Military Gears Up, Haltingly, for the Future

Crouched behind an armored vehicle on the mud-coated hills of this sprawling military training base, 24-year-old Sgt. William T. Minnehan seems the very picture of the Army’s soldier of the future:

His backpack includes a satellite navigation set that tells him his precise position and a laptop computer that receives up-to-the-second data from satellites about everything from weather to enemy tank positions.

His helmet is equipped with night-vision goggles that enable him to see almost everything that moves--even in pitch-black night--along with a viewfinder with an eye-sized video display showing a real-time picture-map of the battlefield.

Even his weapon, an updated M-16 rifle, is right out of science-fiction: It is equipped with thermal sensors, a laser range finder and an image-intensifier that permit him to pinpoint almost any target.

But an impromptu demonstration reveals some imperfections:

The computer system takes more than 15 minutes to set up--a critical drawback in a battlefield situation; the batteries last only a few hours; and the helmet assembly is so heavy that Minnehan has difficulty keeping his head up when he is in a prone position.

“It’s worth having, but it needs a little work,” Minnehan says sheepishly of the new gear.

His assessment underscores what is perhaps the central dilemma facing defense planners as they try to reshape the military for the 21st century:

Pentagon leaders have predicted that new technology will spawn a “revolution in military affairs,” dramatically altering the way the military fights, eventually leading to a smaller force.

But analysts say that despite major advances in weaponry, not all the bugs have been worked out. And more fundamentally, military strategists have not figured out how to revamp their doctrine, tactics and organizational structure to take full advantage of the new gear.

“For all of the hype, the improvements we’ve seen in military capability so far have been incremental,” says Robert W. Gaskin, a former Pentagon planner. “The so-called ‘revolution’ that the services have been touting is coming slowly.”

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Moreover, six years after today’s high-tech weapons first showed their worth in the Persian Gulf War, there still is no consensus among top officials about how commanders will use the technology to carry out operations involving two or more services at once--a vital element in military missions.

“There’s a tremendously wide gap between the rhetoric inside the [Washington] Beltway and the reality out in the field,” says C. Kenneth Allard, a retired Army colonel who is a specialist on reshaping the military.

The issue is important because, on orders from Congress, the Defense Department is about to begin a full-scale review of the nation’s defense posture aimed at reconsidering everything from the military’s basic mission to how big a force the United States needs.

“We’re now at the point where everything is on the table,” says Andrew F. Krepinevich Jr., director of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a nonpartisan defense monitoring group.

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Yet as Williamson Murray, a former Ohio State University military expert, warns: Until the services figure out how to use the technology to change the way they fight, it will be impossible to plan seriously for the 21st century force.

Army Lt. Col. Douglas A. Macgregor, who discusses the issue in the book “Breaking the Phalanx,” to be published early next year, agrees. “Truly large payoffs require changes in strategy, doctrine and organization,” Macgregor writes.

But as he points out, some broad implications--and challenges--resulting from the new weapons technology already are becoming apparent, despite the lag in development of new tactics and doctrine.

* The use of sophisticated sensors and video-display terminals, combined with ultra-long-range weapons such as cruise missiles, will enable U.S. forces to disperse themselves widely over huge battlefields, attacking hundreds of “fronts” simultaneously.

* Individual fighting units, whether companies or brigades, probably will be more self-contained. And even smaller forces will have to include their own combat support elements, such as supply components. Both groups will have to be able to move quickly.

* The data from sensors, combined with the expanded battlefield, will send a flood of intelligence and other information into command posts, compressing the time in which commanders must decide what action to take next, and adding to the confusion of war.

* All four services will have to become somewhat more skilled at working as a team, exchanging intelligence information and data from sensors and attacking in conjunction with U.S. ground forces or warships or aircraft from other services.

By Macgregor’s reckoning, and that of many other defense analysts, the Army ought to be scrapping its structure of 10 permanent, command-heavy, 18,000-person divisions and creating smaller, more mobile, 5,000-member combat-and-support units that would be far more flexible.

Such units could be dispatched virtually anywhere in the world and linked up with pre-positioned equipment stored overseas to provide a quick response. The current redundant division and brigade command structure would disappear.

He also would telescope the Army’s 26 separate specialty branches, many of which are outmoded or duplicative. An example: Combine the old Signal Corps and Military Intelligence branches into a single--and smaller--high-tech “information support” branch.

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To be sure, the services have not just been sitting on their hands.

Weapons technology has come a long way in recent years. The precision-guided munitions that captivated American TV viewers during the Persian Gulf War are even more accurate now, and there are far more of them in U.S. arsenals.

All the services have begun using satellite navigation and lasers to locate enemy forces and to pinpoint targets, displaying it all on an electronic map for pilots, tank drivers, missile crews, foot-soldiers and commanders alike.

And the technological revolution has turned the Pentagon into an intellectual crucible, with generals tripping over each other with their “visions” for the 21st century--replete with sketches of the “battlefield of the future.”

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The Marines have set up a new laboratory to experiment with changes in doctrine and tactics, possibly eliminating companies or battalions.

The Air Force has begun exploring ways to restructure itself to exploit the new technology more fully, creating “composite” squadrons that include both bombers and fighters and combining its training and manpower commands.

And the Army has launched a two-pronged effort: It has established a “Force XXI” to experiment with short-term advances, and it has set up an “Army After Next” program to map out changes for future years.

So far, however, even the short-term changes have been limited. Here at Ft. Hood, where the Force XXI program is in full swing, the pace has been frenetic. But the push toward redesigning the force has been slow.

Almost every day, infantry and armor units equipped with technology such as Minnehan is carrying engage in war games against more traditional battalions and companies, while commanders try to work out the bugs and develop new tactics.

A full-scale test of what has been accomplished here has been scheduled at the Army’s national training center at Ft. Irwin, Calif., next March.

But while Force XXI command tents boast satellite-fed monitors that provide up-to-the-second displays of where the forces are, the tactics they are using are little changed from those of ordinary Army units.

Maj. Gen. Paul J. Kern, commander of the troops participating in the Force XXI experiment, says commanders have found that the video-map technology frees them from having to field backup forces during an exercise because they know precisely where the enemy troops are.

But Kern concedes that the Army still has to come up with doctrine and tactics to go with the new technology, or with recommendations on how to revamp its organizational structure.

The effort also has been disappointing from a budgetary viewpoint. While Force XXI commanders have been able to streamline some components, they have only been able to cut about 2,000 slots from an 18,000-person division--hardly large savings.

Kern insists that eventually the Force XXI experiments “will change the way we fight,” but he admits that the team still has a considerable way to go. “I don’t have all the answers--some things will work, some things will not,” he said. “We’re struggling now with that.”

Allard found a similar picture in the field. Although Army officials have been boasting that U.S. troops in Bosnia are using some high-tech sensors and satellite systems, overall the Army’s day-to-day operations there look “much as they did 20 years ago,” he said.

Murray, now editor of Brassey’s Mershon American Defense Annual, says a similar situation prevails in other services. Air Force fighters bristle with new technology, but tactics remain the same. The Navy, too, is little changed.

Still unresolved is how the services will pay for all this change in the face of steady--or possibly declining--defense budgets.

Both the Army and the Marines already are having difficulty financing the forces they have planned. Adding still more new technology--and extra training--is likely to intensify the strain. Next year’s policy review is certain to have to consider that as well.

Don M. Snider, a onetime defense analyst for the Center for Strategic and International Studies, suggests that policymakers may have to settle for an interim prescription for a force that will serve as a transition to the real 21st century military.

The upcoming defense review may be important, but “it is not the be-all, end-all,” Snider says.

Not everyone is that sanguine. Gaskin, for example, contends that if the United States wants to stay ahead of potential adversaries, there is no time to lose.

“The new weapons that the force is acquiring have the potential to change military combat far beyond anything most people imagine,” he says. “The question is whether [policymakers] will be able to . . . make intelligent choices of strategies and forces.”