Strategy: Fighting a Battle by the Book

By Philip Elmer-DeWitt.

The U.S. plan for fighting a ground war remains, quite properly, a national secret. But by examining the basic tenets of U.S. military strategy, it is possible to draw a fairly detailed picture of what an allied ground campaign might look like. The key, say defense analysts, is an obscure Army publication called Field Manual 100-5. It lays out the principles of "AirLand Battle," a military doctrine taught to every American Army plebe and war-college student since the early 1980s.

An AirLand ground battle would bear little resemblance to the World War I- style frontal assault that Saddam Hussein's generals seem to be bracing to fight. "Don't give me a meat grinder," General Norman Schwarzkopf has repeatedly told his operations planners. Instead, AirLand doctrine calls for air attacks on the enemy's rear areas to cut off supply lines, destroy command-and-control centers, and strike at reinforcing units in order to isolate the battlefront.

The strategy is aimed, ultimately, less at Iraq's weapons and troops than at the enemy's mind. Ground units would make deep, rapid thrusts through enemy lines; troops would take advantage of the combined effect of artillery, air support, naval bombardment and armored assaults on targets carefully chosen to throw the enemy off balance by spreading fear, confusion and dismay. Says Lieut. General Charles Horner, commander of the combined air forces in the gulf war, who worked closely with the Army on the latest version of Field Manual 100-5: "The idea is to feed the enemy in bite-size chunks to the ground forces to devour."

The AirLand scheme was devised as the battle plan for World War III. Its roots go back to the 1970s, when NATO strategists were trying to figure out how to defend Europe from an attack by overwhelming numbers of Soviet tanks. The key was to fall back on the front while trying to disrupt Soviet supply lines from the rear. A seminal 1979 study by Joseph Braddock, a military consultant, showed that the U.S. could predict the location of Soviet armor units as they moved up toward the front and that even modest success in slowing the flow of Soviet reinforcements could produce significant effects on the battlefield, tipping the balance just enough to give NATO forces temporary tactical superiority.

For an AirLand battle to succeed, commanders must learn to plan ahead: they must sequence operations so that the effect of a deep attack on Day One will be felt precisely when those crippled rear forces are needed at the front on Day Five. Relying less on brute force than on operational elegance, it requires commanders to concentrate their efforts on attacking the right thing in the right place at the right time. The enemy's crucial "center of gravity" -- a term borrowed from Prussian strategist Karl von Clausewitz -- is that target whose destruction will have the greatest ripple effect on the enemy's overall military operations.

The debate over whether a land war is even necessary largely misses the point. Much of that discussion is a continuation of the World War II-era argument between the Army and the Air Force about the proper use of air power. Traditionally, the Army has considered the Air Force an adjunct to its ground forces, providing close-air support for tactical maneuvers; the Air Force, on the other hand, prefers to think of itself as a power in its own right, capable of destroying the enemy's will to fight with long-range strategic bombing strikes. In an AirLand battle the Army and Air Force coordinate their efforts from the start. A senior Army official described it as "holding the enemy down in the rear while you gobble him up piecemeal in the front."

The entire allied campaign thus far has unfolded like a classic AirLand operation. In this case, the allies had the luxury of starting with the air war. It began with deep strikes against strategic targets (including major command-and-control centers and facilities for producing chemical and biological weapons) and with missions aimed at giving the allies air superiority (attacks on air-defense sites, airstrips and Iraqi planes).

In a matter of days, the bombing campaign shifted to "deep interdiction targets" -- military jargon for communications facilities, major highways and bottlenecks in supply lines. As a senior Navy official discussing air strikes against Iraqi bridges put it, "All those bridges are AirLand bridges."

Within a week, the bombers began zeroing in on what allied commanders calculated to be Iraq's center of gravity. That could be almost anything: a function, like command and control; a symbol, like the ziggurat at Ur; or a person, like Saddam Hussein. But the allied commanders decided that in this war the center of gravity is the Republican Guard, the well-trained, highly mobile 150,000-man force that Saddam relies on for operational flexibility near Kuwait. "If you can destroy the Republican Guard," says a senior Army planner, "you will unravel the entire Iraqi army. The rest of them will be like fish in a barrel."

In the days before the start of a ground offensive, according to the AirLand scheme, the focus of the air attacks moves closer and closer to the front -- tanks, troops, minefields and artillery emplacements. Analysts say there is no need to destroy the Republican Guard and other troops "in detail"; the rule of thumb is that when units suffer 30% attrition, they usually experience a sudden, sharp decline in capability. When that happens, the enemy loses the ability to respond to an invasion. That is the moment for the final push on the ground.

The land battle called for by the AirLand doctrine would be violent and swift. Following Schwarzkopf's battlefield dictum, "Surround 'em and pound 'em," allied forces have been pushing steadily west along Saudi Arabia's border with Iraq, where the minefields start to dribble out and the Iraqi forces are stretched thin. One scenario calls for allied armored divisions to burst through the battle line and begin a high-speed flanking movement, with tanks, armored personnel carriers and mobile rocket launchers racing to cut off whatever remains of Saddam's Republican Guard forces.

Another possibility is that the Army's XVIII Airborne Corps will attack the Iraqi town of Najaf, a transportation hub halfway between Baghdad and the Saudi border that could act as an allied supply-and-staging post. Speed is critical to concentrate forces for an attack and then disperse before the enemy can pull itself together for a counterattack.

Armchair strategists speculate that the armored attack to the west might be accompanied by a Marine amphibious landing on the Kuwaiti coast, using high- speed hovercraft and "vertical envelopment" -- meaning helicopters -- to disgorge large numbers of troops onto the beaches. Others envision a key role for the American paratroop units -- the 82nd and 101st Airborne divisions.

While the Army and Marine divisions form a giant pincer to isolate the Iraqi forces on the battlefield, the airborne troops could be dropped behind enemy lines from Black Hawk helicopters to lure the Republican Guards out of their tank bunkers. Once in the open, the Guards would be easy pickings for allied tank killers like the Thunderbolt and Harrier jets and the Apache and Cobra helicopters.

In the AirLand scenario, the long-awaited face-off between the U.S.'s high- tech M1A1 tank, with its turbine engine and depleted-uranium armor, and the battle-tested Soviet-built T-72, with its devastating 125-mm gun, would never come to pass. Iraq's heavy armor would be kept at arm's length, picked off from a distance by armor-piercing rounds, laser-guided Hellfires and heat- seeking Mavericks fired from the air. Scout planes and helicopters would identify targets, "squirt" them with lasers, and guide helicopters and fixed-wing aircraft in for the kill. "The point is to reduce our casualty rates by staying out of the enemy's range," said division commander General Paul Funk.

That's the theory. How it will work remains to be seen. An AirLand battle requires long-range planning, superb coordination, perfect timing, uninterrupted communications, pinpoint accuracy, constant high-speed maneuvering by ground forces and well-executed logistics. Getting fuel and ammunition to tank battalions traveling up to 120 miles a day calls for a massive resupply operation that leaves little room for error. The moment a unit stops moving, the battle risks degeneration into a war of attrition in which both sides would take casualties until the less powerful force is worn down to a nub.

With their troops poised to attack, allied commanders were haunted by last- minute doubts. Had General Schwarzkopf correctly assessed the all-important center of gravity? Would chemical weapons disrupt the delicate timing of the attack? Could U.S. forces outpace the Republican Guard in a desert the Iraqis know well? And is the troops' equipment -- particularly the portable antitank weaponry -- up to the job?

These fears are natural and healthy. Battle plans do go awry, and tens of thousands of lives are at stake. There are parts of the AirLand doctrine -- the full-fledged combined-arms ground offensive in particular -- that have never been tested on a battlefield. But the allied command has been running an AirLand battle by the book for more than four weeks now, demonstrating that it can coordinate large, mobile forces with the requisite precision and skill. If the next phase of the battle goes as smoothly, a strategy designed for the plains of Central Europe will have been validated in the sands of the gulf.

With reporting by Dean Fischer/Dhahran and Jay Peterzell and Bruce van Voorst/Washington