Military Fuses Old, New to Create a Lethal Force

Here was the U.S. military in Afghanistan: a bearded soldier riding horseback in a storm of desert sand, looking like something out of “Lawrence of Arabia.” But instead of a dagger, he carried a global positioning system, a sophisticated radio transmitter and a laser for marking targets.

Flying 35,000 feet above him was a Vietnam-era bomber that had seemed headed for the scrap heap--until the Pentagon loaded it with smart bombs and linked its pilot with the guy on horseback.

Since Sept. 11, the United States has harnessed the most outlandishly modern of its capabilities to the seemingly obsolete, creating a new kind of fighting force capable of finding and demolishing a new kind of enemy.

Its success at combining old and new has been a transforming lesson for America’s military. For years, believers in the ultimate power of high-tech have wrestled for defense dollars with traditionalists who say you can’t win a war without boots on the ground. The Pentagon has learned from Afghanistan that it needs both--although Congress now must decide whether the country can afford both.

“We had these guys on horseback, literally, making the difference in these airstrikes. We had, in some cases, 50-year-old bombers flying above them,” Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz said in an interview. “But we took a 50-year-old bomber and combined it with horse cavalry and turned it into a 21st century” fighting force.

From training academies to military bases, from laboratories to shipyards, a new doctrine is emerging. It says that in a world where threats can come from anywhere, America’s military must train and equip itself to be nimble and mighty at the same time--and, above all, to expect the unexpected.

U.S. Marines at a training center in rural Maryland have been getting a crash course in how to outfox terrorists holding hostages. Air Force fighter pilots are flying jets loaded with live missiles over the Capitol as part of a new mission to defend the U.S. homeland. This semester, West Point cadets, the leaders of tomorrow’s Army, can elect to study terrorism in addition to Napoleon.

In the military’s graduate schools and think tanks, strategists and students are coming to terms with this new world.

“It’s how we’re using the things that we have that’s different,” said Army Col. Dan Bolger, director of strategy and analysis for the Joint Forces Command in Norfolk, Va. “It’s rarely the case where you completely junk the old arsenal and use the new stuff. You learn that it’s about how we can use the new stuff along with or to carry the old.”

In Afghanistan, it seemed every move proved the point.

Kits called “joint direct attack munitions” made dumb bombs smart by adding tail fins and global positioning systems, allowing them to strike Taliban troops and trucks with deadly precision.

State-of-the-art Navy fighter planes roared into the air off 30-year-old aircraft carriers--ships built to attack the Soviet Union from the northern seas and until recently considered white elephants by some in the Pentagon.

Pilotless reconnaissance planes called Predator and Global Hawk guided AC-130 gunships first used in Vietnam. The spy planes found Taliban and Al Qaeda fighters and the heavily armed AC-130 aircraft, newly outfitted with navigational computers, mowed them down.

A New War Paradigm

Ever since the Cold War ended, and with it the reason for arming and training a military to wage World War III in Europe, the Pentagon has been searching for a new model of how to fight.

The war on terrorism in general, and the war in Afghanistan in particular, provided the outline of a new approach. It is already having far-reaching effects on the way the military does business, as well as on the lives of the people in it.

On a recent hazy morning on the banks of Mattawoman Creek in Indian Head, Md., Marine infantrymen who have spent their careers training to kill enemy soldiers on a battlefield crawled blindfolded through a collapsed building. In October, they had received orders to join a new 2,400-person anti-terrorist brigade. Their job now is to learn how to rescue hostages and save lives after a terrorist attack.

Across the country at Ft. Lewis, Wash., an Army base 30 miles south of Seattle, a combat squad moved stealthily through a simulated cityscape. The soldiers, trained until now to fight in non-urban battlefields, darted down alleys and into buildings in search of imaginary terrorists. Unlike the Marines at Indian Head, these Army soldiers are training to fight terrorists.

“I wish I were starting out all over again,” said Lt. Jim Cashwell, commander of the squad. “My training 18 years ago was for World War III: very heavy equipment, very linear, line up and shoot. Today it’s more like soccer, with the field 360 degrees around you. It’s an ever-changing problem that has to be figured out.”

The lessons of Afghanistan are also starting to change the way the military thinks of future wars, tactics and adversaries. For a decade or so at places such as the National War College at Ft. McNair in Washington, D.C., where rising stars of the military are trained in foreign policy and diplomacy, the prevailing view has been that the significant wars of the future could be predicted.

They would come, the thinking went, in known hot spots, when a nation-state such as China or North Korea challenged the vital interests of the United States. And they would be fought with familiar tactics and weapons.

Also taught was “asymmetric warfare,” with a small power attacking a big one at its weak points. But it wasn’t considered a threat that could shake the U.S. to its core, as the Sept. 11 attacks have.

“We’ve been planning in too focused a way for wars on the Korean peninsula or reruns of Desert Storm, and it’s fortunate that in spite of that, we had the capability to do this thing that was very different,” Wolfowitz said of the Afghanistan campaign. “You have to be prepared for a broad range of things.”

Air Force Col. Paula G. Thornhill, dean of the faculty at the National War College, says Sept. 11 has driven that point home. “Now we’re moving from the predictable to the unexpected,” she said.

In Newport, R.I., where John Paul Jones founded the U.S. Navy, tacticians at the Naval War College have been gaming out wars since 1887. They once moved pieces around a board in a grown-up version of the game Battleship.

Now they use a $28-million war simulation center with a cavernous room of computer-driven displays. The Space Age technology allows commanders simulating wars to view vast amounts of information from satellites, reconnaissance drones and military intelligence from around the world.

Since Sept. 11, the games they play have changed. Now, they include how to respond to a chemical or biological attack. Others simulate a war on terrorist bases, equipment and financial networks around the world.

“This is a place that is usually about the theoretical,” said Lt. Cmdr. Richard LaBranche, a Navy fighter pilot studying in Newport for a master’s degree. “Now we have something alive and breathing. We have a war going on. It’s given me something to think about--real world, real time.”

The Marines were among the first in the military to begin arming themselves in a serious way for a conflict such as the one in Afghanistan.

But even at the Indian Head training center in Maryland, the current conflict has challenged old assumptions.

Lance Cpl. Matthew Lecorgne has been a Marine for more than two years, but on a recent, warm December day he was doing something new: learning to rescue civilians held hostage by a terrorist in a smoke- and chemical-filled high-rise. Crawling blind through a three-dimensional maze of tight spaces and sudden drops and turns, he said he felt at times utterly panicked and frighteningly alone.

“This is a totally different concept for us,” Lecorgne said. “We’re used to life-taking, and this is life-saving. It’s like the idea of helplessness. At least we know on the battlefield, we’re confident of our skills and abilities. Here you don’t know how stable the building is, whether there are any casualties. The only thing you have is the guy hanging off your ankles, and he’s just as scared as you.”

Funds Wane as Needs Increase

Today’s 1.4-million-member military and its $329-billion budget were already at a crossroads before Sept. 11.

Weaponry bought during the Reagan administration buildup of the 1980s had been wearing out, jacking up maintenance costs just as spending on the latest technologies picked up. Challenges to the American homeland were also on the rise--not only from the possibility of terrorist strikes but from short- and long-range missiles and cyber attacks against computer networks serving key sectors of the U.S. economy.

George W. Bush entered office promising to devote just 1% of the then-projected budget surplus to the military--not nearly enough to retain current forces while buying all the advanced weaponry the military wanted.

Since the terrorist attacks, the surplus has become a deficit. The Pentagon’s clout on Capitol Hill has grown, but so has its shopping list.

It says it needs more military intelligence agents and special forces; those trained in the history and cultures of Central Asia proved invaluable in Afghanistan, but they numbered in the dozens.

The new unmanned aircraft have been critical for spotting targets in Afghanistan. But with fewer than 60 Predators and about 50 Global Hawks, the Pentagon had to pull several out of service in other parts of the globe to fly Afghan skies. Since the Afghanistan campaign began, four Predators and one Global Hawk have crashed.

The Air Force and Navy used so many precision munitions in Afghanistan that they seriously depleted the relatively small stockpile, senior Pentagon officials said.

Concerns about shortages of the kits that add global positioning equipment and tail fins to old bombs are particularly acute. The Navy has had to borrow thousands of the kits from the Air Force to meet its needs in Afghanistan. More have been ordered from Boeing, the manufacturer.

When Pentagon officials are asked whether they want to lavish their resources on the old ways of fighting wars or the new, they typically respond: both. Mike Brown, director of the national security studies program at Georgetown University, says the nation can’t afford that answer.

Nor does he think it’s the right answer. Noting that the military spends billions on the heavy tanks and artillery designed to fight a major land war, he advocates jettisoning the “huge amounts of resources . . . that are contributing very close to zero to deal with the problems of the post-Cold War world.”

The trouble is, no one knows which of America’s aging weapon systems might prove useful in the next war. One example: Before Afghanistan, the Defense Department, under Donald H. Rumsfeld, had been trying to cut funding for the long-range B-1 bomber by about one-third. The supersonic bombers, first produced in 1985 and now carrying a price tag of $200 million each, have had a history of design problems, cost overruns and crashes.

But B-1s, operating from Missouri, dropped more bombs on Afghanistan than any other aircraft and have been receiving recognition as a critical workhorse of the conflict.

The Air Force fighter fleet, by contrast, was grounded in this war because it had no bases close enough to Afghanistan (Navy aircraft flying from carriers have primarily waged the air war). But that didn’t stop the Pentagon from tapping Lockheed Martin in October to build 3,000 new Air Force jet fighters. The projected cost of $200 billion made this the biggest military contract ever.

“It’s the Rubik’s Cube notion,” a senior Army officer said. “You get a different type of makeup every time you look at a different [foe]. What that means to us is, you’ve got to have a force that is not so specifically tailored that it has limitations left and right. You can never have a force that can do everything, but you’ve got to have a force that can do most things.”

Although the Pentagon has been compelled since Sept. 11 to think of what planners call the “away game” in a new way, it is also being forced to contemplate a new and costly role in the “home game.”

Along with Air Force jets flying over Washington, the National Guard is patrolling the nation’s airports. Reserve pilots are on alert to defend U.S. skies. The Coast Guard is using Navy ships to patrol the coasts.

The use of the Reserve and National Guard at home on a grand scale threatens to hamper the military’s performance abroad. The military has relied increasingly on those forces over the last decade to help with everything from food service to public relations in such far-flung places as Bosnia.

The alternative--deploying active-duty military units for missions on U.S. soil--has met with deep opposition from top military leaders.

“The American people have not bought the Navy, in my belief, to defend our coasts,” said Rear Adm. Rodney P. Rempt, president of the Naval War College. “What we want to do is to eliminate the terrorists at the source.”

The military isn’t even sure how much authority it has to operate at home. It has directed a team of military lawyers at the Joint Forces Command in Norfolk, which is in charge of guarding the homeland, to determine the reach of the Posse Comitatus Act.

That law, enacted after the government used the military to enforce Reconstruction-era laws after the Civil War, forbids the federal government to use American soldiers to enforce the law on U.S. soil. (The law permits state and municipal officials to call up the Reserve and the Guard for this purpose.)

“We have to figure out here what the military might actually do in the event of an attack against the U.S., and when you do that, you bump right up against Posse Comitatus and its limitations. All of this has obviously become urgent,” said Capt. Dan Donovan, the command’s legal advisor.

Terrorism Course Added to Curriculum

At the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, N.Y., where patriots strung a 150-ton iron chain across the Hudson River two centuries ago to protect the fledgling republic from British warships, military scholars are mulling how to engage in the contemporary defense of the U.S. homeland.

At 8:40 a.m. Sept. 11, the first plane destined for the World Trade Center flew over the campus on its way from Boston. Ever since, the reality of the war on terrorism has kept intruding on the stately academy.

“It was shock, it was outrage from the cadets,” said Brig. Gen. Daniel Kaufman, dean of the academy’s academic board.

“Their world had changed. They had grown up in the era of the greatest economic expansion in U.S. history. That was the only world they knew. Suddenly they had questions to ask themselves about the nature of their world and the requirements of being a commissioned officer.”

The school quickly added an elective course on terrorism to its liberal arts curriculum, which includes a seminar on lessons learned from the Gulf War.

“We talk about Afghanistan as much as we talk about anything else these days,” said Anne McClain, 23, from Spokane, Wash., a cadet in her final year. “Suddenly, it seems critical to know.

“All of us are about to graduate. We have a greater sense of purpose that, on Sept. 11, became defined. We have to keep an eye on what’s out there, because one day it is going to be up to us.”

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Times researcher Lynn Marshall in Seattle contributed to this report.