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a_majoor said:
aMaj,
I borrowed this from the noted thread, edited (one of my talents) and cleaned it up to be easily readable as very applicable to your comments.
HOW TECHNOLOGY FAILED IN IRAQ
By David Talbot, November 2004 'Technology Review'.
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. The war's backbone was a land invasion from Kuwait. Ultimately, some 10,000 vehicles and 300,000 coalition troops rumbled across the sandy berm at the Kuwaiti border, 500 kilometres from Baghdad. Desert highways crawled with columns of Abrams tanks, Bradley fighting vehicles, armoured personnel carriers, tank haulers, Humvees, and of course, fuel tankers to slake the fleet's nine-million-litre daily demand for fuel.
Several communications links were designed to connect these vehicles with each other and with commanders. First, and most successfully, at least 2,500 vehicles were tracked via Blue Force Tracker - each vehicle broadcast its Global Positioning System coordinates and an ID code. This thin but critical stream of data was in essence a military version of OnStar. Commanders in Qatar saw its content displayed on a large plasma screen. Commanders in the field, also had access to it, thanks to a last-minute installation in command tanks before the invasion. The vehicle-tracking system (known as Blue Force Tracker) successfully ensured that commanders knew the locations of friendly units.
Portions of a forthcoming, largely classified report on the entire Iraq campaign, under preparation by the Santa Monica, CA, think tank Rand and shared in summary with Technology Review, confirm that in this war, one key node fell off the U.S. intelligence network - the front-line troops. Among front-line army commanders - as well as U.S. Marine counterparts - "Everybody said the same thing. It was a universal comment: 'We had terrible Situational Awareness' [SA]," says Walter Perry, a senior researcher and retired army officer at Rand's Arlington, VA office. The same verdict was delivered after the first Gulf War's ground battle, but experts had hoped the more robust technology used in the 2003 conflict would solve the problem. It was a problem all the ground forces suffered. Once the invasion began, breakdowns quickly became the norm. Some units outran the range of high-bandwidth communications relays. Downloads took hours. Software locked up. And the enemy was sometimes difficult to see in the first place. As the marines' own "OIF Lessons Learned" report puts it, "The [First Marine] Division found the enemy by running into them, much as forces have done since the beginning of warfare."
For the movement of lots of data-such as satellite or spy-plane images-between high-level commanders and units in the field, the military employed a microwave-based communications system originally envisioned for war in Europe. This system relied on antenna relays carried by certain units in the advancing convoy. Critically, these relays, sometimes called "Ma Bell for the army", needed to be stationary to function. Units had to be within a line of sight to pass information to one another. But in practice, the convoys were moving too fast, and too far, for the system to work. Perversely, in three cases, U.S. vehicles were actually attacked while they stopped to receive intelligence data on enemy positions. "A lot of the guys said, 'Enough of this crap,' and turned it off", says Perry, flicking his wrist as if clicking off a radio. "'We can't afford to wait for this.'"
One Third Infantry Division brigade intelligence officer reported to Rand that when his unit moved, its communications links would fail, except for the GPS tracking system. The unit would travel for a few hours, stop, hoist up the antenna, log back onto the intelligence network, and attempt to download whatever information it could. But bandwidth and software problems caused its computer system to lock up for ten to 12 hours at a time, rendering it useless. "The network we had built to pass imagery, et cetera, didn't support us. It just didn't work," says Col. Peter Bayer, then the division's operations officer
Sometimes, intelligence was passed along verbally, over FM radio. But, at other times vehicles outran even their radio connections. This left just one means of communication: e-mail. (In addition to tracking vehicles, Blue Force Tracker, somewhat quaintly, enabled text-only e-mail.) At times, the e-mail system was used for issuing basic orders to units that were otherwise out of contact. "It was intended as a supplement, but it wound up as the primary method of control," says Owen Cote, associate director of the Security Studies Program at MIT. "The units did outrun their main lines of communications and networking with each other and with higher command. But there was this very thin pipe of information via satellite communications that allowed the high command to see where units were."
The network wasn't much better for the marines pushing forward on a separate front. Indeed, the marines' Lessons-Learned report says that First Marine Division commanders were unable to download crucial new aerial reconnaissance photographs as they approached cities and towns. High-level commanders had them, but the system for moving them into the field broke down. This created "a critical vulnerability during combat operations," the report says. "There were issues with bandwidth, exploitation, and processes that caused this state of affairs, but the bottom line was no [access to fresh spy photographs] during the entire war."
The largest counterattack of the Iraq War unfolded in the early-morning hours of April 3, 2003, near a key Euphrates River bridge about 30 kilometres southwest of Baghdad, code-named Objective Peach. The battle was a fairly conventional fight between tanks and other armoured vehicles, almost a throwback to an earlier era of war fighting, especially when viewed against the bloody chaos of the subsequent insurgency. Its scale made it the single biggest test to date of the Pentagon's initial attempts to transform the military into a smaller, smarter, sensor-dependent, networked force. In theory, the size of the Iraqi attack should have been clear well in advance. U.S. troops were supported by unprecedented technology deployment.
Yet at Objective Peach, Lt. Col. Ernest "Rock" Marcone, battalion commander of the 69th Armour of the Third Infantry Division, was almost devoid of information about Iraqi strength or position. "I would argue that I was the intelligence-gathering device for my higher headquarters," Marcone says. His unit was at the very tip of the U.S. Army's final lunge north toward Baghdad. The battalion was surprised by the largest counterattack of the war. Sensing and communications technologies failed to warn of the attack's vast scale. "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," Marcone says.
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 armoured 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, "We got nothing until they slammed into us," Marcone recalls.
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. "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," Marcone says. "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." 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 "go up like a Roman candle" when struck by U.S. shells, Marcone says. Sitting in an office at Rand, John Gordon, another senior researcher at Rand and also a retired army officer, puts things bluntly: "If the army had had Strykers at the front of the column, lots of guys would have been killed." At Objective Peach, what protected Marcone's men wasn't information armour (SA), but armour itself.
