Army Puts Computer-Based Technology to Battlefield Test

In the desert where the victors of World War II and Operation Desert Storm learned to flank and maneuver, the Army has been putting a fragile, bug-ridden technology to the test of battle--and concluding that it offers the service’s best hope to dominate a new age of warfare.

Rolling out the new gear for the first time under battlefield conditions, the Army is finding that a 6,500-soldier high-tech force can hold its own--and sometimes outdo--a crafty Soviet-style team that has humbled visitors at this vast mountain-ringed training ground for two decades.

The new paraphernalia spill data from many sources--satellites, radar planes, sensors and scouts--onto a common computer system, giving commanders faster, more detailed knowledge of battlefield positions than they have ever had. They can dispatch troops and call in deadly fire with video-game ease from their computer keyboards.

One sign of the new system’s value came last week, when commanders used it to direct a predawn helicopter attack that pierced deep behind enemy lines, wiping out 27 of the opponent’s big guns.

The high-tech team had two special advantages on that mission. They planned the operation with precise data from an unmanned aircraft carrying infrared sensors and video cameras that fed the computer system with highly detailed images of the area. And they directed the attack with ease while watching computer screens.

More proof of the system’s value came in another early battle, when the Soviet-style forces withdrew a cordon of front-line troops to positions behind the safety of a minefield, fearing they were too vulnerable to attack from the keen-eyed opponents.

In the past, such troops could count on hiding at least some of their number in the harsh terrain, and leaving the adversary uncertain about how big a force it faced. This time, with their positions reported by the reconnaissance and distributed throughout the high-tech force, they were much more vulnerable to counterstrikes.

The high-tech force “has definitely done better than expected,” said Col. William Betson, one of the top umpires of the exercises, which continue this week.

Yet, at the same time, officers acknowledged that the exercises uncovered many technical shortcomings of the new equipment--as well as outmoded tactics and organization in an Army still primarily geared for huge tank battles against the Soviets on the plains of Europe.

The exercises at Ft. Irwin, 37 miles northeast of Barstow, unfolded in a haze of dust kicked up by the dozens of rumbling Abrams tanks and Bradley Fighting Vehicles that range across a boulder-studded, treeless expanse as big as Rhode Island. Troops and vehicles are equipped with laser guns that they aim at the enemy to score “kills.”

On the basis of these exercises, Army generals are to decide in about a month whether to pour in another $200 million or so a year to the Force XXI project, which, so far, has cost about $700 million. Officers say the equipment has done well enough already that the go-ahead is now likely.

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The deep thinkers of the defense world are planning for the day when commanders, using precise data on the enemy’s civil and military assets, will be able to sit thousands of miles from the adversary and push buttons to destroy huge numbers of targets deep in the enemy homeland.

The exercises also have broader significance because, at a time when the Pentagon is reviewing the way it divides its shrunken budget, the tradition-bound Army badly needs to show that it can keep up with its service rivals, which have been boasting about their own high-tech gear and revolutionary thinking.

The Army wants to take the first step toward this futuristic warfare by melting away the age-old uncertainties of the battlefield with a data system that lets soldiers see everything they need to in the immediate vicinity.

At Ft. Irwin, soldiers in tanks and armored vehicles could pore over the same glowing computer screens as their commanders in tents to find friend and foe. Tanks showed up as triangles and armored troop carriers as tiny square icons--either blue for the high-tech Force XXI, or red for the opposition force. Fire from artillery, aircraft or missiles showed up as colored lines that flickered within a couple of minutes from the time they occurred.

“Dead” tanks, guns, or troops showed up as black squares.

The strengths and shortcomings of the “tactical Internet” could be seen in the experience of Sgt. George Thomison, who roamed the battlefield in a dust-coated Humvee that had a computer wedged into a frame next to the driver’s seat.

Seated in his vehicle amid the twisted Mojave scrub, the 31-year-old Oklahoman described how he could report enemy positions with a click of his mouse.

But he acknowledged that he had to shield the computer under an old rations box so he could read the screen in the glare of the desert sun. And he told how awkward it was to try to work the computer from the driver’s seat.

“Right now, it’s not convenient,” he said.

And while Thomison praised the new system, much of what was happening across enemy lines remained unknown. Satellites and radar planes fly over the territory at intervals, and the drones can only focus in detail on portions of the terrain.

In one battle, when the high-tech force mounted a surprise thrust to the south in an attempt to flank the enemy, gaps in surveillance data forced commanders to go for hours without knowing how the enemy was preparing to respond. The opponents finally mounted a counterattack, which pushed the high-tech force into rough terrain and halted its advance.

And there were other shortcomings.

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The new computer network system is highly vulnerable to jamming and hacking--so much so that the enemy team was barred from using any kind of electronic countermeasures lest they end the experiment before it began.

But a more fundamental problem is how to avoid overloading the troops with too much information, which could cause them to miss what they really need to watch.

This problem was clear in the games when a Bradley Fighting Vehicle commander blew up a friendly tank because the platoon commander had overlooked that the triangle on his screen was blue, which should have alerted him that the tank was on his side.

If the project gets the go-ahead, the Army is expected to announce this spring that it will outfit one of its 10 active-duty divisions with the high-tech equipment by the year 2000. A second infantry division may follow suit by 2006.

Yet, even as the Army presses forward, it must defend itself against critics who say the new technology and reorganization will be outdated when it reaches the field.

Army officials acknowledge that their reorganization must be sweeping, and that in trying to pick the right technology they are trying to hit a moving target.

“Change is hard,” said Maj. Gen. Paul Kern, commander of the 4th Infantry Division. “None of this comes easy.”