Section XIII. - The Seroies Beyond Iraq Strategies
Section XI. Technology and Effectiveness in the 4GW World of Conflict and Deceptions
As previously noted, neither Sun Tzu nor Boyd rated technology as highly important, and there are several reasons why. The first is that it is difficult to find historical support for holding technology in such esteem. There are many cases where the side with the higher technology lost. Vietnam springs to mind. It surprises people to learn that in World War II, the Germans tended to win when their technology lagged behind the Allies (as during the 1940 blitzkrieg against France) and lose during the era of wonder weapons. The V-2s rained down on London as Allied tanks were rolling across Europe. Fifty years later, Somali tribesmen blasted high-tech U.S. Blackhawks out of the Mogadishu skies with weapons that would have been quite familiar to the Germans of the blitzkrieg.
The second potential reason why “technology” may not equal “effectiveness” involves the difficulty of determining, in advance, what technology will prove effective. To illustrate, look at the hurdles aviation technology has to overcome in order to prove effective in shaping and supporting operations on land:
1. The technology must physically work and work reliably enough to be effective. That is, it must locate, identify, and destroy enemy forces, sometimes in close contact with our own forces, whether they be in desert, jungles, or cities.
2. It must overcome efforts by the enemy to counter it directly. This means that the system(s) must be able to achieve their acceptable level of effectiveness despite efforts by potential adversaries to defeat it – through hardening, decoys, signature reduction, or other methods that we may not discover until we actually engage in combat. Given the development cycles of U.S. weapons, potential opponents have plenty of time to figure this one out.
3. Potential enemies must not be able to indirectly counter it by attacking the deploying platform, if any. Conversely, its effects on the deploying platform should be minimal, that is, it should not increase its signature, decrease its performance, or require it to operate in such as way as to make it more vulnerable. Early Maverick air-to-surface missiles, for example, required the attacking aircraft to maintain line of sight to the target until the missile could obtain a lock-on. This also includes attacks on wherever the deploying platform is based.
4. It must prove tactically robust. That is, it must withstand efforts by the enemy to render it irrelevant or to degrade it by, for example, engaging in more frequent but shorter attacks that have ended before the new technology arrives.
One might notice that all four of these hurdles are assumed away in the F-22 justification above (“His Advanced Medium-Range Air-to-Air Missiles need no further guidance and autonomously find and destroy intended targets”). In a sense, this represents a type of intellectual arrogance. The U.S. military is informing potential enemies at least five years in advance and daring them to do something about it. Sun Tzu emphasized that such fables are unnecessary and even misleading, primarily because one cannot predict what opponents will do:
The victory of a military force is determined by the opponent.
The ability to gain victory by changing and adapting to the opponent is called genius.
There are many examples of new technology failing to have its intended effect because either the people factors or the doctrine were not ready to use it effectively. Cambrai is not one of the decisive battles of World War I precisely for this reason. In fact, it was the Germans in the next war that successfully integrated the tank with their largely existing organizational climate and infiltration tactical doctrine to produce the blitzkrieg. This is not to say that technology has no role to play in improving tactical aviation for maneuver warfare and 4GW. It does illustrate that one cannot predict beforehand how effective such a system will prove in actual combat. Tactical air is not unique in this regard. A similar list would apply to any attempt to make technology the focus of efforts to improve the effectiveness of a military force. To place technology in its proper place in a Sun Tzu / Boyd assessment, one must stay with the concept of a military force – people, ideas, hardware, in that order. Technology can make a difference only if it is integrated into this scheme. That is, given a well-trained, cohesive, motivated force using maneuver warfare / 4GW tactics, technology appropriately tested and evolved can provide them with better tools to do the job.
Neither Sun Tzu nor Boyd denigrated the role of technology, but neither would they have given it the primary role in determining the effectiveness of a military force. It could be argued that Sun Tzu simply did not have this option, that it was impossible to gain a technological advantage in that era. However, a closer examination shows that his was also an era of technological change, with the crossbow, for example, rendering the chariot obsolete, better grades of iron (and even early steels) becoming available, and the first known appearance of gunpowder. Yet nowhere does Sun Tzu suggest that the path to victory for either a general or a ruler involved who had the stronger crossbows or the hardest iron or even had figured out how to make a weapon from gunpowder.
In “Conceptual Spiral,” Boyd concluded that the OODA loop could be applied to technology as well as to strategy and tactics. The process of developing, testing, and using technology is iterative, and the process of iterating must move through the people and doctrine elements, which in the Sun Tzu / Boyd formulation are decisive and must always remain the focus. As Boyd’s “Patterns of Conflict” demonstrates, there are many examples of the side with the superior organizational climate and doctrine prevailing over the side with the superior weaponry. In fact, it would not be too facetious to suggest a new law of combat effectiveness: The side with the most expensive weapons loses. (26.)
This is not a coincidence. In one of the few instances where Boyd addresses hardware directly, he notes that:
Complexity (technical, organizational, operational, etc.) causes commanders and subordinates alike to be captured by their own internal dynamics or interaction – hence they cannot adapt to rapidly changing external (or even internal) circumstances. The effects of this internal focus were noted above: confusion, disruption, disintegration – the very effects one should be trying to create in the enemy.
Technology and Guerrilla Warfare
While the guerrilla's weapons remain the bomb and the rifle, more recently, advanced technology has also been introduced into guerrilla arsenal: night vision systems, remote control explosives, communications systems, communications intelligence (COMINT) systems, ultra-light aircraft, anti-tank missiles, anti-aircraft systems, rockets with ranges of dozens of miles and other weapons that have added capabilities which enable, with minimum risk, long range target attacks, attack of armored vehicles, maintenance of an effective anti-aircraft defense, and receiving of early warning of enemy movements, which allow guerrilla fighters to vacate an area in time or to plan a surprise attack.
Guerrilla groups become more professional over the course of a conflict until they sometimes are on a higher quality level than the regular army units fighting them. (23) For example, the Hizballah forces in Lebanon display a high level of field skills and expertise in operating mortars, rockets, ground-to-air missiles and intelligence gathering devices. A modern distinction of the asymmetries between regular and irregular warfare was formulated by Gotowicki. (24.)
WIDE-AREA SURVEILLANCE
“Finders”—intelligence, reconnaissance, and surveillance assets— will be of two broad types: those that provide wide-area coverage and those with a narrow field of view but higher resolution. The role of wide-area assets will be to provide information about the overall operations of targeted groups and to identify those areas that might merit more intensive investigation. Assets available today include networks of human informants (HUMINT), signals intelligence collectors (SIGINT), and imaging sensors that provide pictures of potential targets. Each of these types of assets has its strengths and limitations. A limitation of most imagery sensors is their inability to see through heavy foliage -- a major problem in countries such as the Philippines that are heavily forested. Foliage penetration SAR and moving-target indication (MTI) radars could enhance U.S. wide-area surveillance capabilities in such regions, helping to find objects that merit reexamination using a higher-resolution sensor.
Emerging technologies for multispectral and hyperspectral sensors will make it possible to remotely examine phenomena across the electromagnetic spectrum. Because every material has a unique signature, data from such sensors can be processed and used to classify objects automatically and with greater fidelity than is possible with sensors that operate in only a single waveband. By comparing this information against a database of objects of interest, analysts using appropriate algorithms can sort through masses of data quickly to locate objects and activities that merit closer examination.
Other technologies with the potential to enhance widearea search capabilities are chemical “sniffers.” Miniature, mobile chemical-analysis laboratories, sniffers are able to detect traces of certain chemicals in the atmosphere. If it were possible to develop sniffers to detect particular types of explosives, then lowflying aircraft or ground vehicles could patrol large areas and highlight places where bomb factories, arms caches, or potential suicide bombers might be operating. Stocks of chemical weapons or precursor materials might also be detectable. In addition, certain types of illegal drugs or the chemicals used in their processing might be useful targets for sniffers, given the nexus between drug traffickers and terrorists in some areas (e.g., Colombia). Miniature UAVs could carry spectrometers and sample-collection/analysis devices, transmitting data or returning physical samples back to a “mothership” or a ground station.
HIGH-RESOLUTION SENSORS
Sensors employed for wide-area searches help analysts to gain a clearer picture of the nature of the enemy’s organization and operations and to identify places where other human and technical assets can be concentrated in hopes of gaining confirmation of the presence or absence of the enemy and, perhaps, the identity of individual terrorists. Such sensors, be they human sources or technical means, ideally should provide continuous monitoring of suspect areas and persons. They should also be covert; that is, able to function without tipping off targets that they are under surveillance.
These requirements—high resolution, continuous and long-term coverage, and secrecy—suggest that sensors to support targeting should, in general, be small so that they can be easily concealed. Small imaging sensors, in turn, must be placed close to their targets, given the need for high resolution and restrictions on focal length.2 And sensors that need to “stare” at their targets for prolonged periods should generally not be on airborne platforms but rather placed on buildings or other fixed structures, or in trees.
Automated processing tools are being developed to help analysts efficiently screen the masses of data being gathered by new generations of sensors. Such tools are especially important in counterterrorist operations because the signatures associated with most terrorist groups are generally very small and the “noise” surrounding them is often considerable. U.S. and Pakistani officials are attempting to apprehend perhaps several hundred individuals in the city of Karachi, which has a population in excess of five million. Under such circumstances, a surveillance and identification system that boasted an error rate of only 1:1000 could still give off many false alarms for each correct identification.
Conventional cameras cannot see inside buildings if the occupants are cautious and if it is not possible to plant devices inside. One means of gaining information about activities inside a building is to listen to what is being said there. Occasionally, it may be possible to plant listening devices (“bugs”) in buildings or vehicles being used by terrorists. More often, antiterrorist forces will have to rely on remote means of monitoring. It has been demonstrated that one can listen in on conversations inside a building by using lasers to detect the propagation of sound waves off the building’s windows.
Experiments are under way with radars that have the potential to “see” through walls. The resolution of such radars is modest, but it is possible to determine whether particular rooms in a structure are occupied or not—information that can be valuable when planning an attack. Another emerging technology is facial-recognition software. If cameras can be placed in areas where terrorists might pass by, the images they collect can be rapidly screened against a database of facial images and perhaps other physical characteristics of known terrorists. Computer algorithms capable of comparing collected images against a large database and discriminating among key features of those images will be essential if this approach is to be effective. Even with these systems, additional efforts would be required to verify the identity of potential targets, given the large number of samples collected and likely false-alarm rates.
Tagging suspected vehicles helps develop information about patterns of activity and assists shooters in engaging elusive targets. An operative on the ground in a city could covertly place a transmitter on a car that is being used by a group suspected of conducting terrorist activities. Once attached, the transmitter could permit authorities to monitor that vehicle’s movements, perhaps pointing them to other groups of terrorists. Signals from the transmitter could also make it easier to keep the suspect vehicle “in the crosshairs” should a decision be taken to detain its occupants or destroy the vehicle.
Most researchers ignore that technology promotion by the US is primarily to re-assure its people of US superiority, second to prop up the profits of the Congressional-Military-Industrial Complex and by creating so many and diverse technological gadgets and systems some of them turn out to actually be useful. Effectiveness concerns have also overcome institutional momentum in a few notable cases. The Commanche helicopter program was scrapped after costs and concerns that insurgents will posses advanced surface to air missiles rendering the aircraft obsolete.