These are clippings from the overall article that can be found at: http://www.iraq.net/displayarticle5830.html
How Technology Failed in Iraq
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 â Å“Rockâ ? Marcone, a battalion commander with the 69th Armor of the Third Infantry Division, was almost devoid of information about Iraqi strength or position. â Å“I would argue that I was the intelligence-gathering device for my higher headquarters,â ? 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). â Å“Next to the fall of Baghdad,â ? says Marcone, â Å“that bridge was the most important piece of terrain in the theater, 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.â ? 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 armored 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 â Å“We got nothing until they slammed into us,â ? Marcone recalls.
In this grand vision, information isn't merely power. It's armor, too. Tanks weighing 64 metric tons could be largely phased out, giving way to lightly armored vehiclesâ â€at first, the new 17-metric-ton Stryker troop carrierâ â€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. â Å“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,â ? says Stuart Johnson, a research professor at the Center for Technology and National Security Policy at National Defense University in Washington, DC. â Å“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.â ?
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 communicationsâ â€elements of future networked warfare designed for difficult, unconventional battlesâ â€failed to tell him about a very conventional massed attack. â Å“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,â ? 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. â Å“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,â ? Marcone says. â Å“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.â ?
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 â Å“go up like a Roman candleâ ? when struck by U.S. shells, Marcone says. Sitting in an office at Rand, Gordon puts things bluntly: â Å“If the army had had Strykers at the front of the column, lots of guys would have been killed.â ? At Objective Peach, what protected Marcone's men wasn't information armor, but armor itself.
This seems to be a very clear example of why you need combined arms with heavy MBT contingent and not upgunned Strykers, aka MGS.
MHO
