Fighting Weight

ine years ago, as the operations officer for Army troops in Somalia, Brig. Gen. Paul Eaton stood on a street corner in Mogadishu and watched as infantrymen from the 10th Mountain Division prepared to move out on military maneuvers. Soldiers rigged up the beds of five-ton trucks with sandbags and plywood to protect themselves against the region's ubiquitous land mines and small arms fire, then piled into the lumbering trucks and slowly headed out, exposed to the elements and vulnerable to hostile fire. Minutes later, a company of Marines sped by in light-armored vehicles. The Marines were not only moving much faster, they were much better protected-only the drivers' heads were exposed to enemy fire.

The image of his troops' vulnerability has stayed with Eaton, and today he is in a position to do something about it. This spring, the Army will begin fielding light-armored vehicles to soldiers in the 3rd Brigade, 2nd Infantry Division, an experimental unit based in Fort Lewis, Wash. As the deputy commanding general for transformation at the Army's Training and Doctrine Command, Eaton is helping create what Army leaders say will be a new kind of combat unit, one better equipped, trained and organized to carry out the type of missions the Army has been performing since the fall of the Berlin Wall.

"This brigade is optimized for small-scale contingencies," says Eaton. "The intent is to go in fast and establish overwhelming combat power to contain the situation before it jumps out of the box and creates a bigger problem."

The Army already has forces that can be deployed quickly and forces that employ overwhelming combat power, but it doesn't have units that can do both. Its light infantry units can be deployed anywhere in the world within hours, but they don't have the vehicles to move quickly on the battlefield and they lack the firepower to take on an armored force. The Army's heavy armored units can go head-to-head against any military on the planet, but their equipment is so heavy that it needs to be moved by ship. That can take weeks or months. What the Army lacks is something in between-a unit that can be deployed quickly and still pack a serious punch when it arrives. The 3rd Brigade intends to provide it.

Moving the Bureaucracy

The 3rd Brigade and several brigades scheduled to follow its lead are being designed and equipped to handle missions that fall in the middle of the warfare spectrum, somewhere between seizing an airfield-a textbook mission for airborne light infantry-and tank warfare. From Somalia to the Balkans to Afghanistan, the Army has found itself increasingly engaged in such mid-spectrum warfare over the last decade.

The vehicles of the medium-weight brigades will run on wheels, not tracks. Wheels are not as durable as tracks, and they can't go as many places, but they are vastly lighter and easier to maintain. The new brigades will carry more artillery than light infantry brigades, and while they won't have the protective armor of a tank brigade, other changes are expected to make them more operationally nimble. The crown jewel of each brigade will be its reconnaissance, surveillance and target acquisition squadron, which will include intelligence analysts, linguists, engineers, unmanned aerial vehicle operators, and other specialists not normally found in a brigade. Binding all these assets together will be electronic command-and-control communications abilities far beyond those of any current brigade.

The Army had been experimenting with new organizational and tactical concepts for years, but the new brigades are the brainchild of Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki. In October 1999, Shinseki put the service on notice that change was coming and he set ambitious goals for achieving it. He ordered the creation of medium-weight brigades equipped with existing, commercially available technology. Shinseki said the brigades would serve as an "interim force" to help the Army achieve its ultimate objective: to create units as deployable as today's light units, but with all the firepower of heavy units. This "objective force" would be built around a family of combat vehicles whose technology still is being developed.

Unless the Army can move combat power where it is needed, when it is needed, it will become irrelevant, Shinseki has said repeatedly. That might seem like an obvious notion, but his order to create the new medium-weight brigades generated enormous consternation inside and outside the Army. Tankers feared an end run on their beloved M1A1 Abrams tanks, 70-ton behemoths that are the best in the world. Traditionalists feared the demise of legendary divisions in favor of some new organizing principle. Paratroopers wondered whether they would still occupy the tip of the Army's spear if new, more powerful units could get to the battlefield almost as fast. Marines grumbled that the Army was trying to take over their mission. Contractors worried about future contracts, and lawmakers worried about contractor jobs in their districts.

Though it is more than two years in the making, the 3rd Brigade still is not fully equipped. Contractor protests, bureaucratic foot-dragging and congressional roadblocks all have hampered the process. Shinseki isn't letting up, however. In November, he told an Army audience in Washington that he would do everything possible to create "irreversible momentum" and field the objective force in 10 years-a wildly optimistic goal, by most standards.

To outsiders, that may seem an unconscionably long time simply to design and build a new vehicle, but the reality is much more complicated, says retired Lt. Col. Timothy Muchmore, a former Army staff officer and now an analyst with defense contractor JB&A Inc. "We are really pushing what technology can do. In terms of power generation, lightweight composite materials, [stealth technology] and firepower, the Army is on the edge with these technologies. I think Shinseki realizes that the 100 percent solution is probably not achievable this decade, but he also realizes if he doesn't push for it, he definitely won't get it."

Still, Muchmore says, "They have set such demanding requirements on the science and technology community that my concern is that the science and technology community will not be able to deliver when we would like them to deliver."

In the meantime, the 3rd Brigade, the first brigade in the medium-weight force, is slated to be fully equipped, trained and ready for combat by the summer of 2003. That too, is an ambitious goal. While the brigade ultimately is to have more than 300 light infantry vehicles, manufacturer General Motors won't field the first vehicles until March. In the meantime, the brigade is training on 32 similar vehicles borrowed from the Canadian military.

Slow to Change

Since the Persian Gulf War, it has been painfully obvious to service leaders that the Army has a major gap in capability. Soon after Iraq invaded Kuwait in the summer of 1991, light infantry troops from the 82nd Airborne Division deployed into Saudi Arabia to protect that nation's oil fields from Iraqi advances as the Army began a massive deployment of its heavy divisions to the Gulf. But for the five months it took to assemble that armored force on the battlefield, military planners held their breath and grimly predicted the light infantry troops already in the desert would become little more than speed bumps if the Iraqis continued their campaign south into Saudi Arabia. The worrying proved unnecessary. Saddam Hussein never exploited the tactical advantages his army possessed for those many weeks. Once the Army had its armored force in place, it won a stunning victory over the vaunted Iraqi army.

Despite the concerns of war planners during the buildup to the Gulf War, the Army's spectacular victory did more to reinforce Cold War approaches than to dispel them, at least for a time. Coming on the heels of decades of planning for war with the Soviet Union on the plains of Europe, the Gulf War saw the debut of a number of major weapons systems conceived during the Cold War. Desert Storm reinforced the training and world view of a generation of Army officers raised on the doctrine of defeating the Soviet monolith.

"We could not have picked a better time to fight a better opponent than then," says Muchmore. "Did the Gulf War to some degree cause a sense of complacency within some in the Army for the wrong kind of war? I would say yes."

In every operation since the Gulf War, from Somalia to the Balkans, the Army has had to create ad hoc units to handle the unconventional military missions that have become the norm over the past decade. The service's shortcomings became especially apparent in Kosovo in 1999. It took Army leaders more than a month to cobble together and deploy a task force of 24 Apache attack helicopters and support units from Germany to Albania to support the NATO air campaign against Serbia. Even after the Apaches arrived, their crews lacked critical equipment and were not fully prepared. After two crewmen were killed and two helicopters crashed during training accidents, the Apaches were deemed too risky for the operation.

"The picture that emerges is of a service that doesn't want to play, and is just not interested in fighting the wars or in executing the missions that the country needs to have done for it," says Thomas Donnelly, deputy executive director for the Project for a New American Century and a former staff member on the House Armed Services Committee.

Nowhere is the Army's challenge better illustrated that at Fort Hood, Texas, home of the 1st Cavalry Division and the mechanized 4th Infantry Division. A drive along Hell On Wheels Avenue, named for the storied 2d Armored Division's stunning victories in World War II, illustrates both the great power, and the great vulnerability, of today's Army. Mile after mile of motor pools showcasing hundreds of combat vehicles-tanks, troop carriers, artillery systems, fire support systems, ammunition carriers-attest to the Army's tremendous capabilities. Yet this weaponry, designed to wreak havoc on the army of the former Soviet Union, today wreaks havoc on the Army's ability to mobilize for war. As the Army upgraded systems following the Persian Gulf War, many of its weapons became even heavier and harder to move to the battlefield. With armored personnel carriers weighing in at about 30 tons apiece and Abrams tanks running about 70 tons, simply moving the equipment is a major challenge. Additionally, tracked vehicles, while able to go through just about any terrain, tear up roadways, making them ill-suited for many of today's operations. This has been a major consideration for military planners in the Balkans, where road networks are just not robust enough to handle the heavy vehicles.

Compounding the Army's trouble is that it is almost entirely dependent on the Air Force and sealift to move its heavy force to the battlefield. If the Army wants to get to the battlefield quickly, it must fly. The Air Force offers basically three options: The C-5 Galaxy is the largest airlifter in the fleet and can carry up to two Abrams tanks at a time, but the aging aircraft is increasingly difficult to maintain and requires long runways. Offering more flexibility are the C-130 and the C-17, both of which can operate on short runways. The Air Force has about 400 C-130s and plans to have only 120 C-17s, so the Army must be able to take advantage of the smaller C-130s. They are capable of carrying vehicles up to 20 tons, the weight limit imposed on the new light armored vehicles the Army is buying.

Some Army officers suspect that the service's mobilization problems were at play in early November, when the first large-scale deployment of conventional ground troops in the war on terrorism took the form of hundreds of Marines, not Army soldiers, deployed to a base in southern Afghanistan. Some angry Army officers viewed the insertion of Marines hundreds of miles into landlocked Afghanistan as an incursion into battlefield territory historically occupied by the Army. While Defense officials said there were sound tactical reasons for deploying the Marines-they were already aboard ships in the region, for one thing-the deployment struck a nerve with many officers and observers already concerned that the Army's conventional forces are not well-structured for today's missions.

"I think the Army has got a lot more capability that it seems to want to employ," says Donnelly. "If you wanted to put a substantial ground force in Afghanistan, there are things you could do if you're a bit more creative than [Army leaders] seem to want to be. We've got plenty of equipment on ships and stashed in warehouses around the Persian Gulf, and you could deploy the 101st Airborne Division, or anybody that rides in helicopters-that's what makes the Special Forces so useful." Donnelly believes the Army's transformation goals are laudable, but long overdue.

Retired Army Col. Robert Killebrew, a former Army planner involved with experiments that led to Shinseki's decision to create the new brigades, says people are reading too much into the decision to send the Marines into Kandahar. "There were Marines already in the region and they train for these over-the-horizon deployments. It's not even a serious discussion. You might be hearing an echo here of the Army's dissatisfaction with the way the Army leadership handled the Apache option in Kosovo. The Army leadership didn't shine in that."

New Concepts

The burden on soldiers in the 3rd Brigade is huge. They are the guinea pigs of the new army, testing new equipment, developing new doctrine and validating new training.

Early last September, a group of the brigade's officers and soldiers, along with dozens of contractors and observers, hunkered down in a cluster of tents at Fort Lewis, Wash., to participate in a computer simulation that would test new warfighting concepts and equipment and the way soldiers in the new brigade are training.

Generally, major military exercises serve as a sort of mock final exam (the real test being actual combat) and tend to be the culmination of months of intensive, small-unit training that brings together the squads, platoons, companies and battalions that are the building blocks of brigades and larger combat forces. But this exercise was different. Its purpose was not so much to test the tactical capabilities of its participants, but to test the conceptual underpinnings of how the soldiers would fight and the viability of the electronic communications systems upon which those concepts rested.

For the most part, Brig. Gen. Thomas Goedkoop, the exercise director, liked what he saw.

In the simulation, the brigade was facing off against terrorists and rogue paramilitary units. The communications equipment used by the brigade's various components had never been fully linked before, and while there were bugs, the electronics worked surprisingly well, he said. What proved more difficult, however, was getting soldiers to think beyond the tactical implications of what they were doing, to the larger geopolitical context in which they were operating.

"The brigade is a tactical-level organization that also has a strategic impact," Goedkoop says. "In small-scale contingencies, public opinion and political implications are part of the battlefield." When terrorists shot down a helicopter being used to evacuate civilian casualties of the conflict, brigade officials missed a chance to turn public opinion against those who would attack noncombatants. "When they released information about it, they treated it as just another helicopter shoot-down. They didn't fully exploit the political propaganda points to be scored-it was a lost opportunity. It is the sort of thing generally not important to a captain or a major commanding troops in battle, but because of the changed environment, they have to care about these things and understand their implications," Goedkoop says.

The learning curve has been daunting, says Staff Sgt. Matthew Goodine. Although he didn't choose to join the brigade-the Army chose him-he says he is grateful for the opportunity. His role as a squad leader is vastly different from that of squad leaders elsewhere in the Army.

"When you're used to using a piece of paper, some scratch notes and maybe a radio and they put a keyboard in front of you and say make plans, make overlays, it's a shift in the thought process," Goodine says of adapting to the new command-and-control electronics. Perhaps most rewarding, he says, is the increased responsibility. Like other soldiers interviewed, he is eager for the brigade to be fully equipped so they can put the new concepts to the test.

With its range of firepower, its greater intelligence capability and its ability to share information to create a common battlefield picture for all soldiers, the brigade will be expected to operate over a much larger geographical area than other conventional brigades, says Goodine. "We're obviously covering a much larger battle area . . . so I'm going to be more independent as a squad. But I'm going to have more information than I think any other squad leader in the history of the Army," says Gooding.

The Army should have created medium-weight forces 15 or 20 years ago, says Killebrew, the former Army planner. But he is concerned that the Army's current plans for transforming itself are too focused on equipment and technology, and not focused enough on the training and organization of the soldiers who will ultimately determine the success of the effort.

"The Army doesn't suddenly transform. It changes over time. The real transformation, the real adaptation, happens in doctrine and training and the development of leaders and tactics. The materiel solutions are secondary," he says. "The fact is, most Army forces that we have today will be what we're going to have 10 years from now. Most of the weapons systems and most of the rolling stock will still be the bulk of the Army 10 years from now." What the Army really needs, he says, is a revolution in training and doctrine that reaches beyond the medium-weight brigades.