MIT's Technology Review
How Technology Failed
in Iraq
The Iraq War was supposed to be a preview of the new
U.S. military: a
light,
swift force that relies as much on sensors and communications networks
as on
heavy armour and huge numbers. But once the shooting started,
technology fell
far short of expectations.
By David Talbot
November 2004
The largest counterattack of the Iraq War unfolded in the early-morning
hours of
April 3, 2003, near a key Euphrates River bridge about 30 kilometres
southwest
of Baghdad, code-named Objective Peach. The battle was a fairly
conventional
fight between tanks and other armoured vehicles-almost a throwback to
an earlier
era of war fighting, especially when viewed against the bloody chaos of
the
subsequent insurgency. Its scale made it the single biggest test to
date of the
Pentagon's initial attempts to transform the military into a smaller,
smarter,
sensor-dependent, networked force.
In theory, the size of the Iraqi attack should have been clear well in
advance.
U.S. troops were supported by unprecedented technology deployment.
During the
war, hundreds of aircraft- and satellite-mounted motion sensors, heat
detectors,
and image and communications eavesdroppers hovered above Iraq. The four
armed
services coordinated their actions as never before. U.S. commanders in
Qatar and
Kuwait enjoyed 42 times the bandwidth available to their counterparts
in the
first Gulf War. High-bandwidth links were set up for intelligence units
in the
field. A new vehicle-tracking system marked the location of key U.S.
fighting
units and even allowed text e-mails to reach front-line tanks. This
digital
firepower convinced many in the Pentagon that the war could be fought
with a far
smaller force than the one it expected to encounter.
Yet at Objective Peach, Lt. Col. Ernest "Rock" Marcone, a battalion
commander
with the 69th Armour of the Third Infantry Division, was almost devoid
of
information about Iraqi strength or position. "I would argue that I was
the
intelligence-gathering device for my higher headquarters," Marcone
says. His
unit was at the very tip of the U.S. Army's final lunge north toward
Baghdad;
the marines advanced on a parallel front. Objective Peach offered a
direct
approach to the Saddam International Airport (since rechristened Baghdad
International Airport). "Next to the fall of Baghdad," says Marcone,
"that
bridge was the most important piece of terrain in the theatre, and no
one can
tell me what's defending it. Not how many troops, what units, what
tanks,
anything. There is zero information getting to me. Someone may have
known above
me, but the information didn't get to me on the ground." Marcone's men
were
ambushed repeatedly on the approach to the bridge. But the scale of the
intelligence deficit was clear after Marcone took the bridge on April 2.
As night fell, the situation grew threatening. Marcone arrayed his
battalion in
a defensive position on the far side of the bridge and awaited the
arrival of
bogged-down reinforcements. One communications intercept did reach him:
a single
Iraqi brigade was moving south from the airport. But Marcone says no
sensors, no
network, conveyed the far more dangerous reality, which confronted him
at 3:00 a.m.
April 3. He faced not one brigade but three: between 25 and 30 tanks,
plus 70 to
80 armoured personnel carriers, artillery, and between 5,000 and 10,000
Iraqi
soldiers coming from three directions. This mass of firepower and
soldiers
attacked a U.S. force of 1,000 soldiers supported by just 30 tanks and
14
Bradley fighting vehicles. The Iraqi deployment was just the kind of
conventional, massed force that's easiest to detect. Yet "We got
nothing until
they slammed into us," Marcone recalls.
Objective Peach was not atypical of dozens of smaller encounters in the
war.
Portions of a forthcoming, largely classified report on the entire Iraq
campaign,
under preparation by the Santa Monica, CA, think tank Rand and shared
in summary
with Technology Review, confirm that in this war, one key node fell off
the U.S.
intelligence network: the front-line troops. "What we uncovered in
general in
Iraq is, there appeared to be something I refer to as a 'digital
divide,'" says
Walter Perry, a senior researcher at Rand's Arlington, VA, office and a
former
army signals officer in Vietnam. "At the division level or above, the
view of
the battle space was adequate to their needs. They were getting good
feeds from
the sensors," Perry says. But among front-line army commanders like
Marcone-as
well as his counterparts in the U.S. Marines-"Everybody said the same
thing. It
was a universal comment: 'We had terrible situational awareness,'" he
adds. The
same verdict was delivered after the first Gulf War's ground battle,
but experts
had hoped the more robust technology used in the 2003 conflict would
solve the
problem.
The Pentagon points to the Iraq War's many networking successes. During
the
blinding sandstorm that lasted from March 25 to 28, 2003, a U.S. radar
plane
detected an Iraqi Republican Guard unit manoeuvring near U.S. troops.
Bombers
moved in to attack using satellite-guided bombs that were unaffected by
poor
visibility. And the vehicle-tracking system (known as Blue Force
Tracker)
successfully ensured that commanders knew the locations of friendly
units.
Overall, command headquarters in Qatar and Kuwait sported "truly a very
impressive digital connectivity" that "had many of the characteristics
of future
network warfare that we want," Brig. Gen. Robert Cone, then director of
the
Pentagon's Joint Center for Operational Analysis and Lessons Learned,
said in a
Pentagon briefing last year.
Yet connectivity in Qatar was matched by a data dearth in the Iraqi
desert. It
was a problem all the ground forces suffered. Some units outran the
range of
high-bandwidth communications relays. Downloads took hours. Software
locked up.
And the enemy was sometimes difficult to see in the first place. As the
marines'
own "lessons learned" report puts it, "The [First Marine] Division
found the
enemy by running into them, much as forces have done since the
beginning of
warfare." Describing the army's battle at Objective Peach, John Gordon,
another
senior researcher at Rand and also a retired army officer, put it this
way: "That's
the way it was done in 1944."
On April 2, 2003, army lieutenant colonel Ernest "Rock" Marcone led an
armoured
battalion with about 1,000 U.S. troops to seize "Objective Peach"
(inset), a
bridge across the Euphrates River, the last natural barrier before
Baghdad. That
night, the battalion was surprised by the largest counterattack of the
war.
Sensing and communications technologies failed to warn of the attack's
vast
scale-between 5,000 and 10,000 Iraqi troops and about 100 tanks or other
vehicles. The U.S. success in the battle was the result of superior
tactics and
equipment.
Military intellectuals call them "revolutions in military affairs."
Every few
decades, a new technology or a new "doctrine," to use the military
jargon,
changes the nature of war. Single technologies, like gunpowder or
nuclear
weapons, spur some of these revolutions. New doctrines, like Napoleonic
staff
organization or Nazi blitz tactics, drive others. And some are the
result of
many simultaneous advances, like the airplanes, chemical weapons, and
machine
guns of World War I-which achieved new rates of slaughter.
The newest revolution is known to Pentagon planners as "force
transformation."
The idea is that robotic planes and ground vehicles, empowered by an
ever
expanding range of sensing, targeting, imaging, and communications
capabilities
(new technologies), would support teams of networked soldiers (a new
doctrine).
According to its most expansive definition, force transformation is
intended to
solve the problem of "asymmetric warfare" in the 21st century, where
U.S. forces
are not directly confronted by conventional militaries but rather must
quell
insurgencies, destroy terrorist cells, or mitigate regional
instability. Among
other things, more nimble, networked forces could employ tactics like
"swarming"-precise,
coordinated strikes from many directions at once.
The technologies driving force transformation are incredibly
complicated. It
will take at least 31 million lines of computer code to run something
called
Future Combat Systems, the centerpiece of the Pentagon's transformation
effort.
An army-run program expected to cost more than $100 billion, it
consists of a
suite of new manned and unmanned machines, all loaded with the latest
sensors,
roaming the air and ground. Software will process sensor data, identify
friend
and foe, set targets, issue alerts, coordinate actions, and guide
decisions. New
kinds of wireless communications devices-controlled by yet more
software and
relaying communications via satellites-will allow seamless links
between units.
Currently, 23 partner companies, many with their own platoons of
subcontractors,
are building the systems; Boeing of Chicago and Science Applications
International of San Diego are charged with tying them all together and
crafting
a "system of systems" by 2014.
In this grand vision, information isn't merely power. It's armour, too.
Tanks
weighing 64 metric tons could be largely phased out, giving way to
lightly
armoured vehicles-at first, the new 17-metric-ton Stryker troop
carrier-that can
avoid heavy enemy fire if need be. These lighter vehicles could ride to
war
inside cargo planes; today, transporting large numbers of the heaviest
tanks
requires weeks of transport via land and sea. "The basic notion behind
military
transformation is that information technologies allow you to substitute
information for mass. If you buy into that, the whole force structure
changes,"
says Stuart Johnson, a research professor at the Center for Technology
and
National Security Policy at National Defence University in Washington,
DC. "But
the vision of all this is totally dependent on information technologies
and the
network. If that part of the equation breaks down, what you have are
small, less
capable battle platforms that are more vulnerable."
The Iraq War represented something of a midpoint-and an early proving
ground-in
the move toward this networked force. The U.S. offensive did include
the old
heavy armour, and it didn't sport all the techno-goodies envisioned by
the
promoters of force transformation. But it did presume that satellite-
and
aircraft-mounted sensors would support the fighting units on the
ground. The war's
backbone was a land invasion from Kuwait. Ultimately, some 10,000
vehicles and
300,000 coalition troops rumbled across the sandy berm at the Kuwaiti
border,
500 kilometres from Baghdad. Desert highways crawled with columns of
Abrams
tanks, Bradley fighting vehicles, armoured personnel carriers, tank
haulers,
Humvees, and of course, fuel tankers to slake the fleet's
nine-million-litre
daily demand for fuel.
Several communications links were designed to connect these vehicles
with each
other and with commanders. First, and most successfully, at least 2,500
vehicles
were tracked via Blue Force Tracker: each vehicle broadcast its Global
Positioning System coordinates and an ID code. This thin but critical
stream of
data was in essence a military version of OnStar. Commanders in Qatar
saw its
content displayed on a large plasma screen. Marcone, like some other
commanders
in the field, also had access to it, thanks to a last-minute
installation in his
tank before the invasion.
"A Critical Vulnerability"
Once the invasion began, breakdowns quickly became the norm. For the
movement of
lots of data-such as satellite or spy-plane images-between high-level
commanders
and units in the field, the military employed a microwave-based
communications
system originally envisioned for war in Europe. This system relied on
antenna
relays carried by certain units in the advancing convoy. Critically,
these
relays-sometimes called "Ma Bell for the army"-needed to be stationary
to
function. Units had to be within a line of sight to pass information to
one
another. But in practice, the convoys were moving too fast, and too
far, for the
system to work. Perversely, in three cases, U.S. vehicles were actually
attacked
while they stopped to receive intelligence data on enemy positions. "A
lot of
the guys said, 'Enough of this crap,' and turned it off," says Perry,
flicking
his wrist as if clicking off a radio. "'We can't afford to wait for
this.'"
One Third Infantry Division brigade intelligence officer reported to
Rand that
when his unit moved, its communications links would fail, except for
the GPS
tracking system. The unit would travel for a few hours, stop, hoist up
the
antenna, log back onto the intelligence network, and attempt to download
whatever information it could. But bandwidth and software problems
caused its
computer system to lock up for ten to 12 hours at a time, rendering it
useless.
Meanwhile, commanders in Qatar and Kuwait had their own problems. Their
connectivity was good-too good. They received so much data from some of
their
airborne sensors that they couldn't process it all; at some points,
they had to
stop accepting feeds. When they tried to send information to the front,
of
course, they found the line-of-sight microwave-relay system virtually
disabled.
At the command levels above Marcone's-the brigade and even the division
levels-such
problems were ubiquitous. "The network we had built to pass imagery, et
cetera,
didn't support us. It just didn't work," says Col. Peter Bayer, then the
division's operations officer, who was south of Marcone's battalion on
the night
of April 2 and 3. "The link for V Corps [the army command] to the
division, the
majority of time, didn't work, to pass a digital image of something."
Sometimes, intelligence was passed along verbally, over FM radio. But
at other
times vehicles outran even their radio connections. This left just one
means of
communication: e-mail. (In addition to tracking vehicles, Blue Force
Tracker,
somewhat quaintly, enabled text-only e-mail.) At times, the e-mail
system was
used for issuing basic orders to units that were otherwise out of
contact. "It
was intended as a supplement, but it wound up as the primary method of
control,"
says Owen Cote, associate director of the Security Studies Program at
MIT. "The
units did outrun their main lines of communications and networking with
each
other and with higher command. But there was this very thin pipe of
information
via satellite communications that allowed the high command to see where
units
were."
The network wasn't much better for the marines pushing forward on a
separate
front. Indeed, the marines' lessons-learned report says that First
Marine
Division commanders were unable to download crucial new aerial
reconnaissance
photographs as they approached cities and towns. High-level commanders
had them,
but the system for moving them into the field broke down. This created
"a
critical vulnerability during combat operations," the report says.
"There were
issues with bandwidth, exploitation, and processes that caused this
state of
affairs, but the bottom line was no [access to fresh spy photographs]
during the
entire war."
Fortunately for U.S. forces, they faced little resistance during the
Iraq War.
The Iraqis launched no air attacks or Scud missiles. Iraqi soldiers shed
uniforms and boots and walked away barefoot, studiously avoiding eye
contact
with the Americans. When they did fight, they used inferior weapons and
vehicles.
To be sure, U.S. units racing forward would run into stiff "meeting
engagements"-jargon
for a surprise collision with enemy forces. But such meetings would end
quickly.
"They [the U.S. forces] would succeed in these meeting engagements,"
Cote says.
"But we were far from the vision of total knowledge. You can easily see
how we
would have paid a big price if it were a more robust opponent."
The problems are acknowledged at high levels. However, Art Cebrowski,
retired
vice admiral and director of the Pentagon's Office of Force
Transformation,
cites "existence proofs" that networking was generally successful in
Iraq. In
previous conflicts, combat pilots were briefed on targets before
takeoff; hours
would elapse between target identification and an actual attack. In the
Iraq War,
more than half of aerial sorties began without targets in mind,
Cebrowski says.
Instead, targets were identified on the fly and communicated to the
airborne
pilots. "Combat was moving too fast; opportunities were too fleeting.
You had to
be in the networked environment" for it to work, says Cebrowski.
Clearly, networking during the ground war was not as successful. "There
were
certainly cases where people didn't have the information they needed.
This was a
very large operation, so you would expect to see the good, the bad, and
the ugly
in it," Cebrowski acknowledges. But it would be a mistake to use these
problems
as an argument against phasing out heavy armour, he says. Big tanks
require not
only considerable time and energy to move into battle but also larger
supply
convoys that are themselves susceptible to attack. According to
Cebrowski, by
keeping heavily armoured tanks your main line of defence, "you simply
move your
vulnerability to another place on the supply chain."
Alpha Geeks at War
Some defenders of force transformation argue that the troops' problems
were
doctrinal, not technological. According to this line of reasoning, the
networking of the Iraq War was incomplete-because it was fatally
grafted onto
old-fashioned command and control systems. Sensor information went up
the chain
of command. Commanders interpreted it and made decisions. Then they
passed
commands, and tried to pass relevant data, down the chain. The result:
time
delays and the magnification of individual communications failures.
Better, some say, that information and decision-making should flow
horizontally.
In fact, that's how the 2001 war in Afghanistan was fought.
Special-operations
forces organized into "A teams" numbering no more than two dozen
soldiers roamed
the chilly mountains near the Pakistan border on horseback, rooting out
Taliban
forces and seeking al-Qaeda leaders. The teams and individuals were all
linked
to one another. No one person was in tactical command.
But despite the lack of generals making key decisions, each of these
teams of
networked soldiers had a key node, an animal once confined to corporate
IT
departments: the alpha geek, who managed the flow of information
between his
team and the others. The U.S. special forces also maintained a tactical
Web page,
collating all the information the teams collected. And this page was
managed by
a webmaster in the field: the metageek of all alpha geeks.
How did the page perform? Postmortems and reports on special-forces
operations
in Afghanistan are more secret than those from the Iraq War. A report
on one
major special-forces operation, Operation Anaconda-an attempt to
encircle and
root out al-Qaeda in March 2002-is due soon from National Defence
University.
Still, anecdotes are trickling out of the special-forces community. And
they
provide a startlingly different view of warfare than Marcone's
tank-level
vantage. One account, not previously reported, comes from John
Arquilla, an
expert in unconventional warfare at the Naval Postgraduate School in
Monterey,
CA.
The scene was a cold night in the late fall of 2001. In New York City,
the World
Trade Center ruins were still smouldering. In Afghanistan, a U.S. Air
Force
pilot en route from Uzbekistan noticed flashing lights in the mountains
below,
near the Pakistan border. Suspecting that the flashes might be
reflections from
hooded headlights of trucks bumping along, he radioed his observation
to the
webmaster. The webmaster relayed the message across a secure network
accessible
to special forces in the region. One team replied that it was near the
position
and would investigate. The team identified a convoy of trucks carrying
Taliban
fighters and got on the radio to ask if any bombers were in range. One
U.S. Navy
plane was not far off. Within minutes, the plane bombed the front and
rear of
the convoy, sealing off the possibility of escape. Not long after, a
gunship
arrived and destroyed the crippled Taliban column.
The episode, as recounted by Arquilla, shows what's possible. "That's
networking.
That's military transformation right there," Arquilla says. "Some of the
problems in Iraq grew out of an attempt to take this cascade of
information
provided by advanced information technology and try and jam it through
the
existing stovepipes of the hierarchical structure, whereas in
Afghanistan we had
a more fluid approach. This is war by minutes, and networking
technology allows
us to wage war by minutes with a great probability of success." In this
case,
service members on the battlefield collected data, shared that data,
made
decisions, and ordered strikes.
Network vs. Insurgents?
Perhaps Pentagon optimists are right. Perhaps the success of Blue Force
Tracker,
of the special-forces assault on the Taliban column, and of air force
operations
in Iraq accurately foretell the full digital transformation of war. But
to many
observers, the disruption of communications between the main ground
combat units
in Iraq was not a very promising sign at all. "If there is this
'revolution in
military affairs,' and if this revolution is based on technologies that
allow
you to network sensors and process information more quickly and spread
it out
quickly in digestible form, we are still just scratching the surface of
it,"
says Cote of MIT. "If you look at the performance of a lot of the
components of
the first efforts in that direction, it's a pretty patchy performance."
And then
there's the question of terror and insurgency. Even if the Pentagon
transforms
war fighting, the meaning of the word "war" is itself undergoing a
transformation. More Americans died in the September 11 attacks than
have
subsequently died in Afghanistan and Iraq. And the Iraq insurgency
challenges
the meaning of the Iraq military victory. Future wars will be fought in
urban
zones by low-tech fanatics who do not follow the old rules. They are
unlikely to
array themselves as convenient targets for the U.S. to detect and
destroy.
Indeed, a leading cause of death among U.S. soldiers in Iraq today is
improvised
bombs targeting passing vehicles such as Humvees.
Arquilla says some networking technology can be-and is being-brought to
bear
against the Iraq insurgency. While actual strategies are secret, some
general
tactics are known. Suspicious vehicles can be tracked, and their
connections to
other people and locations determined. Small drone aircraft can deliver
video
feeds from urban buildings as well as from desert battlefields. Sensors
can help
find a sniper by measuring the acoustical signature of a bullet. And
jamming
devices can sometimes block radio-controlled detonation of roadside
bombs. But
old-fashioned tips from humans are likely to trump technology. "Our
networks don't
really have the sensitivity to keep up with unconventional enemies. All
the
network does is move information around, but the information itself is
the key
to victory," says Loren Thompson, chief operating officer of the
Lexington
Institute, a think tank in Arlington, VA. "It's a little hard to derive
meaningful lessons from networked war fighting when you are dealing
with such
modest threats."
The welter of postmortems from the Iraq and Afghanistan wars tell many
stories.
But one thing is clear: Marcone never knew what was coming at Objective
Peach.
Advanced sensors and communications-elements of future networked warfare
designed for difficult, unconventional battles-failed to tell him about
a very
conventional massed attack. "It is my belief that the Iraqi Republican
Guard did
nothing special to conceal their intentions or their movements. They
attacked en
masse using tactics that are more recognizable with the Soviet army of
World War
II," Marcone says.
And so at a critical juncture in space (a key Euphrates bridge) and
time (the
morning of the day U.S. forces captured the Baghdad airport), Marcone
only
learned what he was facing when the shooting began. In the
early-morning hours
of April 3, it was old-fashioned training, better firepower, superior
equipment,
air support, and enemy incompetence that led to a lopsided victory for
the U.S.
troops. "When the sun came up that morning, the sight of the cost in
human life
the Iraqis paid for that assault, and burning vehicles, was something I
will
never forget," Marcone says. "It was a gruesome sight. You look down
the road
that led to Baghdad, for a mile, mile and a half, you couldn't walk
without
stepping on a body part."
Yet just eight U.S. soldiers were wounded, none seriously, during the
bridge
fighting. Whereas U.S. tanks could withstand a direct hit from Iraqi
shells,
Iraqi vehicles would "go up like a Roman candle" when struck by U.S.
shells,
Marcone says. Sitting in an office at Rand, Gordon puts things bluntly:
"If the
army had had Strykers at the front of the column, lots of guys would
have been
killed." At Objective Peach, what protected Marcone's men wasn't
information
armour, but armour itself.
Copyright © 2004. Technology Review, Inc.