Learning the (Wrong) Lessons From the Gulf War

By Stephen Biddle
Wall Street Journal, 03 September 1997

During the 1991 Gulf War, the world
watched transfixed as Gen. Norman
Schwartzkopf showed videotapes of
laser-guided bombs scoring bull’s-eyes on
Iraqi air shafts and blowing up bridges
without harming passing motorists. When
it was all over, an Iraqi army of
hundreds of thousands was destroyed, yet
allied losses totaled only 240.

Six years later, it’s no surprise that
this dramatic victory dominates U.S.
defense policy; the problem is that many
planners continue drawing the wrong
lessons. New doctrines, weapons and
strategies are assessed in simulations
based on Gulf War scenarios. Acceptable
casualty levels are judged against its
benchmark. Most military planners assume
that long-range precision air and missile
strikes will dominate future warfare, and
that the struggle for information
supremacy will replace the breakthrough
battle as the determinant of victory.
Such assumptions fuel proposals for a
radical restructuring of the U.S.
military.

This sweeping legacy stems from most
defense planners’ belief that new
technology was chiefly responsible for
the Gulf War’s almost unbelievably low
allied losses. This view holds that new
surveillance, air defense suppression,
stealth and precision-guidance systems
gave U.S. aircraft total command of the
skies; and that thermal sights, compound
armor and depleted uranium ammunition
allowed allied ground forces to strike
from beyond the range of out-gunned,
out-armored Iraqi defenders. The lesson,
we’re told, is that continued
technological modernization will provide
similarly spectacular results in future
wars.

A rival interpretation holds that
Iraqi shortcomings, not U.S. strengths,
produced the dramatic Gulf War results.
In many cases, the Iraqis were so
incompetent that they failed to perform
such crucial routine tasks as digging
their tanks in and alerting other members
of their units that an attack was in
progress. As the political scientist John
Mueller recently put it, “The
Americans gave a war and no one showed
up.” If that’s so, then the Gulf War
was less a revolution in military affairs
than the mother of all military
anomalies.

Recent information on the conduct of
the Gulf War–the ground campaign in
particular–suggests that both views are
inadequate. Explaining the Gulf War’s
unprecedented allied victory and casualty
rate ultimately requires a new
understanding of how technology and skill
interacted to produce the outcome: It was
the major imbalance in the skills of the
Iraqi and allied forces, combined with
the imbalance in the level of technology,
that caused this dramatic outcome. The
implications are indeed far-reaching, but
they’re not what many defense planners
think.

As recent analyses have shown, the
Gulf War saw much more extensive ground
combat than is generally perceived. Many
of these ground engagements were simple
frontal assaults, at modest local
numerical odds, against unbroken
Republican Guard defenders. Some of the
allied forces had advanced sights, armor
and ammunition; others did not. Of
course, many Iraqis did give up, or lost
their equipment to U.S. air attack. But
too many survived the air campaign and
fought back when attacked to account for
the unprecedented allied loss rate. And
while the Iraqis were certainly lacking
in training and leadership, many other
unskilled, poorly led armies have
extracted a much higher proportional toll
than the Iraqis did. The Arabs in 1967,
the Italians in 1941 and Argentine
conscripts in 1982 all inflicted losses
at more than 10 times the rate the Iraqis
did in 1991.

So U.S. technology doesn’t get all the
credit, but neither do Iraqi
shortcomings. Only the two working
together produced the dramatic results:
New technology enabled us to exploit
Iraqi mistakes with unprecedented
severity. The Iraqis made many
fundamental military errors, but so have
many other armies. Against older
generations of weaponry, such errors
would have been not nearly so
catastrophic. Against modern U.S.
technology, however, such errors played
into the strengths of the new weapons,
enabling advanced systems to operate at
proving-ground effectiveness. But without
the Iraqis’ errors for U.S. technology to
exploit, allied losses could easily have
been much higher–exceeding even the
prewar estimates that predicted between
three and 200 times the losses allied
forces actually suffered.

This view holds several lessons for
policy makers. The first is that the
usual technology debate, which pits
high-tech enthusiasts against critics who
think the stuff won’t work, is mostly
beside the point. A recent General
Accounting Office report, declassified in
June, emphasizes the gap between early
claims for high-tech’s performance in the
Gulf and what we now know about the
weapons’ actual accuracy. “Even
under the generally favorable tactical
and environmental conditions prevalent
during Desert Storm, the effectiveness of
air power was more limited than initially
expected or subsequently claimed,”
the report concluded. Yet high-tech
weaponry worked well enough to give us an
unprecedented victory. Whether our
missiles hit their targets 85% or only
45% of the time isn’t nearly so important
as whether we have an enemy who makes
mistakes our technology can exploit–and
whether we’ve got the skills to do it
right.

The second lesson is that we ought to
be very skeptical of “new
paradigm” advocates who argue that
we must quickly move away from heavy
ground forces, nonstealth aircraft and
carrier battle groups, and replace them
with a wholly new generation of deep
precision strike and information warfare
technologies. We must do this, the
argument goes, at the expense of
incremental improvements in existing
weapons, even at the expense of current
levels of manpower and training. Yet if
modern warfare provides mostly a new
ability to exploit mistakes where we find
them but not much ability to prevail
cheaply over skilled enemies, then both
the benefits of change and the costs of
continuity are much lower than the
new-paradigmers say. Rapid modernization
increases U.S. capabilities mostly where
they already enjoy great relative
strength, against unskilled opponents.
But it offers much less benefit against
those with better skills. Conversely, the
threat to U.S. forces of potential
opponents using advanced weapons against
us is much smaller as long as we maintain
the quality of our military training and
organizations.

Third, all our weapons need not be
state-of-the-art for our forces to reap
the benefits of advanced technology. In
the Gulf War, U.S. Marines with
1960s-vintage M-60 tanks defeated
actively resisting Iraqis with very low
losses because the U.S. forces could
combine very high skills with
state-of-the-art air coverage. Likewise,
skilled pilots in nonstealthy,
1970s-vintage aircraft could still fly
with impunity after a few stealth
fighters cleared the way. With a major
skill advantage to exploit, a little
technology goes a long way.

Thus we should be wary of proposals to
protect funding for new technology at the
expense of training and readiness.
Critics of the recent Quadrennial Defense
Review, for example, chide the Defense
Department for not cutting forces and
readiness deeply enough to pay for faster
technology modernization. But a
less-skilled military is more dangerous
than less-advanced technology. Allowing
the decay of today’s combat skills not
only would forfeit the ability to exploit
current technical advantages against
less-skilled opponents, but also would
enable future challengers to turn the
tables by acquiring better technology
themselves and using it against
inadequately skilled U.S. forces. Neither
is a risk worth taking.

Mr. Biddle is a member of the
research staff at the Institute for
Defense Analyses and an assistant
professor of political science at the
University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.