinson erred in believing that he could level German positions with a massive artillery barrage and not have to fight his way through them.

He was wrong. On the day of the attack, the British forces lost 19,240 men in action.

Rawlinson’s miscalculation, Summers noted, was the same error underlying former Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Michael J. Dugan’s faith that air power alone can be decisive against Iraq’s huge and well-entrenched army.

BACKGROUND

Karl von Clausewitz, who was born in 1780 and fought with the Prussian army in all of the campaigns against Napoleon in the early 19th Century, is considered one of the greatest war strategists. After leaving the army, he devoted much of his time to writing about the military. His best-known work is “On War,” which embodies his theories and doctrines and is often quoted, even by his critics. It is a book that has cast an indelible stamp on all subsequent military thought. Although Clausewitz believed that he had discovered the fundamental laws of war, he insisted that in practice these are always subject to an almost infinite number of external influences that often lead to disastrous results on the battlefield.