"Speed is life" is an aphorism that applies equally in politics and on the battlefield. Or so Gen. Eric Shinseki hopes, because in both arenas, the Army Chief of Staff has staked his service's future on speed. Installed only a year ago as chief-on the heels of the Army's humiliating and tortoise-slow deployment of Apache helicopters to the Kosovo war-Shinseki has set the normally cautious service on a rapid schedule:
- In October, Shinseki set a goal of being able to deploy a 5,000-man brigade anywhere on earth within 96 hours.
- In January, at Fort Lewis in Washington state, the first new-model brigade shed its heavy tanks and began reorganizing for rapid deployment.
- On Tuesday, at Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland, the Army will audition competing prototypes for a new class of armored vehicles designed to be easily transported by air.
- By December 2001, the Fort Lewis brigade should have its new vehicles in hand and be ready to go, with four to seven more of the new-style brigades to follow.
- In 2003, just as his term as chief ends, Shinseki will select for the entire Army a new lightweight, heavy-hitting "Future Combat System," a weapon, still in the design stage, that could take many shapes, from a conventional wheeled or tracked armored vehicle to a combination of robotic vehicles and unmanned aerial drones.
But that jump start makes even some military reformers-well, jumpy. Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman, D-Conn., who has been waiting for the Army to modernize, says, "Normally, I find myself trying to push people in the Pentagon" to change. But in Shinseki's case, Lieberman would like to see a little less speed. For example, prototypes for one key weapon, the tank-like "Mobile Gun System," will miss the June tests at Aberdeen because the contractors cannot get them ready in time. Some of the other vehicles will be tested for only 30 days. "I don't think that counts," snorted Rep. Mac Thornberry, R-Texas, who says the Army may be moving too fast. "You need to experiment and try different things." Thornberry says that the Army, before making any decisions, should create entire experimental units, with troops testing several alternative organizations and vehicles.
Shinseki seems reluctant to follow that line of thinking, however, because such experimental units are often squashed by the Army bureaucracy. "[For] a lot of middle managers, this transformation becomes a real threat to their kingdoms, and quite frankly, a lot of them are doing their best to, let's say, muddy the waters," said Earl Rubright, a scientific adviser to the U.S. Central Command, which oversees American troops in the Middle East. "When [Shinseki] asks specific questions in meetings, he can't get straight answers, [even] from his own general officers." A recent page-one story in The Washington Times quoted several current and retired officers-all anonymous-on the "unanimity of opposition" to Shinseki's scheme.
Only speed, insiders argue, can shock the bureaucracy into action. "You can make a good argument that it's too [fast], but that's immaterial," said retired Marine Corps Lt. Gen. Paul Van Riper. "He had to put that kind of a benchmark out there, to get the institution to stretch." Shinseki declined to be interviewed for this story.
Some reformers say Shinseki has advanced too slowly on the most important fronts. "The Army continues to maintain it can institute this radical change within the same culture [and] organization," said a former Army officer. "You run the risk of just hanging electric lights on the horse cavalry." Citing Col. Douglas A. MacGregor's iconoclastic 1997 book, Breaking the Phalanx (the title compares the Army to the lumbering infantry formations of ancient Greece), these frustrated reformers argue that Shinseki has neither taken on the Army's entrenched bureaucracies and redundant headquarters, nor revised outdated war-fighting doctrine. Until the Army reforms its basic concepts, they say, any change will be fatally incomplete. "The Army is solving a legitimate problem" with the new brigades, said analyst and former Pentagon official Andrew Krepinevich. "[But] what's this thing supposed to do besides get there in a hurry?"
It Ain't the Equipment, Stupid
Whenever the military boasts that it will embark on a new path, the debate focuses on what ship, plane, or tank should be purchased to shift the course. But with these new, lighter, brigades, the weapons are secondary. "The sexy thing to do, for a lot of people, is to focus on what the equipment is going to be," said Col. Mark P. Hertling, the commander of the Army's Initial Brigade Combat Team that's now forming at Fort Lewis. "It ain't the equipment, stupid," Hertling said. "What we've got here is a new organization."
Today's Army, like Napoleon's, is built around the division-a "combined-arms" force with a wide enough variety of combat troops and support personnel to fight indefinitely as an independent unit. But with 15,000 to 20,000 troops, and enough hardware to fill all eight of the Navy's fast-transport ships-or all 120 of the Air Force's proposed C-17 cargo jets, seven times over-the "heavy" division lives up to its name. It's too massive to go overseas quickly and yet too limited to do the jobs of the 21st century. Conventional divisions in Bosnia, for example, don't have enough civil affairs officers to administer restless populations, or enough scouts and intelligence analysts to watch for trouble.
"The division was the coin of the realm during the Cold War," said retired Gen. Dennis Reimer, Shinseki's predecessor as Chief of Staff, in an interview with National Journal. "Now we find that you don't necessarily deploy divisions as such; you mix and match much more."
But such "task-organized" forces pose two problems. First, taking scarce resources from several divisions to fill out one task force often breaks the donor units, leaving them without key people they need to train the rest of their troops, let alone go to war. This is the main reason that maintaining just 30,000 soldiers on peacekeeping missions overseas has overstretched a 480,000-person Army.
Second, putting the pieces together takes time. With Task Force Hawk-the Apache units and protecting troops sent to Albania last year-the "settling of what the force package was going to be accounted for half of the delay," said a recently retired Army planner. And the disparate elements take yet more time to come together as a team-if they ever do. Task Force Hawk, for example, spent two months training in Albania, never ultimately to see battle. Col. John D. Rosenberger, who commands an "opposing force" at the Army's National Training Center at Fort Irwin, Calif., has defeated countless ad hoc task forces in simulated battles. "It's like a neighborhood pickup team [against] the Denver Broncos," Rosenberger says.
Army traditionalists say that the ad hoc task force is inevitable. "I'm not sure you can really settle on one set structure," said Reimer, who as chief refused to create a standing 5,000-man "strike force" for fast deployments. But Shinseki has done just that. True, some last-minute custom-tailoring is inevitable-a unit can hardly choose translators, for example, until it knows where it's being sent-but Army planners estimate that the new brigade will require 60 percent less cargo capacity to deploy than a heavy brigade would and that 80 percent of what it does take will be standard, predetermined, and ready-to-go for any mission.
But the remaining 20 percent may omit some critical elements. Perhaps the most crucial is that the brigade has no helicopters for air support. Army planners admit aviation is essential, but they say it will have to be added after deployment. Helicopters are so heavy and bulky that including them in the brigade itself would lengthen deployment time past the 96-hour goal.
Just as worrisome is the brigade's inability to operate independently of the Army's sometimes cumbersome bureaucracy. Although the brigade's headquarters is staffed robustly enough to command its own forces in a fight, it lacks the support personnel to keep itself supplied and repaired for long, and it cannot easily coordinate operations with aid agencies, allied forces, and the other U.S. services.
Nevertheless, the brigade does break new organizational ground. Three of its four component battalions will be made up largely of what the Army calls "boots on the ground"-soldiers needed to patrol, control, and if necessary, fight house to house in Balkan villages or Somali slums. That's half again as many infantry as a traditional mechanized brigade would contain. And unlike existing "light" infantry units, this new "medium" brigade will back up the foot troops with lots of snipers, mortars, antitank missiles, mobile cannons, and enough vehicles to carry everyone rapidly across the battlefield. Most important, the brigade's entire fourth battalion-a quarter of its fighting force-will consist of scouts and military intelligence experts, with their own unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) as robotic eyes in the sky. Rosenberger called this a "revolutionary improvement" because current Army organizations are so short of scouts that "most brigades ... are fighting blind.... You can only fight based on your ability to see."
Having better "eyes" is crucial to this new brigade and the future success of the entire Army. A traditional heavy unit is trained to find the enemy essentially by bumping into him. The medium brigade will not have to wait that long-nor can it afford to. In an all-out battle, it will depend on its scouts to find the enemy quickly, pinpoint his weak spot, and make a quick, decisive attack, one that wins the fight before the medium brigade's vulnerabilities begin to take their toll.
Charge of the Medium Brigade?
No one denies that the Army's new medium brigade sacrifices something for the ability to move overseas rapidly. What it gives up is armor. Armor means weight, and the reality is that the U.S. Air Force, despite its huge inventory of transport planes, cannot get the Army's heaviest fighting vehicles to the battlefield quickly. They simply weigh too much. That's why most of the heavy armor that fought in the Gulf War went by ship and took months to arrive.
To fit into the Air Force's workhorse C-130 transport, for example, a vehicle can weigh no more than 20 tons. By contrast, a heavy unit's M2 and M3 Bradley armored personnel carriers weigh 30 tons each; the M1 Abrams heavy tank weighs 60 to 70 tons. The Air Force can carry the Abrams, but barely. Its new C-17 transport can carry a single M1 across the ocean and land on the same short, unpaved runways the C-130 uses. (The still-larger C-5 carries two Abramses, but is unreliable and requires long runways.) But the Air Force plans to buy only 120 of the C-17s (56 of which it has now). So moving a medium brigade quickly means using the C-130s the Air Force already has in abundance-389 of them, to be exact. "We have to depend on what is there, not on what is coming down the path," said Maj. Gen. Charles Samuel Mahan Jr., chief of staff at the Army Materiel Command.
Reliance on the C-130s means that the basic fighting vehicle for the new Army medium brigade can weigh no more than 20 tons. And a 20-ton vehicle is just much more vulnerable than a heavier one. If a heavy tank cannon, like the 120 mm on the Abrams, for example, hit the new 20-ton vehicle, the impact would spin it like a top, confided a contractor who builds the light machines.
So what can a 20-ton vehicle survive? What most manufacturers offer, and the Army will require, is enough armor to stop 7.62 mm bullets from a light machine gun, the kind a single soldier can carry. Additional armor that can be bolted on after landing should be able to stop bullets from a 14.5 mm heavy machine gun (like the classic U.S. .50-caliber) and primitive rockets such as the Russian rocket-propelled grenades. Forget about stopping a missile or a tank cannon: Even a 20 mm quick-firing cannon, found on cheap Russian vehicles sold worldwide, will kill the medium brigade's lightly armored vehicles.
So if Third World warriors can blow it away, just whom can the new brigade hope to outfight? No one, say skeptics: The new brigade is a glorified police force, ready to rush into peacekeeping missions, and dead as soon as the shooting starts.
But the Army doesn't see it that way. "We're not talking about a force that wants to go head-to-head ... with an armored enemy," said Maj. Gen. Robert Joseph St. Onge, a senior Army planner. "That's not what a medium brigade is designed to do." The new unit will not replace either the heavy tanks or the light infantry, but will bridge the gap between them. A lighter unit, the 82nd Airborne Division for example, can already land a brigade anywhere on earth in 36 hours, well under Shinseki's 96-hour target for the medium brigade. But the paratroopers of the 82nd have no armor or transportation to speak of. The medium brigade would have both, and could arrive a couple of days behind the 82nd to help the paratroopers secure an airfield or fend off an enemy advance. Just as the Union cavalry at Gettysburg held off the Confederates until the slower main force arrived, the medium brigade may not win a war all by itself, but its quick response could keep America from losing one.
Exploding the Tank
Bridging the gap between light infantry and heavy armor, the Army's new medium brigades represent a compromise: not as responsive as the light force, not as potent as the heavy. But the long-term goal-what Chief of Staff Shinseki calls the "objective force"-is to combine the best of both without the weaknesses of either. That will require what the Army is labeling the Future Combat System-something that fights like the 70-ton Abrams tank but weighs just 20 tons.
Even with new wonder materials, that is still physically impossible. "We've been looking at something like this for about two or three years," said Army senior scientist Michael Andrews. "The best we could [do] was somewhere about a 40-ish-ton kind of tank." So last fall, Gen. Shinseki took the Future Combat System out of the hands of his own Army engineers and ordered them to follow the lead of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Pentagon's secretive and super-high-tech think tank. DARPA plans to cut the Gordian knot: Instead of replacing the tank, they're going to blow it up.
Every tank today has a gun, a gun sight, and a crew, explained Lt. Col. Marion Van Fosson, the Army officer who now runs the Future Combat System program for DARPA. "And everywhere that the gun tube goes and the sights go, the [whole] tank goes," said Van Fosson. But with modern information technology, there is no reason the Future Combat System could not have its gun sight aboard an unmanned aerial vehicle flying miles ahead, its gun riding on a robot scooting toward the front line, a long-range missile launcher firing from behind a ridge, and the human crew miles to the rear, running the scattered pieces by remote control over a computer network. "It's not just `replace the tank,' " said Van Fosson. Combining different branches, from aviation to artillery, a single Future Combat System "is effectively a combined-arms force."
Such a "distributed" system would break the 70-ton Abrams into many smaller, easily transported pieces. Rather than rely on heavy armor to take hits, the components would exploit their small size, high speed, and advanced electronics to avoid detection in the first place. And if a component was destroyed, it isn't likely that anyone would die, because only the command vehicle would carry a human crew. Another advantage would be that the robotic components could skimp on protection.
What that requires is a breakthrough in robotics. The program would have to go beyond today's "radio flyer" war, in which one soldier drives each drone by remote control. But the Army is moving steadily toward that goal. Already the Army has tested software that would let a helicopter pilot simply order a UAV to fly itself to a location and transmit views of what it sees. Meanwhile, an experimental computer could instantly plot alternative flight paths for the attack helicopter, based on newly detected threats, and could even autopilot the helicopter in an attack run if the human pilot approves. The ideal is a pack of computer-controlled vehicles that kill only when their human master orders, but carry out the attack themselves.
Before Shinseki took over, the Future Combat System was not scheduled to enter service until 2018. On Shinseki's orders, however, "we took six years out," said Andrews. Pulling this off will take more than fancy engineering. "It requires some risk taking." Added DARPA scientist Allen Adler: "[Instead of] a very linear, logical approach where you always know why you're doing what you're doing, in this particular case we're having to do things in parallel [and] make some educated guesses."
So, to brainstorm as broadly as possible, DARPA in May awarded contracts to four private-sector teams, each of which will develop two Future Combat System concepts: a "distributed network," like DARPA's idea, and a blank-slate alternative. So the Army will have eight alternatives to consider when the teams report back in 2003. The solicitation gives industrywide latitude to propose not only new technologies but also new organizational structures to run them. Said Van Fosson, "I'm not going to say it's unparalleled, but it is extremely broad."
Lawmakers are behind the DARPA effort and are increasing funding, even as they cross their fingers. DARPA has a good record of "blue-sky," innovative thinking, but it has been less good at transforming ideas into finished products. "We're all anxious to see if we can get something out of DARPA that actually gets fielded," said a Senate staffer. But clearly Chief of Staff Shinseki decided going to DARPA was worth the risk to get a new perspective-and more resources. DARPA will invest $406 million of its own funding in the Future Combat System over the next five years, and thereby nearly double the $510 million that the Army could scrape together.
Show Me the Money
In addition to the technological and organizational challenges of creating a lighter, faster force, the Army faces money problems. Repairing and replacing the Army's aging heavy weapons was overburdening the budget even before Shinseki became Chief of Staff. Previous plans for rapid-deployment units went nowhere, recalled Shinseki's predecessor, Reimer, because "what I couldn't figure out was how to get enough resources to construct the brigades." Now Shinseki wants to build "interim" units, speed up research on the ultimate "objective force," and still keep the existing Cold War "legacy force" in fighting trim.
The inevitable funding crunch worries even Army boosters on Capitol Hill. "One of the things that we wanted to do was to make sure we voiced loud and clear support for Shinseki's attempt to transform the Army," said Senate Armed Services Airland Forces Subcommittee Chairman Rick Santorum, R-Pa. "[But] we have, in a sense, put off some ... very difficult decisions to get this effort started."
Rep. Curt Weldon, R-Pa., who chairs the House Armed Services Military Research and Development Subcommittee, agreed. "I obviously support what the Army wants to do ... but they can't get from here to there with the funding levels that have been outlined," he said. "[And] I don't know what else they can give up."
The Army says it has already sacrificed other programs to achieve what it calls its transformation. Army Secretary Caldera said: "We killed and restructured programs to generate almost a billion dollars of internal savings. We haven't said we don't have requirements for those [programs]; we've just said transformation is a higher priority."
But skeptics say the Army has avoided the hard choices. It refused to trim its largest long-term buying program-1,213 Comanche helicopters at an estimated total cost of $43 billion. It did cut the heavy Crusader cannon program by $1.8 billion, but subsequent redesigns to make it more deployable brought the cost back up by $1.4 billion. And even some programs killed outright did not stay dead. After canceling the Wolverine, a tanklike vehicle that carries with it an easily deployable bridge, and the Grizzly, an armored bulldozer that can breach antitank barriers, the Army argued so vehemently that they were essential to help the M1 tank move over obstacles that Congress restored them both in full.
And although the Army is reluctant to give up equipment to save money, it simply refuses to get rid of personnel. "The Army is too small for all of the engagement missions" in Bosnia, Kosovo, and elsewhere, said Secretary Caldera, adding that its 480,000-troop strength is non-negotiable.
Conservatives such as Weldon want to boost the Army budget. But with any increase likely to be small, the Army finds itself in fierce competition with the other services. Some Marines see the new rapidly deployable medium brigade as poaching on their traditional role as first ashore, and Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Michael Ryan publicly declared that he might not have enough planes to move an Army brigade in 96 hours, because deploying the supplies and men for his own first wave of fighters and bombers would take priority.
Caldera counterattacks: "We get less than $10 billion of [the Defense Department's] $60 billion [annual] procurement budget, and that is simply not enough." Although the relative proportions spent on Army, Air Force, Navy, and Marines have long stayed constant, "historical budget shares are just that: historical," he said. "Frankly, the Army doesn't have a choice but to speak up a little bit, because we're the stepchild right now."
That resolve sets the stage for furious funding feuds in the next year, as the services brace themselves for a major review of defense policy after the new President is elected. Congress has responded favorably so far, but the final outcome is anybody's guess. As a Senate staffer noted, "A plan that is wildly unresourced ... is really not a plan."