The Historical Development of Airland Battle Doctrine
The story of how Airland Battle came to be the latest version of Army doctrine goes back to the war in Vietnam. It was clear that the American Army in Vietnam did not do as well as expected by political and even military leaders. There were of course many reasons for this, political as well as military, but within the military the bitter feeling left over from the war was that it was the first war that the United States had "lost." Following too closely on the end of the war in Vietnam were the disastrous marine corps-led Mayaguez incident, the taking of the hostages in Iran, and then the failed marine corps piloted Delta Force raid in Iran. Particularly after the tragedy of the raiding force sent to rescue the American hostages in Iran, many people both inside and outside of the American military began to wonder what was going wrong. Speculation began to run high that the American military would be incapable of conducting itself effectively in a major conventional war, especially one that involved the numerically superior, well-equipped and highly trained forces of the Soviet Union.
Once the Vietnam war ended, American strategic attention returned to Western Europe, and here the picture was not encouraging. Throughout the mid-70s the Soviet Union had been steadily increasing its forces in the Warsaw Pact, until in several key conventional weapons systems the Soviets had an overwhelming numerical advantage over NATO forces. The Warsaw Pact, for example, now has 46,230 battle tanks to NATO's 17,730 and 94,800 armored personnel carriers to NATO's 39,580. If the Soviet Union were to invade Western Europe, the United States claims it might be forced to use nuclear weapons because conventional NATO forces would be unable to stop a full Soviet offensive. This is not an appealing strategy, particularly since it destroys the very country one is trying to defend. Political pressures in Europe, and pragmatic considerations within the United States, made American commanders search for a strategy that would make conventional NATO forces a more formidable opponent and thus raise the nuclear threshold. Secretary of Defense Weinberger and NATO Commander General Rogers called this the attempted "conventionalization" of NATO.
Official American policy with regard to the defense of Western Europe today is to preserve "options," including the use of nuclear weapons. But one of these options has always been fighting a strictly conventional war in Europe and it is in this option that the United States feels there is a serious strategic imbalance.
The traditional ways that armies have changed a perceived strategic imbalance have been to increase the number of Soldiers and weapons available, come up with new technologies that are more effective in destroying an opponent, or develop new tactics and strategies designed to take advantage of an opponent's weaknesses. For a variety of reasons, the first option has been considered unavailable to NATO planners. It is highly unlikely that the U.S.'s NATO partners will increase their defense budgets and their ranks to levels that can compete with the Warsaw Pact. A military peace-time draft is politically unpalatable in the United States as well. And nearly all Western countries are undergoing major demographic changes that have dramatically lowered the draft-age population. West Germany, for example, has a negative birth rate. Similar constraints exist in procuring vast numbers of weapons. The chief Soviet advantage over the West is cheap labor, and the Soviet Union has taken advantage of this by producing twice as many tanks as the United States per year. At current levels of Soviet weapons production, there is virtually no chance that NATO countries could, or would, match such an output.
The options available to American planners have thus been technological development and changes in doctrine. The American military has always been a major user of innovative high technology, so the favored option was one already working at "full steam". The traditional rationale for using high technology in weapons systems has been that it saves American lives-"nothing but the best" for American soldiers. The unspoken corollary to this, but what is more to the point, is that technological advances have made weapons more lethal and war more hazardous. The United States military is now counting on continuous and reliable technological development, funded through the Department of Defense, to offset the numerical superiority of Soviet forces. It is clear that U.S. planners feel that high technology is the most significant comparative advantage of the United States over the Soviet Union, particularly in computers, optics and sensor systems.The New Generation of High-tech Weapons
The United States and other NATO partners are at the leading edge of a whole new generation of weapons which are sometimes called "ET," for "emerging technology" weapons, or "PGMs," for "Precision Guided Munitions," or, in more conventional parlance, "smart" weapons. These weapons are dependent upon computer and opticoelectronic technologies that allow them to "see" a target and then destroy it without simultaneous aiming by a human eye. An illustration can be found in the history of anti-tank weapons. First- generation anti-tank weapons were the traditional World War II "bazooka," which was simply a projectile aimed by a Soldier and fired at a target. Second-generation weapons included the TOW, which is steered after firing by a wire guidance system connected to an optical sight. Third- generation weapons, which are just coming into operation, use lasers for steering the projectiles- but the operator still has to keep his eye on the target. The next generation of anti-tank weapons, true PGMs that are now in use today, are called "fire and forget" weapons, because after the weapon is fired, the projectile itself follows the target and the operator is free to engage another target. The U.S. Army's Javelin is the first to be fielded in the world. Eventually these may be combined with an autonomous system in which the human operator is replaced by a target identification machine. Very sophisticated PGM systems are already in operation on F-14 fighter planes, which can engage six enemy aircraft at once, even when the pilot cannot see them. An advantage to these systems is that, since it is actually the projectile that is "smart," older systems can be fitted with deadlier ammunition. The United States' Copperhead warhead, for example, is a "smart" artillery shell that can be fired from older, standard artillery tubes.
The principal rationale for the development of these so- called "smart" weapons is that the United States can knock out more Soviet forces with them than with other weapons and hence equalize the conventional imbalance in terms of numbers. The U.S. will need fewer units of hardware, and fewer soldiers, if each anti-tank system can knock out 25 tanks instead of two. But in playing this numbers game, such a strategy makes the relative value of the "smart" weapons increase significantly. If the Soviets have 40,000 tanks, losing 100 of them is no great setback; if the U.S. has a hundred "smart" anti-tank helicopters, for example, the destruction of 25 of them will be a serious loss. Consequently, the traditional battle doctrine of Firepower and attrition" is inadvisable. With such potentially indispensable and increasingly expensive weapons systems facing an enemy with considerably more material resources, it is more desirable to keep these weapons mobile and elusive.
Battle Doctrine Rediscovering the "Blitzkrieg"
This then introduces the concept of battle doctrine. A battle doctrine is the general description of how any army is to conduct itself when it fights-whether it will be organized in large, massed units or small, independent units, and so on. The U.S. Army's battle doctrine is codified in a manual called Field Manual (FM) 100-5, Operations and Tactics. This is the manual that is used as the standard source of education and planning for Army operations. The Army's FM 100-5 is periodically reviewed and updated to reflect current thinking about Army doctrine. It was revised in 1976 and again in 1982. The differences between these two versions are very significant and have received relatively little attention in the United States outside a small group of theorists generally identified with the Military Reform Movement. By contrast, the 1982 FM 100-5, the one now known as Airland Battle, has been one of the most controversial political issues of the last few years in Western Europe.
The difference between the FM-100-5 of 1976 and Airland Battle is somewhat similar to the difference between the ways World War I and the early days of World War II were fought. Everyone is familiar with the picture of the grim, murderous hardships of trench warfare in World War I. This traditional "set piece" way of fighting is known as "firepower and attrition," because the principal elements of success are massive firepower and lower attrition than that of the enemy. World War I was characterized by almost round-the-clock artillery barrages, with infantry troops only holding territory that had been abandoned by the enemy. The casualties were staggeringly high; at the Battle of the Somme, the worst battle in all history, 60,000 troops died the first day, and over 1.2 million died in eight days of fighting.
Most people are equally aware of the radically different picture of the German "blitzkrieg" of World War II. The early days of this war were characterized by extremely rapid advances, no discernible lines of fighting, and the collapse of armies that would under other circumstances have been capable of putting up more of a fight. In World War I the opponents focused on killing or capturing more men than the other. In World War II the German Army captured or broke up whole enemy units by using tactics that are the opposite of "fire and attrition" and have come to be known as "maneuver warfare." The blitzkrieg model of war is a war of wits, not material and personnel. And a numerically inferior force can demonstrably overpower an opponent by sticking to the cardinal rule of maneuver warfare: "Be smart."
The Airland Battle doctrine has institutionalized, at least in writing, maneuver warfare in the U.S. Army. This was a self-conscious revision of the previous doctrine of the 1976 FM 100-5, which was known as "active defense." The "active defense" doctrine was a codification of what was the conventional thinking about the way a war in Western Europe might develop: the Warsaw Pact would attack and NATO forces would hold their ground long enough to arrange for reinforcements, after which the Soviets could be turned back. But with the growing numerical superiority of the Warsaw Pact forces and the necessary assumption that the Soviets might use tactical nuclear weapons, a certain pessimism began to surround the idea of "active defense." Some critics derisively called the plan "fall back by ranks." Between 1976 and 1982 Army tacticians rediscovered the German blitzkrieg model. The blitzkrieg model not only carries the potential of a materially inferior force defeating an opponent, but it is also enhanced by technological superiority in three key areas: rapid mobility, communications and air support.
In the early days of World War II, General Guderian demonstrated the German advantage in each of these three areas with the famous Panzer tanks, the first use of portable radios, and German air superiority through the use of Stuka dive bombers. The United States has recently concentrated on these three areas by devoting a tremendous amount of development funding to projects like the Abrams M-1 tank, the Bradley Fighting Vehicle, battle management computer systems and enhanced communications, and improved tactical air capabilties using F-16s, F-18s and advanced attack helicopters.
The Role of "Auftragstaktik"
But the most important feature of the blitzkrieg model is simply an idea, one the Germans called "Auftragstaktik." This means literally "out of the tactical mission," but in German practice it took on a very specific meaning. It is essentially a way of thinking on the part of tactical unit commanders, one that encourages initiative, creativity, innovativeness and boldness. It is described in the following way by a West Point cadet, Stephen W. Richey, in Military Review:
"It was left up to the subordinate to work out for himself the means of obtaining the objective. The subordinate was expected to understand not merely the letter of his orders, but the overall spirit of what his superior wanted to achieve. If rapidly changing circumstances made it necessary, the subordinate was expected to have the good judgement and moral courage to disobey the letter of his orders to attain the ultimate objective toward which these orders had been directed. The purpose of doing it this way was to maximize the freedom of the leader on the spot to exercise immediate personal initiative in seizing unforeseen problems, without having to wait for permission from higher headquarters. This served to "lubricate" the war machine, enabling it to strike faster, farther, and harder."
One of the principal authors of the Airland Battle doctrine, Colonel Huba Wass de Czege, similarly describes the fundamentals of the new American doctrine: The maintenance of the initiative through speed and violence; flexibility and reliance on the initiative of junior leaders; clear definition of objectives, concepts of operations and the main effort; and attack on the enemy in depth. This shift in emphasis to highly mobile units with leaders encouraged to find targets of opportunity has significant implications for the composition of American forces. Instead of the large, massed units of divisions and corps, the focus now is on units of regimental size or even smaller. And understandably there is greater interest in highly mobile and increasingly deadly weapons systems using precision-guided munitions. There is simultaneously an emphasis on improving the so-called "teeth to tail" ratio, or the proportion of combat troops on line to support troops in the rear. Highly mobile, deep-strike units should be self-sufficient by design.
The most politically controversial aspects to the Airland Battle doctrine are its clear emphasis on offense and its commitment to deep-strike attacks. The manual says that "whatever the defensive techniques, the overall scheme should maximize maneuver and offensive tactics." It also says that the "attacker's single greatest asset--the initiative---is the greatest advantage in war." This general attitude is now combined with the tactical commitment to what is called "follow-on-forces attack," or FOFA. In this scheme, Army forces would strike deep behind the enemy's lead forces to attack the second echelon or "follow-on" forces waiting to take up the fight. The goal is the surprise, chaos, demoralization and isolation that would result with the breakup of reinforcement units just as the lead forces were expecting them.
Political and Stategic Implications
What has become so controversial about this is the shift in NATO policy to one of offense, when NATO forces have always been committed to a defensive role for politiical reasons. Furthermore, there are serious reservations within Western European governments about a policy which explicitly intends to invade Eastern European countries and take the war to the Soviet homeland. Many European leaders, citing Soviet statements in the past, think that the Soviet obsession with protecting against invasion of the homeland and of their Warsaw Pact allies will, in combination with the Airland Battle doctrine, increase the potential for a theater-based nuclear war. The new American doctrine, which was introduced into the European theater without consultation with NATO partners, has started a firestorm of controversy in public discussions and within Western European parliaments. The Military Committee of the North Atlantic Assembly, for example, has refused to endorse the new doctrine, saying that any military posture based on offensive intentions is unacceptable in Western Europe. European leaders are also averse to considering the inter- German border as a field for maneuver warfare. The likely consequence of an American Army striking deep and fast into Warsaw Pact territory is a battle with extreme confusion and difficult communication. Colonel de Czege writes that one of the most important realizations of the authors of FM 100-5 was that "the chaos of the battlefield will make centralized control of subordinates always difficult, sometimes impossible." Cadet Richey has described the need for "an attitude toward combat that will enable our higher echelon commanders to remain undismayed if their situation maps look more like whirlpools than like straight lines" and for "senior commanders who have absolute trust in their subordinates to do the right thing when imperfect information, broken-down communications and the rush of events make it impossible for the senior to issue detailed orders that will have any bearing on reality."
Coping with such problems has not been one of the American Army's fortes. Martin van Crewald, a military historian, notes in his 1982 book on World War II that "the Germans viewed battle as a free play of wills in the realm of chance and eschewed rules, while the Americans tended to view battle almost as an engineering problem subject to the application of preconceived formulas." This has been one of the points that military reformers like Edward Luttwak, William Lind, and Stephen Canby have made in the aftermath of Vietnam. Colonel de Czege has noted that, in preparing the 1982 FM 100-5, the authors assumed that, "if we are to operate more flexibly and more effectively, our leaders will have more need for principles and less need for cookbook formulas."
In this, once again, the doctrine of Airland Battle has followed the advice of its German forebears who developed the blitzkrieg model of warfare. Adolf von Schell. a German Army captain of World War I, writes in his book, Battle Leadership, "Every Soldier should know that war is kaleidoscopic, replete with constantly changing, unexpected, confusing situations. Its problems cannot be solved by mathematical formulae or set rules." Given this attitude in the new U.S. Army doctrine, and its institutionalization in force structure, leadership training, and battle plans, it is somewhat difficult to understand the military fascination with artificial intelligence and automated decision systems. The description of DARPA's new Airland Battle Management program appears to be quite incongruous with the attitudes expressed by the military reformers responsible for the Airland Battle concept. As some of them have put it, the Army needs to train Soldiers, and particularly leaders, not "what to do," but "how to think." And yet now large sums of money are going to be spent for a computer system that will ostensibly do that thinking for commanders.
THE AUTHORS OF U.S ARMY AIRLAND BATTLE DOCTRINE
Brigadier General Huba Wass de Czege, U.S. Army, Retired, is a private defense policy consultant and a mentor for student officers in the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College (USACGSC) School of Advanced Military Studies (SAMS) and Advanced Operational Arts Studies Fellowship program, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. As one of the "Jedi Knights," helped the planning of Operation Desert Storm. Born in Kolozsvár (now Cluj), Transylvania, in 1941. First in Class, West Point 1964. Chief of Arms Control Branch, Office of the Supreme Allied Commander, SHAPE, Belgium. When he retired in 1993, he was the assistant division commander (maneuver), 1st Infantry Division (Mechanized), Fort Riley, Kansas. His other positions included director, Advanced Military Studies Program, USACGSC, Fort Leavenworth; special assistant to the Supreme Allied Commander, Europe, Supreme Headquarters, Allied Powers, Europe, Belgium; and special adviser to the secretary general, NATO, Brussels, Belgium. He has been a frequent contributor to Military Review since the early 1980s.
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