GROUND TROOPS WIN WARS

It is often said that the triumph in the Gulf War showed that the United States had learned from its defeat in Vietnam. In the Gulf, the White House gave the military a free hand to develop a strategy and win the war, which it did quickly, with few casualties.

On the other hand, the Gulf War in some ways was more like a major battle. Kuwait was freed, but this was the minimal American objective — and a defensive objective at that, pursued by offensive means, as was the goal of preserving the security of South Vietnam. In both wars, the American military, better armed than its adversary, performed with skill and valor and won all the major battles; yet military victory failed to break the enemy’s will. In both wars, the enemy government was left intact, free to move again when the time was ripe. In both wars, operational success was combined with strategic failure, producing long, drawn-out conflicts that sapped American will and undermined our coalitions.

The years since the Gulf War have seen Iraq repeatedly defiant. Thus, in August 1996, Saddam Hussein sent three Republican Guard armored divisions and his secret police into the Kurds’ “safe haven” in northern Iraq, where the U.S.-backed resistance to Saddam was also based. The only protection the area enjoyed was American, British, and French air patrols policing the “no-fly” zone — useless against a ground force. The United States responded to this offensive by launching 44 cruise missiles against air-defense sites and expanding the no-fly zone. But the air strikes changed nothing on the ground and even prompted France to drop out of the no-fly patrols. Saddam’s regime successfully expanded the territory under its authority. While Baghdad has suffered some reverses in the area since, they have come at the hands of Kurdish guerrillas, who, though poorly armed by U.S. standards, at least are on the scene.

In other words, American strategy dealt only in an irrelevant dimension. The demonstrated emptiness of the “over the horizon” American posture invited a new confrontation. This came in the winter of 1997-98, when Iraq suspended U.N. weapons inspections. In response, the United States deployed forces that looked powerful. Four aircraft carriers (two large American ones and two smaller British ones) mustered about 130 combat aircraft. Another 200 U.S. warplanes sat on airfields around the region, and the British provided additional strike fighters. In the background, a naval armada held hundreds of cruise missiles at the ready.

Nevertheless, this was a smaller force than the one used for the five-week air campaign of 1991. Back then, the United States deployed six aircraft carriers with 300 warplanes, plus 650 more from the Air Force; and France, Canada, and Italy, as well as Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states, joined Britain in providing additional air power. No such support was offered in 1998.

The smaller size of the air and missile forces available in February 1998 was offset to some extent by improvements in precision weapons and intelligence about targets. Still, if the 1991 bombing campaign did not destroy Iraq’s arsenal of missiles and warheads, or its military-industrial infrastructure, or, most important, the regime of Saddam Hussein, a lesser effort was hardly expected to accomplish those goals either. President Clinton acknowledged as much in his address at the Pentagon on February 17, when he said, “Let me be clear: A military operation cannot destroy all the weapons-of-mass-destruction capacity.” At least, not a military operation confined to air and missile strikes.

U.S. field commanders, moreover, feared that Iraq would respond to air strikes with another ground offensive into Kuwait, for which the United States was unprepared. No wonder allies were reluctant to support a U.S. strategy that could not change the fundamental situation. The planned air campaign was then redefined as merely a threat to get Saddam to allow inspections to resume. The campaign never took place.

Even if it had, and even if it had succeeded in forcing the resumption of inspections, the Iraqi threat would have remained, because inspectors on the ground — though they afford the best chance of finding and destroying Iraq’s laboratories and workshops — are constrained by the fact that they are operating in a country controlled at every level by a hostile dictator. Only by changing the regime can the United States end the dangers posed by Iraq’s weapons programs. It cannot do this from 10,000 feet or from over the horizon.

A military posture designed to minimize ground engagements poses a danger to America’s world position that extends far beyond the crisis in the Persian Gulf. Nevertheless, such a posture has wide acceptance, in theory and in practice. The Quadrennial Defense Review released by the Pentagon in 1997, and the response to it by the outside experts of the National Defense Panel, both endorsed a continued emphasis on air and missile power at the expense of troops on the ground. And, predictably, the U.S. response to the bombing of our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania was a string of cruise-missile strikes on August 20. Cruise missiles are designed to take out point targets, like the pharmaceutical/chemical-weapons plant in Sudan, which was successfully destroyed; but they are not designed for saturation bombing of area targets, such as the terrorist training camps in Afghanistan that also were targeted. Not surprisingly, terrorist sponsor Osama bin Laden escaped and his network suffered only superficial damage.

In the war with terrorism, special forces in direct contact with the enemy can be more precise than any “smart” bomb. But U.S. military programs are headed in another direction. Forty percent of the money allocated to the Pentagon’s top 20 modernization programs for the period 1997-2001 will be spent on three new aircraft. Buying all of the tactical aircraft planned for the next 20 years will cost some $ 400 billion. Additional billions will be spent on bombs and missiles to arm them. In contrast, only 8 percent of the budget will go for Army modernization, to cover everything from armored vehicles and artillery to anti-tank weapons and helicopters. The Marines, who make up a quarter of the nation’s ground troops, get even less attention.

The Quadrennial Defense Review called for further reductions in ground forces (manpower cuts of 15,000 Active Army, 45,000 Army Reserve and National Guard, 1,800 Active Marine, and 4,200 Marine Reserve) to pay for the acquisition of high-tech aircraft and missiles. The cuts in the Reserve and National Guard were justified on the grounds that “the need for a large strategic reserve has declined.” The National Defense Panel, with its emphasis on “long-range precision strikes,” said “reductions in both the active and reserve components [of the Army] can be expected.” The Army has already shrunk from 18 divisions with 727,500 troops in 1991 to 10 divisions with 495,000 troops. Some of the Army’s victorious units came home from the Gulf only to be disbanded.

The last time the Army fielded only 10 divisions was between World War II and the Korean War. The National Defense Panel went so far as to urge abandoning the goal of maintaining sufficient ground forces to fight two nearly simultaneous major regional wars. The last time the United States did this was in the 1970s, when President Nixon proclaimed a “one and a half war” standard at a time of disillusionment with “land wars in Asia” and anywhere else. The Nixon Doctrine was quite similar to President Eisenhower’s posture 20 years earlier, when “massive retaliation” by nuclear weapons was thought likely to render ground combat obsolete. Under President Carter, the Nixon Doctrine became the rationale for the near-collapse of American conventional forces, necessitating President Reagan’s crash rearmament. When the use of ground troops was out of favor during both the 1950s and the 1970s, American foreign policy was infected with a neo-isolationist malaise.

This is not to say that Air Force and Navy aviation programs should be neglected. Control of the air is vital. Indeed, American ground troops have not had to fight without the benefit of air superiority since the early days of World War II. So important is air support to the Army and Marines that both services have invested heavily in their own aviation programs (helicopter gunships and, for the Marines, fighter-bombers). The problem has been integrating air and land combat forces in the face of airpower enthusiasts’ claim that aerial bombardment has made ground operations obsolete.

Naturally, the promise of bloodless power projection appeals to political leaders. The loss of 18 Army Rangers in Somalia led to a hasty withdrawal by President Clinton. Even Ronald Reagan, after a terrorist truckbomb killed 241 servicemen in Beirut, called U.S. forces home, leaving Lebanon to slide into Syria’s orbit. President Clinton has committed ground troops when political change was the goal, as in Haiti and Bosnia, but only amid great concern that lives might be lost. It may be that Americans have become too decadent to get their hands dirty — and thus pose little danger to regimes willing to take risks.

This must not be allowed to happen. So concludes T.R. Fehrenbach in one of the best books ever written about the importance of ground combat, This Kind of War, published 35 years ago, after Korea. Fehrenbach could see where military technology was headed, but he also saw the truth of enduring principles. As long as armed force remained an instrument of national policy, he said, soldiers and citizens must be prepared for all forms of war.

“A modern infantry,” he wrote, “may ride sky vehicles into combat, fire and sense its weapons through instrumentation, employ devices of frightening lethality in the future — but it must also be old-fashioned enough to be iron-hard, poised for instant obedience, and prepared to die in the mud.”

William R. Hawkins is senior research analyst for Rep. Duncan Hunter, R-CA. The views expressed here are his own.