Joseph L. Galloway
is the senior military correspondent for Knight Ridder Newspapers and a nationally syndicated columnist.
One of America's preeminent war correspondents,
with more than four decades as a reporter
and writer, he recently concluded an assignment
as a special consultant to Gen. Colin Powell
at the State Department.
Galloway, a native of Refugio, Texas, spent
22 years as a foreign and war correspondent
and bureau chief for United Press International,
and nearly 20 years as a senior editor and
senior writer for U.S. News & World Report
magazine. His overseas postings include tours
in Japan, Vietnam, Indonesia, India, Singapore
and three years as UPI bureau chief in Moscow
in the former Soviet Union. During the course
of 15 years of foreign postings Galloway served
four tours as a war correspondent in Vietnam
and also covered the 1971 India-Pakistan War
and half a dozen other combat operations.
In 1990-1991 Galloway covered Desert Shield/Desert
Storm, riding with the 24th Infantry Division
(Mech) in the assault into Iraq. General H.
Norman Schwarzkopf has called Galloway "The
finest combat correspondent of our generation
-- a soldier's reporter and a soldier's friend."
WASHINGTON - A senior military official at U.S. Central Command told me last year that one of the main lessons learned in the Iraq war is that the next time the United States fights "we will need 10 percent of the troops and 10 times the bandwidth."
He may have been speaking figuratively and underestimating the number of troops that might be required next time, but he was not overestimating the need for bandwidth (the maximum amount of data that can be transmitted in a fixed amount of time).
Technology Review, a magazine published by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, this week reported that a largely classified Rand Corp. study of new technology in the Iraq war found that front-line commanders in the shock-and-awe attack had about as much situational awareness of the battlefield as their grandfathers did in World War II.
Which is to say, not very much at all.
A senior Rand researcher said that what the unclassified part of the study discovered was that the new technologies - aimed at ramping up the power of a smaller, smarter military with advanced computer communications - didn't make it down to battalion and brigade commanders who were making the decisions on the battlefield.
The researcher said what we had was a "digital divide" between division and higher commanders who were totally plugged in and watching the war develop in real time on their blue screens while lower echelons were basically operating in the dark.
One battalion commander, Lt. Col. Ernest Marcone of the 69th Armor, 3rd Mech Division, told the magazine that he was sent to take over a key bridge south of Baghdad on April 2, 2003. He was told to expect one Iraqi brigade advancing against him out of Baghdad Airport. Instead he found himself fighting three Iraqi brigades coming at him from three different directions in the largest counter-attack of the war.
The heavily outnumbered Americans won but only because of better weapons, greater firepower and effective air support - not because the new technology gave them a clear picture of what was about to happen.
The Rand Corp. study reports that the delay in getting vital intelligence data to ground commanders was caused by long download times, software failures and lack of access to high-speed communications.
In fact, the Rand study reports, the enemy attacked three American military vehicles when they stopped to download data on enemy positions.
Higher commanders in Qatar and Kuwait were, if anything, too well plugged in. They were getting so much data from sensors that they couldn't process it all and, at times, had to stop accepting feeds. But when they tried to pass information to the front they found line-of-sight microwave relay systems virtually disabled.
Some who defend the idea that high tech has brought us a new future in warfare - small, agile forces striking swiftly with total situational awareness - argue that problems at the lower echelons were doctrinal, not technological. They say the networking of the Iraq war was incomplete because it was fatally grafted onto an old-fashioned command and control system. In other words, sensor information went up the chain of command where commanders interpreted it, made decisions and issued orders and then tried to pass the relevant data down the chain.
It would be better, they say, if information and decision-making in a war zone flowed horizontally as it did in Afghanistan in 2001 where special operations forces roamed the mountains in small groups, rooting out the Taliban and hunting al-Qaida. Teams and individuals were all linked to each other but no one person was in tactical command.
Curiously, the Army's highest-tech division, wired from one end to the other and fat with bandwidth, didn't make it into the original attack on Baghdad. The 4th Mech Division, the Army's testbed unit for the digitization of warfare, was left floating around in the Mediterranean when Turkey refused to permit passage into northern Iraq.
Once it was on the ground and in Iraq the 4th Division was light years ahead of other units precisely because of bandwidth. Units less well equipped were unable to access such vital information in the counter-insurgency phase of the war as interrogation reports on prisoners they had captured and sent back to centralized interrogation centers.
Maybe the real lesson in all this is if you are going to do high-tech warfare you better make sure the lieutenant colonel's tank can download the goodies and do e-mail on the fly before you wire the general's bunker in the rear.
